This coverage is made possible through a partnership betweenGrist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.
Reverend Brian Sauder had good news in January for 58 faith-based organizations across the Midwest. His Chicago environmental nonprofit, Faith in Place. would be giving each of them a grant to fund tree planting in low-income communities and create urban forestry jobs to maintain them. Those additional trees would help mitigate the effects of climate change and air pollution.
But the good news didn’t last long.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed his “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, which abruptly froze the distribution of funds from the Biden administration’s sweeping climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The move has left critical initiatives in limbo, including urban and community forestry programs like Sauder’s Faith in Place.
“To have to call up those grant awardees and say to them: ‘Hey, you need to stop work on this. We can’t reimburse you. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now.’ [It] was absolutely devastating,” said Sauder, whose organization has already had to lay off five employees as a result of the federal freeze.
The Inflation Reduction Act had pledged $1.5 billion to plant more trees in cities and ensure their survival, too. The funding, roughly 40 times what the federal government typically had spent on urban forestry, promised to transform the urban environment across the country. Nonprofits and local governments staffed up to administer the historic level of funding and made big promises to low-income and minority communities to help “green” their neighborhoods. Now, organizations like Faith in Place, still unable to access federal funds, are facing the financial fallout.
“We’re a microcosm of what’s happening all across the country with these uncertainties and the government not keeping its commitment to these contracts,” Sauder said.
In response, Faith in Place has signed onto a lawsuit spearheaded by Earthjustice, a nonprofit that litigates national environmental issues. The suit seeks to compel the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which distributes the funds, to honor its financial commitments.
“The President cannot come in and say: ‘We’re not doing that, we’re not following the law that Congress legislated.’ That’s a violation of separation of powers,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.
Reverand Brian Sauder is the founder of Faith in Place, an environmental nonprofit based in Chicago. The Trump administration has frozen funds he had promised to nearly 60 faith-based programs so they could increase the tree canopy in their communities.
Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist
The legal challenge comes as federal judges have ordered the government to release the Inflation Reduction Act funds already appropriated by Congress, but the USDA has yet to do so. To date, the freeze has stalled hundreds of urban forestry projects nationwide, including one to improve Portland’s shrinking tree canopy, an initiative to restore the more than 200,000 trees lost in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina and plans to redress the longstanding disparity in tree coverage across Chicago’s majority Black and Latino communities on the city’s South and West sides.
In a statement the USDA said it was in the process of reviewing all grants and while it had authorized certain “mission critical” services to resume, it could not provide information on individual grants.
A 20 minute drive west of the city’s downtown sits the historic Stone Temple Baptist Churchi, once a local touchpoint of the civil rights movement, hosting rallies and speakers like Reverend. Martin Luther King Jr.. Federal money was supposed to cover the cost of planting fruit trees in its community garden, providing the majority Black community with seasonal access to pears, peaches, apples and plums.
“The goal was to get the trees in the ground this spring,” Sauder said. But that’s not happening amidst the funding uncertainty.
As cities like Chicago grapple with rising global temperatures, improving the urban canopy — the layer of collective tree cover in a city — isn’t just about beautifying the neighborhood. Trees help reduce air pollution and are increasingly among the most cost effective ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change, according to Vivek Shandas, who researches climate change at Portland State University and is a member of the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council.
“Trees are there very quietly, providing essential ecosystem services,” Shandas said. “Every single day, they’re cleaning the air, they’re cooling the neighborhoods, they’re absorbing the rainwater, and they’re doing all of these things for absolutely free.”
The problem: Chicago’s urban tree canopy is unevenly distributed across the city — often favoring whiter, weather neighborhoods — and it’s also shrinking due to disease and urban development. The city’s canopy cover dropped from 19 percent to 16 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to a report from The Morton Arboretum, a public garden and center for tree research in suburban Chicago.
The funding freeze has also halted plans to plant trees statewide.
The Trump administration paused nearly $14 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding promised to the state of Illinois for projects that included hazard tree removal and pruning, tree plantings, tree inventories, and other work related to tree canopy management in Illinois communities.
“It’s really upsetting that the government’s not keeping their end of the bargain,” Sauder said. “We’ve kept our commitment, and they aren’t keeping their commitment to us.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Earthwise presenters Lois and Martin Griffiths of Plains FM96.9 radio talk to Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report, about heightened global fears of nuclear war as tensions have mounted since US President Donald Trump has returned to power.
Dr Robie reminds us that New Zealanders once actively opposed nuclear testing in the Pacific.
That spirit, that active opposition to nuclear testing, and to nuclear war must be revived.
This is very timely as the Rainbow Warrior 3 is currently visiting the Marshall Islands this month to mark 40 years since the original RW took part in the relocation of Rongelap Islanders who suffered from US nuclear tests in the 1950s.
After that humanitarian mission, the Rainbow Warrior was subsequently bombed by French secret agents in Auckland Harbour on 10 July 1985 shortly before it was due to sail to Moruroa Atoll to protest against nuclear testing.
Lois opens up by saying: “I fear that we live in disturbing times. I fear the possibility of nuclear war, I always have.
“I remember the Cuban missiles crisis, a scary time. I remember campaigns for nuclear disarmament. Hopes that the United Nations could lead to a world of peace and justice.
“Yet today one hears from our media, for world leaders . . . ‘No, no no. There will always be tyrants who want to destroy us and our democratic allies . . . more and bigger, deadlier weapons are needed to protect us . . .”
Listen to the programme . . .
Nuclear free Pacific . . . back to the future. Video/audio: Plains FM96.9
Interviewee: Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and a semiretired professor of Pacific journalism. He founded the Pacific Media Centre.
Interviewers: Lois and Martin Griffiths, Earthwise programme
A report released by the World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday found that not only was 2024 the warmest year in a 175-year observational period, reaching a global surface temperature of roughly 1.55°C above the preindustrial average for the first time, but each of the past 10 years were also individually the 10 warmest on record. “That’s never happened before,” Chris Hewitt…
Ongoing wars and conflict around the world expose how international law and norms can be co-opted. With the US pulling out again from the Paris Climate Agreement, and other international commitments, this volatility is magnified.
And with the intensifying US-China rivalry in the Pacific posing the real risk of a new “arms race”, the picture becomes unmistakable: the international global order is rapidly shifting and eroding, and the stability of the multilateral system is increasingly at risk.
In this turbulent landscape, the Pacific must move beyond mere narratives such as the “Blue Pacific” and take bold steps toward establishing a set of rules that govern and protect the Blue Pacific Continent against outside forces.
If not, the region risks being submerged by rising geopolitical tides, the existential threat of climate change and external power projections.
For years, the US and its allies have framed the Pacific within the “Indo-Pacific” strategic construct — primarily aimed at maintaining US primacy and containing a rising and more ambitious China. This frame shapes how nations in alignment with the US have chosen to interpret and apply the rules-based order.
On the other side, while China has touted its support for a “rules-based international order”, it has sought to reshape that system to reflect its own interests and its aspirations for a multipolar world, as seen in recent years through international organisations and institutions.
In addition, the Taiwan issue has framed how China sets its rules of engagement with Pacific nations — a diplomatic redline that has created tension among Pacific nations, contradicting their long-held “friends to all, enemies to none” foreign policy preference, as evidenced by recent diplomatic controversies at regional meetings.
Confusing and divisive
For Pacific nations these framings are confusing and divisive — they all sound the same but underneath the surface are contradictory values and foreign policy positions.
For centuries, external powers have framed the Pacific in ways that advance their strategic interests. Today, the Pacific faces similar challenges, as superpowers compete for influence — securitising and militarising the region according to their ambitions through a host of bilateral agreements. This frame does not always prioritise Pacific concerns.
Rather it portrays the Pacific as a theatre for the “great game” — a theatre which subsequently determines how the Pacific is ordered, through particular value-sets, processes, institutions and agreements that are put in place by the key actors in this so-called game.
But the Pacific has its own story to tell, rooted in its “lived realities” and its historical, cultural and oceanic identity. This is reflected in the Blue Pacific narrative — a vision that unites Pacific nations through shared values and long-term goals, encapsulated in the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
The Pacific has a proud history of crafting rules to protect its interests — whether through the Rarotonga Treaty for a nuclear-free zone, leading the charge for the Paris Climate Agreement or advocating for SDG 14 on oceans. Today, the Pacific continues to pursue “rules-based” climate initiatives (such as the Pacific Resilience Facility), maritime boundaries delimitation, support for the 2021 and 2023 Forum Leaders’ Declarations on the Permanency of Maritime Boundaries and the Continuation of Statehood in the face of sea level rise, climate litigation through the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and a host of other rules-based regional environmental, economic and social initiatives.
However, these efforts often exist in isolation, lacking a cohesive framework to bring them all together, and to maximise their strategic impact and leverage. Now must be the time to build on these successes and create an integrated, long-term, visionary, Pacific-centric “rules-based order”.
This could start by looking to consolidate existing Pacific rules: exploring opportunities to take forward the rules through concepts like the Ocean of Peace currently being developed by the Pacific Islands Forum, and expanding subsequently to include something like a “code of conduct” for how Pacific nations should interact with one another and with outside powers.
Responding as united bloc
This would enable them to respond more effectively and operate as a united bloc, in contrast to the bilateral approach preferred by many partners.
Over time this rules-based approach could be expanded to include other areas — such as the ongoing protection and preservation of the ocean, inclusive of deep-sea mining; the maintenance of regional peace and security, including in relation to the peaceful resolution of conflict and demilitarisation; and movement towards greater economic, labour and trade integration.
Such an order would not only provide stability within the Pacific but also contribute to shaping global norms. It would serve as a counterbalance to external strategic frames that look to define the rules that ought to be applied in the Pacific, while asserting the position of the Pacific nations in global conversations.
This is not about diminishing Pacific sovereignty but about enhancing it — ensuring that the region’s interests are safeguarded amid the geopolitical manoeuvring of external powers, and the growing wariness in and of US foreign policy.
The Pacific’s geopolitical challenges are mounting, driven by climate change, shifting global power dynamics and rising tensions between superpowers. But a collective, rules-based approach offers a pathway forward.
Cohesive set of standards
By building on existing frameworks and creating a cohesive set of standards, the Pacific can assert its autonomy, protect its environment and ensure a stable future in an increasingly uncertain world.
The time to act is now, as Pacific nations are increasingly being courted, and before it is too late. This implies though that Pacific nations have honest discussions with each other, and with Australia and New Zealand, about their differences and about the existing challenges to Pacific regionalism and how it can be strengthened.
By integrating regional arrangements and agreements into a more comprehensive framework, Pacific nations can strengthen their collective bargaining power on the global stage — while in the long-term putting in place rules that would over time become a critical part of customary international law.
Importantly, this rules-based approach must be guided by Pacific values, ensuring that the region’s unique cultural, environmental and strategic interests are preserved for future generations.
Sione Tekiteki is a senior lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. He previously served at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in three positions over nine years, most recently as director, governance and engagement. Joel Nilon is currently senior Pacific fellow at the Pacific Security College at the Australian National University. He previously served at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat for nine years as policy adviser. The article was written in close consultation with Professor Transform Aqorau, vice-chancellor of Solomon Islands National University. Republished from DevBlog with permission.
Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior has arrived back in the Marshall Islands yesterday for a six-week mission around the Pacific nation to support independent scientific research into the impact of decades-long nuclear weapons testing by the US government.
Forty years ago in May 1985, its namesake, the original Rainbow Warrior, took part in a humanitarian mission to evacuate Rongelap islanders from their atoll after toxic nuclear fallout in the 1950s.
The Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French secret agents on 10 July 1985 before it was able to continue its planned protest voyage to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia.
Escorted by traditional canoes, and welcomed by Marshallese singing and dancing, the arrival of the Rainbow Warrior 3 marked a significant moment in the shared history of Greenpeace and the Marshall Islands.
The ship was given a blessing by the Council of Iroij, the traditional chiefs of the islands with speeches from Senator Hilton Kendall (Rongelap atoll); Boaz Lamdik on behalf of the Mayor of Majuro; Farrend Zackious, vice-chairman Council of Iroij; and a keynote address from Minister Bremity Lakjohn, Minister Assistant to the President.
Also on board for the ceremony was New Zealander Bunny McDiarmid and partner Henk Haazen, who were both crew members on the Rainbow Warrior during the 1985 voyage to the Marshall Islands.
Bearing witness “We’re extremely grateful and humbled to be welcomed back by the Marshallese government and community with such kindness and generosity of spirit,” said Greenpeace Pacific spokesperson Shiva Gounden.
“Over the coming weeks, we’ll travel around this beautiful country, bearing witness to the impacts of nuclear weapons testing and the climate crisis, and listening to the lived experiences of Marshallese communities fighting for justice.”
Gounden said that for decades Marshallese communities had been sacrificing their lands, health, and cultures for “the greed of those seeking profits and power”.
However, the Marshallese people had been some of the loudest voices calling for justice, accountability, and ambitious solutions to some of the major issues facing the world.
“Greenpeace is proud to stand alongside the Marshallese people in their demands for nuclear justice and reparations, and the fight against colonial exploitation which continues to this day. Justice – Jimwe im Maron.“
During the six-week mission, the Rainbow Warrior will travel to Mejatto, Enewetak, Bikini, Rongelap, and Wotje atolls, undertaking much-needed independent radiation research for the Marshallese people now also facing further harm and displacement from the climate crisis, and the emerging threat of deep sea mining in the Pacific.
“Marshallese culture has endured many hardships over the generations,” said Jobod Silk, a climate activist from Jo-Jikum, a youth organisation responding to climate change.
‘Colonial powers left mark’
“Colonial powers have each left their mark on our livelihoods — introducing foreign diseases, influencing our language with unfamiliar syllables, and inducing mass displacement ‘for the good of mankind’.
“Yet, our people continue to show resilience. Liok tut bok: as the roots of the Pandanus bury deep into the soil, so must we be firm in our love for our culture.
“Today’s generation now battles a new threat. Once our provider, the ocean now knocks at our doors, and once again, displacement is imminent.
“Our crusade for nuclear justice intertwines with our fight against the tides. We were forced to be refugees, and we refuse to be labeled as such again.
“As the sea rises, so do the youth. The return of the Rainbow Warrior instills hope for the youth in their quest to secure a safe future.”
Supporting legal proceedings
Dr Rianne Teule, senior radiation protection adviser at Greenpeace International, said: “It is an honour and a privilege to be able to support the Marshallese government and people in conducting independent scientific research to investigate, measure, and document the long term effects of US nuclear testing across the country.
“As a result of the US government’s actions, the Marshallese people have suffered the direct and ongoing effects of nuclear fallout, including on their health, cultures, and lands. We hope that our research will support legal proceedings currently underway and the Marshall Islands government’s ongoing calls for reparations.”
The Rainbow Warrior’s arrival in the Marshall Islands also marks the 14th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.
While some residents have returned to the disaster area, there are many places that remain too contaminated for people to safely live.
With the sudden departure of New Zealand’s Reserve Bank Governor, one has to ask whether there is a pattern here — of a succession of public sector leaders leaving their posts in uncertain circumstances and a series of decisions being made without much regard for due process.
It brings to mind the current spectacle of federal government politics playing out in the United States. Four years ago, we observed a concerted attempt by a raucous and determined crowd to storm the Capitol.
Now a smaller, more disciplined and just as determined band is entering federal offices in Washington almost unhindered, to close agencies and programmes and to evict and terminate the employment of thousands of staff.
This could never happen here. Or could it? Or has it and is it happening here? After all, we had an occupation of parliament, we had a rapid unravelling of a previous government’s legislative programme, and we have experienced the removal of CEOs and downgrading of key public agencies such as Kāinga Ora on slender pretexts, and the rapid and marked downsizing of the core public service establishment.
Similarly, while the incoming Trump administration is targeting any federal diversity agenda, in New Zealand the incoming government has sought to curb the advancement of Māori interests, even to the extent of questioning elements of our basic constitutional framework.
In other words, there are parallels, but also differences. This has mostly been conducted in a typical New Zealand low-key fashion, with more regard for legal niceties and less of the histrionics we see in Washington — yet it still bears comparison and probably reflects similar political dynamics.
Nevertheless, the departure in quick succession of three health sector leaders and the targeting of Pharmac’s CEO suggest the agenda may be getting out of hand. In my experience of close contact with the DHB system the management and leadership teams at the top echelon were nothing short of outstanding.
The Auckland District Health Board, as it then was, is the largest single organisation in Auckland — and the top management had to be up to the task. And they were.
Value for money
As for Pharmac, it is a standout agency for achieving value for money in the public sector. So why target it? The organisation has made cumulative savings of at least a billion dollars, equivalent to 5 percent of the annual health budget. Those monies have been reinvested elsewhere in the health sector. Furthermore, by distancing politicians from sometimes controversial funding decisions on a limited budget it shields them from public blowback.
Unfortunately, Pharmac is the victim of its own success: the reinvestment of funds in the wider health sector has gone unheralded, and the shielding of politicians is rarely acknowledged.
The job as CEO at Pharmac has got much harder with a limited budget, more expensive drugs targeting smaller groups, more vociferous patient groups — sometimes funded in part by drug companies — easy media stories (individuals being denied “lifesaving” treatments), and, more recently, less sympathetic political masters.
Perhaps it was time for a changing of the guard, but the ungracious manner of it follows a similar pattern of other departures.
The arrival of Sir Brian Roche as the new Public Service Commissioner may herald a more considered approach to public sector reform, rather than the slightly “wild west” New Zealand style with the unexplained abolition of the Productivity Commission, the premature ending of an expensive pumped hydro study, disbandment of sector industry groups, and the alleged cancellation of a large ferry contract by text, among other examples of a rather casual approach to due process.
The danger we run is that the current cleaning out of public sector leaders is more than an expected turnover with a change of government, and rather a curbing of independent advice and thought. Will our public media agencies — TVNZ and RNZ — be next in line for the current thrust of popular and political attention?
Major redundancies
Taken together with the abolition of the Productivity Commission, major redundancies in the public sector, the removal of research funding for the humanities and the social sciences, a campaign by the Free Speech Union against university autonomy, the growing reliance on business lobbyists and lobby groups to determine decision-making, and the recent re-orientation of The New Zealand Herald towards a more populist stance, we could well be witnessing a concerted rebalancing of the ecosystem of advice and thought.
In half a century of observing policy and politics from the relative safety of the university, I have never witnessed such a concerted campaign as we are experiencing. Not even in the turmoil of the 1990s.
We need to change the national conversation before it is too late and we lose more of the key elements of the independence of advice and thought that we have established in the state and allied and quasi-autonomous agencies, as well as in the universities and the creative industries, and that lie at the heart of liberal democracy.
Dr Peter Davis is emeritus professor of population health and social science at Auckland University, and a former elected member of the Auckland District Health Board. This article was first published by The Post and is republished with the author’s permission
Within days, not just “diversity,” but also “clean energy” and “climate change” began vanishing from federal websites. Other institutions and organizations started scrubbing their websites. Scientists who receive federal funding were told to end any activities that contradicted Trump’s executive orders. Government employees — at least, the ones who hadn’t been fired — began finding ways to take their climate work underground, worried that even acknowledging the existence of global warming could put their jobs at risk.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on words tied to progressive causes reflects the rise of what’s been called the “woke right,” a reactionary movement with its own language rules in opposition to “woke” terms that have become more prevalent in recent years. Since Trump took office, federal agencies have deleted climate change information from more than 200 government websites, according to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a network that tracks these changes. These shifts in language lay the groundwork for how people understand what’s real and true, widening the deepening divide between how Republicans and Democrats understand the world.
“I think that all powerful individuals and all powerful entities are in some sense trying to bend reality to favor them, to play for their own interests,” said Norma Mendoza-Denton, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-edited a book about Trump’s use of language. “So it’s not unique, but definitely the scope at which it’s happening, the way it’s happening, the speed of it right now, is unprecedented.”
Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, says that government sites are one of the few sources the public trusts for authoritative, reliable information, which is why removing facts about climate change from them is such a problem.
“It really does alter our ability as a collective society to be able to identify and discuss reality,” Gehrke said. “If we only are dealing with the information that we’re receiving via social media, we’re literally operating in different realities.”
Institutions that fail to follow Trump’s executive orders have already faced consequences. After Trump rechristened the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” for instance, the Associated Press stood by the original, centuries-old name in its coverage — and its reporters lost access to the White House as a result. The effects of these language mandates have reverberated across society, with university researchers, nonprofits, and business executives searching for MAGA-friendly phrases to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs. The solar industry is no longer talking about climate change, for instance, but “American energy dominance,” echoing Trump’s platform.
The new language rules are expected to limit what many scientists are permitted to research. “It’s going to make it really hard to do the climate justice work,” said Amanda Fencl, director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to the field that studies how a warming planet affects people unequally. The National Science Foundation, which accounts for about a quarter of federal support to universities, has been flagging studies that might violate Trump’s executive orders on gender and diversity initiatives based on a search for words such as “female,” “institutional,” “biases,” “marginalized,” and “trauma.” “I do think that deleting information and repressing and silencing scientists, it just has a chilling effect,” Fencl said. “It’s really demoralizing.”
During Trump’s first term, references to climate change disappeared from federal environmental websites, with the use of the term declining by roughly 38 percent between 2016 and 2020, only to reappear under the Biden administration. Trump’s second term appears to be taking a much more aggressive stance on wiping out words used by left-leaning organizations, scientists, and the broader public, likely with more to come. Last summer, a leaked video from Project 2025 — a policy agenda organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — revealed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Some government employees are finding ways to continue their climate work, despite the hostile atmosphere. The Atlantic reported in February that one team of federal workers at an unnamed agency had sealed itself off in a technology-free room to conduct meetings related to climate change, with employees using encrypted Signal messages instead of email. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” an anonymous source at the agency reportedly said. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”
The last time Trump was in office, federal employees replaced many references to “climate change” with softer phrases like “sustainability” and “resilience.” Now, many of those vague, previously safe terms are disappearing from websites, too, leaving fewer and fewer options for raising concerns about the environment. “You really cannot address a problem that you can’t identify,” Gehrke said. A study in the journal Ecological Economics in 2022 examined euphemisms for climate change used under the previous Trump administration and argued that the avoidance of clear language could undermine efforts to raise awareness for taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet using more palatable synonyms could also be viewed as a way for scientists and government employees to continue doing important work. For example, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency rebranded its “Climate Resilience” site to “Future Conditions” in January, it stripped references to climate change from its main landing page while leaving them in subpages. “To me, that reads as trying to fly under the radar,” Gehrke said.
Of course, the reality of the changing climate won’t disappear, even if the phrase itself goes into hiding. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who last year signed a bill deleting most mentions of climate change from Florida state law, is still dealing with the consequences of a warming planet, continuing to approve funding for coastal communities to adapt to flooding and protect themselves against hurricanes. He just calls it “strengthening and fortifying Florida” without any mention of climate change.
“You can ban a word if you want,” Mendoza-Denton said, “but the concept still needs to be talked about.”
At any given moment, more than 10,000 satellites are whizzing around the planet at roughly 17,000 miles per hour. This constellation of machinery is the technological backbone of modern life, making GPS, weather forecasts, and live television broadcasts possible.
But space is getting crowded. Ever since the Space Age dawned in the late 1950s, humans have been filling the skies with trash. The accumulation of dead satellites, chunks of old rockets, and other litter numbers in the tens of millions and hurdles along at speeds so fast that even tiny bits can deliver lethal damage to a spacecraft. Dodging this minefield is already a headache for satellite operators, and it’s poised to get a lot worse — and not just because humans are now launching thousands of new crafts each year.
All the excess carbon dioxide generated by people burning fossil fuels is shrinking the upper atmosphere, exacerbating the problem with space junk. New research, published in Nature Sustainability on Monday, found that if emissions don’t fall, as few as 25 million satellites — about half of the current capacity — would be able to safely operate in orbit by the end of the century. That leaves room for just 148,000 in the orbital range that most satellites use, which isn’t as plentiful as it sounds: A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2022 estimated that as many as 60,000 new satellites will crowd our skies by 2030. According to reports, Elon Musk’s SpaceX alone wants to deploy 42,000 of its Starlink satellites.
“The environment is very cluttered already. Satellites are constantly dodging right and left,” said William Parker, a PhD researcher in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the lead author of the study. In a recent six-month period, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites had to steer around obstacles 50,000 times. “Aslong as we are emitting greenhouse gases, we are increasing the probability that we see more collision events between objects in space,” Parker said.
Until recently, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on the upper atmosphere was so understudied that scientists dubbed it the “ignorosphere.” But research using modern satellite data has revealed that, paradoxically, the carbon dioxide that warms the lower atmosphere is dramatically cooling the upper atmosphere, causing it to shrink like a balloon that’s been left in the cold. That leaves thinner air at the edge of space.
The problem is that atmospheric density is the only thing that naturally pulls space junk out of orbit. Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t suddenly give way to the vacuum of space, but gets dramatically thinner at a point known as the Kármán line, roughly 100 kilometers up. Objects that orbit the planet are dragged down by the lingering air density, spiraling closer to the planet until eventually reentering the atmosphere, often burning up as they do.
According to the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation, the lowest orbiting debris takes only a few months to get dragged down. But most satellites operate in a zone called “low Earth orbit,” between 200 and 2,000 kilometers up, and can take hundreds to thousands of years to fall. The higher, outermost reaches of Earth’s influence are referred to as a “graveyard” orbit that can hold objects for millions of years.
“We rely on the atmosphere to clean out everything that we have in space, and it does a worse job at that as it contracts and cools,” Parker said. “There’s no other way for it to come down. If there were no atmosphere, it would stay up there indefinitely.”
A long-exposure photo shows the number of satellites passing through a section of night sky during a 30-minute window. Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Parker’s study found that in a future where emissions remain high, the atmosphere would lose so much density that half as many satellites could feasibly fit around all the debris stuck in space. Nearly all of them would need to squeeze into the bottom of low Earth orbit, where they would regularly need to use their thrusters to avoid getting dragged down. Between 400 and 1,000 kilometers, where the majority of satellites operate, as few as 148,000 would be safe. More than that, and the risk of satellites crashing into debris or each other poses a threat to the space industry.
“The debris from any collision could go on to destroy more satellites,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts who was not involved with the Nature study. “And so you can get a chain reaction where all the satellites are hitting each other, breaking up, and creating more and more debris.”
This domino effect, commonly known as Kessler syndrome, could fill Earth’s orbit with so much destructive clutter that launching or operating satellites becomes impossible. It’s the runaway scenario that the paper cautions greenhouse gas emissions will make more likely. “But the chain reaction doesn’t happen overnight,” McDowell said. “You just slowly choke more and more on your own filth.”
According to the European Space Agency, at least 650 breakups, explosions, or collisions have flung their wreckage into space since space exploration started. Space surveillance networks, like the U.S. Space Force, are currently tracking nearly 40,000 pieces of debris, some as large as a car. At least 130 million objects smaller than 10 centimeters are also estimated to be orbiting Earth but are too tiny to be monitored.
Scientists have recently been researching ways to remove this debris, by, as McDowell metaphorically put it, “sending garbage trucks into space.” In 2022, a Chinese satellite successfully grabbed hold of a defunct one by matching its speed before towing it into graveyard orbit. In 2024, a Japanese company, Astroscale, managed to maneuver a retrieval device within 15 meters of a discarded rocket — close enough to magnetically capture it — before backing away.
“In general, it’s an environmental problem being stored up for future generations,” McDowell said. “Are we going to hit our capacity? I think we’re going to find out the hard way.”
Scientists rallied nationwide last Friday in opposition to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts for scientific research and mass layoffs impacting numerous agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Thousands gathered at Stand Up for Science protests in over two dozen other cities. We air remarks from speakers in Washington, D.C., including former USAID official Dr. Atul Gawande and Dr. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health.
“I study women’s health, and right now you’re not able to really put into proposals that you are studying women,” says Emma Courtney, Ph.D. candidate at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-organizer of Stand Up for Science. She tells Democracy Now! it’s critical for federal policy to be “informed by science and rooted in evidence.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Scientists rallied nationwide last Friday in opposition to the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts for scientific research and mass layoffs impacting numerous agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service. Thousands gathered at Stand Up for Science protests in over two dozen other cities. We air remarks from speakers in Washington, D.C., including former USAID official Dr. Atul Gawande and Dr. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health.
“I study women’s health, and right now you’re not able to really put into proposals that you are studying women,” says Emma Courtney, Ph.D. candidate at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-organizer of Stand Up for Science. She tells Democracy Now! it’s critical for federal policy to be “informed by science and rooted in evidence.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Janine Jackson interviewed EarthRights International’s Kirk Herbertson about Big Oil’s lawsuit against Greenpeace for the February 28, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Energy Transfer is the fossil fuel corporation that built the Dakota Access Pipeline to carry fracked oil from the Bakken Fields more than a thousand miles into Illinois, cutting through unceded Indigenous land, and crossing and recrossing the Missouri River that is a life source for the Standing Rock tribe and others in the region.
CounterSpin listeners know that protests launched by the Indigenous community drew international attention and participation, as well as the deployment, by Energy Transfer’s private security forces, of unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray, among other things, against peaceful protestors.
Now Energy Transfer saysit was harmed, and someone must pay, and that someone is Greenpeace, who the company is suing for $300 million, more than 10 times their annual budget. No one would have showed up to Standing Rock, is the company’s story and they’re sticking to it, without the misinformed incitement of the veteran environmental group.
Legalese aside, what’s actually happening here, and what would appropriate reporting look like? We’re joined by Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. He joins us now by phone from the DC area. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kirk Herbertson.
Kirk Herbertson: Thanks so much, Janine.
JJ: Let me ask you, first, to take a minute to talk about what SLAPP lawsuits are, and then why this case fits the criteria.
KH: Sure. So this case is one of the most extraordinary examples of abuse of the US legal system that we have encountered in at least the last decade. And anyone who is concerned about protecting free speech rights, or is concerned about large corporations abusing their power to silence their critics, should be paying attention to this case, even though it’s happening in North Dakota state court.
As you mentioned, there’s a kind of wonky term for this type of tactic that the company Energy Transfer is using. It’s called a SLAPP lawsuit. It stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” But what it really means is, it’s a tactic in which wealthy and powerful individuals or corporations try to silence their critics’ constitutional rights to free speech or freedom of assembly by dragging them through expensive, stressful and very lengthy litigation. In many SLAPP lawsuits, the intention is to try to silence your critic by intimidating them so much, by having them be sued by a multimillion, multibillion dollar corporation, that they give up their advocacy and stop criticizing the corporation.
JJ: Well, it’s a lot about using the legal system for purposes that most of us just don’t think is the purpose of the legal system; it’s kind of like the joke is on us, and in this case, there just isn’t evidence to make their case. I mean, let’s talk about their specific case: Greenpeace incited Standing Rock. If you’re going to look at it in terms of evidence in a legal case, there’s just no there there.
KH: That’s right. This case, it was first filed in federal court. Right now, it’s in state court, but if you read the original complaint that was put together by Energy Transfer, they referred to Greenpeace as “rogue eco-terrorists,” essentially. They were really struggling to try to find some reason for bringing this lawsuit. It seemed like the goal was more to silence the organization and send a message. And, in fact, the executive of the company said as much in media interviews.
Civil litigation plays a very important role in the US system. It’s a way where, if someone is harmed by someone else, they can go to court and seek compensation for the damages from that person or company or organization, for the portion of the damages that they contributed to. So it’s a very fair and mostly effective way of making sure that people are not harmed, and that their rights are respected by others. But because the litigation process is so expensive, and takes so many years, it’s really open to abuse, and that’s what we’re seeing here.
JJ: Folks won’t think of Greenpeace as being a less powerful organization, but if you’re going to bring millions and millions of dollars to bear, and all the time in the world and all of your legal team, you can break a group down, and that seems to be the point of this.
KH: Absolutely. And one of the big signs here is, the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline were not led by Greenpeace, and Greenpeace did not play any sort of prominent role in the protests.
These were protests that were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who was directly affected by the pipeline traveling through its primary water source, and also traveling a way where they alleged that it was violating their treaty rights as an Indigenous nation. So they started to protest and take action to ask for this pipeline not to be approved. And then it inspired many other Indigenous tribes around the country, many activists, and soon it grew into a movement of thousands of people, with hundreds of organizations supporting it both in the US and internationally. Greenpeace was one of hundreds.
So even in the case where Energy Transfer’s “damaged” and wants to seek compensation for it, it’s really a telltale sign of this abusive tactic that they’re going after Greenpeace. They have chosen to go after a high-profile, renowned environmental organization that played a very secondary role in this whole protest.
JJ: So it’s clear that it’s symbolic, and yet we don’t think of our legal system as being used in that way. But the fact that this is not really about the particulars of the case, an actual harm being done to Energy Transfer by Greenpeace, that’s also made clear when you look at the process. For example, and there’s a lot, the judge allowed Energy Transfer to seal evidence on their pipeline safety history. There are problems in the process of the way this case has unfolded that also should raise some questions.
KH: That’s right. So when the case was first filed–I won’t go through the full timeline of the protests and everything that happened. It’s very in-depth, and it’s well-covered online. But the pipeline became operational in June 2017, and a little over one month later, that’s when the first lawsuit was filed against Greenpeace and others.
And that first lawsuit was filed in federal court. Energy Transfer brought it into federal court, and they tried to claim at that point that Greenpeace was essentially involved in Mafia-like racketeering; they used the RICO statute, which was created to fight against the Mafia. That’s when they first alleged harm, and tried to bring this lawsuit.
The federal court did not accept that argument, and, in fact, they wrote in their decision when they eventually dismissed it, that they gave Energy Transfer several opportunities to actually allege that Greenpeace had harmed them in some way, and they couldn’t.
So it was dismissed in federal court, and then one month later, they refiled in North Dakota state court, where there are not these protections in place. And they filed in a local area, very strategically; they picked an area close to where there was a lot of information flowing around the protest at the time. So it was already a situation where there’d already been a lot of negative media coverage bombarding the local population about what had happened.
So going forward, six years later, we’ve now started a jury trial, just in the last week of February. We’ll see what happens. It’s going to be very difficult for this trial to proceed in a purely objective way.
JJ: And we’re going to add links to deep, informative articles when we put this show up, because there is history here. But I want to ask you just to speak to the import of it. Folks may not have seen anything about this story.
First of all, Standing Rock sounds like it happened in the past. It’s not in the past, it’s in the present. But this is so important: Yesterday I got word that groups, including Jewish Voice for Peace, National Students for Justice in Palestine, they’re filing to dismiss a SLAPP suit against them for a peaceful demonstration at O’Hare Airport. This is meaningful and important. I want to ask you to say, what should we be thinking about right now?
Kirk Herbertson: “This is a free speech issue that in normal times would be a no-brainer.”
KH: There’s a lot of potential implications of this case, even though it’s happening out in North Dakota state court, where you wouldn’t think it would have nationwide implications.
One, as you mentioned, this has become an emblematic example of a SLAPP lawsuit, but this is not the first SLAPP lawsuit. For years, SLAPPs have been used by the wealthy and powerful to silence the critics. I could name some very high-profile political actors and others who have used these tactics quite a bit. SLAPPs are a First Amendment issue, and there has been bipartisan concern with the use of SLAPPS to begin with. So there are a number of other states, when there have been anti-SLAPP laws that have passed, they have passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.
So just to say, this is a free speech issue that in normal times would be a no-brainer. This should be something that there should be bipartisan support around, protecting free speech, because it’s not just about environmental organizations here.
I think one of the big implications of this trial going forward at this time, in this current environment, is that if Energy Transfer prevails, this could really embolden other corporations and powerful actors to bring copycat lawsuits, as well as use other related tactics to try to weaponize the law, in order to punish free speech that they do not agree with.
And we’ve seen this happen with other aspects of the fossil fuel industry. If something is successful in one place, it gets picked up, and used again and again all over the country.
JJ: Well, yes, this is a thing. And you, I know, have a particular focus on protecting activists who are threatened based on their human rights advocacy, and also trying to shore up access to justice for people, and I want to underscore this, who are victims of human rights abuses perpetrated by economic actors, such as corporations and financial institutions. So I’m thinking about Berta Caceres, I’m thinking of Tortuguita.
I don’t love corporate media’s crime template. It’s kind of simplistic and one side, two sides, and it’s kind of about revenge. And yet I still note that the media can’t tell certain stories when they’re about corporate crimes as crimes. Somehow the framework doesn’t apply when it comes to a big, nameless, faceless corporation that might be killing hundreds of people. And I feel like that framing harms public understanding and societal response. And I just wonder what you think about media’s role in all of this.
KH: Yes, I think that’s right, and I could give you a whole dissertation answer on this, but for my work, I work both internationally and in the US to support people who are speaking up about environmental issues. So this is a trend globally. If you’re a community member or an environmental activist who speaks up about environmental issues, that’s actually one of the most dangerous activities you can do in the world right now. Every year, hundreds of people are killed and assassinated for speaking up about environmental issues, and many of them are Indigenous people. It happened here.
In the United States, we fortunately don’t see as many direct assassinations of people who are speaking up. But what we do see is a phenomenon that we call criminalization, which includes SLAPP lawsuits, and that really exploits gray areas in the legal system, that allows the wealthy and powerful to weaponize the legal system and turn it into a vehicle for silencing their critics.
Often it’s not, as you say, written in the law that this is illegal. In a lot of cases, there are more and more anti-SLAPP laws in place, but not in North Dakota. And so that really makes it challenging to explain what’s happening. And I think, as you say, that’s also the challenge for journalists and media organizations that are reporting on these types of attacks.
JJ: Let me bring you back to the legal picture, because I know, as a lot of us know, that what we’re seeing right now is not new. It’s brazen, but it’s not new. It’s working from a template, or like a vision board, that folks have had for a while. And I know that a couple years back, you were working with Jamie Raskin, among others, on a legislative response to this tactic. Is that still a place to look? What do you think?
KH: Yes. So there’s several efforts underway, because there’s different types of tactics that are being used at different levels. But there is an effort in Congress, and it’s being led by congressman Jamie Raskin, most recently, congressman Kevin Kiley, who’s a Republican from California, and Sen. Ron Wyden. So they have most recently introduced bipartisan bills in the House, just Senator Wyden for now in the Senate. But that’s to add protections at the federal level to try to stop the use of SLAPP lawsuits. And that effort is continuing, and will hopefully continue on bipartisan support.
JJ: Let’s maybe close with Deepa Padmanabha, who is Greenpeace’s legal advisor. She said that this lawsuit, Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace, is trying to divide people. It’s not about the law, it’s about public information and public understanding. And she said:
Energy Transfer and the fossil fuel industry do not understand the difference between entities and movements. You can’t bankrupt the movement. You can’t silence the movement.
I find that powerful. We’re in a very scary time. Folks are looking to the law to save us in a place where the law can’t necessarily do that. But what are your thoughts, finally, about the importance of this case, and what you would hope journalism would do about it?
KH: I think this case is important for Greenpeace, obviously, but as Deepa said, this is important for environmental justice movements, and social justice movements more broadly. And I agree with what she said very strongly. Both Greenpeace and EarthRights, where I work, are part of a nationwide coalition called Protect the Protest that was created to help respond to these types of threats that are emerging all over the country. And our mantra is, if you come after one of us, you come after all of us.
I think, no matter the outcome of this trial, one of the results will be that there will be a movement that is responding to what happens, continuing to work to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, and also to put a spotlight on Energy Transfer and its record, and how it’s relating and engaging with the communities where it tries to operate.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kirk Herbertson. He’s US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International. They’re online at EarthRights.org. Thank you so much, Kirk Herbertson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Four decades ago, Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed came to power, with the promise to make the province’s economy less dependent on the fluctuating price of oil and gas. Yet decades on, the province’s finances are still heavily reliant on royalties from bitumen sales to the United States, and natural gas sales across Canada and around the world.
Progress has been made. While it was a very different era to the one we find ourselves in today, Lougheed’s first few budgets were completely dependent on oil revenue, which at one point made up nearly 80 per cent of the income for Alberta’s provincial coffers.
In 2024 that number was closer to 27 per cent.
The 2025 budget introduced by Alberta finance minister Nate Horner on February 27th pegs the forecasted revenue from oil and gas at about 28 per cent, though they are cautiously budgeting it to be a few points lower.
In the last decade, the revenue share of Alberta’s budget which depends on oil and gas royalties has been as low as eight, and as high as 30 per cent.
What this means is that one out of every four dollars spent on health care, education, and critical social services depends on the oil and gas sector having a very good year. The financial well-being of the petroleum industry is so crucial to Alberta’s budget that a special Economic Outlook section focused almost entirely on the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude (pegged at $68/barrel).
I expect that by now you see the flaw in this logic. The American market is no longer a reliable purchaser of our crude oil. America is now the largest energy producer in the world and has high hopes for being energy-independent in the coming years. While many of the country’s refineries have been converted to process the heavy crude we sell them, only money is preventing them from re-tooling once again to manage the lighter oil produced throughout much of the US’s portion of the Western Sedimentary Basin.
A quick scan across the rest of the world doesn’t demonstrate much hope that our heavy, carbon-intensive, and very expensive crude oil is welcome anywhere else. The Trans Mountain Pipeline, heralded as a means of selling our goop to Southeast Asia and China, today sends most of its product to California. Just ten per cent went to China last year.
Europe doesn’t want our dirty oil. They are at the forefront of the energy transition. While natural gas might have been on their shopping list at the beginning of the war in the Ukraine, that ship has now sailed.
The reality is, within the next five years, it is projected that the world will be consuming 1,000,000 barrels of oil a day less every single year, as the energy transition kicks into high gear nearly everywhere else in the world except Alberta.
We’re stuck. We need the revenue that oil and gas bring to keep our schools and hospitals open, but we can no longer count on our number one market for our products, and we haven’t done nearly enough to diversify our energy economy. We have created major barriers to new renewable energy development to meet our domestic needs, but we continue to put nearly all of our eggs in the petroleum energy basket when it comes to our export market.
It is said that the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Alberta’s 2025-26 budget shows no signs of acknowledging that such a problem exists. A $4 billion contingency fund is in place to offset the impacts of American tariffs, but there is no complementary fund set up to invest in diversification so we’re less dependent on the US in the first place.
Why is it so hard for Alberta to have this conversation?
There are solutions, and Alberta has dabbled in them: the high-tech sector, health care research, international education, manufacturing, petrochemicals, agriculture, and tourism, to name a few. None of these on their own can supplant the massive impact that petroleum has on Alberta’s economy. It’s almost as if the province needs to have a group chat about what we want our economy to look like in a post-petroleum world. We should do that before it’s too late.
Every month you pay an electricity bill, because there’s no choice if you want to keep the lights on. The power flows in one direction. But soon, utilities might desperately need something from you: electricity.
A system increasingly loaded with wind and solar will require customers to send power back into the system. If the traditional grid centralized generation at power plants, experts believe the system of tomorrow will be more distributed, with power coming from what they call the “grid edge” — household batteries, electric cars, and other gadgets whose relationship with the grid has been one way. More people, for example, are installing solar panels on their roofs backed up with home batteries. When electricity demand increases, a utility can draw power from those homes as a vast network of backup energy.
The big question is how to choreograph that electrical ballet — millions of different devices at the grid edge, owned by millions of different customers, that all need to talk to the utility’s systems. To address that problem, a team of researchers from several universities and national labs developed an algorithm for running a “local electricity market,” in which ratepayers would be compensated for allowing their devices to provide backup power to a utility. Their paper, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described how the algorithm could coordinate so many sources of power — and then put the system to the test. “When you have numbers of that magnitude, then it becomes very difficult for one centralized entity to keep tabs on everything that’s going on,” said Anu Annaswamy, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper’s co-author. “Things need to become more distributed, and that is something the local electricity market can facilitate.”
At the moment, utilities respond to a surge in demand for electricity by spinning up more generation at power plants running on fossil fuels. But they can’t necessarily do that with renewables, since the sun might not be shining, or the wind blowing. So as grids increasingly depend on clean energy, they’re getting more flexible: Giant banks of lithium-ion batteries, for instance, can store that juice for later use.
Yet grids will need even more flexibility in the event of a cyberattack or outage. If a hacker compromises a brand of smart thermostat to increase the load on a bunch of AC units at once, that could crash the grid by driving demand above available supply. With this sort of local electricity market imagined in the paper, a utility would call on other batteries in the network to boost supply, stabilizing the grid. At the same time, electric water heaters and heat pumps for climate control could wind down, reducing demand. “In that sense, there’s not necessarily a fundamental difference between a battery and a smart device like a water heater, in terms of being able to provide the support to the grid,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
Along with this demand reduction, drawing power from devices along the grid edge would provide additional support. In testing out cyberattack scenarios and sustained inclement weather that reduces solar energy, the researchers found that the algorithm was able to restabilize the grid every time. The algorithm also provides a way to set the rates paid to households for their participation. That would depend on a number of factors such as time of day, location of the household, and the overall demand. “Consumers who provide flexibility are explicitly being compensated for that, rather than just people doing it voluntarily,” said Vineet J. Nair, a Ph.D. student at MIT and lead author of the paper. “That kind of compensation is a way to incentivize customers.”
Utilities are already experimenting with these sorts of compensation programs, though on a much smaller scale. Electric buses in Oakland, California, for instance, are sending energy back to the grid when they’re not ferrying kids around. Utilities are also contracting with households to use their large home batteries, like Tesla’s Powerwall, as virtual power plants.
Building such systems is relatively easy, because homes with all their heat pumps and batteries are already hooked into the system, said Anna Lafoyiannis, senior team lead for transmission operations and planning at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. By contrast, connecting a solar and battery farm to the grid takes years of planning, permitting, and construction. “Distributed resources can be deployed really quickly on the grid,” she said. “When I look at flexibility, the time scale matters.”
All these energy sources at the grid edge, combined with large battery farms operated by the utility, are dismantling the myth that renewables aren’t reliable enough to provide power on their own. One day, you might even get paid to help bury that myth for good.
The Trump administration’s decision to eliminate more than 90 percent of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding means “nothing’s safe right now,” a regional political analyst says.
President Donald Trump’s government has said it is slashing about US$60 billion in overall US development and humanitarian assistance around the world to further its America First policy.
Last September, the former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said that Washington had “listened carefully” to Pacific Island nations and was making efforts to boost its diplomatic footprint in the region.
Campbell had announced that the US contributed US$25 million to the Pacific-owned and led Pacific Resilience Facility — a fund endorsed by leaders to make it easier for Forum members to access climate financing for adaptation, disaster preparedness and early disaster response projects.
However, Trump’s move has been said to have implications for the Pacific, which is one of the most aid-dependent regions in the world.
Research fellow at the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre Dr Terence Wood told RNZ Pacific Waves that, in the Pacific, the biggest impacts of the aid cut are likley to be felt by the three island nations in a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US.
He said that while the compact “is safe” for three COFA states – Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and Palau – “these are unprecedented times”.
“It would be unprecedented if the US just tore them up. But then again, the United States is showing very little regard for agreements that it has entered into in the past, so I would say that nothing’s safe right now.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Dr Terence Wood speaking to RNZ Pacific Waves. Video: RNZ Pacific
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
In the year marking 40 years since the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents and 71 years since the most powerful nuclear weapons tested by the United States, Greenpeace is calling on Washington to comply with demands by the Marshall Islands for nuclear justice.
“The Marshall Islands bears the deepest scars of a dark legacy — nuclear contamination, forced displacement, and premeditated human experimentation at the hands of the US government,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Shiva Gounden.
To mark the Marshall Islands’ Remembrance Day today, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is flying the republic’s flag at halfmast in solidarity with those who lost their lives and are suffering ongoing trauma as a result of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
On 1 March 1954, the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb was detonated on Bikini Atoll with a blast 1000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
On Rongelap Atoll, 150 km away, radioactive fallout rained onto the inhabited island, with children mistaking it as snow.
The Rainbow Warrior is sailing to the Marshall Islands where a mission led by Greenpeace will conduct independent scientific research across the country, the results of which will eventually be given to the National Nuclear Commission to support the Marshall Islands government’s ongoing legal proceedings with the US and at the UN.
Still enduring fallout
Marshall Islands communities still endure the physical, economic, and cultural fallout of the nuclear tests — compensation from the US has fallen far short of expectations of the islanders who are yet to receive an apology.
Former Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony deBrum’s “nuclear justice” speech as Right Livelihood Award Winner in 2009. Video: Voices Rising
“To this day, Marshall Islanders continue to grapple with this injustice while standing on the frontlines of the climate crisis — facing yet another wave of displacement and devastation for a catastrophe they did not create,” Gounden said.
“But the Marshallese people and their government are not just survivors — they are warriors for justice, among the most powerful voices demanding bold action, accountability, and reparations on the global stage.
“Those who have inflicted unimaginable harm on the Marshallese must be held to account and made to pay for the devastation they caused.
“Greenpeace stands unwaveringly beside Marshallese communities in their fight for justice. Jimwe im Maron.”
Rainbow Warrior crew members holding the Marshall Islands flag . . . remembering the anniversary of the devastating Castle Bravo nuclear test – 1000 times more powerful than Hiroshima – on 1 March 1954. Image: Greenpeace InternationalChair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission Ariana Tibon-Kilma . . . “the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents.” Image: UN Human Rights Council
Ariana Tibon Kilma, chair of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission, said that the immediate effects of the Bravo bomb on March 1 were “harrowing”.
“Hours after exposure, many people fell ill — skin peeling off, burning sensation in their eyes, their stomachs were churning in pain. Mothers watched as their children’s hair fell to the ground and blisters devoured their bodies overnight,” she said.
“Without their consent, the United States government enrolled them as ‘test subjects’ in a top secret medical study on the effects of radiation on human beings — a study that continued for 40 years.
“Today on Remembrance Day the trauma of Bravo continues for the remaining survivors and their descendents — this is a legacy not only of suffering, loss, and frustration, but also of strength, unity, and unwavering commitment to justice, truth and accountability.”
The new Rainbow Warrior will arrive in the Marshall Islands early this month.
Alongside the government of the Marshall Islands, Greenpeace will lead an independent scientific mission into the ongoing impacts of the US weapons testing programme.
Travelling across the country, Greenpeace will reaffirm its solidarity with the Marshallese people — now facing further harm and displacement from the climate crisis, and the emerging threat of deep sea mining in the Pacific.
This week on CounterSpin: Just because we might witness the daylight robbery of the social benefits we’ve been paying for and counting on for the entirety of our working lives, and just because Black people are no longer officially allowed to even mentor Black people coming in to fields they’ve been historically excluded from, and just because any program receiving public funding will now have to pretend there are “two genders”—doesn’t mean the environment isn’t still in immediate peril. It is.
But the lawsuits of deep-pocketed fossil fuel corporations against any and everyone who dares challenge their profiteering destruction are really also about our ability as non-billionaires to use our voice to speak out about anything. Not speaking out is increasingly a non-option. So where are we? We’ll learn about a case that is “weaponizing the legal system” against anyone who wants a livable future from Kirk Herbertson, US director for advocacy and campaigns at EarthRights International.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the FCC, the Washington Post and Medicaid.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina, WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region, and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Marie Richards sat in her living room in northern Michigan. She was having a hard time talking about her job at the U.S. Forest Service in the past tense.
“I absolutely loved my job,” she said. “I didn’t want to go.”
Richards, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, was a tribal relations specialist at the Huron-Manistee National Forests. In mid-February, she found out she was one of the some 3,400 workers who had been targeted for layoffs — an estimated 10 percent of the workforce — as part of the Trump administration’s move to cut costs and shrink the federal government.
Richards watched as some of her colleagues were laid off on February 14 — the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre, when the Trump administration laid off thousands of probationary employees, generally hired within the past two years. She got a call from her supervisor that Saturday informing her that she had been let go, too. The letter she received cited performance issues, even though she, along with others in a similar position, had received a pay raise less than two months earlier.
“None of us deserved this,” Richards said. “We all work hard and we’re dedicated to taking care of the land.”
The U.S. Forest Service, which stewards 193 million acres of public lands from Alaska to Florida, was in trouble even before Trump took office. Chronically understaffed, the service was already under a Biden-era hiring freeze, all the while on the front lines of fighting and recovering from back-to-back climate disasters across the country.
Marie Richards loved her job as a tribal relations specialist for the U.S. National Forest Service. She was one of 3,400 workers targeted for layoffs.
Izzy Ross / Grist
For now, workers with the Forest Service fear this isn’t just the end of the line for their dream careers, but also a turning point for public lands and what they mean in the United States.
“It’s catastrophic,” said Anders Reynolds with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit that litigates environmental issues in the southeastern U.S. “We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion.”
The federal agency does more than ensure that Americans have a place to hunt, hike, fish, or paddle. In the South, forest workers played a key role in helping western North Carolina and other communities recover from impacts of Hurricane Helene. In the West, they’re taking on fire risk mitigation and fighting wildfires. They’re also involved in fisheries management in places like Alaska. Across the country, agency biologists and foresters are busy working to strengthen the over 150 national forests and 20 grasslands it monitors in the face of changing climate.
Increasingly, the service is getting spread thin.
The agency has experienced a steady decrease in staffing over the last decade and the workers that remain are often overworked and underpaid, according to Reynolds.
“That means you’re going to see those campgrounds close, the trails go unmaintained, roads closed, you’re going to feel the effects of wildfire and hurricane recovery work that’s just going to remain undone,” said Reynolds. “Communities are going to struggle.”
The Forest Service has reduced its capacity over many years, causing headaches for staff.
A report from the National Association of Forest Service Retirees showed the agency losing a little over half of staff who supported specialty ecological restoration projects — meaning a whole range of jobs, from botanists to foresters to wildlife and fisheries biologists — between 1992 and 2018. As a result, understaffed Forest Service ranger districts, hemorrhaging staff positions, have consolidated.
Former employees report they saw serious financial and staffing shortages during their time. Bryan Box, a former timber sale administrator with the Forest Service who took some time out of the agency to care for his aging mother, said he found the working conditions unsuitable for a stable, normal life. Box worked for the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, where he said he made so little he biked around on his off days rather than wasting money on gas. While he was working, multiple national forests around him consolidated, causing a downward spiral on organizational capacity.
“We decommissioned buildings, we decommissioned the infrastructure that we had back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when we had this huge staff,” Box said. “And that put us into a position where we couldn’t hire seasonal employees anymore because we didn’t have housing for them. In rural northern Wisconsin, you know, just there’s not any housing available really. I think at one point our firefighters were all living above a bar.”
Other foresters he knew failed to make rent and were evicted or lived itinerantly, couch-surfing, for the love of the work they did. For Box, the financial realities became untenable. So, too, had the restrictions on his work, which grew as budgets failed to grow.
Box’s program was expensive to run and required travel, often to reduce fire fuels by harvesting timber after an emergency. The program he worked for, Box said, ended up needing to reduce costs by cutting travel funds and ending overtime, making it difficult for him to do his job well.
Much of their work involves emergency response, not only fighting fires but also picking up the pieces after conflagrations and hurricanes leave potentially thousands of acres of dead timber.
Matthew Brossard works as the current business representative and organizer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was formerly the general vice president for the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, which represents around 18,000 employees of the Forest Service, 6,000 of whom are probationary, meaning they have either recently been hired or moved to a new position within the agency. Typically, probation — a part of every federal hiring process — is one or two years. Probationary employees were primarily targeted in the layoffs, meaning a generation of hires is potentially interrupted. Brossard said even though the administration maintains they have not fired positions essential to public safety, there’s more to fighting fires than just the firefighters. Support and logistical personnel are essential. “Extra dispatchers, security to close off roads, food unit leaders, base camp managers, all these very important, 100 percent-needed positions. Those people are getting terminated right now,” Brossard said.
In another instance recounted by Brossard, someone on assignment to help with long-term hurricane recovery in Louisiana was fired while he was there. The employee lived in Oregon and reported having no financial support for his trip home.
The loss of a seasonal workforce will also be felt, Brossard added. “Without that influx of seasonal workforce, it puts a huge amount of work onto the permanent staff if they’re still employed to do all the work,” he said, meaning not only trailwork and campground maintenance, but also research and other essential work. “So the work that in the summer that should have been done by 15 or 20 people are now going to be done by five or six.”
As workers continue to struggle with the fallout of their abrupt firings, their union is jumping in to protect them, Brossard said. The NFFE-FSC has joined in multiple lawsuits to challenge the firings, including one filed February 12, provided to Grist, that aims to put a stop to the firings and reverse the ones that have already happened, on grounds that the terminations are unlawful. A decision on the lawsuit is still to come, with more potential legal action following, Brossard said.
“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.”
In an emailed statement to Grist, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the new agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, supported Trump’s directive to cut spending and inefficiencies while strengthening the department’s services. “As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters.”
The statement continued, “Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”
Back in northern Michigan, Marie Richards, the former tribal relations specialist, crunched down the snowy driveway, pointing toward the Huron-Manistee National Forests where she worked. It spans nearly 1 million acres and covers land tribal nations ceded in two treaties, which the federal government has a responsibility to keep in trust.
Richards said workers like her are also a vital part of pushing the federal government to meet its trust responsibility to tribal nations. She helped connect the region’s federally recognized tribes with officials and staff at the forest service, set up meetings, and ensured work was being carried out responsibly.
“It’s not just the damage to that trust relationship with the Forest Service,” said Richards, who left her job as a repatriation and historic preservation specialist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to work at the agency. “It’s across the board for so many things, and tribes trying to work through that freeze, and making people understand that this isn’t DEI — that this is governmental affairs.”
Richards doesn’t know what’s next; she wants to finish her dissertation (about the impact of the lumber industry on traditional cultural landscapes and Anishinaabe bands and communities) and continue her work.
“It still really hurts that this dream of mine is kind of shattered, and we’ll see, and find a new dream,” she said. “But ultimately, my career, my livelihood, is in tribal relations for our heritage and I will find a home somewhere.”
Two weeks ago, we wrote about the EXPLORE Act — an expansive piece of legislation aimed at expanding and improving outdoor access, which passed Congress unanimously in 2024. What the EXPLORE Act’s success seemed to show was that a love of nature transcends party lines, even in our current climate where just about everything feels politicized. That can translate into climate solutions everybody can get behind. In today’s newsletter, we’ll look at this on a community level, exploring how investing in neighborhood parks has transformed climate resilience in some at-risk areas — just one example of how a focus on parks, green spaces, and public amenities can lead to popular climate action. In a few weeks, we’ll take it all the way down to the personal level, with a look at how to proactively cultivate this connection to nature in (or rather, outside of) your own home.
“Climate change has become politically divisive,” Mike Bybee, senior director of federal relations at the Trust for Public Land, told me when we spoke a few weeks ago. “What’s not divisive are those impacts of things like flooding and fires and drought and heat.” Everyone agrees that the weather is changing, Bybee said — they can see that with their own eyes, in their own communities, whether it’s stronger and more frequent storms, floods, heat, or wildfires.
And, he said, the popularity of creating and preserving parks and outdoor spaces creates an opening for doing something about it. In the 2024 election, state and local ballot initiatives passed across the country, in both red and blue states, that supported building parks or restoring natural areas. In some cases, those initiatives even specifically mentioned climate resilience. “The work of protecting open space, creating parks and playgrounds that provide stormwater mitigation and rainwater runoff in the face of these storms — everyone agrees on that,” Bybee said.
Bybee and others at Trust for Public Land see that message in the success of these ballot measures, as well as national legislation like the EXPLORE Act and even the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which included funding for park and restoration projects with a climate resilience aspect to them.
You might not think of parks as connected to mitigating the risks of extreme weather. Of course, green spaces have a broad positive effect when it comes to climate: Plant life sequesters carbon, helps clean the air, and reduces the urban heat island effect.
But parks can contribute to much more than that when they’re built as green infrastructure with climate resilience in mind. Green infrastructure is a general term for systems that either use or mimic nature to maximize natural benefits and minimize the effects of things like flooding, erosion, and pollution. It can include rain gardens, green roofs, living shorelines — even urban street trees may be considered part of green infrastructure.
Public parks, from large nature preserves down to neighborhood playgrounds, can include many different types of green infrastructure in their designs, tailored to the unique needs of specific locations and communities.
In the city of Atlanta, that has had a lot to do with water. In one example, a new park helped to make the city more drought resilient — Shirley Clarke Franklin Park, Atlanta’s largest green space, is a former quarry that was transformed into a 35-acre reservoir, shoring up the city’s water supply. In other areas, it’s an overabundance of water that’s the problem.
Vine City, a historically Black neighborhood in Atlanta, has long had problems with flooding. In 2002, heavy rains brought a flood combining stormwater and sewage that was so severe, it rendered 60 homes unlivable.
“There were houses where the first floor was completely submerged under the water,” said George Dusenbury, who at the time was leading the district office for Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. “People were out there in boats.”
Faced with the near certainty of continued flooding in the area, the city offered to purchase the most damaged homes, and residents accepted the deal to relocate. The city demolished those homes, and the 16-acre parcel of land — about seven city blocks — sat vacant for several years. “In the meantime, the community around the park continued to flood. We did not solve the problem,” Dusenbury said.
And residents wanted to see something done with the space that would benefit the surrounding community. “If you look at five city blocks of grass, people started saying, ‘We need a park here,’” Dusenbury recalled. In 2010, an Atlanta organization called Park Pride put forth a “green infrastructure vision” for the watershed that includes Vine City and two adjacent neighborhoods, informed by a yearlong public outreach process. The vision was to address recurring flooding in the area through a series of connected green spaces, and the empty lot — what would later become Rodney Cook Sr. Park — was one of them.
“I wouldn’t refer to it as a common city planning activity, but fortunately some really innovative leaders in the city and nonprofits saw the value in that,” said Jay Wozniak, a landscape architect and director of Trust for Public Land’s urban parks program in Georgia, who became the project manager for the site.
In 2016, the city of Atlanta brought in the Trust for Public Land to help raise funds for, design, and build a park on the vacant Vine City lot that would not only provide a recreation space for the community, but also mitigate its flooding. The organization, along with local partners and residents, broke ground a year later.
Designed in collaboration with the community, Rodney Cook Sr. Park features walking trails and bridges, a playground, a splash pad, climbing boulders, restrooms, and a public performance space. But what’s underneath is just as vital.
“When I talk about the park, I talk about it being like a layer cake — and the bottom layer is this green infrastructure,” said Dusenbury, who is now the Trust for Public Land’s Georgia state director. The core of that green infrastructure is a pond with an adjoining field, which sits at the park’s lowest point — a low point for the entire Vine City neighborhood — and doubles as a stormwater retention basin, able to hold around 9 million gallons of water and then slowly release it through specially engineered soil that helps to filter out pollutants as the water drains after a heavy rain.
Cook Park opened in 2021, and in recent years it has faced down extreme weather events.
“We got two 100-year floods in two years,” Dusenbury said.
The second of those floods was caused by Hurricane Helene, the deadly Category 4 storm that brought destruction across its path from Florida to Tennessee, and broke a record for rainfall in Atlanta. When those rains came, Cook Park went underwater — exactly as it was designed to.
Top to bottom: Cook Park on September 27, 2024, the day after Hurricane Helene arrived in Georgia, and the park three days later, on September 30. Jay Wozniak
“It was supposed to flood,” Dusenbury said. “Those walkways were supposed to be underwater. We have trees and vegetation that are planted to be flooded. We even have mulch that stays in place better when it gets flooded.” Within just a few days, the park had returned to its unsubmerged state, as the collected water slowly seeped through the specially engineered soil and made its way into the city’s stormwater system. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint just how much the park reduced flooding in the surrounding area during a specific event like this, local reports noted that there was very little flooding in the park’s immediate vicinity.
In another part of the city, Historic Fourth Ward Park, which was completed in 2012, boasts a 2-acre lake that also doubles as a stormwater retention basin. It, too, helped to protect surrounding communities from the worst impacts of Helene.
Atlanta isn’t alone in these types of efforts. Trust for Public Land integrates green infrastructure into almost all of its park projects, Dusenbury said, and other organizations and governments are doing the same. The city of Seattle, no stranger to rain, has considered green infrastructure a critical part of its stormwater management plans for over a decade, installing rain gardens in parks and medians and offering rebates for homeowners to put them in their yards. Boston, which appointed its first director of green infrastructure in 2022, recently broke ground on a park renovation project that will include both flood-resilient infrastructure as well as shade trees and water features that will help protect residents from the impacts of extreme heat.
“That being said, I still think we’re at the early stages of this becoming an overall best practice,” Dusenbury added.
One thing he would like more cities to recognize is that green infrastructure, in addition to being widely desirable, can also be incredibly cost-effective. “Too often, cities default to what they know, which is building a big pipe or building a cistern underground,” he said. Those types of targeted solutions can be costly — and they don’t offer the same benefits to the community that green spaces do. Dusenbury pointed to Historic Fourth Ward Park as an example: “The estimated cost of building the park was about $16 million. And the estimated cost of building a giant underground pipe to hold all the water and prevent the flooding was more than $20 million,” he said. The city was able to actually save money by choosing green infrastructure. “And then it has this wonderful 16-acre amenity that people can use.”
Read: about Babcock Ranch, a town in Florida that was designed with hurricane resilience in mind — including a large area of preserved wetland — and housed evacuees after Hurricanes Helene and Milton (The New York Times)
An example of green infrastructure in a totally different setting — the San Diego Bay Native Oyster Living Shoreline Project is an effort to restore oyster reefs to a bay where they once flourished, using “reef balls” made out of a mixture of cement, rock, and oyster shells. The artificial reef, shown below, aims to reproduce a habitat that should act as a natural buffer against increasingly powerful waves that cause coastal erosion. The project is an alternative to conventional forms of “gray infrastructure,” like seawalls, that have in many cases exacerbated problems of habitat loss and erosion.
The city of Alto Hospicio, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is one of the driest places on Earth. And yet its population of 140,000 continues to balloon, putting mounting pressure on nearby aquifers that haven’t been recharged by rain in 10,000 years. But Alto Hospicio, like so many other coastal cities, is rich in an untapped water resource: fog.
New research finds that by deploying fog collectors — fine mesh stretched between two poles — in the mountains around Alto Hospicio, the city could harvest an average of 2.5 liters of water per square meter of netting each day. Large fog collectors cost between $1,000 and $4,500 and measure 40 square meters, so just one placed near Alto Hospicio could grab 36,500 liters of water a year without using any electricity, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science.
By placing the collectors above town — where the altitude is ideal for exploiting the region’s predictable band of fog — water would flow downhill in pipelines by the power of gravity. So that initial investment for collectors would keep paying liquid dividends year after year. “If you’re pumping water from the underground, you will need a lot of energy,” said Virginia Carter Gamberini, a geographer and assistant professor at Chile’s Universidad Mayor and co-lead author of the paper. “From that perspective, it’s a very cheap technology.”
A view of Alto Hospicio, Chile.
Virginia Carter Gamberini
It’s a simple idea that’s already in use around the world. Fog is just a cloud that touches the ground. Like a puffy cloud higher in the atmosphere, it teems with tiny water droplets that gather in the mesh of a fog collector, dripping into a trough that runs into a tank. Communities across South America, Africa, and Asia have been deploying these collectors, though on very small scales compared to other methods like pumping groundwater.
So why haven’t cities expanded their use? For one, if a region gets rain, that volume of water is much higher than what can be extracted from fog, and communities can store that rainfall in reservoirs. Fog collection also requires constant attention, as the devices can break in fierce winds, requiring repairs.
The economics are tricky, too. Water remains very cheap in places with modern infrastructure, disincentivizing fog collection, said Daniel Fernandez, an environmental scientist at California State University, Monterey Bay who studies the technology but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “They’re going to catch a few gallons, if you’re lucky, in a day,” said Fernandez, who also founded a company that installs collectors. “That’s kind of cool to get that much from fog. But how much is that going to cost you to turn on your tap and get that much?”
A fog collector at work near the port city of Antofagasta, Chile.
Daniel Fernandez
The investment is more enticing where water is scarcer and therefore more expensive, Fernandez said. As climate change makes droughts more intense, communities struggling to get enough water might find the economics make sense. Supplementing aquifers, reservoirs, and other established sources with fog would help a region diversify its water system, in case one of them dries up or gets contaminated. Alto Hospicio can’t just rely on its aquifers, since they’re no longer being replenished by rain. “Without thinking outside the box, including fog harvesting, that solution places a limit on how long human habitation can exist there,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the new paper.
Dense cities, though, may struggle to deploy fog collectors compared to the countryside. “The wind load on a fog collector is like that on the sail of a sailing ship,” said Robert S. Schemenauer, executive director of FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit that advises on collection projects. “It has to be very strongly anchored. Therefore, placing it on the building could lead to building damage or material ending up on the street below.”
Beyond drinking water, using the fog for hydroponic farming could help Alto Hospicio and other parched communities grow their own food. Gamberini is already doing additional research elsewhere in the Atacama to expand this kind of farming, growing tomatoes, lettuce, and other crops with fog water and bountiful desert sunlight.
Even in the United States, where water is comparatively cheap, gardeners are experimenting with fog collectors. Peter Weiss, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been installing them in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco. In the summertime, fog can provide enough water to sustain a home’s established plants without turning on the hose.
For Weiss’ next project, he wants to bring fog collection to California’s vineyards. “That could be a way to make it more sustainable, less water intensive,” he said. “At first I hated fog because it’s so dreary. But then I started collecting it, and I loved it.”
A New Zealand-based community education provider, Dark Times Academy, has had a US Embassy grant to deliver a course teaching Pacific Islands journalists about disinformation terminated after the new Trump administration took office.
The new US administration requested a list of course participants and to review the programme material amid controversy over a “freeze” on federal aid policies.
The course presentation team refused and the contract was terminated by “mutual agreement” — but the eight-week Pacific workshop is going ahead anyway from next week.
Dark Times Academy’s co-founder Mandy Henk . . . “A Bit Sus”, an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes on disinfiormation for Pacific media. Image: Newsroom
“As far as I can tell, the current foreign policy priorities of the US government seem to involve terrorising the people of Gaza, annexing Canada, invading Greenland, and bullying Panama,” said Dark Times Academy co-founder Mandy Henk.
“We felt confident that a review of our materials would not find them to be aligned with those priorities.”
The course, called “A Bit Sus”, is an evidence-based peer-reviewed series of classes that teach key professions the skills needed to identify and counter disinformation and misinformation in their particular field.
The classes focus on “prebunking”, lateral reading, and how technology, including generative AI, influences disinformation.
Awarded competitive funds Dark Times Academy was originally awarded the funds to run the programme through a public competitive grant offered by the US Embassy in New Zealand in 2023 under the previous US administration.
The US Embassy grant was focused on strengthening the capacity of Pacific media to identify and counter disinformation. While funded by the US, the course was to be a completely independent programme overseen by Dark Times Academy and its academic consultants.
Co-founder Henk was preparing to deliver the education programme to a group of Pacific Island journalists and media professionals, but received a request from the US Embassy in New Zealand to review the course materials to “ensure they are in line with US foreign policy priorities”.
Henk said she and the other course presenters refused to allow US government officials to review the course material for this purpose.
She said the US Embassy had also requested a “list of registered participants for the online classes,” which Dark Times Academy also declined to provide as compliance would have violated the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020.
Henk said the refusal to provide the course materials for review led immediately to further discussions with the US Embassy in New Zealand that ultimately resulted in the termination of the grant “by mutual agreement”.
However, she said Dark Times Academy would still go ahead with running the course for the Pacific Island journalists who had signed up so far, starting on February 26.
Continuing the programme
“The Dark Times Academy team fully intends to continue to bring the ‘A Bit Sus’ programme and other classes to the Pacific region and New Zealand, even without the support of the US government,” Henk said.
“As noted when we first announced this course, the Pacific Islands have experienced accelerated growth in digital connectivity over the past few years thanks to new submarine cable networks and satellite technology.
“Alongside this, the region has also seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities.
“This course will help participants from the media recognise common tactics used by disinformation agents and support them to deploy proven educational and communications techniques.
“By taking a skills-based approach to countering disinformation, our programme can help to spread the techniques needed to mitigate the risks posed by digital technologies,” Henk said.
Especially valuable for journalists
Dark Times Academy co-founder Byron Clark said the course would be especially valuable for journalists in the Pacific region given the recent shifts in global politics and the current state of the planet.
Dark Times Academy co-founder and author Byron Clark . . . “We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa.” Image: APR
“We saw the devastating impacts of disinformation in the Pacific region during the measles outbreak in Samoa, for example,” said Clark, author of the best-selling book Fear: New Zealand’s Underworld of Hostile Extremists.
“With Pacific Island states bearing the brunt of climate change, as well as being caught between a geopolitical stoush between China and the West, a course like this one is timely.”
Henk said the “A Bit Sus” programme used a “high-touch teaching model” that combined the current best evidence on how to counter disinformation with a “learner-focused pedagogy that combines discussion, activities, and a project”.
Past classes led to the creation of the New Zealand version of the “Euphorigen Investigation” escape room, a board game, and a card game.
These materials remain in use across New Zealand schools and community learning centres.
Gabriel Filippelli got the form letter from the U.S. State Department on a Monday morning two and a half weeks ago. Since October, Filippelli has been teaching students and faculty in Pakistan how to use air quality devices to monitor air pollution exacerbated by rising temperatures — a consequence of climate change. The letter from the State Department, which had awarded the $300,000 underpinning the collaboration, said the funding was suspended, effective immediately. The project, it said, “no longer effectuates the priorities of the agency.”
Since President Donald Trump took office on January 20, his administration has sought to pause, eliminate, and claw back federal funding for research across the federal government.
Filippelli, the executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University, is a poster boy for the on-the-ground effects of these new policies. One of his research proposals at the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, the federal agency that funds and executes medical research, is frozen. Another proposal and four grants at the National Science Foundation, the country’s non-medical science and engineering research agency, are on pause. The institute he directs relies on a $5 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the law Democrats passed in 2022 that directs hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments to climate and environmental justice projects. The institute has been pulling from that money, which was authorized by Congress, since 2023 — but Filippelli is worried that Trump will try to take the remaining balance away.
Practically overnight, the steady stream of funding that allows Filippelli to conduct research, collaborate with colleagues, pay graduate students, and keep his institute running has become an endangered resource. He had to cancel upcoming trips to Pakistan, and reports experiencing confusion and doubt — unusual sensations for a veteran researcher long used to navigating the intricacies of the federal funding ecosystem.
Filippelli is not alone. Most researchers working in this country benefit from the roughly $200 billion the government makes available annually via various agencies and initiatives for research and development at some point in their careers. Hundreds of thousands of scientists, and their institutions by association, are sustained by this funding, which is responsible for some of humanity’s biggest scientific breakthroughs: weather forecasting technology, the flu vaccine, the Human Genome Project, the first nuclear reactor, the Internet, and GPS.
But that funding, which comprises a tiny fraction of total federal spending, is now in jeopardy, as Trump undertakes what will likely go down as one of the most abrupt and profound shifts in federal research and development policy in American history. In its first few weeks, the Trump administration sought to freeze all federal grants and loans — and has defied judges who have ordered the executive branch to release the funding. Trump’s staff also issued a list of phrases, including the words “underrepresented,” “socioeconomic,” and “community,” that will cause a federal research grant at the National Science Foundation to get flagged for further review. The president summarily dismissed government watchdogs responsible for making sure federal dollars get to where they’re supposed to go. The administration has also offered buyouts to more than 2 million federal employees, many of whom are tasked with distributing federal funding for research.
If these changes become permanent, they will have far-reaching consequences for the country’s understanding of and response to climate change for years, experts told Grist. “What it looks like to me is an absolute full-on brakes moment for any further climate advances at least in the short term,” Filippelli said. “But I think what people don’t fully recognize is that if you disrupt funding on a wide scale, even for a short time, the hangover effect lasts for a long time.”
Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation are studying melting glaciers and the long-term ramifications in Greenland and beyond. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Before 2022, the federal government spent less than $15 billion annually on all of its climate change programs, including climate research and development initiatives. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate spending bill in U.S. history, marked the beginning of a new era. Most of the roughly $370 billion in climate-focused spending in that legislation was earmarked for the deployment of clean energy and technologies, infrastructure development, and incentives for consumers to adopt climate-friendly technologies.
But the law also authorized hundreds of millions for climate research, including $200 million for oceanic and atmospheric research and $300 million to the Department of Agriculture for greenhouse gas emissions research programs — the pot of funding that sustains Filippelli’s institute. This money is already funding projects that will help better predict future climate-related flooding, more accurately forecast extreme weather events, and develop techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere. In his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order ordering agencies to pause the disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, and his administration has followed through on halting payments related to the law.
Researchers who receive grants from NIH also receive a certain amount of money that goes toward supporting the universities they work in. These are called “indirect costs.” A researcher who receives a $1 million grant from NIH to study the effects of rising temperatures on seasonal allergies, for example, might also get awarded $300,000 on top of that that goes to their university to cover the costs of running laboratories, paying administrative staff, leasing buildings, and buying equipment. In this way, the federal government doesn’t just fund research — it funds the infrastructure that makes that research possible.
And that infrastructure helps drive the U.S. economy. Writ large, NIH investments support jobs and millions of dollars in economic activity in all 50 U.S. states, comprising an even more substantial portion of the economy in states like California, Texas, New York, and Massachusetts, which get billions of dollars from the agency. Last week, NIH announced that it would be capping indirect costs across the board at 15 percent. For the federal government, which spends more than $6 trillion annually, taking aim at the roughly $9 billion it spends annually on these indirect research costs is somewhat akin to looking for nickels in a couch. But the new policy could have profound consequences for American research and medical universities that depend on that funding to operate and serve communities.
“For a large university, this creates a sudden and catastrophic shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars against already budgeted funds,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, in a post on Bluesky. “It is difficult to overstate what a catastrophe this will be for the U.S. research and education systems.”
Sarah Hengel, an assistant professor in the biology department at Tufts University, which has an indirect cost rate of upward of 50 percent, researches how chemicals in the environment affect female reproductive health. She has three doctoral students whose salaries are paid for by federal funding. “These NIH grants and those costs enable our students to be trained,” she said. “We just want to do research.”
Trump’s efforts to drain federal funding out of research institutions are already encountering legal roadblocks and pushback from researchers who say they’re not going down without a fight. On Monday, 22 states sued the Trump administration over its indirect costs policy and successfully requested that a federal judge block the NIH from implementing its new cap. For the time being, Hengel said, Tufts is still receiving its grant funding from NIH, but she said that the chaos created by that policy change and the other spending freezes and purges occurring throughout the federal government are fueling panic and confusion. That, too, she said, takes a toll on science.
An activist protests against Trump’s plan to stop most federal grants and loans during a rally near the White House in late January. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
“These are clear attempts to undermine the scientific community,” said Richard Ostfeld, a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who researches the effects of climate change on tick-borne illnesses. “Somehow science and scientists, information and facts, are perceived as the enemy. The casualties of all this, in addition to the scientists, are the American people.”
Meanwhile, on January 29, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release billions of dollars in federal grants it had frozen, noting the obvious fact that the executive branch doesn’t have the constitutional authority to revoke funding approved by Congress. The administration has refused to comply for weeks, openly disobeying that judicial mandate,violating a number of other federal statutes, and raising the specter of a constitutional crisis.
On Wednesday, NIH leadership issued an internal memorandum ordering staff to unfreeze grants across the agency, citing the federal judge’s order. Crucially, the memo said that the grants do not have to adhere to the indirect cost cap of 15 percent. NIH will “effectuate the administration’s goals over time,” the memo said, a warning to researchers that more changes are coming. Federal funding for research from other agencies across the government remains in limbo.
A few days after Filippelli got the letter from the State Department telling him that his project in Pakistan was frozen, he got a message from the U.S. embassy in Pakistan telling him that it would reinstate his award on the condition that he remove the word “underrepresented” from the grant.
“One can wonder whether this is just simply a case of we keep doing exactly what we’re doing but screen through our own proposals to make sure that we don’t use those oh-so-offensive terms such as ‘diversity’ and ‘equity,’” he said. “I think we can do all the same stuff without saying those words, but what really pushes my buttons and makes me want to fight back is why should we? How far do you bend until you’re complicit in the whole thing?”
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.
It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.
The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.
“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.
“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR
‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.
“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.
“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”
This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.
The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.
Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.
The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.
Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:
“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”
All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:
“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”
A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.
New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.
Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.
“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”
Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.
Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.
Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.
It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.
Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:
“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.
I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.
We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.
In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.
Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.
Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
A sudden surge in tree planting across New Orleans has come to an even more sudden halt.
When President Donald Trump issued a series of orders that froze billions of dollars in federal climate funding late last month, he also slammed the brakes on the most ambitious replanting initiative in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina wiped out more than 200,000 trees across the city. The blocked funding could also spell the end of the nonprofit group spearheading the restoration of New Orleans’ tree canopy, which has suffered an almost 30 percent decrease over the past 20 years.
“Overnight, our operations were paralyzed,” said Susannah Burley, executive director of Sustaining Our Urban Landscape, also known as SOUL Nola. “We can’t afford to wait this out. We only have enough funding to keep operating until mid-April.”
Former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, earmarked $1.5 billion for urban and community-based forestry initiatives across the nation, an amount the U.S. Forest Service called an “historic level of investment.” The money was directed to hundreds of nonprofits, schools and city and state governments. A large share of the funding is now in doubt.
The IRA had budgeted $3.5 million to support a sharp rise in SOUL’s city-wide planting efforts, amounting to 80 percent of the group’s budget over the next five years. SOUL had been ramping up operations when Trump’s orders ground everything to a halt.
SOUL was adding staff, increasing the number of volunteer planting events and had set a goal of nearly doubling its output to about 3,000 trees per year. The IRA funding was passing to SOUL via the Arbor Day Foundation, which allocated $1 million, and the New Orleans Office of Resilience and Sustainability, which planned to give SOUL $2.5 million to help the city meet climate action goals that rely heavily on trees and other carbon offsets to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Federal judges have in recent days ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze the IRA and other federal funding. But the administration is digging in, refusing to release the pent-up funds and triggering what many legal experts are calling a constitutional crisis.
Trump has derided the IRA, which was approved by Congress in late 2022, as a “green new scam” that the country can ill afford. His decision to put an immediate hold on disbursements has thrown many nonprofits into crisis. Some groups are worried about having to lay off staff, cancel contracts, delay projects or close down entirely.
Burley had to nix a $20,000 order with a North Shore tree farm and contract with a delivery company. She also had to take back a job offer and put a hold on a new position she planned to advertise in the coming weeks. SOUL’s four remaining staff jobs are on shaky ground.
“It took me eight years to build the team we have, and they’re impeccable at what they do,” Burley said. “If I lost them because I had to put them on furlough, I can’t start over. I’m too old, too tired. I don’t have the energy or the flexibility in my life to rebuild SOUL.”
New Orleans’ lack of trees makes the city less able to cope with heavier rainfall, rising temperatures and other challenges from climate change. Trees offer shade, reducing ambient air temperatures and air conditioning costs. They also lower flood risk by absorbing water and altering the soil, making it more spongy. That’s crucial for a city shaped like a bowl, where more than half its area sits below sea level.
The monumental task of replanting the city has fallen largely on nonprofits like SOUL and the NOLA Tree Project. The groups, which depend on volunteer labor and donations, have together planted more than 80,000 trees since Katrina, but the city’s tree canopy isn’t nearly what it was before 2005 and doesn’t come close to comparable cities.
“New Orleans has one of the lowest tree canopy coverage rates in the country,” said Chris Potter, a former NASA scientist who uses satellite imagery to study urban development. “It’s a special case because of all the floods and hurricanes and particularly the Katrina impact.”
New Orleans’ tree coverage ranked last among 10 comparable cities in the South, according to a report SOUL produced for the city in 2022. While most of the cities, including Atlanta, Memphis, Tenn. and Jacksonville, Fla., had tree coverage of more than 30 percent, New Orleans’ coverage was only 18 percent.
Remove two unusually large wooded areas in New Orleans — City Park and Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge — and the coverage rate falls to about 10 percent. The park and Bayou Sauvage, one of the country’s largest urban refuges, do little to reduce heat and flooding in other parts of the city, especially the many neighborhoods that were subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices, according to Burley.
“The neighborhoods that were historically redlined are often more flood-prone, hotter and they have less trees,” she said.
SOUL has focused most of its efforts on low-income neighborhoods. The group had planned to finish planting the Lower 9th Ward and much of Gentilly, and were getting ready for a big push in Hollygrove. All three areas are majority Black and have large numbers of low-income residents. The Lower 9th, for instance, is 90 percent Black and has an average household income of $49,000 — less than half the U.S. average, according to the Data Center.
Alex Dunn, president of the Algiers Riverview Association, credited SOUL with “completely transforming the canopy and aesthetics” of his neighborhood.
“They do this work more efficiently and cost-effectively than the city or its contractors ever could,” he said. “Losing SOUL would be a major setback for our city.”
Some supporters have offered donations, but Burley said the group’s needs are likely beyond the scope of New Orleans alone.
“We have only one Fortune 500 company and Entergy already gives to us,” she said of the New Orleans-based power company.
Instead, SOUL has urged supporters to lobby Louisiana’s mostly Republican congressional delegation and Gov. Jeff Landry, who could, in turn, push the Trump administration to restore IRA funding.
Burley knows it was risky to tie so much of SOUL’s growth to one federal source.
“I put all our eggs in one basket, and that’s never wise,” she said. “But we’ve never had the chance to have funding at that level before. We had to try because we could have done so much good with it.”
Rats are in many ways better adapted to cities than the humans that built them. While urbanites struggle with crowds, sparse parking spaces, and their upstairs neighbors stomping around at 4 a.m., rats are living their best lives. Huddled safely underground, they pop up at night to chew through heaps of food waste in dumpsters and hot dogs left on stoops.
Now scientists have found yet another gnawing advantage for rats. A study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances found that as temperatures climb in cities, rat populations are growing, even as city dwellers suffer. “In cities that have experienced the fastest warming temperatures, they tended to have faster increases in their rat numbers as well,” said Jonathan Richardson, an urban ecologist at the University of Richmond and lead author of the paper. “Females will reach sexual maturity faster. They’re able to breed more, and typically their litters are larger at warmer temperatures in the lab.”
The analysis used public complaints about rats and inspection records from 16 cities between 2007 and 2024, which collectively served as a proxy for rat populations. In 11 of those cities, rat numbers surged during that period. The winner of the Most Rats Gained award goes to Washington, D.C., with a 390 percent increase according to the city’s last decade of data, followed by San Francisco (300 percent), Toronto (186 percent), and New York City (162 percent). Meanwhile, a few cities actually saw their rat populations decrease, including New Orleans, Tokyo, and Louisville, Kentucky, due in part to more diligent pest control.
“It’s a first step at answering this question, that if you get a bunch of rat scientists into a room we’re bound to ask each other: How might climate change play into rat populations?” said Kaylee Byers, a health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the study.
Beyond the physiological factors that influence breeding, rat behavior changes with temperature, too. If it’s too cold out, the rodents tend to huddle underground — in basements, sewers, and really anywhere else in the subterranean built environment. Once it warms up, rats emerge and gorge, but also bring food back to their nests to store in caches. Climate change is also altering the timing of seasons: If the weather stays warmer a week or two longer into the early winter, and if spring comes a week or two earlier, that’s more time to forage. “Rats are really well-adapted to take advantage of a food resource and convert that to new baby rats that you’ll see in your neighborhood,” Richardson said.
While temperatures are rising globally, they’re getting particularly extreme in cities thanks to the urban heat island effect. Buildings and concrete absorb the sun’s energy, raising temperatures up to 27 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in surrounding rural areas and releasing that heat at night. That’s especially dangerous in the summer for urbanites during prolonged heat waves. But in the winter, that bit of extra heat could be helping rats.
Rising temperatures were the dominant force helping rat populations grow, but they weren’t the only factor, the study found. Urban human populations are exploding around the world, and they’re wasting a lot of food for rats to find. As cities expand around their edges, they have to add new infrastructure, which rats colonize. And when cities build new sewer systems to handle more people, they often leave the old ones in place, providing a welcoming environment for rats. “The vestigial urban infrastructure that’s down there, it doesn’t really matter for us,” Richardson said. “But for a rat, that’s like a free highway.”
The researchers also found that cities with fewer green spaces had higher growth of rat populations. It’s not clear yet why that might be, they said. No two green spaces are the same: A small urban park might teem with rats because office workers flock there to eat lunch, then drop their leftovers in trash bins, whereas the interior of a larger space like Central Park might provide less food and fewer places for rodents to hide from predators like hawks and coyotes.
So how can a city control its rat population as temperatures rise? For one, by getting more data like the numbers found in this study. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Niamh M. Quinn, who studies human-wildlife interactions at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources but wasn’t involved in the research. “We live in an infinite sea of rats, so you can’t just manage small pockets. You have to have municipal rat management.”
New Orleans has succeeded by being proactive, Richardson said, such as with education campaigns teaching building owners how to rat-proof their structures, and insisting that if they do see rats to call the city for eradication. Cities can’t just poison their way out of this problem without hurting other animals, he said, because that poison makes its way into the stomachs of rat-eating predators.
“Right now, our approach to rat management is very reactive,” Byers said. “We’re not thinking about the future at all. We need to do that if we’re actually concerned about rats, and if we want to manage the risks associated with them.”
In a fervent appeal to the global community, Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea has called on US President Donald Trump to “rethink” his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and current global climate initiatives.
Marape’s plea came during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, on 23 January 2025.
Expressing deep concern for the impacts of climate change on Papua New Guinea and other vulnerable Pacific Island nations, Marape highlighted the dire consequences these nations face due to rising sea levels and increasingly severe weather patterns.
“The effects of climate change are not just theoretical for us; they have real, devastating impacts on our fragile economies and our way of life,” he said.
The Prime Minister emphasised that while it was within President Trump’s prerogative to prioritise American interests, withdrawing the United States — the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide– from the Paris Agreement without implementing measures to curtail coal power production was “totally irresponsible”, Marape said.
“As a leader of a major forest and ocean nation in the Pacific region, I urge President Trump to reconsider his decision.”
He went on to point out the contradiction in the US stance.
US not closing coal plants
“The United States is not shutting down any of its coal power plants yet has chosen to withdraw from critical climate efforts. This is fundamentally irresponsible.
“The science regarding our warming planet is clear — it does not lie,” he said.
Marape further articulated that as the “Leader of the Free World,” Trump had a moral obligation to engage with global climate issues.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape’s plea to President Trump. Video: PNGTV
“It is morally wrong for President Trump to disregard the pressing challenges of climate change.
He must articulate how he intends to address this critical issue,” he added, stressing that effective global leaders had a responsibility not only to their own nations but also to the planet as a whole.
In a bid to advocate for small island nations that are bearing the brunt of climate impacts, PM Marape announced plans to bring this issue to the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).
He hopes to unify the voices of PIF member countries in a collective statement regarding the US withdrawal from climate negotiations.
US revived Pacific relations
“The United States has recently revitalised its relations with the Pacific. It is discouraging to see it retreating from climate discussions that significantly affect our region’s efforts to mitigate climate change,” he said.
Prime Minister Marape reminded the international community that while larger nations might have the capacity to withstand extreme weather events such as typhoons, wildfires, and tornadoes, smaller nations like Papua New Guinea could not endure such impacts.
“For us, every storm and rising tide represents a potential crisis. Big nations can afford to navigate these challenges, but for us, the stakes are incredibly high,” he said.
Marape’s appeal underscores the urgent need for collaborative and sustained global action to combat climate change, particularly for nations like Papua New Guinea, which are disproportionately affected by environmental change.
It didn’t come as a surprise to see President Donald Trump sign executive orders to again pull out of the Paris Agreement, or from the World Health Organisation, but the immediate suspension of US international aid has compounded the impact beyond what was imagined possible.
The slew of executive orders signed within hours of Trump re-entering the White House and others since have caused consternation for Pacific leaders and communities and alarm for those operating in the region.
Since Trump was last in power, US engagement in the Pacific has increased dramatically. We have seen new embassies opened, the return of Peace Corps volunteers, high-level summits in Washington and more.
All the officials who have been in the region and met with Pacific leaders and thinkers will know that climate change impacts are the name of the game when it comes to security.
It is encapsulated in the Boe Declaration signed by leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2018 as their number one existential threat and has been restated many times since.
Now it is hard to see how US diplomats and administration representatives can expect to have meaningful conversations with their Pacific counterparts, if they have nothing to offer when it comes to the region’s primary security threat.
The “on again, off again” approach to cutting carbon emissions and providing climate finance does not lend itself to convincing sceptical Pacific leaders that the US is a trusted friend here for the long haul.
Pacific response muted
Trump’s climate scepticism is well-known and the withdrawal from Paris had been flagged during the campaign. The response from leaders within the Pacific islands region has been somewhat muted, with a couple of exceptions.
Vanuatu Attorney-General Kiel Loughman called it out as “bad behaviour”. Meanwhile, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape has sharply criticised Trump, “urging” him to reconsider his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and plans to rally Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders to stand with him.
It is hard to see how this will have much effect.
The withdrawal from the World Health Organisation – to which the US provides US$500 million or about 15 percent of its annual budget – creates a deep funding gap.
In 2022, the Lowy Pacific aid map recorded that the WHO disbursed US$9.1 million in the Pacific islands across 320 projects. It contributes to important programmes that support health systems in the region.
In addition, the 90-day pause on disbursement of aid funding while investments are reviewed to ensure that they align with the president’s foreign policy is causing confusion and distress in the region.
Perhaps now the time has come to adopt a more transactional approach. While this may not come easily to Pacific diplomats, the reality is that this is how everyone else is acting and it appears to be the geopolitical language of the moment.
Meaningful commitment opportunities
So where the US seeks a security agreement or guarantee, there may be an opportunity to tie it to climate change or other meaningful commitments.
When it comes to the PIF, the intergovernmental body representing 18 states and territories, Trump’s stance may pose a particular problem.
The PIF secretariat is currently undertaking a Review of Regional Architecture. As part of that, dialogue partners including the US are making cases for whether they should be ranked as “Strategic Partners” [Tier 1] or “Sector Development Partners [Tier 2].
It is hard to see how the US can qualify for “strategic partner” status given Trump’s rhetoric and actions in the last week. But if the US does not join that club, it is likely to cede space to China which is also no doubt lobbying to be at the “best friends” table.
With the change in president comes the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He was previously known for having called for the US to cut all its aid to Solomon Islands when then Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare announced this country’s switch in diplomatic ties from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.
It is to be hoped that since then Rubio has learned that this type of megaphone diplomacy is not welcome in this part of the world.
Since taking office, he has made little mention of the Pacific islands region. In a call with New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters they “discussed efforts to enhance security cooperation, address regional challenges, and support for the Pacific Islands.”
It is still early days, a week is a long time in politics and there remain many “unknown unknowns”. What we do know is that what happens in Washington during the next four years will have global impacts, including in the Pacific. The need now for strong Pacific leadership and assertive diplomacy has never been greater.
Dr Tess Newton Cain is a principal consultant at Sustineo P/L and adjunct associate professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. She is a former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and has more than 25 years of experience working in the Pacific islands region. This article was first published by BenarNews and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
