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CALGARY — David Pickup, director of the Pembina Institute’s Electricity program, made the following statement in response to the government of Alberta’s announcement that Meta will build its first Canadian data centre in Alberta. “Today’s...

As EV sales boom and grids seek more energy storage, researchers are racing to develop batteries that are cheaper, more powerful, and less reliant on hard-to-source materials. Lithium-ion still dominates, but sodium-ion and solid-state technologies are moving from lab to market.

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As governments and institutions pledged billions for offshore wind, cleaner shipping and marine protection at last month’s Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, countries are increasingly turning to the ocean as a source of jobs and climate action.

But civil society groups warn that the push to expand the “blue economy” may reproduce familiar inequalities unless coastal communities have a greater say in how projects are designed, financed and governed. 

Neville van Rooy from The Green Connection in South Africa, which works with coastal communities who rely directly on the ocean for their livelihoods, said local people were frequently unaware of proposed developments until civil society groups alerted them. 

“Communities need to be taken seriously,” van Rooy told delegates at the Mombasa conference held on the shores of the Indian Ocean. 

“Just because they are often struggling does not mean they do not have a vision of development. Inclusivity needs to be at the centre and development pathways must build on communities’ own experience, including indigenous knowledge systems rooted in harmony with nature.” 

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Ocean investment flowing in

The value of the blue economy—the sustainable use and protection of marine resources—doubled from $1.3 trillion in 1995 to $2.6 trillion in 2020 and is projected to quadruple by 2050, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The scale of ambition in Mombasa was clear, with governments, institutions, companies and civil society groups announcing 320 commitments worth $6.4 billion.

The largest share went to sustainable blue economy projects, with 86 commitments worth $2.86 billion, followed by sustainable fisheries with $1.75 billion and ocean-climate action with $1.18 billion.  

The pledges included support for ocean startups in Africa, coastal ecosystem restoration across the Indian Ocean, marine research and policy, recycling discarded fishing nets, sustainable livelihoods in Timor-Leste and planning tools for offshore wind.  

Cynthia Barzuna, global deputy director of the Ocean Program at the World Resources Institute, said there are signs that blue finance and ocean planning are moving closer to coastal communities, particularly through the development of sustainable ocean plans.  

In 2020, a group of 14 countries – co-led by Australia and Chile – pledged to manage their oceans sustainably, by jointly drawing up plans with coastal communities to shape how marine resources are managed and where investments should go.

“Once communities are involved in the planning, bring in their knowledge, and participate in designing, developing and implementing a sustainable ocean plan, it puts us on the right path,” Barzuna told Climate Home News on the sidelines of the conference. 

Yet some of those countries – including Kenya, Australia and Mexico – have embarked on a new wave of offshore oil and gas projects, threatening key biodiversity hotspots, according to a recent report by a group of environmental NGOs.

When projects go wrong

Civil society groups say lessons need to be learnt from failed blue economy projects too. 

In Kenya, a proposed coal-fired power plant at Lamu Port – a fragile coastal ecosystem and a UNESCO World Heritage site – was challenged by residents and campaigners who cited little consultation and threats to fishing, tourism, culture and public health. 

In 2019, Kenya’s National Environment Tribunal revoked its environmental licence, citing inadequate public participation and flaws in the environmental assessment – a decision later upheld by the courts.  

“It is not enough to say that whatever you are doing is in the name of the communities, their livelihoods and whatever else you want to improve”, but that they should be directly involved in projects from the start, said Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan climate activist and Convenor of the Africa Movement of Movements. 

He said another lesson learnt was that environmental impact assessments must not only be completed, but “must be done rigorously” and that the process has to be transparent so that people feel involved and that their views are being counted. 

Blue transition

Blue carbon schemes can also attract finance, but campaigners said communities that have long protected mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes must be treated as rights-holders, not just beneficiaries. In some past projects, they said, communities were asked to provide labour, attend consultations or receive small payments, while outside developers retained control over carbon revenues and decisions over how ecosystems were managed.

Similarly, offshore wind and marine protected areas can bring climate and conservation gains, but if poorly planned, they can disrupt fishing grounds, marine species and small-scale fishers’ access to the sea, added campaigners. 

Farida Aliwa, executive director of Natural Justice, said the answer was not to halt ocean-based development, but to put in place stronger safeguards before projects are approved, financed and expanded. 

Aliwa said legal frameworks across Africa were evolving, with strategic litigation increasingly being used to hold governments accountable for environmental, climate and human rights impacts related to new projects.  

But she warned that communities and coastal defenders still face shrinking civic space, and said any shift to renewable energy must be designed responsibly. 

“As we work on alternatives, we need to ensure that renewable projects benefit communities,” she said. 

The post As blue economy gathers pace, communities must benefit from ocean boom, activists say appeared first on Climate Home News.

As countries gathered in Geneva this week for the first UN dialogue on the governance of artificial intelligence, campaigners said the debate around the fast-evolving technology has overlooked the potential harm it could cause to nature and biodiversity.

Not only has nature been absent from discussions on the environmental impacts of AI data centres, which focus mainly on carbon emissions and water use, there has also been no consideration of how AI deployment by industry could gobble up more natural resources, activists warned.

Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said that while AI can help protect wildlife and forests, the broader boost it will give to economic growth poses a far bigger threat than expected benefits.

“We’ve seen over $250 billion of private capital go into AI in 2024 alone – and almost all of that is seeking an economic return, and the money follows commercial value,” he told journalists. “Extraction, industrial farming, resource logistics, and the engines that drive ever more consumption are all activities that contribute to biodiversity loss.”

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The leading conservationist added that the policy documents produced by leading AI companies do not address the downstream effects of their technology for nature and biodiversity, focusing more on employment and other social issues.

Some have firms have put small sums towards projects that support conservation, he noted, but none are addressing the issue in a serious way or have included nature in the safety rules for their models.

“The living world that all of this rests upon – nature being the foundation of our economies, our societies, all life on earth – is not a primary concern in the governance of AI, as proposed by the corporates of AI,” O’Donnell said.

Positive uses steal the show

Last month, UN chief António Guterres launched an initiative to hold major AI firms accountable for their exploding environmental impacts, including carbon emissions, the amount of water and land used for data centres, and the energy they consume.

The UN boss also wants big players to commit to power all data centres with renewable energy by 2030. On Monday in Geneva, in a wide-ranging speech, he again raised his proposed “AI Environmental Transparency Initiative”. But nature has not featured in his comments on the issue.

UN asks AI companies to reveal full environmental impacts

In addition, the preliminary report of the newly formed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI – which assesses the opportunities, risks and impacts of AI – mentions environmental concerns only briefly.

The report, which examines available scientific evidence and was presented to governments at the Geneva dialogue, does not highlight any threats to nature and biodiversity but cites a study showing how AI has been used to track and reduce conflict between humans and wildlife.

O’Donnell pointed to “some really important technological uses of AI for biodiversity” such as monitoring species, forest damage and tree cover and using camera traps to see what kind of wildlife migrates in a particular area. But, he added, these get a disproportionate amount of attention compared with the threat from more rapacious resource extraction which he perceives as far greater.

By making commercial operations cheaper, quicker and more efficient, and opening access to untapped areas of land and sea, AI could drive biodiversity loss through increased over-exploitation of fish, wildlife and timber, worsening pollution and spreading invasive species on faster trade networks, he added.

Indigenous concerns

Indigenous peoples are also worried that their lands, critical mineral reserves and knowledge will be appropriated by AI and the accelerated economic development it fuels, said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a leading global environmental activist and Indigenous leader from Chad.

Ibrahim, who produced a report on Indigenous peoples and AI for the UN in April, told journalists that before Indigenous peoples share their know-how on managing forests and stewarding nature, companies and governments must put in place principles to ensure this can happen in a fair way that prevents it being abused by bad actors.

Warning against ‘consumer club’ as G7 forms critical minerals alliance

Her report also points to positive ways that AI can support Indigenous culture and rights, such as tackling their lack of access to digital tools, preserving their languages and knowledge and mapping their territories to detect threats and better protect biodiversity.

Efforts such as those by the UN to shape the future of AI governance should look not only at what AI can do, but also ask who benefits and how it safeguards the planet, Ibrahim said.

“If we answer those questions together with Indigenous peoples as equal partners, we can build AI that serves humanity, protects biodiversity and help restore the balance between peoples and planet in an equitable and just way,” she added.

Policy processes lag AI development

Both O’Donnell and Ibrahim said they would lobby countries, the UN and AI firms themselves to put nature and biodiversity on the political agenda, including at the UN biodiversity summit in Armenia in October.

O’Donnell told Climate Home News that when the Global Biodiversity Framework, the world’s main treaty to protect nature, was agreed in 2022, AI was still nascent but has since exploded in terms of investment and its influence on economies.

The vote that stopped a data center: US communities query resource-hungry AI

He pointed to the mismatch between the timeline of the UN’s efforts to develop governance guidelines and the speed with which AI is being developed in the real world.

“Nature can’t be sidelined in these discussions,” he said, calling for a faster and more comprehensive response from policymakers, business and the environmental community.

“We have a very short window to embed nature both into the governance constitutions of the companies themselves and into the formal regulatory [system] going forward,” he added.

The post AI governance debate silent on risks to nature, campaigners warn appeared first on Climate Home News.

Two incidents that generated worldwide headlines in recent months have called attention to the often-overlooked plight of India’s captive elephants.

In the first, an elderly female elephant died three months after she was painted pink by a Russian photographer.

Then, this May, a young tusker attacked an older, tuskless male elephant at a camp run by the forest department, leading to the death of a tourist and the elder elephant.

Although media around the world carried news about these two sad events, they’re not exactly isolated occurrences. Over the past year alone, multiple distressed elephants used in temple festivities have gone on rampages and killed people, or have suffered immensely and died.

The deaths underscore a hidden reality: Despite India’s designation of the elephant as the national heritage animal, the country allows the animals to be privately owned, which has created opportunities for them to be trafficked and exploited.

“India has an ancient cultural relationship with elephants,” says Kartick Satyanarayan, CEO and co-founder of Wildlife SOS, an animal-welfare and conservation organization headquartered in New Delhi. “But in today’s day and age, captive elephants live in a highly compromised situation as their physical, social and psychological needs are not met. Many elephants succumb to serious health and welfare issues over time.”

 

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An estimated 3,000 elephants live in captivity across the country. Of these, about 70% are privately owned – either by individuals or institutions – with a majority spending their lives in horrific conditions. Owners use these elephants for providing rides to tourists, parades at religious festivals, begging, and other exploitative activities, despite the serious concerns raised by animal-welfare activists.

The rest are owned by the various forest departments in the country, where they’re mainly used for anti-poaching patrols or forest-management activities and are better cared for than privately owned elephants.

A subspecies of the Asian elephant, Indian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) are classified as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). They’re native to 11 countries in south and southeast Asia, and India is home to nearly 75% of the subspecies’ population. The latest census in India (2021-2025) estimated the wild elephant population to be 22,446.

Elephants receive the highest level of protection under Indian law. Yet traffickers take advantage of longstanding legal loopholes and continue to poach calves from the wild, torture them into submission, and exploit them in captivity.

“The law, though strong in intent, has enough structural gaps to render its protections largely ineffective in practice,” says advocate Rishabh Karan Mehta, who practices at India’s Supreme Court.

“Every elephant removed from the wild is a loss to the gene pool and genetic diversity of the wild population,” says Satyanarayan.

According to Mehta, a 2020 response to a Right to Information petition revealed that roughly 1 in 4 privately owned captive elephants lacked proper supporting documentation.

“That’s how widespread the problem is,” he says.

Captive Elephants in Tourism

Elephant riding continues to be touted by some travel agents as a must-do experience in India. Over 100 elephants ferry eager tourists to Amer Fort in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, for example.

“Tourists who ride elephants are often misled,” says Satyanarayan. “Their cultural experience is built entirely on the suffering and abuse of the elephant and causes irreversible damage to its spine and back.”

Several of the elephants at Amer Fort are blind, crippled, and have scores of wounds and abscesses. “These injuries are masterfully concealed beneath colorful decorations, velvet fabrics and paint,” says Satyanarayan.

Snatched from their mothers at an early age, elephant calves undergo a brutal “breaking-of-the-spirit” process involving severe beatings and starvation. Once they’ve submitted to their captors, they spend decades of their lives in chains, abused and neglected until death saves them from their daily suffering.

Two Cases That Ignited Firestorms

In November 2025 a Russian photographer visiting Amer Fort asked for a captive elephant to be painted bright pink for a photoshoot. The owner of an elderly elephant named Chanchal agreed. When the images of the “pink elephant” were shared on social media, a global furor erupted about the ethics of using animals in such projects.

“It’s deeply troubling that people don’t hesitate to use elephants as props and abuse them in the process,” says Satyanarayan. “It shows how little consideration there is for the elephant’s welfare,” he adds.

Three months later, Chanchal — who was in her mid-60s — died. Though the post-mortem said that she died of age-related issues, a lifetime of captivity and neglect would have had an impact on her health and wellbeing, Satyanarayan says.

“Chanchal spent decades without ever knowing a day of true freedom, a victim exploited by people for greed and profit,” he says.

Another gruesome incident in the southern state of Karnataka reignited the conversation around elephant captivity. In May, during an elephant bathing activity in the Cauvery River at the forest department-run Dubare camp, a 26-year-old tusker named Kanjan attacked an older tuskless male, Marthanda.

“These situations can occur when captive bull elephants are in proximity to each other,” says Satyanarayan.

The older elephant lost his footing in the water and fell on a female tourist standing nearby, killing her instantly. Marthanda later succumbed to his injuries as well.

“When camps become tourism attractions, then the welfare and safety of visitors and elephants needs to be the highest priority,” says Satyanarayan. “Placing visitors in close proximity to elephants can create dangerous situations for both.”

Though the camp authorities responded swiftly by stopping all close contact activities, including elephant bathing, feeding, and selfies, the measures came too late for the tourist and the elephant who lost their lives in this entirely preventable tragedy.

Captive Elephants at Religious Festivals

The southern state of Kerala has a tradition of parading richly dressed captive elephants as part of festival processions. Some of these elephants are owned by Hindu temples, but most are leased from private owners for the festivities. While churches and mosques in Kerala are not known to own any elephants, some do rent them for festival parades. The approximately 300 privately owned elephants in the state are transported between thousands of local festivals to meet demand.

Physical trauma and exhaustion, psychological distress from prolonged confinement, combined with the loud noises of festival music and fireworks, have driven several processional elephants to run helter-skelter in distress. Since January there have been multiple such incidents involving human fatalities and injuries, as well as the destruction of property.

Each festival gives elephant owners “a lot of money,” says Sangita Iyer, founder of the U.S.-registered nonprofit Voice for Asian Elephants Society and a National Geographic explorer, who notes that an elephant can bring in thousands of dollars a day for its owner. “So they don’t care about the welfare of the elephants,” she adds. “That’s the reason these elephants are constantly distressed.”

Iyer, a practicing Hindu herself, has been outspoken about the cruelty these elephants suffer in captivity.

“When elephants are tied in one spot, their wild instincts are cruelly denied,” she says. “In captivity, they are alone and they suffer like human beings suffer in solitary confinement. It impacts their brain and nervous system, and they’re constantly terrified of what’s going to  happen next.”

Iyer’s powerful 2016 film Gods in Shackles sheds light on the dark reality behind the flamboyant elephant parades at Kerala’s festivals.

“They live a life of misery,” Iyer says. “You see the shackles cutting into their flesh, tears oozing down their face,” she adds.

Loopholes in the System

Wildlife traffickers and traders use many different loopholes — both legal and administrative — to circumvent laws and legalize wild-caught elephants.

“When the [Wildlife Protection] Act was enacted [in 1972], ownership certificates were issued to regularize elephants that were already in captivity at the time,” says advocate Mehta. This was intended to be a one-time measure that was never meant to continue. “Over the decades, this mechanism has been repeatedly misused to introduce newly captured wild elephants into the captive pool by issuing fresh ownership certificates.” Mehta explains that these fresh ownership certificates are often fraudulent or issued in a rush without verifying the origin or history of the elephant.

“The absence of a centralized, tamper-proof national elephant registry and the lack of mandatory DNA-based verification means there is no reliable way to distinguish a wild-caught elephant from a captive-born one,” Mehta says.

The Way Forward

Some Asian countries are leading the way on addressing the exploitation of elephants in captivity.

In early 2026 Indonesia became the first country in Asia to introduce a nationwide ban on elephant rides and forced performances and interactions. In May Bangladesh introduced new regulations banning the use of elephants in any exploitative or cruel activities. While India has banned the use of elephants in circuses, their mistreatment in tourism and religious festivities continues.

India launched a DNA profiling program in 2022 to enable the monitoring of the captive elephants in the country and prevent the trafficking of wild elephants into captivity. Genetic material of nearly 2,000 captive elephants has been collected so far. The profiles — including parentage and ownership information — will eventually be uploaded to a centralized database and app that will make it easy to identify wild-caught elephants from captive-born ones, as well as any illegal transfers or fraudulent ownership cases.

Meanwhile animal welfare advocates hope to make elephant riding less attractive by calling attention to the hidden abuses behind tourism activities, such as the Refuse to Ride campaign that Wildlife SOS launched in 2018.

“The only way to stop the demand is by creating awareness,” says Satyanarayan. “When the demand dies, the abuse and cruelty stops,” he adds.

 

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Wildlife SOS also works closely with the Responsible Tourism Society of India, whose members include thousands of local travel agents. “Many of the big operators have assured us and given us written commitments that they will never promote the riding of elephants,” says Satyanarayan.

Wildlife SOS’ latest campaign focuses on the nearly 300 “begging” elephants in the country, who are forced to walk on hot tar roads for hours and beg for alms, despite their many injuries. The nonprofit is working toward the goal of ending this cruel practice by 2030.

The increasing number of incidents involving distressed elephants running amok during festival processions and causing human fatalities is starting to make people rethink their use. As a cruelty-free alternative to the use of captive elephants in festival processions, two nonprofits — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in India and Iyer’s VFAES — have donated life-size robotic elephants to several temples.

“This elephant can be paraded across the village and the public have really taken well to it,” says Iyer. “They get to touch and feel these elephants and feel safe doing it. I’m hoping that in the next five to ten years, we will see a complete abolishment of live elephants being paraded.”

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

Study: Commercial Lion Farming in South Africa Could Be Harming, Not Helping, Wild Lions

The post India’s Captive Elephants in the Spotlight After High-Profile Deaths appeared first on The Revelator.

“On the Ground with Dani Nierenberg” is an ongoing series documenting Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg’s ground-truthing work. Read more by clicking here. 

Mary Atemo greeted us with hugs and a warm smile on her farm in Kisumu West County, Kenya, roughly 120 kilometers from the Ugandan border.

She has been working with researchers from icipe for 16 years. They introduced her to push-pull farming, a simple but powerful intercropping strategy that increases crop diversity. Some plants push pests away from crops, while others pull them in, helping farmers reduce crop losses and rely less on pesticides and other agrichemicals.

Mary told us that in 2010, the Striga weed was decimating her maize crop. Striga, also called witchweed in parts of Kenya, is a parasitic plant and one of the biggest threats to maize and sorghum production in sub-Saharan Africa. According to icipe, it infests about 40 percent of the region’s arable land and causes an estimated US$7 to US$13 billion in crop losses each year. Around the Lake Victoria basin, where Mary farms, Striga can reduce maize yields by 30 to 100 percent.

And Striga wasn’t the only problem. Stem borers, insect larvae that tunnel through the stems of cereal crops, were also destroying her harvest.

When researchers from icipe first visited, Mary agreed to set aside a small experimental plot on farm. “I wanted to prove if the technology was effective or not,” she told us.

It didn’t take long.

“The stem borers ran away after a few days,” she said with a laugh.

As we sat in the shade outside her house, Mary told us she is differently abled and relies on a crutch to move around her farm. But she also made something else very clear.

She is fully capable.

Walking through the farm with her we listening as she pointed out the Napier grass that repels stem borers and the Desmodium that suppresses Striga while enriching the soil with nitrogen. As she spoke, it became obvious that what makes Mary successful isn’t physical strength—although she has plenty of that. It’s years of observation, experimentation, and an openness to trying something new.

Too often, conversations about agriculture focus on what farmers, especially women farmers, don’t have—land, financing, technology, healthy soil, extension services. Those challenges are real. But Mary reminded me to pay just as much attention to what farmers do have—knowledge, experience, and curiosity. And the ability to adapt.

Sixteen years after planting that first experimental plot, Mary has become much more than an adopter of push-pull farming. She has become one of its best ambassadors, sharing what she’s learned not only with her neighbors, but also with researchers, policymakers, and visitors from around the world who come to her farm. She is proof that science has the greatest impact when it reaches farmers’ fields.

Mary also reminded me that farmers with disabilities are too often overlooked. But they are growing food, supporting their families, and strengthening their communities every day. If we’re serious about building more resilient food systems, they have to be included in the research, financing, and training that shape agriculture’s future.

As we were getting ready to leave, Mary hugged me again. She hugged Haven, our filmmaker, too. Before we climbed into the van, she made me promise that I would come back.

Next time, she said, she’d make me ugali.

I’ve met farmers like Mary all over the world. They don’t want sympathy, and they certainly don’t want to be underestimated. They want access to good science, good seeds, good markets, and the opportunity to keep doing what they’ve always done which is feed their communities.

Mary reminded me that if we’re serious about building a better food system, we have to invest in all farmers. Otherwise, we’re overlooking some of agriculture’s greatest innovators.

As we drove away, I was already thinking about that promised bowl of ugali. I hope I get the chance to go back.

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 Haven Worley

The post On the Ground with Dani Nierenberg: Differently Abled, Fully Capable appeared first on Food Tank.

Asamblea #20 - 24/07/2026 Fecha, hora y enlace a la reunión * Fecha: 24/07/2026 * Hora: 1 p. m. GMT * Duración: 2 horas * Enlace a la reunión: Agenda * Apertura y resumen de Bandung * Breve bienvenida y contextualización como la primera Asamblea Virtual desde Indonesia.

Assembly #20 - 24/07/2026 Date, time and meeting link * Date: 24/07/2026 * Time: 1pm GMT * Duration: 2 hours * Meeting link: Agenda * Opening and Bandung recap * Short welcome and framing as the first Virtual Assembly since Indonesia. alternativesalternatives

More than half of the 41 Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) registered for use in Uganda are currently banned in the European Union. Despite this, they remain on Ugandan shelves and in Ugandan fields.

The post Uganda’s Peasant Movements Push Back Against Harmful Pesticides with Agroecology appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Whales, dolphins and porpoises are protected from hunting in most places these days. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe from fishing.

Accidental entanglement and drowning, often called bycatch, is one of the greatest threats to cetaceans. The overwhelming majority of those incidents were tied to gillnets, curtains of virtually invisible nylon mesh dangled in the water, indiscriminately trapping anything that swims into them.

The carnage is worldwide. In the Indian Ocean, an estimated 4.1 million small cetaceans such as dolphins died between 1950 and 2018 in gillnets targeting tuna. Gillnets have pushed Mexico’s vaquita porpoise to the brink of extinction. In U.S. waters, the nets claimed more than 6,000 marine mammals every year in the 1990s.

But for at least some gillnets, the solution might be easily at hand in the nearest trash can. Plastic drink bottles tethered to drift nets cut bycatch of an endangered South American dolphin by nearly 90% without affecting the overall amount of fish caught, according to new research in Marine Mammal Science.

“This is a good news story and something that we strive for—a simple solution that benefits both dolphins and the fishers who use the gear,” said Per Berggren, a marine conservation scientist at the United Kingdom’s Newcastle University who developed the idea of using the bottles. “Attaching plastic bottles to fishing nets can reduce dolphin bycatch globally and is something that every fisher can afford.”

 

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The arrangement is remarkably low-tech, taking advantage of the acoustic properties of air-filled bottles and the hunting strategies of dolphins. Slender-snouted franciscana dolphins, which grow to a little less than 2 meters, pursue fish close to shore in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. That puts them in direct conflict with small scale fishers, who sink their nets to the seafloor.

The dolphins use echolocation to survey their surroundings, emitting a series of clicks and then interpreting the sounds reflected back to them. The air-filled bottles act a bit like mirrors, reflecting the clicks better than the fine mesh of the nets.

The researchers attached the small bottles every 130 meters along the upper edge of nets that totaled 3 kilometers in length, like wide-spaced Christmas lights. Working with fishers in southern Brazil, between 2020 and 2025 they tracked what came up in the bottle-festooned nets compared to regular nets.

The results showed a dramatic 88% fewer dolphins caught in the bottle-topped nets when adjusted for the total amount of time each set of nets were in the water. In the modified nets, just one franciscana dolphin was caught, compared to eight franciscana dolphins and two bottlenose dolphins in the standard nets.

At the same time, there was no significant change in the number of fish caught in the nets, meaning there was little downside to the bottles.

“This is genuinely recycling that rescues dolphins,” said Berggren.

That doesn’t mean this is a silver bullet for all bycatch problems. Similar experiments in Zanzibar and Peru with gillnets that float near the surface didn’t produce the same benefits, according to a companion paper in Fisheries Research. Berggren suspects that’s because the surface water is a “noisier” environment, obscuring the presence of the bottles.

There are fancier devices that might overcome some of the weaknesses of the plastic bottles. For instance, there are electronic devices that can be attached to nets that emit a “ping.” But the researchers note that the cost of buying and maintaining them might be deterring small-scale local fishers from adopting them.

Empty plastic bottles, on the other hand, are all too abundant.

Sucunza, et. al. “Evidence of Dolphin Bycatch Reduction With Upcycled Plastic Bottles Acoustic Reflectors Attached to Bottom-Set Gillnets.” Marine Mammal Science. May 18, 2026.  

Berggren, et. al. “Upcycled glass and plastic bottles offer potential low-cost mitigation to megafauna bycatch in gillnet fisheries.” Fisheries Science. May 9, 2026.

Image: © Yaroslaf | Dreamstime.com

"If we want more farmers, policies for generational renewal must be based on principles of justice rather than profit-making." ECVC

The post Europe: ECVC responds to European Commission’s strategy for Generational Renewal appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

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Pervasive plastic contamination and unreliable methods have clouded the science on microplastics in the human body. In an interview, Australian scientist Cassandra Rauert, who built a plastics-free lab to study human exposure, explores the challenges for researchers.

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We’re not even one month into “super” El Niño, the natural Pacific weather pattern characterized by warmer than average sea surface temperatures, and fisheries around the world are already getting scrambled.

In Peru, government officials have effectively canceled the fishing season for anchovies, one of the country’s most important exports and a leading source of fish oil and animal feed globally. The Indian government is preparing for a season of smaller, less plentiful Indian mackerel. Meanwhile, in Southern California, recreational and commercial fishers have reported some of the most successful months of tuna fishing they’ve ever seen. 

The divergent situations show how El Niño can create winners and losers across the fishing industry, decimating some species while making others easier to catch. For fishers, the result is instability, with many forced to consider seasonal diversification. And consumers can expect fluctuations in the price of key fish products.

“People are worried,” said Juan Carlos Sueiro, an economist and fisheries director for the nonprofit Oceana Peru. As climate change is expected to drive more frequent, stronger El Niños, “our vulnerability is increasing.” 

El Niño is a weather phenomenon that happens every two to seven years in the tropical Pacific Ocean. It was named by Peruvian fishers who, hundreds of years ago, noticed periodic fluctuations in their catches, with huge declines occurring every few years around Christmas. They called it El Niño, after the baby Jesus.

The reason it has such disparate impacts on different fisheries has to do with the way it moves around ocean water. 

Under normal conditions, trade winds blowing west along the equator move warm water from South America toward Asia. This causes cold, nutrient-dense water to rise up from the depths, a process known as “upwelling” that encourages the growth of tiny algae near the ocean’s surface. During an El Niño, however, weakening trade winds slow or even stop this upwelling. Less algae at the surface means species that depend on it, like anchovies, are forced to search for grub in deeper waters. Not only does this make the fish harder to catch, it can also stress and shrink their populations.

At the same time, those ocean dynamics can boost other fisheries. El Niño often sees warm-water species like the skipjack tuna straying toward coastal waters of the Americas, where temperatures would normally be too frigid for them. Nearer to the shore, these species become easier to catch.

Both of these dynamics affect Peru, where El Niños of the past have both wiped out the country’s anchoveta fishery — the largest single-species fishery in the world — and increased the availability of shrimp, scallops, dolphinfish, and tuna. This spring and summer, coastal El Niño conditions have already strained the country’s anchovies, prompting the government to issue an indefinite ban on fishing for them during the April to July season so their populations don’t fall even further. Humberto Speziani, a Peruvian industrial fishing adviser and former director of the International Marine Ingredients Organization, said vessels equipped with sonar technology have been locating anchovies more than 100 meters below the sea surface. Even if commercial fishers were trying to catch those anchovies, they likely couldn’t — that’s twice the depth that’s reachable using normal purse seine fishing nets.

A fisherman carries a box of fish at Chorrillos beach in Lima, Peru, in April. Luis Robayo / Getty Images

Seafood prices are liable to change, too, due to El Niño’s milder impacts outside the Pacific Ocean. Wild salmon, for example, can get so skinny from a lack of food during El Niño that they’re dubbed “snakes”; their decline in North American coastal waters can lead to higher ex-vessel prices — what fishers receive at the dock — that are then passed down to retail and restaurant customers. And in local Peruvian markets, prices for jack mackerel and corvina have already reportedly doubled, prompting families to buy more chicken instead. Sueiro said the opposite may happen with species like shrimp, whose populations have boomed during past El Niños.

One demographic that is likely to benefit from El Niño is Southern California fishers, who call the weather phenomenon a “special treat” due to higher-than-normal catches of bluefin tuna, swordfish, blue marlin, and other species that usually stay closer to the equator. Even before El Niño was officially declared in June, SoCal’s recreational anglers and commercial fishers were celebrating “unprecedented” bluefin tuna yields; one fishing tracker suggests that nearly 300,000 more of the fish were caught off the California coast during the first half of the year, compared to the same period last year.

“We’ve got yellowfin, we’ve got bluefin, yellowtail, and dorado. What else can you ask for?” the manager of one San Diego-based sportsfishing company said on YouTube at the end of April. “It’s not even May, and fishing’s been red-hot.”

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Although artisanal fishers in South America often catch more of these species, too, they’re unlikely to fully offset economic losses wrought by El Niño. For one, high winds associated with the weather phenomenon can frustrate shipping vessels, making it harder to reel in additional species. And heavy rainfall can damage onshore infrastructure needed to process marine animals and take them to market.

El Niño-related shifts in fish migration can impact more than fishing economies. High ocean temperatures associated with the weather phenomenon can decimate coral reefs and the species that call them home. They can also cause kelp to deteriorate faster, reducing the amount of underwater oxygen available to maintain healthy ecosystems. And there’s been some research to suggest that shifting fish populations can escalate geopolitical conflict, as vessels stray into other countries’ economic zones.

Arnaud Bertrand, a senior scientist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, also worries about the Humboldt squid. These animals are an important income source for Peru’s artisanal fishers — they yield half a million tons of catch per year — and they tend to fare poorly during El Niños due to changes in prey availability. “If the Humboldt squid collapses, then you’ll have 10,000 boats that will try to find another resource,” Bertrand said. And because these artisanal fishers are less strictly regulated than commercial enterprises, all those boats looking for alternative species could have “huge, huge consequences for the ecosystem.”

Ultimately, the exact impacts will depend on how this El Niño forms and when its peak arrives. Exceptionally high temperatures in September could signal a more damaging El Niño, on par or similar to the disastrous one that struck in 1982. But even then, it’s hard to say exactly what will happen.

“Each El Niño is different,” Bertrand said, though climate change doesn’t make him optimistic. “With global warming, the worst is the most probable.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline El Niño is here, and it’s already scrambling fisheries throughout the Pacific on Jul 8, 2026.

When a 150-mph cyclone hit the Mariana Islands in mid-April, federal officials handed out more than 1,400 tents and 1,100 temporary roofs to help families with damaged or destroyed homes. Last week, local officials urged residents to take the tents down and find safer shelter as another super typhoon approached.

“Those tents are not rated to withstand anything stronger than a weak tropical storm,” Miguel Dandan, a public information officer for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, told NMI News Service. Days later, Super Typhoon Bavi hit the island of Rota with 180 mph winds; the neighboring islands of Guam and Saipan saw winds over 100 mph. “Our washer flew, our dryer, even our freezers flew. Everything, even the trees in the back broke down and fell on our cars,” Rota resident Peter James Meskin told the Marianas Press.

It’s the second massive typhoon to pummel the Marianas in less than three months, and the archipelago is only a week into its typical typhoon season. The islands are home to Indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian peoples who are accustomed to frequent storms, but scientists say climate change is making them more intense. It’s part of a broader pattern of Indigenous Pacific peoples bearing the brunt of climate impacts while contributing relatively little to the burning of fossil fuels that cause the atmosphere to warm. 

Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist who leads the science division at the nonprofit Climate Central, said abnormally hot ocean waters due to that warming atmosphere intensified both Bavi and Sinlaku, another super typhoon that struck Chuuk with 185 mph winds then weakened to 150 before hitting the Marianas on April 14. “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths,” she said. 

Federal emergency officials were still processing disaster aid applications for Sinlaku when Bavi hit on Monday, and many families were still without power. A June 26 update from the commonwealth government estimated 29 percent of utility customers — more than 4,000 — lacked electricity more than two months after the April storm. Zeno Camacho Deleon Guerrero Jr., an Indigenous Chamorro resident of northern Saipan, considered himself lucky that his outage lasted only a little over a month after Sinlaku. But now his family is out of water and power again. Deleon Guerrero had been in Japan on a work trip when Sinlaku hit and was shocked to see the islandwide destruction on Saipan when he returned. “We were all just jaw-dropped flying in from Guam, being able to just see the whole south to north landscape, and it was just brown, dry and toasted bare,” he said. “We got the house cleaned up to a standard where it was livable but to where things were actually clean it was impossible because there was just a lack of running water.” He saw his neighbors lining up as early as 3 a.m. to buy water. 

Bavi didn’t hit his village as hard as Sinlaku did, but he still spent the storm mopping up water coming in through the windows. “It was honestly really chilling and terrifying to hear the rattling of the windows and just wondering, is it going to cave in or burst in at any moment?” 

The island of Rota, also known as Luta, had a direct hit from the 180-mph storm. Courtesy of Marianas Press

Deleon Guerrero’s experience might be repeated yet again before the year ends. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated last month that U.S.-affiliated Pacific island nations and territories would experience more frequent tropical cyclones due to El Niño, a weather pattern that shifts warm waters in the Pacific Ocean east toward South America. Chuuk is expected to see four to six cyclones this year, with Saipan and Guam potentially experiencing as many as seven tropical storms and typhoons.

Dahl noted that while El Niño may be fostering the formation of those storms, climate change is making them more intense. “Our data shows that the temperatures that (Bavi) is encountering along its path are 10 to 40 times more likely to be as hot as they are because of climate change,” she said. 

The fact that storms are growing more intense has major implications for Pacific peoples’ homes, health, economies, and lives. There are no confirmed deaths from Bavi so far, but Sinlaku was the deadliest storm to strike the Micronesian region in more than two decades, with the death toll reaching 17 across the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Deleon Guerrero, who works as solidarity director at the nonprofit Right to Democracy that advocates on behalf of U.S. territories, said the commonwealth’s inability to meaningfully participate in the federal government — including its lack of a vote in Congress or for president — makes it hard for the community to have any say in critical moments like this, when the commonwealth relies so heavily on federal disaster response. 

The day after Bavi swept through the Marianas, Deleon Guerrero woke up to another landscape of destruction, with his neighbors’ temporary roofing installed post-Sinlaku now part of typhoon debris. 

“We understand that it was meant to be temporary but it just goes to show that in this region, especially with the climate changing the way that it is, these temporary fixes aren’t cutting it,” he said. “A lot of people are just back to square one when some people thought we were making some meaningful progress.”

Grist reporter Joseph Lee contributed to this story. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Another super typhoon just pummeled the Pacific on Jul 8, 2026.

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