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Study: Hundreds of chemicals linked to breast cancer in lab and animal studies in high use in the U.S. Anthony Lacey October 13, 2026

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer diagnosis among women and cases are on the rise. Anyone can get breast cancer – but it’s most common in women.

A new peer-reviewed study looks at where Americans are exposed to chemicals that may contribute to that rise. Published in Environmental Health Perspectives, the analysis found that hundreds of chemicals tied to breast cancer risk in animal and laboratory studies turn up in everyday products, food, drinking water, pesticides and air pollution.

It was led by scientists at the Silent Spring Institute, with co-authors from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco. 

In this study, the researchers found breast-cancer-relevant chemicals in consumer products, food, drinking water and drinking water supplies, pesticide products, medications and building materials. 

Many of the chemicals are produced in large amounts. In 2019 alone, 143 were made in or imported to the U.S. in volumes of 1 million pounds or more.

A 2024 analysis by the same authors identified 920 chemicals that caused mammary gland tumors in animal studies or changed hormone activity in ways linked to breast cancer. This study tells us where we could potentially be exposed to those chemicals.

Breast-cancer-relevant chemicals

In their 2024 study, the Silent Spring researchers created the list of 920 chemicals they call breast-cancer-relevant chemicals. A chemical made the list if it did at least one of the following:

• Caused mammary gland tumors in rats or mice in at least one study.
• Increased estrogen or progesterone production in lab tests using human cells. 
• Activated the estrogen receptor, the switch inside cells that responds to estrogen.

The researchers also checked whether each chemical can damage DNA, another way chemicals can lead to cancer. Many chemicals on the list do more than one of these things. Chemicals with strong hormone effects that also damage DNA were the most likely to cause mammary tumors in animals.

Presence on this list is not proof that a chemical causes breast cancer in people. It flags chemicals that need more research, especially when many of us are exposed to them every day.

What the authors found

The team combined data from more than a dozen federal databases that track how chemicals are produced, used, released into the environment and measured in people.

Some of the chemicals are well known, including bisphenol A, better known as BPA, bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, the solvent dichloromethane and parabens. Others, such as p-cresol and 2,4-dimethylphenol, have received much less attention.

Federal biomonitoring data show many of these chemicals, or the compounds they break down into, are in almost all people. The “breakdown products” of methylparaben, the sunscreen active ingredient oxybenzone, several phthalates and certain pesticides were detected in more than 95% of people tested.

Industrial facilities reported releasing nearly 82 million pounds of these chemicals into the air, water and land in 2024. When the researchers included all sources of air pollution, such as vehicles, wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels, estimated emissions topped 2 billion pounds in 2020.

Consumer products

Most of the breast cancer chemicals, about 500, were present in the consumer products category. Of those, 181 are also hormone disruptors and 88 are genotoxic, meaning they can damage cellular genetic material, which can lead to mutations or cancer. 

Among these commonly used ingredients in personal care products are chemicals like parabens, phthalates and bisphenols. 

Also on the list are ingredients in hair dyes like resorcinol and p-phenylenediamine, which causes mammary tumors in animal studies. They can also damage DNA and increase production of estrogen and progesterone in lab tests. 

Studies have linked hair dye use to breast cancer risk.

Prescription skin-lightening creams can contain hydroquinone, which also increased estrogen and progesterone production in lab tests. The researchers note these products are more likely to be used by women of color, which could add to existing disparities in exposure. 

Pesticide products

The study also highlighted pesticide products as an important source of exposure to breast cancer chemicals. People can be exposed to pesticides in multiple ways, including as residues on produce and in drinking water. Pesticides may also be found in products in the home, such as insect repellents, medical treatments and pest control. 

The study reported 485 chemicals found in pesticide formulations. But the authors point out that only about one-third of them are currently registered with the Environmental Protection Agency as active ingredients. 

In most cases, before a pesticide can be sold, the EPA requires extensive toxicity testing of its active ingredients, including long-term studies of whether they cause cancer.

The other chemicals are classified as inert ingredients – solvents, preservatives and other chemicals that help a product work. Inert ingredients do not require tests as stringent as those for active ingredients. Only sometimes they are required to be on product labels. This means people using these products usually can’t tell which inert ingredients they contain. 

Using national biomonitoring data collected between 2017 and 2020, the study reported that organophosphate pesticides (like malathion, which is commonly used on crops) were found in more than 90% of  the U.S. population. 

This finding adds to existing concerns about widespread “forever chemicals” PFAS pesticide use, including mixtures of pesticide classes frequently detected on produce. 

Food and water

The researchers report 462 of these chemicals in food. Of these, 83 are on the Food and Drug Administration’s list of substances added to food, which means they are expected to be there. The others may be present as contaminants that migrate from packaging and processing equipment or be present as contaminants for other reasons, such as pesticide residues. 

Others are chemicals formed when meat is cooked at high temperatures and some, such as soy compounds, occur naturally in plants.

People who rely more on packaged and ultra-processed foods may face higher exposure to chemicals from food additives and packaging.

The authors also reported 162 breast-cancer-relevant chemicals, such as pesticides and industrial solvents, likely to be present in drinking water. 

Some chemicals form as byproducts when drinking water is disinfected. These disinfection byproducts, or DBPs, emerge when disinfectants such as chlorine react with naturally occurring organic matter in water. 

Some DBPs have been linked to cancer and other health concerns.

Among the pesticides linked to breast cancer and reported present in drinking water, 50 have current registrations, but 37 no longer have a current EPA registration. 

The data source the authors used to identify chemicals in drinking water, the EPA’s CPDat, reports only whether a chemical has been found in drinking water. It does not report where or how much of it was found or when the detection occurred. 

Pharmaceuticals

The researchers also found 142 breast-cancer-relevant chemicals in medications sold in the U.S. Most of the active ingredients fall into a few groups: hormone treatments, chemotherapy drugs, treatments for infections and parasites, anti-inflammatory drugs and blood pressure medications.

This does not mean you should stop taking medication. Many of these drugs treat serious conditions, and some, like hormone therapies, have been shown to interact with the hormone system because they have been designed for that purpose. 

Totality of exposures

The study highlights the widespread occurrence of breast-cancer-relevant chemicals. People are not just exposed to one chemical at a time. They’re exposed to hundreds of chemicals from multiple sources over the course of their lives. Even if most are at low levels, exposures add up.

The national biomonitoring data cited in the study show how common these combined exposures are. Research shows that exposure to chemical mixtures, or multiple chemicals that can add up or sometimes interact together to multiply each other’s effects, creates a total health risk that is measurably more harmful than those from the chemicals acting alone. 

And in most cases, regulations for chemicals do not take cumulative exposures into account.

What you can do to reduce exposure 

• Check EWG’s resources for safer products. Use our Healthy Living App, Skin Deep® and Guide to Healthy Cleaning and look for products with low hazard scores or our EWG Verified® mark.
• Invest in a home water filter for improving water quality. Consult the EWG Tap Water Database to find out what’s in your water. EWG’s water filter guide can help you find the right filter for your budget. Shop organic, when possible, to reduce pesticide exposure. Consult the EWG Shopper’s Guide Pesticides in Produce™ to find out which fruits and vegetables have the highest and lowest pesticide residues, so you can make the best decisions for your family. And see EWG’s Guide to Washing Produce. 
• If you have questions about a medication, especially if you have a history or higher risk of breast cancer, talk with your doctor or pharmacist before making changes.

Other actions you can take

• Know your family history. If possible, find out whether anyone in your family has had breast cancer. Some genes with mutations increase risk of developing this type of cancer. 
• Get screened early. Preventive procedures such as regular breast cancer screenings are important to detect breast cancer early, which can also make it easier to treat. As of 2026, experts suggest screening for breast cancer starting at age 40. 

Areas of Focus Food & Water Family Health Women's Health Toxic Chemicals BPA Pesticides October 13, 2026

From California to France to the G20, “tax the billionaires” is shifting from slogan to concrete proposal. Beyond the revenue it would raise, it draws a sharp line between those who profit from crisis and everyone else. As the far right turns economic insecurity into a politics of scarcity and division, the billionaire enemy could become the foundation for a different political “we.” But only targeting a handful of people at the top risks leaving broader inequalities untouched.

This article is an 11-minute read. In the time it takes to finish reading it, the world’s most chronically online billionaire, Elon Musk, could add another 11 million dollars to his wealth – more than most people around the world will earn over their entire working lives – without having to do much of anything at all, other than, perhaps, angrily “tweet”.

And those millions add up fast. When SpaceX went public in June 2026, Musk became the first person Forbes had ever valued at more than one trillion – after his wealth had grown by more than 550 billion dollars over the previous year.

But Musk is not the only one. The US has Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; Europe has its own billionaire class, from Bernard Arnault and his family in France to Amancio Ortega in Spain; China has Zhong Shanshan; and India has Mukesh Ambani. The list goes on, as do the zeros. By 2025, billionaire wealth reached a record 18.3 trillion dollars, increasing by more than 16 per cent in that year alone.

Beyond the numbers, what does any of this mean for our societies? For decades, there has been a rather convenient economic story about what happens when wealth grows at the top: it generates investment, jobs, and growth whose benefits eventually spread to everyone else, or “trickle down”. Yet wealth has become increasingly concentrated: the richest 10 per cent now own around three quarters of global wealth, while the poorest half own just 2 per cent.

The result is not simply inequality. At a certain point, the extraordinary concentration of resources in the hands of a very small number of people also becomes a concentration of power. Billionaires own or control major companies, media, and digital infrastructure; they finance political campaigns; some enter politics themselves. Others do not need to hold office for access. It has become common to see Elon Musk alongside presidents and heads of government, Mark Zuckerberg sitting down with political leaders, and some of the world’s wealthiest people moving through spaces of political power to which very few people have access. Nobody elected them to those rooms. Their invitation is, in large part, their wealth.

That concentration of wealth and power becomes particularly difficult to ignore when set against what everyone else has been asked to absorb. Austerity after the financial crash was followed by a pandemic and then a prolonged cost-of-living crisis. Eurofound’s 2025 survey found that 61 per cent of respondents in low-income EU households were struggling to make ends meet. Yet between 2020 and 2022 alone, billionaire wealth increased more than it had over 23 years between 1987 and 2010.

This divergence between those at the top and everyone else matters politically. When governments talk again about what societies can afford and what must be sacrificed, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what “ordinary people” must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back.

What even is wealth?

Which brings us back to Musk’s 11 million dollars, which is not a salary. Musk does not receive a million-dollar pay cheque every sixty seconds. Much of his wealth comes from his ownership of companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, whose increasing value allows his wealth to grow without anything resembling a conventional income. And that distinction matters enormously when it comes to taxation.

Work remains remarkably easy for states to see and tax. Billionaire wealth is a different creature. It can appreciate without being sold, sit inside companies and be reorganised through legal structures in ways that wages cannot. Someone can therefore become billions richer without reporting anything resembling those billions as taxable personal income.

Tt becomes increasingly difficult to focus on what ‘ordinary people’ must give up without also confronting what those who have accumulated the most should be expected to give back

The result is a peculiar political economy. Governments can tell an ordinary worker with extraordinary precision what she owes from her next euro of salary, while struggling to answer a seemingly simpler question about some of the richest people ever to have lived: what constitutes their fair share?

There is also a curious asymmetry in how we think about wealth. We are very accustomed to drawing poverty lines, minimum incomes, measures of deprivation. States have developed remarkably sophisticated ways of calculating exactly how little someone can have before they officially count as having too little. Far less attention has been devoted to drawing a line at the other end: can someone have too much?

That is beginning to change. For instance, political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns has made the case for limitarianism – the idea that there should be an upper limit to how much wealth an individual can hold. Others, like University of California, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have focused on designing a wealth tax for the ultra-rich.

The idea has travelled well beyond academia. In 2024, under Brazil’s G20 presidency, Zucman was commissioned to develop a proposal for a coordinated minimum tax on the world’s billionaires, based on the principle that they should contribute at least 2 per cent of their wealth each year. And in California, home to many Silicon Valley billionaires, voters will decide this November on Proposition 40, which would impose a one-off 5 per cent tax on billionaire wealth to help fund healthcare.

These proposals differ substantially in their design, scale, and ambition. But taken together, they point towards a simple idea gathering political momentum: tax the billionaires.

Taxing the untaxable?

How exactly to do that remains contested – and the usual objections are never far behind. Wealth, we are told, can move across borders; billionaires can change their tax residence; some assets are difficult to value; assets tied up in companies are not necessarily available as cash; and sufficiently determined billionaires can employ sufficiently determined accountants to find ways around whatever rules governments create.

These are not imaginary problems. Several European countries have abandoned recurrent net wealth taxes over the past few decades amid concerns over avoidance, valuation, and administrative complexity. IMF economists have also questioned whether annual net wealth taxes are always the most effective instrument, arguing that stronger taxation of capital gains and inheritance may sometimes work better.

But these are, ultimately, problems of design. Tax systems already value assets, trace ownership, and deal with people and companies operating across borders. International information-sharing has made hiding financial wealth offshore more difficult, while international coordination – the entire logic behind Zucman’s G20 proposal – is precisely an attempt to prevent the world’s wealthiest people from playing one tax system against another.

None of this makes taxing billionaire wealth easy. But “difficult to tax” and “should not be taxed” are two quite different arguments.

Zucman estimates that, in proportion to their income, France’s approximately 100 billionaires currently pay half as much tax as the average French person. Correcting that imbalance, which is not unique to France, would improve the fiscal situation of cash-strapped governments. It could mean more resources for healthcare, housing, education, and public transport, or help meet the enormous investment required for the green transition. California’s Proposition 40 makes that connection particularly tangible: take a relatively small (5 per cent) share of excessive private wealth and direct most of it towards healthcare.

There is also the redistributive effect of the tax itself. If wealth at the very top has been accumulating far faster than it has for everyone else, taking some of that wealth back into the public realm can narrow the distance between the top and the rest – particularly when it pays for services on which people with the least depend most. That alone would be a substantial argument for doing it. But it may not be the most politically consequential one.

The perfect enemy

There is one thing billionaire taxation does exceptionally well: everyone knows who it is not about.

That is because, unlike “the rich”, “billionaire” has a very clear boundary. Someone earning 100,000 euros a year, a homeowner sitting on an expensive property, a successful small-business owner or someone who inherited a few millions might all be considered rich – or not – depending on who is drawing the line. And even well-off people have a tendency to draw that line somewhere just above themselves.

There is a distinctly populist logic to that structure. Political scientist Cas Mudde famously defines populism as dividing society into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. Few political demands draw that boundary as cleanly as “tax the billionaires”.

The billionaire line sits so far up the wealth distribution that almost nobody risks mistaking themselves for the target. Politically, that distance matters. “Tax the billionaires” singles out an extraordinarily small group while leaving almost everyone else standing on the other side. The “them” is remarkably easy to identify; the potential “us” is enormous.

California’s Proposition 40 makes that political divide unusually concrete: a little over 200 billionaires, according to the campaign, would be subject to the tax, while 90 per cent of the revenue would go towards healthcare. And it is precisely this ability to make distribution so immediately legible that gives the demand its wider political significance.

Across Europe, far-right parties have become adept at connecting experiences of insecurity – unaffordable housing, strained public services, stagnant wages, shrinking welfare provision – to immigration. The details vary between countries, but the underlying story is familiar: resources are scarce, ordinary people are losing out, and somebody else is getting what should have been theirs. Migrants, refugees, and welfare recipients become visible explanations for problems whose causes are considerably more complicated.

Part of the power of that politics is that it gives insecurity a direction. It tells people not only that something has gone wrong, but who is benefiting at their expense and, ultimately, who belongs on either side of “us” and “them”.

Progressive politics has often struggled to offer an equally legible account. For Greens, the problem can be particularly acute. Climate politics is easily caricatured by its opponents as a growing list of things ordinary people will have to surrender or pay more for: your car, your boiler, your flight, perhaps even your steak. However unfair the caricature, it pulls political attention towards what millions of people consume rather than towards who owns, accumulates, and exercises economic power.

“Tax the billionaires” points in a different direction.

Who are “we”?

There is nothing particularly new about politics trying to construct a “we” out of people who do not occupy exactly the same economic position. Political coalitions have repeatedly been built across existing class boundaries, and those boundaries have shifted as societies and economies have changed.

There are particularly striking precedents for organising those coalitions against concentrated economic power. During the New Deal years of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt – himself hailing from an affluent family – railed against what he called the “economic royalists”. Thus, he was placing concentrated private power on one side and a much broader democratic coalition on the other. Decades later, Occupy Wall Street found an even simpler formulation: “We are the 99%.”

Neither required everyone inside the “we” to be economically equal. And “tax the billionaires” doesn’t either. A renter on a relatively high salary, a nurse who owns her home, a factory worker, a precarious university lecturer, a delivery rider and a small-business owner may have very different economic interests and may not understand themselves as belonging to the same class. Yet they all have something rather obvious in common: none is remotely close to being a billionaire.

That makes for an unusually broad political coalition – one capable, at least in principle, of bringing together people who might otherwise have little reason to see their economic interests as shared. But bringing people onto the same side of a political dividing line is one thing; giving them a common politics is another.

Roosevelt’s attack on concentrated wealth was attached to a much broader political project. The New Deal did not simply ask wealthy Americans to contribute more to public coffers. It strengthened collective bargaining, regulated finance, expanded social protection and public investment, and challenged aspects of concentrated corporate power.

Occupy’s “99%”, meanwhile, proved extraordinarily successful at changing the language through which inequality was discussed. The “1%” escaped the occupations themselves and entered mainstream political vocabulary. But turning that enormous “99%” into a durable political organisation or a common programme proved much harder. The billionaire version stretches the boundaries of that “we” even further, placing people with vastly different levels of wealth and economic power on the same side of the line.

But in so doing, it can also obscure the inequalities and conflicts among everyone who is on the same side. What is income to a landlord is rent to a tenant; what increases returns to shareholders may come at the expense of wages; what preserves the value of a large inheritance also preserves inequalities between those who inherit and those who do not.

In other words, the slogan “tax the billionaires” risks serving as a diversion from tackling inequality more broadly.

Beyond the billionaires

And there is plenty beneath the billionaire line to look at. A billion euros of private wealth does not appear from nowhere. It grows within an economy in which companies and land have owners, profits are divided between workers and shareholders, wages reflect very different levels of bargaining power, housing can function as both a home and a financial asset, and wealth can be passed from one generation to the next. Long before the tax authorities arrive, decisions have already been made about who owns what, who receives what, and who has power over whom.

This is where a distinction emerges between redistributing wealth and changing how it is distributed in the first place. A billionaire tax largely does the former. Once enormous wealth has accumulated, the state takes a share of it and redirects those resources towards society. That can make the final distribution less unequal – particularly when the money funds public services and social protection on which people with lower incomes depend.

Changing how wealth is distributed in the first place means intervening earlier. It means looking at workers’ bargaining power and how profits are shared; at who owns companies, housing and land; at what is publicly or collectively owned and what remains privately controlled; and at how large amounts of wealth are inherited across generations.

None of this is an argument against billionaire taxation; after all, it can raise substantial revenue, redistribute resources, and slow accumulation at the very top. Nor do redistribution and changing the underlying distribution need to be mutually exclusive. But if the politics ends at the billionaire line, much of what created the inequality on either side of it remains beyond reach.

Perhaps this is where the real political potential of “tax the billionaires” lies. The billionaire may be the most visible expression of a much broader distribution of wealth and power.

And this matters at a moment when the far right has become remarkably successful at explaining insecurity through competition between locals and immigrants over scarce resources. Billionaire politics offers a very different account: away from who might be receiving too much, and towards who has accumulated so much, how they did so, and what that accumulation allows them to do.

For Greens and the wider left, that offers something more than a new source of tax revenue. It offers the possibility of contesting the politics of scarcity itself. And in doing so, it unsettles the premise on which so much of that politics rests: that there is simply not enough to go around, and that politics is therefore a matter of deciding who among the rest of us must make do with less. Before accepting that ordinary people must compete over what is available – who gets the house, the hospital bed, the welfare payment or the secure job – it asks us to look at where resources and power have actually gone, who owns them, who controls them, and how they became so concentrated in the first place. And why, in societies capable of producing such extraordinary private wealth, does the political conversation so often begin with what everyone else must learn to live without?

That does not make scarcity imaginary. Housing can genuinely be in short supply, public services can simply lack capacity, and governments face real choices about resources. But those shortages do not tell us, by themselves, how the resources a society does have should be distributed, who should contribute more, or whose claims should be placed in competition with who else’s. Those are political choices too.

But constructing a convincing “them” is still easier than building a meaningful “we”. If that “we” is to mean more than simply everyone who doesn’t own a billion euros, it eventually has to acquire political content: what should be more equally shared, what forms of power should be challenged, and what people should be able to expect from the society they belong to.

That is why “tax the billionaires” is perhaps most powerful as the point of departure. It can raise revenue and redistribute wealth at the very top. But it can also serve to open a much broader argument about who owns companies, housing, and land; how economic power is distributed between workers and owners; and how much of the wealth societies produce should remain privately controlled in the first place.

The risk is that the politics stops at the slogan. The opportunity is that it does not.

24th Provincial Seed Fair in Catamarca for the Exchange of Native and Local Seeds A transformative practical experience with a story to tell Article by BePe... explore BePe's campaigns here

 In a global context of extreme violence that has escalated into various forms of war, life—and, above all, the planet’s habitability for the human species—is seriously and gravely threatened. Meanwhile, those who hold the power to make decisions on behalf of the people remain entrenched in their many layers of denial. And today, more than ever, the relationship between the global and the local is glaringly evident.

Thus, in Catamarca, where extractive violence wages war against us by exploiting, plundering, and poisoning our sacred resources, local governments—puppets of corporate power—remain blind and deaf to the Earth’s rebellious cry. As we know, Catamarca is not an isolated case in Argentina, nor in Latin America and the Caribbean, nor in Africa, nor in the Global South. We recognize that this violence is cruel and widespread; yet the Earth’s strength and courage is far-reaching, for this strength is ancestral and the spring which gave rise to Life.

Throughout these more than 500 years of imperial, capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal wars, the Earth has made its voice heard through the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala and Africa, right up to the present day. Today, as the war intensifies, that nonviolent struggle has become an unwavering voice in the slogan “Water is worth more than gold,” proclaimed by countless assemblies, communities, and socio-environmental organizations throughout the world. And the Earth itself cries out with the peoples: its elements are shaken; its climates and the gases that regulate life-sustaining conditions become unstable and unpredictable; the illness caused by the long war endured manifests itself in devastation and phenomena labeled “natural” when they are not.

And we do not merely cry out and resist; we also re-exist through collective experiences that open up possible futures of lives worth living. For example, the forms of re-existence emerging in the Bolsón de Fiambalá, a land formation in the Andean foothills (1), with a landscape of immeasurable beauty and mystery. Mystery in the face of the invisible balance of living energies that combine extreme temperatures, winds, snow, semidesert aridity, brackish and fresh waters, with human and non-human cultivation—all of which generate and reproduce Life.

Photos by BePe: Seed Fair festivities in Fianbalá, Catamarca, Argentina

There, where corporate power sees only speculative profit and calls the object of imperial possession the “Lithium Triangle,” mega-corporations have set up shop under the protection of local governments that call themselves democratic. Currently operated by the Zijin Mining Group, the high-Andean Tres Quebradas lagoons are being plundered of lithium to fuel weapons of war and luxury goods in the Global North. As is well known, the destruction caused by extractive mining is never limited to the mine site itself: in this case, it irrevocably affects an entire ecosystem of perennial snowfields, surface and groundwater—both brackish and fresh—that sustain unique animal and plant species and maintain the climatic balance between the high peaks and the agriculturally productive valleys.

It is precisely in one of those valleys—the one nestled in the Bolsón de Fiambalá—that peasant families live in villages whose names allude to the local geography or recall ancient indigenous terms: Medanitos, Tatón, Chuquisaca, La Mesada, Palo Blanco, Quebrada de Zárate, Las Papas, La Ciénaga, Antinaco, Quebrada del Cerco. People, families, communities bearing the colonial wound etched into the memory of their bodies and their lands, where the monoculture of grapevines—to name just one of those wounds—accelerated the processes of soil desertification and the impoverishment of life. However, despite the imposition of a capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal system, these families came together as Peoples, transforming the stigma of those wounds into courage, dignity, and organized struggle.

It did not happen overnight; nor did it follow a linear, unidirectional path. Because becoming a community involves engaging in processes of community dialogue, the course of which is not the focus of this article. We do, however, wish to highlight the fundamental importance of these processes for wisely safeguarding the ways of life that sustain the community with sustainability and justice.

It was during the final years of the 1980s when the gatherings, the collective readings of contexts, and the critical interpretation of situations referred to as “gaps between rich and poor” (2)… gradually expanded into circles of analysis and reflection, which added complexity to existential issues and defined praxis as a form of communal struggle. When the time came to harvest the first fruits from the gardens, they felt that Mother Earth, caressed by peasant hands, had regained her power to bring forth life and had given them food…

26th Provincial Catamarca Seed Fair Poster 2026

Nearly forty years after those early organizational efforts, these farming families are part of ACAMPA, the Abaucán Farmers’ Association—named after the river that provides them with food and a sense of identity. They farm using agroecological methods and live in community with a sense of shared identity. They run a community FM radio station whose broadcasts reach all the communities in Bolsón. And, since 2001, they have been organizing—in collaboration with BePe—a seed fair featuring native and heirloom seeds.

Going against the grain of the decisions made by those who call themselves politicians and business people—but who are merely modern-day versions of the conquerors of the 15th through 18th centuries—the Peoples of Bolsón de Fiambalá re-exist in defiance of the systems of death imposed for millennia. They unmask the lies of those who claim to be representatives of democracy and agents of progress. They exercise political and economic power in the service of the reproduction of Life.

On 12th September this year, the fair—which had begun with a dozen stalls—spanned a grounds that accommodated more than 200 tables where farming families displayed the fruits they had harvested, raised, and processed. The 24th Provincial Fair for the Exchange of Native and Creole Seeds took place. What had once been a local event has spread to various parts of the province of Catamarca and to the neighboring provinces of Santiago del Estero and La Rioja. What began as a display of seeds expanded to include seedlings, farm animals, nuts, sweet and savory preserves, various types of textile crafts, wines, and fruit syrups… and most importantly; the scale of this growth also served to foster values, promote autonomous and dignified ways of life, and share transformative knowledge and practices.

While the dominant powers expand the frontiers of extraction in the Global South—currently in the name of the misnamed “energy transition”—grassroots policies have been building ecologically sustainable territories open to economically independent horizons. In the face of the denial of the future engineered by oligarchic elites, these small-scale initiatives scattered across various regions of the Global South build bridges toward possible and necessary futures.

 

References:

1. It is a depression or flat valley, completely surrounded by mountains, with no access to the sea. In this case, the basin—with an area of approximately 2,000 km²—borders the puna, a desert high plateau ranging in elevation from 3,000 to 6,000 meters above sea level. Both regions are characterized by the presence of volcanoes and high-Andean lakes (as well as salt flats in the puna).

2. An explicit way of describing socioeconomic inequality during those years; it served as a key to a critical interpretation of reality.

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By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

This is the first of a new series on the Green New Deal 2.0.

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations, New York addresses the audience during the session ‘Time Is Running Out for Water’ at the Annual Meeting 2008 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 24, 2008. Photo credit: Remy Steinegger, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

In 2008, in the depths of the Great Recession, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for “investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs and spurs green growth.” He said what the world needs, in short, is a “Green New Deal.”

The project of a Green New Deal rapidly picked up momentum around the world. Green New Deals became official policy in many countries, endorsed by the UN, the international trade union movement, and even by the IMF. China, India, and the European Union began “implementing some of the policies envisioned by the Green New Deal.” But within a couple of years a global counterattack demanding austerity stymied much of the drive for massive investment to implement climate protection and economic justice. The Green New Deal appeared dead.

The Green New Deal was reborn a decade later when the youth Sunrise climate movement in the U.S. held a sit-in in the office of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi demanding she support a resolution for a Green New Deal proposed by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Drawing on the proposals a decade earlier for a Global Green New Deal, the resolution called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” The Green New Deal amassed support among congressional representatives, progressive organizations, and young people across the country. A poll found that more than 80% of registered voters “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the general concepts behind a Green New Deal. A poll five years later found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.”

Notwithstanding its popularity with the public the Green New Deal met implacable opposition from the fossil fuel industry and hostile forces in both the Democratic and Republic parties. Upon his election as president, Donald Trump declared the Green New Deal dead and proceeded to devastate both climate protection and social justice.

Nonetheless, even in the Trump era the Green New Deal has continued as a force in American life – from below. It has continued to be implemented through little-noticed initiatives by community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other nonfederal actors pursuing the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. I have described it as the “Green New Deal from Below.”

The Green New Deal has proved perennial because it addresses the basic problems faced by our people and planet. It is a project that in all its varied manifestations takes the necessity for climate protection as the basis for a broad program for social reconstruction — a visionary program designed to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. It can be the basis for what many have called a “just transition” to a climate-safe world.

The Green New Deal 2.0 and the Polycrisis

Environmental activists protesting for change – A group of activists gather in an urban setting, holding signs that call for action against climate change. Their placards bear powerful messages. Photo credit: Lomb, Adobe Stock

The Green New Deal project is more necessary than ever. But many things have changed since the earlier Green New Deals. We need to redefine the Green New Deal for today, tomorrow, and the long-range future. Let’s call it the Green New Deal 2.0.

The Green New Deal 2.0 will not be defined by one or another thinker or leader, but by a broad social process of dialogue and experiment. This series is offered as a contribution to that social process.

In earlier Green New Deals, the elimination of fossil fuel extraction and burning was a costly though necessary duty. Today, “Greentech” — technology that reduces or repairs harm to the environment – is transforming the economics of energy and therefore of the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal 2.0 will be potentiated by a Greentech revolution that makes fossil free energy cheaper and more competitive than fossil fuel energy.

The emergence of the first Green New Deal coincided with the end of a long period of economic globalization combined with the geopolitical hegemony of the United States. That has been followed by what is often referred to as the “Polycrisis,” a period of global disorder that continues to intensify day by day. The Green New Deal 2.0 will have to survive and develop under the conditions created by the Polycrisis. And to succeed it will need — working with other forces — to quell the Polycrisis and establish a viable world order.

Here are some of the key dynamics of the Polycrisis that a Green New Deal 2.0 will have to contend with:

• Climate devastation: The extraction and burning of fossil fuels has continued to grow, leading to a rapid increase in fires, floods, storms, heatwaves, and other devastating manifestations of global warming.
• Inequality: The world’s 12 richest billionaires now have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, or more than four billion people; meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.
• Democracy Deficit: Countries around the world face autocratic, plutocratic, and kleptocratic rule; repression of political opposition; degradation of electoral procedures; and monopolization of communications media.
• Rise of Fascist and Para-Fascist Movements: Parties and movements with fascist characteristics, such as authoritarianism, racism, hostility towards migrants, abuse of women, suppression of dissent, expanded policing powers, celebration of violence, and might-makes-right ideologies control many countries, exercise de-facto veto powers in many others, and impose terror and brutality on many peoples.
• Fragmented Globalization: While globalization as a regulated system has largely broken down, international trade has continued to grow, but it is increasingly shaped by geopolitical economic warfare focused on the struggle to control global economic networks, such as data flows, platform rules, AI systems, and the critical minerals and energy infrastructures that power them.
• Unleashed Warfare: There are at least 65 active conflicts across 35 countries, the highest number recorded since World War II – with a doubling of international conflicts from four to eight since 2024. The objectives of military power have expanded from defense and domination to outright plunder; as the International Crisis Group put it, Trump’s “lawlessness, revisionism and cavalier use of force” risk “normalizing the idea that war is an OK way for powerful states to get what they want.” According to an analysis of “Systemic Risk And Escalation Dynamics In Global Politics,”

“The 2026–2027 period marks a critical phase in the international system, best described as a systemic crisis of governability. Across multiple regions, crises—both active and latent—are increasingly interconnected, creating conditions in which local tensions can quickly escalate into broader instability. . . and trigger escalation beyond political control.”

• Vicious Circles of Conflict: Conflicts aggravated by tit-for-tat escalation are creating dangers that are in nobody’s interest and that nobody can control. The war between Ukraine and Russia, with their European, Chinese, and other backers and their American manipulator seeking opportunities for plunder provides a prime example: the war has produced growing levels of devastating bombing of civilian areas on both sides; cycles of drone war escalation; and threats of nuclear escalation.

  Address by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the Parliament of Lithuania. Photo credit: The Presidential Office of Ukraine, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

• Breakdown of International Cooperation: International cooperation for peacekeeping, arms limitation, climate protection, economic cooperation, water use, fighting pandemics and other public health threats, and action to address threats from new technologies, such as nanotechnology, drones, and Artificial Intelligence, have atrophied or worse. Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. entirely from 66 international organizations responsible for addressing such global needs.
• Rising and Resisting Powers: The Polycrisis is marked by the rivalry between China and the U.S. –an example of what is sometimes known as the “Thucydides trap” of conflict between rising and dominant powers.
• War Crime Wave: Israel, backed by the U.S., has conducted what the International Court of Justice has found may constitute genocide in violation of international law. Both Russia and Ukraine are conducting massive attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure that are clearly crimes against humanity. The US attack on Iran is nothing but a war of aggression – itself a war crime. International law, often flouted in practice, is now being openly scorned in principle. Donald Trump said in a recent interview with The New York  Times, “I don’t need international law.” His aide Steven Miller explicitly spelled out the doctrine of might makes right: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
• Geopolitics Trumps All: The wellbeing of people, democratic governance, and even the survival of humanity have all been made subservient to the pursuit of superpower domination. This reality was recognized in Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s widely publicized Davos proclamation of “a rupture in the world order” where “geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no constraints. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.” Polycrisis geopolitics is now shifting, to borrow a term from Richard Falk, toward “nihilistic geopolitics” oblivious to meaning, morality, or knowledge. Rational, realistic pursuit of national self-interest is increasingly passing over into bullying and plunder, with little regard to their actual consequences.
• Incoherence: The Polycrisis is complex, contradictory, and chaotic. Apparent trends and tendencies conflict. Policymaking is increasingly erratic, incoherent, and self-contradictory, with results far different from those intended.
• Unpredictability: The world order has become even more unpredictable. As Margaret MacMillan put it in the New York Times, “We are living in a time of what’s been called radical uncertainty. We are in a transition in which the previous system is unraveling but we don’t yet know what comes next.”
• Decline of Social Learning: World actors increasingly plunge into self-destructive actions without recognition that past experience has proven their futility. Aggressive use of tariffs in the past has regularly led to trade wars and mutual impoverishment, yet it is burgeoning. Rearmament and other preparation for war predictably leads not only to mutual impoverishment, but to increased likelihood of military conflagration, yet it continues to escalate. Maniacal investment in bubbles like AI have repeatedly led to devastating crashes, yet the mania continues without either public or private restraint.
• The folly factor: As the Polycrisis deepens, the gap between rational self-interest and foolishness grows wider. As Monica Duffy Toft pointed out in the New York Times, the withering of cooperation to address common threats leads to “more flashpoints among nuclear-armed powers, more nuclear proliferation, less cooperation on global threats and a system structurally incapable of mitigating the risks it creates.”

While each of these dynamics is devastating in itself, their interaction makes the Polycrisis appear even more intractable.

Every aspect of a Green New Deal 2.0 will be affected by every aspect of the Polycrisis. Obviously, the Green New Deal 2.0 will not be able to quell the Polycrisis all by itself or all at one blow. But quelling it must be the horizon and provide the perspective from which it works. In particular, the Green New Deal 2.0 must

• Halt fossil fuel burning to halt global warming
• Implement the Greentech revolution to halt fossil fuel burning
• Use the Greentech revolution to reverse deteriorating social conditions for people in the U.S. and around the world
• Establish global cooperation sufficient to achieve these objectives

The next commentary in this series will present an overview of the Green New Deal 2.0. 

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The post The Green New Deal 2.0 vs. the Polycrisis first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

PARA SU PUBLICACIÓN INMEDIATA: 13 de octubre de 2026

Grupos exigen que se ponga fin al financiamiento público de la incineración en la reunión anual del Banco Mundial

Hoy, la Alianza Global por Alternativas a las Incineradoras (GAIA) ha publicado un informe titulado «The Burn Book: Incineradoras que amenazan el clima, la salud pública y nuestras finanzas».  La publicación analizó datos de veinte incineradoras y propuestas de incineradoras en todo el mundo, centrándose en la deuda pública y los subsidios, el cambio climático y la contaminación del aire, los subproductos tóxicos y otros problemas comunes relacionados con la industria, identificando patrones clave que surgieron independientemente de los contextos regionales. El lanzamiento de esta publicación coincide con la Semana Global de Acción contra la Incineración, del 13 al 16 de octubre, con eventos de solidaridad programados en todo el mundo. 

«Como muestran estos ejemplos, las incineradoras o las llamadas plantas de “energía a partir de residuos” no resuelven por arte de magia nuestros problemas de residuos, sino que crean otros nuevos», afirma Marcel Howard, coordinador de proyectos especiales de GAIA y autor del informe. 

«No solo cargan a las comunidades con emisiones tóxicas al aire y al clima, así como con una deuda pública agobiante, sino que también necesitan volúmenes masivos de residuos para seguir funcionando, lo que socava los esfuerzos municipales por conservar los valiosos recursos naturales. Con nuestra crisis climática cada vez más grave y el rebasamiento de los límites planetarios, ya no tenemos más tiempo que perder en mantener a flote esta industria contaminante». 

El informe pone de manifiesto varias tendencias clave: 

• Las incineradoras de “energía a partir de residuos” convierten los desechos en contaminación atmosférica tóxica y cenizas. Según datos públicos, solo estas incineradoras produjeron al menos 1.7 millones de toneladas de cenizas tóxicas al año —el equivalente en peso a 230 Torres Eiffel—. También existe una gran cantidad de evidencia sobre contaminantes atmosféricos que amenazan la salud humana, entre ellos el monóxido de carbono, el óxido nitroso, las dioxinas y los furanos. Muchas comunidades cercanas a estas plantas se quejaron de olores, problemas respiratorios y contaminación del suelo. 

• Estas instalaciones tienen una gran huella climática. A pesar de que los estudios demuestran que la incineración para la generación de energía produce más emisiones climáticas que cualquier otra fuente de energía, muchas de las incineradoras de la lista no monitorean ni divulgan públicamente sus niveles de emisiones. Las once que sí contaban con datos disponibles emiten un total acumulado de 5.5 millones de toneladas métricas de CO2eal año, el equivalente a 1.3 millones de autos de pasajeros. 

• La “generación de energía a partir de residuos” es un desperdicio de dinero. Las veinte incineradoras analizadas han acumulado hasta la fecha casi 7 mil millones de dólares en inversiones, y una parte de esa suma proviene directamente de los contribuyentes en forma de subsidios gubernamentales y préstamos municipales. En algunos casos, los municipios están en la obligación de pagar millones de dólares en deuda que se extiende por décadas. Las incineradoras de residuos son la forma más costosa de gestión de residuos. 

• Quemar residuos socava la reducción de residuos. Una vez construidas, las incineradoras de “energía a partir de residuos” requieren grandes volúmenes de residuos para mantenerse en funcionamiento, y muchos municipios tienen contratos de “pagar o entregar” que desincentivan la reducción de residuos. Gran parte del material quemado en estas incineradoras podría haberse convertido en compost, reciclado o evitado por completo.  

Mientras el Banco Mundial celebra sus reuniones anuales en Bangkok, Tailandia, comunidades de todo el Sur Global exigen que se ponga fin al financiamiento público de la incineración disfrazada de acción climática. El Atlas Ciudadano sobre Soluciones Falsas para el Clima y la Economía Circular de GAIA Asia-Pacífico reveló que 42 de los 59 proyectos del Grupo del Banco Mundial evaluados en Asia-Pacífico apoyaban tecnologías de incineración entre 2015 y 2026. Desde la incineradora «Smokey Mountain» propuesta en Manila hasta las 12 plantas industriales de conversión de residuos en energía respaldadas por el Banco Asiático de Desarrollo (ADB) y el Banco Asiático de Inversión en Infraestructura (AIIB) en Tailandia, estos proyectos amenazan a las comunidades, los medios de vida de los trabajadores del sector de residuos y la justicia ambiental.

Declaraciones de miembros de GAIA cuyas campañas contra las incineradoras aparecen en el «Burn Book»: 

Elisah Pals, fundadora y miembro de la junta directiva de Basura cero Países Bajos (Zero Waste Nederland): 

«La incineración es un camino equivocado, incluso para un país como los Países Bajos. Ya luchamos contra la contaminación del aire, el agua y la tierra, y sin embargo seguimos importando residuos para mantener en funcionamiento las incineradoras. Incluso cuando logramos producir menos residuos, podemos terminar enfrentando sanciones. Los problemas de dependencia son reales aquí. Ese es un mundo al revés. Necesitamos prevención, no más razones para quemar».

Karen Wirsig, gerente sénior del programa de plásticos de Environmental Defence Canada:

«Quemar residuos es sucio y costoso, y a menudo recae en las comunidades que tienen menos poder para decir que no. Los gobiernos que quieran abordar un problema creciente de residuos deben enfocarse en la reducción de residuos, no en cuentos de hadas tóxicos».

Alejandra Torres, subdirectora de Incidencia y Organización, Ironbound Community Corporation:

«Quemar basura no es la respuesta correcta para gestionar los residuos. La incineradora de Ironbound, en Newark, Nueva Jersey, ha superado su vida útil y cada vez es más contaminante y costosa. Nos inspiran las comunidades que han logrado impulsar prácticas y empleos basura cero, cerrar incineradoras y garantizar que los subsidios para energía limpia se destinen a energía realmente limpia. ¡Un mundo mejor es posible!»

Jane Bremmer, presidenta de Toxics Free Australia: 

«Australia tiene una oportunidad única de evitar los errores de Europa, el Reino Unido y Estados Unidos en materia de gestión y eliminación de residuos al optar por un modelo de “ciudad basura cero” en lugar de incineradoras. Ninguna comunidad merece soportar la carga adversa para la salud y el medio ambiente que supone incinerar los residuos de otra ciudad o industria. Si bien existen formas más seguras y efectivas de gestionar los residuos de cualquier país, la incineración sigue siendo indefendible».

Rossano Ercolini, presidente de Basura cero Italia (Zero Waste Italy): 

«La incineración es el pasado contaminante. Destruye recursos que deberían compartirse con el futuro. La incineración va en contra de la economía circular y promueve un modelo lineal de usar y tirar».

Victor Argentino, Instituto Polis: 

«Impulsadas en las ciudades como una “solución rápida” en lugar de la inclusión de los recicladores de base  y la recolección selectiva, las incineradoras o plantas de conversión de residuos en energía (WTE) en Brasil refuerzan el racismo ambiental al ubicarse en zonas periféricas de bajos ingresos».

Jai Muhammad, activista de WALHI Java Oriental: 

«Para que podamos llevar una buena vida, debemos respirar aire limpio. ¡Y para respirar aire limpio, hay que cerrar las incineradoras!»

Sue Maxwell, presidenta de Basura cero BC (Zero Waste BC):

«La incineración está frenando las medidas hacia el objetivo basura cero, ya que es muy costosa y condena a las comunidades a la contaminación y al desperdicio de recursos».

Contactos de prensa:

Manuela Quaroni

manuela@no-burn.org

Nota para el editor:

• Hoy, Zero Waste Europe ha publicado un informe titulado «Exceso de capacidad de incineración en Europa: Actualización de datos para 2026», en el que se concluye que la capacidad de incineración de residuos de la región no se ajusta a sus objetivos actuales de generación y reducción de residuos.
• GAIA ha publicado «Incineración de residuos 101: Lo que necesitas saber sobre las llamadas incineradoras de “energía a partir de residuos”», que ofrece una visión general de las últimas investigaciones sobre los daños asociados con la incineración de residuos.
• A lo largo de la semana, GAIA y sus miembros organizarán eventos virtuales en el «Global Action Lab», una oportunidad para escuchar de primera mano a los miembros de GAIA sobre cómo la incineración de residuos está afectando a sus comunidades. 

###

GAIA es una alianza mundial de más de 1,000 grupos de base, organizaciones no gubernamentales y personas en más de 100 países. Con nuestro trabajo buscamos impulsar un cambio global hacia la justicia ambiental mediante el fortalecimiento de los movimientos sociales de base que promueven soluciones para los residuos y la contaminación. Imaginamos un mundo justo y sin residuos, basado en el respeto a los límites ecológicos y los derechos de las comunidades, donde las personas estén libres de la carga de la contaminación tóxica y los recursos se conserven de manera sostenible, en lugar de ser quemados o vertidos. 

The post Un análisis de veinte incineradoras de residuos en todo el mundo revela amenazas para el medio ambiente, las inversiones y la salud pública first appeared on GAIA.

Despite the high-tech name of “waste-to-energy” and its sustainability claims, GAIA’s documentation of the financial, climate, and human health impacts of twenty incinerators worldwide paints a very different picture. Although these twenty incinerators and incinerator proposals ranged across the globe, they told the same story: decades of debt, a dark cloud of air pollution, and the burning of resources that could have been recycled, composted, or prevented altogether. 

Below are the toplines from GAIA’s research into these twenty incinerators, called  The Burn Book: Incinerators that Threaten the Climate, Public Health, and our Finances. For more in-depth information you can read the report itself.

Read The Report Read The Press Release Attero Moerdijk Facility – Netherlands .stk-fw9xuqb {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 1997, Attero’s Moerdijk plant is one of the Netherlands’ largest waste incinerators. The plant has emitted roughly 945,000 MT of CO2 in a single year, was supported by a $269.4 million USD (€233 million) European Investment Bank (EIP) loan, and was tied to contracts requiring 510,000 MT of waste annually—commitments that later generated financial disputes when increased waste separation reduced municipal waste deliveries.10 11 Rather than eliminating waste, Moerdijk demonstrates how a large, capital-intensive incinerator can create decades-long dependence on maintaining waste throughput while generating hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 and ash annually.

Runcorn Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) – United Kingdom .stk-lw6v25u {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 2014–2015, Runcorn is one of the UK’s largest waste incinerators, permitted to burn 1.1 million MT annually in an industrial area surrounded by communities living and working nearby that have spent years reporting odors, noise, dust, vermin and other disturbances.56 57 The facility released approximately 1.11 million MT of CO2 in 2025 and generated more than 218,000 MT of bottom and fly ash, while its development was supported by long-term Greater Manchester waste commitments and substantial public financing, including a direct European Investment Bank (EIB) loan.58 59 Community opposition ultimately contributed to legal action by nearly 200 households and a reported $1.3 million USD (£1 million settlement), while residents and campaigners continue to press for stronger monitoring, enforcement, transparency and protection from the cumulative impacts of one of Britain’s largest incinerators.60 61

Hempstead Resource Recovery Facility (Reworld Hempstead) – USA .stk-xeh36zw {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 1989, the Hempstead Resource Recovery Facility (Reworld Hempstead) is a large waste incinerator located in Westbury, New York, operated by Reworld (formerly Covanta), and capable of processing approximately 944,000 MT of waste annually.103 The facility generates substantial greenhouse-gas emissions and roughly 197,000 MT of incinerator ash per year, much of which has historically been disposed of at the Town of Brookhaven Landfill, adjacent to the predominantly Black and Latino community of North Bellport, where regulators have documented a groundwater plume contaminated with PFAS and 1,4-dioxane.104 While the plume has not been specifically attributed to Hempstead’s ash, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) fined Reworld $878,500 in penalties in 2025 for nearly a decade of historic violations in ash-management practices.105 Hempstead is also supported by a long-term put-or-pay contract requiring payment for at least 381,000 MT of waste annually through 2034, reinforcing dependence on incineration even if municipal waste deliveries decline.106

Essex County Resource Recovery Facility (Reworld Essex) – USA .stk-jggh5s1 {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 1990, the Essex County Resource Recovery Facility (Reworld Essex) is a large waste incinerator located in Newark’s heavily industrialized Ironbound neighborhood, where it is operated by Reworld and permitted to burn approximately 894,000 MT of waste annually.139 The facility released roughly 854,000 MT of direct fossil and biogenic CO2 in 2023, alongside hundreds of metric tons of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and other air pollutants, adding to the cumulative pollution burden facing the surrounding environmental-justice community.14 The facility generates roughly 177,000 MT of incinerator ash annually that must be transported elsewhere for processing or disposal.141 142 For decades, the Ironbound Community Corporation and allied environmental-justice organizations have challenged the facility’s pollution and called for its closure, stronger enforcement, and an end to Newark’s dependence on waste incineration.143

Timarpur-Okhla Waste-to-Energy Plant – India .stk-zzg0urs {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 2012 in one of the most densely populated parts of New Delhi, the Timarpur–Okhla Waste-to-Energy Plant burns up to 711,750 MT of municipal waste per year beside residential communities, hospitals and schools.178 The facility has received substantial government support—including publicly supplied waste, nominal cost land, an approximately $1 million USD (₹10 crore) central government subsidy, public sector financing and carbon credits—while residents have spent more than a decade challenging its pollution and expansion.179 180 181 Regulatory monitoring has repeatedly documented pollution problems: government testing found violations for particulate matter and dioxins/furans as early as 2013, while 2021 monitoring measured dioxins/furans at nearly ten times the legal limit and hydrogen chloride at nearly four times the limit.182 183 Despite this history of violations and community opposition, the facility has pursued a major expansion that would increase waste processing capacity by another 1,000–1,200 MT/day.184

Amager Bakke (CopenHill) – Denmark .stk-x677skk {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 2017, Amager Bakke—also known as CopenHill—is a municipally owned mass-burn waste incinerator in Copenhagen operated by Amager Resource Center (ARC). Although promoted internationally for its architecture, ski slope, energy efficiency and advanced pollution controls, the facility has also become a prominent example of the financial and climate risks associated with oversized incineration infrastructure. Amager Bakke was financed through approximately $682 million USD (DKK 3.95 billion) in publicly backed borrowing, while its owner municipalities later loosened restrictions on imported waste after lower than expected local waste volumes weakened the project’s finances.233 234 ARC currently reports stack emissions of approximately 560,000 MT of CO2 per year, while local and regional advocates have argued that the plant’s scale and long-lived debt create pressure to maintain high waste throughput even as Copenhagen seeks to increase recycling and reduce residual waste.235 236

Isséane Incinerator – France .stk-nnkre40 {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 2007–2008, Isséane is a large publicly owned waste incinerator embedded in the densely populated Paris metropolitan area, with over one million people living within 5 km of the facility.276 In 2024, the plant burned 536,000 MT of waste and released 252,060 MT of fossil CO2, alongside NOx, particulate matter, mercury, heavy metals and dioxins; it also generated approximately 89,300 MT of bottom and hazardous fly ash, with fly ash transported to hazardous-waste facilities outside Paris.277 Built at a cost of approximately $836 million USD (€600 million) largely through public financing, Isséane has faced sustained criticism over its short stacks, cumulative pollution in an already heavily urbanized area, health monitoring, and the financial and infrastructural dependence created by large-scale incineration.278 279

Kwinana Energy Recovery Facility – Australia .stk-0bxmez9 {height:10px !important;}

Australia’s first large-scale operational municipal waste incinerator, Kwinana Energy Recovery was developed at a cost of approximately $474 million USD (A$668 million) and is permitted to burn up to 460,000 MT of waste annually in the heavily industrialized Kwinana area south of Perth.313 314 The project received $16.3 million USD (A$23 million) in direct federal grant funding and up to $63.8 million USD (A$90 million) in debt financing from the Australian Government-owned Clean Energy Finance Corporation, while participating councils entered 20-year waste-supply agreements committing residual municipal waste to the facility.315 316 The plant’s own pre-construction lifecycle assessment estimated 115,165 MT CO2e/year in gross greenhouse gas emissions, while residents and environmental groups have raised concerns about air pollution, cumulative industrial exposure, long-term waste contracts and the potential diversion of materials from recycling and composting.317 318 Since waste burning began, residents of nearby Medina have reported recurring burning-plastic/rubbish odors, and Western Australian authorities have acknowledged increasing odor complaints.319

Reppie Waste-to-Energy Facility – Ethiopia .stk-qfu0w19 {height:10px !important;}

Reppie was inaugurated in 2018 as Africa’s first large-scale municipal waste incinerator, after the Ethiopian government spent approximately $120 million USD developing the facility beside Addis Ababa’s longstanding Koshe landfill.380 381 Designed to burn 1,400 MT/day—approximately 511,000 MT/year—the plant now processes only about 396–650 MT/day, while roughly 3,000 MT of waste can still arrive at the adjoining landfill each day.382 383 The facility’s underperformance has created continuing public costs: its annual operating cost is approximately $6.09 million USD (800 million Ethiopian birr), while Addis Ababa faces more than $1.83 million USD (240 million Ethiopian birr) annually in compensation to Ethiopian Electric Power associated with power-generation shortfalls.384 385 Residents and waste pickers living around Reppie and Koshe report smoke, odors, respiratory and skin problems, continued landfill expansion and loss of livelihoods, while interviewed waste pickers reported an average 50% decline in income following introduction of the incinerator.386

Beddington Energy Recovery Facility – United Kingdom .stk-m458ufd {height:10px !important;}

Beddington Energy Recovery Facility is a mass-burn municipal waste incinerator in south London built for approximately $308 million USD (£205 million) and operating under a 25-year residual waste contract between Viridor and the four councils of the South London Waste Partnership.431 432 The facility burned 330,484 MT of waste in 2025 and released 338,934 MT of carbon dioxide, while its environmental permit now allows it to receive up to 382,286 MT/year following a controversial capacity increase approved by the Environment Agency in June 2026.433 434 The facility has faced sustained community opposition over air pollution, waste imports, traffic and regulatory oversight. Concerns intensified after investigators determined that Beddington had exceeded its daily nitrogen oxide emissions limit 916 times between 2022 and 2024 without those exceedances being correctly reported at the time.435 436

Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC) – USA .stk-a0y5qqe {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 1989, the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC) is located next to the historically black and working-class neighborhoods of North Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is owned by Hennepin County and operated by Great River Energy (GRE HERC Services LLC). Minnesota has the third-highest number of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) incinerators in the country, with six of the seven located in an environmental justice community.494 Over the past 37 years, the HERC facility has become the top polluting facility in Hennepin County, contributing roughly $16 million in health damages, and at least 1-2 premature deaths annually from particulate matter alone, according to a PSE Healthy Energy study.495 496 In October 2024, the Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution pushing to end waste incineration at the HERC by December 31, 2027, and fully decommission the facility by 2033.497 However, this timeline is a recommendation to the county, with county officials not committing to an enforceable closure timeline.

Benowo Waste-to-Energy Plant – Indonesia .stk-n619ngl {height:10px !important;}

The Benowo Waste-to-Energy Plant in Surabaya is Indonesia’s first commercially operating large-scale municipal waste gasification facility, developed through a 20-year Build-Operate-Transfer agreement between the Surabaya City Government and PT Sumber Organik.549 550 Its thermal gasification unit, formally inaugurated in 2021 after an approximately $54.2 million USD (Rp704.4 billion) investment, is designed to process 1,000 MT of waste per day, or 365,000 MT/year, and generate up to 12 megawatts of electricity.551 The public-private arrangement guarantees PT Sumber Organik payment for at least 1,000 MT/day even when the city delivers less waste, while the national electricity utility purchases the plant’s electricity at a preferential $0.1335 USD/kWh tariff.552 553 Communities around Benowo have raised concerns about odors, respiratory illness, ash and the absence of transparent toxic-emissions data, while community air monitoring found daily-average PM2.5 concentrations exceeding the World Health Organization guideline on all 31 monitoring days, with maximum concentrations reaching roughly eight times the guideline.554

Maishima Incineration Plant – Japan .stk-ym9q7hw {height:10px !important;}

Osaka’s Maishima Incineration Plant is a publicly owned mass-burn waste incinerator that began operating in 2001, with two 450-MT/day furnaces capable of burning up to 900 MT/day.625 Designed by Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the highly decorated facility cost approximately $492.0 million USD (¥60.9 billion) to construct and became controversial over its unusually high public cost.626 627 Recent FY2024 records show 32,762 MT of Maishima ash and other incineration residues sent to landfill.628 629 The plant also became the center of a major environmental controversy in 2013–14 when Osaka burned approximately 15,300 MT of disaster debris transported more than 700 kilometers from Iwate Prefecture following the Fukushima disaster, despite opposition from residents concerned about possible radioactive contamination.630 Residents sought an ordinance establishing Osaka’s financial responsibility if health damage occurred, but the Osaka Municipal Assembly rejected the proposal in February 2013.631 Osaka authorities maintained that monitoring showed the material could be processed safely.632

Emerald Energy-from-Waste Facility – Canada .stk-ek34p2z {height:10px !important;}

Operating since 1992, the Emerald Energy-from-Waste Facility is located in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. The company is beginning construction on a phased expansion in 2027 (approved in 2025) to increase capacity from approximately 182,000 to 912,000 MT/year, processing non-hazardous municipal and commercial waste— generating electricity, steam, with plans to eventually produce hydrogen. A recent report from the region’s Medical Officer of Health and Commissioner of Health Services warns that additional emissions from the expanded facility would increase cumulative exposure to air pollutants – posing serious health risks to nearby residents, many of whom are considered to be vulnerable.658

Joinville Energy Recovery Unit (URE) – Brazil .stk-578xvco {height:10px !important;}

The Joinville Energy Recovery Unit (URE), which began operating in October 2025, is a new waste-to-energy facility constructed inside the city’s Parque de Educação Ambiental Bororós and designed to process 110 MT of municipal waste per day, or approximately 40,150 MT/year.686 Rather than directly feeding untreated waste into a conventional moving-grate furnace, the facility mechanically processes municipal waste into a dry fuel marketed as Composto Biossintético Industrial (CBSI), which is subsequently burned in a steam boiler to generate electricity.687The project has faced significant local opposition: environmental advocates, recycling organizations and academics have argued that burning CBSI still constitutes waste incineration, questioned its potential air emissions and challenged whether Joinville should invest more heavily in recycling, environmental education, and composting instead.

Rome Waste-to-Energy Plant – Italy .stk-70z2xq6 {height:10px !important;}

Construction began in May 2026 on Rome’s planned 600,000-MT/year waste incinerator at Santa Palomba, with first waste deliveries scheduled for September 2029. The nearly $1.12 billion USD (€946.1 million) project will bind Rome to a 33-year concession for one of Europe’s largest new municipal waste incinerators, even as the city plans to increase separate collection to 70% by 2035. The facility is expected to generate approximately 150,000 MT of bottom ash each year, while its experimental carbon capture system will initially address only part of the plant’s CO2 stream. Local governments and community groups have opposed the project over its size and location, raising concerns about air pollution, health, water resources, traffic, existing contamination and the potential for a large, long-lived incinerator to compete with waste reduction and recycling.

Pomona Waste-to-Energy Incinerator – Zimbabwe .stk-edkc9xn {height:10px !important;}

Harare’s planned Pomona Waste-to-Energy incinerator is the centerpiece of a controversial $344 million USD, 30-year waste concession that requires the city to pay for minimum quantities of waste whether or not they are actually delivered.  The contract transfers control of Harare’s principal dumpsite to private operator Geo Pomona and ultimately requires as much as 1,000 MT of municipal waste every day, creating a long-term financial incentive to maintain a large residual waste stream.  The project has also become intertwined with a major international corruption controversy: Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Structure identified Mirel Mërtiri and Klodian Zoto as the de facto owners of Geogenix B.V., the Dutch parent company behind the Pomona concession, and alleges that they concealed their beneficial ownership and benefited from falsified invoices connected with Albania’s Tirana incinerator concession. Documents reported by Albanian media also identify Mërtiri as a Geogenix negotiator in Zimbabwe. In Harare, residents’ groups, civil society organizations and elected officials have challenged the Pomona agreement over its procurement, cost, minimum-payment guarantees and diversion of scarce public resources.

Energy Recovery Unit Barueri (URE Barueri) – Brazil .stk-yolhjxw {height:10px !important;}

Now under construction in the densely urbanized western São Paulo metropolitan area, URE Barueri is designed to become Brazil’s first large-scale mass-burn municipal waste incinerator, processing approximately 300,000 MT of waste per year when operations begin in 2027. The project has drawn sustained community opposition over its proximity to residential areas, projected air emissions, ash generation, licensing history, and potential competition with recycling and composting.  The original environmental review projected approximately 293 MT/year of nitrogen oxides (NOx), 73 MT/year of sulfur oxides (SOx), 73 MT/year of carbon monoxide and 15 MT/year of particulate matter, while estimating that ash and slag would equal 12–14% of incoming waste.  At the same time, Barueri’s 2026 waste plan shows that the plant’s 870-MT/day capacity is roughly three times the amount of residual municipal waste the city itself generated in 2024, meaning the facility is explicitly designed to receive waste from surrounding municipalities as well. The project is tied to a 30-year public-private partnership, long-term electricity contracts and approximately $77 million USD (R$395 million) in tax-incentivized infrastructure debt, creating financial and contractual commitments that will extend for decades.

3-in-1 WtE Complex: Khiang Kan Energy Plant + Me Preme Energy Plant + Phraofa Power Plant – Thailand .stk-5ue16rg {height:10px !important;}

Three industrial waste incinerators are being developed side-by-side at the Hi-Tech Kabin Industrial Estate in Prachinburi Province, Thailand. The three plants are part of Gulf Development’s larger 12-incinerator GWTE Circular Economy Project, backed by more than $500 million USD in debt financing arranged by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and other lenders, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Under Thai regulations, the individual 9.9-MW plants fell below the 10-MW threshold requiring a full Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and instead proceeded through the less stringent Code of Practice process, despite their close proximity and common corporate ownership. Local residents and civil society organizations have challenged this fragmented assessment, arguing that the three facilities should be evaluated together for their cumulative pollution and health impacts. Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission investigated complaints that residents opposing the projects were excluded, restricted and intimidated during public hearings, concluding that the process lacked genuine public participation.

Vallon Incinerator Plant – Switzerland (Closed in 2005) .stk-y74zdni {height:10px !important;}

Operating from 1958 to 2005, the municipally owned Vallon incinerator burned Lausanne’s household waste for nearly five decades in the densely populated Vallon neighborhood. Although designed to burn approximately 73,000 MT of waste annually, the aging facility experienced recurring combustion and pollution-control problems, including historical exceedances for particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. Decades after the plant opened, extensive dioxin and furan contamination was discovered in soils across Lausanne, with Swiss authorities identifying the former Vallon incinerator as the probable principal source. Residents had complained about black particulate fallout, smoke, odors and potential health risks since the 1960s, and the contamination discovered after closure has turned Vallon into a long-term environmental-liability case involving soil remediation, public-health monitoring and demands for greater government accountability.  A new facility named the Tridel Waste-to-Energy Plant was built and currently operates at the same location of the former Vallon Incinerator.

The post GAIA’s “Burn Book” Documents the Hazards of the Waste-Burning Industry first appeared on GAIA.

Groups Demand End to Public Financing for Incineration at World Bank Annual Meeting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 13 October, 2026

Today, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives’ (GAIA) has released a report entitled, The Burn Book: Incinerators that Threaten the Climate, Public Health, and our Finances.  The publication analyzed data from twenty incinerators and incinerator proposals worldwide, focusing on public debt and subsidies, climate and air pollution, toxic byproducts, and other common issues surrounding the industry– identifying key patterns that emerged regardless of regional contexts. The release of this publication is timed with a Global Week of Action to Stop Incineration October 13-16, with solidarity events planned around the world. 

“As these examples show, incinerators or so-called ‘waste-to-energy’ plants don’t magically burn away our waste problems– they create new ones,” states Marcel Howard, GAIA Special Projects Lead and author of the report. 

“Not only do they burden communities with toxic air and climate emissions and crippling public debt, but they also need massive volumes of waste to stay in operation, undermining municipal efforts to conserve precious natural resources. With our escalating climate crisis and overshoot of key planetary boundaries, we have no more time to waste on keeping this polluting industry afloat.” 

The report surfaces several key trends: 

• “Waste-to-energy” incinerators turn waste into toxic air and ash pollution. Based on public data, these incinerators alone produced at least 1.7 million tons of toxic ash per year– the equivalent in weight to 230 Eiffel Towers. There is also significant documentation of air pollutants that threaten human health– including carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, dioxin, and furans. Many communities surrounding these plants complained of odors, respiratory issues, and ground contamination. 

• These facilities have a large climate footprint. Despite studies showing that waste-to-energy incineration produces more climate emissions than any other power source, many of the incinerators on the list do not monitor or publicly disclose their emissions levels. The eleven that did have available data release a cumulative 5.5 million metric tons of CO2e per year, the equivalent of 1.3 million passenger cars. 

• “Waste-to-energy” is a waste of money. The twenty incinerators profiled have racked up nearly $7 billion of investments to date, with a portion of that directly from taxpayers in the form of government subsidies and municipal borrowing. In some cases municipalities are on the hook for millions of dollars in debt that stretches for decades. Waste incinerators are the most expensive form of waste management. 

• Burning waste undermines waste reduction. Once built, “waste-to-energy” incinerators require large volumes of waste to stay in operation, and many municipalities have “put-or-pay” contracts that disincentivize waste reduction. Much of the material burned in these incinerators could have been composted, recycled, or avoided altogether.  

As the World Bank convenes its annual meetings in Bangkok, Thailand, communities across the Global South are demanding an end to public financing for incineration disguised as climate action. GAIA Asia Pacific’s Citizens’ Atlas on False Climate and Circularity Solutions found that 42 of 59 World Bank Group projects assessed in Asia Pacific supported incineration technologies between 2015 and 2026. From the proposed Smokey Mountain incinerator in Manila to 12 industrial waste-to-energy plants backed by ADB and AIIB in Thailand, these projects threaten communities, waste workers’ livelihoods, and environmental justice.

Statements from GAIA members whose incinerator campaigns are featured in the Burn Book: 

Elisah Pals, Founder and Board Member, Zero Waste Nederland: 

“Incineration is the wrong direction, including for a country like the Netherlands. We already struggle with air, water and land pollution, yet we continue to import waste to keep incinerators running. Even when we succeed in producing less waste, we can end up facing penalties. Lock-in problems are real here. That is the world turned upside down. We need prevention, not more reasons to burn.”

Karen Wirsig, Senior Plastics Program Manager, Environmental Defence Canada:

“Burning waste is dirty and expensive and often ends up in communities that have the least power to say no. Governments that want to address a growing waste problem need to focus on waste reduction, not toxic fairy tales.”

Alejandra Torres, Assistant Director of Advocacy & Organizing, Ironbound Community Corporation:

“Burning trash is not the right answer for managing waste. The incinerator in the Ironbound, Newark, NJ, has surpassed its lifetime and is getting dirtier and costlier. We are inspired by communities who have managed to advance zero waste practices and jobs, shut down incinerators, and ensure that clean energy subsidies go to real clean energy. A better world is possible!”

Jane Bremmer, Chair, Toxics Free Australia: 

“Australia has a unique opportunity to leapfrog ahead of the mistakes of Europe, the UK and the US on waste management and disposal by choosing a Zero Waste City model instead of incinerators. No community deserves to carry the adverse health and environmental burden of incinerating another town or industry’s waste. While there are safer, more effective ways to manage any country’s residual waste, incineration remains indefensible.”

Rossano Ercolini, President, Zero Waste Italy: 

“Incineration is the polluting past. It destroys resources to be shared with the future. Incineration is against the circular economy and promotes a linear throw-away model.”

Victor Argentino, Instituto Polis: 

“Pushed in cities as a ‘quick fix’ over waste picker inclusion and separate waste collection, incinerators or WTE in Brazil reinforces environmental racism by being placed in low-income, peripheral areas.”

Jai Muhammad, Campaigner, WALHI East Java: 

“In order for us to live a good life, we must breathe clean air. And in order to breathe clean air, incinerators must be shut down!”

Sue Maxwell, Chair, Zero Waste BC:

“Incineration is blocking action on zero waste as it is so expensive and locks communities into pollution and wasting resources.”

Press contacts:

Claire Arkin, Global Communications Lead, GAIA

claire@no-burn.org | +1 510-604-7833

Note to Editor:

• Today, Zero Waste Europe has released a report, Incineration overcapacity in Europe: 2026 Data Update, which finds that the region’s waste-burning capacity is misaligned with its current waste generation and reduction goals.
• GAIA has released Waste-Burning 101: What You Need to Know about So-Called “Waste-to-Energy” Incinerators, which provides a broad overview of the latest research around the harms associated with waste incineration.
• Throughout the week, GAIA and its members will be hosting virtual events in a Global Action Lab, an opportunity to hear from GAIA members first-hand about how waste incineration is impacting their communities. 

###

GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 1,000 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 100 countries. With our work we aim to catalyze a global shift towards environmental justice by strengthening grassroots social movements that advance solutions to waste and pollution. We envision a just, zero waste world built on respect for ecological limits and community rights, where people are free from the burden of toxic pollution, and resources are sustainably conserved, not burned or dumped. 

The post Analysis of Twenty Waste Incinerators Worldwide Shows Threats to Environment, Investments, Public Health first appeared on GAIA.

THE SHELL LEAKS FILES: 12 OCTOBER 2026 SLF-2007-085 The Sakhalin Papers LXXV: From Sakhalin to the Baltic — Shell Joins Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 Project as Europe Divides On 4 September 2015, Royal Dutch Shell chief executive Ben van Beurden joined Gazprom chairman Alexey Miller and four other European energy companies in signing an agreement to develop Nord Stream 2. The proposed pipelines would double the capacity of the existing Baltic Sea route for Russian gas exports to Germany. Shell described the project as necessary for Europe’s future energy needs. Six days later, the Slovak prime minister publicly condemned the agreement as a betrayal of Ukraine and Slovakia. Within weeks, the European Parliament was raising concerns about energy dependence, security and the political consequences of bypassing established transit countries. The authenticated corporate announcements, contemporary journalism, parliamentary records and subsequent court proceedings reveal how a project promoted as commercial infrastructure became a major geopolitical controversy.

Archive reference: SLF-2007-085
Publication date: 12 October 2026
Collection: The Sakhalin Papers — Shell, Gazprom and Russia
Principal authenticated records: Gazprom and OMV joint corporate announcement, 4 September 2015; European Parliament briefing, 1 October 2015; US Treasury sanctions announcement, 12 September 2014; EU regulatory and judicial records.

Contemporaneous reporting: Reuters, 18 June and 4 September 2015; Associated Press, 10 September 2015; Euractiv, 10 September 2015; Agence Europe, June and October 2015.

Judicial context: Court of Justice of the European Union, Nord Stream 2 AG v European Parliament and Council, Case C-348/20 P, judgment of 12 July 2022. Used solely to distinguish the original 2015 shareholding proposal from the ownership and financing arrangements subsequently adopted.

Evidence standard: Corporate announcements establish what was signed and publicly proposed, not whether every anticipated share acquisition or investment subsequently occurred. Contemporary political statements are attributed to their speakers. Subsequent judicial findings are identified separately from the events of 2015. No allegation is made that Shell violated sanctions or that the September agreement was unlawful.

Introduction: Shell’s Russian ambitions cross Europe

The previous instalment, The Shell Leaks Files — 11 October 2026, examined the expanding strategic relationship between Shell and Gazprom.

On 18 June 2015, Ben van Beurden and Alexey Miller had signed agreements concerning their wider cooperation and the proposed third LNG production train at Sakhalin II.

The Sakhalin expansion depended upon additional gas from Gazprom-controlled resources.

But on 7 August 2015, the United States imposed export-control restrictions specifically targeting the Yuzhno-Kirinskoye field, an important potential source of that gas.

Those restrictions complicated the commercial assumptions underlying the expansion.

Yet Shell’s ambitions in Russia were not limited to Sakhalin.

At the same St Petersburg forum in June, Shell had also participated in discussions about constructing additional gas-export infrastructure across the Baltic Sea.

That proposal was considerably more than an extension of an existing commercial partnership.

It envisaged two new offshore pipelines delivering Russian gas directly to Germany.

The additional capacity would equal that of the original Nord Stream system.

And it would provide Gazprom with another major route to European customers without passing through Ukraine.

On 4 September 2015, the proposal advanced from preliminary understandings to a shareholders’ agreement.

Shell’s chief executive personally signed it.

The political reaction was immediate.

1. The authenticated record: 4 September 2015

The most important primary document is Gazprom’s official announcement issued at 08:00 on 4 September 2015.

Its title was:

“Gazprom, BASF, E.ON, ENGIE, OMV and Shell sign Shareholders Agreement on Nord Stream 2 project.”

The signing took place at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia.

The participants were:

• Alexey Miller — Gazprom.
• Kurt Bock — BASF.
• Klaus Schäfer — E.ON.
• Pierre Chareyre — ENGIE.
• Rainer Seele — OMV.
• Ben van Beurden — Royal Dutch Shell.

The announcement confirmed that the companies had signed a shareholders’ agreement concerning the construction of Nord Stream 2.

It identified New European Pipeline AG as the proposed project vehicle.

The plan envisaged two offshore pipeline strings running from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea.

Their combined annual transport capacity would be approximately 55 billion cubic metres of natural gas.

Gazprom presented the project as an expansion of the existing Nord Stream system, applying experience acquired during its development and operation.

The announcement is an authenticated corporate record.

It identifies the signatories, the proposed structure and the commercial purpose of the agreement. Gazprom

Importantly, the announcement was independently reproduced by one of the Western participants.

OMV published its own official release on the same day.

The two records agree on the principal facts.

Primary source: OMV — Shareholders’ Agreement on Nord Stream 2, 4 September 2015

This provides strong documentary confirmation of Shell’s participation.

There is no need to rely on anonymous sources or retrospective recollections to establish that van Beurden signed the agreement.

2. Shell’s proposed 10 per cent interest

The September agreement set out a proposed ownership structure.

Gazprom would hold 51 per cent.

E.ON, Shell, OMV and BASF/Wintershall would each hold 10 per cent.

ENGIE would hold the remaining 9 per cent.

Gazprom would therefore retain majority control.

The Western partners collectively expected to hold 49 per cent.

For Shell, the proposed 10 per cent participation represented a potentially significant investment in European gas infrastructure.

But there is a crucial documentary distinction.

The September agreement specified intended shareholdings. It does not, by itself, prove that Shell subsequently acquired the proposed equity interest.

That distinction is particularly important because the project’s ownership arrangements changed.

Later regulatory objections prevented the original Western participation structure from being completed as planned.

Shell ultimately became a lender rather than a shareholder in the project company.

The later court record confirms that Gazprom remained the sole shareholder of Nord Stream 2 AG, with Western companies, including Shell, contributing through financing arrangements.

That subsequent development must not be projected backwards onto September 2015.

At the time of the Vladivostok signing, the publicly announced intention was for Shell to acquire a 10 per cent interest.

The fact of the agreement is established.

Completion of the proposed share acquisition is a separate question. Italaw

3. What the new pipeline would do

The original Nord Stream project consisted of two offshore pipelines connecting Russia and Germany beneath the Baltic Sea.

The first began operating in 2011.

The second followed in 2012.

Together, they provided approximately 55 billion cubic metres of annual transport capacity.

Nord Stream 2 proposed to add another two pipelines.

If completed and fully utilised, the four lines would provide a combined nominal capacity of approximately 110 billion cubic metres annually.

That was a major potential expansion of Russia’s direct gas-export infrastructure to Germany.

The route also had a fundamental geographical characteristic.

It bypassed Ukraine.

This was commercially significant because Ukraine had historically been a major transit country for Russian gas entering European markets.

Gas transported through Ukraine also passed through infrastructure in neighbouring countries, including Slovakia.

Transit arrangements generated revenue and gave those countries an important role in Europe’s energy system.

The Baltic route offered Gazprom an alternative.

It could transport gas directly to Germany without using Ukrainian transit infrastructure.

That possibility was central to the controversy.

It is important, however, to distinguish pipeline capacity from actual deliveries.

An additional 55 billion cubic metres of capacity did not automatically mean an additional 55 billion cubic metres of European gas consumption.

Nor did the agreement establish that all existing transit volumes would immediately be transferred away from Ukraine.

Those outcomes depended upon future production, contracts, market demand, regulatory requirements and operational decisions.

The authenticated agreement established the intended infrastructure capacity.

Its eventual commercial utilisation remained uncertain. OMV

4. Ben van Beurden’s public justification

Shell’s chief executive did not leave his reasons for supporting the project entirely to speculation.

The joint corporate announcement included his statement.

Van Beurden argued that natural gas would remain an important component of Europe’s energy supply for many years.

He pointed to declining European domestic gas production.

In his view, additional import infrastructure would be needed to meet future demand.

This was a recognisable commercial argument.

Natural gas played an important role in European electricity generation, industry and heating.

Domestic production in several mature European gas provinces was declining.

Additional imports could help replace that lost production.

Shell was also a major participant in international gas markets and LNG production.

The commercial logic behind investment in gas infrastructure was therefore consistent with the company’s wider business strategy.

But the argument contained an important omission.

Van Beurden addressed Europe’s anticipated demand for natural gas.

He did not, in the quoted statement, explain why meeting that demand specifically required additional dependence upon infrastructure transporting gas from Russia.

There is a distinction between needing gas and needing more Russian pipeline capacity.

Europe could pursue additional imports through several routes and from different suppliers.

Those alternatives had different costs, capabilities and limitations.

The September corporate announcement presented Nord Stream 2 as an answer to future European gas demand.

It did not independently establish that Nord Stream 2 was the only available or most secure solution.

Source: The joint corporate announcement, including van Beurden’s statement

5. Gazprom’s argument: a more reliable route

Gazprom’s public position was equally clear.

Alexey Miller welcomed the proposed doubling of the Baltic Sea route.

He argued that declining European domestic gas production would create demand for additional imports.

He also stressed the importance of having major international energy companies participate.

For Gazprom, Western corporate involvement offered several advantages.

It provided prospective investment partners.

It offered commercial and technical expertise.

And it demonstrated that important European energy companies remained willing to undertake substantial business with Gazprom despite the deterioration in relations between Russia and the West.

Gazprom presented the project as strengthening the security and reliability of European gas supplies.

But the meaning of security was contested.

For Gazprom, an offshore route bypassing established transit countries could reduce exposure to disputes involving those countries.

For Ukraine and Slovakia, the same route could weaken their economic and strategic positions.

For critics within the European Union, it could increase reliance upon a single external gas supplier.

The disagreement therefore concerned competing definitions of energy security.

Security of a particular transport route was not necessarily the same as security through diversification of suppliers.

That distinction would become central to the European political debate.

6. The project had already been prepared in June

The September shareholders’ agreement did not emerge without warning.

On 18 June 2015, Shell, Gazprom, E.ON and OMV had signed memoranda concerning additional gas-transmission infrastructure across the Baltic Sea.

The proposal involved the same additional annual capacity of approximately 55 billion cubic metres.

Contemporary Reuters reporting identified the political context immediately.

Russia was facing Western sanctions over Ukraine.

Gazprom was seeking additional routes to European customers that did not depend upon Ukrainian transit.

The June memorandum demonstrated corporate interest.

The September agreement moved the project forward by specifying a proposed ownership structure and implementation vehicle.

That progression is important.

A memorandum of intent indicates the parties’ willingness to explore a project.

A shareholders’ agreement represents a more developed contractual framework.

But neither should automatically be treated as proof that construction was inevitable.

The project still required financing arrangements, regulatory approvals, technical preparations and commercial commitments.

The September agreement therefore marked a significant development without resolving every obstacle. La Tribune

7. The political contradiction: sanctions and new investment

The timing made the agreement unusually sensitive.

Russia had annexed Crimea in March 2014.

Western governments had introduced sanctions.

Those sanctions were expanded later in 2014.

In September of that year, Washington had imposed restrictions affecting certain Russian deepwater, Arctic offshore and shale-oil activities.

The European Union had introduced its own measures affecting finance, technology and specified energy-sector activities.

Shell’s annual reporting subsequently confirmed that the restrictions had caused it to pause certain Russian liquids-rich shale-exploration activities.

The previous instalments documented those operational consequences.

Yet in June and September 2015, Shell was advancing new commercial arrangements with Gazprom.

Was this necessarily a contradiction in law?

No.

The 2014 sanctions were targeted restrictions.

They did not amount to a blanket prohibition on all business dealings with Gazprom.

They did not automatically prohibit every transaction involving Russian natural gas.

Nor did they establish that the Nord Stream 2 agreement was unlawful.

The US Treasury’s September 2014 announcement shows the particular financial and energy activities being restricted. U.S. Department of the Treasury

Nevertheless, there was an unmistakable political tension.

Western governments were attempting to impose economic costs upon Russia because of its conduct in Ukraine.

At the same time, major Western energy companies were agreeing to pursue infrastructure that could strengthen Russia’s capacity to sell gas directly to European markets.

The companies could argue that they were operating lawfully and addressing legitimate energy needs.

Critics could argue that the proposed infrastructure conflicted with the strategic objectives behind Western policy.

Both positions must be understood.

The documentary record does not support replacing that debate with an unsupported allegation of sanctions evasion.

8. Six days later: Slovakia calls the agreement a betrayal

On 10 September 2015, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico delivered an exceptionally strong response.

Speaking alongside Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Fico condemned the agreement between Gazprom and its Western European partners.

He described it as a betrayal of Slovakia and Ukraine.

The language was unusually blunt for a disagreement over energy infrastructure.

But the underlying concern was substantial.

Slovakia had historically received Russian gas transported through Ukraine.

Transit arrangements were economically important.

Ukraine also depended upon revenues from transporting Russian gas to European customers.

A major alternative pipeline system could reduce those revenues.

Fico argued that European governments had been discussing ways to support Ukraine while Western companies were simultaneously pursuing a project that could undermine Ukraine’s transit role.

His criticism was therefore not limited to the potential loss of income.

He regarded the arrangement as inconsistent with European political commitments to Ukraine.

The reaction was documented contemporaneously by Associated Press and Reuters-linked reporting.

Yatsenyuk also condemned the project.

He characterised it as damaging to Ukraine’s interests.

At their joint appearance, Yatsenyuk estimated that Ukraine could lose approximately $2 billion annually in transit revenues, while Slovakia could lose approximately $800 million.

Those were political estimates of potential future losses.

They were not established financial consequences of the unbuilt pipeline.

The importance of the statements lies in what they reveal about the contemporary political response.

Only six days after Shell signed the agreement, the governments of two countries directly affected by the proposed route were publicly condemning it. Fox News

9. Ukraine’s objection went beyond transit fees

Ukraine’s concerns were not purely commercial.

For many years, Ukrainian infrastructure had played an important role in transporting Russian gas to Europe.

That role gave Ukraine economic revenue and a degree of strategic importance.

A substantial reduction in transit could weaken both.

From Kyiv’s perspective, Nord Stream 2 threatened to remove part of the economic and political relationship connecting Ukrainian infrastructure with European energy security.

The political circumstances were especially sensitive.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine continued.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea remained internationally contested.

Relations between Moscow and Kyiv were severely damaged.

A new route bypassing Ukraine could therefore have consequences extending beyond pipeline tariffs.

The commercial partners did not necessarily share that interpretation.

Germany and the participating companies could reasonably argue that infrastructure decisions should reflect economics, reliability and future market demand.

But for Ukraine, the project could not be separated from the wider conflict.

This explains why the September agreement attracted a reaction far beyond the energy industry.

It had become a question about the relationship between European commercial interests and European political commitments.

10. Poland joins the opposition

Poland also viewed the proposal with concern.

The September reporting recorded criticism from Polish president Andrzej Duda.

Poland was concerned that new Baltic infrastructure could strengthen Gazprom’s position in the European gas market.

There were also concerns that infrastructure benefiting Germany and Gazprom could be developed without adequate consideration of the interests of other European countries.

The issue was not simply whether Germany wanted additional gas.

It concerned the consequences for the wider European energy system.

The original Nord Stream route already bypassed several countries in central and eastern Europe.

Nord Stream 2 would substantially increase the capacity of that route.

For countries seeking to reduce dependence upon Russian gas, the project appeared to move in the opposite direction.

These concerns would later develop into concrete regulatory action.

At the time of the September agreement, however, they were part of a growing political controversy.

Poland’s government had not yet determined the outcome of the proposed ownership arrangements.

That development lay ahead. Euractiv

11. The European Commission had already defended Ukrainian transit

There is another contemporary record that helps explain the institutional disagreement.

On 21 June 2015, shortly after the preliminary Baltic pipeline agreement, European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič spoke at a security forum in Bratislava.

Šefčovič was responsible for the Energy Union.

He emphasised the strategic importance of continuing Russian gas transit through Ukraine.

He pointed to the capacity of Ukraine’s existing pipeline network.

He also questioned the economic logic of constructing expensive infrastructure primarily to bypass an established transit country.

The remarks were reported by Agence Europe on 23 June.

The Commissioner was not issuing a legal judgment against Shell or the proposed project.

He was articulating an important policy concern.

The European Union’s Energy Union strategy emphasised energy security, integration and diversification.

A project that concentrated additional transport capacity on a route controlled by the same major external supplier raised questions about its consistency with those objectives.

The Commission’s concern therefore predated the September signing.

This is an important historical distinction.

Opposition to bypassing Ukraine did not arise solely because of the September agreement.

It was already part of the European policy debate. Agence Europe

12. October: the European Parliament formally raises the alarm

By October 2015, the controversy had reached the European Parliament.

On 1 October, Parliament issued an official briefing announcing a debate scheduled for 7 October.

The briefing explicitly named Shell alongside Gazprom, E.ON, OMV, BASF/Wintershall and ENGIE.

It stated that Members of the European Parliament were concerned that the project could increase dependence upon Russia.

They also feared that it could weaken Ukraine and adversely affect European countries bypassed by the pipelines.

The briefing identified Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland among the countries whose political, security and economic interests were under discussion.

This is particularly valuable evidence.

It is not merely a newspaper describing criticism of the project.

It is an authenticated parliamentary publication establishing that Nord Stream 2 had become a formal subject of debate within an EU institution.

The questions went directly to the central issues.

Would the project increase European dependence upon Russian gas?

Would it undermine diversification?

Would it weaken Ukraine?

Would it disadvantage countries excluded from the new route?

These were questions that the September corporate announcement had not resolved.

Primary parliamentary source: European Parliament — MEPs to debate plans to expand Nord Stream, 1 October 2015

Contemporaneous reporting of the debate held on 7 October recorded strong criticism from a number of MEPs.

Some urged the European Union to oppose the development.

Others argued that the project was inconsistent with the Union’s efforts to diversify energy supplies.

The political battle had clearly begun. Agence Europe

13. The fundamental dispute: diversity of routes or diversity of suppliers?

Nord Stream 2 exposed a significant disagreement over energy-security terminology.

For the participating companies, the project offered a new transport route.

That could provide operational advantages.

It might reduce exposure to interruptions involving existing transit arrangements.

It could connect Russian production more directly with large Western European gas markets.

But critics argued that the project did not diversify the underlying gas supplier.

The gas would still originate in Russia.

Gazprom would remain the principal supplier and the controlling corporate participant.

Additional transport capacity could therefore strengthen an existing supplier’s commercial position rather than reduce dependence upon it.

Both arguments had substance.

Multiple routes can improve resilience against a failure affecting one route.

But multiple routes originating from the same supplier do not eliminate the risks associated with dependence upon that supplier.

The September disagreement was therefore not merely semantic.

It concerned two different models of energy security.

One emphasised reliable infrastructure and adequate import capacity.

The other emphasised supplier diversification and reduced strategic dependence.

Shell publicly supported the first argument.

Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and a number of European parliamentarians emphasised the second.

The documents demonstrate that this disagreement was visible from the project’s earliest formal stages.

14. The shareholders’ agreement did not settle the regulatory position

There is another important distinction between the September announcement and the project’s eventual development.

The agreement was a corporate instrument.

It did not constitute approval from every relevant regulator.

The proposed pipelines would operate across an international maritime environment and connect with European gas infrastructure.

Their development raised questions involving construction permissions, environmental assessment, energy regulation and competition law.

Different legal questions required consideration under different rules.

The fact that Gazprom and its Western partners signed a shareholders’ agreement did not determine how every provision of European energy law would apply.

Nor did it remove the possibility of objections from national competition authorities.

That became highly significant when the proposed ownership structure was examined.

It is important not to apply later legislation retrospectively.

The legal framework governing pipelines to and from third countries was subsequently amended.

Those later developments cannot simply be treated as if the same provisions already governed the September 2015 agreement.

The correct historical approach is to examine the law as it stood at the time, then trace subsequent changes.

15. What the subsequent court record establishes

A later judgment provides authoritative confirmation of the distinction between the original corporate proposal and the project’s subsequent legal structure.

On 12 July 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered its judgment in:

Nord Stream 2 AG v European Parliament and Council of the European Union, Case C-348/20 P.

The case concerned amendments to EU natural-gas market legislation introduced in 2019.

Those amendments extended certain rules governing the internal gas market to pipelines connecting EU member states with third countries.

The proceedings concerned the admissibility of Nord Stream 2 AG’s challenge to the legislation.

The Court held that the company’s action was partially admissible and referred the relevant issues back to the General Court.

It did not make a finding that Shell’s 2015 agreement was unlawful.

Nor did it determine that Shell had violated sanctions.

The judgment is nevertheless important for the documentary history.

Its account of the project’s later corporate structure identifies Gazprom as the sole shareholder of Nord Stream 2 AG.

It also records financing arrangements involving five Western companies, including Royal Dutch Shell.

The contrast with the September 2015 announcement is significant.

In September 2015, Shell was publicly identified as an intended 10 per cent shareholder.

Under the later arrangements described by the Court, Shell was a financing participant, not a shareholder in the project company.

The development between those two positions belongs to the next stage of the story.

The judicial record confirms that the original ownership plan did not become the permanent structure of the project. Italaw

16. The importance of Shell’s participation

Shell was not a peripheral participant in the September agreement.

Its chief executive was one of the signatories.

The company’s public statement endorsed the commercial justification for the project.

The proposed ownership structure allocated Shell a significant minority interest.

And the agreement was part of a broader relationship with Gazprom that extended from Sakhalin LNG production to European gas infrastructure.

The connection with earlier events is particularly important.

In 2006–07, Shell had surrendered majority control of Sakhalin II following the confrontation surrounding the project’s development.

Gazprom became the controlling shareholder.

Shell nevertheless remained involved.

By 2014, the companies were discussing LNG expansion.

In June 2015, they entered a wider strategic cooperation agreement.

And in September 2015, Shell joined Gazprom and other European companies in proposing one of Europe’s largest new gas pipeline projects.

The relationship had therefore evolved far beyond the original Sakhalin investment.

Shell was no longer simply preserving an existing Russian asset.

It was actively exploring further commercial integration with Gazprom.

The September documents establish that much.

They do not establish that Shell supported Russian government actions in Ukraine.

Nor do they show that participation in the project constituted a sanctions violation.

Those claims would require evidence not present in the records examined here.

The significance of the agreement lies in the extent of the proposed cooperation and the political environment in which it was pursued.

Documentary Findings Established by authenticated corporate records

On 4 September 2015, Ben van Beurden signed the Nord Stream 2 shareholders’ agreement at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

The signatories represented Gazprom, BASF, E.ON, ENGIE, OMV and Royal Dutch Shell.

The proposed project involved two additional offshore pipelines across the Baltic Sea.

Their combined annual capacity would be approximately 55 billion cubic metres.

Gazprom’s announced ownership share was 51 per cent.

Shell’s proposed interest was 10 per cent.

The agreement identified New European Pipeline AG as the intended project vehicle.

Van Beurden publicly justified the project by reference to Europe’s future gas requirements and declining domestic production.

These facts are confirmed by the 4 September Gazprom and OMV announcements. Gazprom

Established by contemporaneous reporting

Reuters reported the June and September agreements as developments in Gazprom’s effort to expand direct gas-export infrastructure to Europe.

The proposed route would bypass Ukraine.

On 10 September, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico publicly condemned the agreement as a betrayal.

Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk also opposed it.

Both leaders warned of substantial potential losses of transit revenue.

Those losses were forecasts attributed to the political leaders, not independently established consequences.

Polish political leaders also expressed opposition to the project. La Tribune

Established by European institutional records

On 1 October 2015, the European Parliament announced a debate concerning Nord Stream 2.

Its briefing explicitly identified Shell and the other participating companies.

It recorded concerns about dependence upon Russian gas, Ukraine’s strategic position and the interests of European countries bypassed by the proposed route.

The debate was scheduled for 7 October.

Contemporaneous reporting confirms that the project attracted substantial criticism from MEPs.

These records establish political opposition.

They do not establish a judicial ruling that the September agreement was illegal. European Parliament

Established by subsequent judicial proceedings

The Court of Justice’s judgment of 12 July 2022 confirms that Nord Stream 2 AG subsequently operated under a structure in which Gazprom was the sole shareholder and Western companies, including Shell, were involved in financing.

The judgment concerned later EU gas-market legislation.

It does not establish wrongdoing by Shell.

It is relevant here because it prevents the proposed 2015 shareholding arrangements from being mistakenly presented as the project’s final ownership structure. Italaw

Not established

The documents do not establish that Shell breached sanctions by signing the September 2015 agreement.

They do not establish that Shell endorsed Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

They do not establish that Shell had completed the acquisition of its proposed 10 per cent shareholding.

They do not establish that construction had received every required approval.

They do not establish that the proposed pipelines would automatically replace all Ukrainian gas transit.

They do not establish that the project was economically unnecessary.

They do not establish that it was economically indispensable.

And they do not establish that the September agreement settled the project’s eventual ownership, financing or regulatory position.

Commentary: A Commercial Decision With Political Consequences

The September 2015 agreement illustrates a recurring difficulty in the relationship between multinational energy companies and governments.

Infrastructure investments are often presented in commercial terms.

And frequently, those commercial arguments are substantial.

Europe needed natural gas.

Domestic production was declining.

New infrastructure could offer additional import capacity.

Shell and the other companies participating in the agreement were pursuing opportunities within their established areas of expertise.

There was nothing inherently surprising about major energy companies considering another large gas pipeline.

But Nord Stream 2 was not being proposed in an ordinary political environment.

Russia had annexed Crimea.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine continued.

Western governments had introduced economic sanctions.

The European Union was attempting to strengthen energy security and maintain support for Ukraine.

Within that environment, Shell and other Western companies agreed to pursue infrastructure that could reduce Ukraine’s role in Europe’s gas supply system.

For Gazprom, the attraction was obvious.

A direct Baltic Sea route could reduce reliance upon existing transit countries.

It could also strengthen Gazprom’s relationships with major Western European energy businesses.

For Shell, the attraction was different.

Participation offered a prospective stake in important gas infrastructure and an opportunity to deepen an already substantial commercial relationship with Gazprom.

The company’s public argument focused upon European energy demand.

But commercial logic did not remove the political implications.

A project can be economically attractive to its investors while creating serious disadvantages for countries outside the investment agreement.

That was precisely the concern expressed by Ukraine and Slovakia.

Their objections were not evidence that Shell had broken the law.

They were evidence that the commercial consequences of the project extended beyond its immediate shareholders.

There is a broader point about corporate responsibility.

Energy companies are entitled to pursue lawful commercial opportunities.

But large energy infrastructure can influence national security, international relations and the economic resilience of entire countries.

Those consequences deserve consideration alongside projected financial returns.

The September announcement demonstrated that Shell considered additional Russian gas infrastructure commercially desirable.

The reaction from Ukraine, Slovakia and the European Parliament demonstrated that important political institutions saw the project differently.

That divergence deserves to be preserved in the historical record.

The lesson of Sakhalin

There is also a revealing continuity with the earlier Sakhalin story.

Shell had experienced the consequences of Russian political and regulatory power during the Sakhalin II confrontation.

The company’s original majority position had been substantially reduced.

Gazprom had taken control.

Yet Shell remained commercially committed to the relationship.

By 2015, the companies were discussing expansion in Sakhalin and infrastructure in Europe.

The partnership had survived a major dispute over the ownership and development of Sakhalin II.

It was now surviving serious geopolitical tension.

But the Nord Stream 2 agreement would encounter obstacles of its own.

This time, the pressure would not arise primarily from Russian environmental regulators or negotiations over production-sharing arrangements.

It would emerge from European institutions and competition authorities.

The proposed ownership structure, confidently announced in September 2015, would prove particularly vulnerable.

That later development provides an important reminder about the difference between corporate ambition and completed investment.

The September agreement was real.

The signatures were real.

Shell’s participation was real.

But the proposed ownership arrangements were not immutable.

And the political controversy had only begun.

Principal Documentary Sources

1. Gazprom — 4 September 2015

Gazprom, BASF, E.ON, ENGIE, OMV and Shell sign Shareholders Agreement on Nord Stream 2 project.

The central primary document confirming the Vladivostok signing, participants, proposed shareholdings, pipeline capacity and executive statements.

Read Gazprom’s official announcement

2. OMV — 4 September 2015

Gazprom, BASF, E.ON, ENGIE, OMV and Shell sign Shareholders’ Agreement on the Nord Stream 2 project.

Independent company-authored confirmation of the terms and Shell’s participation, including van Beurden’s statement.

Read OMV’s official announcement

3. Reuters — 18 June 2015

Contemporaneous reporting of the preliminary Baltic gas-transmission agreement involving Gazprom, Shell, E.ON and OMV.

Reuters report: Gazprom announces agreement with Shell, E.ON and OMV

4. Reuters — 4 September 2015

Contemporaneous account of the shareholders’ agreement, estimated project cost and anticipated construction timetable.

Reuters: Gazprom and European partners sign Nord Stream 2 agreement

5. Associated Press — 10 September 2015

Reporting of the objections raised by Slovak prime minister Robert Fico and Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, including their estimates of potential transit-revenue losses.

Associated Press: Ukraine and Slovakia condemn Nord Stream 2

6. Agence Europe — 23 June 2015

Contemporaneous reporting of European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič’s position on the strategic importance of continuing gas transit through Ukraine.

Šefčovič calls for continued gas transit through Ukraine

7. European Parliament — 1 October 2015

MEPs to debate plans to expand Nord Stream pipeline from Russia.

Official parliamentary briefing identifying Shell and other participating companies and setting out concerns about energy dependence, Ukraine and bypassed EU countries.

Read the European Parliament briefing

8. Agence Europe — 9 October 2015

Contemporaneous reporting of the 7 October European Parliament debate and opposition to the project.

European Parliament debate: Opposition to Nord Stream 2

9. US Department of the Treasury — 12 September 2014

Official announcement of the expanded Russian financial and energy-sector sanctions in force before the September 2015 agreement.

US Treasury: Expanded sanctions against Russia

10. Court of Justice of the European Union — 12 July 2022

Nord Stream 2 AG v European Parliament and Council, Case C-348/20 P.

Subsequent judicial record concerning EU gas-market regulation and the project’s later corporate and financing structure.

Read the Court of Justice judgment

11. OSW Centre for Eastern Studies — 26 April 2017

The Nord Stream 2 financing agreements.

Independent analysis documenting the eventual financing structure and explaining how the original shareholding arrangements failed following Polish competition objections.

Read the OSW analysis

Archive disclaimer: This instalment distinguishes authenticated corporate documents, contemporary political statements, independent journalism, parliamentary records, subsequent judicial material and editorial interpretation.

The 4 September 2015 shareholders’ agreement is evidence of the participating companies’ stated intentions and contractual arrangements at that date. It must not be treated as proof that all proposed equity acquisitions were ultimately completed.

The Court of Justice proceedings cited concern subsequent EU gas-market legislation, not a prosecution of Shell or an adjudication of its conduct in September 2015.

No sanctions violation, unlawful transaction or other misconduct by Shell is alleged or established in the documents examined.

Site-wide disclaimer also applies.

NEXT: The Ownership Plan Unravels — Poland Challenges Gazprom and Shell’s Nord Stream 2 Joint Venture

The September 2015 agreement proposed that Gazprom would hold 51 per cent of Nord Stream 2, with Shell and four other Western companies holding the remaining shares.

But the plan encountered an obstacle that the signing ceremony in Vladivostok had not resolved.

Competition law.

In December 2015, the participating companies sought approval from Poland’s competition authority for their proposed joint venture.

The application would eventually be examined by Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, known as UOKiK.

In July 2016, the authority published objections.

It was concerned that the proposed concentration could strengthen Gazprom’s already substantial position in the Polish gas market.

The applicants subsequently withdrew their notification.

The original multinational ownership structure could not proceed as planned.

Shell remained interested in the project, but its participation would eventually take a different form.

A subsequent financing agreement would leave Gazprom as the project company’s sole shareholder, with the Western companies providing substantial funding.

The documentary trail is unusually clear.

The proposed shareholding structure can be found in the September 2015 corporate announcements.

The Polish competition authority’s objections were publicly reported in July 2016.

And the later financing arrangements were documented in 2017. PAP

The next Shell Leaks File — SLF-2007-086 — will examine how Poland’s competition authority challenged the original Nord Stream 2 ownership structure, why Gazprom’s Western partners withdrew their proposed share acquisitions, and how Shell’s involvement survived the failure of the initial plan.

It will also examine an important distinction for shareholders.

A company can cease to be a proposed equity partner in a controversial project without necessarily ceasing to provide the money required to build it.

The evidence establishing how that distinction applied to Shell lies in the corporate, regulatory and financial records that followed the Vladivostok agreement.

THE SHELL LEAKS FILES: 12 OCTOBER 2026 was first posted on October 12, 2026 at 8:22 pm.
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Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.

The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.

These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.

They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).

Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”. 

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Exemption push rejected

More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.

Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.

They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.

But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.

A spokesperson for the Project Developer Forum, an umbrella group for carbon credit developers, said it was “disappointed” with the Supervisory Body’s decision. “The new requirements are expected to weigh heavily on a sector where major integrity improvements are already underway,” he added.

‘New paradigm’

The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing. 

For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists. 

Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added. 

Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.

Pre-COP draws attention to Pacific’s climate plight and 1.5C goal

Pushback over science

As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.

The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves. 

While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.

A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.

A drone view of the Turmalina Farm in Mae do Rio, Para, Brazil, September 29, 2025. REUTERS/Wagner Santana Policy discounts questioned

To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting. 

That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme. 

Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced. 

“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.

Moving target

A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes. 

These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”. 

Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.

Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.

“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.

The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.

CNA/NNOC has officially seated a newly elected Council of Presidents to serve a three-year term from 2026-2029. The new leaders took office on Oct. 1, 2026 at the CNA/NNOC convention in San Francisco, California, where nearly 1,500 nurses from around the country convened.

Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom has taken full control of one of the country’s largest logistics companies, consolidating an expanding transport empire that now stretches from Arctic icebreakers to Black Sea grain terminals.

The acquisition, announced October 7, gives Rosatom the remaining 51 percent of Delo Group, a major Russian container and freight operator, from its founder Sergei Shishkaryov. Rosatom already owned the other 49 percent.

The takeover is the latest step in Rosatom’s transformation from a nuclear energy corporation into a sprawling state conglomerate with an increasingly important role in Russia’s international trade.

Bellona expert Alexander Nikitin sees a broader political purpose behind the expansion.

“Putin trusts Rosatom,” Nikitin said. “That is why Putin is giving Rosatom access to resources the nuclear corporation could previously only have dreamed of.”

According to Nikitin, the corporation’s rapid growth has become particularly pronounced since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Building a transport empire

The purchase gives Rosatom complete control of Delo’s network of maritime terminals, rail infrastructure and container operations.

According to Reuters, the company operates a container fleet with capacity exceeding 220,000 twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, and approximately 40,000 railway platforms. It also controls the KSK grain terminal at Novorossiysk, one of Russia’s largest grain export facilities, with annual handling capacity of up to 10 million tonnes.

Rosatom already controls another major shipping company, FESCO, which operates maritime and rail freight services linking Russia’s Far East with domestic and international markets.

According to Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev said the corporation’s combined logistics operations now account for approximately 50 percent of Russia’s container-handling market and 44 percent of its rail container transport.

The acquisition followed a prolonged disagreement between Rosatom and Shishkaryov over Delo’s future. Under a shareholder buyout mechanism initiated earlier this year, Rosatom acquired the founder’s stake for a reported 77 billion rubles, approximately $900 million. Interfax reported that Rosatom financed the purchase with borrowed funds.

Nikitin argues that the acquisition belongs to a much larger pattern of concentrating strategically important industries under Rosatom’s control.

The corporation’s influence, he said, now extends across “nuclear and conventional weapons, advanced technologies across the civilian nuclear design and construction industry, mineral resources in the Arctic, including rare earths and precious metals,” as well as logistics infrastructure.

“Rosatom is becoming the managing corporation for Russia’s major port facilities,” Nikitin said, citing Vladivostok, Kaliningrad, Novorossiysk, St. Petersburg and Nakhodka.

The Arctic connection

For Rosatom, the acquisition is about more than moving containers. Since 2018, the corporation has been responsible for developing the Northern Sea Route, while its nuclear icebreaker fleet provides the infrastructure necessary to keep Arctic shipping lanes navigable.

Moscow has repeatedly promoted the route as a strategic commercial corridor connecting Russian Arctic resources and Asian markets.

But expanding Arctic shipping requires considerably more than icebreakers. It also depends on cargo terminals, railway connections, container services and reliable transport networks linking the Arctic to the rest of Russia.

By combining Delo with FESCO and its existing transport operations, Rosatom is seeking to bring more of that infrastructure under unified management.

In remarks published by Vedomosti, Likhachev described the corporation’s goals as strengthening Russia’s transport sovereignty, maintaining international freight connections and developing both the Northern Sea Route and the broader Trans-Arctic transport corridor.

The corporation also argues that consolidating its logistics businesses will eliminate overlapping investments and could save as much as 100 billion rubles over the next decade.

Whether those savings materialize remains uncertain.

The acquisition does not mean that all these operations will directly serve the Northern Sea Route. Many of Delo’s most important assets lie far from the Arctic. But the consolidation gives Rosatom a much larger role in determining how Russian freight moves between ports, railways and international markets.

More than a commercial transaction

The acquisition also illustrates how closely Russia’s largest state corporations are becoming intertwined with the country’s broader strategic priorities.

As Reuters reported, Shishkaryov said he intends to devote a substantial portion of the proceeds from the sale to Russia’s national security needs, although he provided no details about how the money would be used.

For Nikitin, however, Rosatom’s growing power is about more than overcoming commercial obstacles.

“Rosatom is becoming an institution the Kremlin can rely on when necessary,” he said.

Concentrating so many resources under its roof, Nikitin argues, is making Rosatom increasingly important to the country’s political leadership.

“Today, it is impossible to name another Russian company that has expanded so dramatically or accumulated so many resources as Rosatom,” he said. “In every sense, it has become the most trusted asset of Russia’s current leadership.”

The post From reactors to shipping: Rosatom tightens its grip on Russian transport appeared first on Bellona.org.

Gender, Patriarchy & Extractivism YLNM position paper | 2025

Introduction

What is Gender?

Feminist Understandings of Extractivism

Extractvism & Patriarchy

Extractivism & Gendered Impacts

Women on the frontlines of resistance to extractivism

Historical & Material Connection

Challenges of Resistance

Feminist Future Beyond Extractivism

Conclusion

Download

Yes to Life No to Mining and Rainforest Rescue standing in solidarity with the women in Loeha Raya resisting nickel mining, Sulawesi, Indonesia, October 2023. Credit. YLNM

This position paper was prepared by Dr V’cenza Cirefice, member of CAIM, on behalf of and in collaboration with YLNM.

Introduction

Extractivism creates both environmental and social injustices because it is rooted in systems of oppression, patriarchy, colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism. Gender and extractivism are intertwined in multiple and complex ways. Here, we lay out these links and call for gender justice and dismantling patriarchy to be considered central to anti-extractivism movements and deeply necessary for post-extractive futures.

Extractive projects, their impacts and resistance to them, are highly gendered. Women and girls are often first and worst impacted but also on the frontlines of resistance to extractivism, while the extractive sector is often gendered as a masculine space. Adopting an intersectional gendered lens to all aspects of extractivism is needed to understand how certain groups of people experience extractive violence and oppression in different ways.

(Eco)feminist movements have been central in calling out destructive extraction, as well as narratives of green growthand green extractivism. Instead, they highlight the many ways to embrace a life-sustaining society beyond extractivism that already exist today.

What is Gender?

Gender is socially constructed. This means it’s not about biology, but the ways that people are socially conditioned, or taught, to take on different roles in society and perform certain gendered identities.

Gender is not just about women, but is about the power relationships between men, women and gender non-conforming peoples.

Gender is fluid, it changes across cultural contexts and times, it is not binary (i.e. just man or woman), it includes trans, intersex and non-binary people.

European colonialism imposed a strict gender binary on colonised cultures, erasing a wide range of genders and sexualities that were common before. Many cultures have more than two genders, for example, the Two Spirit folks in Indigenous North American societies.

As a key organisational aspect of society, gender often determines the division of labour in society, which means who does the productive work (normally waged work done by men) and who does reproductive work (care work and domestic roles, often unpaid work done by women).

The genders that are marginalised by patriarchy (women, girls, trans, intersex and non-binary people) experience the impacts of extractivism first and worst.  Feminist Understandings of Extractivism

Feminism is a political tool, a social movement and an analysis of power and oppression. It works towards equality between all genders and sexes and aims to fight patriarchy.

Ecofeminism is a reaction to how women and nature have been marginalised and devalued in modern patriarchal society, and highlights that all types of domination (capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy) are connected. Therefore, one cannot be eliminated without the others.

Feminists have highlighted that extractivism is not just about the removal of resources from the ground but a specific way of relating to the world, a worldview about relations of power. It is a model of relationships that are non-reciprocal and that destroy, enclose and rupture relations between people and the rest of the living world.

Feminist approaches are important because they emphasise that extractive logics are rooted in oppressive systems of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. Therefore, only systemic change and different ways of relating to each other and the more-than-human can resist extractivism and build post-extractive worlds.  Extractivism & Patriarchy

Patriarchy is a social system of domination, control, exploitation, hierarchy and supremacy. Under this system women are oppressed, and their bodies and work are exploited. It is a system, not just about individuals – all genders can act in patriarchal ways and can be hurt by patriarchy.

Patriarchy, like colonialism, divides the world into strict binaries or opposites, with one valued more than the other. This includes man above woman, people above nature, western above non-western, science above tradition, and mind above body. The devalued side of the binary, like women, nature, non-western peoples, are dehumanised and treated like a resource to extract from. Colonialism and capitalist patriarchy are intertwined systems that are at the root of extractivism and extractive violence.

“But women are—and have always been—viewed as disposable. Extractivism was born out of colonialism, which wasn’t just about conquering land. It was also about taking control of women’s bodies, silencing them, and turning them into objects for male consumption. That context impacts everything.”

Winnet Shamuyarira, the project coordinator at WoMin African Alliance

Feminists say this way of thinking about the world is at the root of our social and environmental crises. Extractivism is rooted in this patriarchal worldview, both women and the Earth are treated like an object, to extract from to make profit. Patriarchy and gender inequality has a huge impact on power relations and control of land and natural resources, therefore they are central components when thinking about extractivism.

The concept of territorio/cuerpo/tierra from Latin American Feminist and Indigenous movements is important when thinking through extractivism and patriarchy. It emphasises the interconnectedness of territories, bodies and land. The body and territory are seen as sites of control and colonial extraction, but also as sites of resistance and agency.  Extractivism & Gendered Impacts

Extractive industries do not deliver the “development” they promise instead they leave a host of environmental devastation, displace communities and worsen social, economic and gender inequality. This is because extractivism reproduces capitalism, patriarchy and (neo)colonialism

Most of the socio-environmental costs of the extractive industry are felt by the mainly rural populations of extractive regions – women are often disproportionately impacted. While most jobs are held almost exclusively by men, the negative effects are felt in the household and community, where, due to gender socialisation, women have the most responsibility.

Women are the most impacted by extractive development, not because of inherent vulnerability, but because of systems, like capitalist patriarchy, positioning them as caregivers and enforcing structural inequalities. Patriarchal structures mean women have less access to decision making, land, resources and power. There is a material link.

Not all women experience these impacts in the same way – an intersectional approach is important. Age, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, migration status, caste, ability, and more are all factors that create different lived experiences for women in relation to extractivism.
Indigenous women and women across the Global South are further impacted by colonialism. 

Research highlighting the gendered impacts of mining can be understood in four categories: environmental impacts, health impacts, community displacement, and violence against women.

Environmental Impacts: Water and Food Sovereignty

The gendered division of labour brings women in contact with natural resources and the environment for subsistence.

Women, as primary caregivers, have a material connection as key stakeholders in small-scale farming and managing natural resources. Women produce up to 80% of the food in the Global South and have important roles in managing water systems and firewood, saving seeds, caring for livestock and in forest conservation.

When extractivism impacts the local environment, women are on the frontline of its impacts.

Women in many cultures are responsible for water. Extractive projects exhaust and contaminate water supplies, with women often being the first to notice that water is drying up or making people sick. This places a heavier care-work burden on younger women, who must travel farther to collect water.

These impacts are especially felt by Indigenous communities and those with subsistence economies that rely on natural resources for hunting, fishing, foraging, medicine and culture.

Health Impacts

The land, air and water contamination caused by extractivism makes communities sick, placing more care-giving burdens on women.

Women’s central role in agriculture and day-to-day tasks that bring them in contact with the environment means they are more exposed to toxic substances and heavy metals.

The attack on nature by mining industries also impacts women’s bodies as the effects of radiation poisoning are most apparent on reproductive systems with increased cases of ovarian cancer, miscarriages and birth defects.

Indigenous women are on the frontline of these impacts. In South Dakota, a toxic legacy of uranium mining disproportionately impacts the health of Indigenous Oglala Lakota women. Women of All Red Nations (WARN)make connections between uranium contamination and the high rates of miscarriage and reproductive cancers among Lakota women.

Extractivism can also increase poverty and food insecurity, which is also gendered. Women are often the first to reduce how much they eat. This further impacts neonatal and maternal health. 

Community Displacement and Loss of Communal Land

Land grabbing, the selling off and occupation of land by the extractive industry, leads to community displacement.

Often, communal lands that women especially depend on for farming, foraging, firewood and water are enclosed (gated and made private). The gendered impact of displacement is heavy, placing a huge physical and mental burden on women who are responsible for their family’s and community’s well-being due to a lack of access to resources and power. It also alters the social fabric both socially and economically.

Extractivism depends on rupturing community cohesion it creates divisions that destroy community care and support practices, which often women depend on more for survival.

Many Indigenous, peasant and rural women have strong ancestral and spiritual ties to the land. Women’s experiences from Zimbabwe detail how the loss of land to extractivism is more than just a material loss – it is a deep spiritual and emotional wound. The land is understood as sacred and ancestral. Women are custodians of traditional knowledge related to these sacred places. Its loss impacts their cultural identity and spiritual well-being.

This destruction of these deep-rooted relationships with place is seen across many extractive contexts and is a tactic of extractive logics that try to turn living landscapes into “natural resources” to extract from.

Violence Against Women (VAW)

The extreme violenceand human rights abuses that accompany extractivism are felt in gender specific ways. Women’s bodies and the land are both exploited and commercialized by extractive violence.

There is a link between sexual violence and extraction zones globally. The transient and mainly male workforce surrounding extractive projects can increase sexual exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence – this comes with added health risks like HIV. When this violence is intersected with race and ethnicity, it becomes even more brutal.

Many large-scale extractive projects take place in post-conflict contexts or ongoing conflict zones where VAW is normalised, and women’s position is particularly precarious. The militarization and securitisation around extractive projects can increase gender violence – cases of sexual assault carried out by security forces employed by extractive companies are documented globally. For example, security for Barrick Gold raped women at the Porgera mine in Papua New Guinea. 

Extractivism can also increase structural violence towards women. In many cases, extractivism reinforces patriarchal dynamics, like a gender binary and strict gender roles in society. Men often receive cash wages, making women more dependent on them. Women lose cultural, economic and social status. This dynamic can lead to increases in alcoholism, domestic violence and abuse.

Because of patriarchal inequalities in society, women are often left out of decision making and discussions around land and ownership. Compensation is normally paid to the head of households who are predominately recorded as male.

Gender-based violence also increases with displacement, increasing poverty, and a loss of resources, all common consequences of extractive projects.

The extractive sector is represented as highly masculinised, however, women still participate as workers but often in informal, badly paid, precarious roles. This is largely in the Artisan and Small-scale Mining (ASM) sector. Due to gender norms, women who work in mines, sometimes face shame and ostracization by society. This short video, “Nadirah” explores honour and shame for a female informal coal miner in Tajikistan.

Women on the Frontlines of Resistance to Extractivism

Women are much more than passive casualties of extractivism – they are not victims, they are fighters. Women Human Rights and Environmental Defenders are standing up to extractivism across the world.

As noted, women experience the material impacts of extractivism first and the worst, therefore, they are often the first to stand up and resist. For many women, their resistance is seen as an extension of their care-work, what some ecofeminists call Earthcare. Research has focused on women’s motivations, practices and experiences of resistance, from Colombia, to Ecuador, to Greece, to Ireland and the Pacific. 

Often, this resistance is globally networked. Feminist solidarity building beyond borders is linking affected communities internationally against toxic extractivism. Also, a number of collectives and networks organise within grassroots struggles against extractivism from a gendered and feminist perspective.

The Ecofeminaria Initiative: Women in Defense of Territories and The Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Sociales y Ambientales, are working in Latin America to foreground the gendered impacts of extractivism and feminist alternatives.

WoMin is a pan-African ecofeminist alliance building solidarity and movements against extractivism as well as woman-centred just alternatives. WoMin highlight the role of peasant women in Sub-Saharan Africa in organising to resist and hold mining corporations to account and reclaim lands taken by extractive industries. 

Feminist anti-extractive movements have also been intersecting with other social justice movements, connecting across struggles that challenge extractive capitalism, colonial and patriarchal violence. This includes movements for health and reproductive justice, drawing on the concept of “body as territory”.

There is also the connection between Indigenous and peasant rights and anti-imperial struggles, as seen from the solidarity of those resisting the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia with the people of Palestine throughout the ongoing genocide.

The roots of these issues are interconnected. These struggles show it’s more than about a specific mine, but about a system predicated on violence and death. Building strong coalitions across connected issues is an important tool of resistance. Historical and Material Connection

Historically, women have fought against the commercialization of nature, resisting land enclosures and defending communal cultures. Silvia Federici argues that three hundred years of witch hunts in Europe, followed by peasant revolts that accompanied the transition to a capitalist system, were a tool to subjugate and control the power of women.

Colonial violence around the world enforced this gendered system. In turn, this ensured that women provided reproductive work for free, to continue producing and caring for a workforce. Despite this, women have continued to be at the front of the defence of the commons since the inception of colonial capitalism. This includes defending the commons from the enclosures by extractive industries. Globally, due to the gendered division of labour, women rely heavily on commons for subsistence livelihoods and so are often involved in resisting their enclosure. 

Women are more affected due to a lack of resources and power dynamics within society, not an innate vulnerability. Material approaches argue participation of women in resistance movements stems from their closer day-to-day contact and use of Nature and caring for a healthy environment, as well as their greater awareness and respect for community cohesion and solidarity. This material link is key, however, some women make political use of traditional gender roles, such as motherhood, for mobilisation or draw on a biological link between women and the Earth.

There is a diversity of women’s motives to engage in resistance, some traditionally feminine and some not, reminding us there are many ways for a woman to become an activist, not all of which depend on discourses of motherhood and caring.

  Challenges of Resistance

When women stand up, they face a range of gender specific challenges. Not only are women taking on corporate and state power, but they are transgressing traditional gender norms and conventions. Violence or the threat of violence is used to maintain patriarchal power and gender binaries. 

A report by AWID outlines how women face criminalisation, stigmatisation and smear campaigns against them, militarisation by private and public security, and marginalisation in their own communities and movements. Women Earth Defenders face severe threats in many contexts, from sexual violence to murder.

For example, Rosane Santiago Silveira was tortured and murdered in 2019 for her resistance to extractive industries and Dora Recinos Soto was shot dead for her resistance to the El Dorado mine in El Salvador. The role of women in resisting extractivism is often minimised and sidelined, even within movements, drawing attention to the ways women resist is key. 

Further, resistance to mining is riddled with invisible work, which is often done by women. Because of the way women are socialised they are often more responsible for care work, emotional labour, building relationships, administrative tasks and more. Not romanticising resistance but also acknowledging the added burden on women is important. There is a need to emphasise inequalities around gender including the invisibility of women’s contributions and the silencing of their concerns in anti-mining activism. 

On the other hand, women’s involvement in anti-extractive resistance can also transform traditional gender norms. Resistance in Greece altered the patriarchal structure of society and rhythm of everyday life as women took on leadership roles and care work was redistributed throughout the community.

Women’s resistance can generate new ways of thinking about the world, for example, the concept of territorio/cuerpo/tierra  emerges from Guatemalan Indigenous activists’ opposition to the El Escobal mine.

This brings us to the varied feminist alternatives for a post-extractive world. 

Feminist Futures Beyond Extractivism

A feminist perspective means taking a structural approach.

In many mainstream discussions of gender and the extractive industries, the focus falls on including women in the perceived benefits of extractivism. The argument goes: the extractive sector needs legal and regulatory reform to address gender inequality, so women can participate more fully in the system. This neoliberal viewpoint, which focuses on individuals rather than the system, argues: if we incorporate more women into the current system, things would be better.

In contrast to this, a feminist approach is systemic and structural. It sees the whole extractivist model and worldview as the issue: we need to challenge the colonial and capitalist roots of the extractivist system. If a mining company is still structured around pursuing endless growth, with the human rights and environmental injustices that go along with that, having more female CEOs is not a solution. 

Instead, grassroots feminist movements around the world are proposing and enacting alternative development models to extractivism. This includes a huge array from agroecology, to commoning, community-owned energy, seed saving, projects that centre traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge, Rights of Nature movements, solidarity economies based on care and more.

Feminist approaches call for system change, not green capitalism, technological fixes or eco-modernisation.

This map prepared by the Latin American Network of Women Defenders of Social and Environmental Rights shows the impacts on women from extractivism across Latin America, but also shows women’s role in building alternatives.

The ONAMIAP Women initiative in Peru is working towards a just energy transition that is based in community and ancestral knowledge and challenges extractive capitalism.

Adivasi Indigenous women in India are using traditional ecological knowledge to advance food sovereignty and regenerate forests in the face of extractive threats. 

Feminist movements have been thinking about how to relate to the land and each other differently for a long time. We see this through the Beijing Declaration of Indigenous women 1995, Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, 2010 and in September 2015, the Indigenous Women of the Americas signed a Defend Mother Earth Treaty against extractive industry. It stated that:

“While opposing extractive industries, women human rights defenders are advancing alternative economic and social models based on the stewardship of land and common resources in order to preserve life, thereby contributing to the emergence of new paradigms”.

This resistance to extractivism is making a systematic critique and calling for a move away from growth-orientated capitalist and extractivist-based models.

Feminist movements against extractivism demonstrate the power of collective action and solidarity, pushing back against the neoliberalisation of environmentalism that reduces action to individual lifestyle changes. Feminist approaches mean revaluing care and embedding it into all our relationships, with each other, human and non-human. Central is valuing relationships and different ways of relating.

Indigenous feminist scholar activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson highlights that:

“The alternative to extractivism is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local”.

These alternative visions of non-extractive relationship building exist in movements that say no to mining and yes to life. 

Conclusion

Applying a gender perspective to all injustices from extractivism to mining projects, from supply chains to resistance movements, is important.

Not all women are the same. An intersectional lens is key to understanding the different ways women are impacted and resist. Beyond women as passive victims or romanticised saviours, we need to understand how specific contexts shape the gendered impacts of extractivism. Women are the most impacted by extractive development, not because of inherent vulnerability, but because of systems, like colonialism and capitalist patriarchy, positioning them as caregivers and enforcing structural inequalities. 

Feminist perspectives highlight that systemic change is needed, not technofixes, green extractivism or green growth. Instead, alternative economic models that centre care and the wellbeing of people and planet are crucial.

The struggle to dismantle patriarchy and advance gender justice is not an ‘add on’, it must be part of our movement to resist extractivism globally. 

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It’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and right now, the government and corporate polluters are aggressively driving policies that will destroy our communities and our public lands.

We’re supporting Tribal and Native organizers and expanding our partnerships with Tribes, Native communities, and multiracial coalitions to strengthen the grassroots movements we need to protect Native lands.

Current threats include:

• The Department of Homeland Security is building a destructive border wall in and near Big Bend National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation itself.

• After the protected area surrounding Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments was cut by 90%, mining companies lined up and applied for permits, which were granted for mining and profit-driven development of this land, and now they are trying to destroy Bears Ears’ groundbreaking federal-intertribal collaborative management authority created by community gatherings.

These actions violate Tribes’ inherent and legal right to sovereignty, including the right to decide on projects that may affect our communities, resources, and territories.

Ensuring Native people can steward lands as their ancestors have is a major pathway to conservation and sustainability, mitigating the impacts of climate change, and protecting Mother Earth for future generations.

The post Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2026 appeared first on Native Organizers Alliance.

“When Dominion was asked about the [Virginia Clean Economy Act], its executive vice president told the commission, ‘I am still your throat to choke,’ and that was a shocking thing for me to hear as a legislator,” said Virginia Del. Irene Shin, D.

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Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). 

Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.

This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.

The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets. 

During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources. 

(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)

Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below. 

The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan. 

The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J). 

SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024. 

The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.

The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.

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Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus. 

The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining. 

Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table. 

The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action. 

The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation. 

Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit. 

Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility. 

At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.

related Analysis: Lula presidency saved at least 20,000km2 of Brazilian Amazon since 2022 28.09.2026 International policy Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century – in six charts 17.08.2026 Climate pollutants Analysis: 84% of nations miss deadline to identify ‘nature-harming’ subsidies by 2025  28.07.2026 International policy UK withdraws millions in funding from world’s second-largest rainforest in Congo  15.07.2026 Nature

The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.

By KAY MATTHEWS

Making a movie about the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire is not for the weak of heart. Untangling the tension between those who suffered so much destruction and those, namely the US Forest Service, that caused that suffering, requires courage and tact. Fortunately, a talented filmmaker named Hillary Bachelder has both, and her film, “Burn, Scar,” is an achingly fair and honest assessment of what happened. The first showing in New Mexico will be at the Santa Fe Film Festival, October 15. Starting Friday, October 30, the film will show in Las Vegas at the Indigo Theater, 5 pm and 7:45 pm with multiple showings throughout the week. Tickets are available at Indigo Theater.

In April of 2022 a prescribed fire set by the Forest Service near Hermit’s Peak in Mora County jumped its perimeter boundary. Soon after, a previously prescribed burn in a nearby canyon that had smoldered under the winter snows erupted into a fire that joined the fire near Hermit’s Peak. In total, what became known as the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire burned 341,471 acres and destroyed 903 structures in Mora, San Miguel, and Taos counties.

Before I continue with this review, I have a disclaimer. I contributed some of the video footage and photos used in the film and know many of the people who are featured and interviewed, including Antonio “Ike” DeVargas, about whom I wrote a book. Hopefully that adds to, rather than detracts from, the review.

This film rests on the shoulders of the narrators Bachelder chose to tell the story. It begins in 2022, when the fires erupted, and ends in 2025, when Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)money finally compensates many of those who lost their homes and livelihoods.

Here are the protagonists:

• Ernie is a handsome cattle rancher and acequia mayordomo who simmers with anger over the impacts of the fire and the negligence of the Forest Service.
• Martin, a gentle man, works to rebuild his grandparents’ house and fence his cows (whom he names), waiting for FEMA reimbursements while he goes into debt.
• Dennis is the Santa Fe National Forest Fire Ecologist who takes responsibility for the fire but is adamant that fire will always be part of the landscape and needs to be managed
• Angie is the District Ranger at Canjilon and works with the people of Rio Arriba County to integrate thinning and prescribed fire into the community after the fire
• Antonia is an Albuquerque lawyer who comes back to her el norte home to help everyone file their claims with FEMA for compensation
• Moises is a Rio Arriba County Commissioner who opposes the proposed thinning and prescribed burning on the land near his home in Canjilon
• Ike is the longtime activist who founded La Raza Unida Party in Rio Arriba County and the small logging company La Companía de Ocho.

These people take us through story as the fire erupts and spreads to the communities. The film’s footage of the blaze is unsettling, as acres and acres of trees are scorched and homes burned to the ground. The Forest Service is omnipresent, holding uncomfortable meetings with community members. At one of those on the Pecos/Las Vegas Ranger District the district ranger says, “We take full responsibility” for the fires and when Dennis apologizes, he’s asked why anyone should trust the Forest Service. He answers, “Because the alternatives aren’t very good.” At a meeting on my district, the Camino Real, the district ranger is confronted by a hostile audience, one of whom says, “We don’t want fire and we don’t agree with our government.” The ranger tells her the Forest Service is obligated to do what is needed to protect her community.

Three months after the fire, 90 percent contained, Antonia Roybal Mack enters the narrative, evacuating her grandmother’s house for fear of flooding as the rains have arrived and the floods caused by the burn scar begin. The film shows water rising to the doorstep of homes, roads washed away, and acequias filled with mud and debris. Antonia becomes a stabilizing figure in the film with her lawyerly competence and understanding of the emotions of those who have lost so much. The US Senate appropriates the FEMA budget to support the fire victims. Antonia: “It’s my job to represent people against FEMA. There is an enormous amount of distrust of the federal government.”

Five months after the fire started it’s 100 percent contained. Dennis is profiled as a lifelong fire fighter who works his way up into fuels and fire ecology to dismantle the Smokey Bear mythology that all forest fires need to be extinguished. One hundred years of this policy is what has left the forests overgrown, diseased, and prone to massive fires. Dennis is one of my favorite figures in the film: obviously very sincere in his acceptance of responsibility but also a little pugnacious in his determination to pursue policy that he believes is essential to forest management. His language is blunt and his hurt is heavy.

Ernie’s hurt is also a large component of the film. The shots of him at his acequia meeting—held outside—are painful as he fields questions from his fellow parciantes trying to parse FEMA regulations. They ask about what will happen when the acequias flood next year and the year after that during the monsoons. Will FEMA be back to help them then? It’s a revealing moment when a FEMA representative shows up to try to explain how to log on to the portal to begin the process and Bachelder films only his back. It’s also telling that there is only one parciante younger than Ernie (who looks to be in his thirties or early forties) who takes over Ernie’s mayordomo position.

One year after the fire Martin is living in a FEMA trailer with a generator his only source of heat, at $30 a night for gas. He’s selling wood to made a little money while waiting for FEMA to reimburse him for all the money he’s spent fixing the house and his road. He ends up having to sell his cows as he can’t afford to borrow any more. Although his life is more difficult than Ernie’s, he seems less angry, maybe just more resigned, in the quotidian grind of the life he’s been dealt.

Moises and Ike appear in the film in juxtaposition. While their values aligned for many years, they were estranged by the time the film was made. They both speak about the loss of the land grants to unscrupulous speculators like attorney Thomas Catron and eventually the government, who Ike says his grandfather referred to as “Los Americanos.” They both were in the front lines in the 1960s and 70s Chicano movement. Moises participated in the raid by Reies Lopez Tijerina on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse and was, with Ike, an active member of La Raza Unida that brought down Emilio Naranjo, the despotic ruler of Rio Arriba County. Bachelder includes footage of Ike from the Danny Lyon film “Little Boy” in La Raza protests and at home in Servilleta Plaza with his young son, Antonio. Ike was the founder of La Companía de Ocho, a small logging company, and fought many battles with the Forest Service, that favored corporate logging, and urban environmentalists, who were opposed to any logging on public lands. Sam Hitt, founder of Forest Guardians, who went head-to-head with Ike throughout the 1990s, is filmed opposing a 2024 Santa Fe Watershed restoration project in a meeting where Dennis has this to say: “We know what works but none of that shit matters without public buy in.”

Ike and Moises’s assessments of the fire and its aftermath reveal their divergent paths, however. Moises thinks the thinning project near Canjion cut too many trees and he doesn’t want to see any prescribed burning. Angie, the district ranger, whose lovely green eyes are captured by the camera’s closeups, hopes to change his mind. She’s trying to implement new policies, like the leñero mayordomo projects from the east side of the Carson that have successfully recruited community people as sawyers to cut their own small allotments in restoration projects. But Moises pushes the Rio Arriba County Commission to block her efforts. He bluntly says, “I think all them people who started these fires should be accused of crimes.” Filmed at home, Angie agonizes over what happened during the fire but stays true to the science she knows is needed to protect the forests in the future. “Were we broken before, yeah, we were broken before, but perhaps in this new world we’re in there will be a remaking.”

It takes me a minute to realize it’s my voice asking Ike a question back in the 1990s after the environmentalists’ lawsuits shut down his logging company: “Do you still think the Forest Service is primarily responsible for mismanagement of the forests in northern New Mexico.” He answers in the affirmative. But the film then fast forwards to an interview just before he died in 2024 where he provides a measured analysis of the relationship between the communities and the Forest Service today: the land grants are not going to be given back to the people and the Forest Service has the ability to manage the forests with the communities foremost in mind.

The movie ends three years after the fire, but I won’t write a wrap-up and spoil it for those who haven’t seen the film. What I can say is that Bachelder has beautifully crafted it to reflect the emotional and moral complexity of this amazing film. I haven’t used the term beautiful before, but that word describes both the aesthetics of the film—the way Bachelder zooms in with facial close-ups to emphasize emotionally charged moments—and the grace with which every opinion, argument, and complaint is granted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The PJM Interconnection’s plan for curtailing large loads that don’t have matching new generation intrudes on state jurisdiction and appears to be discriminatory, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said.

The ocean surrounding California’s Channel Islands can feel like another world. Beneath the surface sway towering kelp forests that are patrolled by huge sheephead fish, striking in pink and black with protruding teeth, along with refrigerator-sized giant sea bass. Seals and sea lions swim among colorful sponges and sea stars. “We sometimes think of the Channel Islands as our Galapagos in California,” said Doug McCauley, a professor of marine science at UC Santa Barbara. 

The cornucopia of marine wildlife here wasn’t always this vibrant. Violet Sage Walker, the chair of California’s Northern Chumash Tribal Council, recalled documentary footage showing the Channel Islands before marine protections were enacted, in an era when intensive commercial fishing had damaged kelp forests and key species. “It looked like Mars, like a dead planet,” she said.

But beginning in 2003, areas around the Channel Islands were designated as California Marine Protected Areas, or MPAs — a conservation strategy akin to creating underwater state parks. With roughly 150 square miles of protected waters, the islands now function as a safe haven for marine flora and fauna, essentially acting as nurseries for baby fish and protecting dozens of iconic species like kelp bass, rockfish, leopard sharks, and more.  

Now, for the first time in 15 years, California officials are considering proposals to create new areas and expand existing ones, as part of the state’s first-ever review of its MPA network. “This is a historic opportunity that we don’t want to miss,” said McCauley.

Building California’s marine protections

MPAs are designated ocean zones where restrictions on activities such as fishing, oil and gas drilling, and other seafloor disturbances can help preserve marine ecosystems and give damaged habitats room to recover. Protections vary by site, but in areas where these kinds of disturbances are removed, “you have larger fish, more abundant wildlife, and a healthier habitat,” said Sandy Aylesworth, director of the Pacific Initiative, Nature, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC.

Among the 2026 potential additions are two new proposals for protected areas on the state’s Central Coast: the Point Sal and Mishopshno State Marine Conservation Area proposals. Each of these sites is co-sponsored by a California Tribe in collaboration with NRDC, and in the case of Mishopshno, also by the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit. These Tribally sponsored proposals represent a first for California’s MPA network, and offer the state an opportunity to formally recognize the longstanding role of California Tribes as ocean stewards and make good on its commitment to Tribal marine stewardship. 

A rare convergence of habitats

The proposed Point Sal State Marine Conservation Area would include roughly nine square miles off the Santa Barbara County coast. Here, a headland shelters the waters on its southern side from the wind, creating calmer conditions where fish larvae can linger and mature safely. Nearby Lion Rock is a gathering place for seals and sea lions and a roosting area for seabirds, while kelp forests and rocky reefs provide habitat for fish, sharks, sea otters, and other wildlife. Over 880 sea lions have been documented there by scientists in a single day. “It’s a little tiny paradise,” Walker said.

For the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, which co-sponsored the proposal, Point Sal is also a place of deep cultural significance. Chairwoman Walker described ancient village sites up and down the coast and a relationship to the area woven through Chumash history. “Our people lived and thrived there for thousands of years,” she said. 

Preserving marine ecosystems and cultural connections

That history is central to another feature of the current MPA review: Tribal stewardship. California’s current MPAs don’t have formal Tribal co-management systems, though the Tribes  have stewarded the lands and waters of the Central Coast for over 10,000 years. The Point Sal and Mishopshno proposals are among the first potential additions to the MPA network led by California Tribes.

Walker said she wants California to create a clearer pathway for coastal Tribes to continue to participate in ocean stewardship, including access for cultural practices and a role in management. “Being able to reconnect and offer our vision and our help with dealing with climate resiliency and coastal stewardship is critical,” she said.

The proposed Mishopshno State Marine Conservation Area offers another example of what that kind of Tribal stewardship could look like. Farther down the coast, near Carpinteria, is another unusual convergence of habitats. Just offshore sits a 1.6-mile rocky reef supporting one of the Central Coast’s most enduring kelp forests. 

Nearby sandy-bottom habitat, beach, and a protected salt marsh create connected nursery and feeding areas for marine life, supporting hundreds of bat rays, large fish species, and juvenile white sharks. The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, NRDC and the Environmental Defense Center have sponsored a proposal to protect the area, which is named for a historic Chumash village in the region.

A refuge for marine wildlife

Shark filmmaker, documentarian, and researcher Carlos Gauna has spent thousands of hours filming the marine environment that would be protected by the Mishopshno MPA. “I live and breathe sharks daily, and this is one of the most amazing spots in the world to see a great white shark. There is literally nothing like it anywhere else on the California coast,” he said. 

In his years of filming there, Gauna said, he’s documented illegal fishing, jet skiers purposely ramming into wildlife, and other harms to the local marine population. “I’ve seen sharks get hit and injured by boats, or even deliberately killed,” he says, noting that the proposed MPA might help guard against such damaging actions because its status as an MPA would signal to visitors that it’s a safe haven for marine wildlife. 

He also points to successful protected areas as a model for what the new Mishopshno MPA might achieve. At Cabo Pulmo in Baja California, Gauna said, the contrast across the protected-area boundary is night and day. Inside is a thriving, abundant ecosystem. “It’s one of the most stable and beautiful areas in the world for marine wildlife,” he said. Outside, where there is intensive  fishing activity, “it’s an underwater desert.”

An urgent moment

The state’s voters treasure California’s iconic coastal waters and advocate for keeping them healthy: Roughly 70% of California voters support expanding MPA protections at both Point Sal and Mishopshno. And while a small group of fishing interests opposes the new MPA proposals, there is no scientific evidence that California’s MPAs cause financial harm to fisheries. In certain circumstances, the opposite is true: a 2021 study of two Southern California MPAs established in 2012 found that fishing boats in the surrounding areas had increased lobster catch by about 225% over six years.

The California Fish and Game Commission final votes on the proposed changes to the California MPA network are scheduled for October 14th-16th. “We have an opportunity now to protect the areas where California has jurisdiction, at a time when the Federal government is undoing protections more broadly,” McCauley said. Given that the periodic reviews of California’s MPA network only happen once every ten years, the Fish and Game Commission is unlikely to consider these two proposals again for many years. 

The outcome of the October 2026 process could help define the next chapter of California’s marine protection network. For Walker, the stakes extend beyond this unique moment. “The ocean, given the opportunity, will thrive,” she said. “But we have to give it the space and the time to heal itself.”

California’s Fish and Game Commission are deciding whether to expand MPAs this month. Now is our chance to protect these precious areas and the marine life that call them home. Join NRDC in calling on the California Fish and Game Commission to conserve these special areas of our Coast.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A once-in-a-generation opportunity for California’s ocean on Oct 12, 2026.

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