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Deadly US-Israeli coalition attacks on densely populated areas of Tehran in March 2026, that killed and injured dozens of civilians, must urgently be independently and impartially investigated to determine whether they constitute war crimes, Amnesty International said in a new briefing published today. The organization is calling for accountability and redress for possible indiscriminate attacks in violation of international humanitarian law as hostilities continue to escalate between the USA and Iran.

The recent escalation between the USA and Iran – with reports of civilian casualties in a deadly US attack on a wedding celebration in Hormozgan province on 1 September 2026, and Iran’s retaliatory attacks on Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq and Bahrain – demonstrates that the risks to civilians across the region remain high.

The organization’s investigation into air strikes on Niloufar, Resalat, and Javadieh neighbourhoods of Tehran between 1 and 13 March 2026 found evidence that explosive weapons with wide area effects were used in densely populated areas, killing and injuring civilians and causing extensive damage to homes, businesses and other civilian buildings.

In Resalat, air strikes destroyed or damaged a facility belonging to one of the Basij battalions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as three nearby buildings – at least one of which was a residential building – killing 16 civilians. In Niloufar and Javadieh, at least 25 civilians were killed during air strikes that caused destruction or damage to police stations as well as widespread damage to nearby homes and other civilian structures.

Police are normally considered civilians under international humanitarian law unless they are incorporated into the armed forces or are directly participating in hostilities. In Iran, the police force is part of the broader armed forces structure and therefore police stations may qualify as military objectives. While the USA and Israel announced strikes on “regime” targets in Tehran in March 2026, neither confirmed carrying out these three specific attacks.

“The available evidence in Tehran points to a series of strikes using explosive weapons with wide area effects on security-related facilities within densely populated urban areas, with devastating and yet entirely predictable consequences for civilians. The civilian death toll, the scale of destruction, the timing of the attacks, the impact on nearby civilian structures and the lack of effective advance warnings point to alarming failures by the US-Israeli coalition to abide by the obligations to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm and spare civilian objects,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International

“The US/Israeli strikes in Tehran investigated by Amnesty International may constitute indiscriminate attacks and amount to war crimes. They must be the object of independent, impartial, effective and transparent investigations.

The available evidence in Tehran points to a series of strikes using explosive weapons with wide area effects on security-related facilities within densely populated urban areas, with devastating and yet entirely predictable consequences for civilians
Agnès Callamard, Secretary General

“Amid the resumption of US strikes in Iran and renewed threats by US President Donald Trump to target civilian infrastructure, it is imperative that the US and Israel end all unlawful attacks and strictly comply with international humanitarian law, including by taking all feasible precautions to avoid, and in any event minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects during the planning and execution of military operations. The same international law obligations apply to Iran while carrying out retaliatory attacks, including against Gulf states.”

Amnesty International renews its calls for an enduring ceasefire, and accountability for the unlawful US and Israeli attacks on Iran in violation of the UN Charter, and for all violations of international humanitarian law.

The organization also calls on the USA, Israel, and Iran to invite the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to conduct enquiries into allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law by all parties, including attacks on energy infrastructure; and urges the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly to consider all possible avenues to deliver and ensure peace, security and justice for all unlawful attacks in Iran.

Amnesty International analysed satellite imagery, as well as verifying 60 videos published online in relation to the three incidents. The organization also reviewed official public statements made by authorities in Iran, Israel and the USA and conducted interviews with two individuals inside Iran. Pseudonyms are used to protect their security. Amnesty International wrote to Israeli and US authorities on 17 July 2026 and to Iranian authorities on 31 July 2026. No response was received by the time of publication.

AIR STRIKES IN NILOUFAR

At least 20 civilians were killed in the attack in Niloufar Square in central Tehran on 1 March 2026, according to information gathered by Amnesty International from eyewitness accounts, media reports, and statements from Iranian officials. The attack took place at around 9pm when restaurants and cafes were open and the presence of civilians was readily foreseeable.

The evidence gathered indicates that the attack directly struck and destroyed the 104 Abbas Abad Police Station (Kalantari 104), located on Eshghyar Street in Niloufar Square.

Stills from a video showing the impact of the strike on buildings and cars in Niloufar Square. © VahidOnline

Verified videos show that the blast destroyed the police station and caused extensive damage to surrounding apartment buildings, shops and other civilian structures located up to approximately 100 metres away.

A journalist who visited the site said the devastation extended well beyond the police station, leaving multiple apartment buildings uninhabitable and killing civilians, including a father and son who worked at a nearby bakery.

Satellite imagery from 1 March 2026(left) shows the police station building. On 6 March 2026 (right) imagery shows the building has been destroyed. The yellow circle highlights areas of damage and destruction visible in the imagery which extend beyond the police building. ©Planet Labs PBC
AIR STRIKES IN RESALAT

At least 16 civilians were killed and dozens injured during an attack in the densely built-up neighbourhood of Resalat, a populated district in eastern Tehran, at around 2.30pm local time on 9 March 2026, according to information gathered by Amnesty International from open-source evidence, eyewitness accounts, state media reports, and statements from Iranian officials and the Iranian Red Crescent.

According to Amnesty International’s research, the attack directly struck a facility belonging to a Basij battalion of the IRGC.

Amnesty International is unable to independently verify the exact number of strikes that took place and the nature of all buildings impacted in Resalat but satellite imagery analysed by the organization shows four distinct buildings where heavy damage and destruction are visible, including a residential building known as “Number 12” (Pelak-e 12). An eyewitness told Amnesty International that at least 13 civilians in residential building Number 12 were killed, including the building’s caretaker and 12 members of one family.

Evidence gathered by Amnesty International, including satellite imagery and videos as well as witness accounts, indicates that Number 12 was likely struck separately from the Basij facility.

Satellite imagery from 6 March 2026 (left) shows Basij facility and nearby buildings in the Resalat neighbourhood. On 21 March 2026 (right), imagery shows four distinct buildings with heavy damage and destruction © 2026 Planet Labs PBC AIR STRIKES IN JAVADIEH

At least five civilians, members of the same family, were killed and dozens injured during an attack in the densely populated neighbourhood of Javadieh in southern Tehran at around midday on 13 March 2026, according to information gathered by Amnesty International from state media reports and statements from Iranian officials.

Satellite imagery taken between 11 and 14 March 2026 and audiovisual evidence show that the attack destroyed parts of Police Station 117 (Kalantari 117) on Ghorbani Street and other buildings nearby.

Satellite imagery from 5 June 2025 (left) shows the police station gate and surrounding area. On 5 April 2026, imagery shows the area of destruction, highlighted with a yellow circle (centre) . On 10 May 2026, imagery shows the areas that were cleared in red extending beyond the area of heavy destruction, further suggesting other buildings were heavily impacted and were cleared during the clean-up (right).©Planet Labs PBC

Verified videos show the blast impact extending up to more than 50 metres and causing severe damage to surrounding residential and commercial buildings. One verified video shows emergency and rescue workers carrying out rescue operations. Amnesty International’s weapons experts analysed a photograph published by state media showing individuals standing around two dark, cylindrical pieces of metal lying on the ground and identified the objects as consistent with a component of a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), specifically the section that houses the GPS guidance unit. JDAM kits are manufactured in the US and are known to be used by both US and Israeli forces.

Components of a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) found in Javadieh as reported by Iranian state media. © Farsnews
BACKGROUND

On 28 February, the USA and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran, with tens thousands of strikes across the country since. The strikes killed at least 1,469 civilians in Iran, including hundreds of children, between 28 February 2026 and 24 July 2026, according to official figures.

The Iranian authorities launched retaliatory attacks across the region. Iranian attacks have thus far killed at least 21 civilians in Israel and four in the occupied West Bank; and at least 29 killed across Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Amnesty International found that some of the attacks carried out by the Islamic Republic authorities were unlawful, including an attack that killed nine civilians in Beit Shemesh in Israel, and an attack on a migrant labour camp in Saudi Arabia that killed four civilians. Israel has also escalated its attacks on Lebanon, in response to Hezbollah’s attacks, with at least 4,333 killed in Lebanon since 2 March 2026.

An integrated, nationwide system for recycling and reusing old EV batteries could save 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over 30 years, according to a new study.

The savings depend on resolving a conceptually simple but logistically profound problem: a geographic mismatch between where old batteries get switched out of EVs and where they could be reused.

China has the world’s largest EV market that is also growing faster than anywhere else, leading to a flood of old EV batteries, which are typically retired from use once they can hold only 80% of their original charge. The most common method for recycling these batteries recovers only a limited set of metals and sends the rest of the battery material to the landfill.

Recently reuse of old EV batteries as part of stationary storage for solar or wind power has emerged as an alternative solution. New recycling methods are also being developed that remanufacture battery components without breaking down their chemical structure.

But retired batteries aren’t always where they need to be in order to get a second act. And moving lots of old EV batteries around isn’t straightforward since they are hazardous materials that can catch fire, be damaged, or leak toxic materials into the environment if not transported properly. Is it worth it?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to the new study, the first to systematically explore how to optimize battery reuse and advanced recycling.

The researchers modeled the supply, demand, and disposal of retired EV batteries for each province in China from 2020 through 2050. They calculated the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions and economic costs associated with a dozen different scenarios involving varying levels of battery collection and post-disposal pathways.

 

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Retired batteries mostly accumulate in the wealthier eastern provinces of China with high rates of EV ownership, the researchers report. But demand for battery storage is mostly in the western part of the country where there is a lot of renewable energy potential. And demand for advanced recycling is mostly in battery manufacturing regions with the necessary specialized factories.

Absent any intervention, the mismatch will become more acute in the coming decades, as EV adoption accelerates in the east and renewable generation expands even further in the west.

Study scenarios that prioritize either advanced recycling or storage reuse are associated with three to five times greater cost savings and one to three times greater emissions reductions compared to a system that continues to route batteries mostly to conventional recycling, according to the researchers’ model.

Put another way, the business-as-usual pathway leaves 50-97% of potential cost savings and 26-53% of emissions reductions on the table.

Realizing those savings will require establishing efficient networks for transporting retired batteries between provinces: investing in specialized trucks, streamlining permitting, and so on.

The impact of building out that system would be pretty minimal, eating up just 2.3% of the cost savings and 0.03% of the emissions savings.

The optimal scenario according to the analysis, involving a balance of storage reuse and advanced recycling and moving away from conventional recycling after 2030, would save about 6.1 billion tons of carbon emissions and 3.9 trillion Chinese Yuan over three decades.

Other regions such as Europe and the United States have similar spatial mismatches between EV adoption and renewables generation, so the findings have relevance beyond China. “These results demonstrate that early, coordinated planning can convert spatial barriers into scalable climate and economic benefits, offering a transferable pathway for other rapidly electrifying markets,” the researchers write.

Source: Xie H. et al.  “Spatial mismatches constrain high-value utilization of retired batteries for decarbonization in China.” Environmental Science and Ecotechnology 2026.

Image: Based on Getty for UnSplash. ©Anthropocene Magazine.

Carbon credit developers, corporate buyers and some leading conservation NGOs are challenging new proposed rules to stop UN carbon credits being wiped out by fire, drought or logging, in what critics have called a “coordinated lobbying campaign” to weaken the nascent market’s push for greater integrity.

According to documents seen by Climate Home News – including a briefing given to government officials – companies, NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) have contested the scientific basis for the move, arguing that stronger protection for carbon reductions could hike project costs and restrict the supply of credits to the market.

The climate benefit of credits that claim to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions by storing carbon is undone if that carbon is released back into the atmosphere – something known as reversal risk. To protect against such losses and preserve the credibility of the credits’ carbon-offsetting claims, projects are generally required to set aside a reserve of credits that cannot be sold, as a form of insurance.

How these “buffer pools” are calculated has long been a source of contention, especially in forest conservation projects, which many experts say have historically underestimated the risk of carbon losses. 

In July, the technical UN panel tasked with drafting rules for the Article 6.4 mechanism, which underpins the credits that countries and companies can use to meet their climate goals, proposed a new system. It would require project developers to size these insurance pools of credits based on local risk values derived from new research published by a group of independent scientists.

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Its supporters have hailed it as a more rigorous approach than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork and, in some cases, gives significant leeway for project developers to come up with their own data.

“The decision on the reversal risk assessment tool will be crucial,” said Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch. “It would bring a new paradigm for calculating the number of units forwarded to the buffer pool based on empirical data.”

The technical panel is due to discuss the reversal risk tool and its application to a specific set of projects at a five-day meeting in Bonn this week. It is then expected to forward new recommendations to the mechanism’s regulator, the Supervisory Body, for a decision on whether to approve them at a meeting in early October.

The rules are set to be applied initially only to clean cookstove projects, one of the market’s most popular and heavily criticised credit types. They could then be extended to other activities, including programmes to protect forests. 

Copy and paste?

More than 30 organisations aired their views in lengthy public submissions to the Article 6.4 mechanism, responding to a call from the UN secretariat for external feedback.

A Climate Home News review of those submissions found that there was significant overlap in their messages and, in several cases, sections of the text, or even entire submissions, were copied and pasted by different organisations. This points to a coordinated effort to flag concerns regarding the new rules.

In one instance, tech giant Apple, a large buyer of nature-based carbon credits, warned against relying on one scientific model and called for rules that let project developers use a variety of risk mitigation tools, rather than surrendering buffer credits, to cover the risk of carbon losses. 

Apple’s submission is a lightly-edited version of a separate input presented by the Beyond Alliance, a coalition of corporate buyers and NGOs that promote market-based climate investments. In an apparent oversight in one paragraph, the Beyond Alliance’s name appears in Apple’s submission instead of the tech giant’s. 

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The Beyond Alliance told Climate Home News that, after receiving input from its members, it shared its final submission, leaving them to decide if and how they wanted to use it. The coalition rejected any characterisation that its submission advocates for a weaker tool and only reflects business concerns.

The Beyond Alliance added that its members received briefings by UNEP, which Climate Home News understands has played an important role in wider efforts to influence the development of the rules underpinning the UN carbon market. 

Three experts and a European Union diplomat told Climate Home News that the interventions of the UN agency overwhelmingly supported the views of those with a financial interest in carbon markets. 

UNEP’s head of mitigation Gabriel Labbate rejected this accusation. He told Climate Home News that the UN agency contributes technical inputs from a “politically-neutral, science-based perspective” and its positions are grounded in an assessment of environmental integrity and are not shaped by, or aligned with, the financial interests of any market participant. 

UNEP, NGOs criticise scientific basis

In mid-July, representatives from UNEP, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) briefed government officials from Canada, the UK, Germany, Costa Rica, Belgium, Nigeria and Peru, according to a webinar readout seen by Climate Home News.

The online event was organised by the Forest & Climate Leaders Partnership (FCLP), an initiative that brings together 41 countries plus the EU.

The speakers voiced strong criticism of the new proposed rules. A technical advisor to Conservation International, a US-based NGO that runs several large-scale carbon offsetting programmes, told participants the Article 6 panel’s approach was “based on bad science”. This, he said, is because it relies on a single model that he claimed is not appropriate to determine buffer pool contributions, according to a presentation seen by Climate Home News. 

During a high-level discussion led by UNEP’s Labbate, speakers said the application of measures to manage reversal risk on cookstove projects could “impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities”, according to the readout.

Burn company enumerator Teresia Wanjiru checks moisture on firewood at a client’s house using clean cookstoves in Kachoroba village of Kiambu county, Kenya, August 16, 2023. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi Burn company enumerator Teresia Wanjiru checks moisture on firewood at a client’s house using clean cookstoves in Kachoroba village of Kiambu county, Kenya, August 16, 2023. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi

Cookstove programmes issue credits by calculating the greenhouse gas emissions prevented by burning less fuel – usually wood or charcoal – through the use of more efficient stoves. With the new reversal risk tool, these activities would be expected to guard against future carbon losses for the first time under the UN carbon market.

But UNEP, as well as leading NGOs and carbon credit firms, have pushed back against the requirement, arguing this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. Scientists reject that distinction, noting that the wood left unburned is still standing in a forest exposed to the same risks as any other.

At the online briefing, speakers also raised concerns that the tighter approach would be replicated for nature-based carbon projects with a direct impact on the future of large-scale forest conservation credits. The Conservation International advisor called it a “bad precedent”.

Both Conservation International and TNC run carbon credit programmes that aim to protect trees from being cut down. Labbate leads the UN-REDD programme, which supports countries developing forest protection initiatives including through carbon credits, and is co-chair of the expert panel advising the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM).

After the webinar, the organisers shared by email a series of “key messages” and draft submissions produced by the three organisations as optional aids for participants if they decided to prepare their own inputs to the Article 6.4 consultation process

Getting the rules ‘right’

In a statement to Climate Home News, the FCLP Secretariat said members of the coalition welcomed expert views from a range of partners to help them understand the potential impact of Article 6.4 rules on the eligibility of forest carbon credits in international markets.

They added that the FCLP does not have a common position on the rules and its members are free to choose whether to attend webinars and use any of the materials circulated.

In a statement to Climate Home News, Conservation International said “getting these rules right is important to the environmental integrity of the carbon market, while ensuring all sectors have a place in it”. It added that the NGO does not dispute the validity of the scientific research underlying the proposed buffer pool, but recommends a broader approach including multiple models and datasets.

A spokesperson for TNC said the organisation had helped clarify complex materials and their potential implications, while decisions on how to respond remained entirely with participating countries.

‘Inconvenient science’

The scientific basis for the disputed reversal risk tool rests on two pieces of research. A peer-reviewed study, published in Nature in May and led by scientists at several US universities, modelled forest carbon-loss risk across the United States and found existing buffer pools there are undersized by an average factor of six. 

To extend that approach worldwide, the Article 6.4 panel also drew on a second, global analysis by the same research team, which has not yet completed peer review. That study used satellite images, weather records and computer modelling to estimate a 31-42% chance of forests worldwide losing stored carbon within 100 years, depending on the scenario. 

The panel picked one of these scenarios and turned its estimates into fixed risk percentages for individual countries, and in some cases provinces, which projects in those locations would need to apply.

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Critics say the peer-reviewed portion of the research was calibrated on North American forests, and that applying the same approach to other regions relies on a global study that is still going through academic checks.

But, for William Anderegg, professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and one of the authors of that research, it is the best science currently available. He described it as “light-years better” than assumptions underlying the voluntary carbon market, where risk numbers are not generally based on independent evidence and tend to be incredibly low. 

Scientific research, including by Anderegg, has found that buffer pools in forestry projects in the voluntary carbon market are substantially smaller than they should be to adequately protect against future releases of carbon. 

“There really seems to be a fairly coordinated campaign to try to weaken the strength of these [Article 6.4] tools and their scientific underpinning,” he told Climate Home News. “It’s a little dispiriting to see folks attack science that’s inconvenient.”

Regulators under pressure?

An EU diplomat told Climate Home News that experts and negotiators working on the Article 6.4 mechanism have faced intense pressure from big carbon credit developers and large parts of the nature-based solutions community. 

“It is very clear that they are lobbying against strong rules, and they want to align the Paris Agreement mechanism with the standards of the voluntary carbon market,” the diplomat said. “They have influence, time and money, even more than some governments, so they can be very effective in their efforts.”  

Last year, the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, the new market’s regulator, approved rules on the permanence of credits aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere which critics said were watered down compared to the technical panel’s recommendations. This followed feedback from carbon market firms and conservation NGOs, which submitted dozens of critical views.

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Carbon Market Watch’s Dossi said decisions that strengthen environmental integrity are targeted in particular as they tend to reduce the number of credits that can be issued.

Then, as now, those who opposed tighter rules argued that overly strict safeguards would make some projects too expensive to carry out, with a negative impact on local communities and the climate.

But proponents argue that higher-integrity programmes will drive up market prices, ultimately benefiting everyone.

“If rules ensuring better-quality credits make them somewhat more expensive than they are today, that’s an acceptable consequence, not a reason to weaken the rules, especially since these credits will be used to offset continued emissions,” said Dossi. 

Efforts to pull the rule-makers in different directions are expected to intensify in the coming weeks as a decision on the new credit protection system nears. 

“I really don’t know how this will turn out in the end,” one veteran carbon market expert said. “What I am sure about is that it will be quite a battle.”

The story was updated to clarify FCLP’s position and the attribution of its comments.

The post Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push appeared first on Climate Home News.

Almost half of the world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every single year, a study has found.

Read more on E360 →

Sugar Coated, a new book by Marion Nestle and Lisa Sunderland, reveals the influence American cereal companies have on food policy and public health.

Nestle, a nutritionist and Professor Emerita at New York University, has been collecting cereal boxes for years, drawn to the “ridiculous health claims” they once displayed.

Consumer advocacy and government interventions have forced companies to alter their marketing over the years. But Nestle and Sunderland—the former Vice President of Nutrition at Kellogg Company—still see so much reflected in their design.

“The boxes are so big, they’re like billboards,” Nestle tells Food Tank. And because they change so frequently, “they can respond to every health claim in the world.”

Sugar Coated explores these health claims along with the ingredients and marketing strategies that Big Cereal companies have embraced to sell products and cover up their negative health effects. Throughout the book are full-color images of boxes over the years.

Nestle and Sunderland trace the history of cereal back to what they call its “bizarre start” in the 1860s, when early breakfast cereals emerged from health reform movements that promoted bland, grain-based foods as a path to better physical—and even moral—health. From there, they follow cereal’s evolution into a highly marketed staple and the public health debates that continue today. A section on color additives likely wouldn’t have existed if U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hadn’t taken up the issue, Nestle explains.

Companies have worked hard to entice eaters from an early age—an important tactic for the sector and one they’re particularly good at, Sugar Coated shows. “The Big Four cereal companies were among the first to target marketing directly to young children,” the authors write.

When did it become okay to feed kids vitamin-supplemented cookies for breakfast, “which is basically what kids’ cereals are?” Nestle asks.

Cartoon characters, toys, and prizes have been used to draw children to sugary breakfast foods. For a time, toys disappeared in response to concern from eaters, but now they’re back,  Nestle says. “It’s time for [advocates] to get busy again.”

But these efforts must go beyond plastic prizes, Nestle says, arguing that nothing substantive will change until corporations hold less influence over government. “Get money out of politics.”

Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America’s Favorite Breakfast Food is now available from the University of California Press.

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 Phil Aicken, Unsplash

The post Unboxing Breakfast: Marion Nestle on the Hidden Forces Shaping What We Eat appeared first on Food Tank.

With less than a year to go before France’s presidential election, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen seems almost certain to reach the run-off. Her party’s fortunes have continued to rise in recent years thanks to its leaders’ ability to rally working-class voters while securing support from business elites. Tensions between these two bases remain, but they are unlikely to come to a head before the vote.

Marine Le Pen is no stranger to strategic ambiguity. She has existed in this state for the past year, promoting Jordan Bardella as a potential presidential candidate for the Rassemblement National (RN) in 2027, but not ruling out running herself if the courts decided to reduce her sentence for embezzlement of public funds.

In July, her sentence was reduced to three years in prison, two suspended, one under house arrest. Her ineligibility for public office was cut to 15 months. Because she had already served this since the first verdict, her path to the presidency reopened, and she immediately threw her hat back into the ring.

Le Pen has already launched an appeal against the new sentence too, at the Cour de Cassation, France’s supreme court. Depending on when this judgement is delivered, she may have to face an ignominious end to the election campaign, spending the last few days wearing an electronic ankle tag and under curfew. If she is lucky, however, the sluggish timeline of French justice may spare her a verdict until after the second round, by which point she hopes to have presidential immunity.

Candidate, or perhaps not. Ankle tag, or perhaps not. The uncertainty of the French justice system is not where the ambiguity ends either: Le Pen’s bid for the Élysée Palace rests on her ability to maintain unity between different fractions of her base that have competing interests.

A short-lived social turn

When Le Pen achieved her first major breakthrough, advancing to the second round of the presidential election in 2017, she did so off the back of a “social turn”. Advised by Florian Philippot, then vice-president of the Front National (now RN), she ran on a platform of retirement at 60, scrapping the 2016 labour reform which restricted workers’ rights, fighting against tax evasion, and maintaining the 35-hour work week and the wealth tax, amid a host of other statist measures.

Ten years on, […] Le Pen has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

During the campaign, she attacked Le Siècle, an elite cross-partisan social club that she described as a secret meeting point of the oligarchy. She borrowed the slogans of populist left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon to appeal to his voters in the second round, calling them to “dégagez-les” (“throw them out”), a direct echo of his call to “dégagez-les tous” (“throw them all out”). She even quoted the Socialist leader of the early 20th century, Jean-Jaurès, but it was to no avail. She had spent the 2017 campaign talking up the benefits of euro-exit and Frexit, which business and 70 per cent of the French public strongly opposed. At the last minute, she tried to backpedal but failed to convince the electorate. Her campaign ended with a bruising debate against Emmanuel Macron in which she appeared not to understand her own economic policies.

Ten years on, little remains of that Marine Le Pen. As part of the de-demonisation strategy of rendering the RN palatable, she has dropped her social commitments as opportunistically as she initially picked them up.

Unlike in the US or the UK, companies in France cannot donate to political campaigns, and donations from private citizens are capped at 7,500 euros. Industry thus doesn’t intervene as directly in the democratic process as the cryptocurrency and fossil fuels interests backing Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Similarly, because of the RN’s ties to historical fascism, business has previously been wary of being seen to associate with the party, to the point that the Front National couldn’t even access French bank loans.

Nonetheless, since 2024, when the Rassemblement National became the largest individual party in both the European Parliament and the French National Assembly, the RN and big business have gradually moved closer. This has been in no small part thanks to Jordan Bardella, the young gun who would have replaced Le Pen if the courts had rejected her appeal. Bardella, who is just 30 years old and currently dating an aristocrat, believes the RN needs to expand beyond its working-class and struggling petit-bourgeois base into the affluent classes. He sees austerity as a core part of the RN’s project: in 2024, he proclaimed the need for “order in the streets and order in the public accounts”.

Party of capital

Two additional factors have enabled the RN to become a standard party of capital: support from oligarchs, and an attempt by centrists to paint the Left as the real extremists, letting the RN off the hook.

Media moguls Vincent Bolloré and Pierre Édouard Stérin relentlessly platform the party and talk up its preferred themes in the media (although they also boost other right-wing forces, like Éric Zemmour’s party Reconquête, various other Catholic reactionaries, and what remains of the Sarkozyist right). François Durvye, a former hedge fund manager for Stérin and a special advisor to Bardella, was tasked with establishing relationships with the business elite. Durvye recently quit the party, but in a parting shot, he claimed he was unable to reconcile himself to Le Pen’s insufficiently neoliberal positions. In reality, reporting in Libération and Mediapart suggests that his departure was largely an ego-driven firing by Le Pen, who made clear that his days were numbered after he had unsubtly expressed his dissatisfaction to various RN bigwigs that she – and not Bardella – was running for president. This was not an ideological purge. Bardella, and his other economically liberal advisors like Ambroise de Rancourt, remain part of Le Pen’s campaign team. On 29 August, the party announced that, if it gained power, it would enshrine a “golden rule” of keeping the deficit below 3 per cent in the constitution.

Durvye and Bardella’s strenuous efforts to sign up to the agenda of the patronat – France’s business establishment – appear to be working. In 2011, Laurence Parisot, then head of the business lobby MEDEF, denounced Le Pen, accusing her of sitting squarely within the far-right tradition. By 2025, Bardella was a guest at the MEDEF summer university, keen to demonstrate that the party was abandoning any statist economic policies it may have previously favoured. In 2026, he was invited back for a working lunch, which he later described as “courteous”. The rapprochement extends to Le Pen herself: In April, she dined with influential corporate leaders including France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the owner of luxury goods firm LVMH, who backed Macron in 2017 and 2022 and is a personal friend of Vincent Bolloré.

The institutions representing business interests are taking the RN seriously because the polls currently show Le Pen/Bardella making it into the second round in all scenarios, and likely beating their opponent in the runoff. Business leaders feel they have to suss out the potential next party of government. They also fear the alternative: though centrist candidates seem to stand a better chance of making it to the second round, some polling scenarios show the RN candidate facing off against Mélenchon, who is himself running for the fourth time.

The centrist parties have already supplied the arguments for business to back the far right, treating Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”, LFI) as an equivalent “extreme” to the RN, while also slowly turning the framework of demonisation away from the RN and onto LFI. In 2024, the newspaper Libération revealed secret dinners between Édouard Philippe, the likely candidate of the Macron camp, and Marine Le Pen. At one of these dinners, Philippe reportedly said that he wanted the next election to be between his camp and the far right; an election of “project against project, without moral critique”, according to the revelations. Last year, Bruno Retailleau, head of the right-wing Les Républicains party and former interior minister under Macron, called for a united “republican front” including the RN against LFI. Most of the attacks from the Macron camp on the RN have thus far concentrated on the party’s economic irresponsibility, based often on the promises they made during their brief social turn.

In this context, business has little work to do to abandon republicanism and justify a swing behind the RN. In the 2026 Toulouse municipal election, local industrial leaders threatened to cancel investments or to pull their businesses from the city if LFI candidate François Piquemal beat Macronist Jean-Luc Moudenc. Business and industrial leaders are primed to take this one step further and come out against LFI in future LFI-RN runoffs. As Bernard Cohen, the head of a lobby group representing the interests of small- and medium-sized businesses put it recently: “whether they are small, medium or large, what the bosses like generally is financial and economic stability […] economic danger for the bosses comes not from the Left of government, but a certain section of the Left; by which they mean LFI”.

For their part, the unions, or at least the more radical ones, have started to push back against the bosses creeping toward the RN. In August, Sophie Binet, the leader of the CGT, denounced MEDEF in an interview with Le Monde for helping roll out the red carpet to the far right. She argued that the party’s economic position was irrelevant and that business leaders should be thinking about the RN’s programme regarding women, LGBT rights, climate change, the constitution, and the independence of the judiciary, rather than any economic reforms that the bosses might favour.

The standard position across the unions is that the far right is a unique and dangerous threat to the republic, to which any other political force is preferable. The Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front; a broad left-wing electoral alliance in France) was endorsed in 2024 because it was a rare instance of left unity. In other words, the unions wouldn’t burn any bridges by backing it. In 2024, the leaderships of various unions condemned media outlets and politicians trying to invoke a false equivalence between LFI and the far right, but they prefer to remain relatively politically neutral, not least because the leadership of LFI and union leaders have butted heads over strategy many times.

Kicking the can

The RN’s move closer to its roots on the economy poses problems for the coalition that it is trying to build over the long term. The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

For example, the RN has been keen to position itself as the party of French agriculture, and has allied closely with small farmers who smile in selfies with Bardella. These traditionalist farmers are the kinds of people who oppose the over-financialisation of agriculture and the mass purchase of land by agri-giants like Otium, owned by Pierre Edouard Stérin, one of the oligarchs instrumental in smoothing the party’s path to power. When iron and steel colossus ArcelorMittal entered crisis due to global overcapacity, the company closed two sites and said it would cut a further 600 jobs. The RN attacked Macron incessantly, but when LFI proposed a vote on nationalising the firm, it abstained, fearing it would alienate business.

The party has also opposed wealth taxes as well as taxes on private jets. It promises a better life for workers through horizontal redistribution away from immigrants, welfare cheats, the recipients of overseas development aid, and a very optimistic assessment of government waste. It also proposes cutting France’s contributions to the EU, which could ultimately result in reduced subsidies for its agricultural base. In the RN’s 2026 counter-budget, the party put forward proposals for deeper austerity than the Macronist government, arguing for 36 billion euros in savings compared to prime minister Sébastien Lecornu’s 30 billion. In short, the RN is back to the ultra-racist Reaganism that defined the party under Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.

The party has no meaningful answer to how it reconciles the interests of its working-class and petit-bourgeois voters with those of the oligarchs that now back it.

To obviate the conflict between the interests the RN is trying to represent, Marine Le Pen defaults to unity through nationalism. She talks in the language of the people and presents the struggle as a national one against a cosmopolitan establishment. As political scientist Théo Bourgeron has observed, Le Pen kicks down the road the difficult spending tradeoffs that will arise when not enough government waste is found to cover what remains of the party’s social commitments.

Where there is a genuine tension in the strategy is Le Pen’s disagreement with Bardella (and previously Durvye) over pensions. Bardella used the period when he was the likely presidential candidate to argue against Le Pen’s position on the subject. Fearful of alienating the party’s older working-class base, she wants to roll back Macron’s pension reforms and revert the retirement age to 62. Bardella, by contrast, wants to keep the reform and is even considering scrapping a rule that allows people to retire at 67 on full pension, aiming to replace it instead with a minimum of 42 years of contribution, or the option to take a smaller pension. While it does open the party up to accusations of abandoning its base, even this tension could work in the RN’s benefit. Candidate once more, Le Pen can set the line in favour of the lower pension age, while Bardella privately reassures his newfound friends in MEDEF that he will do his utmost to lobby for a higher one when in power.

Maintaining the coalition

For the moment, this tension seems unlikely to pose too many problems for the RN. The far right does not have a monopoly on the working class, most of whom choose abstention, and many of whom vote for left-wing parties. It is true, however, that the voters they do have, including those among the working class, are unlikely to be fazed by the imprecision on economic questions and the cosiness with big business. Félicien Faury’s Des électeurs ordinaires (“Ordinary Voters”), a study of the RN electorate, has demonstrated the importance of race and identity to the far-right vote. He has amassed ample evidence that RN voters tend to feel that the distributional conflicts in society are almost entirely between natives and immigrants, not between social classes, and that they generally share the low-tax impulses of the Grand Patrons – France’s most influential corporate bosses.

The contradictions of the RN aren’t likely to be confronted on the ground or in the media. Although LFI speaks in the language of class conflict and is committed to highlighting RN hypocrisy, Mélenchon’s strategy is to assemble a “New France” of public sector workers, educated young people, and the urban, often racialised working class. This means that they will spend limited time and resources during the campaign in the working-class areas where the far right is strongest, because their strategy is not premised on converting far-right voters, but on building an alternative coalition by activating abstentionists to reach the second round.

There is a certain logic to Mélenchon’s gamble. Abstentionists are sociologically closer to left-wing voters, and have values that more closely resemble those of the left bloc than those of the centre or the far right. The French presidential election accounts only for raw numbers, not the geographic distribution of voters, so there is a lot to be gained for a Left concentrated primarily on winning votes in densely populated urban areas.

Polling hypotheticals show Mélenchon, currently the only left candidate with a plausible shot of making it to the second round, being destroyed by both Le Pen and Bardella in a runoff. To this, the Insoumis retort that polls always underestimate Mélenchon and overrate Le Pen. They argue that the extra votes from the abstentionists they hope to activate can be combined with the same dynamic that made the New Popular Front, a broad left-wing electoral alliance, win the legislative elections in 2024 (albeit without a majority), when enough centrist voters chose to block the far right.

Mélenchon’s candidacy remains a long shot, though his campaign is progressing well. The far right’s unity is currently being held in place by proximity to power. Commonalities are emphasised and differences dissolved by the possibility that Marine Le Pen might soon be in the Élysée. If Mélenchon wins, the factions will compete to establish the post-Le Pen orientation of the far-right bloc. If she (or a candidate of post-Macronism) wins, then the reverse occurs: the Left will be scrambled, and the succession battle will play out among the interest groups and political tendencies to the left of Macron. For now, the far right’s contradictions are likely to remain unresolved.

Nama sebuah game bisa bertahan lama bukan cuma karena fitur di dalamnya. Karakter kuat, simbol khas, ritme permainan, sampai konsep visual ikut membentuk identitas hingga mudah dikenali. Pola Slot Maxwin kini berada di tengah perubahan tersebut, saat pemain mulai memperhatikan kombinasi mekanisme serta tema populer sebagai pembeda antarjudul.

Kondisi ini membuat istilah game ikonik memiliki arti lebih luas. Sebuah permainan tidak harus rumit untuk mendapatkan perhatian. Justru konsep sederhana dengan ciri visual konsisten sering lebih mudah melekat. Dari mitologi, dunia oriental, permen, petualangan, sampai karakter unik, setiap tema membawa pendekatan berbeda dalam membangun pengalaman.

Pola Slot Maxwin Mulai Identik dengan Karakter Game

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Sudut pandang ini penting agar pembahasan pola tidak berubah menjadi klaim kepastian hasil. Pola Slot Maxwin lebih tepat dibaca sebagai cara pengguna mengenali karakter permainan, bukan formula untuk menjamin hasil tertentu.

Game Ikonik Memiliki Identitas Mudah Diingat

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Mitologi dan Oriental Tetap Mudah Dikenali

Dewa, petir, kuil, naga, koin emas, serta ornamen Asia mempunyai karakter visual kuat. Elemen tersebut dapat dipahami dalam waktu singkat tanpa membutuhkan penjelasan panjang. Tema mitologi cenderung membawa atmosfer dramatis. Sebaliknya, konsep oriental sering menggunakan simbol keberuntungan, warna kontras, serta ilustrasi tradisional dengan sentuhan modern. Keduanya mampu melahirkan game ikonik karena memiliki bahasa visual jelas. Namun popularitas tema tetap tidak menentukan peluang hasil. Aspek visual dan sistem permainan merupakan dua lapisan berbeda.

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Ada alasan mengapa konsep lama terus muncul dalam bentuk baru. Familiaritas mempermudah pengguna memahami tampilan sejak sesi pertama. Pengembang kemudian menambahkan variasi mekanisme supaya pengalaman tidak terasa seperti salinan judul sebelumnya. Pola Slot Maxwin Dengan Game Ikonik dapat terlihat melalui kombinasi tersebut. Simbol familiar dipertemukan dengan animasi baru, fitur interaktif, struktur reel berbeda, atau presentasi bonus lebih ekspresif. Pendekatan ini juga menjelaskan mengapa beberapa judul cepat mendapat perhatian. Pengguna memperoleh sesuatu untuk dikenali sekaligus unsur baru untuk dipelajari.

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Dua game bertema sama belum tentu memberikan pengalaman serupa. Perbedaan jumlah baris, sistem pembayaran, simbol khusus, multiplier, free spin, atau fitur bonus bisa mengubah ritme secara signifikan. Karena itu, membaca informasi permainan tetap lebih berguna daripada hanya mengikuti tema. Paytable, aturan fitur, informasi volatilitas jika tersedia, serta penjelasan simbol memberi konteks lebih konkret mengenai cara sebuah judul bekerja. Pendekatan tersebut membuat pembahasan Pola Slot Maxwin lebih informatif. Fokus tidak berhenti pada istilah populer, tetapi masuk ke struktur permainan secara nyata.

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Pola Slot Maxwin Bergerak Bersama Tren Tema

Perubahan tema memperlihatkan bahwa industri permainan digital terus mencari cara baru untuk mempertahankan perhatian pengguna. Pola Slot Maxwin ikut berkembang dalam percakapan tersebut karena istilah ini kini bersinggungan dengan mekanisme, visual, karakter, serta popularitas sebuah game. Game ikonik memberi unsur familiar, sementara tema populer membawa variasi baru. Ketika keduanya dipadukan secara tepat, sebuah permainan memiliki peluang lebih besar untuk mudah dikenali di antara banyak pilihan.

Namun identitas populer tetap perlu dipisahkan dari anggapan soal hasil. Tema, karakter, atau pola visual tidak memberikan jaminan kemenangan. Nilai utamanya terletak pada cara sebuah game membangun ciri khas, menjelaskan mekanisme, serta menciptakan pengalaman berbeda dari judul lain.

Canada currently faces numerous, interconnected challenges. Budget 2026 presents a critical opportunity to demonstrate the country’s commitment to becoming a clean energy superpower through ambition and investment that exceeds the public support...

On August 26, the side of a mountain near the border between Nepal and Tibet collapsed. Seven billion cubic feet of glacial ice and rock, enough to fill 100 football stadiums, crashed roughly a mile straight down into the river below. The impact created a muddy wall of water that swept through the valley as fast as 100 miles per hour, destroying villages dozens of miles downstream and killing more than 1,300 people. Thousands more remain missing. 

The scale of the disaster is extraordinary, even for a region accustomed to deadly floods and landslides. It will take months for scientists to confirm exactly what happened. But, they warn, one thing is already clear: As climate change melts icy landscapes worldwide, tragedies like this are more likely to happen. They are also incredibly hard to predict.

“Glacial loss destabilizes slopes in many far-reaching ways that are often unpredictable and catastrophic,” said Mark Carey, a professor of environmental studies and geography at the University of Oregon who leads a lab that studies glaciers. Proactive research and monitoring have saved lives in some parts of the world, Carey said, but in a place like the Himalayas, where thousands of glaciers are spread over vast areas, “it’s impossible to predict everything and establish early warning systems everywhere.”

The world’s glaciers have shrunk by about one-fifth in the last century and are expected to lose at least another quarter of their mass by 2100. Each fraction of a degree of warming makes them vanish faster, with hundreds of billions of tons of ice lost each year.

The downstream effects of this disappearing ice are complex and varied. Glaciers often buttress the sides of mountains and, as they retreat, newly exposed silt and rock can become unstable. The soil itself is also often glued together by a frozen layer known as permafrost, which helps lock slopes into place, but thaws when temperatures become too warm. Glacial meltwater can eat into the cracks in the bedrock, weakening it over time. All of these processes can result in sudden avalanches or rock slides — like one that caused a 1,500 foot tsunami in Alaska last summer, or possibly like the collapsed mountain slope in Nepal.

It’s also common for retreating glaciers to leave behind ridges of dirt and rock, known as moraines, that trap meltwater and rain. These natural dams can release enormous amounts of water if they break. 

Glaciers themselves can behave as dams, too. In Juneau, Alaska, glacial meltwater has triggered flooding every year since 2011. Just north of the city, a glacier-dammed valley, known as Suicide Basin, fills with meltwater and rain throughout the year. When it becomes too full, the ice holding back the water lifts up, releasing billions of gallons at once. But while the yearly flood causes plenty of property damage, it has never killed anybody. That’s because it’s carefully monitored, said Eran Hood, a hydrologist and professor of environmental science at the University of Alaska who studies the basin.

“Every single cell phone in Juneau goes off when the lake starts to drain,” he said. “We have a lake in a known location, we have cameras all over it, we have a laser measuring the elevation of the water, and we have the ability to make drone maps every few weeks to update our estimates of the volume of water in the lake.”

Close monitoring and engineering has successfully prevented disaster in Peru as well. The country has spent decades draining dozens of high-risk glacial lakes across the Andes, “no doubt saving tens of thousands of lives,” said Carey, who wrote a book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers, about these measures. And last year, Swiss authorities were able to evacuate 300 residents from the Alpine village of Blatten just days before a glacier collapsed and engulfed it in an avalanche. 

But success stories like these stand in stark contrast to what happened in Nepal, Hood said. While early-warning systems in the Himalayas monitor water levels in some high risk rivers and lakes, there is no regional system capable of continuously watching for the kind of sudden rock-and-ice collapse that triggered the disaster. Doing so would require intensive research and surveillance across a vast, remote, and difficult-to-access landscape where resources are limited.

“There’s really no effective way to monitor all these glaciers,” Hood said. “When you’re dealing with something that releases immediately and moves downslope so quickly, how can you find a way to provide people with any warning?” 

The village of Blatten, Switzerland, in May 2025 after a glacier collapse.
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images

Emerging or repurposed technology may be able to help fill some of these gaps, said Dan McGrath, a glaciologist and associate professor at Colorado State University. 

In places like Mexico City, seismic early-warning systems have sometimes given residents more than a minute to prepare before strong earthquake shaking arrives. Scientists are now wondering whether these same networks could be used to detect landslides and floods caused by glaciers. The glacial-break in Nepal caused readings equivalent to a 5.2 magnitude earthquake that traveled as far as Alaska, leading authorities to initially assume a seismic event had caused the disaster. There, too, just a few minutes of warning was shown to make all the difference. After warnings of the flood reached a school downstream, the principal was able to evacuate 900 students to safety before the torrent submerged it. 

Researchers have also recently experimented with laying fiber-optic cables across a glacier in Switzerland to detect “icequakes,” or tiny fractures in the ice that generate seismic vibrations and could provide clues about changes in a glacier’s stability.

A new satellite, recently launched jointly by the United States’ and India’s space agencies, also holds promise. Known as NISAR, it was designed to detect subtle changes in Earth’s surface, like shifting glaciers, and can capture detailed information about ice and snow cover while seeing through cloud cover in ways that previous satellite sensors were not capable of. Recent analysis of the satellite’s data showed that it had recorded slumping on the mountain slope in Nepal several weeks before it collapsed. 

But still, there’s no silver bullet, McGrath said. “Many of these mountain ranges are at a tipping point,” he said. “Freezing, or not freezing, is binary. And as temperatures warm above that and permafrost thaws, that is undoubtedly going to lead to an increase in disasters like this.”

Matt Simon contributed reporting to this article.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why it’s so hard to predict a tragedy like Nepal’s glacier collapse on Sep 8, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Von Der Leyen Tries To Counter Trump With €200 Million Investment In Greenland” • Ursula von der Leyen unveiled a €200 million investment package to back Greenland’s territorial integrity and counter pressure from US President Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to annex the mineral-rich island. The funds will arrive over the next two years. [Euronews]

Nuuk (Quintin Soloviev, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped)

• “Nepal Holds A Day Of Mourning For Flash Floods Victims, As Rescue Efforts Continue” • Nepal held a day of mourning for the 1,300 known dead in the floods of August 26. Government offices lowered flags and family members carryed out mourning rituals. Rescue efforts are focused on twelve hydropower projects, where about 500 workers may still be trapped. [Euronews]
• “ICCT Says EV Operating Costs Are A Third Lower In Europe” • The International Council On Clean Transportation said in a report that in 2025 operating an electric car in Europe cost one third less than operating a car powered by internal combustion. With higher fuel costs after the US attack on Iran, the disparity could be greater in 2026. [CleanTechnica]
• “Russia Destroys Solar Plants, But Ukrainian Businesses Continue Investing Millions In Green Energy.” • Russian attacks continue to damage Ukraine’s renewable energy infrastructure. Nevertheless, Ukrainian businesses and banks are still moving ahead with millions of euros in new solar and energy storage investments. [Ukraine Business News]
• “Even More Questions Swirl Around Tesla Cybercab Rollout” • When Tesla unveiled its Cybercab robotaxi in Austin, there was a lot of media buzz. However, it seems that a lot of that buzz was the sound of heads being scratched. One of the questions being asked: How many, if any, fleet managers will stock their robotaxi fleets with Cybercabs? [CleanTechnica]

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

This summer was more than uncomfortably hot — it was record-breaking, with many countries reporting their highest average temperatures yet. Western Europe, for example, sweated through five grueling heat waves this year that sucked moisture from the soil, turned vegetation into wildfire fuel, and shrank rivers until the fish ran out of water. Emergency rooms and ambulances were overwhelmed. Early estimates found that at least 35,000 excess deaths were recorded as temperatures soared — and that only accounts for the first four heat waves in about half of the continent.

But all this, the World Health Organization said, was just a “dress rehearsal.” The coming summers are bound to be even hotter. 

Two factors in particular could push global temperatures even higher in the coming years: El Niño and human-caused climate change. El Niño is a climate pattern that brings extra warmth around the globe every two to seven years. We’re in the early stages of the current cycle, which is on track to be the strongest in a millennium. 

And then there’s the problem of Earth’s atmosphere increasingly filling with heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Addressing climate change requires countries to drastically move away from burning fossil fuels and invest in alternative technologies, such as solar and wind power. In 2015, nearly every nation in the world entered a voluntary commitment to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). But a new United Nations report released last week found that we are certain to overshoot the latter goal within the next few years. This means that even more severe heat, drought, fire, sea level rise, and glacier loss is headed our way. 

As the effects of climate change and El Niño converge, scientists predict 2027 is very likely to be the hottest year ever recorded.

“There really is nowhere that is terribly well adapted to these very extreme events,” said Kristie Ebi, a lead author of the U.N. report and professor of global health at the University of Washington. Poor countries are the most vulnerable to climate change, but even wealthy countries are failing to adapt fast enough, the U.N. report found.

Some countries have found ways to reduce suffering and death from heat, even as the climate has warmed. After a 2003 heat wave claimed 70,000 lives across Europe, countries took steps to protect people, instituting early warning systems, establishing cooling centers, and helping hospitals prepare. France made an aggressive national plan that mandated air-conditioned rooms in nursing homes, instructed health workers to check in on older and frail people during extreme heat, and developed green spaces in cities to help cool them down. 

The Paris Fire Brigade displays a heatstroke kit to Minister Laurent Nunez and the press in Paris, France, on June 28, 2026, as part of measures to protect the population against the heat wave.
Daniel Perron / Hans Lucas via AFP via Getty Images

“A given heat wave is now actually much less deadly in France than it was before,” said Christopher Callahan, a climate scientist who studies heat, health, and economics at Indiana University. Still, the world is already at 1.4 degrees C of warming and counting, and scientists expect that at some point, “the heat waves will become so intense that they will sort of outstrip that adaptation progress,” he said. If countries continue to adapt to heat at the rate they have in recent decades, it would only prevent about 1 in 10 deaths that would be expected, according to one of his studies.

Ebi said that health officials have failed to keep up with the pace of change, such as more heat waves occurring outside of the traditional mid-May to mid-September season, and have overlooked extreme scenarios such as the record-breaking heat waves seen in Western Europe this summer. “The temperatures were just so high, much higher than the heat wave early warning systems were designed to manage,” Ebi said. 

The fact that the world is struggling to adapt to the amount of warming that’s already arrived is a troubling sign. Studies in recent years have suggested that the threshold at which heat becomes hazardous for the human body is lower than previously thought, with the danger zone starting with temperatures as low as 26 degrees C (79 F) when combined with high humidity. In addition to causing heat stroke, increased temperatures can put lethal amounts of stress on organs such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys.

“When 1.5 was decided, there was an assumption that 1.5 degrees C above preindustrial [temperatures] would be relatively safe,” Ebi said. “And I would say, today, that Europe does not think 1.4 degrees is relatively safe. For most of the U.S., it does not feel like 1.4 is relatively safe.”

A heat wave pushes temperatures in Granada, Spain, past 40 degrees C on July 7, 2026.
Alex Camara / Anadolu via Getty Images

So what will it mean for the world to overshoot its climate goals? The U.N. report warns that there “are no good outcomes above 1.5 degrees C” and the updated best-case scenario for global temperatures ends up peaking at 1.8 C. It lays out potential paths to slowly bring average temperatures back down to safer levels after that peak, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean a return to present-day conditions. At that point, it may be impossible for dead coral reefs to thrive again, or for all the melted ice to be refrozen. But it could still help with extreme heat.

To prepare for hotter conditions, Ebi said it’s important to “stress test” possible disaster scenarios, just as banks and militaries conjure worst-case scenarios to see how they’d play out and better prepare for them. Otherwise, communities will be forced to discover the devastating effects of extreme heat in real time, such as when Portland, Oregon, was struck with 116-degree F temperatures during the heat dome in June 2021. Under those unprecedented conditions, roads buckled, bridges warped, the power cables on the streetcar melted, and the light rail’s overhead copper wires expanded and sagged.

“There are a million different ways in which we can imagine making our society resilient to this kind of threat,” Callahan said, “and we just aren’t there yet.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world is adapting to extreme heat — but not nearly fast enough on Sep 8, 2026.

In an age of brutal philosophies, shrieking media, cold arts, lying politicians, and devouring institutions, Wendell Berry was a hero of an entirely human way of being.

Imagine being able to compost almost everything and keep the majority of the biomass. Imagine, finally, that it only takes a matter of weeks, not months.

Dan Dallas had defended these communities before. The little towns on the Karuk tribal land are nestled in a gorge along the Klamath River, amidst a million-acre wilderness of Northern California conifer and hardwood that makes up the Six Rivers National Forest. This time, August 2023, a fusillade of lightning strikes had ignited the web of steep canyons south of the town of Orleans in two dozen places, and as the fires expanded, they merged.

As an incident commander for the U.S. Forest Service, Dallas wasn’t called up until fires got big. On the drive from Colorado, he considered the recent experiences that had begun to trouble him.

“I’d been to multiple places, two, even three, sometimes four times,” he remembered in a recent interview. On each fire, he’d followed the Forest Service playbook. Keep the fire small. Contain it quickly. Box it in by throwing hardware at it, bulldozing the ridgetops, and dropping fire retardant slurry or water from planes and helicopters. Don’t light the fuse on a megafire that could reach the nearest town. But he was starting to realize: Even if you don’t light the fuse, you still have the bomb.

“Finally, I figured out all I’m doing is deferring risk to this place,” said Dallas, whose day job is director of renewable resources for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain region. “I’m going to come back and protect it again.”

When he got to the Six Rivers, he found the local forest supervisor and the Karuk Tribe had been percolating the same idea he had. It had rained in those mountains, and the conditions were mild. Fog was rolling in from the coast in the mornings, settling in the canyon bottoms. “It actually had gone from being fire weather to basically prescribed fire season,” Dallas remembered.

What if, instead of tearing up the Six Rivers to attack this fire, they allowed it to creep along the forest floor as long as they could? There’d be less fuel to burn the next time a fire came through, and it wouldn’t burn as hot even if the weather was bad. Fifty thousand acres of fire; fifty thousand acres less fuel to burn next summer.

Incident commander Dan Dallas gives a briefing on the Divide Complex Wildfire in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest in 2021. Photo courtesy of Brenda Bowen, Rocky Mountain Team 1, Fire Information Officer

The strategy was a success, but a fleeting one. The opportunities to let wildfire do its job are being increasingly extinguished by hotter, drier conditions that last longer throughout the year. The Trump administration has also returned to “full suppression” — shutting down every fire, even when it doesn’t threaten human life and property — after three decades of federal policy that, at least on paper, encouraged a friendlier approach to wildfire.

The problem with putting out all fires, said Dallas, is the same one that troubled him on that drive to California. You’re leaving fuel there that could stoke the next megafire you can’t manage, or even stop. “We keep going back to the same places, and it’s more often that the fires are more severe,” Dallas said. 

Over the past decade, so-called megafires — characterized not only by their size, often bigger than 100,000 acres, but by their severity, speed, and impact — have become more common. They now account for the bulk of the money spent on firefighting, with the federal government spending 10 times more on suppressing wildfires than it did 30 years ago.

This summer’s fire conditions have already been extreme. Nearly 73 percent of the Intermountain West is experiencing severe to exceptional drought, with temperatures breaking records across the country. Add to that last winter’s meager snowpack, which has left forests ready to burn. So far in 2026, the U.S. government has reported more than 53,000 wildfires that have burned over 8 million acres — about 3 million acres more than average over the past decade. 

The onslaught is straining firefighting resources, with many requests for help going unfulfilled. An August 11 memo from the National Multi-Agency Coordinating group, which handles logistics for firefighting across the federal government, warned that “resource availability remains critically low, with commitments approaching all-time peak levels.”

Wildland firefighting is increasingly facing an intractable reality: We’re stuck in a vicious cycle. A doom loop.

In 2013, the U.S. Forest Service quietly convened a panel of futurists to imagine the arc of wildfire over the coming decades. The group included luminaries in futures studies — the science of systematically gaming out distant outcomes — a couple of wildfire experts, and a science fiction writer. 

Over three weeks of conference calls, the futurists grilled the wildfire experts — John Phipps, a regional research station director who helped make national wildfire policy for the U.S. Forest Service, and Sarah McCaffrey, a social scientist with the agency who studied the human aspect of how it worked. Together, the group imagined possible trajectories for the American wildfire saga — carrying it forward beyond the scope of a presidential administration, longer than the span of any individual government career. Where, they asked, was all this really going?

U.S. Forest Service firefighters monitor the Line Fire near San Bernardino, California, in 2024.
Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

They released their final report, “Wildland Fire Management Futures: Insights from a Foresight Panel,” in 2015. The one big takeaway: We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. “As conditions change over time,” the report reads, “the existing fire suppression approach will fail across the whole range of plausible future conditions.”

If we don’t change course, the futures panel wrote, “risk will continue to escalate until fuel-filled landscapes eventually reset catastrophically.” Translation: Much of the West will burn. Today’s children will see forests converted to grass or shrublands in their lifetimes. Biodiversity will be irreversibly destroyed, along with thousands upon thousands of American homes.

This isn’t pessimism. The science behind it has been well-established for decades. In any combustible ecosystem, fire periodically clears away all but the strongest plants, allowing them to thrive and reproduce. The process enriches the soil and opens the understory to new growth. On the other hand, if you suppress fire on the landscape for a century, as the United States has done, leave trees and brush to pile up in a continent-sized pyre, then heat up the planet and take away the rain, everything’s going to burn at once. Windy, hot days and lightning strikes and accidents are bound to converge, and our expanding settlements are bound to be in the way.

It’s not that firefighting doesn’t work; federal firefighters are able to contain more than 98 percent of wildfires. The vast majority of damage to human infrastructure is done by the 2 percent of ignitions that get away, said Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. The top 1 percent are responsible for more than a quarter of the total acreage burned. But those megafires happen under nightmare weather conditions — hot, dry, and windy — and escape control quickly. “There is no doubt that our federal fire suppression apparatus is effective, that’s why we’re in the predicament we’re in,” Hurteau said. “It’s only under the most extreme conditions that things escape, and it’s been that way for decades.”

The more climate change extends the fire season, Hurteau said, the more chances for megafires to start. The more small fires we put out, the more fuel there is for megafires to eat up on the way to our towns. This is what the futures panel meant by “escalate.”

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With the build-up of fuels that constant fire suppression causes, their report concluded, “we are self-selecting for fires we cannot control and do the greatest damage.”

Thirteen years after the futures panel, interviews with more than 20 experts in the field of wildland fire — foresters and firefighters and bureaucrats and scientists and even a lobbyist, from varying positions on the political spectrum — painted a stark picture of where our fire policy is taking us. Several of them had the same question: “What the f**k we are doing here?”

The way out of this quagmire is widely agreed upon: Somehow, we have to get rid of all that extra fuel, and once a semblance of balance is restored, make friends with natural, lower-severity ground fires by hardening human communities against them and letting them be. This plan has, in one form or another, been entrenched in federal policy since the mid-90s.

In addition to establishing programs to physically remove extra fuels and clear out forest floors through prescribed burning, that policy has included allowing unplanned wildfires to do the work, as long as it’s safe to do so. In other words, when fires pose a danger to people, including firefighters and the public, they’re generally fought aggressively. Otherwise, fire managers have had the option of allowing them to play their natural role.

Many fire scientists believe that letting more fires run their course in the backcountry, the way Dallas and his colleagues did on the Six Rivers, will have to happen if we’re going to reduce fuels at the necessary scale.

“We keep putting out fires, and we’re going to get bigger and hotter fires,” said Hurteau. “It’s just true. It’s physics and chemistry.”

Dave Calkin, who recently retired from his job as a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, where he focused on wildland fire risk management, said many fires are “inherently insuppressible”; all you can do is run.

Fires that don’t threaten people, on the other hand, are useful. “The science is clear and has been clear for decades that the answer to the problem is more fire, not less fire,” Calkin said.

A separate camp of foresters believes using wildfires to remove fuel is reckless, given the volatile conditions during fire season, and that the way forward is to clear fuels by loosening environmental regulations and opening public lands much more broadly to “mechanical thinning” — in many cases logging — launching a moonshot effort to revitalize the moribund timber industry in the process.

A member of a local Prescribed Burn Association uses a drip torch to ignite a controlled burn in Angwin, California, last year.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

“Because the forests are all clogged up, you can’t use [wild]fire as a maintenance tool,” said Michael Rains, who helped lead the Forest Service across five administrations. “You’ve got to use prescribed fire, and you have to use mechanical treatments. And then one day, hopefully, our forest lands will be in the condition [such that], when a fire starts, we can manage it to let it burn a little longer.”

The Trump administration has sided firmly with Rains’ camp, doubling down on suppressing all wildfires — including those that don’t threaten communities — while also demanding more board feet of lumber coming off public lands. Frank Carroll, a former Forest Service incident commander and a zealous advocate for full suppression, said the decrees are like “trying to steer an aircraft carrier with a canoe paddle.” Still, he believes, they are a start. 

Adam Mendonca, the Forest Service’s deputy director of Fire and Aviation Management, said the agency isn’t anti-fire. “No two ways about it. Science will tell you, you need more fire on the landscape.” But, he said, the agency’s focus is on prescribed fire. 

The Forest Service did about 1.2 million acres of prescribed burning in 2025, down from 2.2 million the year before. (The agency attributes the drop to dangerously dry conditions that spring, particularly in the Southeast where it does most of its burning). Recent research shows that the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce — a ProPublica investigation found that more than a quarter of the Forest Service’s firefighting positions were unfilled as of July 2025 — also contributed to the slower progress on clearing fuels last year.

Mendonca said the Forest Service needs to be doing between two and 10 times more fuels reduction work to turn the tide. “We’re not doing enough,” he said, “but we continue to try to ramp up.”

Prescribed fire offers what the agency has become less tolerant of losing: control. But Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), said a war on wildfire is unwinnable. “We’re just throwing good money after bad in these reactive, siege-like suppression spectacles, versus proactive preparation and treatments within communities.” 

The wildfire doom loop has roots far beyond the current administration, and is fueled by a cycle of perverse incentives. 

One problem, experts say, has to do with how fire-related funding is distributed. Every year in the hot and dry months, Congress authorizes additional funding for emergency wildland fire suppression as needed, not unlike the way it funds a war. The annual expenditure has grown from an average of about $450 million in the 1990s to well over $3 billion in recent years, with $4.3 billion spent in 2021 alone. (Research published earlier this year projected that climate change could push that number to $13 billion by the end of the century.)

“There are no consequences for spending as much money as you possibly can to put that fire out,” said Kelly Martin, a former chief of fire management for two national parks who also served on the congressionally mandated Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission during the Biden administration. When they have airplanes and bulldozers and armies of firefighters at their disposal, she said, federal fire managers are inclined to use them. “There’s not a connection in people’s brains to say, putting that fire out actually does more harm than good in the long term.” 

Crews cut vegetation to widen a fire line for the Oak Fire near Mariposa, California, in 2022.
David McNew / AFP via Getty Images

In contrast, funding for fuel-reduction initiatives like forest thinning and prescribed burns is budgeted, limited, and comes with mountains of paperwork. “Prescribed burning is discretionary — emergency management is not,” said Martin. “So, you end up with this really lopsided scale that tips the scale to the favor of suppression.”

The annual glut also creates an incentive for private firefighting contractors to lobby for as much involvement as possible while the cash is flowing. “I have clients, they’re like farmers,” said Phil Hardy, a Washington lobbyist for the firefighting aviation industry, including retardant and water tankers, which are most effective in suppressing fires while they’re still small. “They make all their money from June to September or October, and then they’ve got to wait all the way until next year to get paid again. By the time fire season starts, they’ve totally wiped out their line of credit.” Hardy said his clients would vastly prefer a steadier cash flow, but Congress only pays when pillars of smoke are looming and it’s too late to do anything but fight like hell. That means that air tankers, which are among the most costly elements of wildland firefighting, are often used even when they’re not especially effective.

A second problem is personnel — fuel-reduction work is often done by the same federal employees who get sent out to fight wildfires. One federal fuels reduction specialist, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak freely, said even experts who are hired to plan and conduct prescribed burns and other fuel-clearing projects often spend up to half the year fighting wildfires. 

“The simple tasks that are supposed to get done to allow these projects to move forward,” he said, “go almost stagnant for like four to six months out of the year.”

Beyond budgets and workforce management and policy memos, there’s a bigger, more emotional machinery at work. After all, fire can destroy homes and take loved ones in the most terrifying ways.

Wildfires are a seasonal spectacle, with journalists dispatched to the firelines like war correspondents reporting from the front, broadcasting images of towering flames and smoking ruins that stoke the feeling in the zeitgeist that everything in the whole world is going to hell. 

“When you see people’s homes burning on the 5 o’clock news and you know people are chasing their horses and their dogs are dying and people are losing their lives,” said Martin, “it’s hard to switch that narrative into something different.”

The fire-as-invader narrative helps drive a kind of patriotic zeal that moves everyone from firefighters to legislators to defend the homeland.

“I hate war analogies when it comes to fire,” said Riva Duncan, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit firefighter advocacy organization. “It’s not a war and firefighters are not soldiers, because I don’t want them to think that their lives are expected to be given for this.”

Mendonca, the Forest Service fire director, agrees — kind of. “We don’t treat fire as though it’s the enemy,” he said. “It’s just, how do we get there in a way that gets us to those desired conditions or outcomes with the highest probability of success for all the values involved.” 

A home burns as flames from the Dixie Fire tear through the Indian Falls neighborhood of unincorporated Plumas County, California, in 2021.
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

Fire, in other words, is like a wild animal. We don’t hate wild animals, but the closer they get to us the less we feel we can afford the risk of tolerating their presence.

But Calkin said there’s also a bureaucratic momentum to the status quo. “It’s the inherent human bias of like, right now, the easiest thing for me to do would be to make this fire go away,” he said. “It’s really hard for me to make this fire grow in a safe way to get good fuel treatment. And it’s risky. And if something goes bad, I am responsible. You know, if in the future it actually saved something really important, I’d never get credit for it. It’s just easier to kick the problem down the road.”

More fire isn’t the answer in every part of the country. Native plants like sagebrush and saguaro cactus haven’t evolved to burn, but invasive grasses in the Great Basin and Sonoran Desert have brought fire with them. “There are certain places where we have too much fire and we need to try and keep it out,” said Hurteau. And as long as our communities are nestled in burnable ecosystems, they’ll sometimes need to be defended. The question is whether we can find a balance we can live with.

Since that futures panel wrapped up its conference calls in 2013, we’ve had 13 years of one record-breaking fire after another. The image of burning houses is no longer the uncanny experience it was — the slash of bright orange across the country’s front pages is now part of our collective wallpaper. And the ranks of the dispossessed, the evacuated, and the dead have only grown.

Dallas, a practical man, said it would make a big difference if firefighting teams like his were allowed to back off fires, setting low-severity backburns on ground of their choosing so that the wild flames don’t blow through and annihilate everything in their path. “Right now,” he said, “that’s off the table.”

When we spoke in early August, Dallas had just come from a fire in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, that was threatening hundreds of homes. The local forest supervisor called for a Complex Incident Management Team — the big guns — and got a response that’s becoming more common across the country: no one was available. All the teams were on other fires.

“Our system is taxed beyond capacity to respond,” Dallas said. “It’s already falling apart.” 

For every fire he puts out, Dallas knows he’s leaving a tinderbox behind. More and more, he said, he’s finding himself back at the same table, looking at the same map. 

Next time, he could be watching a bigger, more dangerous fire escape his grasp.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America is losing its war against wildfire on Sep 8, 2026.

Labor activists take steps to preserve the documents and strategies they use today, so future organizers will have a practical guide.

Red Pepper editors pick out the songs and albums that shaped their political imaginations

The post Red Pepper Media’s inspirational tracks appeared first on Red Pepper.

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The 'voracious, clandestine' donkey skin trade Channel Comment brendan 8th September 2026 Teaser Media

• A short-term continuing resolution will keep federal transportation funds flowing for the next three months while Congress considers a new five-year bill, but the CR cuts transit funding by 20 percent and passenger rail funding by 81 percent. (Mass Transit, Metro Magazine)
• The federal government continues to spend billions of dollars on highways even though the interstate system is largely complete. Angie Schmitt wonders, what if that money were spent on sidewalks instead? (Strong Towns)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s proposed budget would eliminate early-morning bus service, as well as a dozen routes. (Herald)
• More than 4 million people a year would ride light rail along the Atlanta Beltline, according to a new study. But it would cost almost $5 billion, and there is currently no funding. (AJC)
• Maryland is removing bus lanes in Bethesda built during Red Line construction instead of making them permanent. (Fox 5)
• The Seattle DOT is in the process of completing 70 safety projects near schools. (KIRO)
• Despite efforts to protect fish, about 2,000 have died around Sound Transit’s new bridge over Lake Washington. (Axios)
• Pete Buttigieg talked about the Cincinnati streetcar during a recent campaign stop to support Ohio Democratic candidates. (Enquirer; paywall)
• San Antonio installed three new flashing beacons and other pedestrian safety improvements on Pleasanton Road. (Kens)
• A Chicago developer is proposing a new White Sox stadium and a hospital at the site of an Amtrak rail yard. (Trains)
• Auckland is considering congestion pricing. (The Conversation)
• A company in Mexico is producing the opposite of gargantuan American pickups — a tiny electric truck that can haul almost 1,500 pounds and costs just $8,400. (Autoblog)

5 healthier school lunches you can pack in minutes Anthony Lacey September 8, 2026

Food companies sell a lot of pre-packaged lunches wrapped in bright colors, new flavors or other ways to get kids’ attention. In fact, the company behind Lunchables used some of the same research and marketing strategies that boosted tobacco companies’ sales of cigarettes.

The food companies’ goal is keeping kids hooked on their products – not keeping them healthy.

While they’re appealing to parents stretched for time, these pre-packaged lunches are often highly processed. They can contain dozens of ingredients, including food chemicals with potential health harms, and don’t necessarily provide the nutrition kids need.

The good news: You don’t need much extra time in your morning routine to pack something better.

What does a less-processed school lunch actually look like?

Here are five less-processed lunches that you or your kids can build in minutes. 

Image

Crackers and cheese (2 minutes)

• Whole grain crackers like Triscuits
• Cheese
• Roasted seeds (sunflower, pumpkin)
• Clementine
• Cucumber

Image

Hummus and pita (2 minutes)

• Hummus
• Whole grain pita
• Cheese
• Carrots
• Apple

Image

Peanut butter pita (3 minutes)

• Whole grain pita
• Nut butter (sunflower, peanut*)
• Banana
• Popcorn
• Cucumber

* Make sure to check your school’s nut policy.

Image

Tuna plate (4 minutes)

• Whole grain cracker such as Triscuits
• Canned tuna
• Cheese
• Carrots
• Applesauce

Image

Chips and salsa (4 minutes)

• Whole grain chips
• Salsa
• Black beans
• Cheese
• Pear

These combinations are all flexible. Swap in whatever fruits, vegetables or sides – like popcorn, nuts or seeds – you already have on hand. Add a dip or sauce if that encourages your kid to eat healthier food.

And remember that not every single meal has to be perfectly balanced. What matters most is what your kid eats over the course of the day or week, not a single lunchbox.

Other ideas to try

Beans can be a major value-add. They’re affordable, high in protein and fiber, and ready to use straight from the can. Add some chickpeas to a hummus and pita plate, or black beans to chips and salsa, for a nutrition boost.

If your kid likes leftovers, you can also keep things simple and cook one batch of whole grain pasta or rice for the week. Add your choice of vegetables and protein – like cherry tomatoes and cheese cubes in a pasta salad, or frozen edamame in brown rice – to make it a meal. This is also a great place to add some chicken or other meat from last night’s dinner.

If lunch doesn’t feel complete without something sweet, a piece of dried fruit or a handful of chocolate chips makes an affordable treat with far fewer additives than most packaged candy or fruit snacks.

When in doubt, check EWG’s Food Scores for more information on food ingredients, processing and nutrition. Use EWG’s Healthy Living™ app to scan products right on grocery store shelves.

A few foods worth skipping – try these instead

Here are some old favorites that don’t stack up when it comes to nutrition – and what to consider as alternatives.

Processed meat. There’s a reason deli sandwiches didn’t make the cut for less-processed lunches. Despite their popularity, particularly for lunches, processed deli meats like turkey, ham, salami and roast beef have been strongly linked to cancer. 

Cheese, beans, hard boiled eggs, plain yogurt, nuts and seeds all deliver protein without that potential health risk.

Enriched bread. Many kids and adults alike eat a lot of bread, crackers and snacks made with enriched flour, which don’t offer much in the way of real nutrition. It can be hard to find a whole-grain bread without all the additives, despite how many options seem to be available. 

Whole grain pitas and woven wheat crackers tend to be easier to track down and contain some healthy fiber.

Less-processed pantry staples

Keeping a few of these foods on hand can help you pack school lunches and snacks in a pinch.

Produce

• Apples
• Bananas
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Pears

Dairy, eggs and refrigerated

• Cheese. Avoid orange powders, sprays and spreads; sticks and bricks are better choices
• Eggs. Use EWG’s meat and dairy label decoder to see what the certifications actually mean
• Hummus. Look for these five ingredients – chickpeas, tahini, salt, oil and lemon juice – plus seasonings like garlic.
• Yogurt. Choose yogurt free of added colors, flavors and sweeteners (including added sugar and artificial sweeteners)

Canned goods

• Black beans. The label should list beans only, or can include some salt
• Chickpeas. The label should say chickpeas (or garbanzo beans) only, and may include some salt
• Salsa. Look for just vegetables, herbs and spices you might use at home

Snacks and pantry

• Applesauce. Skip any added colors, flavors, and sweeteners (including added sugar and artificial sweeteners)
• Chocolate chips. For a sweet treat, look for cocoa butter and five or fewer ingredients total
• Dried fruit. For a sweet treat, stick to just the fruit without added sugar
• Nut butter. Just nuts or seeds with salt – avoid added sugar and hydrogenated oils
• Popcorn. A short ingredient list is the goal: popcorn, and maybe a little oil and salt
• Roasted nuts or seeds. Nuts or seeds and a little salt is all you need
• Whole grain crackers. Look for woven wheat: whole grains and salt, nothing more
• Whole grain chips. Like whole grain corn with some oil and salt, the shorter the ingredient list, the better

Breads and bakery

• Whole grain pita. Look for whole grains and five or fewer ingredients total

Areas of Focus Food Ultra-Processed Foods Women's Health Children’s Health Food Chemicals Authors Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN September 8, 2026