CPJ and 16 other international human rights organizations on Wednesday called on the European Union to press Azerbaijan to release around a dozen jailed journalists and improve its dire human rights record as the country hosts the United Nations Climate Change Conference on November 11-22, 2024.
The statement highlights how, in the months leading up to the COP29 conference, Azerbaijani authorities have pursued a “relentless crackdown” against independent media and civil society, “eradicating most forms of dissent and legitimate human rights work.”
At least 15 Azerbaijani journalists have been arrested since November 2023 and currently await trial on charges that could see them jailed for between eight and 20 years. Thirteen of them remain in pre-trial detention.
Donald J. Trump will once again be president of the United States. The Associated Press called the race for Trump early Wednesday morning, ending one of the costliest and most turbulent campaign cycles in the nation’s history. The results promise to upend U.S. climate policy: In addition to returning a climate denier to the White House, voters also gave Republicans control of the Senate…
Johnny Appleseed’s heart was in the right place when he walked all over the early United States planting fruit trees. Ecologically, though, he had room for improvement: To create truly dynamic ecosystems that host a lot of biodiversity, benefit local people, and produce lots of different foods, a forest needs a wide variety of species. Left on their own, some deforested areas can rebound surprisingly fast with minimal help from humans, sequestering loads of atmospheric carbon as they grow.
New research from an international team of scientists, recently published in the journal Nature, finds that 830,000 square miles of deforested land in humid tropical regions — an area larger than Mexico — could regrow naturally if left on its own. Five countries — Brazil, Indonesia, China, Mexico, and Colombia — account for 52 percent of the estimated potential regrowth. According to the researchers, that would boost biodiversity, improve water quality and availability, and suck up 23.4 gigatons of carbon over the next three decades.
“A rainforest can spring up in one to three years — it can be brushy and hard to walk through,” said Matthew Fagan, a conservation scientist and geographer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a coauthor of the paper. “In five years, you can have a completely closed canopy that’s 20 feet high. I have walked in rainforests 80 feet high that are 10 to 15 years old. It just blows your mind.”
That sort of regrowth isn’t a given, though. First of all, humans would have to stop using the land for intensive agriculture — think big yields thanks to fertilizers and other chemicals — or raising hoards of cattle, the sheer weight of which compacts the soil and makes it hard for new plants to take root. Cows, of course, also tend to nosh on young plants.
Secondly, it helps for tropical soil to have a high carbon content to nourish plants. “Organic carbon, as any person who loves composting knows, really helps the soil to be nutritious and bulk itself up in terms of its ability to hold water,” Fagan said. “We found that places with soils like that are much more likely to have forests pop up.”
And it’s also beneficial for a degraded area to be near a standing tropical forest. That way, birds can fly across the area, pooping out seeds they have eaten in the forest. And once those plants get established, other tree-dwelling animal species like monkeys can feast on their fruits and spread seeds, too. This initiates a self-reinforcing cycle of biodiversity, resulting in one of those 80-foot-tall forests that’s only a decade old.
The more biodiversity, the more a forest can withstand shocks. If one species disappears because of disease, for instance, another similar one might fill the void. That’s why planting a bunch of the same species of tree — à la Johnny Appleseed — pales in comparison to a diverse rainforest that comes back naturally.
“When you have that biodiversity in the system, it tends to be more functional in an ecological sense, and it tends to be more robust,” said Peter Roopnarine, a paleoecologist at the California Academy of Sciences, who studies the impact of the climate on ecosystems but wasn’t involved in the new paper. “Unless or until we can match that natural complexity, we’re always going to be a step behind what nature is doing.”
Governments and nonprofits can now use the data gathered from this research to identify places to prioritize for cost-effective restoration, according to Brooke Williams, a research fellow at the University of Queensland and the paper’s lead author. “Importantly, our dataset doesn’t inform on where should and should not be restored,” she said, because that’s a question best left to local governments. One community, for instance, might rely on a crop that requires open spaces to grow. But if the locals can thrive with a regrown tropical forest — by, say, earning money from tourism and growing crops like coffee and cocoa within the canopy, a practice known as agroforestry — their government might pay them to leave the area alone.
Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, said that more than 1,500 species have been used in agroforestry worldwide. “There’s a lot of fruit trees, for example, that people use, and trees that provide medicinal services,” Cook-Patton said. “Are there ways that we can help shift the agricultural production towards more trees and boost the carbon value, the biodiversity value, and livelihoods of the people living there?”
The tricky bit here is that the world is warming and droughts are worsening, so a naturally regrowing forest may soon find itself in different circumstances. “We know the climate conditions are going to change, but there’s still uncertainty with some of that change, uncertainty in our climate projection models,” Roopnarine said.
So while a forest is very much stationary, reforestation is, in a sense, a moving target for environmental groups and governments. A global goal known as the Bonn Challenge aims to restore 1.3 million square miles of degraded and deforested land by 2030. So far, more than 70 governments and organizations from 60 countries, including the United States, have signed on to contribute 810,000 square miles toward that target.
Sequestering 23.4 gigatons of carbon over three decades may not sound like much in the context of humanity’s 37 gigatons of emissions every year. But these are just the forests in tropical regions. Protecting temperate forests and sea grasses would capture still more carbon, in addition to newfangled techniques like growing cyanobacteria. “This is one tool in a toolbox — it is not a silver bullet,” Fagan said. “It’s one of 40 bullets needed to fight climate change. But we need to use all available options.”
The leading Cook Islands environmental lobby group says that if Donald Trump wins the United States elections — and he seemed to be on target to succeed as results were rolling in tonight — he will push back on climate change negotiations made since he was last in office.
As voters in the US cast their votes on who would be the next president, Trump or US Vice-President Kamala Harris, the question for most Pacific Islands countries is what this will mean for them?
“If Trump wins, it will push back on any progress that has been made in the climate change negotiations since he was last in office,” said Te Ipukarea Society’s Kelvin Passfield.
“It won’t be good for the Pacific Islands in terms of US support for climate change. We have not heard too much on Kamala Harris’s climate policy, but she would have to be better than Trump.”
The current President Joe Biden and his administration made some efforts to connect with Pacific leaders.
Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies senior lecturer Dr Anna Powles said a potential win for Harris could be the fulfilment of the many “promises” made to the Pacific for climate financing, uplifting economies of the Pacific and bolstering defence security.
Dr Powles said Pacific leaders want Harris to deliver on the Pacific Partnership Strategy, the outcomes of the two Pacific Islands-US summits in 2022 and 2023, and the many diplomatic visits undertaken during President Biden’s presidency.
Diplomatic relationships
The Biden administration recognised Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign and independent states and established diplomatic relationships with them.
The Biden-Harris government had pledged to boost funding to the Green Climate Fund by US$3 billion at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates.
Harris has said in the past that climate change is an existential threat and has also promised to “tackle the climate crisis with bold action, build a clean energy economy, advance environmental justice, and increase resilience to climate disasters”.
Dr Powles said that delivery needed to be the focus.
She said the US Elections would no doubt have an impact on small island nations facing climate change and intensified geopolitics.
Dr Powles said it came as “no surprise” that countries such as New Zealand and Australia had increasingly aligned with the US, as the Biden administration had been leveraging strategic partnerships with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan since 2018.
She said a return to Trump’s leadership could derail ongoing efforts to build security architecture in the Pacific.
Pull back from Pacific
There are also views that Trump would pull back from the Pacific and focus on internal matters, directly impacting his nation.
For Trump, there is no mention of the climate crisis in his platform or Agenda47.
This is in line with the former president’s past actions, such as withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2019, citing “unfair economic burdens” placed on American workers and businesses.
Trump has maintained his position that the climate crisis is “one of the great scams of all time”.
Republished with permission from the Cook Islands News and RNZ Pacific.
Tucked away in the most extreme nooks and crannies of the Earth are biodiverse galaxies of microorganisms — some that might help scour the atmosphere of the carbon dioxide mankind has pumped into it.
One microorganism in particular has captured scientists’ attention. UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus” for the way it guzzles carbon dioxide, is a previously unknown cyanobacterium found in volcanic ocean vents. A recent paper in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology found it boasts exceptional atmosphere-cleaning potential — even among its well-studied peers. If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it, this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system.
Cyanobacteria like Chonkus, sometimes referred to by the misnomer blue-green algae, are aquatic organisms that, suck up light and carbon dioxide and turn it into food, photosynthesizing like plants. But tucked away inside their single-celled bodies are compartments that allow them to concentrate and gobble up more CO2 than their distant leafy relatives. When found in exotic environments, they can evolve unique characteristics not often found in nature. For microorganism researchers, whose field has long revolved around a handful of easy-to-manage organisms like yeast and E. coli, the untapped biodiversity heralds new possibilities.
“There’s more and more excitement about isolating new organisms,” said Braden Tierney, a microbiologist and one of the lead authors of the paper that identified Chonkus. On an expedition in September 2022, Tierney and researchers from the University of Palermo in Italy dove into the waters surrounding Vulcano, an island off the coast of Sicily where volcanic vents in shallow waters provide an unusual habitat — illuminated by sunlight and yet rich with plumes of carbon-dioxide. The location yielded a veritable soup of microbial life, including Chonkus.
Researchers from Two Frontiers and the University of Palermo diving near Vulcano.
John Kowitz / Two Frontiers
After Tierney retrieved flasks of the seawater, Max Schubert, the other lead author of the cyanobacteria paper and a lead project scientist at the scientific nonprofit Align to Innovate, got to work identifying the different organisms in it. Schubert said that out in the open ocean, cyanobacteria like Chonkus grow slowly and are thinly dispersed. “But if we wanted to use them to pull down carbon dioxide, we would want to grow them a lot faster,” he said, “and grow in concentrations that don’t exist in the open ocean.”
Back in the lab, Chonkus did just that — growing faster and thicker than other previously discovered cyanobacteria candidates for carbon capture systems. “When you grow a culture of bacteria, it looks like broth and the bacteria are very dilute in the culture,” Schubert said, “but we found that Chonkus would settle into this stuff that is much more dense, like a green peanut butter.”
Chonkus’ peanut butter consistency is important for the strain’s potential in green biotechnologies. Typically, biotech industries that use cyanobacteria and algae need to separate them from the water they grow in. Because Chonkus does so naturally with gravity, Schubert says, it could make the process more efficient. But there are plenty of other puzzles to solve before a discovery like Chonkus can be used for carbon capture.
CyanoCapture, a cyanobacteria carbon capture startup based in the United Kingdom, has developed a low-cost method of catching carbon dioxide that runs on biomass, housing algae and cyanobacteria in clear tubes where they can grow and filter CO2. Although Chonkus shows unique promise, David Kim, the company’s CEO and founder, said biotechnology companies need to have more control over its traits, like carbon storage, to use it successfully, and that requires finding a way to crack open its DNA.
CyanoCapture’s photobioreactors full of bacteria that can filter out carbon dioxide from emission sources. CyanoCapture
“Oftentimes we’ll find in nature that a microbe can do something kind of cool, but it doesn’t do it as well as we need to,” said Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a nonprofit biotech start-up in Watertown, Massachusetts, that specializes in genetically engineering microbes. Cultivarium has been working with CyanoCapture to help them study Chonkus but has yet to figure out how to tinker with its DNA and improve its carbon capturing attributes. “Everybody wants to juice it up and tweak it,” he said.
Since the expedition to Vulcano where Tierney scooped up Chonkus, the nonprofit he founded to explore more extreme environments around the world, the Two Frontiers Project, has also sampled hot springs in Colorado, volcanic chimneys in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Italy, and coral reefs in the Red Sea. Perhaps out there, researchers will find a chunkier Chonkus that can pack away even more carbon, microbes that can help regrow corals, or more organisms that can ease the pains of a rapidly warming world. “There’s no question we’ll keep finding really, really interesting biology in these vents, Tierney said. “I can’t stress enough that this was just the first expedition.”
Kim noted that out of all the microbes out there, less than 0.01 percent have been studied. “They don’t represent the true arsenal of microbes that we could potentially work with to achieve humanity’s goals.”
As the US election unfolds, American territories such as the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, and Guam, along with the broader Pacific region, will be watching the developments.
As the question hangs in the balance of whether the White House remains blue with Kamala Harris or turns red under Donald Trump, academics, New Zealand’s US ambassador, and Guam’s Congressman have weighed in on what the election means for the Pacific.
Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies senior lecturer Dr Anna Powles said it would no doubt have an impact on small island nations facing climate change and intensified geopolitics, including the rapid expansion of military presence on its territory Guam, following the launch of an interballistic missile by China.
Pacific leaders lament the very real security threat of climate-induced natural disasters has been overshadowed by the tug-of-war between China and the US in what academics say is “control and influence” for the contested region.
Dr Powles said it came as “no surprise” that countries such as New Zealand and Australia had increasingly aligned with the US, as the Biden administration had been leveraging strategic partnerships with Australia, New Zealand, and Japan since 2018.
Despite China being New Zealand’s largest trading partner, New Zealand is in the US camp and must pay attention, she said.
“We are not seeing enough in the public domain or discussion by government with the New Zealand public about what this means for New Zealand going forward.”
Pacific leaders welcome US engagement but are concerned about geopolitical rivalry.
Earlier this month, Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Baron Waqa attended the South Pacific Defence Ministers meeting in Auckland.
He said it was important that “peace and stability in the region” was “prioritised”.
Referencing the arms race between China and the US, he said, “The geopolitics occurring in our region is not welcomed by any of us in the Pacific Islands Forum.”
While a Pacific Zone of Peace has been a talking point by Fiji and the PIF leadership to reinforce the region’s “nuclear-free stance”, the US is working with Australia on obtaining nuclear-submarines through the AUKUS security pact.
Dr Powles said the potential for increased tensions “could happen under either president in areas such as Taiwan, East China Sea — irrespective of who is in Washington”.
South Pacific defence ministers told RNZ Pacific the best way to respond to threats of conflict and the potential threat of a nuclear attack in the region is to focus on defence and building stronger ties with its allies.
New Zealand’s Defence Minister said NZ was “very good friends with the United States”, with that friendship looking more friendly under the Biden Administration. But will this strengthening of ties and partnerships continue if Trump becomes President?
US President Joe Biden (center) stands for a group photo with Pacific Islands Forum leaders following the Pacific Islands Forum Summit at the South Portico of the White House in Washington on September 25, 2023. Image: Jim Watson/RNZ
US President Joe Biden, center, stands for a group photo with Pacific Islands Forum leaders following the Pacific Islands Forum Summit, at the South Portico of the White House in Washington on September 25, 2023. Photo: Jim Watson
US wants a slice of Pacific Regardless of who is elected, US Ambassador to New Zealand Tom Udall said history showed the past three presidents “have pushed to re-engage with the Pacific”.
While both Trump and Harris may differ on critical issues for the Pacific such as the climate crisis and multilateralism, both see China as the primary external threat to US interests.
The US has made a concerted effort to step up its engagement with the Pacific in light of Chinese interest, including by reopening its embassies in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga.
On 12 July 2022, the Biden administration showed just how keen it was to have a seat at the table by US Vice-President Kamala Harris dialing in to the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Fiji at the invitation of the then chair former prime minister Voreqe Bainimarama. The US was the only PIF “dialogue partner” allowed to speak at this Forum.
However, most of the promises made to the Pacific have been “forward-looking” and leaders have told RNZ Pacific they want to see less talk and more real action.
Defence diplomacy has been booming since the 2022 Solomon Islands-China security deal. It tripled the amount of money requested from Congress for economic development and ocean resilience — up to US$60 million a year for 10 years — as well as a return of Peace Corps volunteers to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu.
Health security was another critical area highlighted in 2024 the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Declaration.
The Democratic Party’s commitment to the World Health Organisation (WHO) bodes well, in contrast to the previous Trump administration’s withdrawal from the WHO during the covid-19 pandemic.
It continued a long-running programme called ‘The Academy for Women Entrepreneurs’ which gives enterprising women from more than 100 countries with the knowledge, networks and access they need to launch and scale successful businesses.
While both Trump and Harris may differ on critical issues for the Pacific such as the climate crisis and multilateralism, both see China as the primary external threat to US interests. Image: 123RF/RNZ
Guam’s take Known as the tip of the spear for the United States, Guam is the first strike community under constant threat of a nuclear missile attack.
It was seen as a signal of China’s missile capabilities which had the US and South Pacific Defence Ministers on edge and deeply “concerned”.
China’s Defence Ministry said in a statement the launch was part of routine training by the People’s Liberation Army’s Rocket Force, which oversees conventional and nuclear missile operations and was not aimed at any country or target.
The US has invested billions to build a 360-degree missile defence system on Guam with plans for missile tests twice a year over the next decade, as it looks to bolster its weaponry in competition with China.
Despite the arms race and increased military presence and weaponry on Guam, China is known to have fewer missiles than the US.
The US considers Guam a key strategic military base to help it stop any potential attacks. Image: RNZ Pacific/Eleisha Foon
However, Guamanians are among the four million disenfranchised Americans living in US territories whose vote does not count due to an anomaly in US law.
“While territorial delegates can introduce bills and advocate for their territory in the US Congress, they have no voice on the floor. While Guam is exempted from paying the US federal income tax, many argue that such a waiver does not make up for what the tiny island brings to the table,” according to a BenarNews report.
US Congressman for Guam James Moylan has spent his time making friends and “educating and informing” other states about Guam’s existence in hopes to get increased funding and support for legislative bills.
Moylan said he would prefer a Trump presidency but noted he has “proved he can also work with Democrats”.
Under Trump, Moylan said Guam would have “stronger security”, raising his concerns over the need to stop Chinese fishing boats from coming onto the island.
Moylan also defended the military expansion: “We are not the aggressor. If we put our guard down, we need to be able to show we can maintain our land.”
Moylan defended the US military expansion, which his predecessor, former US Congressman Robert Underwood, was concerned about, saying the rate of expansion had not been seen since World War II.
“We are the closest there is to the Indo-Pacific threat,” Moylan said.
“We need to make sure our pathways, waterways and economy is growing, and we have a strong defence against our aggressors.”
“All likeminded democracies are concerned about the current leadership of China. We are working together…to work on security issues and prosperity issues,” US Ambassador to New Zealand Tom Udall said.
When asked about the military capabilities of the US and Guam, Moylan said: “We are not going to war; we are prepared to protect the homeland.”
Moylan said that discussions for compensation involving nuclear radiation survivors in Guam would happen regardless of who was elected.
The 23-year battle has been spearheaded by atomic veteran Robert Celestial, who is advocating for recognition for Chamorro and Guamanians under the RECA Act.
Celestial said that the Biden administration had thrown their support behind them, but progress was being stalled in Congress, which is predominantly controlled by the Republican party.
But Moylan insisted that the fight for compensation was not over. He said that discussions would continue after the election irrespective of who was in power.
“It’s been tabled. It’s happening. I had a discussion with Speaker Mike Johnson. We are working to pass this through,” he said.
US Marine Force Base Camp Blaz. Image: RNZ Pacific/Eleisha Foon
If Trump wins Dr Powles said a return to Trump’s leadership could derail ongoing efforts to build security architecture in the Pacific.
There are also views Trump would pull back from the Pacific and focus on internal matters, directly impacting his nation.
For Trump, there is no mention of the climate crisis in his platform or Agenda47.
This is in line with the former president’s past actions, such as withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2019, citing “unfair economic burdens” placed on American workers and businesses.
Trump has maintained his position that the climate crisis is “one of the great scams of all time”.
The America First agenda is clear, with “countering China” at the top of the list. Further, “strengthening alliances,” Trump’s version of multilateralism, reads as what allies can do for the US rather than the other way around.
“There are concerns for Donald Trump’s admiration for more dictatorial leaders in North Korea, Russia, China and what that could mean in a time of crisis,” Dr Powles said.
A Trump administration could mean uncertainty for the Pacific, she added.
While Trump was president in 2017, he warned North Korea “not to mess” with the United States.
“North Korea [is] best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met by fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
North Korea responded deriding his warning as a “load of nonsense”.
Although there is growing concern among academics and some Pacific leaders that Trump would bring “fire and fury” to the Indo-Pacific if re-elected, the former president seemed to turn cold at the thought of conflict.
In 2023, Trump remarked that “Guam isn’t America” in response to warning that the US territory could be vulnerable to a North Korean nuclear strike — a move which seemed to distance the US from conflict.
If Harris wins Dr Powles said that if Harris wins, it was important to move past “announcements” and follow-through on all pledges.
A potential win for Harris could be the fulfilment of the many “promises” made to the Pacific for climate financing, uplifting economies of the Pacific and bolstering defence security, she said.
Pacific leaders want Harris to deliver on the Pacific Partnership Strategy, the outcomes of the two Pacific Islands-US summits in 2022 and 2023, and the many diplomatic visits undertaken during President Biden’s presidency.
The Biden administration recognised Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign and independent states and established diplomatic relationships with them.
Harris has pledged to boost funding to the Green Climate Fund by US$3 billion. She also promised to “tackle the climate crisis with bold action, build a clean energy economy, advance environmental justice, and increase resilience to climate disasters”.
Dr Powles said that delivery needed to be the focus.
“What we need to be focused on is delivery [and that] Pacific Island partners are engaged from the very beginning — from the outset to any programme right through to the final phase of it.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Washington Post (10/24/24) claims that “the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.”
As the country begins to vote in an election that will be hugely consequential for the climate crisis, the central task of news outlets’ climate beats should be informing potential voters of those consequences. Instead, the Washington Post‘s “Climate Lab” seems to be working hard to cast doubt on whether climate change is really causing weather disasters to be more expensive.
In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:
The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.
The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.
Distorting with cherry-picked data
The problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.
What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”
A review of Roger Pielke’s book The Climate Fix in the journal Science (11/26/10) accused him of writing “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.”
When Pielke published the argument in his 2010 book, the journal Science (11/26/10) published a withering response, describing the chapter as “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.” It detailed the multiple methodological problems with Pielke’s argument:
He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.
Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.
That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”
Debunked a decade ago
In response to Pielke, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (538, 3/31/14) pointed out that it’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product (GDP) if the intent is to detect an underlying climate trend,” since “GDP increase does not translate in any obvious way to damage increase,” as “wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets.”
Pielke peddled the story in 538 (3/19/14) four years later—and lost his briefly held job as a contributor for it, after the scientific community spokeoutagainst it in droves, as not being supported by the evidence.
The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”
That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?
Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.
Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.
Pielke agrees with Pielke
Roger Pielke “agrees with studies that agree with Pielke” (Environmental Hazards, 10/12/20).
Stevens tells Post readers that the science is firmly on Pielke’s side:
Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.
You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.
The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”
A phony ‘consensus’
Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say
disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.
He also adds that
many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.
Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that
the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.
But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)
When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.
Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?
By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
This year, we yet again witnessed the dramatic consequences of the world’s continued burning of fossil fuels, such as hurricane Debby in Quebec, the wildfires in Jasper, and the flooding in southern Ontario. Around the world, millions of people were displaced, harmed and even killed by climate catastrophe.
It is in that context that world leaders will gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22 to continue the global effort to address the climate crisis. This important gathering, known as COP29 (which stands for the ‘Conference of the Parties’), is the 29th annual United Nations climate negotiations since the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1995.
Ahead of this important moment, here are the key things you need to know.
Why is COP important?
COP is far from just a showy conference – it is an important forum that has created agreements and momentum which over the past three decades have measurably reduced the severity of climate change. Before the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world was on track for a catastrophic four degrees of warming. Though we’re still not on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, progress has been made that otherwise wouldn’t have been. For example, at COP28, for the first time, all of the countries agreed to a transition off of fossil fuels, a tripling of renewable energy and a double in energy efficiency.
Let’s start with four quick reasons why COP is important
Global equity: COP is the only forum where every country, including those most vulnerable to the climate crisis, has an equal seat at the table. Decisions are made by consensus, giving Global South countries, at least in theory, an equal voice, though Global North countries often exert influence. This is essential, as the Global South contributes the least to, but suffers the most from, climate change. COP has also established funding mechanisms for wealthier nations, like Canada and the U.S., to support countries needing help with climate adaptation and emission reduction. This COP aims to set a new funding goal to ensure fair contributions from wealthy nations.
COP is the only forum where all countries have an equal seat at the table, including those who are most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. At COP, final decisions are reached through consensus, meaning that at least in theory Global South countries have a platform to negotiate as equals. (In practice, Global North countries still exert a lot of power and influence). This is critical. Countries in the Global South are the least responsible yet most impacted by the climate crisis. COP is the only forum where multiple funding mechanisms were created to transfer funding from wealthy countries like Canada and the United States to countries that need assistance with both adapting to climate disasters and reducing their emissions. This COP will set a new funding goal, to ensure wealthy nations are paying their fair share.
Global collaboration on climate action: We need global collaboration to address global problems. The most important outcomes of the COP process are binding treaties to increase climate ambition, like the Paris Agreement. Every year, negotiators at COP develop processes and tools which are used to ratchet up countries’ individual approaches to climate change. Alongside the official negotiations, lots of countries use COP as a platform for bilateral or multilateral initiatives, like a global treaty to reduce methane emissions.
Accountability: The process forces governments to report back on their progress against their “Nationally Determined Contributions”, which are their domestic plans to reduce emissions. At COP, everybody pays attention to which countries are leading or lagging. This can create pressure on polluting countries from civil society, the media, and through inter-country diplomacy and negotiations to speed up climate action. And that’s why Canadian civil society groups like Environmental Defence go there: to hold Canadian government representatives accountable!
Global attention: COP is also a major moment where much of the world is focused on the issue of climate change. It’s an opportunity for impacted communities to share their stories on the world stage and for climate experts to help build awareness and public mobilization.
Who attends COP?
The primary attendees are representatives from national governments that signed on to the United Nations Framework Convention Climate Change – the UNFCCC. Catchy, right?
Each country sends a delegation that includes government officials as well as Ministers and their staff (known as the ‘negotiators’). They’re the only ones allowed to engage in formal negotiations.
But countries also bring representatives from outside the government to help shape the conversations. For the Government of Canada, this usually includes representatives from provincial governments, Indigenous nations and organizations, climate experts, labour, and voices from the business community. These people are allowed into some of the negotiations, but they don’t actually get a direct say.
Observers are also welcome at COP. This includes non-profit organizations and other civil society groups and activists, industry representatives, scientists, labour representatives, and Indigenous nations. Observers are key to the COP process because they provide expertise and insights that can inform negotiations and, very often, push governments further.
Indigenous nations joined forces with Environmental Defence to call out the Alberta Government’s greenwashing at COP28
Unfortunately, fossil fuel lobbyists and other big polluters also have a strong presence at COP. Last year, the oil and gas industry represented one of the largest contingencies of interest groups present at COP28. Canada was one of the worst countries for enabling fossil fuel lobbyists to participate. There is a clear conflict of interest. Fossil fuel lobbyists aren’t coming to help push for more ambitious action. Their goal is to protect their profits (aka business as usual) and they do so by derailing the negotiations and blocking progress. Each year the movement to Kick Big Polluters Out of climate negotiations grows.
What comes out of COP?
The ultimate goal of COP is to reach global agreements and commitments to combat climate change, like the famous Paris Agreement, which was adopted at COP21 in 2015. Under this Agreement, countries across the world committed to doing everything in their power to prevent temperature rise above 1.5 degrees (which is the temperature limit beyond which climate catastrophe becomes irreversible) all while supporting sustainable development in a way that eradicates global poverty. This is a tall order and one that we are still fighting for.
Other outcomes of COP include commitments from wealthy countries to help fund vulnerable countries dealing with the climate crisis, the signing of bilateral and multilateral agreements between countries, announcements for increased domestic climate action, and new collaborations between state and non-state actors.
Why is COP28 happening in Azerbaijan?
The COP summit rotates through different regions, and this year it was Eastern Europe’s turn. The country that hosts the summit also holds the pen on the final agreement’s text and is responsible for securing unanimous approval of the text from all other countries. Rotating the COP summit between regions is a way for the UN to help promote equity.
Countries from the year’s designated region can volunteer to host the summit based on their interest and infrastructure. Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, therefore emerged as the chosen host for this year’s COP.
Now you’re up to speed on what COP is and why it matters. Stay tuned for another update soon on what we’re hoping to achieve at COP this year!
Papua New Guinea’s decision to withdraw from the upcoming United Nations climate change talks has caused concern among local environmental activists, who argue COP serves as a platform for regional solidarity.
PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko announced last week that PNG would not participate in the 29th United Nations Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP29) in protest and defence “of forest nations and small island states”.
“Papua New Guinea is making this stand for the benefit of all small island nations. We will no longer tolerate empty promises and inaction, while our people suffer the devastating consequences of climate change,” he said.
“Yet, despite contributing little to the global climate crisis, countries like PNG are left grappling with its severe impacts.”
Tkatchenko pointed to the difficulty in accessing climate finance over the years, which he said came despite making “high-level representation at the UNFCC COP”, and said the international community was failing its financial and moral commitments.
“The pledges made by major polluters amount to nothing more than empty talk,” he said.
“They impose impossible barriers for us to access the crucial funds we need to protect our people. Despite continuous attempts, we have not received a single toea in support, to date.
PNG ‘will no longer wait’
“If we must cut down our forests to sustain ourselves and develop our economy, so be it. Papua New Guinea will no longer wait for empty words while our people suffer. We are taking control of our destiny.”
Climate activist and former chair of the Commonwealth Youth Council Kim Allen said getting access to funds to deal with climate change was a big problem.
But he said the climate conference provided a platform to speak louder with other Pacific nations.
“We have to come together and say these are our challenges, this is the story of Pacific Island countries,” he said.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape at the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Meeting in Tonga last August . . . the “non-attendance” at the annual climate talks “will signal our protest at the big nations — these industrialised nations who are big carbon footprint holders”. Image: Pacific Islands Forum
In August, Prime Minister James Marape said he had declared that PNG’s “non-attendance” at the annual climate talks “will signal our protest at the big nations — these industrialised nations who are big carbon footprint holders for their lack of quick support to those who are victims of climate change, and those of us who are forest and ocean nations”.
“We are protesting to those who are always coming in to these COP meetings, making pronouncements and pledges, yet the financing of these pledges seem distant from victims of climate change and those like PNG who hold substantial forests,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ and also with the permission of ABC Pacific.
“For so long, we’ve assumed that when the climate crisis got bad enough, everybody would just wake up, come together, and solve it in some grand ‘kumbaya’ moment — and that’s not necessarily how the story will go. When crises get worse and scarcity gets worse, sometimes it gets harder to love your neighbor. And there is no doubt in my mind that the empathy and respect we will need for our fellow citizens in order to address the climate crisis can only exist in a healthy democracy.”
— Nathaniel Stinnett, executive director of the Environmental Voter Project
On the flipside, participating in democracy is crucial for ambitious climate policy. You’ve almost certainly heard it before: One of the single most important things you can do to make your voice heard and stand up for the issues you care about is vote.
“I think it is worth stressing that we have an absurdly large number of solutions to all of the climate problems we are faced with,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, the executive director of the Environmental Voter Project. “We just have politicians who don’t want to enact those solutions — and that lack of political will to force politicians to lead on climate is a real problem.”
He founded the Environmental Voter Project to address that problem, by identifying environmentalists who don’t vote and using behavioral science to try and turn them into more consistent voters — creating a stronger voting bloc for the climate. “At the end of the day, politicians always go where the votes are because they love winning elections,” Stinnett said. “That, more than any other reason you can come up with, is why anybody who cares about climate change needs to show up and vote, because it’s power just sitting there waiting for us to grab it.”
The organization is driven by data — and it’s already seeing some promising results for 2024. According to a press release shared on Monday, over 214,000 first-time climate voters have already cast ballots in the U.S. presidential election, across the 19 states the organization works in. And in some key swing states, climate-identified voters generally seem to be outperforming other early voters. In Pennsylvania, for instance, 12.8 percent of registered voters had already cast ballots, and 21.7 percent of climate voters had, Stinnett told me when we spoke last week.
Still, participating in democracy remains easier for some than others. Voter suppression is alive and well in 2024, as some groups, fueled by the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen, are ramping up efforts to purge voter rolls, among other tactics. And those efforts hurt the climate movement.
“Laws have been put in place that are designed to make it harder for young people and people of color to vote,” Stinnett said. “And this has been historically the case — there’s nothing shocking or new about this — but we continue to see in our data that young people and people of color are the heart of the modern environmental movement. And so these laws disproportionately impact the climate and environmental movements.”
The pernicious thing about voter suppression, he said, is that it seeps into cultural consciousness. When people believe that voting is complicated — or when they are aware that it is, in fact, more difficult for them than for others — they may simply opt out.
The Environmental Voter Project is one organization working to combat this, by sharing information to demystify the process and helping people make a plan to vote.
You, too, can help make it easier for more people to cast their votes — in some low-key (and even fun!) ways. If you’re feeling an ever-increasing sense of anxiety and dread in these waning days before the 2024 election (hi! same!), getting involved may be one way to quell those feelings. Read on for five ways you can help get out the vote.
Making calls and knocking on doors
Environmental Voter Project has opportunities for volunteers looking to make calls to voters, specifically targeted to non-active voters who list the environment as their top concern. “Just over the last five days of the election, so November 1 through November 5, we’re looking to fill 4,825 phone-banking shifts,” Stinnett said. Modern phone-banking technology enables volunteers to do this from a computer, using a system that automatically dials the target numbers and shows the calls as coming from the organization, shielding the individual volunteer’s phone number. Find out more here.
The organization also has canvassing opportunities for environmental voters in Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Austin, Texas; and Tucson, Arizona. If you’re in any of those cities and interested in going door-to-door to get out the vote, you can sign up here.
Lead Locally is another organization working to rally the environmental vote, by focusing on building support for down-ballot candidates with strong climate platforms. It has two more “Calls for Climate” events before election day — one is today, October 30, and another is Monday, election eve. You can learn more and sign up here.
Offering rides to the polls
Do you have an electric car? And do you live in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, or Wisconsin? If so, you can volunteer to give people rides to the polls with ChargeTheVote, a nonpartisan initiative to boost voter turnout and slash transportation emissions on Election Day. Learn more here.
If you don’t drive an EV, there are still ways to help out with transportation. Look for groups in your area — for instance, Drive Your Ballot is one nonprofit operating in Pennsylvania, coordinating volunteer drivers as well as volunteers who can help organize ride dispatches. Check it out here.
And you can always take a more personal approach, too: Plan a voting carpool with friends, family, coworkers, etc. Studies have shown that something as simple as making a plan with someone can increase the likelihood that a person will follow through on their intention of voting.
Getting free food to voters in long lines
Beyond simply getting there, a long line at the polls can be a formidable barrier for many — and, historically, voters in Black and brown neighborhoods face longer wait times on Election Day. Having access to food and water can help ease some of the burden of having to wait. Pizza to the Polls coordinates pizza deliveries (it also has a food truck program) to places where there are long lines. Anyone can report a crowded polling location online and then help coordinate the pizza delivery. There’s also an option to preorder, for nonprofits and other groups planning events for voter registration and turnout.
Do keep in mind that every state has some form of restrictions on the activities that can take place near voting locations, and for some, that extends to offering sustenance (sometimes known as “line warming.”) For instance, in Georgia, it’s illegal to offer free food or water within 150 feet of a polling place. Still, local groups are finding ways around these restrictions.
Supporting a voting holiday
What about the bigger picture, you might ask? There are, of course, many ways that states and the national government could make it easier for people to vote. One idea is to make Election Day a federal holiday, so that working people would be able to make it to the polls more easily.
If you like that idea, and if you’re the sort of person who calls up your representative in Congress (or if you’re even curious about calling up your representative in Congress) you could do so to express support for the Election Day Holiday Act, a bill introduced by California Representative Anna Eshoo this year.
Talking, texting, and posting about it
If you’ve made it this far in the newsletter, you probably care at least a little bit about voting, and ensuring that others are able and motivated to vote, too. A final, very simple action you can take to encourage those around you to vote is to let them know that you have.
“Often the best thing you can do is be loud and proud about the fact that you are a climate voter,” Stinnett said. “We think it’s so satisfying when we can rationally convince people to do things. But the truth is we’re more social animals than we are rational animals.”
He cited a 2012 study published in Nature, which found Facebook users were more likely to vote when they received a message about voting that included profile pictures of their friends who had already voted. It may sound silly, Stinnett said, but human beings are constantly looking at one another to figure out what behavior is good and appropriate. Don’t waste time (and emotional labor) trying to craft the perfect argument to convince somebody to vote, he said. “If you, on social media or in real life, make it very clear that you are a voter because that’s integral to who you are as an environmentalist, or as a good neighbor, or as a good child, or as a good parent, then anybody else who wants to be those things will say, ‘Oh, I wanna be a good environmentalist, so I should vote, too.’”
— Claire Elise Thompson
A parting shot
In the spirit of being a loud and proud voter, here is a picture of me (and my dog) dropping off my own ballot yesterday in Seattle! I did it! As is the way in Washington state, the ballot showed up in my mailbox a couple weeks ago, and the drop box was a mere 15-minute walk from my house. (I also could have put it in the mail, with no postage required.)
Hello, and welcome back to State of Emergency. I’m L.V. Anderson (or Laura to my colleagues), a senior editor at Grist, and I’m taking over the newsletter today to give you a wide-angle look at how climate change is affecting democracy not just in the U.S., but around the world.
One of the biggest stories of this year’s U.S. presidential election is former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric. Over the past few years, Trump has described his political opponents as “vermin” and made more than 100 threats to prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish them. He’s said he would be a dictator on “day one” of his second term. He’s called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He’s demonized immigrants and promised mass deportation. That’s just a small sample of Trump’s numerous pledges to pursue retaliation and personal grievances without regard for democratic norms.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign appearance on July 31 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.Spencer Platt / Getty Images
In some ways, Trump’s persona and bombast are uniquely American. But he is hardly the only politician around the world to incite violence, scapegoat vulnerable communities, and seek unchecked power in recent years. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are just a few of Trump’s international counterparts. The global rise of these authoritarian populists, also known as strongmen, has coincided with rapidly accelerating climate change and unprecedented hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires. Could climate change actually be contributing to the rise of authoritarianism? That’s the question I address in my latest piece for Grist.
Economists and social scientists have found evidence that global warming can push individuals, and nations, in an authoritarian direction.
There’s never any single factor behind a political trend, but economists and social scientists have found evidence that global warming — which increases people’s physical, social, and economic vulnerability — can push individuals, and nations, in an authoritarian direction. “Climate change is often discussed as a global security risk,” said Immo Fritsche, a social psychology professor at Leipzig University in Germany. As climate change reduces water access and habitable land around the world, the theory goes, intergroup conflict increases. But Fritsche has co-authored a series of studies that demonstrate that reminding people of the dangers of climate change can cause them to more strongly conform to collective norms — and to denigrate outsiders.
His findings point to a different possible explanation for how climate change could contribute to political destabilization. “The idea was to think about another potentially catalyzing process that might also be relevant for such effects, which is a bit more psychological and a bit more subtle.”
You can read about Fritsche’s research, along with other studies that have looked at the ties between climate change and authoritarianism, in my full article here. I hope you find this body of scholarship as interesting as I do.
A referendum on Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico is still struggling to recover from historic damage caused by Hurricane Maria, which took down the U.S. territory’s power grid in 2017 and created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis there. Trump, who took office that year, withheld about $20 billion in disaster aid and famously tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd as citizens of the island suffered nearby with limited federal aid.
Now, a week before the election, a Trump rally in New York City has thrust the former president’s response to that storm back into the spotlight. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe said in the opening segment of a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. The Trump campaign quickly denounced the racist remark — “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” a senior advisor said — but the Harris campaign, which had put out a Puerto Rico policy plan that same day, had already pounced.
Vice President Kamala Harris attends an event in Puerto Rico to highlight the administration’s support of the U.S. territory’s recovery and renewal.Drew Angerer / AFP via Getty Images
“Today I released my plan to help build a brighter future for Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people as president,” Vice President Harris posted on X Sunday night. “Meanwhile, at Donald Trump’s rally, they’re calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.” Harris’ proposal, called Building an Opportunity Economy for Puerto Rico, focuses on making the island’s grid greener and more resilient by tapping into federal disaster funding and clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Latin pop stars Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin, who have tens of millions of followers between them, shared Harris’ Puerto Rico plan hours after the racist, misogynistic, and vitriolic comments made by the former president and other speakers at the rally, including Hinchcliffe, started making headlines. Puerto Ricans can participate in primary elections, but it does not have votes in the Electoral College, so residents have no say over who becomes president. There are, however, nearly 6 million Puerto Ricans living in the continental U.S. who can vote — and 8 percent of them live in Pennsylvania, the swing state where Harris unveiled her Puerto Rico policy plan on Sunday.
— Zoya Teirstein
What we’re reading
Colorado River punt: The Biden administration, which is leading negotiations between seven western states over water usage on the Colorado River, has decided to delay a decision on water cuts until next year, reports Politico Pro. It will be up to the next president to decide who bears the brunt of future water shortages on the river. Read more
Harris leads on disaster poll: A new survey from the left-aligned polling firm Data for Progress found that voters trust Kamala Harris to respond to a natural disaster more than they trust Donald Trump. The poll, which was conducted just days after Hurricane Milton made landfall, found the vice president leading the former president on the issue by 50 percent to 46 percent. Read more
An Election Day hurricane?: We’re nearing the end of hurricane season, but there’s still enough heat in the tropics to support the formation of a tropical cyclone, and some models even predict that one could emerge next week around Election Day. Counties in Florida have contingency plans to shift polling places around, reports Florida Today, but there’s only so much they can do. Read more
Trump politicized disaster aid: In the last months of his presidency, as Washington state raced to recover from a wildfire outbreak, then-president Donald Trump refused to grant a disaster declaration for the blue state. The state’s Democratic former governor, Jay Inslee, told E&E News that he had to wait until President Joe Biden took office to get money from FEMA. Read more
Ballot box arson: A drop box for mail-in ballots in the city of Vancouver, Washington, was set on fire Monday morning in what appeared to be an act of arson, following similar arson attempts in Portland, Oregon, and Phoenix. The city of Vancouver is part of Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, home to one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the closely divided House of Representatives. Read more
Footage of Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa swaying along to the siva dance as she sat beside Britain’s King Charles III encapsulated a palpable national pride, well deserved on delivering such a high-profile gathering.
Getting down to the business of dissecting the meeting outcomes — in the leaders’ statement and Samoa communiqué — there are several issues that are significant for the Pacific island members of this post-colonial club.
As expected, climate change features prominently in the text, with more than 30 mentions including three that refer to the “climate crisis”. This will resonate highly for Pacific members, as will the support for COP 31 in 2026 to be jointly hosted by Australia and the Pacific.
Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa opening CHOGM 2024. Video: Talamua Media
One of the glaring contradictions of this joint COP bid is illustrated by the lack of any call to end fossil fuel extraction in the final outcomes.
Tuvalu, Fiji and Vanuatu used the CHOGM to launch the latest Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative report, with a focus on Australia’s coal and gas mining. This reflects the diversity of Commonwealth membership, which includes some states whose economies remain reliant on fossil fuel extractive industries.
As highlighted ahead of CHOGM, this multilateral gave the 56 members a chance to consider positions to take to COP 29 next month in Baku, Azerbaijan. The communiqué from the leaders highlights the importance of increased ambition when it comes to climate finance at COP 29, and particularly to address the needs of developing countries.
Another drawcard
That speaks to all the Pacific island nations and gives the region’s negotiators another drawcard on the international stage.
Then came the unexpected, Papua New Guinea made a surprise announcement that it will not attend the global conference in Baku next month. Speaking at the Commonwealth Ministerial Meeting on Small States, PNG’s Foreign Affairs Minister Justin Tkatchenko framed this decision as a stand on behalf of small island nations as a protest against “empty promises and inaction.”
As promised, a major output of this meeting was the Apia Commonwealth Ocean Declaration for One Resilient Common Future. This is the first oceans-focused declaration by the Commonwealth of Nations, and is somewhat belated given 49 of its 56 member states have ocean borders.
The declaration has positions familiar to Pacific policymakers and activists, including the recognition of national maritime boundaries despite the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce emissions from global shipping. A noticeable omission is any reference to deep-sea mining, which is also a faultline within the Pacific collective.
The text relating to reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery required extensive negotiation among the leaders, Australia’s ABC reported. While this issue has been driven by African and Caribbean states, it is one that touches the Pacific as well.
‘Blackbirding’ reparative justice
South Sea Islander “blackbirding” is one of the colonial practices that will be considered within the context of reparative justice. During the period many tens-of-thousands of Pacific Islanders were indentured to Australia’s cane fields, Fiji’s coconut plantations and elsewhere.
The trade to Queensland and New South Wales lasted from 1847 to 1904, while those destinations were British colonies until 1901. Indeed, the so-called “sugar slaves” were a way of getting cheap labour once Britain officially abolished slavery in 1834.
The next secretary-general of the Commonwealth will be Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey. Questions have been raised about the quality of her predecessor Patricia Scotland’s leadership for some time and the change will hopefully go some way in alleviating concerns.
Notably, the CHOGM has selected another woman to lead its secretariat. This is an important endorsement of female leadership among member countries where women are often dramatically underrepresented at national levels.
While it received little or no fanfare, the Commonwealth has also released its revised Commonwealth Principles on Freedom of Expression and the Role of the Media in Good Governance. This is a welcome contribution, given the threats to media freedom in the Pacific and elsewhere. It reflects a longstanding commitment by the Commonwealth to supporting democratic resilience among its members.
These principles do not come with any enforcement mechanism behind them, and the most that can be done is to encourage or exhort adherence. However, they provide another potential buffer against attempts to curtail their remit for publishers, journalists, and bloggers in Commonwealth countries.
The outcomes reveal both progress and persistent challenges for Pacific island nations. While Apia’s Commonwealth Ocean Declaration emphasises oceanic issues, its lack of provisions on deep-sea mining exposes intra-Commonwealth tensions. The change in leadership offers a pivotal opportunity to prioritise equity and actionable commitments.
Ultimately, the success of this gathering will depend on translating discussions into concrete actions that address the urgent needs of Pacific communities facing an uncertain future.
But as the guests waved farewell, the question of what the Commonwealth really means for its Pacific members remains until leaders meet in two years time in Antigua and Barbuda, a small island state in the Caribbean.
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. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.
Tuvalu’s Transport, Energy, and Communications Minister Simon Kofe has expressed doubt about Australia’s reliability in addressing the climate crisis.
Kofe was reacting to the latest report by report by the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, which found that Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom are responsible for more than 60 percent of emissions generated from extraction of fossil fuels across Commonwealth countries since 1990.
Kofe told RNZ Pacific that the report proves that Australia has essentially undermined its own climate credibility.
He said that there is a sense of responsibility on Tuvalu, being at the forefront of the impacts of climate change, to continue to advocate for stronger climate action and to talk to its partners.
“When the climate crisis really hits these countries, I think that might really get their attention. But that might actually be too late when countries actually begin to take this issue seriously,” he said.
He noted that Australia approved the extension of three more coal mines last month, which demonstrates that “there’s a lot of work to be done”.
‘Shoots their credibility’
“I think [that] kind of shoots their own credibility in the in the climate space.”
While Pacific leaders have endorsed Australia’s bid to host the United Nations climate change conference, or COP31, in 2026, Kofe said that if Australia really wanted to take leadership on the climate front, then they needed to show it in their actions.
“They are in control of their own policies and decisions. All we can do is continue to talk to them and put pressure on them,” he said.
“We just have to keep pressuring our partner, Australia, to do the right thing.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Creating a trigger event and a moment of the whirlwind — a period in which social movements capture the political spotlight in a country in a major way and shift the terms of public debate — is a rare and important accomplishment. The initial rounds of Extinction Rebellion actions in the U.K. in 2018 and Sunrise’s public breakthrough in the United States the same year, as well as the emergence of…
Grassroots environmental defenders are building a variety of strategic, community-based approaches to environmental justice. Global actors can do more to support their work write Rebecca Iwerks & Ye Yinth & Otto Saki on 14 October 2024 in Open Global Rights.
The last few years have seen encouraging steps to respond through global and regional policy. National governments have started to make specific commitments to protect environmental rights defenders, deeming it necessary to address the climate crisis. The Escazu agreement in Latin America has explicit requirements for the state protection of environmental rights defenders. [NOTE: On 16 October 2024 civil society in the Americas has issued an urgent call to accelerate the implementation of the Plan of Action on Human Rights Defenders, of the Escazú Agreement, adopted five months ago].Just this month, the UNFCCC Supervisory Body for Article 6.4 and the UN Secretary General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals showed how global bodies can incorporate the protection of environmental rights defenders directly into climate policy. More broadly, hundreds of organizations have pooled their efforts to end retaliation against environmental defenders through the ALLIED network.
Last year, we examined the experiences of environmental defenders who were able to continue their work in repressed environments, using tenets of legal empowerment to find pathways to justice in ways that reduce their risk. Here’s what we saw:
Building community power.…
Changing paths to remedy. …
Building relationships with allies. …..
Knowing, using, and shaping the law to respond to security concerns. …
How do we super-charge support for this subtle, effective protection alternative?
While grassroots justice advocates are continuing to seek remedies in tricky places, global actors can do more to support them. The primary shift that can support this type of innovative risk response is to provide flexible, unrestricted funding directly to grassroots justice advocates, whether through philanthropy or from pooled private sector funds that facilitate independent legal and technical support. Flexible funding allows the practitioners to shift their plans as pathways become riskier; it also allows them to invest in security equipment that may not clearly fit into a project-driven budget. Openness to different types of reporting can allow grassroots justice advocates to make decisions about what information is safest for them to reveal without concerns about financial security.
Secondly, those who influence global frameworks, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), can do more to incorporate the security of environmental rights defenders into these frameworks. For example, the security of environmental rights defenders is integral to the access to justice encompassed by Sustainable Development Goal 16, and progress on that issue should be included in all SDG 16 reporting. Within the UNFCCC, the language protecting defenders from Article 6.4 Supervisory Body and the Secretary General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals should be mirrored throughout climate policy frameworks and resourced during their implementation.
While the actions against environmental defenders are shocking, there are significant steps the rights community can take now to support grassroots actors moving forward.
The royal office said as well as attending CHOGM, the King’s programme in Samoa would be supportive of one of the meeting’s key themes, “a resilient environment”, and the meeting’s focus on oceans.
The King and Queen were to be formally welcomed by an ‘Ava Fa’atupu ceremony before meeting people at an engagement to highlight aspects of Samoan traditions and culture.
As we head towards Apia, we can’t wait to visit Samoa for the first time together and to experience the warmth of ancient traditions with your remarkable people. Feiloa’i ma le manuia!
Charles will also attend the CHOGM Business Forum to hear about progress on sustainable urbanisation and investment in solutions to tackle climate change.
He will visit a mangrove forest, a National Park, and Samoa’s Botanical Garden, where he will plant a tree marking the opening of a new area within the site, which will be called ‘The King’s Garden’.
Queen Camilla’s engagements include visiting an aoga faifeau to see first-hand how pupils are taught to read and write, and will visiting the Samoa Victim Support Group, an organisation which assists survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Page one: Thursday, 24th October 2024.
Photo: Junior S Ami / Samoa Observer
Design: Terry Tovio / Samoa Observer
Since 1969, King Charles III has visited 44 of 53 Commonwealth countries, many of them on several occasions.
His visits to the Pacific — before he was King — included representing his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, at Fiji’s independence celebrations in 1970; and visiting Papua New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand as part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012.
Queen Elizabeth II visited the Pacific multiple times during her reign.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“Are you sure you don’t want to just, you know, remove it?” the artist asks assertively.
I considered this before making my appointment at the open-air studio. It’s a relic from a bleak time, after all. But history wasn’t meant to be erased.
“Yep, let’s stick with the plan.”
I’m nervous I’ll prickle too much once the algae ink-coated needle pierces my forearm, now sun-loved and wrinkled. But the process ends up being way less painful than I remember.
After a couple of pokes, the tattoo of my youth, The climate changed, has a new ending: And so did we.
Roughly half of L.A. tattoo artist Sonny Robinson Bailey’s clients come to him for climate-themed tats: a motley crew of surfers, scuba divers, scientists, and environmental scholars no doubt lured by his Instagram bio: “tattoos for the climate concerned.”
Originally from the U.K., Robinson Bailey started focusing on climate tattoos after moving to the U.S. and feeling overwhelmed by all the waste he saw. Some of his designs are quite dramatic (think: a cartoon sun with burning-hot lasers coming out of its eyes; “MINDLESS CONSUMPTION” written in commanding letters), while others are more subtle nods to planetary thresholds and tipping points.
“I did a flash tattoo day a couple of years ago where I wrote a few paragraphs of facts and figures about the climate, put all the numbers in boxes, and tattooed them on people,” he told me on a video call. Five people showed up to get inked with numbers such as .9 (projected sea level rise by the end of the 21st century, in meters) and 1.5° (the warming threshold set forth in the Paris Agreement, in Celsius).
He added a new tattoo to his personal collection that day, too, he said, maneuvering the camera to show me the 2.12° above his left elbow — the approximate amount that global temps have risen since the Industrial Revolution, in Fahrenheit.
Sonny Robinson Bailey’s “2.12” tattoo. Courtesy of Sonny Robinson Bailey
While this figure will eventually become outdated, Robinson Bailey doesn’t mind. “I like to look at my tattoos as a journal,” he said. “[They] are always going to be a sign of the times.” And, he said, looking at it helps him sit in the discomfort of global warming. While many climate disasters feel far away when he reads about them in the news, tattoos “bring things back to reality.”
Robinson Bailey’s clients all have their own reasons for getting climate-themed tattoos. He recalls a researcher who asked for a coral tat to celebrate their work making reefs more resistant to heat waves, and a New Yorker who got the .9 sea level rise tattoo in solidarity with their threatened coastal city. Robinson Bailey said that talking to people about their connections to the climate is “the best part” of his job.
I took a page from his book and spoke with several people who have climate-themed tattoos about why they got them and what they represent. For some, they are reminders of what to fight for; for others, an ever-present reminder of what’s already lost. Almost all of them said they plan to get more. Here are their tats and the stories behind them.
Most of visual artist Justin Brice Guariglia’s photography, sculpture, and installation work explores human relationships with the natural world, built upon a foundation of climate science. So when he felt the itch to get tatted in 2016, it was only natural to turn to the latest NASA data for source material.
Sitting in a bean bag chair in his studio in downtown New York, Brice Guariglia pulled up his sleeve to reveal a NASA Surface Temperature Analysis graph climbing all the way up his right arm.
Justin Brice Guariglia’s Surface Temperature Analysis tattoo. Studio Justin Brice Guariglia
The tattoo, which shows the planet’s surface temperature from 1880 to 2016, is accurate and to scale. Brice Guariglia even emailed the scientist behind the work, James Hansen, for fact-checking before he made it permanent. “If you make art about climate or the environment, it’s so important to know the science,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just decoration.”
Although his tattoo is essentially global warming immortalized, Brice Guariglia isn’t distressed when he looks at it — or when he explains it to others who inevitably mistake it for a mountain range or an electrocardiogram reading. “It doesn’t feel negative to me. If it felt negative, I wouldn’t have gotten it.” Instead, he said, it reminds him of his mission to keep working for a better future. “Climate change is the moral imperative of our time.”
Sanjana Paul is currently a graduate student at MIT focused on conflict negotiation in the energy transition, but she’s worn many hats throughout her career in climate. Trained as an electrical engineer, Paul (who was featured on the Grist 50 list in 2023) has collected atmospheric science data with NASA, hosted environmental hackathons, and pushed for climate policy as a community organizer.
The tattoo on her right ankle — the “ground” symbol, which resembles an upside-down T with two lines underneath — is a symbol for her of what has been constant throughout these diverse experiences.
“In circuit diagrams, the ground symbol is where the electric potential of the circuit is zero, so it’s your starting point,” she explained. She got the tat after she graduated from engineering school as a way to mark the starting point of her new career. Now, it nudges her to stay “grounded” — that is, motivated by her deep love for the planet — as she engages in different forms of climate work. And, she added, “In all seriousness, it was just funny.”
Sanjana Paul’s ground symbol and Green New Deal tattoos. Courtesy of Sanjana Paul
As for the “GND” letters above it, Paul added those after her community successfully advocated for a Green New Deal in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a package of environmental policies that passed the legislature in 2023.
“It took us two years of concerted effort,” Paul said. “[The tattoo] was kind of a commemorative thing to say, ‘We did it.’” She still has a screenshot of the photo of it she sent to her group chat when the legislation passed.
Paul, who also has a likeness of the NASA satellite Calipso on her arm, is currently dreaming up her next climate tattoo: an ode to the North Atlantic Ocean in honor of an offshore wind project she’s involved with. The tattoos in her growing collection are reminders of the unexpected places her work has taken her, and she also considers them gateways into climate conversations with all types of new people who ask about what the designs mean.
France-based photographer Mary-Lou Mauricio started something of a movement two years ago, when she began taking photographs for a campaign she called “Born in … PPM.” In the lead-up to COP27, the 2022 U.N. climate summit, she used temporary makeup to “tattoo” subjects with the measurement of the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere the year they were born — a way to capture just how much our overreliance on fossil fuels has changed the Earth’s chemistry — and photographed portraits of them.
The campaign caught on, and to date, she has collected over 4,000 images of people all around the world who have marked their personal ppm on their hands, faces, and stomachs. The portraits offer a way to visualize rapidly rising global greenhouse gas emissions, particularly when older subjects are juxtaposed with younger ones.
She knows of at least two people who have gotten their numbers permanently inked — and she has as well.
For Mauricio, the 340 ppm tattoo on her right shoulder represents the marks that climate change has already left on her and her family. “My parents live in the south of Portugal, where droughts are becoming increasingly severe,” she said. “In 2022, a fire ravaged my parents’ region. … Sometimes they call me when it’s raining, because it’s becoming so rare.”
She told me that this ppm tattoo likely won’t be her last: “I’d like to add the ppms of my children’s births, because they’re the ones I’m campaigning for.”
The Ocean Declaration that will be agreed upon at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) this week will be known as the Apia Ocean Declaration.
In an exclusive interview with the Samoa Observer, Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland said members were in a unique position to bring their voices together for the oceans, which have long been neglected.
“The Apia Ocean Declaration aims to address the rising threats to our ocean faces, especially from climate change and rising sea levels,” she said.
Commonwealth pushes for ocean protection with historic Apia Ocean Declaration. Video: Samoa Observer
Scotland, reflecting on her tenure as Secretary-General, noted the privilege of serving the Commonwealth, a diverse family of 56 countries comprising 2.7 billion people.
“I am very much the child of the Commonwealth. With 60 percent of our population under 30 years, we must prioritise their future.”
Scotland reflected that upon assuming her role, she recognised immediately that addressing climate change would be a key priority for the Commonwealth.
“Why? Because we have 33 small states, 25 small island states and we were the ones who were really suffering this badly,” she said.
Pacific a ‘big blue ocean state’
“We also knew in 2016 that nobody was looking at the oceans. Now, the Pacific is a big blue ocean state.
“But it’s one of the most under-resourced elements that we have. And yet, look at what was happening. The hurricanes and the cyclones were getting bigger and bigger.
“Why? Because our ocean had absorbed so much of the heat, so much of the carbon, and now it was starting to become saturated. So before, our ocean acted as a coolant. The cyclone would come, the hurricane would come, they’d pass over our cool blue water, and the heat would be drawn out.”
The Apia Ocean Declaration emerged from a pressing need to protect the oceans, especially given the devastating impact of climate change on coastal and island nations.
“We realised that while many discussions were happening globally, the oceans were often overlooked,” Scotland remarked.
“In 2016, we recognised the necessity for collective action. Our oceans absorb much of the carbon and heat, leading to increasingly severe hurricanes and cyclones.”
Scotland has spearheaded initiatives that brought together oceanographers, climatologists, and various stakeholders.
Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland . . . discussing this week’s planned Apia Ocean Declaration at CHOGM, highlighting the urgent need for global action to protect oceans. Image: Junior S. Ami/Samoa Observer
Worked in silos ‘for too long’
“We worked in silos for too long. It was time to unite our efforts for the ocean’s health.
“That’s when we realised that nobody had their eye on our oceans, but of the 56 Commonwealth members, many of us are island states, so our whole life is dependent on our ocean. And so that’s when the fight back happened.”
This collaboration resulted in the establishment of the Commonwealth Blue Charter, a significant framework focused on ocean conservation.
“Fiji’s presidency at the UN Oceans Conference was a turning point. Critics said it would take years to establish an ocean instrument, but we achieved it in less than ten months.”
“We are not just talking; we are implementing solutions.”
Scotland also addressed the financial challenges faced by many small island states, particularly regarding climate funding.
“In 2009, $100 billion was promised by those who had been primarily responsible for the climate crisis, to help those of us who contributed almost nothing to get over the hump.
Hard for finance applications
“But the money wasn’t coming. And in those days, many of our members found it so hard to put those applications together.”
To combat this issue, the Commonwealth established a Climate Finance Access Hub, facilitating over $365 million in funding for member states with another $500 million in the pipeline.
“But this has caused us to say we have to go further,” she added.
“We’re using geospatial data, we have to fill in the gaps for our members who don’t have the data, so we can look at what has happened in the past, what may happen in the future, and now we have AI to help us do the simulators.
“The Ocean Ministers’ Conference highlighted the importance of ensuring that countries at risk of disappearing under the waves can maintain their maritime jurisdiction,” Scotland asserted.
“The thing that we thought was so important is that those countries threatened with the rising of the sea, which could take away their whole island, don’t have certainty in terms of that jurisdiction. What will happen if our islands drop below the sea level?
“And we wanted our member states to be confident that if they had settled their marine boundaries, that jurisdiction would be set in perpetuity. Because that was the biggest guarantee; I may lose my land, but please don’t tell me I’m going to lose my ocean too.
Target an ocean declaration
“So that was the target for the Ocean Ministers’ Conference. And out of that came the idea that we would have an ocean declaration.
“It is that ocean declaration that we are bringing here to Samoa. And the whole poignancy of that is Samoa is the first small island state in the Pacific ever to host CHOGM. So wouldn’t it be beautiful if out of this big blue ocean state, this wonderful Pacific state, we could get an ocean declaration which could in the future be able to be known as the Apia Ocean Declaration? Because we would really mark what we’re doing here.
“What the Commonwealth has been determined to do throughout this whole period is not just talk, but take positive action to help our members not only just to survive, but to thrive.
“And if, which I hope we will, we get an agreement from our 56 states on this ocean declaration, it enables us to put the evidence before everyone, not only to secure what we need, but then to say 0.05 percent of the money is not enough to save our oceans.
“Oceans are the most underfunded area.
“I hope that all the work we’ve done on the Universal Vulnerability Index, on the nature of the vulnerability for our members, will be able to justify proper money, proper resources being put in.
“And you know what’s happening in this area; our fishermen are under threat.
“Our ability to use the oceans in the way we’ve used for millennia to feed our people, support our people, is really under threat. So this CHOGM is our fight back.”
As the meeting progresses, the emphasis remains on achieving consensus among the 56 member states regarding the Apia Ocean Declaration.
Republished from the Samoa Observer with permission.
Burr of blade and crash of trunk broke embraces held for centuries. My grove — seeded ere memory — found itself emptied of life by the sound and fury of saw.
Alone, I watched seasons grow erratic. Alone, I watched frost whip rathe flowers. Alone, I watched heat deepen and linger. Alone, I lost the hope to restore the grove.
Then, the humans returned. With spade in place of saw, they broke the ground again. In wounds reopened, they sowed you whose roots embrace all mine, you who taste of lands unknown.
On a near cloudless August day, I arrived at a waist-high iron barrier gate in Washington’s Marckworth State Forest, accompanied by staff from the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, a Seattle-based nonprofit that conserves and restores land from the easternmost edge of the Cascade mountains to the Puget Sound — an area known as the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area. In 1900, Weyerhaeuser — the second largest lumber company in North America — bought its first 900,000 acres of timberland in what, today, is the greenway. “The birth of industrial timber was right here,” said the trust’s executive director Jon Hoekstra, “for better or for worse.” For 35 years, Hoekstra said, conservation groups and nearby tribes have made intense efforts to knit the devastated forests back together through many different projects.
On this particular day, Kate Fancher, the trust’s restoration project manager, took me into the forest to the Stossel Creek reforestation site, which lies some 20 miles northeast of Seattle in the foothills of the Cascade mountains. Stossel Creek is unique among the roughly four dozen projects that the trust currently manages. Here, Fancher is overseeing a multiyear experiment on an urgent new approach to forest management: assisted migration. The strategy involves intentionally shifting the range of certain trees to make forests more resilient to climate change.
“I’m not used to doing this type of experiment. Normally it’s more informal,” she said. “But I think it’s really important to see what we can take away from this and then potentially tie that into our restoration work going forward.”
Fancher (right) walking to the Stossel Creek restoration site in August, along with Sarah Lemmon, a public relations consultant hired by the trust. Syris Valentine / Grist
For the last several decades, standard best practice for reforestation projects said to source native treelings from local nurseries that collect seed from nearby forests. Forest managers learned the hard way that locally sourced seedlings had a better chance of survival, forest geneticist Sally Aitken later told me. During early large-scale reforestation campaigns, seedlings sourced from native but nonlocal trees had a much harder time establishing themselves into environments they weren’t adapted to. Many died. Those that survived often failed to grow as tall or healthy as their locally sourced counterparts.
“Forest geneticists spent decades and decades convincing foresters that they should use local populations of trees to get their seed from for reforestation,” said Aitken, who has been studying the implications of climate change for trees since the early ’90s.
But as the changing climate has created both new extremes and a new normal outside of what local species evolved to withstand, some forest managers are championing an approach that replants with trees adapted not to the current climate, but to the future one.
While that can mean introducing species into ecosystems they have never before occupied, in most cases, like Stossel Creek, the species are the same ones already in the forest, but the individual seedlings are trucked in from other regions, selected based on the environments they’ve adapted to.
The trust and its partners seeded the Stossel Creek acreage with trees sourced from warmer, drier climes akin to what the Pacific Northwest can expect to experience in the future. Some of the 14,000 seedlings planted on the site traveled over 500 miles north from California to reach their new home.
This experiment emerged after Seattle City Light, the city’s electric utility, purchased 154 acres of land in 2015 that a logging company had clear-cut three years prior. City Light acquired the land to preserve salmon and steelhead habitat as part of its extensive commitments to environmental stewardship, and the utility partnered with the trust and several other organizations to coordinate a mass planting of climate-adapted trees in 2019. The hope is that by reseeding the lands with trees adapted to hotter and drier environs, interplanted among locally sourced seedlings, the emergent forest “will be more resilient to heat, drought, pests, disease, and wildfire,” said a report authored by Rowan Braybrook, the programs director at Northwest Natural Resource Group, one of the trust’s partners on the project.
To find out where to source trees that may be well-adapted to the future climate of this particular forest, the project’s designers used the Seedlot Selection Tool developed by the U.S. Forest Service, Oregon State University, and the Conservation Biology Institute. The tool allows researchers and practitioners to experiment with a wide range of scenarios to determine where they might source seeds for the climate scenario selected. In the case of Stossel Creek, the project designers looked at the worst-case climate projections for the next several decades to identify regions and nurseries in southern Oregon and Northern California that would provide the best seedstock.
The specific portions of those two states were selected based primarily on two measures: the “summer heat-moisture index,” to capture the increasing aridity of Northwest summers, and the “mean coldest month,” a key consideration because Douglas firs need a good winter chill to grow come spring. Selecting seedlings from across this range, Braybrook said, has allowed them to use the Stossel Creek experiment to “stress test” assisted migration.
“If you move too far, too fast,” Aitken said, “the biggest risk is cold damage.” While climate change is, on average, warming things up year over year, it has also made sudden and severe cold snaps more likely, which could damage or kill trees born for the California sun.
But after I walked around the Stossel Creek site itself with Fancher, weaving through rows of baby trees ringed by plastic mesh skirts to protect them from grazing elk and deer, and later reviewed the data collected in the four years after the big 2019 planting, I was surprised by how much the Douglas firs from California seem to love the new climate emerging in the western Cascade foothills.
Of the three seedlots — one each from Washington, Oregon, and California — the California Dougs have survived the best and grown the fastest, followed closely by the Oregon firs. On average, over 90 percent of the firs sourced from those southern neighbors survived through 2023. Meanwhile, those sourced from Washington’s own iconic evergreen forests have fared worse, with only 73 percent surviving, according to data collected through last September. According to a report published last year by the Northwest Natural Resource Group, it’s still too early to draw major conclusions from the experiment — but these early results seem to indicate that planting for the climate of the future could bolster reforestation efforts.
Left: A row of Douglas firs planted in one of Stossel Creek’s test plots leading to a weather station. Right: A shore pine planted beside a stump on one of the test plots. Syris Valentine / Grist
Despite the results from experiments like Stossel Creek, and others that have occurred in the Eastern U.S. as well as Canada and Mexico, assisted migration is still a controversial practice. “The Forest Service still requires us to use local seed stock for most of our restoration work,” Jon Hoekstra said, with the goal of preserving local adaptations. Hoekstra, Aitken, and others have increasingly come to realize that those local adaptations may be mismatched to the future climate. Still, they said, forest managers can be averse to assisted migration because they’re often focused on reducing near-term risks. “The safest thing for getting the trees established today isn’t necessarily the best thing for the longer term,” Aitken said.
Assisted migration essentially goes against decades of conservation wisdom — and it constitutes a level of intervention that makes some uneasy. Aitken also noted that it’s not going to be the right approach in every circumstance. “If you’ve got an established, intact forest ecosystem that isn’t suffering from some massive hit of climate or pest, disease, et cetera, I don’t think you want to intervene at this point,” she said. She also advises caution when it comes to moving species outside of their established range — for instance, planting redwoods in Washington. “It’s fundamentally going to change that ecosystem.”
But, ultimately, ecosystems are changing — and, as Grist has covered previously, some believe that approaches like assisted migration may be the best way to recognize and direct the profound changes humans are already having on the landscape. As forest managers plan and implement conservation projects, Aitken said, “We need to balance the risks of movements against the risks of doing nothing, and the right decisions are going to be different in different situations.”
Assisted migration is also being considered as a potential strategy to help animals whose homes are threatened by climate change — like the key deer, a subspecies of white-tailed deer that lives only on the islands of the Florida Keys. Just about 1,000 remain in the wild, and some are advocating relocating the species as sea level rise threatens its home. Here, a doe (smaller than her mainland cousins; about the size of a golden retriever) crosses Key Deer Boulevard on Big Pine Key.
IMAGE CREDITS
Vision: Grist
Spotlight: Syris Valentine / Grist
Parting shot: Jeffrey Greenberg / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Janine Jackson interviewed writer/researcher Derek Seidman about insurance and climate for the October 4, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: As we watch images of devastation from Hurricane Helene, it’s hard not to hold—alongside sadness at the obvious loss—anger at the knowledge that things didn’t have to be this way. Steps could have been, still could be taken, to mitigate the impact of climate change, and making weather events more extreme, and steps could be taken that help people recover from the disastrous effects of the choices made.
As our guest explains, another key player in the slow-motion trainwreck that is US climate policy—along with fossil fuel companies and the politicians that abet them—is the insurance industry, whose role is not often talked about.
Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian. He contributes regularly to Truthout and to LittleSis. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Derek Seidman.
Home Insurers Cut Natural Disasters From Policies as Climate Risks Grow:
Some of the largest US insurance companies say extreme weather has led them to end certain coverages, exclude natural disaster protections and raise premiums.
I think that drops us right into the heart of the problem you outline in that piece. What’s going on, and why do you call it the insurance industry’s “self-induced crisis”?
DS: Thank you. Well, certainly there is a growing crisis. The insurance industry is pulling back from certain markets and regions and states, because the costs of insuring homes and other properties are becoming too expensive to remain profitable, with the rise of extreme weather. And so we’ve seen a lot of coverage in the past few months over this growing crisis in the insurance industry.
Derek Seidman: “The insurance industry itself is a main actor in driving the rise of extreme weather, through its very close relationship to the fossil fuel industry.”
But one of the critical things that’s left out of this is that the insurance industry itself is a main actor in driving the rise of extreme weather, through its very close relationship to the fossil fuel industry. And in this narrative in the corporate media, the insurance industry on the one hand and extreme weather on the other hand, are often treated like they’re completely separate things, and they’re just sort of coming together, and this “crisis” is being created, and it’s a real problem that the connections aren’t being made there.
So I guess a couple things that should be said, first, are that the insurance industry is the fossil fuel industry, and its operations could not exist without the insurance industry.
We can look at that relationship in two ways. So first, of course, is through insurance. The insurance giants, AIG, Liberty Mutual and so on and so on, they collectively rake in billions of dollars every year in insuring fossil fuel industry infrastructure, whether that’s pipelines or offshore oil rigs or liquified natural gas export terminals. This fossil fuel infrastructure and its continued expansion, this simply could not exist without underwriting by the insurance industry. It would not get its permit approvals, it would just not be able to operate, it couldn’t attract investors and so on. So that’s one way.
Another way is that, and this is something a lot of people might not be aware of, but the insurance industry is an enormous investor in the fossil fuel industry. Basically, one of the ways the insurance industry makes money is it takes the premiums, and it pools a chunk of it and invests those. So it’s a major investor. And the insurance industry, across the board, has tens of billions of dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry.
And this is actually stuff that anybody can go and look up, because some of it’s public. So, for example, the insurance giant AIG, because it’s a big investor, it has to disclose its investments with the SEC. And earlier this year, AIG disclosed that, for example, it had $117 million invested in ExxonMobil, $83 million invested in Chevron, $46 million in Conoco Phillips, and so on and so on.
So, on the one hand, you have this hypocritical cycle where the insurance industry is saying to ordinary homeowners, who are quite desperate, we need to jack up the price on your premiums, or we need to pull away altogether, we can’t insure you anymore—while, on the other hand, it’s driving and enabling and profiting from the very operations, fossil fuel operations, that are causing this extreme weather in the first place, that the insurance industry is then using to justify pulling back from insuring just regular homeowners.
JJ: This is a structural problem, clearly, that you’re pointing to, and you don’t want to be too conspiratorial about it. But these folks do literally have dinner with one another, these insurance executives and the fossil fuel companies. And then I want to add, you complicate it even further by talking about knock-on effects, that include making homes uninsurable. When that happens, well, then, that contributes to this thing where banks and hedge funds buy up homes. So it’s part of an even bigger cycle that folks probably have heard about.
DS: Yeah, absolutely. This whole scenario, it’s horrible, because it impacts homeowners and renters. If you talk to landlords, they say that the rising costs of insurance are their biggest expense, and they are, in part, taking that out on tenants by raising rents, right?
But it also really threatens this global financial stability. I mean, with the rise of extreme weather, and homes becoming more expensive to insure, or even uninsurable, home values can really collapse. And when they collapse, aside from the horrific human drama of all that, banks are reacquiring foreclosed homes that, in turn, are unsellable because of extreme weather, and they can’t be insured.
The big picture of all this is that it leads to banks acquiring a growing amount of risky properties, and it can create a lot of financial instability. And we saw what happened after 2008, as you mentioned, with private equity coming in and scooping up homes. And so, yeah, it creates a lot of systemic financial instability, opens the door for financial predators like private equity and hedge funds to come in.
JJ: And it seems to require an encompassing response, a response that acknowledges the various moving pieces of this. I wonder, finally, is there responsive law or policy, either on the table now or just maybe in our imagination, that would address these concerns?
DS: There are organizers that are definitely starting to do something about it, and there are some members of Congress that are also starting to do something about it.
For this story, I interviewed some really fantastic groups. One of them is Insure Our Future, and this is sort of a broader campaign that is working with different groups around the country, and really demanding that insurers stop insuring new fossil fuel build-out, that they phase out their insurance coverage for existing fossil fuels, for all the reasons that we’ve been talking about today.
At the state level, there’s groups that are doing really important and interesting things. So one of the groups that I interviewed was called Connecticut Citizen Action Group, and they’ve been working hard, in coalition with other groups in Connecticut, to introduce and pass a state bill that would create a climate fund to support residents that are impacted by extreme weather. (Connecticut has seen its fair share of extreme weather.) And this fund would be financed by taxing insurance policies in the state that are connected to fossil fuel projects. So it’s also a disincentive to invest in fossil fuels.
In New York, a coalition of groups and lawmakers just introduced something called the Insure Our Communities bill. And this would ban insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel projects, and it would set up new protections for homeowners that are facing extreme weather disasters.
I spoke to organizers in Freeport, Texas, with a group called Better Brazoria, and these are people that are on the Gulf Coast, really on the front lines. And Better Brazoria is just one of a number of frontline groups along the Gulf Coast that are organizing around the insurance industry, and they’re trying to meet with insurance giants, and say to them, “Look, what you’re doing is, we’re losing our homeowner insurance while you’re insuring these risky LNG plants that are getting hit by hurricanes, and fires are starting,” and trying to make the case to them that this is just not even good business for them.
And then, more recently, you’ve seen Bernie Sanders and others start to hold the insurance industry’s feet to the fire a little more, opening up investigations into their connection to the fossil fuel industry, and how this is creating financial instability.
So I think this is becoming more and more of an issue that people are seeing is a real problem for the financial system, and it’s something that we should absolutely think about when we think about the climate crisis, and the broader infrastructure that’s enabling the fossil fuel industry to exist, and continue its polluting operations that are causing the climate crisis and extreme weather. So I think we’re going to see only more of this going forward.
JJ: All right, then, we’ll end it there for now.
We’ve been speaking with Derek Seidman. You can find his article, “As Florida Floods, Insurance Industry Reaps What It Sowed Backing Fossil Fuels,” on Truthout.org. Thank you so much, Derek Seidman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
This story originally appeared in Truthout on Oct. 8, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
As Hurricane Milton barrels toward Florida, residents are bracing for their second catastrophic storm in less than two weeks. Since September 26, when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4, communities across the Southeast have been grappling with the aftermath of that storm’s destruction. Among those hardest hit — and most overlooked — are farmworkers in southern Georgia.
The Georgia Department of Agriculture estimates that the storm has caused billions of dollars in damage to the state’s agriculture industry, affecting more than 100 farmers. Absent from many of these headlines, however, is Helene’s impact on the predominantly Latinx farmworker community, many of whom are undocumented or migrant workers with temporary visas. Ever since Hurricane Helene tore across Georgia, destroying pecan farms, poultry houses, cotton fields, and more, thousands of farmworkers have nowhere to turn as they grapple with decimated homes and lost livelihoods.
“I’ve been seeing pretty much every struggle that farmworkers experience in their daily lives, but magnified times 100,” said Alma Salazar Young, the UFW Foundation’s Georgia state director. “Everybody in South Georgia is struggling, especially in those really hard hit areas, but farmworkers are still an afterthought. Nobody has thought about going the extra mile to take care of them.”
Georgia is one of the top states employing migrant farmworkers through the federal H-2A program, which offers temporary visas for agricultural work. Before Hurricane Helene, living conditions for farmworkers in Georgia were already notoriously poor. The H-2A program requires employers to provide housing for their migrant workers that complies with the standards for temporary labor camps set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These standards, a legal expert noted, are already the bare minimum and have not been updated in decades. Still, they are often not met by employers; federal investigations have cited Georgia farms for mold and water damage, dangerous exposed wiring, and more.
Undocumented workers, meanwhile, rent their homes, usually single-wide trailers. Desperate for affordable housing, these workers also tend to be pushed into substandard conditions, including mobile homes riddled with holes in the siding and drywall, roof and faucet leaks, lightbulbs dangling from wires, pest infestations and front doors lacking locks, secured only by a rope. And that was before the storm. When Hurricane Helene hit, these shoddy structures stood little chance against 90 mile per hour gusts.
The roughly 35,000 H-2A workers in Georgia, as well as an untold number of undocumented immigrants, are not eligible for disaster relief from FEMA.
“Conditions for the workers were already terrible to begin with, but now, many of them don’t realize that they’re homeless,” said Young, who has been traveling to the various farmworker communities in South Georgia that have been impacted by Hurricane Helene. She has seen trailers with their roofs blown off, littered with debris and the floors caving in, while families still attempt to seek shelter in whatever remains.
The roughly 35,000 H-2A workers in Georgia, as well as an untold number of undocumented immigrants, are not eligible for disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), nor do they qualify for food stamps or unemployment assistance.
The financial burden is exacerbated by the fact that many farmworkers already lived in extreme poverty before the hurricane. Minimum wage for H-2A workers in the state is $14.68, while undocumented workers often earn less — usually 10 to 12 dollars an hour, according to Young. If workers are paid by the piece — a basket of blueberries or a busload of watermelons, for instance — that hourly rate can be even more meager. Now, with fields and farms destroyed, it’s unclear when, if at all, workers will be able to return to earning a living.
Many agents that companies hire to recruit H-2A workers charge those workers illegal fees which the workers often pay by taking out crushing loans. If they’re unable to work, these workers will be unable to pay back that debt, on top of struggling to support themselves and their families. Visas for H-2A workers are also tied to one specific employer; if that employer no longer has work for them, they must return to their home countries, primarily Mexico, or risk being in violation of the law.
In the absence of government aid, local churches and groups like the Red Cross or Salvation Army are the only sources of relief for many of Georgia’s farmworkers. But these resources don’t come without barriers.
“Even before the storm hit, we were getting information on the storm, on shelters, and I would have to translate it before I could text it to our farmworker leaders, because it was not being provided in Spanish,” said Young. Sometimes information would be posted to Facebook groups that most farmworkers might not be familiar with, “so even if they do find out, they don’t find out about any type of assistance until it’s gone.”
I’m just so disheartened by how little everybody in general cares about farmworkers, because during the pandemic, they risked their lives to bring food to everybody.
Additionally, police officers and National Guard members have often been present at aid distribution sites, which dissuades undocumented workers from accessing those resources. In May, aiming to crack down on undocumented immigrants, Georgia passed House Bill 1105, which requires local law enforcement agencies to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if an arrested individual cannot provide documentation. Even though the Red Cross and other groups don’t ask for a name or ID, Young said that farmworkers are still afraid to show up: “They’re not going to risk getting deported over trying to get some food.”
In addition to food and water, farmworkers’ most requested items right now are diapers and baby formula. “They’re just trying to make it day by day,” Young said. “They haven’t had a chance to think about the future, while they’re trying to just figure out what they’re going to eat today.”
Immigrants form the bedrock of the country’s food supply, making up an estimated 73 percent of agriculture workers in the United States. Young joined the UFW Foundation after working as the director of Valdosta State University’s College Assistance Migrant Program, during which she witnessed firsthand what farmworkers sacrificed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to put food on tables around the country.
“I’m just so disheartened by how little everybody in general cares about farmworkers, because during the pandemic, they risked their lives to bring food to everybody. Not just in several states, but all over the country,” Young said. “Now that they’re in need, we forgot about them.”
Marshall Islands was elected on Wednesday to sit on the United Nations Human Rights Council, or HRC, from next year, with climate change and nuclear justice as its top priorities.
Currently there are no Pacific island nations represented on the 47-member peak U.N. human rights body.
Marshall Islands stood with the full backing of the Pacific Islands Forum, or PIF, and its 18 presidents and prime ministers.
The HRC’s mission is to promote and protect human rights and oversee U.N. processes including investigative mechanisms and to advise the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Addressing the General Assembly in September, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine warned that “common multilateral progress is failing us in the hour of greatest need, perhaps most at risk are human rights.”
She said accountability must apply to all nations “without exception or double standard.”
“Our own unique legacy and complex challenges with nuclear testing impacts, with climate change, and other fundamental challenges, informs our perspective, that the voices of the most vulnerable must never be drowned out,” she said in New York on Sept. 25.
The Able U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, pictured July 1, 1946. (U.S. National Archives)
At the 57th session of the Human Rights Council two days later in Geneva, she made a specific plea, for it to recognize the impact of the nuclear legacy left by U.S. atomic tests in her country.
“Despite these wrongs, for almost 80 years, we have not received an official apology. There has been no meaningful reconciliation, and we continue to seek redress,” Heine said, as she pitched for a seat on the U.N. body.
“It is my sincere hope that this Council will continue to keep the human rights of the Marshallese people at heart, when considering the matters that we bring before it for consideration,” she said.
Sixty-seven nuclear weapon tests were conducted between 1946 and 1958 while the Marshall Islands were under U.N. Trusteeship and administered by the United States government.
“The Marshallese people were misled, forcibly displaced and subjected to scientific experimentation without their consent,” she told the council, adding that despite Marshallese requests to the U.N. for the tests to stop, they were allowed to continue.
Marshall Islands is considered extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise, cyclones, drought and other impacts of climate change, with a 2-degree Celsius increase to global temperatures above pre-industrial levels expected to make the low-lying atoll state’s existence tenuous.
Aerial view of a surge of unexpected waves swamping the island of Roi-Namur in the Marshall Islands, pictured Jan. 21, 2024. (Jessica Dambruc /U.S. Army Garrison-Kwajalein Atoll/AFP)
In 2011, Marshall Islands along with Palau issued a pioneering call at the General Assembly to urgently seek an advisory opinion on climate change from the International Court of Justice on industrialized nations’ obligations to reduce carbon emissions.
While they were unsuccessful then, it laid the foundation for a resolution finally adopted in 2023, with the ICJ due to begin public hearings this December.
Heine has been highly critical of the wealthy nations who “break their pledges, as they double down on fossil fuels.”
“This failure of leadership must stop. No new coal mines, no new gas fields, no new oil wells,” she told the General Assembly.
When Marshall Islands takes up its council seat next year, it will be alongside Indonesia and France.
Both have been in Heine’s sights over the human and self-determination rights of the indigenous people of the Papuan provinces and New Caledonia respectively.
For years Indonesia has rebuffed a request from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for an independent fact-finding mission in Papua and ignored the Pacific Islands Forum’s calls since 2019 to allow it to go ahead.
“We support ongoing Forum engagement with Indonesia and West Papua, to better understand stakeholders, and to ensure human rights,” she told the General Assembly.
In May, deadly violence erupted in New Caledonia over a now abandoned French government proposal to dilute the Kanak vote, putting the success of any future independence referendum for the territory out of reach.
Heine said she “looks forward to the upcoming high-level visit” by PIF leaders to New Caledonia. No dates have been agreed.
President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands Hilda Heine addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., Sept. 25, 2024. (Reuters/Eduardo Munoz)
Countries elected to the council are expected to demonstrate their commitment to the U.N.’s human rights standards and mechanisms.
An analysis of Marshall Islands votes during its only previous term with the council in 2021 by Geneva-based think tank Universal Rights Group found it joined the consensus or voted in favor of almost all resolutions.
Exceptions include resolutions on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories where it “has generally voted against,” the report released ahead of the HRC election said.
As part of its bid to join the council, Marshall Islands committed to reviewing U.N. instruments it has not yet signed, including protocols on civil and political rights, abolition of the death penalty, torture and rights of children.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stefan Armbruster for BenarNews.
“Our planet is transforming in a way that will make life much harder for most people. It already has brought suffering to millions and millions of people. And in the United States, most of us are learning about the scale and significance of this crisis at a point when there is not a whole lot of time to shift course. That realization carries both a mental toll and an emotional reckoning.”
While it is absolutely crucial to cover climate disasters like these — and many on the Grist team are doing exactly that — here in the Looking Forward newsletter, our mission is to hold up a vision of a clean, green, just future, and report on the solutions that could help get us there. It can feel difficult to do that when the news of the day is so heartbreaking and grim. But the painful realities of climate change are exactly why we need to put forward ambitious, well-thought-out solutions with all haste, for both mitigation and adaptation.
And grappling with those painful realities, and the difficult questions they raise, is an essential part of getting to the solutions — which is what we’re looking at in this week’s newsletter. Last week, Grist rolled out a series, dubbed “Moral Hazards,” that examines some of the ethical quandaries of living in the era of climate change. For instance, how much responsibility does each of us bear to change our actions, and what does it mean to take meaningful action as an individual? Who counts as a climate villain, when every flight you take and every hamburger you eat is a small piece of a deadly puzzle? Is a policymaker who has fought climate change from within the systems that perpetuate it doing good, or failing to meet the moment?
“We really loved this idea of trying to spark a conversation about climate change on these issues where there aren’t easy answers,” said Kate Yoder, a Grist writer and one of the leaders of the series. She wanted the four stories in the package to “create discussions and leave the reader sort of grappling with these issues, and maybe not even knowing exactly how to feel about them, but wanting to discuss them with someone else.”
Living in the Anthropocene — the name sometimes given to our current geological era, in which humans are the driving force of change on the environment — comes with a host of moral questions. And none of them have simple answers, but being willing to entertain and debate them can inform how we decide what’s right, wrong, enough, and fair when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.
“For so long, there’s been this question about debating climate change — and it’s always debating whether the problem is real or what we should do about it,” Yoder said. But rehashing that false debate is getting in the way of asking the questions that really need to be debated to frame how we move forward. “This is sort of like, Can we reframe debating climate change to actually discussing these real dilemmas that there’s no easy answer to?” Yoder said. “Can we debate those, instead of the problem’s existence?”
Managed retreat
Perhaps no issue illustrates the ethical thorniness of adapting to our changing climate more than managed retreat — the planned movement of communities away from hazard-prone areas, often due to flood risks or sea level rise. What counts as “fair” when deciding who must be relocated, and how they will be compensated?
Grist’s Jake Bittle, who has extensive experience covering climate displacement and disaster management around the U.S., writes:
“When I discuss these stories with readers and friends, I find that people’s reactions depend a lot on who lives in the flood-prone community in question. If it’s a case of a coastal city trying to buy out wealthy beachfront homeowners, readers tend to side with the government trying to force residents to take a payout; if it’s a city trying to buy out a low-income or middle-class neighborhood, readers instead tend to side with the residents. In some cases, in other words, we decide that private property rights trump the public interest, and in other cases we decide the opposite, even when the underlying risk from climate change is the same.”
Even after thousands of home buyouts and local managed retreat efforts across the country, Bittle writes, “there exists nothing close to a rubric for deciding when it’s right for a government to force someone to leave their home for the sake of climate adaptation — or when the government has a moral obligation to protect a community that wants to remain in place.”
Bittle runs through some of the difficult questions managed retreat raises, and ultimately envisions a potential scenario that tackles them quite differently. Instead of dealing with managed retreat community by community, he posits, as individual localities come under imminent threat, what if these decisions were made countrywide, holistically, and well in advance?
Knowing that a community is slated for relocation years or decades out would create an opportunity to involve locals in deciding where and how to preserve certain relics, and allow ample time for moves to happen on residents’ terms.
“What if we didn’t think about relocation as, ‘We’re going to move people out today’?” A.R. Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware and a leading voice on managed retreat, said to Bittle. “What if we thought about it as, ‘Where are the places where the people who are in their homes right now are the last people to own those homes?’ That’s still going to be emotionally difficult and challenging, but you have years to prepare.”
Is an approach like this possible? Debatable. Is it desirable? You can decide. What’s so interesting about it to me is that it takes an issue that raises all these thorny and unanswerable questions and reframes it entirely — we don’t have to grapple only with the questions the way they’re typically posed. We can turn them into different questions that might eventually have more satisfying answers.
One of the core questions that has long plagued the environmental movement is that of placing blame and pointing fingers. There has been a concerted effort by many prominent voices in the climate movement to shift away from shaming individuals for failing to lead perfectly sustainable lifestyles within an inherently unsustainable system — and a growing understanding that we can happily lay blame on big corporations and actors like fossil fuel execs who knew exactly what they were doing.
But who else deserves blame, and where is the line between those who do and those who don’t? Is blame even a productive tool in this fight?
A group called Climate Defiance has set up camp on one side of this question. The group has gained recognition for its approach to disrupting events and publicly shaming leaders — with the frank goal of “ending the careers and decimating the reputations of those who disagree with us.”
In his profile of the group, editor John Thomason writes: “The way they see it, the rich and powerful have thrown their lot in with those who have a vested interest in continued fossil fuel use, and this cabal is the main thing standing in the way of a fossil fuel-free future.”
That cabal includes oil CEOs and elected officials like retiring Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, who has obstructed major climate policy and has well-known financial ties to the coal industry. But it also includes President Joe Biden’s climate advisers, Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, who have been key to some of the administration’s climate victories, and whom the group has targeted on multiple occasions for public shaming.
The approach has clearly resonated; the group raised over $100,000 in a single week last month, and has garnered high engagement on social media, although it’s been less successful getting mass turnout to its actions, which typically have involved a small group of core activists. And Climate Defiance leaders have landed meetings with lawmakers and officials, including some of the same ones they’ve made their targets.
But if average individuals don’t deserve to be shamed, and powerful individuals complicit in the system do, where does the line exist between the two? When does an outsider become an insider, for example? (Climate Defiance funders include Hollywood celebrities and heirs to the Disney and Getty fortunes, and the group counts congresspeople among its supporters). And, if your entire approach is based on shaming those who hold power, when they’re ready to listen, are you ready to propose an alternative?
Thomason recounts that as Climate Defiance prepared for its first sitdown with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team, the group’s demands involved stopping two newly built pipelines and ending federal subsidies for fossil fuel production. Thomason writes: “Given the group’s apocalyptic view on the stakes of the climate crisis, those demands struck me as alarmingly modest.”
Perhaps more than a fully calculated strategy, what Climate Defiance seems to represent is a sense of anger, and determination, that I’m guessing many climate-concerned citizens can relate to. Whether or not you’ve translated it into action, I wonder if some of you might resonate, even a little bit, with the sentiment expressed in this quote from one of the group’s volunteers: “Let’s keep f***ing up shit until these shitty f***ers stop destroying our futures.”
And I highly recommend checking out the other two pieces in the series as well:
A thoughtful profile by Yoder of climate scientist Patrick Brown, who caused a stir in the scientific world when he wrote an article last year criticizing his own recently published study in Nature that documented the links between climate change and wildfires;
When an approach as sensitive as managed retreat doesn’t take residents’ priorities into account, it can go horribly wrong. In his story, Bittle mentions the Indigenous community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, where officials began discussing a planned move in 2016, and promised to build a new home for residents that would preserve the architectural style and the fishing traditions of the island. “Instead, they ended up building an ordinary-looking subdivision that tribespeople from the island decried as shoddy and foreign,” Bittle writes. These photos show the problem of erosion on the island — along with some residents’ determination to stay put.
IMAGE CREDITS
Vision: Grist
Parting shot: Bill Haber / AP Photo; Patrick Semansky / AP Photo
Like a priceless painting, the beautiful blue and green swirl in a lake or pond presents a look-don’t-touch kind of situation. It’s the work of proliferating cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, which produces toxins that are poisonous to humans and other animals, especially when blooms corrupt freshwater supplies. These toxins, which the microbes evolved to deter herbivores, are linked to ALS and Parkinson’s disease, plus muscle paralysis and liver and kidney failure. One of the toxins, anatoxin-a, is known as Very Fast Death Factor, in case you were doubting that toxicity.
It seemed a shame, then, that a highly nutritious fern called Azolla — that green mat ducks eat on ponds — long ago made a pact with a species of cyanobacteria, an “endocyanobiont.” Living inside the fern, the microbes get shelter, and provide the plant with essential nitrogen in return. Lately, scientists have been campaigning to turn the fast-growing Azolla into a food of the future. Others envision it becoming both a sustainable biofuel and a fertilizer that captures carbon. But these ideas aren’t likely to get very far if the cyanobacteria living within end up being highly toxic.
A new paper suggests that Azolla may find its way to plates one day: An international team of researchers discovered that endocyanobiont is no typical cyanobacteria. “The cyanobacteria that lives in Azolla doesn’t produce any of these toxins, and it doesn’t even have the genes required to create those toxins,” said Daniel Winstead, a Penn State research technologist and coauthor of the paper. “So that takes one of those barriers away towards its use as food or even livestock feed.”
This is not to say that anyone should find a local pond, skim off the Azolla, and eat it by the handful. Other research groups need to confirm that Azolla is fully nontoxic and safe for consumption before an industry can develop and produce the plant for food. Winstead’s previous research found that while some species of Azolla are high in harmful polyphenols, a species native to the southeastern United States called Carolina Azolla has much lower levels that are further lowered to safe amounts by cooking. Azolla is also high in protein and nutrients like potassium, zinc, iron, and calcium.
Azolla and the cyanobacteria it harbors have co-evolved a mutually beneficial relationship. Floating out in the open, other cyanobacteria species synthesize toxins to ward off hungry fish. “For the cyanobacteria to live within the Azolla, it can’t produce those toxins or it’d also kill the plant,” Winstead said. “So at some point, it didn’t have those genes anymore, and that’s unique among cyanobacteria.”
In return for providing the microbes housing, the Azolla gets an extremely valuable resource: nitrogen. Plants need that element to thrive, but not many species can pull it from the atmosphere themselves. So-called “nitrogen-fixers,” such as beans and clovers, rely on bacteria in their roots to process nitrogen into something the plant can use to grow. The endocyanobiont does the same for Azolla, helping supercharge the growth that allows the plant to double its biomass as quickly as every two days.
Winstead said that some smallholder farmers already use Azolla as fertilizer, and now that the cyanobacteria are confirmed to be nontoxic, perhaps the technique can spread. With that natural source of nitrogen, farmers would be less reliant on synthetic fertilizers, whose production and use spews greenhouse gases and pollutes rivers and lakes. Azolla could also be used as livestock feed, as some farmers are already doing if they can’t afford traditional feed for cattle and poultry.
Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, farmers in China managed to exploit Azolla for both purposes. They grew Azolla in their flooded rice paddies, added fish that fed on the plants, then ate the fish. But it was a difficult process. It was labor-intensive to grow, since farmers needed to separate the fishes before applying herbicides or pesticides. When the fields drained, crews worked the Azolla into the soils as a fertilizer, but that was labor-intensive, too.
While Azolla can fix its own nitrogen thanks to its cyanobacteria, it needed applications of phosphorus to really get growing in rice paddies. “There is no free lunch,” said Jagdish Ladha, a soil scientist and agronomist at the University of California, Davis, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. Those farmers in China switched to using cheap synthetic fertilizers instead. But the idea behind industrializing the production of Azolla would be to produce the plant at a larger scale, then conveniently package it as fertilizer or livestock feed.
Beyond its potential in farming, Azolla could also become a biofuel, according to Winstead, much as corn has been used to make biodiesel. That fuel would be close to carbon-neutral: As the plant grows, it sequesters carbon; burning the biofuel would then release that carbon back into the atmosphere. By incorporating Azolla into soils as fertilizer, farmers would put still more carbon into the ground.
Humans might also shape Azolla like they’ve modified other crops like wheat and corn, selectively breeding the most desired traits, such as bigger grains. “There’s a lot of potential for Azolla to go through that process,” Winstead said, “whether it’s creating a variation of Azolla that tastes the best, or it’s a variation of Azolla that has the most vitamins or the most protein, or maybe the best nitrogen-fixing ability.”
This week on CounterSpin: “How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis” was a recent Newsweekheadline, on a story with a source saying smaller insurers were “especially in danger.” A layperson might wonder why events we pay insurance for should present a crisis for the industry we pay it to. The unceasing effects of climate disruption will only throw that question into more relief.
Writer and historian Derek Seidman joins us to help understand what’s happening and how folks are resisting.
Also on the show: If it comes to issues that many unaffected people are told to care strongly about, immigration from the southern border is high on the list. But how seriously should we attend to a public conversation where believing that your Haitian neighbors want to eat your pets is not a bar to entry? We’ll talk about building a humane dialog on immigration and asylum policy with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of the TikTok ban.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
