This is a guest blog by Tom Ellison, Deputy Director, Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a research institute tackling systemic climate and ecological security risks, and Phil Newell, Communications co-chair, Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a global coalition of over 50 leading climate and anti-disinformation organizations dealing with climate misinformation and disinformation.

This past summer’s extreme weather has brought home the intensity of the climate crisis for many of us around the world: from the catastrophic floods in Nepal, to the lethal heatwaves across Europe and India, to the choking wildfires in North America, France, and Spain. 

As if that isn’t enough, we are seeing these extreme weather crises going hand-in-hand with information crises. The danger of heatwaves is being downplayed. Flooding is getting blamed on foreign neighbors. Wildfires are being attributed to a land-clearing conspiracy. As fossil-fueled extreme weather continues, it is also fueling an information crisis, bringing climate denial, AI slop content, political propaganda, extremism, and online rage bait. This has ramifications that endanger lives, divide societies, and undermine climate action. 

We must protect ourselves and those around us not only from the physical impacts of extreme weather but also from the disinformation that comes with it. The good news is, we can keep ourselves safe by anticipating and short-circuiting lies and distortions.  A new toolkit ‘Weathering Extremes,’  by Jennie King  from CCS lays out some practical steps forward:  

A Spanish military unit battles wildfires in August 2026, which displaced more than 300,000 people across Spain and France. (Military Emergencies Unit, Spanish Ministry of Defense)

Understanding the Threat

Wildfires, floods, and other extreme events bring a host of problematic claims and narratives. Experts sometimes talk about false information that is spread knowingly (disinformation), or  false information spread unknowingly (misinformation), or even  cherry-picked facts that are spread to manipulate (malinformation). But the most important thing is the impact this kind of information has, not the mindset of the person clicking “share.” 

In the wild, we might encounter three main categories of deception around extreme weather. These can look different from traditional denialism in climate debates. But they have a variety of harmful impacts.

• The first category is environmental, which attacks science or cherry picks facts to separate a disaster from its climate-related causes. To use wildfires as an example, this could mean saying this wildfire was started by an arsonist, not climate change. That may be true, but it obscures the fact that climate change is making wildfires more likely and intense, regardless of how they start. Over time, this can weaken our understanding of climate change, and slow down climate action. 
• The second category is political, which attacks disaster response efforts, often to grind an unrelated partisan or geopolitical axe. For example, Russia falsely claimed the wildfire wouldn’t have been so bad if the US hadn’t wasted resources supporting Ukraine, or the US President misleadingly argued that the LA wildfires are the fault of his political rival’s water policies. These claims can polarize governance, undermine disaster relief or recovery, or empower authoritarian leaders.
• The third category is hateful and extremist, which blames disasters on minorities or promotes conspiracy theories. These deceptions might look like the wildfires were caused by Jewish weather control or that foreigners are stealing all the disaster aid. Such falsehoods can divide societies or endanger the safety of vulnerable people. 

The Perpetrators and Motives

These claims are mostly about directing blame, whether to “natural” causes, to conspiracies, to minorities, to political rivals or foreign enemies–basically, anything but climate change. So what is really behind the lies? It comes down to money and power that vested interests have on the line during chaotic, viral climate disasters.

Big Oil & Big Tech

Private interests have a great deal of money to protect or gain from high-profile extreme weather events. Most obviously, oil, gas, coal, animal agriculture, and other polluting sectors don’t want disasters to motivate climate action that threatens their profits. The role of corporate lobbying, advertising, and PR in climate disinformation and on climate  obstruction, i.e. creating doubt on the severity of the climate crisis has been documented for decades. But more recently, the interests of Big Oil are increasingly aligned with those of Big Tech. 

Social Media Algorithms

Once upon a time, social media promised an open shortcut for connecting with other people, be they friends, family, or strangers. But along the way, social media became a stew of addictive algorithms, with users forever scrolling in circles, where attention is sold to advertisers rather than browsing an open web. Now, online conversation around disasters favors whatever earns clicks and cash– whether it’s rumors, rage bait, AI slop, propaganda, or hate speech. As a result, the social media channel for public engagement has been hijacked by dishonest influencers, polluters, and bots. That leaves policymakers and the public struggling to find reliable information during disasters, right when they need it most.

Political Ideology

Besides money, disinformation about extreme weather is also motivated by ideology and politics. Authoritarian governments see extreme weather as a chance to attach their message to a major news event and to undermine opponents and critics. Political extremists, especially the far right, have started treating climate change not just as an energy debate but as an enemy cultural identity. These actors are not the cause of our toxic information environment, but exploit and shape it to serve their goals.

Often, all these motives are mixed. For example, Russia has covertly sponsored far-right climate ‘disinfluencers’ in the United States, and the state-owned gas company owns Russia’s largest media conglomerate, showing how directly fossil fuel interests, social media, and global politics are intertwined.

During Hurricane Helene in 2024, the far right, online provocateurs, and Russian media spread climate denial, partisan attacks, and xenophobic messages, fueling security threats to public officials and FEMA relief workers (FEMA).

What Can We Do?

There are ways we can protect ourselves and our communities from these threats:  

1. We as communities and climate concerned citizens should expect disinformation during extreme weather as the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, these information crises can happen anywhere, as local events are co-opted into viral narratives. By reading this and the resources here, you are already ahead of the curve. 
2. Second, we need to sidestep the algorithm and not rely only on social media. It’s tempting to focus all our energy online, but social media tends to reward lies and nonsense over truth. As Jennie King writes in Weathering Extremes, “information resilience is built on networks, not newsfeeds.” That means real-world connections matter – personal relationships, ties with local governments, or simple tools like email lists, phone trees, and group texts – that we can build before a disaster strikes. And it’s worth remembering: as Yale’s Climate Maps show, most people in the U.S, for example, support key climate actions – even if you’d never guess that from social media.
3. Third, we can build defenses ahead of time, rather than scrambling to counter or fact-check every rumor and lie during a crisis. One way is “pre-bunking”– warning people in advance about certain narratives, messengers, or tactics they are likely to run into. In fact, the disinformation examples earlier in this piece are themselves a form of pre-bunking. Another tool is the “truth sandwich” – leading with the truth, then knocking down a false claim or bad source, before reiterating the facts again. We can also work to get accurate information into the data AI chatbots learn and draw from – also called “generative engine optimization”. This is increasingly important as AI use grows, and because cunning governments and companies are already trying to feed their own messages into chatbots.
   

   A resource on prebunking and generative engine optimization, from Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster (CCS).

4. Finally, as citizens and civil society, we can push for the global, systematic reforms needed to make our online environment more trustworthy. Reforms that call for improved safety, transparency, privacy, and accountability standards for tech platforms endorsed by CAAD are a great starting point, and at will  unwind some of the toxic incentives that give lies and outrage the upper hand. 

Toward Information Resilience

Climate change and disinformation are two of the systemic challenges of our time, and they are colliding in harmful ways. Neither will be solved easily. But more people and institutions globally are tackling the challenge, from the UN to researchers to certain governments. Ultimately, reliable information is just as much a part of necessary climate infrastructure as is solar and wind power or flood defences. And everyone has a part to play from newsrooms to social algorithms and even family group chats. 

References and resources: 

• Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster
• Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition

The post Keeping Safe from Fires and Liars appeared first on 350.

For António Guterres, it was his final UNGA as UN Secretary-General. And he used the moment to make the case, repeatedly and forcefully, for international cooperation at precisely the moment when it is under greatest strain. In his final General Assembly address, Guterres called on governments to adopt national plans to transition away from fossil fuels, aligned with 1.5°C, and to protect workers and communities through that transition. And then, in words that will resonate far beyond the UN chamber, he landed on three words: “Polluters must pay.” 

 

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For us here at 350, that matters. For years, movements around the world have been demanding that those who have profited most from fossil fuels contribute to addressing the damage caused by their pollution. On Monday 21st of September, 350.org along with partners from Greenpeace and Oxfam presented a petition to the UN with over 2 million signatures, calling to make pollluters pay. On Tuesday that demand was articulated from the highest level of the UN. 

And it wasn’t Guterres alone. The call for greater accountability from major polluters was echoed by political leaders, including the Spanish minister for ecological transition, Sara Aagesen Muñoz

Perhaps one of the most powerful interventions came from Nepal. Prime Minister Balendra Shah addressed the General Assembly following the devastating Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods, which killed more than 1,400 people and left thousands unaccounted for, according to Nepalese authorities. He spoke not in abstract terms about climate risk, but about families waiting for loved ones who may never come home; communities searching through mud, rocks and floodwater; and homes, schools, roads and livelihoods swept away. 

His message was simple: Nepal heard the warnings. But global political action did not move at the speed required.

“The Bhotekoshi-Trishuli disaster was not just a local tragedy, it was a warning to the world.”

Shah also made the injustice explicit. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet is facing profound consequences from a warming climate. He called for greater climate finance, including grant-based support rather than repeatedly pushing vulnerable countries further into debt.  This is what climate injustice looks like in practice: countries that have contributed least to the crisis are being forced to spend scarce resources responding to its consequences.

THE AWKWARD SILENCE

Scientists, frontline communities and climate movements have been saying for decades that climate breakdown will amplify existing vulnerabilities, undermine livelihoods, drive displacement and interact with conflict and instability. The intelligence assessment adds another powerful voice to that evidence base. But the fundamental problem isn’t a lack of warnings. It is the gap between what governments know and what they are prepared to do.

This brings us to one of the most concerning contradictions at play now: the leaders who will preside over the next stage of the climate negotiations, Australia and Türkiye, both used UNGA and New York Climate Week to talk about energy, electrification and climate action. But they were awfully silent about the elephant in the room: the urgent need to phase-out fossil fuels. It’s not like we’re living the worst energy crisis ever, emphasizing how crucial it is to break our toxic dependency towards oil, coal and gas.

Coal mine in Hunter Valley, Australia. Photo credit: Max Phillips

On the positive side, Türkiye launched its 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge, calling for electricity to account for 35% of global final energy consumption by 2035, alongside initiatives covering grids, buildings, transport, industry and AI. Electrification is important. But there is a fundamental question that cannot be avoided: electrifying with what, and for who?

ELECTRIFY NOW, BUT IN THE RIGHT WAY

As 350 and partners argued this week, electrification needs to go hand in hand with rapidly scaling renewables and phasing out coal, oil and gas – and with making climate finance available for developing countries to achieve this. 92+ organizations published this open letter saying that the electrification target counts only if the power is renewable, if it reaches the people who have no electricity today, if the money follows, and if it comes alongside progress in the negotiations on the Just Transition mechanism, finance, and adaptation, and other existing commitments

Otherwise, we risk increasing electricity demand while leaving the fossil-fuel system at the center of the energy system.

That contradiction was particularly visible in the speeches and policies surrounding COP31. Australia is talking about climate action while its government recently approved an expansion of BHP’s Saraji coal mine. Türkiye is promoting electrification while planning further fossil-fuel power capacity. The issue isn’t whether electrification is necessary. It is. The issue is whether governments are prepared to phase out fossil fuels and support a just transition.

AMBITION CANNOT WAIT

Street view of the wildfires in Türkiye’s Antalya province, which will host the COP31 summit. (Photo credit: 350.org Türkiye)

As COP32 hosts, Ethiopia showed its hand with President Atske’s UN address demonstrating the leadership East Africa has been waiting for. Inviting world leaders to Ethiopia in November 2027 in order to find solutions to the climate crisis, one of the defining imperatives of our era.At a time when other world leaders are backsliding on climate action, Ethiopia carried the torch of climate ambition high. As the next host of the Conference of Parties (COP32), this is exactly the kind of ambitious agenda-setting Africa needs, one that prioritizes a people-centered transition away from fossil fuels. 

However, with the world on the verge of overshooting 1.5C, every fraction of a degree we can avoid heating matters – and so does every political meeting. The World Bank. The IMF. The UN. The climate finance negotiations. The UN Tax Convention. COP31. Each is another opportunity to close the gap between what governments know and what they do. We cannot wait until COP32 to see the fossil fuels phase out in the agenda. We need it now.

UNGA ends. The diplomats leave New York. The speeches disappear from the headlines. But the crises don’t. The world has experienced devastating wildfires, catastrophic floods, extreme heat and a rapidly intensifying El Niño. The impacts are already being felt by people and communities around the world.

Next week, the climate season moves to Fiji for the COP31 pre-COP. All eyes will increasingly turn towards the negotiations in Türkiye and Australia. The question for COP31 should be straightforward:

Will governments finally put a date on the end of fossil fuels,  and put the money behind a just transition?

Because after this week in New York, there is little excuse for pretending we don’t know where the world is heading. We know the risks. We know the solutions. We know who has profited. And, who is paying the price.

Now the question is whether governments are prepared to act. Polluters must pay. And the fossil-fuel era must end.

The post UNGA: A week that laid bare the world’s fault lines, climate crisis all over it appeared first on 350.

This is a first-hand account by Margaretha Winda, a journalist based in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan, on Indonesia’s wildfires, which has produced hazardous smoke that chokes its people and wildlife, and has spread to neighbouring countries Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, and the Philippines. 

There is something ironic about forest and land fires. A blaze may start on a single plot of land. But the resulting smoke and haze do not recognize boundaries of ownership. They move past fences, roads, villages. They enter homes, schools, and the lungs of people who never lit a match. Those who never started the fire are the ones who end up paying for it — and that is as true a few kilometers from the fire as it is a few hundred.

What it’s like here

I remember one morning this season waking up to a sky already overcast, the sun reduced to a faint, sickly yellow smear behind the haze. The smell hits before anything else — burning peat, sharp and distinctive, the kind that settles into your chest until it’s hard to take a full breath. And yet life around me didn’t stop: women were still washing clothes at the riverbank with no protection at all, no masks, no thought given to a health check. Children rode their bicycles to school through thick smoke, unmasked, because no notice had come telling schools to close.

This year is worse than anything I remember from three years ago. Back then, fires happened too, but the smoke never got this thick, and it was brought under control quickly. This year’s fires spread everywhere, and the response never caught up.

Where I live, in Pulang Pisau, 1,503 hotspots and 38 fires have burned 334 hectares this season. Jabiren Raya alone accounts for 1,303 hotspots and 257 hectares — including peat near the Tumbang Nusa bridge up to 40 meters deep, among the deepest burning in the regency. It smolders underground and resists rain rather than burning out quickly.

A Forest and Land Fire Control Brigade worker tries to extinguish a fire in Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan province, on Aug 12, 2026. Photo: Reuters/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana

I am not writing this from a distance. I’m a journalist, and this season my job has put me at the fire sites themselves, working right up against the smoke. The one thing that’s changed for me is that I now have to wear a mask more carefully than ever, just to avoid getting sick myself — though for most people around me, that choice doesn’t even exist. Work doesn’t stop for haze. There is no version of survival here that includes staying home.

It has reached my own family, too. I have two children, and both came down with acute respiratory infections during this haze season that simply wouldn’t clear — coughing, flu, and at one point diarrhea. They were not the only ones. Children and elderly people across my community have ended up in hospital, struggling to breathe.

Other impacts I’ve seen

Nationally, Indonesia’s health ministry recorded nearly 51,000 acute respiratory infection cases tied to the haze in July and August alone. Two volunteers fighting fires in Central Kalimantan died this month from breathing difficulties. An orangutan was found on a plantation in West Kalimantan and later died of suspected smoke inhalation; firefighters elsewhere have found snake and pangolin carcasses in burned areas.

I’ve seen versions of this closer to home too. In Pulang Pisau, in the early morning and evening, visibility here drops to about one meter. The wildlife I’ve seen displaced is mostly snakes, turtles, and monkeys — animals whose habitat simply burned out from under them. A duck farm near one of the fire sites was directly hit as well, its surroundings caught up in the same blaze. On schooling: some areas of Pulang Pisau have shifted to distance learning, but others are still holding regular in-person classes in the middle of all this smoke — there’s no consistent rule, just whatever each school decides on its own.

And the government’s presence has been strangely uneven. Even as fires grew large across the district, official attention stayed narrowly fixed on Desa Tumbang Nusa, while other areas burned with far less response. 

Smoke doesn’t stop at the borders

I’ve lived through enough dry seasons here to recognize the warning signs: the sky dimming to a dull yellow-grey before the smoke rolls in for good. The wind carries the smoke north toward Palangka Raya. This year, it even crossed the Java Sea and kept going — and by the first week of September, four other countries were living inside it too.

• Singapore. On September 4, residents woke up to a smoggy sky as the air quality index crossed into unhealthy territory. By late afternoon, IQAir’s global rankings placed the city with the third-worst air on the planet.
• Malaysia. In Sarawak state, the capital Kuching had already been ranked the world’s most polluted city for over a week straight, with a hazardous reading of 311. On September 4, its Air Pollutant Index in the town of Serian surged past 500 — a level that can halt nonessential work and outdoor activity — prompting Malaysia’s king to consent to a state of emergency there. A Serian resident told reporters, “Even when I turn on the air conditioner, I can still smell the smoke in my house.” Days earlier, the health ministry reported asthma cases up 259% and upper respiratory infections up 124% in a single week.
• The Philippines. Officials declared air quality “acutely unhealthy” across Manila’s metro area, the Visayas, and Mindanao — three separate island groups, hundreds of kilometers apart, choking on the same haze. The health department was telling people to mask up..
• Brunei. Hazy conditions have blanketed the sultanate since mid-August, with no clear end in sight as the fires behind it keep burning.

The city center blanketed in thick haze in Kuching, Sarawak state, Malaysia, on Sept. 4, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Xpin Voon.

We may live in very different places, but our fears are starting to sound the same. Families in Sarawak are now doing what mine has done all season — watching their children for coughs, keeping them inside, waiting for the air to clear. Those who contributed least to causing this crisis are so often the first, and the hardest, hit by it. 

An estimated 10.67 million people are affected by this haze here in Indonesia alone.  Citizens have taken this to court before. In 2017, a group of Palangka Raya residents won a citizen lawsuit against the Indonesian government over its failure in handling forest and land fires and in preventing a haze disaster — a court found the state guilty of unlawful negligence, a ruling upheld on appeal and again by the Supreme Court in 2019, only to be dismissed again in a judicial review on 2022. But winning in court hasn’t meant winning in practice: judgments like this one have gone largely unenforced. 

So when people elsewhere start watching their children for coughs and keeping them indoors, waiting for the air to clear — I recognize that fear completely. It’s the one my family has lived inside all season, without the world watching.

Why this keeps happening

Landowners are responsible for safeguarding their land. Companies are responsible for ensuring their operations don’t create risk. Government is responsible for making sure all of this is actually enforced — not just showing up once a fire is already large.

And I want to be precise about who is actually burning, because this gets misunderstood constantly, both inside and outside Indonesia. Dayak communities here largely stopped clearing land by fire a long time ago. The fires happening now are not, in my experience, a story about traditional farming practices gone wrong. 

Part of why these fires catch and spread so easily  goes back decades, to how this land was managed. Much of Kalimantan’s peat has been drained for industrial agriculture, including oil palm, leaving it dry enough to burn like fuel instead of holding the water that once kept it from catching. Indonesian law requires companies operating on peatland to keep it wet, but those rules are widely ignored, and to make it worse the President dismantled the ad hoc government agency that tasked specifically for peat restoration last year, leaving accountability gap that no other institutions seem to prepared to fill.

Burnt peatland in Central Kalimantan province, Indonesia, in August 2026. Photo: Krismes Santo Haloho/Mongabay Indonesia.

What’s also changed is the climate in which we now live. Longer, hotter dry seasons — the kind scientists tie to the broader climate crisis – are setting the stage for fires to start faster and burn longer. Layered on top of this year’s own strong El Niño, fires can now burn underground indried-out peat for months.

The way forward

Communities here already practice gotong royong — mutual cooperation, neighbors carrying each other through hardship. I opened a volunteer relief post in the Kahayan Hilir subdistrict this season to supply logistics to Masyarakat Peduli Api — the volunteer firefighters actually on the ground putting these fires out. A lot of people have stepped up to donate food and drink for them. But those volunteers are still going out without basic equipment — hoses to fight the fire, fuel for the pumps that draw water. That gap shouldn’t be theirs to fill alone, and it shouldn’t have to substitute for a government or companies acting before the smoke crosses a border, rather than after.

This haze disaster isn’t new, and it isn’t only this year’s story — it comes back every long dry season, and every year the response arrives just as unprepared as the last. My ask, to the government and to anyone reading this far: don’t let this become an opportunity for a handful of elites remain unaccountable while residents’ rice fields burn, while elderly people, children, and pregnant women are hospitalized, while the actual cost gets absorbed by people who had no hand in causing it.  In the end, polluters are darkening our collective skies and must pay for the damage they’ve caused. From burning fossil fuels that heat up the planet to clearing forests for plantations, it’s the actions of big corporations, not small farmers, that are setting our forests on fire. 

These are the very forests and lands that have given life to our communities for generations that deserve better than to be reduced to smoke. Governments must step up and hold the polluters accountable, so that our forests, our country, and all of us who live here can finally breathe freely again.   

The post The Haze We All Breathe: A Letter from Kalimantan, Indonesia appeared first on 350.

This is a guest blog by Rodrigo Leitão, environmental lawyer and member of Coletivo Pororoka, and Alexandre Anderson, of Rede Ahomar — a nationwide organization representing fishermen and fishing communities in the Guanabara Bay region, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, and throughout the country. On October 7 2026, Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency (ANP) is set to hold its next oil block auction — including further expansion of exploration areas in the Foz do Amazonas basin.

The confirmed discovery of oil off the coast of Oiapoque, at the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil — an area known as the Foz do Amazonas basin, puts the region on a slippery path that fishers in Guanabara Bay already know well. A path that, once travelled, leaves marks impossible to erase.

Rodrigo Leitão is an environmental Lawyer; member the Amazonian organization Pororoka and Representative of the Brazilian Institute of Environmental Law (IBDA). Photo: AHOMAR

Guanabara Bay, in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, knows what it looks like when the oil industry arrives. The story began in 1954, when the Manguinhos Refinery started operating. In 1961 came the Duque de Caxias Refinery, known as REDUC. After that came the pipelines, the terminals, the petrochemical plants, the support structures for the offshore industry, the vessels and the new facilities. Decade after decade, the industry took up more of the Bay, competing for space with the people who already lived there. 

Separate licences, accumulated impacts

In Guanabara Bay, the destruction caused by oil didn’t happen all at once — it built up slowly, one project at a time. Each new project was licensed on its own, so no one ever assessed the full, combined impact. By the time the damage became visible, a great deal had already been lost. 

In January 2000, a ruptured of a pipeline spilled around 1.3 million litres of oil, roughly 340,000 gallons, into Guanabara Bay. Mangroves, beaches, fish, birds and thousands of fishers were hit. But the violence against small-scale fishing did not begin at that moment. It had  already been under way for years: in the shrinking fishing grounds, the exclusion zones, the traffic of large vessels, the dredging, the pollution and the steady transformation of the territory.

A participatory mapping carried out with small-scale fishers in Guanabara Bay showed the scale of that loss. The study by Carla Ramôa Chaves, developed at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), found that only 12% to 25% of the bay remained free of restrictions on fishing. The oil industry stood out as the largest single user of the water surface.

Territory and life

Losing a fishing territory is not simply losing an area on a map. Territory means income, food, knowledge and spirituality. Even the definition used by Brazil’s Federal Government recognizes that life in these communities is organized around the waters and their cycles. It took many generations to learn the right time to take from nature what nature offers. And for that, fishers depend on mangroves, rivers, estuaries and seas that are still alive.

So when a fishing territory disappears, what disappears is far more than an economic activity that could easily be swapped for another source of income, as many people assume. It is a form of violence, because it wipes out a way of life handed down from parent to child, built in community and in respect for nature. It is violence because it destroys what people learned to love and to value, in the name of a development that never arrived and never will.

It is impossible to look at this history and not think about the mouth of the Amazon.

Fishing industry leaders from Rio de Janeiro join forces with leaders from the Amazon against well drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River. Photo: AHOMAR

Block 59 is only the first

On August 14 2026, Petrobras confirmed that it had found oil in the main well of Block FZA-M-59 – the first confirmed discovery of oil in the mouth of the Amazon River. As soon as the news broke, several foreign oil companies applied for permission to drill in the area. The block, with four wells planned, can be presented as an isolated business venture 175 kilometres (about 109 miles) off the coast of Amapá. But we are not talking about a single project.

In 2025, contracts were signed for 19 new blocks in the Foz do Amazonas basin, at the mouth of the Amazon River. In June 2026, Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency (ANP) listed another 36 blocks in the same basin for study, with a view to including them in future auctions. What these facts show is the opening of Foz do Amazonas basin as a new frontier for oil exploration.

Once production begins, what comes with it are support vessels, shuttle tankers, helicopters, subsea structures, safety zones, logistics bases, port facilities, fuel, waste, workers, storage, pipelines and terminals.

That is how the occupation of Guanabara grew, little by little, until it stopped being a set of separate projects and became a permanent dispute over territory.

Fishers in the Foz do Amazonas basin do not need to wait twenty or thirty years to find out what fishers in Guanabara learned over the course of their own lives: oil does not only occupy the seabed. It moves into living territories and destroys them.

A mangrove that wraps around the planet

Unlike the generations before us, our greatest challenge is no longer to control nature. It is to join it, if we want any chance of surviving climate change. In the delicate balance of the world, mangroves play a key role. They are important sinks for carbon dioxide, one of the gases responsible for global warming. At the mouth of the Amazon lies the largest mangrove belt on the planet and most of Brazil’s mangroves, stretching across the states of Amapá, Pará and Maranhão – a huge carbon sink.

Mangroves are also fundamental to local life. They are nurseries for countless marine species that provide food and income for traditional communities, something already recognized by Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment. IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, has classified the region as extremely sensitive in social and environmental terms, pointing to Indigenous Lands and protected areas that shelter Indigenous villages, threatened species and one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity known.

IBAMA has also warned that assessing a project in isolation, as in the case of Block 59, does not answer the question of whether the region is suited to receiving the entire oil production chain.

“May the wind blow strong in Guanabara Bay”

That is the motto of the Association of Men and Women of the Sea of Guanabara Bay (AHOMAR), a kind of omen that comes before a great victory. AHOMAR, founded in 2007, today brings together 11 associations and around four thousand fisherpeople who are fighting for formal recognition of their community territories and against the steady loss of fishing grounds in Guanabara Bay. The group stands up to chronic pollution, to the pressures created by REDUC’s operations and by the logistics expansion linked to COMPERJ, the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex project, in a context of serious socio-environmental conflict and threats against fishers.

The experience of Guanabara can help strengthen a wide alliance of small-scale fishing in the Foz do Amazonas basin: to map fishing territories, to record traditional fishing spots and routes, to track changes in the quantity and quality of the catch, to monitor impacts, to produce information through the communities themselves, and to fight so that these peoples have a voice before decisions are taken and not only after the damage is done. To fight so that an economy that may last a few decades does not destroy a socio-bioeconomy that has sustained generations and could sustain many more.

Alexandre Anderson de Souza is a fisherman and president of the Association of Men and Women of the Sea (AHOMAR). Photo: AHOMAR

May the wind blow strong in Guanabara Bay, and may it reach the peoples of the mouth of the Amazon.

The post Oil Exploration at the Mouth of the Amazon: a Warning from the Guanabara Bay appeared first on 350.

Adam Currie is Campaign and Movement Support Manager at 350 Aotearoa. In this piece, prompted by a photograph of the glacier collapse on the Tibet/Nepal border, Adam reflects on grief, scale, and the difference between despair and honest reckoning — and issues a gentle challenge: one climate commitment, made and kept, this September.

Credit: Chinese mountaineer Zhia Yitie

Take a look at this photo. It isn’t remarkable until you look closer. It shows the aftermath of the tragic glacier collapse on the Tibet/Nepal border. The pale stream running down the center is where the ice came away.

What made me double-take wasn’t what had fallen, but what remains.

Look closely at the glacier. Almost all of it is still there. Then think of the tens of thousands of other glaciers across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Picture yourself running away from a surging torrent caused by a collapsed glacier – as thousands in Nepal actually did. Imagine a circle widening across the globe from this one place: rivers, coastlines, towns, ecosystems and lives, all shaped by how much more warming we allow. And it’s so easy in our detached lives to not think about any of this – although perhaps less so for the increasing numbers of us struck by climate-fuelled disasters across the world.

It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of the damage still ahead of us, and there is plenty to grieve; not least the 1300+ folks killed by the flash floods. Our hearts and prayers go out to everyone affected — those who lost loved ones, homes, and communities in this disaster.

But let’s resist the urge to give up before we’ve truly lost. Because the same image also tells us something hopeful: there is still so much damage we can prevent.

The climate crisis isn’t a cliff we either fall off or don’t. There’s no single line that, once crossed, seals our fate — and no single line that, if held, saves us. It’s more like a boulder rolling down a long slope: it’s already moving, and we can’t stop it outright, but we can still shape how fast it goes and how much damage it does on the way down.

A recent UN report confirmed that the world is now set to breach the 1.5°C warming threshold within the next few years. That’s real, and it’s serious. But the same report makes a crucial point: breaching 1.5°C is not the same as losing. How far the boulder rolls, and how much it flattens on the way, is still being decided — by the emissions we cut or don’t cut, starting now.

That’s why every fraction of a degree matters: each one changes what happens on the way down, a slightly worse drought, a stronger storm, another flooded town. And that’s why every tonne of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere matters too — not because any one tonne will stop the boulder, but because collectively, our tonnes decide how hard it lands.

I am writing from New Zealand, where there is a whakataukī – or saying – “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua” or “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past,” has always resonated with me, and never been more relevant toda

I remember the solidarity after the climate-fuelled destruction of Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. People flooded into the area with shovels, food, generators, boats and above all, kindness. Roads were cut off and homes were destroyed, but communities still found ways to reach one another. Hope in moments like that one was never about pretending the damage is small; but is refusing to let the damage be the only thing that defines what happens next.

As I wrote in 2020, there’s no point in a ‘climate sprint’ into the future without learning from and honouring the climate-fuelled disasters that have already happened, or forgetting the mātauranga and ways of living that communities have carried for generations. Sure, a few technological ‘advancements’ may or may not give us a bump. But the key solutions are in the past – living within our means, leaning into hard work/discomfort, sharing, living in the right relationship with others and the land.

None of us controls the whole picture. But everyone reading this has some small piece of it within reach.

So, as September and spring begin, I encourage us all to make one new climate commitment for this month. Just one thing you will actually do differently. The commitment could be anything. Write to someone dealing with a climate disaster here or overseas. Turn up to a planting day. Donate to 350.org. Ground yourself in your community. Volunteer for a climate org. Reach out to someone you’ve lost touch with and pull them a little closer into your community.

The glacier in this photograph is partly gone, but most of it is still there. It’s the same with our humanity. This government and the philosophy behind it are doing their best to undermine the bonds that tie us to each other, and make us retreat into our shells. We’ve lost a lot. But most of us are still here. Monty Python might say, “Always look on the bright side of life.” To that I would add: if we truly believe in the bright side, we have to walk towards it.

Credit to Chinese mountaineer Zhia Yitie for the photo, and 350.org pioneer Bill McKibben for bringing our attention to it.

The post Finding Steady Ground on a Glacier still Standing: A Letter from Aotearoa appeared first on 350.

What does the Pacific Ocean have to do with the electricity you need to charge your phone?

Quite a lot, actually.

Scientists are monitoring the development of El Niño, a natural climate pattern that begins with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific. It might seem a long way from South Africa, and it is, but changes in the Pacific can influence weather patterns thousands of kilometres away.

For Southern Africa, that can mean hotter and drier conditions, putting more pressure on water supplies and agriculture while increasing the risk of fires.

In the Western Cape, officials are already warning that the months ahead could bring higher temperatures, increased fire risk and greater pressure on water resources.

We don’t often connect what is happening with the climate to what is happening in our energy system. But we should. Our electricity system doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It operates in a world that is getting hotter, drier and more extreme. That changes things.

More extreme heat can drive up electricity demand as households and businesses try to keep cool. Fires, floods and severe storms can damage power lines, substations and other infrastructure used to distribute electricity. Water shortages can create additional challenges for parts of the electricity system that depend on reliable water supplies.

These impacts can have very real consequences. Damaged infrastructure can leave people without power. Rising demand can put an already stretched system under even more pressure. Repairs and replacements can increase costs. When the grid is under pressure, electricity becomes scarcer and more expensive.

When we connect the weather and electricity, one thing becomes clear: climate change is changing the conditions in which our electricity system has to operate.

South Africa’s electricity system isn’t exactly starting from a position of strength. We’ve spent years dealing with loadshedding, load reduction, breakdowns and expensive diesel backup, all of which have made the system unreliable, unaffordable and inaccessible.

Unpredictable weather caused by climate change adds another layer to these challenges.

At the same time, South Africa is in the middle of a major reform of its electricity system. We’re talking about electricity market reform, new generation, transmission infrastructure, electricity pricing, the future of Eskom, the role of renewable energy, and how to make electricity more affordable and accessible.

These decisions will shape our energy future. That means we can’t just ask, “Will the lights stay on?” We also need to ask, “Will the energy system we’re building be resilient to climate change?”

We may not have all the answers yet. But the current reforms give us an opportunity to think beyond simply producing more electricity and start thinking about the kind of energy future we want and need.

One that is reliable.

One that people can afford.

One that everyone can access.

One that can withstand a changing climate.

Written by: Boitumelo Masipa for 350.org

Sources:

Western Cape warns of El Niño risks as summer heat, fires and water pressure loom 

Transforming our energy system to ensure reliable and affordable electricity for all | South African Government 

The post Can South Africa’s Electricity System Weather What’s Coming? appeared first on 350.

On August 26, 2026, a catastrophic flash flood swept down from the Bhote Koshi River near the Nepal-Tibet border, tearing through Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading districts in Nepal and destroying entire villages within minutes, leaving thousands missing and hundreds dead. This account is by Dikshya Subedi, a local in Kathmandu who has spent the past seven years working in climate advocacy across the Himalayan region. She is the country lead at SHE Changes Climate and founder of the youth-led organization Youth Action For Sustainable and Eco Nepal (YASEN), and writes here as someone whose own family was directly affected by the disaster.

That Wednesday morning started like any other. At around 9:30 AM, I saw the first news of a massive flood in Rasuwa, the beautiful mountainous district on the Tibet border. Lined with brightly coloured houses and where the Bhote Koshi River enters Nepal, Rasuwa is located a few hours from Kathmandu. Feeling confused and unsettled, I scrolled on, the way we sometimes do when something feels too big to look at directly. A few minutes later, my eyes landed on Facebook again, and this time the news was impossible to scroll past. The flash flood had hit  Devighat, Nuwakot, a quiet riverside town further downstream where my husband was born and grew up in, the place that held his entire childhood.

I called my aunt, who lives in Nuwakot. Her voice on the phone was shaking, terrified. “Nothing is left,” she told me. “Everything is destroyed.” Somehow, my uncle, aunt, and brother Manzil Rimal managed to evacuate from that flooded area just before the massive flood.  But that phone call broke something in me. The place where we used to visit my husband’s hometown for festivals, where we gathered as a family, where his memories live, turned into mud in ten minutes.

An aerial view shows houses covered in mud after flash floods at Devighat, Nepal’s Nuwakot district. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

I’ve worked in climate advocacy for several years. I’ve explained flood risks to government officials, helped authorities understand the danger maps for glacial lakes, and used the phrase “climate crisis” more times than I can count. But watching the impacts of the climate crisis arrive at your own doorstep, was beyond anything I could have imagined. I have spent years telling other people this could happen to them. I never imagined I would be the one making the phone call, listening to my aunt’s voice break on the other end.

There is a saying in Nepal: disaster won’t come by making noise. On that Wednesday, the people of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading learned exactly how true that is. And so did I, not as an advocate this time, but as a daughter-in-law of that soil.

What happened

A sudden, catastrophic flash flood surged in from the Bhote Koshi River near the Nepal-China border on the morning of August 26. It tore downstream through Timure, Syaphrubeshi, and Betrawati in Rasuwa district, sweeping away entire villages within an hour. The floodwaters continued down the Trishuli River corridor, devastating communities further downstream in the districts of Nuwakot and Dhading. Devighat, my husband’s village, was severely affected.

Floodwaters caused severe devastation in Devighat. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

While the exact cause is still being investigated, scientists have traced the flood back to an over 2,000-foot-wide (approx. 600 meters) chunk of glacier that sheared off high in the Himalayas and plunged 7,000 feet (over 2 kms) into the Lhende Khola a tributary of the Bhote Koshi River, sending a flood wave downstream at speeds of up to 193 km/h. This is exactly the kind of event climate change triggers. Warming shrinks glaciers and makes them more likely to break apart. 

The death toll from the devastating Bhote Koshi flood in Rasuwa has reached 939, while 3,925 people remain out of contact, according to the latest update from National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA). The highest number of bodies, 279, was recovered in Chitwan, followed by 216 in Nawalparasi Purba, 169 in Nawalparasi Paschim, 95 in Nuwakot, 65 in Gorkha, 55 in Dhading, 38 in Tanahun, and 23 in Rasuwa. Search and rescue teams, along with relief and medical response units, are still working around the clock. The government has set up dedicated teams for rescue, relief, health, communications, and infrastructure restoration, but the scale of destruction will take a long time to fully understand, let alone recover from.

The floodwaters along with mud and debris completely destroy homes, reaching levels above the rooftops. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

This is personal

For me, this is not something I am following from a distance through headlines. My husband’s home is in Devighat, Nuwakot, one of the places hit hardest. My uncle, aunt, and brother were there and saw the destruction with their own eyes: houses swept away, communities losing almost everything in a matter of minutes. Thankfully, my close relatives are safe. We have not lost anyone in our own family. But we have lost our house and factory, which is the main source of income that my parents and Uncle Aunt took many years to built on is swept away in  seconds. The place where we held countless family gatherings, where all of my husband’s childhood memories live, no longer exists.

Caption: Dikshya’s husband’s family home, buried under mud and debris from the flood. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

The reports coming out of Devighat now are hard to read. A village once known for its bustling market and Jalpa Devi temple one of the very popular temple is buried under mud so complete that only the upper floors of houses still break the surface – uprooted trees flung onto rooftops, electric pylons snapped like twigs. Search teams there are still pulling bodies from collapsed homes, working through mud so thick that sometimes all that’s visible of a victim is a foot. Survivors who’ve come back describe standing in the wreckage of houses they spent their whole lives building, with nothing left to salvage but the clothes on their backs, unsure whether the land is even safe to rebuild on. Watching what has happened to our neighbors, to the village that shaped my husband’s childhood, is heartbreaking in a way I don’t fully have words for.

The destruction left in Devighat in the aftermath of the flood. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

This is the part that people rarely talk about when they discuss climate advocacy: the work is never as abstract as it looks from the outside. I have spent years building the language – resilience, adaptation, loss and damage – that is supposed to help policymakers understand disasters like this one. Advocacy taught me the facts. This flood taught me what the facts actually cost.

Houses in Devighat left destroyed as mud and debris reach rooftops. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

It’s not climate change anymore; it’s a climate emergency

This disaster is a brutal reminder that climate change is not something we can keep filing away as a threat for later. We are already living its consequences here in the Himalayas. 

Global heating is melting the permafrost, the “glue” that holds our mountains together, and that’s raising the risk of glacier collapse more and more likely. A survey published within a day of this flood has now mapped over 3,600 glacial lakes across our river basins, 47 of them classified as potentially dangerous, and this one wasn’t even on the list, because the lake that burst didn’t exist the morning before. That’s how fast this hazard is moving.

Climate change makes flashfloods like the one above in Nuwakot more likely due to glacier collapse triggered by global heating. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

What makes this especially unjust is the imbalanced cruelty of who pays: Nepal is responsible for roughly 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it ranks among the 10 countries most affected by climate change on the Global Climate Risk Index. Nepal’s finance minister, Swarnim Wagle, has put the initial rebuilding cost at US$4–5 billion, nearly a tenth of the country’s entire economy. But that estimate assumes this is a one-time cost. It isn’t. With the region’s glaciers and permafrost continuing to destabilize, a disaster like this one is not a low-probability outlier, it is the shape of what is coming again.

There is still room for hope

In the middle of all this grief, something has genuinely moved me: the response of young people.Within a day, young volunteers across Nepal had organized themselves into the Rasuwa Relief Group, tracking who was missing, making sure support reached those who needed it, even volunteering for risky ground operations. 

Locals and volunteers provide support and rescue in Devighat after the flood. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

I’ve sat in plenty of meetings where “youth engagement” was just a line on someone’s agenda, a box to check before the real decisions happened elsewhere. Watching this unfold in real time, I don’t need convincing anymore. No one assigned these young people this responsibility: they simply took it on, faster than any ministry could move, because these were their families too.

It doesn’t erase my grief. But it has given me hope.It’s proof that the years I spent showing up to advocate for the climate as it affects young people,did build something – a generation that doesn’t wait to be asked.

Things need to change now

The flood that took my husband’s hometown moved at 193 kilometers an hour. We need to move faster. And for that, we need three things:

1. Disaster preparedness and management: Climate response and preparedness cannot be the thing we get to eventually. It has to come first, before the next village disappears. We need early-warning systems, climate-resilient infrastructure, and locally led preparedness for the mountain communities already living with this risk.
2. Locally led adaptation: Youth and affected communities must be given real, resourced roles in local adaptation and early-warning planning, not token invitations after the mourning has begun. 
3. Real climate finance: Wealthy nations, most responsible for the climate crisis, need to stop treating funding as a favor delivered on their own timeline. Nepal needs that money now, not at the next summit. It needs to come as genuine compensation, not charity, and paid out as grants rather than loans that burden our country. It must reach impacted families directly and fast.

This isn’t a wish list; it’s the difference between a village saved in time and one that isn’t. My husband’s hometown is already gone. What we do next decides how many more we can save.

Dikshya in Devighat. Photo: Dikshya Subedi

“Yesterday, this was a climate and disaster story in the news; today, it is a story happening at my family’s doorstep. But the people of Rasuwa, Nuwakot, and Dhading are still here, still fighting, still helping each other. Let’s unite to rebuild together. 

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A fifth of the world’s oil passes through a strait just 55km wide. Right now, that strait is closed, and it’s not the only one. For most of us, the Strait of Hormuz, the Panama Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait are names we half-remembered from a geography lesson. But right now, all three of these critical shipping lanes, plus the Suez Canal and the South China Sea straits, are under simultaneous strain. And the causes aren’t separate stories. War, the climate crisis and a strong El Niño are compounding each other, squeezing the narrow waterways that carry the fuel, food and goods the world runs on.

That’s the warning at the heart of a report from the climate think tank E3G, Beyond Securing Supply. It makes a case that should worry anyone who cares about a just, liveable future: the world’s energy system isn’t just fragile because of any one crisis. It’s fragile because a small number of choke points now have to absorb war, sabotage, congestion and climate breakdown, often at the same time and there’s no cushion left when several hit at once.

Three narrow waterways, one overstretched system

The Strait of Hormuz. Just 55km wide at its narrowest point, this single passage between Iran and Oman normally carries roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its LNG. Since the outbreak of the 2026 war between Iran, the US and Israel, the strait has been effectively shut to commercial shipping. Attacks on tankers pushed war-risk insurance premiums up as much as fourfold, and freight rates on the key Gulf-to-Asia route jumped over 300% almost overnight. Oil and gas prices spiked globally within days, even hitting countries with no direct trade link to the region at all. 

The Gulf of Oman connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/NASA/The Visible Earth

Bab el-Mandeb, at the mouth of the Red Sea, is a vital 18-mile-wide sea lane, a primary global chokepoint where roughly 10% to 12% of international trade and millions of barrels of oil pass dailyOngoing Houthi attacks since late 2023 have made it too dangerous, pushing most Western-linked shipping to go all the way around Africa, via the Cape of Good Hope. That’s not a return to normal , it’s a new, permanently more expensive normal: longer voyages, higher freight and insurance costs, and less spare tanker capacity to absorb the next shock. Egypt runs the  Suez Canal revenues and depends on its tolls, a critical piece of its economy, that have now reportedly fallen by roughly half.

The Bab al-Mandeb Strait from space, between the Horn of Africa (left) and the Arabian Peninsula (right). Photo: by Gallo Images, Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021/Getty Images

The Panama Canal. This is a channel where 5-6% of all global trade goes through, including critical food and gas supplies. Unlike the other two, this chokepoint isn’t shut by conflict , it’s impacted by drought. A strong El Niño, layered on top of long-term climate change, has driven Gatún Lake (the freshwater reservoir the canal’s locks depend on) to record lows for a second time in three years. Daily transits have been cut from the normal ~36–38 ships down toward the low 20s. Ships without a booked slot now face costly reservation auctions , where the average winning bid has reportedly jumped from around $135,000 to as much as $4 million. Scientists studying the 2023 Panama drought concluded it would have been “unlikely” without El Niño, and that climate change is making these swings between El Niño and La Niña more extreme and more frequent.

The Panama Canal is located directly between the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) and the Pacific Ocean Photo: GeogGlobeTales, TikTok

Why these aren’t separate problems 

It would be easy to file all this under “geopolitics” and move on but climate change isn’t a bystander here  it’s a structural multiplier of chokepoint risk.

Three things are happening at once:

1. Physical disruption: War, attacks and accidents slow-down or block the routes directly..
2. “Paper chokepoints”: , Insurance companies, sanctions and shipping contracts make it hard to reroute,  even when another path technically exists. 
3. Climate change: drought, heat and extreme weather are steadily eroding the capacity and reliability of the routes that would normally offer a way around a crisis.

Crucially, these layers stack. When Hormuz  closed ships couldn’t simply detour through the Red Sea route as an escape valve from the Hormuz crisis , because that route was already too dangerous.. When shipping gets rerouted around Africa to avoid the Red Sea, that adds pressure on tanker capacity everywhere else. And when the Panama Canal , one of the few large alternative corridors for Asia-bound US cargoes , is running at reduced capacity because of drought, there’s less slack left in the whole system to absorb the next shock, wherever it comes from.

In other words: the more the climate crisis narrows our margin for error, the harder every other kind of shock , war, sabotage, an accident, a blockage , hits.

Who pays the price

The costs of this don’t land evenly, and that’s the injustice at the centre of it.

While governments of oil-exporting countries may actually see revenues rise when prices spike; Ordinary households, especially in import-dependent countries, see the opposite: higher fuel and shipping costs pushed straight through to food and energy bills. A 10% rise in fuel prices is estimated to raise food distribution costs by 3–5% in import-dependent economies , a burden that falls hardest on the poorest households, where food can already absorb 50–70% of income.

• South Asian economies like Pakistan and Bangladesh are the most structurally exposed of all major importers, heavily dependent on Gulf LNG routed through Hormuz, with little spare capacity to cushion a shock.
• There’s also a slower-moving hit still coming: the Gulf supplies close to half the world’s sulphur and urea (both critical fertiliser inputs) and roughly 40% of global helium. E3G’s analysis (echoed elsewhere) suggests fertilizer shortages triggered by the Hormuz disruption could take 6–9 months to show up, meaning the full effect on food prices and harvests across South Asia and East Africa may still be ahead of us. 

More fossil fuels won’t fix this

The instinctive response to a supply shock is to look for more fossil fuel supply, from new suppliers, new pipelines, new terminals but more supply does not remove the exposure. Oil is priced on integrated global markets, so a shock anywhere raises prices everywhere, regardless of where your own cargo comes from. Diversifying suppliers can smooth short-term bumps, but it doesn’t touch the structural vulnerability of depending on a small number of narrow physical corridors in the first place.

The one thing that does reduce exposure, durably, is needing less oil and gas to move through these chokepoints at all. Once a wind turbine or solar panel is installed, it generates power locally for 25–30 years, immune to a closed strait or a dried-up lake, in a way that no amount of LNG diversification can match. Electrification, efficiency, grid build-out and clean power aren’t just climate policies anymore , they’re energy security policy, and arguably the only kind that actually holds up under simultaneous shocks.

That’s the throughline connecting Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and Panama: three very different crises, one shared root cause , a global energy system built on continuous shipments through a handful of chokepoints, now colliding with a warming, more volatile world. The war in the Gulf will end at some point. The next El Niño will not be the last, and it won’t be gentler. Building resilience means shrinking our dependence on the fossil fuel system that keeps putting all of us at the mercy of these narrow stretches of water.

Sources:

• E3G, Beyond Securing Supply: Chokepoint Risk for Oil and Gas Importers, March 2026.
• Additional information from World Weather Attribution, Carbon Brief, and reports on the August 2026 Panama Canal restrictions.

The post When war, warming and El Niño collide: the world’s shipping lanes are buckling all at once appeared first on 350.

This is a guest post by Camilo Sánchez, a communications strategist working for Greenpeace International.

We are living through a cost of living crisis that is being treated as if it were a mysterious, purely “economic” event, when in reality it has a clear, combustible cause: our dependence on coal, oil and gas. Across the United States, Europe and far beyond, the main driver of recent price surges has not been wages or “too much money” in the system, but repeated fossil fuel shocks feeding into everything from electricity bills to food prices. When we talk about inflation today, in many countries we are mostly talking about fossilflation, a price spiral rooted in the fossil fuel system itself.

War, chokepoints and the human cost of fossilflation

The US‑Israeli war on Iran is first and foremost a human catastrophe, with thousands of lives lost, families displaced and communities facing bombing, blackouts and water cuts across Iran and the wider Middle East. Those impacts are compounded by the environmental devastation of burning refineries, major oil spills, leaking pipelines and militarised shipping lanes, whose toxic fallout will last far beyond the nightly news cycle. At the same time, the decision to wage war in a region that carried a substantial share of the world’s oil and LNG has triggered what the International Energy Agency calls the worst energy crisis since the 1970s, sending fuel, food and transport prices soaring.

The closure and repeated disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, which controls around a fifth of global oil and gas shipping, has shown again how easily a single chokepoint can turn into a global economic weapon. Another fossil fuel chokepoint, the Bab al‑Mandeb strait, has become a flashpoint in a connected war over Red Sea shipping and Yemen, against the backdrop of the same energy shock. This strategically located transit route has enabled Saudi Arabia to boost its oil revenue during the crisis, even as missile threats and blockade politics deepen a humanitarian emergency and ripple into higher bills far from the frontline. As long as our energy system relies on oil and gas flowing through war‑prone chokepoints, war anywhere becomes a crisis everywhere.

The US‑Israeli war on Iran is not an isolated episode. Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, earlier energy crises and repeated OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) supply squeezes have all followed a familiar pattern, fossil fuel prices surge, inflation jumps, whiteland households are left to absorb the shock through higher bills. Each time, governments and central banks talk about “temporary energy noise”, but the reality is that every fossil shock leaves a permanent mark on the price level, pushing people deeper into hardship even after headline inflation starts to fall again.

Governments are bailing out fossil fuels, not people

August 06 2023, Canada, Alberta. Tar Sand Processing in Alberta near Fort McMurray. © Markus Mauthe / Greenpeace

Since fossilflation is driven by oil and gas, governments must cut down their countries’ dependence on fossil fuels as a response to energy shocks. But this is not what we are seeing. An analysis of seven EU countries’ responses to the US‑Israeli war on Iran shows that most emergency packages have been designed to protect fossil fuel consumption rather than to cut dependence on it. Across Europe, roughly 86% of crisis spending by governments is encouraging more fossil fuel use through fuel tax cuts, broad VAT reductions on energy (cutting sales tax on everyone’s gas and electricity bills) and untargeted subsidies (direct payments or price supports for fossil fuel costs for all consumers rather than prioritising support for the most vulnerable households. 

Spain, Germany, and Ireland have spent the most on broad fossil fuel bailouts by cutting fuel taxes across the board. This brings prices down for now, but keeps these countries hooked on imported oil and gas.

The Spanish government’s energy relief €5 billion package is a mixed bag: it includes protection for people against rising energy costs and measures towards shifting to renewables but also a massive tax break for heavy industry, making it one of Europe’s strongest renewable energy commitments and one of its biggest fossil fuel lock-ins, at the same time.

Despite its bold climate rhetoric, Germany’s actual response to the energy price shock has been almost entirely fuel tax cuts and price caps, nothing that meaningfully reduces its fossil fuel dependence.

The Netherlands and Sweden have done better, putting more money into things like energy-efficient homes, heat pump incentives, and cheaper public transport. But even they still spend heavily on fossil fuel subsidies.

Overall, none of these seven EU countries has a plan that actually ends fossil fuel dependence, all are allocating more to fossil fuel bailouts than to structural solutions.

Such measures make fossil fuels cheaper to keep using, rather than helping people use less of them which is not only inconsistent with climate goals, it also deepens inequality. Broad tax cuts and general fuel untargeted subsidies tend to benefit higher‑income households and sectors with high fossil consumption, while leaving the poorest communities with only partial relief and no long‑term protection. Only a small share of the government spending is going towards reducing fossil fuel for good, or speeding up the transition to renewables.

Instead of using limited  public budgets to insulate buildings, expand clean public transport, support agroecology and tax windfall fossil profits, many governments are effectively writing cheques to the fossil fuel industry, hoping that temporary discounts will buy social peace.

Fossilflation, inequality and peace

Fossilflation is not just a technical issue for central bankers, it is a justice and peace issue. Every time oil and gas prices surge, it is ordinary households, especially in low‑income communities on the frontlines of climate impacts, that pay the price through rising bills and reduced public services. In the first 50 days of the US‑Israeli war on Iran, an estimated 150 billion dollars moved from households to oil and gas companies through higher energy prices alone, while governments worldwide are on track to spend around 1.1 trillion US dollars propping up the fossil fuel industry in 2026.

Meanwhile, the social and environmental costs of fossilflation are enormous too. Air pollution from burning coal, oil and gas is linked to roughly 8.7 million premature deaths a year worldwide, and climate‑driven disasters such as floods and heatwaves add hundreds of millions of euros to energy bills in countries like France and Germany on top of lives lost. When governments choose to preserve fossil fuel profits and military alliances over people’s wellbeing, they are effectively trading peace and stability for an economy built on volatile, violent energy sources.

May 01 2002, Germany, Ingolstadt. Esso Refinery. © Jens Küsters / Greenpeace

Dependence on fossil fuel chokepoints such as Hormuz and Bab al‑Mandeb also undermines peace directly. It gives armed actors leverage over global energy prices, incentivises military protection of shipping lanes, and turns entire regions into geopolitical battlegrounds where civilians pay in parts: first through war and destruction, then through the economic fallout and ultimately, through more extreme weather. Breaking this dependence is therefore imperative not only to the climate imperative but also to peace.

The way out: decentralised renewables and a fair response to fossilflation

August 16 2023, Indonesia, Jakarta. Electric Bus in Jakarta.© Jurnasyanto Sukarno / Greenpeace

The evidence from the US, Europe and conflict zones points to a clear conclusion: tackling fossilflation means ending our dependence on oil and gas. There is no shortage of sunlight or wind threatening our energy security, what keeps our societies vulnerable is the decision to stick with fuels whose price and supply can be disrupted at any moment by Trump’s mood, a pipeline explosion or a war.

A coherent response needs four pillars.

• Decentralised, price‑stable renewables. Wind and solar have become the cheapest forms of new electricity generation in history, with solar costs falling by around 87% and battery storage by more than 90% since 2010, and they do not depend on shipping through war‑prone chokepoints. Scaling up local energy communities, rooftop solar, heat pumps, smart grids and green storage can turn households and communities from passive bill‑payers into active participants in a resilient energy system.
• Demand reduction and fair transport. Instead of subsidising fossil fuels for private cars, governments can introduce affordable climate tickets for public transport, strengthen rail networks and night trains, and support remote working and speed limits to cut oil demand. Fair transport policies reduce emissions and shield people from future oil price spikes.

June 10 2015, Japan, Kanagawa-ken. Neighbors Visiting at Farmer’s Market in Japan © Kayo Sawaguchi / Greenpeace

• Resilient food system. Large‑scale renovation of homes, phasing out gas from buildings, and investing in agroecology to break dependence on fossil‑based fertilisers can turn cities and rural areas into climate‑resilient spaces, while making heating and food more affordable in the long run.
• Tax justice and ending fossil fuel bailouts. Ending fossil fuel subsidies and broad tax cuts, introducing permanent taxes on super‑profits and on the ultra‑rich, and banning fossil fuel advertising can help fund solutions that can actually protect people from energy shocks while accelerating the transition.

February 24 2025, Germany, Nauen. Wind Farm. © Paul Langrock / Greenpeace

Breaking free from fossil fuels is not just climate policy, it is an anti-inflation policy, social policy and peace policy. As long as we remain locked into oil and gas, we will remain trapped in repeated cycles of fossilflation, war‑fuelled price shocks and widening inequality. Shifting to renewables, efficiency, fair taxation and justice‑based solutions, is both the opportunity and the precondition for real energy independence, economic stability and lasting peace.

What can you do?

For us to fully tackle this situation, we have to look at both its causes and its solutions. You can start by calling it the right way: fossilflation, so that we put the light on the oil and gas addiction that is causing this crisis in the first place.

Together with that, you can also demand your government to tax those fossil fuel polluters that are reaping astronomical profits from the war. That money would fund the policies and measures that are needed to protect you and your community in this and the next crises, as well as to finance the shift towards the clean, stable and renewable energies that we so urgently need.

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This is a guest blog by Rebecca Stoner, Senior US Communications Campaigner at Oil Change International, a research, communications, and advocacy organization working to expose the true costs of fossil fuels and facilitate the ongoing transition to clean energy.

Globally, over 1 billion people lack reliable access to energy they can afford. Across the US and the world, families are being squeezed by rising energy costs. In the U.S. alone, around 80 million people currently struggle with the cost of utilities.  Some even forgo food or medications to keep the lights on. 

Why gas prices are going to rise

New research from Oil Change International (OCI) finds that the Trump administration’s energy and AI dominance agenda, coupled with its attacks on renewable energy, are likely to raise households’ bills even further. It turns out that for working families, Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda actually means “pay, baby, pay.” 

OCI found that the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies could cause the wholesale price of fossil* gas to double over the next decade. Households will feel the impact of rising wholesale gas prices in multiple ways. Their gas bill will rise. So will their electricity bills, since gas is now the dominant fuel used to generate power for the grid. Businesses are likely to raise prices on food and consumer goods as their electric and gas bills go up. 

A gas power plant in Trumbull County, Ohio. Photo: Credit: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2021. Aerial support provided by LightHawk.

The wholesale cost of gas is expected to balloon because the Trump administration has thrown its weight behind a massive expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG)** exports by lifting a previous pause on  approving new LNG export projects  and backing a massive buildout of AI data centers that largely run on fossil gas, pushing up demand for the fuel to unprecedented heights.  

The primary sources of gas in the US today, the Permian (spanning west Texas and southeastern New Mexico) and Appalachian Basins (centered in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio, in the northeastern U.S.), won’t be able to produce enough to meet the surge in demand Trump’s policies create. To fill the gap, producers will need to turn to the Haynesville shale play in Texas and Louisiana, a large underground gas deposit in western Louisiana and eastern Texas that requires fracking: drilling deep wells and injecting a high-pressure mixture to crack open the rock and release the gas trapped inside. Production in the Haynesville shale play in western Louisiana and eastern Texas is expected to soar by over 130%. The problem is, it’s much more expensive to drill in the Haynesville, where gas is harder to extract. This higher cost of drilling will get passed down to consumers. 

A drilling rig next to a flare outside of Midland, Texas. Photo: Oil Change International

Over the past decade, the annual average wholesale price of fossil gas was $3. When gas supply from the Haynesville grows to meet surging demand, prices will rise above $5. This will escalate the energy affordability crisis in the US and the many countries that import American LNG. 

Trump’s attacks on renewables will also raise prices for households and businesses. His administration has blocked solar and wind projects and slashed clean energy tax credits, taking away renewable energy options that could save families money. While we pay, Trump’s fossil fuel industry donors profit from keeping us hooked on gas. 

The health and climate cost of gas

Reliance on fossil gas costs us in more ways than one. Extracting, processing, and transporting gas pollutes our air and water with nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and hazardous compounds, which are known to cause cancer, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and birth defects with prolonged exposure. 

Greenpeace USA and the Sierra Club estimate that air pollution from currently operating US LNG export terminals causes 60 premature deaths and $957 million in total health costs per year. If all the planned LNG terminals and expansion projects are built in the US, those numbers would increase to 149 premature deaths and $2.33 billion in health costs per year.

The oil and gas industry builds LNG facilities in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities that it treats as “sacrifice zones”, areas where the industry and decision-makers allow concentrated pollution and health risks to accumulate, on the assumption that the harm to residents there is an ‘acceptable cost of doing business elsewhere’.  Because of longstanding environmental racism, these communities are often already facing high burdens of pollution. 

Fossil gas is also a major threat to our climate. It’s primarily composed of methane, a superpotent greenhouse gas, and when more is in the atmosphere, extreme wildfires, floods, and hurricanes are more frequent and more ferocious. Fossil gas also displaces renewable energy options from the market. 

What policymakers need to do differently

There’s nothing inevitable about a future of higher energy costs, polluted communities, and climate chaos. The Trump administration and its Big Tech and fossil fuel industry backers are working to bring it into being so they can get even richer at everyone else’s expense. 

But communities across the world are rising up to demand a better future. They’re resisting attempts to build data centers and LNG projects in their communities, which would drive up energy costs and pollute the air, water, and climate. 

Community leaders march through downtown Houston to oppose oil and gas expansion. Photo: Luigi Morris, Climate Defenders

Decision-makers must listen and act. They can protect families from out-of-control energy costs by stopping the buildout of expensive gas projects and AI data centers, and investing in affordable renewable energy instead. Transitioning to a just renewable energy system will also create good green jobs, reduce toxic fossil fuel pollution, and safeguard communities from deadly climate disasters. 

Political choices are driving the energy affordability crisis, and different choices can get us out of it. 

Congress is currently considering a moratorium on new data centers but lawmakers won’t act unless they hear from constituents. Join us in telling your senators to support the AI Data Center Moratorium Act. 

*Fossil gas, which we’ll usually refer to as simply “gas” in this piece, is not the same as the gasoline that powers vehicles. Fossil gas is the gas used in stoves, for heating homes, and for generating electricity.

**LNG (liquefied natural gas) is the same fossil gas described above, just in a different form. To ship gas overseas, companies cool it down until it turns into a liquid — natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state, at about -260° Fahrenheit, for shipping and storage. The volume of natural gas in a liquid state is about 600 times smaller than its volume in a gaseous state, which is why it’s called “liquefied.” That shrinking is what makes it possible to load gas onto tankers and sell it to other countries, instead of only piping it to homes and businesses nearby. 

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