The 27th annual air quality report from the American Lung Association, or ALA, released on Wednesday evaluates pollution across the country by grading levels of ground-level ozone — also known as smog —as well as year-round and short-term spikes in particle pollution, commonly referred to as soot. The report analyzed quality-assured data collected between 2022 and 2024.

It found that 33.5 million children in the U.S. — 46 percent of those under 18 — live in areas that received a failing grade for at least one measure of air pollution.

The report also found that 7 million children, or 10 percent of all children in the U.S., live in communities that failed all three measures.

Speaking to the Guardian, Will Barrett, assistant vice president of the ALA’s Nationwide Clean Air Policy, said: “Children’s lungs are still developing. For their body size, they’re breathing more air. And also, kids play outdoors, they’re more active, they’re breathing in more outdoor air … So, air pollution exposure in children can contribute to long-term developmental harm to their lungs, new cases of asthma, increased risks of respiratory illness and other health considerations later in life.”

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The report further found that communities of color are disproportionately exposed to unhealthy air. As a result, they are more likely to live with one or more chronic health conditions that make them more vulnerable to pollution, including asthma, diabetes, and heart disease.

Although people of color make up 42.1 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 54.2 percent of those living in counties with at least one failing grade, the report noted. It also found that a person of color is 2.42 times more likely than a white person to live in a community that fails all three pollution measures.

Smog remains the most widespread pollutant affecting Americans’ health. Between 2022 and 2024, 38 percent of the U.S. population — approximately 129.1 million people — were exposed to ozone levels that put their health at risk. This marks the highest number recorded in the ALA’s report in six years, and a 3.9 million increase from the previous year.

Several factors contributed to these unhealthy pollution levels, including extreme heat, drought, and wildfires, which have exposed a growing share of the population to harmful ozone, the report said.

The regions most affected by high ozone levels include southwestern states from California to Texas, as well as much of the Midwest. This is mainly driven by smoke from Canada’s 2023 wildfires crossing into the U.S., along with high temperatures and weather patterns that favored ozone formation in 2023 and 2024 — particularly in Southern states.

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More broadly, the report found that climate change is intensifying ozone pollution by boosting precursor emissions and creating atmospheric conditions such as higher temperatures and lower wind speeds that allow pollutants to build up and ozone to form.

The report also highlighted data centers as a growing source of air pollution. In recent years, data centers have consumed roughly 4.4 percent of total U.S. electricity, a figure that could rise to as much as 12 percent within the next decade.

Their impact stems largely from reliance on regional electricity grids where fossil fuels such as methane gas and coal still account for a large portion of generation, the report said. In addition, many data centers use dozens of large diesel-powered backup generators, which emit carcinogenic particulate matter.

“As the demand for increases in data centers continues to grow, the focus needs to be on non-combustion, clean renewable energy sources that are additive and not taking away from the grid,” Barrett said.

He also pointed to a series of environmental rollbacks by the current Environmental Protection Agency, warning that they are putting air quality at greater risk.

“There’s a devaluing of children’s health by this EPA as they are weakening, delaying, and repealing critical health protection,” he said, pointing to reversals including “missing deadlines for particle pollution standards, repealing vehicle standards, repealing EPA’s responsibility for protecting health against climate pollution, and even allowing for increased emissions of pollution from oil and gas facilities.” He also cited mercury — a toxic air contaminant released from coal plants — as a key concern.

“[There is] a wide-scale effort by the federal EPA to eliminate health protections while also distancing themselves from their own mission to protect public health,” Barrett added.

Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has initiated at least 70 actions to roll back environmental and climate protections. Among them is the loosening of regulations on power plants that limit mercury and other hazardous air toxics.

Other rollbacks include overturning limits on major air pollution sources, disbanding EPA advisory committees on air quality, and ending the practice of estimating the monetary value of lives saved by limiting fine particulate matter and ozone while still calculating costs to companies.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nearly half of US children are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, report warns on Apr 25, 2026.

Now, Indigenous leaders at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII,  are wrestling with a paradox: how to harness AI’s protective capabilities without fueling the extractive forces they’ve resisted for generations.

A new study published by Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Mbororo and a former chair of the Permanent Forum, highlighted some of the possibilities and challenges AI presents for environmental protection, as well as the impacts of the technology on Indigenous territories. These include land-grabbing, water overexploitation, and land degradation due to its high energy, water, and critical mineral needs.

“For generations, Indigenous peoples have protected the world’s most intact ecosystems without satellites, without algorithms or technologies,” Ibrahim told Mongabay. “AI can become a powerful ally to that stewardship, if it is used on our terms in a culturally appropriate way.”

Ibrahim explained that AI can help Indigenous communities monitor biodiversity, detect deforestation, illegal mining, wildfires, or water contamination through the use of satellite imagery and sensors. “When combined with Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, AI can help predict climate impacts, track wildlife movements, and strengthen land-use planning while helping to plan faster resilience strategies,” she added.

In the Katukina/Kaxinawá Indigenous Reserve in Brazil’s Acre state, Indigenous agroforestry agents have been using AI to combat deforestation. The reserve ranks among the top five for deforestation risk, according to a forecast from an artificial intelligence tool developed by Microsoft and the Brazilian nonprofit Imazon.

“It is very important to monitor the land, because we Indigenous people are safer when we can detect if someone is invading, if someone is taking wood from our land, if someone is hunting directly on our land, if someone is putting up a fire close to our land,” Siã Shanenawa, one of 21 agroforestry agents in the reserve, said.

Lars Ailo Bongo, a professor at UiT The Arctic University in Norway, leads the Sámi AI Lab, which investigates how AI can support Indigenous Sámi people. AI is not yet inclusive enough, he said in an email, but it does present some opportunities for communities. “AI can democratize access to the analytical capabilities needed to conduct data-driven modeling aligned to Sámi views and norms,” he said. 

In Nunavut, Inuit communities are blending traditional knowledge with predictive AI models and time-series analyses to locate new fishing locations as climate change impacts the availability of fish. Similarly, in Chad, Indigenous pastoralists are combining participatory mapping and satellite data with predictive AI tools to anticipate severe droughts and secure transhumance corridors, boosting their climate resilience.

In South America, Rainforest Foundation US uses a combination of traditional knowledge and evolving technologies, from planting trees along boundary limits to smartphones and drones, to support Indigenous communities in protecting their territories.

“AI is the latest tool in that continuum,” Cameron Ellis, field science director at Rainforest Foundation US, said in an email. “Community monitors can use AI-derived remote sensing products to process large volumes of satellite data and interpret deforestation patterns linked to mining or agriculture expansion, to respond to those threats more quickly.”

Residents and farmers from Thailand’s Chonburi, and the neighboring Rayong province, which suffer from water shortages and pollution, have raised fears about the environmental impacts of data center expansion in the area — the digital infrastructure that powers AI. Data centers require large volumes of water for cooling and a large amount of energy to operate.  

The same scenario is playing out in many other communities around the world, from rural communities in eastern Pennsylvania to villages in the state of Querétaro in north-central Mexico. Residents are worried about wastewater contamination, water and energy shortages, and rising costs linked to the expansion of data centers in their towns.

“AI is often perceived as immaterial, but it carries a very real environmental footprint,” Ibrahim said. “It depends on vast amounts of energy, water, and critical minerals, many of which are extracted from or located near Indigenous peoples’ territories, leading to land degradation, biodiversity loss and, in some cases, the displacement of communities.”

Beyond the environmental impacts of data centers, Ibrahim’s study also drew attention to other challenges for Indigenous peoples related to AI, such as a lack of infrastructure, legal protection, and institutional capacity to safeguard digital rights. She wrote that AI can also lead to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples or facilitate the extraction of sensitive data. The use of drones, satellites, or mapping tools without the prior consultation of Indigenous peoples, for instance, can expose the location of sacred sites, ecologically strategic areas, or other sensitive areas.

Kate Finn is a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute, which works to align investor strategies with Indigenous rights. She describes what she calls “opportunity space” within AI to help Indigenous peoples preserve their languages and strengthen their governance systems. At the same time, she agrees with concerns about the environmental risks. “The consistent ask from Indigenous peoples around the world is that they want their free, prior, and informed consent respected before data centers go into their land.” she said. “As we approach AI from an Indigenous lens, it will necessarily have to take account of all of those different nodes, both the opportunity space, but also a protective space of lands, territories, and resources, and also of language and culture, and the creative property that Indigenous peoples have placed online.”

Bongo said the Sámi are limited by a lack of funding to hire the AI developers that can create Sámi-aligned AI models and to make these available to the community. “This is especially sad, since we have Sámi AI developers that are interested in doing the work,” he explained, meaning it is not a lack of competency, but capacity. “To make progress there is a need for a bigger center and push, that the Sámi organizations do not have the budgets for, so the states [Norway, Finland, and Sweden] need to provide the funding.”

For projects that rely on outside funding, it’s also important that Indigenous peoples do not become a small minority partner, he said. 

“Technology on its own doesn’t protect forests — people do,” Ellis said. “These tools are only effective when grounded in community governance and leadership, and when the data they generate is used to trigger action on the ground. Likewise, communities must be able to retain sovereignty over how their data is collected to ensure it advances their own priorities without undermining their rights.” 

Ibrahim said that to ensure the protection of Indigenous peoples and their territories, governments must prevent all forms of land-grabbing, water exploitation, and mining activities related to data centers and energy sources, and respect Indigenous rights, worldviews, and aspirations.

“AI becomes harmful when it is imposed without free, prior, and informed consent,” Ibrahim said. “In that context, it risks repeating old patterns of extraction of the resource, data, and appropriation of knowledge and the credit to this knowledge.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline AI is a double-edged sword for Indigenous land protection, UN experts warn on Apr 24, 2026.

The world is entering an “age of electricity,” according to the reports, which come from the International Energy Agency, or IEA, an intergovernmental organization that publishes the world’s most authoritative analyses on the global energy sector, and the think tank Ember. That’s because core economic activities that traditionally involve burning oil and gas — driving cars, heating buildings, and even running industrial processes like steelmaking — are increasingly powered by electricity instead. And, most importantly for the climate fight, an ever-larger share of that electricity is coming from renewable sources. 

The two new analyses confirmed that 2025 was a banner year for renewable energy. Solar power was the single biggest source used to meet humanity’s growing appetite for electricity. New power generation from the broader suite of carbon-free sources — including wind, nuclear, and hydropower — actually exceeded the overall rise in electricity demand, meaning renewables began to displace fossil fuel sources. If this trend sticks, it would mean that the so-called energy transition meant to shepherd humanity out of the climate crisis is no longer theoretical.

“This was a year when the economy boomed, electricity demand grew very healthily — and still all that demand growth was met with renewables,” said Daan Walter, a lead researcher at Ember. 

In 2025, renewables edged out coal in global electricity generation for the first time in more than a century. This progress was fueled by China and India, the world’s two most populous countries that together comprise 42 percent of global fossil power generation. The nations both saw electricity generated by fossil fuels fall in the same year for the first time this century. Like other countries around the world, China and India have been rapidly building out solar, wind, and battery infrastructure. (The cost of batteries fell 45 percent in 2025, an even steeper decline than the 20 percent drop in costs that analysts tracked in 2024.)

There’s another sign that 2025 marked a turning point in the energy transition, according to the Ember report: Unlike in past years, the plateau in fossil fuel use was not tied to a recession. Global economic growth last year was normal, which indicates that renewable energy is driving a structural trend away from fossil fuels when it comes to generating electricity. 

But that doesn’t mean that oil, gas, and coal use are nearing extinction. When it comes to the broader energy economy, rather than just electricity generation, the IEA’s report finds that renewables still aren’t displacing fossil fuels fast enough to force a sustained decline in the world’s use of greenhouse-gas-emitting energy. (This is because not all energy — for instance that which currently powers jets, cargo ships, and many motor vehicles — is generated from electricity.)

As a result of complications like these, global carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high last year, rising 0.4 percent from 2024 levels. The pace of the increase, however, is declining as renewables rise. For years, emissions declines were driven by developed countries like the United States and European Union member states. Last year, however, emissions from advanced economies grew faster than emissions from developing countries for the first time since the 1990s, according to the IEA. 

The trend reversal was driven by the U.S., where coal demand rose 10 percent last year. Rising natural gas prices prompted power producers to switch back to coal, which had been displaced by fracked natural gas in recent years. Plus, electricity use rose thanks to a harsh winter across much of the eastern part of the country, as well as the rollout of industrial-scale power customers like the data centers needed for new artificial intelligence applications.

But trends in the opposite direction in developing countries played a role, too. In Indonesia, for example, electric cars now comprise more than 15 percent of new car sales — a larger share than in the United States and up from virtually 0 percent in the early 2020s. Many customers are “leapfrogging” gasoline-powered cars altogether and purchasing an EV as their first vehicle.

“The energy transition was conceived as something that is led by the developed world, and the developing world kind of hobbles after at a slower pace,” said Walter. “We’re now seeing ‘leapfrogging’ across the world where actually developing economies are going faster in many ways than developed economies.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘age of electricity’ is here. No one knows what comes next. on Apr 23, 2026.

Those warnings came during the 25th session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, where the overarching theme “ensuring Indigenous peoples’ health in the context of conflict” resonated with participants from around the world. In 2023 alone, 31 percent of human rights defenders killed worldwide were Indigenous or working on Indigenous rights, despite making up only 5 percent of the global population.

“There is a crisis Indigenous people are currently experiencing, and it’s because many Indigenous peoples are killed, many are under arrest, many live in hiding. This is because Indigenous peoples’ land and territory are often not protected enough,” said Albert K. Barume, the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, in an introductory statement at Wednesday’s session.  

As the largest gathering of Indigenous voices in the world, the forum provides a critical platform for communities to tackle systemic inequities together. Claire Charters, who is from Ngāti Whakaue, and is an expert in Indigenous global affairs who regularly presents at the forum, said the power of UNPFII lies in this shared experience.  

“That is a very empowering thing,” Charters said, “because it supports the movement as a whole.” 

For Indigenous nations worldwide, the fight for health and rights is inextricably tied to the land. Yet, communities without legally recognized land tenure are left vulnerable to extractive industries and state-sponsored violence. As a result, Indigenous land defenders are facing a growing crisis of criminalization, with human rights groups warning that legal systems are increasingly being weaponized to suppress resistance on ancestral lands. 

“The violence against Indigenous peoples happens so often,” said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Mbororo and the former chair of the forum, in a statement in Wednesday’s session. “It’s happening every single day.” 

According to the Global Terrorism Index, the Sahel region in north-central Africa has seen the rapid expansion of militant jihadist groups, particularly focusing on the pastoral sector — a key source for the well-being of the Indigenous peoples of the region. “Access to the land, access to water, is becoming a big challenge in the daily lives of women and men, and of course children’s lives are being lost on top of that,” Ibrahim said. 

Fatal violence against land defenders and Indigenous leaders is a global issue. While Latin America remains one of the most dangerous regions for fatal violence against defenders, the suppression of Indigenous voices is a pressing issue in the U.S. and Canada as well.  

“Canada is prioritizing rapid resource development,” said Judy Wilson, who is Secwépemc and an elder and knowledge keeper for the British Columbia Native Women’s Association. “The legislation directly threatens our Indigenous sovereignty, environmental protection, safety, and specifically increases the risks associated with man camps and missing, murdered Indigenous women and girls.” 

Across North America, Indigenous nations have documented the widespread use of detention, surveillance, and strategic lawsuits to silence Indigenous leaders opposing projects like pipelines and logging. In 2022, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recently called for urgent action in land rights cases for Western Shoshone, Native Hawaiian, Gwich’in, and Anishinaabe peoples. 

Advocates at the U.N. say the criminalization of Indigenous land defense is often linked to disputes over natural resources, where governments and corporations seek access to land without consent. Amnesty International has found that those abuses are rarely investigated, contributing to a cycle of impunity that leaves defenders vulnerable. 

Indigenous leaders and advocates are calling for stronger protections, warning that the suppression of Indigenous voices undermines human rights and environmental efforts globally. In an interim report to the General Assembly, Barume, the special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, warned that states must stop treating Indigenous lands as mere commodities and recognize the sacred, foundational nature of their tenure. 

“Indigenous peoples’ land rights are inherent and do not originate from state authority or recognition,” Barume wrote in the report. “They arise from Indigenous peoples’ long-standing and ancestral ownership, use and occupation of their lands as distinct nations, prior to colonization or the establishment of state boundaries.” 

With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, or AI, data sovereignty has also become a critical battleground for Indigenous leaders worldwide. As these systems expand, long-standing patterns of exploitation are being replicated in the digital realm. 

A new study presented at the forum by Ibrahim outlined the double-edged sword of the AI boom for the world’s estimated 476 to 500 million Indigenous people.  

While she said AI offers powerful tools for Indigenous peoples, Ibrahim warns of a looming era of “digital extractivism.” Generative AI systems frequently scrape Indigenous medicinal knowledge, traditional stories, and cultural motifs from the internet without consent, leading to the commodification and appropriation of their heritage. Furthermore, due to the underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the data sets used to train AI models, algorithmic biases can result in systems that fail to accurately recognize Indigenous identities or languages, ultimately amplifying structural discrimination. 

To combat digital exploitation, a growing global movement is pushing for strict “Indigenous data sovereignty” to replace the Western “open data” paradigm that often fails to protect collective rights. Ibrahim’s report highlights several successful frameworks where Indigenous communities are already implementing this digital sovereignty. In Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, the report praises the development of te reo Māori speech recognition tools created by Te Hiku Media. This initiative demonstrates how communities can build vast linguistic corpora while ensuring their cultural and linguistic data remains firmly under Māori control. 

On an international scale, Ibrahim’s report recommends the adoption of the CARE Principles — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics — which establish a framework for the ethical management of AI technologies and ensure Indigenous communities retain ultimate decision-making authority over their data. Similarly, the report cites the OCAP principles — Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession — developed by the First Nations of Canada as a robust model that establishes a community’s absolute right to own its data and to control how it is collected, accessed, and physically stored. 

The Kāhui Raraunga Charitable Trust is taking digital sovereignty into its own hands. Te Kāhui Raraunga Data Program Manager, Roimata Timutimu, said having Indigenous people in control of their own data is vital to ensuring better outcomes for service delivery, which Māori are implementing through the Māori Data Governance Model. The model is intended to assist all agencies to undertake Māori data governance in a way that is values-led, centered on Māori needs and priorities, and informed by research. 

Māori data sovereignty expert Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru says artificial intelligence can offer opportunities for Māori, but only if it is grounded in Māori customs and Indigenous governance. In a panel discussion about Māori data sovereignty, he emphasized that data is not just a product but is deeply connected to identity and lineage.

“All data is whakapapa [lineage],” Taiuru said. “It still has that spiritual connection.” 

Displacement, climate change, and the fallout of extractive industries have an even more acute impact on Indigenous women. In North America, this reality is starkly visible in the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls — a situation driven by the exact intersecting vulnerabilities being debated at the U.N. this week. 

To combat this global crisis, Wednesday’s session featured a dedicated review of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 2022 Recommendation No. 39, which stands as the only form of international law specifically dedicated to protecting the rights of Indigenous women and girls. 

Despite that landmark status, Indigenous women at the U.N. repeatedly highlighted the lack of implementation and ongoing threats they face. “The international trauma and ongoing trauma is compounded each day, with more losses in our families and in our communities,” said Judy Wilson from the British Columbia Native Women’s Association. “This needs to change.” 

Beyond physical violence, the recommendation outlines how systemic barriers restrict access to fundamental rights. In education, for example, Indigenous girls face major hurdles to school enrollment and completion, compounded by a lack of culturally appropriate, Indigenous-controlled educational facilities. To dismantle these barriers, CEDAW is urging states to provide targeted scholarships, expand financial aid, strengthen Indigenous-led education systems, and actively combat discriminatory stereotypes that continue to limit Indigenous girls’ educational opportunities globally. 

However, Claire Charters notes that while discrimination against women isn’t a new phenomenon among Indigenous communities, dissecting the root causes of that discrimination remains a crucial and complex debate. “One focus or one question that often comes up is the extent to which Indigenous people discriminate against particularly our own women, and the extent to which that might be driven by colonization,” Charters said.  

As one of the final speakers of the morning session, Em-Hayley Kūkūtai Walker, who is Ngāti Tiipa and an artist, reflected on the disparities Māori women face in Aotearoa New Zealand. As of 2025, Māori women make up 63 percent of the total female prison population, 49 percent of Māori women experience and/or sexual intimate partner violence and are a further three times more likely to experience intimate partner violence as opposed to non-Māori. 

In her statement on Wednesday, she encouraged U.N. mechanisms to push Aotearoa New Zealand to ensure the rights of Indigenous women and girls are protected. “Hear the cry of my people,” she said. “Our women, children, and ancestors, who wish for our tapu [sacredness] and mana [authority] to be upheld.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous land defenders are being killed, and AI is scraping their knowledge on Apr 23, 2026.

Wildfires are burning across more than 27,000 acres in south Georgia, according to the Georgia Forestry Association. Governor Brian Kemp has declared a state of emergency in 91 counties.

One fire, the Brantley Highway 82 fire, began Monday night and has since prompted evacuation orders. On Tuesday morning, that fire covered a few hundred acres and was 75 percent contained. But it rapidly spread and intensified later in the day and overnight. By Wednesday morning, it had reached 5,000 acres and was just 10 percent contained, according to Western Fire Chiefs Association, which tracks fires around the country. Local officials say 54 homes have been destroyed.

“I will be very honest with you and say it’s a miracle that there have not been any lives lost,” said Brantley County Manager Joey Cason in a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

Brantley County and several area churches have set up shelter sites for displaced residents and begun collecting donations for firefighters and people who’ve lost their homes. The Pinelands Road fire in Clinch County, near the Florida border, began over the weekend and has since spread over 16,000 acres. It is just 10 percent contained.

Both counties are heavily forested and sit on the edges of the vast Okefenokee swamp, Clinch to the west and Brantley to the northeast.

Fires are burning in northern Florida, too, which is experiencing similar drought conditions. Officials in both states were monitoring more than 100 fires as of Wednesday, though many were small and quickly contained.

While it’s common for fires to start in Georgia forests due to lightning strikes, stray cigarettes, sparks from backyard fires, and a number of other causes, thanks to forest management and plenty of rain, most don’t normally burn very far. Officials say this year is different. Rainfall and water levels are far below normal across Georgia, increasing fire risk. Conditions like this are becoming more likely in many places as climate change worsens the intensity and duration of droughts.

“Under drought conditions, we have that much less water available either in the water table or in our swamps, ditches, drains, lakes,” said State Forester Johnny Sabo. “So the wildfires can spread more rapidly.”

A large swath of South Georgia is in an “exceptional drought,” the driest category under the federal drought monitoring system. Much of the rest of the state is in “extreme drought,” the next most severe designation. Many Georgia forests also still have downed trees from Hurricane Helene, providing more potential fuel for large fires, said Erin Lincoln, director of the Center for Forest Business at the University of Georgia.

“This is a serious and evolving situation,” said Tim Lowrimore, president and CEO of the Georgia Forestry Association, in a statement on the group’s Facebook page. “We urge all Georgians to remain vigilant. Preventing additional fires right now is critical as responders work to manage this emergency.”

Hazy, smoky air has reached as far north as Atlanta, in the middle of the state, downgrading the air quality there to moderate, meaning it could be risky to some people. In Macon and Columbus, unhealthy air quality levels have been reported.

The state has issued a burn ban for south and central Georgia, asking people not to light any fires outdoors. “Our number one cause of wildfires in the state are humans, unfortunately — people being careless,” Sabo said. It’s critical that Georgians heed those warnings, he continued.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What’s driving the catastrophic wildfires in Georgia on Apr 22, 2026.

“We’re just actively monitoring water quality,” they told her, but she pressed on.

“Are you looking for that flesh-eating bacteria?”

“We’re looking into it,” they replied, hoping not to frighten her. The woman turned back toward the ocean, her curiosity satisfied. As she walked away, Kumar noticed that she had scrapes and bruises on her body. A few minutes later, he watched her step into the waves. He shook off a chill and returned to the task at hand. 

Magers and Kumar study a bacteria called Vibrio, part of a lineage of ancient marine species that likely emerged sometime around the Paleozoic Era. Enormous, shallow seas flooded the massive, interconnected supercontinents that constituted the Earth’s landmass at the time, and complex marine ecosystems developed that thrived in these temperate, freshly-formed bodies of water. Researchers think there are more than 70 Vibrio species in the environment today, hundreds of millions of years later. The organisms float in warm, brackish water, attaching themselves to plankton and algae and accumulating in prolific water-filtering species like clams and oysters. 

A small number of Vibrio species can sicken and even kill. In worst-case scenarios, a person who has been exposed to the most dangerous of them — by swimming in brackish water with an open wound or ingesting a piece of raw shellfish that is contaminated with the tasteless and odorless toxin — may find themselves with only hours before the flesh on one or more extremities starts to bruise, swell, and decay. Without the quick aid of powerful antibiotics, septic shock can set in and lead to death. Anyone can get infected, though it is much more likely in people who have liver disease or are immunocompromised, elderly, or diabetic.

Climate change is making the world’s oceans, which have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, more hospitable to Vibrio. Research shows that temperature and salinity are the largest predictors of how widespread Vibrio bacteria are. As water temperatures rise, so does the concentration of Vibrio in seawater — boosting the risk of infection for beachgoers and shellfish consumers. The bacteria start getting active in water temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and multiply rapidly as coastal waters warm throughout the summer.

In recent years, scientists have documented Vibrio expanding into places that were once too cold to support the bacteria, pushing as far north along the U.S. East Coast as Maine and appearing with more prevalence in temperate seas around the world. 

Vibriosis infections in general are the leading cause of shellfish-related illness in the U.S. They have increased “more than any other illness caused by a pathogen in the U.S. food supply” since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, started keeping tabs on such illnesses in 1996, according to a 2019 analysis by the International Association for Food Protection. The report attributed the precipitous rise to a “perfect storm” of factors that include climate change, food handling practices, expanding globalization, a patchwork of regulatory oversight, and improved diagnosis.

On their conspicuous expeditions to Pensacola and other Sunshine State beaches, Magers and Kumar are trying to understand where, and when, harmful Vibrio species are present across the state. The research they’re doing is part of an ongoing effort by a laboratory at the University of Florida to create a Vibrio early warning system for the eastern United States — a program that can alert public health departments to high Vibrio concentrations in any given area a month in advance.

How many limbs would be saved, Magers wonders, if doctors and nurses could be warned ahead of time that their emergency rooms would soon see an uptick in these chronically underdiagnosed infections? 

The work serves more than one purpose: As Vibrio bacteria spread north into cooler waters, they serve as a first warning signal of changing marine conditions — giving researchers a heads-up that the familiar composition of marine species in their local waters may be starting to shift. In Europe’s Baltic Sea, for example, a spike in Vibrio infections in July 2014 closely mirrored a heatwave that rapidly warmed the shallow sea.

The incident showed researchers that Vibrio spikes herald unusually warm marine conditions — and they have since been utilized as barometers for ocean heatwaves and sea-surface warming patterns, not just food safety.

“We see Vibrio as the indicator for climate change,” said Kyle Brumfield, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland who has been studying the bacteria for a decade. “We can use the presence of Vibrio and Vibrio cases as a proxy for water health in general.”

The CDC estimates that about 80,000 cases of vibriosis occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in about 100 deaths. Of those 80,000 cases, most are caused by a Vibrio called parahaemolyticus, which most commonly results in gastroenteritis, or food poisoning. The vast majority of the deaths, however, are caused by a type of Vibrio called vulnificus — the Latin word for “wound-making.”

Vulnificus is so potent it can squeeze through a pinhole-sized cut in the skin and lead to death in just 24 hours. In the last five years, the CDC registered 429 such vulnificus cases, plus 136 foodborne cases. But even though foodborne cases are less numerous, the patients that contract vulnificus by eating contaminated shellfish are more likely to die than those infected via open wounds. Thirteen percent of those nonfoodborne cases died, compared to 32 percent of people who got the infection from eating seafood. Most cases occur in the Gulf and Atlantic coastal regions.

As far as infectious diseases go, vulnificus is exceedingly rare: The CDC reports between 150 and 200 cases a year. The sexually-transmitted disease chlamydia, by comparison, one of the most common bacterial infections in the U.S., infects northward of 1.5 million Americans annually. But vulnificus’ astonishing speed and high fatality rate — 15 to 50 percent, depending on the health of the person exposed and the route of infection — makes it a unique public health threat, particularly as climate change grows its pathways of exposure. 

Vulnificus is not the kind of pathogen you’d want behaving erratically, but that’s exactly what it’s been doing since the late 2010s. Across the Eastern Seaboard, local and federal health officials have been reporting “unusual increases” in vulnificus prevalence — jagged spikes in infections that appear to correspond to extreme weather events like hurricanes and marine heatwaves.

In 2022 and 2024, years when the brackish water that Vibrio bacteria thrive in was pushed inland by major hurricanes, Florida’s public health department reported 17 and 19 deaths, respectively, linked to vulnificus exposure via open wounds. North Carolina, New York, and Connecticut also saw small clusters of infections during a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of 2023. “As coastal water temperatures increase,” the CDC warned in its investigation of those outbreaks, “V. vulnificus infections are expected to become more common.”

A 2023 study that analyzed a 30-year database of confirmed vulnificus infections from outdoor recreation along the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts found the northern boundary of infections has moved north by a rate of 30 miles per year since 1998. The study noted that “V. vulnificus infections may expand their current range to encompass major population centers around New York,” and that annual case numbers may double as temperatures rise and America’s elderly population grows. 

“In the 1980s, Vibrio abundance would increase in the late spring and stay high through the summer and drop in the middle of October,” Brumfield, who conducts research on Vibrio in Maryland, said. “Now … we can pretty much find them almost year-round.”

Just how worried we should be about the changing dynamics of Vibrio bacteria depends on who you ask and what you read. The gruesome and fast-acting nature of the vulnificus infection makes it enticing fodder for local and national news media, fueling a spree of terrifying reports every time a new severe infection or death surfaces.

“Virginia dad wades in calf-high water, dies 2 weeks later of flesh-eating bacteria that ‘ravaged’ his legs,” read a recent headline in People magazine. “2 dead after eating oysters, contracting flesh-eating bacteria, officials say,” per a 2025 web story about two deaths linked to oyster consumption in Louisiana and Florida. Like many others in their mold, neither story mentions how rare the bacteria are. 

The press is bad news for some in the seafood industry, which does not welcome a national conversation about the rise in vibriosis cases, vulnificus in particular. Shellfish farmers and industry representatives that Grist spoke to in Florida and New York argued media attention on the safety of their products is unwarranted. “‘Flesh-eating bacteria,’” said Leslie Sturmer, a researcher who works for the University of Florida’s shellfish aquaculture extension program and consults with the shellfish industry on research and regulation — “the media loves it.”

Paul McCormick, an oyster farmer in Long Island who sells 750,000 oysters a year, thinks all press is bad press. “Even if the title of your article says ‘New York oysters are the safest oysters in the universe,’” he told me on the phone from his office in East Moriches in January, “you’ve already created a problem.”

In unrefrigerated oysters left out in warm conditions, Vibrio bacteria reproduce every 20 minutes. But in 2010, states began deploying strict protocols known as “Vibrio control plans,” which require harvesters to rapidly cool their catch onboard and then refrigerate it at a shellfish processing facility within a set number of hours. The measures have proven effective at stopping the growth of Vibrio in harvested shellfish and preventing disease.  

The fact that infections can happen in one of two ways — shellfish consumption and seawater exposure — makes it easy to shift blame and point fingers. Consumers have more control over how much exposure they have to Vibrio than they have with E. coli, for example. A person with a kidney condition can choose not to eat oysters on the half shell. E. Coli, often found in raw vegetables, is far tricker to avoid. Likewise, someone with an open wound can opt not to bathe in brackish waters if they are aware of the risks lurking in the surf.

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For shellfish industry representatives, personal responsibility is the primary way to bring caseloads down. “The person is the risk,” said Sturmer. “Not the climate, not the water, not the bacteria.” Implicitly, this appears to be the government’s position as well: There is currently no numerical threshold at which state public health agencies will “shut down” a beach for outdoor recreation, though states will issue public advisories and, very rarely, close beaches if they happen to find high levels of Vibrio in the water.

But that perspective doesn’t account for the rapid marine changes brought on by climate change, the patchiness of vibriosis awareness, and the fact that Americans often make personal decisions that are at odds with their own health and safety.

The shellfishers Grist spoke to fully acknowledged the research underpinning Vibrio’s spread. McCormick studied environmental science in college, and Sturmer is running her own climate experiments in a laboratory in the fishing town of Cedar Key, Florida, putting different kinds of clams and oysters through heat stress tests to determine which species are best equipped to weather the decades ahead.

Marine mollusks are uniquely threatened by rising ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, and sea level rise, issues that can lead to thin shells, low crop yields, and mass die-offs on farms. A detailed understanding of climate science, in other words, is good business for those who make their living fishing.

The problem, according to Sturmer, is that shellfishers have been unfairly singled out for a health issue that doesn’t affect most consumers and is more often contracted by ocean bathing rather than raw oyster consumption. While beaches stay open even when Vibrio bacteria are present in the water and lead to infections, a small number of foodborne vibriosis cases can trigger state closures of shellfish harvesting areas and product recalls. The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science noted that these precautions “erode consumer confidence and likely decrease sales.” 

The panic that ensues after media reports of Vibrio infections has a similar effect: A 2024 study asked more than 350 shellfish consumers in Rhode Island — a state that relies heavily on its shellfish industry, particularly in summer months when people vacation along the coastline — to bid on entrees of raw oysters and clams. After showing study participants a real newspaper article about a 2015 Vibrio outbreak linked to an oyster farm in Massachusetts, the researchers reported that the news had a “significant negative impact” on participants’ willingness to bid on oysters. It had a depressive effect on clam sales, too.

“You should really be out there beating the drum on botulism or salmonella or E. Coli,” Sturmer told me on a recent visit to her lab in Cedar Key. “Why worry about [vulnificus] when the number of cases are so minimal?” Sturmer is quick to point out that even the term “flesh-eating bacteria” is a misnomer. She’s right, in a sense: The bacteria doesn’t “eat” tissue; it destroys it. But it’s hard to say whether someone who has survived a bout of necrotizing fasciitis, the medical term for what vulnificus does to the flesh, would care to dispute the difference.

Protecting consumers from being sickened by the bacteria isn’t as simple as trusting people with underlying medical conditions not to eat shellfish. Americans consume 2.5 billion oysters every year, half of which are eaten raw. Vibrio infections, which most often resemble food poisoning, are still underreported and underrecognized, even among individuals who are most at risk of developing a severe infection. Vulnificus infections are also underreported, but much less so than other Vibrio-related infections because they often require a hospital or emergency room visit. 

“I’ve cared for many people with salmonella infections and water-borne infectious processes, but this is the one that is likely the most serious,” said Norman Beatty, an associate professor at the University of Florida College of Medicine who is also a practicing infectious disease doctor in Gainesville, and has seen limbs and lives lost to vulnificus.

When it comes to preventing Vibrio infections, the work Magers and Kumar are doing could take some of the onus off of individual responsibility. The researchers are identifying which parts of the eastern U.S. coastline will be most risky for overall vibriosis infections, and vulnificus specifically, as waters warm. Alongside a group of microbiologists from the University of Maryland, including Brumfield, the scientists have developed a computer model that can predict how high the vibriosis risk will be in any given coastal county on the Gulf or East coasts a month in advance. The team trained their model by pairing the CDC’s count of Vibrio-related foodborne and waterborne illnesses from 1997 to 2019 with satellite data that measures the conditions that fuel Vibrio growth, such as water temperature and salinity. 

The system is far from perfect. When the model was first trained and evaluated, it was only 23 percent precise in pinpointing high-risk counties, meaning just one in four of the counties the program labeled as high-risk actually ended up seeing a vibriosis case in a given month. But it was very good at determining which counties were low-risk, capturing those regions with 99 percent precision. And it improved over time as the quality of the data they fed it got better. When they had the model do a test run on data collected by the Florida Department of Public Health from 2020 to 2024, 72 percent of total cases occurred in counties the tool flagged as high-risk for vibriosis. 

Perhaps most significantly, the model was especially adept at predicting high-risk counties ahead of Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 — more than 80 percent of the vibriosis cases that occurred in Florida in the aftermath of those hurricanes were reported in counties the model had already flagged as high-risk. 

The tool is geared toward predicting water-borne infections, but it may also provide useful information to the shellfishing industry, though the system isn’t a replacement for the established protocols farmers already use — protocols that have proven to be effective, particularly in states that are aggressive about enforcing them. What the new tool could do, however, is supplement those Vibrio control plans, especially when an upcoming weather pattern deviates from the historical norm — something that has been happening a lot lately.

States currently use a rolling five-year average illness rate to calculate how many minutes or hours harvested shellfish can stay on a boat before moving into indoor refrigeration. In February, for example, Florida shellfishers have to get their oysters into refrigeration by 5 p.m. on the day of harvest. In July, they have no more than two hours, or they have to cool their catch in ice slurries on board. But these timetables don’t account for sudden temperature anomalies.

“It’s going to be 80 degrees this week in Alabama,” Andy DePaola, a Gulf Coast oyster farmer, told me in February. “Yet I can keep my oysters out for, like, 14 hours, because the rolling five-year average is 20 degrees less than that anomaly.” (DePaola is also a microbiologist who worked on Vibrio at the FDA for the better part of 40 years, and is the author of the 2019 analysis that diagnosed the “perfect storm” for Vibrio spread.)

But the shellfish industry doesn’t appear enthusiastic about the idea of assigning counties a risk category based on Vibrio prevalence. Vibrio researchers, by their own admission, haven’t done a good job of reaching out to shellfishers to find out how such a tool would work best for them. At an August meeting of the Delaware Bay Section of the ​​New Jersey Shellfisheries Council last year, the director of a shellfish research laboratory brought up the idea of using Vibrio predictive models to “determine optimal days to harvest to reduce the transfer of infection to humans.” A lengthy discussion ensued. The consensus, ultimately, was that the model was a bad idea, and could be “used against the industry.”

Not all shellfishers are dead set against the kind of work Magers and Kumar are doing. “If Vibrio is an indicator of global warming, then that’s just an unfortunate bad luck scene for us,” McCormick, the Long Island oysterman, said. But it’s hard for him to see what relevance that research has to an industry that already has its own methods of controlling Vibrio. “In my mind that exists in one realm and the safety of our oysters is a whole different thing.”

As we move deeper into the 21st century, however, those two realms will have more overlap. If countries keep up their current pace of greenhouse gas emissions, most coastal communities along the East Coast will be environmentally primed for vibriosis outbreaks during peak summer months by midcentury. It won’t be a question of if there will be more vibriosis cases — it will be a matter of how to manage them. That’s the scenario Magers and Kumar are preparing for.

“In 30, 40, 100 years, these models won’t even matter because the risk is so high,” said Magers, the lead author of the predictive modeling study. “When it gets to that point, it would probably be a different kind of modeling strategy where we’d be modeling case numbers instead of infection risk.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A deadly bacteria is creeping up the Atlantic Coast. How worried should you be? on Apr 22, 2026.

Vibrio is a type of bacteria that has been around for hundreds of millions of years; researchers have identified more than 70 species. These species are mostly harmless, but some can cause infection. The bacteria thrive in warm, brackish (slightly salty) water such as estuaries and bays, attaching themselves to plankton and algae and accumulating in prolific water-filtering species like clams and oysters. Serious infections typically happen either through exposure to an open wound in saltwater or, more rarely, ingestion of raw shellfish that contain the bacteria. 

The concentration of Vibrio in coastal waterways is higher from May through October, when temperatures are warmer. Most U.S. cases are in the Gulf and Atlantic coastal regions. Vibrio is tasteless and odorless. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, estimates that about 80,000 cases of vibriosis (an infection caused by the Vibrio bacteria) occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in about 100 deaths. Florida has the highest number of cases, with about 20 percent reported from the Indian River Lagoon region, a popular recreation destination on the Atlantic Coast. 

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What happens if you come into contact with Vibrio?

Most people are not at risk of developing illness, or they may have only mild symptoms. However, those with compromised immune systems can develop life-threatening infections. 

The majority of the 80,000 annual U.S. cases are caused by a Vibrio called parahaemolyticus, which most often infects people via the raw seafood they eat and usually leads to gastroenteritis, or food poisoning. Symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever and chills, weakness, fatigue, and headache. 

A different type of Vibrio, vulnificus, is much less common, but can cause severe illness. The infected wound may be red, swollen, and painful, or you may develop mild gastrointestinal issues such as watery diarrhea, stomach cramps, or vomiting. Symptoms typically appear within 12 to 24 hours and can last up to seven days. Healthy people tend to fight off the infection on their own. But if flesh on one or more extremities to bruise, swell, and decay, or symptoms of sepsis occur, it is a medical emergency. Vulnificus can squeeze through a pinhole-sized cut in the skin and lead to death in just 24 hours. This severe infection is rare, but it has a 15 to 50 percent fatality rate; the vast majority of the 100 annual deaths are from this strain. A severe vulnificus infection is much more likely in people who have liver disease or are immunocompromised, elderly, or diabetic.

How concerned should I be — and how do I stay safe? 

You don’t necessarily need to avoid oyster bars or cancel your beach trip, but you should know how to stay informed and take precautions. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Be aware that there are many fearmongering headlines about flesh-eating bacteria, despite vulnificus being one of the rarest forms of Vibrio exposure. Vibrio doesn’t attack random healthy flesh — there must be exposure through an open wound (a break in the skin) or it must be ingested, most often through raw shellfish. People who get sick often have underlying health conditions. 
• If you don’t feel well after eating raw seafood or swimming in brackish water, don’t wait — go to the doctor. Some medical professionals, particularly those in areas where the bacteria hasn’t historically infected people, don’t know what vibriosis is. Advocate for yourself — ask for a test. 
• If you have liver disease, your risk is much higher than the general population’s. Keep an eye out for public health advisories from state and local health officials and avoid swimming in ocean water with an open wound or consuming raw shellfish in warm months. Note that ocean temperatures, especially along the lower Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, have been elevated outside the typical seasonal range in some recent years.
• Be aware when eating raw shellfish, particularly raw oysters. It’s best to be confident that the shellfish was refrigerated and stored in compliance with government standards. The vast majority of foodborne Vibrio cases lead to food poisoning. (Food poisoning from bacteria is always a risk when eating uncooked shellfish and many other foods like salads or deli meat.)

How is climate change affecting Vibrio?

Climate change is making the world’s oceans, which have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, more hospitable to Vibrio. The bacteria start getting active in temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and multiply rapidly as waters warm throughout the summer. Vibrio is expanding into places that were once too cold to support it, farther north on the U.S. East coast and in other temperate seas around the world. As it spreads, it serves as a first warning signal of changing marine conditions.

What’s being done to address Vibrio?

There’s a lot of research happening to better understand the risks these bacteria pose under changing environmental conditions: A group of microbiologists at the University of Maryland, alongside other scientists, have developed a computer model that can predict how high the risk of vibriosis will be in any given coastal county in the eastern U.S. a month in advance. The team trained its model, which is still under development, by pairing the CDC’s count of Vibrio-related foodborne and waterborne illnesses from 1997 to 2019 with satellite data that measures the conditions that fuel Vibrio growth, such as water temperature and salinity. It’s far from perfect, but it’s improving. And it was especially adept at predicting high-risk counties ahead of hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 — more than 80 percent of the vibriosis cases that occurred in Florida in the aftermath of those hurricanes were reported in counties the model had already flagged as high-risk. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Know the facts about Vibrio, a bacteria found in coastal waters and raw shellfish on Apr 22, 2026.

Scientists at nearby Cornell University have discovered that this seemingly sterilized habitat — lots of tombstones and cropped lawn — doesn’t just support this wonderful insect. It hosts one of the biggest and oldest known communities of ground-nesting bees anywhere in the world. 

Great for the miner bee, to be sure. But the findings also add to a growing body of evidence that cemeteries, of all places, provide essential habitats for all kinds of wildlife, from insects to mammals. Bees are already under significant threat due to habitat loss and insecticide use, so thoughtfully managing these final resting places can protect the pollinators we need to fertilize crops amid rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather. “It’s exciting to see that things like this are being discovered, where you find biodiversity in unexpected places,” said Christopher Grinter, collection manager of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It’s kind of this key, or this ‘aha,’ moment, where it’s like: ‘Wait, not only is this happening without us noticing, we should now encourage and foster this biodiversity.’”

It’s not your fault, but you might have the wrong idea about bees. We’re taught that bees live in colonies with a queen and lots of workers that produce honey. These are such essential flower-visiting pollinators that farmers rent hives to work their crops.

As honey bees swarm farms, though, their less visible colleagues are also hard at work. The vast majority of them are solitary, making their homes underground or in natural cavities like trees. The regular miner bee, for instance, digs cavities under the East Lawn Cemetery, where it lays eggs that hatch into larvae and emerge as adults the following spring. Those adults go on to become critical pollinators for local plants, including New York’s apple trees, a highly valuable crop. 

Weirdly enough, a cemetery might tick many of the boxes for a ground-dwelling buzzer in the market for a home. If this is a good spot for humans to bury their dead, it’s also a good spot for the regular miner bee: “places that don’t flood, and places that are easy to dig and don’t collapse when you dig them,” said Jordan Kueneman, a community ecologist at Cornell University and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “So we think the bees in this area are drawn towards some of those same characteristics.”

But if a lawn mower grazed your house, wouldn’t you think about moving? Well, this might not be too big of a deal for the regular miner bee. In fact, by cutting the grass close, groundskeepers could be doing the insects a favor. “They do like to often have the ground exposed,” Kueneman said. “That helps the ground warm up quicker, allows them to become more active more quickly in the day. It allows them to get in and out of their nests easily.”

The researchers discovered that this population of miner bees is absolutely booming. By collecting individuals and scaling that count up across the grounds, they estimate that the East Lawn Cemetery hosts between 3 million and 8 million bees, including species other than the miner. “It was an extraordinary size, and a lot of that has to do with extraordinary density,” Kueneman said. “In some locations, we were measuring thousands of individuals emerging in a square meter.” (Still, Kueneman added, gardening crews could help the bees out even more by mowing earlier in the morning, before the insects emerge for the day.)

The researchers could also determine that this is a healthy population because of how many females were flying around. Male regular miner bees are smaller than they are, so when a mother lays eggs, she has to put fewer resources into making male offspring. If a population has a healthy proportion of females, then, it suggests that it’s thriving, and indeed that’s what the scientists found in the cemetery.

Enter the miner bee’s mortal enemy, Nomada imbricata, a variety of cuckoo bee. Just as cuckoo birds lay their eggs in other species’ nests, this opportunist invades the miner bee’s burrows and lays its eggs. This saves it the trouble of digging its own home, and its offspring hatch with plenty of food. “The parasitic bee develops and often has these large mandibles that they use to devour everything in their path, including the host bee,” Kueneman said. “They’ll sometimes decapitate them.” Not great for the miner bee, obviously, but the cuckoo’s presence at the cemetery provides more evidence that it has a healthy population to parasitize.

The bees are not alone in their success in this unlikely habitat. Other scientists are finding that many species across the tree of life — bats, migrating geese, owls, coyotes, rare types of plants — are using cemeteries as refuges in an increasingly urbanized world. “It has a lot of the things you want,” said Seth Magle, senior director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It’s got trees, it’s got grass, it’s potentially got prey species for you, and resources. And then it largely lacks a couple of things you don’t like about parks, which are probably people and dogs.” Also absent from cemeteries are speeding cars, which in the United States hit hundreds of millions of birds and large animals, not to mention untold numbers of insects, each year.

While cemeteries already shelter hoards of regular miner bees and other species, groundskeepers can do even more to support wildlife. Reducing the use of rodenticides protects birds of prey, which die when they consume poisoned rats and mice. Adding native plants provides food and shelter for native pollinators, which go on to help humans adapt to a changing climate. These species fertilize greenery across a city, for instance, significantly reducing urban temperatures, and help farmers to propagate their crops. “In order to have flowers, in order to have a beautiful ecosystem, or any biodiversity, we have to have pollinators that are fueling the reproduction of those plants,” Grinter said.

While cities have been historically cast as destroyers of biodiversity, conservationists now take a more nuanced view, Magle said. Yes, clearing forests to build metropolises is terrible for nature. But there are also ways to foster the natural world deep within cities. As places for the dead, ironically enough, cemeteries can teem with the living. “What would it look like to create a world where we continue to urbanize,” Magle said, “but we do it in a way that leaves the space for some of these species?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why millions of adorable bees are emerging from this cemetery on Apr 22, 2026.

The forum’s focus on Indigenous health comes as a new study by former Permanent Forum member Geoffrey Roth, who is a Standing Rock Sioux descendant, argues that U.N. agencies’ fragmented approach — addressing health, environment, and land rights through separate mandates — has “consistently failed Indigenous Peoples.” The study, presented as the forum opened its 25th session, positions environmental degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss not as external pressures but as “direct manifestations of injury” to Indigenous well-being.

“For Indigenous peoples, health is deeply tied to the health of the land,” said Roth. “It’s not just about access to clinics or medicine — it’s about clean water, healthy forests, traditional foods, and the ability to maintain cultural practices. When the environment is damaged — whether from mining, deforestation, pollution, or climate change — it directly affects people’s health.”

At the forum, many Indigenous leaders spoke out about how the growing environmental crises increase the urgency to address their impacts on Indigenous health. “Climate change is also another threat to our health,” said Minnie Grey, former executive director of the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services in northern Canada. “We are people of the Arctic: We need the ice, we need the snow, and we need the wildlife that depend on it. Our hunters and people rely on these animals that sustain our food systems and nutrition.” 

A second study, also presented at the forum by former Permanent Forum members Hanieh Moghani, Hannah McGlade, and Geoffrey Roth, examines how armed conflicts disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples, as they are frequently driven by competition over natural resources. This leads to the displacement of Indigenous peoples from ancestral lands and territories, the erosion of social and cultural cohesion, resource exploitation, and disruptions to agricultural livelihoods, leading to intergenerational health crises.

“These impacts add to existing inequalities, which is why Indigenous communities are often hit hardest,” he explained. “In that sense, environmental damage isn’t separate from health — it’s a major driver of it.”

By focusing on Indigenous health as separate from territories, waters, food systems, and culture, Roth said global health efforts have failed to address the structural drivers of health problems Indigenous peoples face, such as land dispossession, environmental degradation, cultural disruption, and the erosion of Indigenous governance.

The study emphasizes that climate change functions as a severe “risk multiplier” that intensifies pressures across biological, ecological, and social systems, with disproportionate impacts on Indigenous populations. Extreme weather events, such as droughts and flooding, degrade water quality and availability, which raises the risk of waterborne diseases and undermines hygiene. Furthermore, the climate crisis is driving severe mental health consequences in Indigenous communities. Evidence links climate-related disasters and environmental loss to increased rates of depression, substance abuse, and emerging diagnoses like “ecological grief” and “climate anxiety,” particularly among Indigenous youth who are watching their ancestral ecosystems change.

In Alaska, for example, severe storm events like Typhoon Halong have devastated coastal villages, resulting in the forced climate relocation of thousands of Indigenous people. These relocations, driven by coastal erosion and thawing permafrost, cut communities off from their traditional food harvesting and weather forecasting systems, compounding their health vulnerabilities.

Biodiversity degradation, for instance, can impact food availability and therefore cause nutritional inequalities, chronic disease, and mental distress. In the Munduruku territory in Brazil, which is one of the lands that has been hardest hit by illegal mining in the country, the Indigenous Munduruku people face many health issues, even after a government-led operation to halt illegal mining in the territory.

Community members have reported a wide range of diseases linked to mercury pollution and ecological destruction caused by mining, including diarrhea, itchiness, flu, fever, childhood paralysis, and brain problems.

“The situation is even more serious for Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact,” said Ginny Alba Medina, an Indigenous leader and lawyer from OPIAC, the national organization for Colombia’s Amazon peoples. “For them, the right to health begins with absolute respect for the principle of no contact. Any external intrusion can trigger lethal epidemics against which they have no immune defenses. Allowing extractive activities, armed presence, or territorial pressure in their territories poses an immediate threat to their physical and cultural survival.” 

“What’s been missing is a more connected approach — one that includes land, culture, and self-determination as central to health,” Roth said. “Moving forward, U.N. agencies need to reduce fragmentation and work in a more coordinated way. You cannot improve Indigenous health in isolation. It requires aligning efforts across sectors and supporting Indigenous leadership within these systems.”

Just weeks before the forum kicked off at the U.N. headquarters in New York, Indigenous Batwa women and children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, suffered fresh attacks by a group of armed men believed to belong to the Alliance Fleuve Congo and March 23 movement rebel groups. These cases, which took place on March 5 in the country’s South Kivu province, are linked to a larger pattern of targeted violence against the Batwa people to gain control over their land and natural resources.

Conflicts in Indigenous territories are inherently an environmental and health crisis. As armed conflicts are frequently driven by competition over natural resources, Indigenous lands become strategic battlegrounds. 

Analysts have pointed out that this escalating armed conflict in the DRC has had a significant and often overlooked impact on the environment. They highlight a sharp increase in deforestation since it broke out in late 2021, with an estimated 3,019 acres of tree cover lost in 2023. Between 2019 and 2022, the yearly average forest loss was 1,410 acres.

Advocates at the conference discussed how conflict can restrict Indigenous peoples’ access to their lands, as they often must flee violence to protect themselves. But without access to their lands, similar to biodiversity degradation, which is sometimes also generated by conflict, Indigenous communities may struggle to obtain access to nutritional foods, leading to health impacts and the weakening of social and spiritual cohesion, as Roth’s study on Indigenous health pointed out. 

“These conflicts have immediate and long-term health impacts,” Roth said. “Communities are displaced from their lands, access to healthcare is disrupted, and people face lasting trauma and stress. At the same time, the environment is damaged or destroyed — polluted water, deforestation, loss of food systems — which further undermines health.”

This is the situation Ngāti Tīpā peoples of Waikato Tainui Tribal Confederation in Tauranganui Marae, New Zealand, are facing.

“My great-great-grandmother said all the waters surrounding our community were once clean,” said Em-Haley Kūkūtai Walker, who is Ngāti Tīpā and an artist from the community. “We didn’t receive many floods, and our fisheries were healthy. Now, because of sea level rise into our river that is increasing salinity levels, fish are dying and moving elsewhere.”

Indigenous leaders at the forum, such as Wilton Littlechild, a Cree chief and lawyer defending treaty rights, argued that legal recognition for their territories is a foundational prerequisite to protect biodiversity and Indigenous health.

“Indigenous people have these treaties [and there is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples], which are tools to protect their health,” said Littlechild.

This call was echoed by the WHO in its draft Global Plan of Action, or GPA, on the health of Indigenous people, which called for supporting “Indigenous-led ecosystem stewardship and nature-based approaches that safeguard health.” On February 5, the WHO’s Executive Board decided to delay consideration of the GPA draft to 2027 to allow more time for consultation.

According to advocates, Indigenous health is completely inseparable from land tenure, biodiversity, food sovereignty, and self-determination, and this must be recognized by bodies such as the U.N. and the WHO.

Leaders warn that global climate and biodiversity goals cannot be met without Indigenous peoples. In a session about tying national obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, to health, Ruth Mercredi, an elder and a traditional healer in Yellowknife, Canada, said governments need to start prioritizing Indigenous health.

“Today, we are getting sick of the water, of the food, of the air,” said Mercredi. “Whatever we are putting in our bodies. We have to now be mindful of that when we didn’t have to before.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous health can’t be separated from environmental health, leaders tell UN on Apr 22, 2026.

Plug-in solar panels — sometimes called “balcony solar” — allow people to generate electricity by plugging panels directly into a standard outlet and help cut down on utility bills, without the need for expensive rooftop installations. The relatively cheap technology has taken off in parts of Europe, and a recent Utah law sponsored by Ward has spurred interest across the U.S.

Utah lawmakers passed HB 340 last year with bipartisan and unanimous support, becoming the first state to allow residents to plug solar systems directly into residential outlets.

“It’s great for anyone who wants a little solar power but does not want to pay $30,000 for a roof install,” said Ward, a Republican.

Ward learned about plug-in solar panels after reading about their popularity in Germany. Balcony panels there added 10 percent more solar capacity to the grid in just a few months, The New York Times reported, just as Russia’s war with Ukraine was draining energy supplies.

Since Ward’s bill passed last year, 30 more states plus the District of Columbia have drafted similar bills, according to information tracked by the plug-in solar lobbying group Bright Saver.

“Thank you, Utah,” said Cora Stryker, a co-founder of the California-based nonprofit. “It’s a common-sense, no-brainer thing that should keep sweeping the country.”

Maine’s governor signed a similar bill earlier this month. Virginia’s plug-in solar bill currently sits on the governor’s desk awaiting a signature. Colorado and Maryland have legislation approved by both chambers of their statehouses. Bills in Hawaii, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Vermont have passed in one chamber so far.

Despite that momentum, U.S. residents still can’t buy plug-in panels from the same big box stores that sell other consumer electronic appliances, like hair dryers, washing machines, or toasters. That’s because Utah and other states also need rules and regulations for the panels, because while they sound simple, they flip the way the electrical utility system works on its head.

Residential households are only designed to pull power off the grid, through wires to outlets, and into plugged-in devices. Balcony solar does the opposite by creating power and pushing it backward into the outlet and “upstream” through a home’s wires, Ward explained. “Utilities tend, in general, not to want anybody else to make power,” he said.

Power providers also have concerns about safety, the lawmaker said. If line workers are trying to repair an electrical line they think is switched off, for example, but a condo’s solar panels are still pushing electricity through that line, it could put those employees in danger of getting electrocuted.

To Ward, those problems were solvable. “The electricity is the same over [in Europe] as it is over here,” he said. “All the same rules of physics work and have proved to be safe.”

But U.S. residents can’t smuggle balcony solar systems over in a suitcase from Europe, because North America uses different plugs and voltages.

Ward collaborated with Utah’s largest electricity provider, Rocky Mountain Power, to craft language for his bill so that the plug-in movement in Utah can be homegrown.

A spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Power noted the utility took no position on Ward’s bill. “We remain concerned that some products entering the market may not meet the requirements of the bill,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, “potentially creating electrical hazards for utility workers.”

The legislation removes liability for utilities, and owners of plug-in panels can’t ask for payments for the electricity they send back to the grid. It also requires a company called Underwriters Laboratories, often shortened to UL Systems, to develop safety certification for plug-in panels.

UL develops all kinds of safety standards for consumer products, building materials, and other goods. But Utah’s legislation marked the first time they were asked to test plug-in panels, and the company got to work over the summer. Kenneth Boyce, vice president of engineering for UL, said he was surprised to see his company named in Utah’s legislation. 

“But we take it very seriously,” Boyce said. 

The company issued a white paper in November outlining potential hazards with the panel systems themselves as well as how they might interact with a typical home’s wiring. From there, it developed product-level requirements that will allow the UL mark to appear on certified products.

“We’re … making sure we keep [consumers] safe while they get the benefits of participating in the energy transition,” Boyce said. “We can do both.”

Underwriters Laboratories’ researchers tested ways to ensure that plug-in panels don’t make circuit breakers explode, or that GFCI plugs that are supposed to trip and switch off — commonly found in bathrooms, kitchens, and outdoors — don’t fry and malfunction without the residents’ knowledge.

No plug-in systems have been certified by UL to date, Boyce said. “We expect that will change soon,” he said, noting he’s heard from multiple manufacturers. He expects the UL stamp to appear on U.S. panels in “months, maybe even weeks.”

Some inventive individuals, including the popular Utah YouTuber JerryRigEverything, have cobbled together their own plug-in systems. They use components that are individually UL certified, like panels, cords, and inverters. But all the components combined into a balcony system haven’t been tested and green-lit for safety, Boyce cautioned.

For those willing to take the risk, a global company called EcoFlow is one of the most popular online retailers for plug-in panels in the U.S. They’re currently in conversations with UL about how to certify their product, according to Ryan Oliver, a spokesperson for EcoFlow.

They’ve sold portable solar systems for about four years in Europe “where they’re very popular,” he said.

An inverter, which brings electricity from the solar panels into the home and shuts down generation to ensure safety, currently costs about $300 on EcoFlow’s website. A system that includes a battery to store solar energy costs $1,200. And compatible solar panels run between $250 to $1,000, depending on the size of the array.

“It’s consistent with Utah’s values of wanting to supply your own energy, and letting people make their own decisions around meeting their needs,” said Josh Craft, director of government relations and public affairs for Utah Clean Energy.

Craft said he’s experimenting with his own plug-in system at home donated by EcoFlow. “It works. It’s fun,” he said. “I have foldable panels set up on my patio roof.”

The panels could also amp up an entirely new market for clean energy. Their surge in popularity comes at a time when the Trump administration is slashing subsidies for wind and solar projects, even as energy bills are expected to spike due to demands from data centers and artificial intelligence, Craft noted.

Utah code resulting from Ward’s bill caps power output from plug-in systems at 1,200 watts, which means they won’t offset all the electrical use from a typical household.

On his YouTube channel, JerryRigEverything reported that his array saves about a dollar a day on his electricity bill. Craft figures his system, which is combined with a battery, cuts down his power bill by about 10 percent, but he hasn’t tested it while running an air conditioner.

In just the last few weeks, Ward said he’s had conversations with lawmakers in Hawaii, Washington, Minnesota, and Colorado about how to facilitate plug-in solar in their states. With Maine adopting a similar policy and several other states close behind, Utah’s experiment is already spreading.

“Heck yeah,” Ward said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How deep-red Utah helped launch a portable plug-in solar movement on Apr 21, 2026.

Congress eventually whittled his ambitions down to the Inflation Reduction Act, a package of green tax credits and incentives that became the nation’s first comprehensive climate policy. That is, until Republicans dismantled the law last year. Under President Donald Trump, the national policy wins Democrats had scored by leveraging the Green New Deal’s momentum all but vanished. The party was left soul-searching, wondering how it should talk about climate change, or if those calling for solutions should even talk about it at all.

Progressives seem to have settled on an answer: Make everything about affordability. A new climate agenda released Wednesday by the Climate and Community Institute, a left-leaning think tank, aims to lower costs for everyday people through home insurance rate caps, bans on utility shutoffs, and other measures. It promotes “green economic populism,” a framework to provide relief for the working class through policies that also happen to cut carbon emissions (such as free transit or a moratorium on data centers), while regulating the corporations contributing to climate change and the cost-of-living crisis. 

The architects of the so-called “working-class climate agenda” say they’ve learned lessons from the Green New Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act: One lacked political will, while the other failed to deliver tangible results to working-class voters quickly enough. “I think we’re all hugely inspired by the Green New Deal, and the Green New Deal moment, and what that represented,” said Patrick Bigger, research director at the Climate and Community Institute. “But I think that we recognize that we’re in a radically different place, politically, socially, economically now than we were eight years ago.” 

American voters have declared, in poll after poll, that their top concern is paying the bills as food, housing, and health care become more expensive. But many of these rising household costs are related to climate change. Because heat waves diminish harvests, and extreme weather leads to spikes in energy prices and home insurance rates, climate advocates are connecting the dots. An analysis the Brookings Institution released last year found that the effects of a warming world — including the health costs of wildfire smoke and flooding — are costing the average household somewhere between $219 and $571 a year.

As the war in Iran drives up fuel prices, revealing the economic fragility of the nation’s dependence on oil, it creates a unique opportunity to advance the new agenda, said Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding co-director of the Climate and Community Institute: “It should be easier than it’s ever been before to say, ‘Fossil fuels are unreliable. They drive up your cost of living. They cause wars and people die. And if we make a green transition, that will make everyday life better for working people who are struggling.’”

The agenda was also inspired by the mayoral campaigns of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Katie Wilson in Seattle, both of whom won elections last year with populist platforms focused on affordability. Like the Green New Deal, green economic populism also seeks to mobilize massive investments in communities, infrastructure, and industry. In the medium-term, that means rolling out technologies that can cut household expenses alongside fossil fuel use, like heat pumps, induction stoves, and electric vehicles — and making them accessible to the working class, unlike Biden’s EV tax credits that were taken advantage of mainly by the wealthy.

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Some of the climate solutions you might expect are noticeably absent from the agenda. For example, it makes no call for carbon taxes or cap-and-trade, since these economic systems can pass on costs to consumers — an option Bigger said is “not politically tenable right now.” Meanwhile, some of the plan’s suggestions, such as implementing rent caps or freezes, might not even strike most people as climate policies. But making housing easier to afford is a climate solution, according to Wilson, the new mayor of Seattle, where transportation is the leading source of carbon emissions. “When you build affordable housing in the city near where people work, near where people shop, near where people do all the things — that is what enables people to not drive a car an hour to get to work each day,” Wilson said during a press briefing about the agenda. 

Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, said Americans’ lack of trust in institutions, combined with a skepticism that they’ll reap the benefits, could make implementing bold public investments difficult. “I will say that the biggest question I often get about proposed climate solutions or climate infrastructure is, ‘How can you assure me that I’m not going to be paying the cost down the line?’” Adcox said. Her polling firm, however, found that 70 percent of voters believe economic policy can simultaneously lower costs and emissions. 

But Emily Becker, director of communications for the climate and energy program at the center-left think tank Third Way, described the agenda as “Biden on steroids,” warning that it may not resonate as broadly as its proponents hope. “It lacks the imagination of the Green New Deal, and it lacks the pragmatism of the Inflation Reduction Act,” she said. “They find themselves stranded between, ‘OK, do we tell policymakers how to make something durable that works and that has political fortitude? Or do we paint the picture of the world we wish to build?’” That middle ground makes her think the agenda won’t catch on. She also thinks using a populist framing to convince the public to care about climate is unnecessary. “You are lucky to be a clean energy advocate in this moment, because clean energy is affordable energy,” Becker said. “So talk to them about addressing energy affordability and how clean energy can satisfy that.”

Advait Arun, an energy policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, which advocates for state-led economic development, said the agenda is promising, but wonders if focusing so narrowly on how climate-friendly measures could cut individuals’ bills might be a mistake. Could climate advocates get so caught up in, say, pitching people on how a heat pump could cut their electric bills that they fail to fight for the larger changes needed to reduce price spikes? Or communities’ recovery costs after weather disasters? “I think [it] actually limits our imagination for the kind of stability we can sell and the kind of politics we can build around it,” Arun said.

The architects of the plan are working with their allies to refine the particular policies of the agenda, but they feel confident in the general vision. “I would characterize green economic populism at this stage,” Bigger said, “as very much that sort of overarching North Star towards which we’re orienting.”

Frida Garza and Jake Bittle contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Green New Deal has evolved. Now it’s all about ‘affordability.’ on Apr 21, 2026.

Last year, the world’s highest court — the International Court of Justice — issued an advisory opinion saying state governments that contribute to climate change should be accountable for the harm they cause, particularly to small island states. The Inter-American Court on Human Rights issued a similarly sweeping decision last summer, calling on governments to reduce fossil fuel emissions and incorporate Indigenous knowledge into climate policies. 

But the rulings have collided with a harsh reality: Many U.N. member states would prefer to ignore their climate obligations, leaving open the question of whether these rulings can be implemented, enforced, and used to protect Indigenous land and rights. 

“This is a moment of opportunity. These advisory opinions are not symbolic, they are instruments of power,” Luisa Castañeda-Quintana, executive director of the advocacy group Land is Life, told hundreds of Indigenous advocates at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on Monday. “They can and must be used to strengthen Indigenous peoples’ advocacy at every level. But to do so, Indigenous peoples must claim them, integrate them into the rights narratives, and take them into every space where their futures are being decided.” 

That gap between legal recognition and enforcement is particularly stark in Ecuador. Magaly Ruiz Cajas, a member of the country’s Judiciary Council who also spoke at the forum, noted that Ecuador’s constitution has recognized the rights of nature since 2008. “In Ecuador, green justice is not an option, it is an obligation,” Cajas said, pointing to court rulings including a 2011 case regarding pollution in the Vilcabamba River. 

But multiple speakers from Ecuador said those constitutional protections haven’t stopped companies from ignoring Indigenous land rights. Juan Bay, president of the Waorani Nation of Ecuador, told the forum that Ecuador is not complying with international or national law to protect Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation or living close to oil wells — actions he called “incompatible with climate action and with the rights of Indigenous peoples.” Indigenous land defenders in Ecuador have faced persecution and death in recent years, and in February, Ecuador passed a law to accelerate mining that weakened environmental protection requirements, ignoring criticism from Indigenous and environmental organizations. 

The pattern isn’t unique to Ecuador. Albert Kwokwo Barume, the U.N. special rapporteur on Indigenous peoples, identified it across the region in a report last year: “Latin America and the Caribbean presents a paradox. The contributions reveal strong legal frameworks that coexist with persistent failures in implementation,” he wrote. “Even favourable court rulings are undermined by poor enforcement and lack of consultation.”

Resistance has come from more powerful nations as well. Vanuatu and a dozen supporting states introduced a U.N. resolution earlier this year to operationalize the ICJ ruling, calling for fossil fuel phaseouts and climate reparations. In response, President Donald Trump’s administration sent a message to all U.S. embassies calling the resolution “disturbing” and a “charade,” urging Vanuatu to withdraw the resolution and other countries to reject it. 

Vanuatu did not back down, but the vote in the General Assembly has been delayed until May. 

Joie Chowdury, an attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, said the ruling gave states clear obligations to address climate change. “It remains important to translate that legal clarity now into action,” she said. 

As policy discussions continue, Indigenous nations in Northern Ontario are dealing with climate-driven flooding, large-scale evacuations, and contaminated water supplies. “We’re in 2026 right now, and we have Indigenous communities living in a poverty state,” said Ryan Fleming, of the Attawapiskat First Nation. “And it is not just an implementation gap. This becomes a human rights issue.” 

Fleming said the flooding highlights the intersection of climate change and Canada’s failure to honor treaty obligations. 

In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori lands face stronger storms without increased support. Janell Dymus-Kurei, who is from Te Whakatōhea, spoke at the forum on behalf of National Iwi Chairs Forum Pou Tikanga, a national group focused on Māori self-determination, and said international courts and forums present an underused opportunity. “We’re just not really making the most of those mechanisms,” she said.

Despite the resistance, legal momentum continues to build. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is currently considering a case on states’ climate obligations, including how African governments should handle climate-related displacement. 

Fleming said spaces like the Permanent Forum are crucial for pressuring countries like Canada to honor their human rights obligations. “We understand the importance of leveraging these international mechanisms,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline At the UN, Indigenous leaders tackle how to enforce global climate court rulings on Apr 21, 2026.

This Earth Month, Grist reached out to climate leaders across the country, to hear about how they’re staying motivated and continuing to push forward. 

Their responses remind us that wins are still happening, progress is still possible, and inspiration comes in so many forms.

[Read even more of these conversations, and find out how to see them live]

These interviews were conducted over email, and have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Gaurab Basu is a primary care physician and an assistant professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He is a leader in integrating climate education into medical curriculum, and studies the health impacts of climate change and the health benefits of climate solutions, in the U.S. and overseas.

What originally led you to work on climate solutions?

The U.N. IPCC report in 2018 was a catalytic moment for me. I had been spending my career studying global health inequity around the world, and how social systems in the U.S. impacted health and disease. This report made it clear that climate change was at the heart of everything I cared about in my professional and personal life. It fundamentally changed me, my understanding of the world, and my sense of responsibility. From that time on, I worked to incorporate climate solutions into all facets of my work.

How have you seen climate action change over the past five to 10 years?

We created an unprecedented movement for climate action in recent years. I’ve never seen so many people passionate about protecting our planet — and anchoring in our responsibility to protect people’s health and the vitality of future generations. We’ve made a lot of progress in explaining to people that climate change is a health issue. 

At the same time, we have seen an unprecedented rejection and destruction of science and an extraordinary regression on the progress we were making. So much of what I have taken for granted — funding for science, medicine, and international aid — it’s made me appreciate how extraordinary the progress and gains we have made through these funding streams have truly been. I have no illusions of the challenges ahead of us, but I believe deeply that we can catalyze a new era in which we once again fund science, create durable policy, and take pride in protecting the planet and people. So many people are putting their heads down and pushing forward, in spite of the challenges. 

What’s your best advice for staying motivated and making a difference?

One of the projects I am working on right now that I care most about is in the Indian Sundarbans, a region that has beautiful ecology, including being a part of the largest continuous mangrove forests in the world. But it’s extremely poor, and being hit harder and harder by cyclones like Cyclone Amphan. They are clear-eyed about the tremendous challenges that face them — they know their home is changing, that floods are impacting their farmlands and threatening distressed migration and impacting health, education, nutrition, and gender equity. But they remain a vibrant, courageous community, ready to face the challenges with determination. I want to channel that clarity of purpose and courage in my own work, dig in, and continue to try my very best to be of service to the world for the rest of my life.

Who or what inspires you and gives you hope?

I see the ways that solar and batteries are profoundly decreasing emissions in California. I’ve been following Bill McKibben’s message of just how transformative solar has become in the clean energy transition. I’m also watching Pakistan exponentially increase solar on its grid. So many developing countries are switching to EVs faster than we ever could have imagined. 

I’m inspired by organizations like the Environmental League of Massachusetts, where I am on the board. It’s a state organization that is fighting the headwinds from the pullback of federal policy, but just continues to push forward. 

There are going to be times that are very, very hard, and we are in one of them. And we have to keep going with passion, dogged determination, and belief that we can make the impossible possible.

Emily Graslie is an independent science communicator and digital media producer.

Her YouTube show, The Brain Scoop, breaks down science topics for hundreds of thousands of viewers. She has worked with a number of organizations (recently including the Great Lakes chapter of the Audubon society and the state tourism board of Montana) to make engaging videos about their research, education, and conservation efforts. 

What originally led you to work in the climate space?

As a non-scientist myself (I studied art and history in college), I never really felt like there was a place for me in the world of science or conservation. During the end of college I got involved with the campus natural history museum with the goal of creating artwork about the collections, but soon realized there was a major gap when it came to museums and scientists sharing their work broadly. That was a gap I was uniquely able to fill, as someone interested in being an informational conduit for others. 

How have you seen things change over the past five to 10 years?

Well, climate-wise, it’s become incredibly apparent that our world is undergoing unprecedented and likely irreversible changes. As I’ve learned more about deep time and the many phases our planet has gone through over the last 4.56-plus billion years, it’s astonishing to realize the human-influenced environmental catastrophes we’re experiencing are happening on a scale unlike anything Earth has ever before endured. So, that’s terrifying. 

But on the bright side, there are also way more people involved in climate and environmental sciences, and awareness of these issues is way more pervasive than it was 10+ years ago when I started in the YouTube/digital media space. Social media gets a lot of (warranted) flak for all of its ills and detriments, but these platforms have established and facilitated incredible connections around the world. Creating and participating in online spaces is a powerful way to fight overwhelming feelings of isolation and hopelessness when it comes to facing an oftentimes daunting future. 

What challenges (foreseeable and unforeseen) have you encountered in your work?

The stakes feel much higher today than they were when I started my career during the starry-eyed Obama era. I saw a meme about how we thought becoming science educators was going to be similar to Bill Nye conducting whimsical experiments — not convincing people that the world isn’t flat, it is older than 6,000 years, and climate change is real. Add on the prevalence of harassment that women content creators face, and there’s a real weariness that has culminated over the years and resulted in various stages of burnout. And yet … nearly 15 years later, I’m still in the field, and still feeling as strongly and passionately about this work as ever. 

What’s your best piece of advice for staying motivated and making a difference?

Find like-minded people and communities that leave you feeling inspired, not tired. Working in the climate/environment space can be emotionally draining, so it’s imperative to surround yourself with those who share your passion and can support you fundamentally as a person. And get a hobby completely outside of your profession. I play violin in a professional symphony orchestra outside of Chicago. It’s glorious to have a space a few hours every week where the focus is on creating something beautiful with a group of incredibly talented musicians.

Nick Tilsen is the founder and CEO of NDN Collective, a national, Indigenous-led advocacy organization.

NDN Collective “bolsters the ability of Indigenous peoples, communities, and nations to exercise our inherent right to self-determination, while fostering a world that is built on a foundation of justice and equity for all people and Mother Earth.”

What originally led you to work on climate solutions?

I’ve been connected to the climate justice fight since before I was born. My parents met at the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee, where Native people were demanding the U.S. government stop violating their own treaties by desecrating our rightful land. Indigenous peoples have been stewarding our land sustainably for centuries, and have been fighting against environmental destruction since the U.S. government slaughtered millions of buffalo as part of their strategy to eradicate us. Our peoples hold a vast amount of traditional ecological knowledge that mainstream climate groups are finally beginning to take seriously. 

Our message remains that landback is a necessary solution to the climate crisis, and should be centered in every climate organization’s mission. The more power Indigenous people have over our lands and waterways and can protect them from extractive industries, the better and safer our shared planet is for everyone. 

How have you seen climate action change over the past five to 10 years? What challenges have you encountered?

While Indigenous people have been ringing the alarm on climate change for many decades, most people began understanding the urgency and importance of developing alternatives to the extractive economy within the last decade or so, once folks started seeing material impacts to their lives. 

From flooding and fires in the colonized kingdom of Hawai‘i, to the disastrous rains in Alaska, wildfires sweeping the plains, smoky orange skies in California, a hurricane devastating western North Carolina — more and more people are regularly facing climate disaster. 

Under the Biden administration we saw the largest-ever climate investment in history, a victory which was the result of decades of Black and brown frontline organizers working tirelessly and strategically to make the climate crisis a national priority.

When Trump took office, climate groups, programs, and efforts were totally gutted, with federal funding swiftly pulled out from under them. Many philanthropic organizations have followed suit, tightening their grip around their money rather than releasing it to the frontline organizations fighting to protect all of us. NDN Collective’s budget was rapidly cut in half.

Despite an enormous funding and resourcing gap, we will continue to fight because our great-grandchildren are asking us to. The central problem is colonialism, which manifests itself in countless daily challenges, both ongoing and still emerging. We see colonialism show up in insidious ways, even within climate justice and environmental spaces.

In the last five years alone, hundreds of Indigenous people have been killed for protecting Mother Earth — from forest defender Tortuguita in Atlanta, to Eduardo Mendúa in Ecuador, to Mãe Bernadete in Brazil, and many more. We honor their lives by continuing the work.

What’s your best piece of advice for staying motivated?

It is important to stay grounded in your purpose. We didn’t sign up to do this work because it is easy or popular. We do this work because it is necessary, because it is what the people need and what Mother Earth needs. Sometimes that means our work gets lifted up as a shining example — and other times, that means it gets attacked. 

The other piece of advice I would offer is that you must have a strong belief in radical possibility. When doing this work, we need a steadfast vision — if we don’t have a vision of what is possible in the world, then it is really hard to keep fighting for a better one. So you need that vision of what you want the future to look like — and then be audacious enough to go after it. 

What solutions excite you, or what gives you the most hope within your field?

Our movement is strong, and we are telling our own stories in our own way. Our youth are learning our traditions and languages, keeping our ceremonies alive, and bringing invaluable insight and energy to movement spaces. Because we maintain and use our spiritual power, we have made impossible things happen. 

Indigenous people are building sustainable food systems across Turtle Island — from revitalizing buffalo corridors, to having access to spearfishing in Wisconsin, to rebuilding traditional eel harvesting practices, to running a school in South Dakota centered around our interconnectedness to everything, and more. 

We have the solutions. I remain steadfast in my belief that the best days are ahead of us.

Benji Backer is the founder and CEO of Nature Is Nonpartisan, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting public lands and pursuing environmental action across party lines.

The organization emphasizes natural climate solutions, aiming to build a movement that makes it easy and fun to take action for the protection of nature.

What originally led you to work in the climate and environmental movement? 

I grew up in Wisconsin, where snowy winters have become increasingly rare, invasive species have become a major issue, wildlife populations are out of balance, and ecosystems (like our prairies and the Mississippi River) have become significantly damaged. From childhood until today, I’ve watched the environment worsen in front of my eyes. Additionally, I’m an avid hiker, camper, and skier, so fighting for these places means a lot to me. As someone who has a background in politics, I thought this issue was the best way to bring Americans together again. Talking one-on-one with people across the spectrum offers great hope, as there is far more alignment than people realize. 

How have you seen things change over the past five to 10 years? 

The issue has become more polarizing than I’ve ever seen it. People feel really divided on this issue, believing it is more partisan than ever before, and understandably so. But in the hearts of most Americans, they actually largely want the same things when it comes to environmental protection, which makes this work really frustrating yet also hopeful. 

As environmental advocates, there’s just so much outside our control. Between the mass media’s incentive to divide us, the ever-changing social media algorithms, and worsening global and national events (wars, the economy, etc.), focus on the environment has decreased for nearly every voter, making it difficult to rally and reach people. Additionally, the loudest voices in the country are increasingly the most hateful, which makes it hard to create a narrative.

What’s your best piece of advice for staying motivated and making a difference? 

“This too shall pass.” Everything we’re seeing right now is temporary, and we need to build for when the moment is right for us again. Outside of social media and the political landscape, when I talk to everyday people from all walks of life, I’m reminded that the army of Americans who stand together on this still exists, and that we can — and will — absolutely win again. Giving up is what they want us to do. Being divided is what they want us to be. And we must be better than that. The world needs it.

What solutions excite you, or what gives you the most hope within your current field? 

We’re launching entertaining, informative content like “The Firepit,” which is our YouTube show where two unlikely allies who are well-known and respected in their fields sit over a campfire to talk about environmental issues and the world at large. We want to educate and activate Americans in a way that makes environmental action engaging, uplifting, and impactful.

I think the most immediate opportunity is rallying people around nature and conservation — natural climate solutions — which is exciting, because that’s what most people’s connection to climate and the environment is. That’s what people want to fight for. Nature isn’t just the grandiose mountains out West or a lavish beach vacation — it’s the river in your town, the trees in your neighborhood, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. It’s personal to everyone, and it’s worth fighting for every time. 

Melanie Allen is CEO of the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice.

The Hive Fund supports groups working to accelerate the clean energy transition across the South — in ways that center justice, redistribute power, and create healthier, safer, and more prosperous communities. 

What originally led you to work on climate solutions?

Like many people in this movement, I came to environmental justice through the lens of public health. As a young person, I got really sick and was diagnosed with a chronic illness. That eventually led me into advocacy around making sure all people could have access to health care. 

Over time, it became clear that many of these challenges weren’t just about health care access. They were shaped by environmental conditions like air pollution, water quality, and housing. That realization fundamentally shifted how I understood the work. I began to see environmental issues as deeply connected not only to public health, but also to economic justice and the broader conditions that allow communities to thrive. That holistic lens has stayed with me ever since.

How have you seen things change over the past five to 10 years?

The last decade has shown that, when the conditions are right, even institutions many thought were immutable can change. We saw this during the early days of COVID, when funders streamlined processes to move money faster, and again in the summer of 2020, when many introduced practices centered on racial justice.

But it shouldn’t take a crisis to move organizations to operate in ways that are more equitable and work better for all of us. And the rollback of much of that progress is a reminder that shifts driven by external pressure alone rarely hold. For change to endure, it has to go deeper — not just at the level of institutional practices, but into an organization’s values and how it understands its mission.

What has also become clear is that no matter how conditions shift, frontline and grassroots groups find ways to hold the line. At the end of the day, this work is about things most people want: lower energy bills, cleaner air and water, and communities that can truly thrive.

What challenges (foreseeable and unforeseen) have you encountered in your work?

One of the most persistent challenges in this work is a mismatch between where the need and opportunity are greatest, and where resources actually flow. We’ve seen this play out in the South for decades. Southern states account for nearly 40 percent of the nation’s climate pollution, yet groups in this region receive only less than a quarter of U.S. regional climate funding.

This gap reflects longstanding assumptions in philanthropy about where change is possible and whose leadership is worth investing in. But Southern groups have shown that when they’re well-resourced, they can and do win. In the past year alone, we’ve seen Hive Fund grantee partners stop polluting projects, secure major public and municipal investments in clean energy, and build coalitions that cut across partisan divides.

Yet climate philanthropy continues to underinvest in the region. If funders can close this gap, it’s one of the most powerful levers we have to slow pollution, accelerate clean energy, and build the people power needed for long-term climate progress.

What solutions excite you, or what gives you the most hope within your current field?

What’s most exciting to me right now is seeing communities get creative about meeting the need for affordable, reliable, and scalable clean energy. Supporting communities to be the architects and builders of new possibilities and new futures is something we’ve been really intentional about at Hive Fund.

Communities most impacted by climate and environmental injustice have long been forced to spend limited resources fighting harm and resisting injustice. That work is essential and will continue, but what’s often missing is support for people to not only fight, but also to imagine and create what comes next.

Photos: Gretchen Ertl; Tom McNamara; Willi White; Brad Konopa; Cornell Watson Photography

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline We asked climate leaders what’s keeping them inspired. Here’s what they said. on Apr 21, 2026.

That may soon change.

Adopted in 2001 during the final days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, as it is formally known, grew out of a realization within the U.S. Forest Service that it had built more roads than it could afford to maintain. Many were crumbling into streams, fragmenting habitat, and degrading drinking water, alarming even agency scientists. The rule barred road construction and logging in nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped national forest in 39 states. In the eastern U.S., these areas provide rare pockets of ecological and natural relief in a densely developed region.

As the Trump administration moves to dismantle the policy and open those lands to logging and mining, the future of these forests — and the communities that rely on them — is in question.

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The Department of Agriculture, under which the Forest Service sits, argues the roadless rule limits its ability to reduce wildfire risk, maintain access for firefighters, and promote forest health. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has called the policy an “absurd obstruction” and “overly restrictive.” She said its repeal would give the Forest Service greater flexibility to protect woodlands and support rural economies.

But conservationists argue the administration’s position is unsupported by science and ignores the importance of these relatively pristine expanses of forest. The woodlands play an outsize role in sheltering wildlife, supporting recreation, and protecting drinking water supplies to millions of people, as well as storing carbon to help fight climate change. “Roadless areas are a finite resource,” said Garrett Rose of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are our last best stretches of national forest land.”

Even some former leaders of the Forest Service oppose the repeal. Four former chiefs, drawing on 150 years of collective experience, have urged the administration to preserve the rule. “Removing protection of these precious lands that belong to all citizens, rich and poor, would be an irreparable tragedy,” said Vicki Christiansen, who led the agency from 2018 until 2021.

The policy safeguards about one-third of all national forest land. Ninety-five percent of it lies in 10 Western states where vast, contiguous forests remain the norm. East of the Mississippi River, however, the policy shields smaller, more vulnerable parcels. In Shawnee National Forest in Illinois, for example, just 4,000 acres are road-free; across the Southeast, the total is roughly 416,000. 

The Trump administration began its repeal effort last fall with an unusually short 21-day public comment period — far shorter than the usual timeframe, which can be as long as 90 days. Still, it drew more than 220,000 responses, nearly all of them opposed, according to an analysis by the advocacy organization Roadless Defense. Most cited concerns about wildlife, tourism, and water quality. 

Still, the administration plans to press ahead. The rollback is part of a broader push to expand logging and remake the nation’s second-largest land management agency. Last month, the Trump administration shuttered 57 of the 77 research stations the Forest Service operated nationwide, many of which studied the impacts of climate change, invasive species, and wildfires on woodlands. The shakeup included plans to move the agency headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah from Washington, D.C. and shutter nine regional offices.  

Since his return to office last year, President Donald Trump has pushed federal agencies to intensify timber production, an effort that includes making it easier to use legal loopholes to fell trees. With the Department of Agriculture aiming to overturn the roadless rule this year, the debate is shifting from Washington to the woods — and to the communities living alongside some of the last protected forests in the East. 

— Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco & Katie Myers

Shawnee National Forest, Illinois

A quiet stand in the woods against a warming world

In the summer of 1990, John Wallace celebrated his 31st birthday by looping a bike lock around his neck and securing himself to a log skidder deep within Shawnee National Forest. He was among dozens of activists who spent 79 days occupying the woodland to stop the sale of its timber. U.S. Forest Service officers arrested him only after cutting him free with a blowtorch. The campaign, which drew national attention, helped secure an injunction on commercial logging and oil and gas drilling that ended in 2013.

Still, the roadless rule continued to protect about 2 percent of the forest from harvest.  

Thirty-five years after locking himself to that skidder, Wallace worries about what President Trump’s push to expand logging will mean for the land he loves. “The impact in the Shawnee is not going to be as profound as the impact in the forest out west,” said Wallace, who spent part of his career managing public lands in Carbondale, Illinois. “But make no mistake, the Trump administration is determined to open up our public land to industrial exploitation.”

Shawnee stretches across the southern tip of Illinois, covering nearly 289,000 acres of steep hills, hardwood forest, and sandstone bluffs. Heavily logged a century ago, the forest has grown back unevenly, hemmed in by farms, power lines, warehouses, and small towns. Only a handful of scattered pockets of the forest, about 10,000 acres in all, are safe from pavement through the rule.

The roadless areas in the park are vital to imperiled species like the cerulean warbler, the bird-voiced tree frog, and the Indiana bat. One tree can also absorb approximately 48 pounds of carbon dioxide each year — and many of these woodlands are at a stage when that process is at its peak.

“Eastern forests are middle-aged,” typically between 80 and 120 years old, said Richard Birdsey, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and former U.S. Forest Service researcher. “That’s a period when they are optimally removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in biomass and the soil.” 

Birdsey has spent decades studying the role forests play as carbon sinks. Woodlands offset more than 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2019, and a study he co-wrote in 2023 found that Eastern forests had reached only about half of their carbon storage potential. Left intact, they could continue accumulating it for decades, even centuries. Stopping all timber harvesting in these forests could absorb about 117 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2050. Accelerating timber harvest, as Trump wants to do, could increase emissions by a similar amount.

Back on the ground in Shawnee, Wallace navigated the winding backroads, passing a patchwork of fields, power lines, and scattered homes that cut across the forest. “I can see national forest in my rearview mirror and there’s national forest up here on our left,” he said. “When we get close to the roadless area, we’ll be surrounded by national forest.”

After missing a turn and backtracking onto a country road, he pulled into the modest cabin of his longtime friend Mark Donham. It’s tucked deep inside the Shawnee near Burke Branch, an expansive woodland ecosystem that fell short of the protection criteria of the roadless rule, but that the Forest Service still preserved from timber harvests due to its sensitive plant and water resources.

Inside, Donham — who works at a grocery co-op across the river in Kentucky — stoked one of his wood-burning stoves, the home’s only source of heat, and unrolled a large map. “Down here and over, all of this up to here — all the way up to where that transmission line is — that’s the roadless area,” he said. Donham moved to the cabin with his late wife in 1980 and soon joined the fight against logging. “It’s almost 7,000 acres.”

Outside, he led the way down a muddy, uneven path into Burke Branch, which is crisscrossed by a dense network of improved and unimproved roads, according to the forest’s 2006 management plan. Donham pointed out towering pines, one rising nearly eight stories. “And these aren’t even the biggest ones,” he said, gesturing farther down the trail toward even taller conifers. 

His mood shifted as the path narrowed. Deep ruts from all-terrain vehicles marred the soil. Beer cans lay scattered about. “I’ve lived here 45 years,” Donham said, filling a white plastic bag with trash. “Other than it being abused by vehicles, nothing’s happened in this area. You can take off walking that way, go four or five miles and just be in the wilderness.”

To Donham, the damage is a warning. Roads mean access — and access, he said, rarely brings good things.

— Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco

Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia 

The fire risk on both sides of the road

A narrow, heavily potholed dirt road stretches deep into the Chattahoochee National Forest outside the tiny north Georgia mountain town of Clayton — a moderate hike on foot, or a fun, if bumpy, ride on a mountain bike or all-terrain vehicle. But scramble up the steep slope to one side, through the leaf litter and scattered branches, and you’ll crest a ridge overlooking an expanse of woodland with no roads at all. Pines, oaks, and twisty mountain laurel roll down the mountainside. Off in the distance, another peak rises into the sky.

It’s beautiful — and remote. 

The Chattahoochee covers roughly 751,000 acres in the Appalachian foothills of northern Georgia. Just 7 percent of the forest, a tapestry of winding streams, steep ridges, and mixed woodland, remains free of roads. It feels vast and untouched — a rarity in the East. But that beauty comes with risk. 

“If lightning hit one of those peaks and started burning, starting a fire, it would get a fair way before they could maybe do much about it,” said JP Schmidt, an ecologist with Georgia Forest Watch.

That concern — access — lies at the heart of the U.S. Forest Service’s argument for repealing the roadless rule. Agency officials say that without roads, firefighters may struggle to reach blazes quickly, giving them ample opportunity to grow larger and more dangerous. In 2016, the Rough Ridge fire tore through 28,000 acres of the forest, underscoring those fears.

“It was a fire that they were unable to keep up with,” said James Sullivan, also with Georgia Forest Watch. The blaze, which burned for about a month, threatened small mountain communities like Tate City and Betty’s Creek. Though firefighters defended those areas, “the rest of it burned on its own.”

Allowing a fire to run its course — so long as people and homes are protected — isn’t necessarily a failure of forest management. It clears leaf litter, thins crowded saplings, and reduces the buildup of debris. “You’ve got all these fuels taken care of,” Schmidt said, “and there’s much less threat of a major fire again any time soon.”

It wasn’t always that way. The National Forest Service was founded in 1905 with aggressive fire suppression as a key policy. That began to change in the 1960s, and today some blazes burn themselves out under careful supervision. In fact, many public lands are managed with fire, a technique Indigenous peoples used for millennia to promote forest health.

“Prescribed fire is one of the most effective tools for reducing hazardous fuels and maintaining healthy, fire-adapted forests in the Southeast,” said Laura Fitzmorris, a Forest Service spokesperson. Roadless areas make up only about a sliver of the Chattahoochee and are “generally small and interspersed with nearby communities, roads, and recreation sites.” Access, she said, is “one of many operational factors considered” in wildfire response.

But access cuts both ways — because roads allow more than fire trucks in.

“If there were more roads, there would be more access,” Schmidt said. “So people might start fires, purposely or accidentally.”

Human activity is by far the leading cause of wildfires. From Virginia to Texas, people sparked 23,980 fires in 2024, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Lightning strikes caused just 809. Many of those fires start near roads, the result of cigarettes tossed from passing cars. Hot exhaust pipes or dragging tailpipes throwing sparks also are common causes. Hikers and campers can start them when they fail to extinguish campfires. And then there are those who intentionally start a blaze, using roads to easily get in and out.

In all of these cases, said Sam Evans, the National Forests and Parks program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, “roads are the common denominator.” The roadless rule already makes an exemption for firefighting, and he called the administration’s argument that repealing it will make that job easier “malarkey.”

“They’re trying to trick the American people into thinking that timber production is somehow making us safer from wildfire,” he said. “It’s not.” 

— Emily Jones

Green Mountain National Forest, Vermont

A denuded swath of woodland hints at the future

The snow crunched under Zack Porter’s boots as he wove his way to the crest of a small ridge in the thick of Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. When he reached the knoll, he looked out at acres of denuded land and wondered aloud: “Why?” 

It’s unclear exactly when it happened, but sometime between 2020 and 2025, loggers legally stripped away the maple, beech, birch, and ash trees that had stood here for more than a century. In their place grew prickly brambles that caught on Porter’s pants and left thorns in his socks. “I am blown away,” he said. Porter, who co-founded Standing Trees, a nonprofit that advocates for forests in New England, hadn’t visited the site since it was logged. “They turned this into a moonscape,” he said.

He worries that more clearcutting may be coming.

The U.S. Forest Service manages about 376,000 acres of Green Mountain National Forest, and this stretch — called Homer Stone — lies in the southern portion of that range. The government has labeled the 11,619-acre parcel as a roadless area, but because it wasn’t designated as such until after the 2001 rule took effect, it has remained ripe for what the Forest Service calls “early successional habitat creation.”

“You have to get used to that with the Forest Service. There’s a lot of gobbledygook, a lot of names that kind of throw you off,” said Porter. “That’s shorthand for logging.” 

The Forest Service has deemed roughly 81,000 acres of Vermont part of a “roadless area,” but only about 25,000 acres of that are projected by the Clinton-era rule. The other 56,000 aren’t covered, and the Forest Service has approved about 6,000 acres for logging. This is a preview, Porter said, of what would happen to protected trees across the country if the Trump administration scraps the Clinton-era protections.

“The roadless rule is really one of the best tools we have to keep these public lands on a path to ecological restoration,” he said, staring at land covered in stumps, some of them 3 feet or more in diameter.

The Forest Service maintains that cutting mature trees can help revitalize the forest by creating swaths of young, fast-growing vegetation that provide food and cover for songbirds, small mammals, and insects. Some ecologists, ornithologists, and conservationists support this approach, arguing that decades of fire suppression and development have reduced the amount of this habitat on the landscape.

The trees in this patch of Homer Stone are, for the most part, now gone. With them, Porter argues, went irreplaceable ecological benefits. Less old growth forest means a smaller potential habitat for the American Marten, which is endangered in Vermont. It also means fewer shaggy bark trees, and the inevitable fallen deadwood, that make great homes for northern long-eared bats. A dearth of cover can also increase runoff, exacerbating Vermont’s growing problems with flooding. 

Porter is also troubled by how these trees came to be cut. The Forest Service announced its plans to log during the first Trump administration, but didn’t provide exact locations. The public comment before cutting began was brief, Porter said, and led only to superficial changes. For example, some of the proposed roads were re-labeled “temporary,” though Porter said it is unclear what, in practice, distinguishes them from permanent roads. 

Tracey Forest runs the Spirit Hollow silent retreat in southern Vermont and told the local news outlet VTDigger that she wasn’t aware of the public comment periods. Foresters appeared in the forest surrounding her land in 2024, and trees began to fall last year. She has since had to relocate parts of her business. “To place such a giant, loud, factory operation right at our border — it seems unconscionable to us,” Forest said. 

Driving deeper into the Homer Stone forest, the evidence of logging is easy to find: stumps where trunks have been hauled away, a hilltop where light pours through thinned trees. Then, abruptly, the forest resumes, largely undisturbed. On either side of this invisible line, the trees are ecologically identical — but those beyond it were inventoried before 2001, and so are shielded from logging.

“There’s little to stop the logging of this place, except for the roadless rule,” said Porter, crossing into protected land, onto a path lined with sturdy Vermont hardwoods. “Look how easy it would be for someone to drive a logging truck in here.”

— Tik Root

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests on Apr 20, 2026.

This year’s United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is focused on the grim topic of survival in the midst of war, with its official theme “Ensuring Indigenous peoples’ health, including in the context of conflict.” Experts emphasize that Indigenous peoples already face health inequities from colonialism and climate change, and these harms are compounded by armed conflicts and militarization that risk ecological degradation and further displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Experts say that health for Indigenous peoples is directly tied to the environment, land, and sovereignty, and can’t be siloed into clinical discussions about medicine or public health.

Warfare isn’t the only concern — advocates are seeing the extraction of critical minerals for the green transition drive Indigenous rights violations, and are echoing a long-standing call to make climate financing directly available to their communities, instead of through state or foreign intermediaries.

But before diplomatic conversations can even begin, many delegates must confront the practical barrier of visa restrictions put in place by the Trump administration. Mariana Kiimi Ortiz Flores, who is Na Ñuu Savi from Mexico and works as an advocacy assistant at Cultural Survival, said last year, her organization prepared Indigenous representatives from Africa to attend the forum, but their visa applications were denied — and this year, one of their Indigenous staff members from South America was denied her visa as well. 

“It’s getting harder and harder to access the United States, not only because of the visa [issues],” said Flores. “People from the Global South, especially Indigenous peoples that have a certain look like brown skin and certain characteristics, we feel threatened because of the general climate of insecurity and hate speech against Latin people and Indigenous peoples.”  

Last year, Flores’ organization helped Indigenous leaders from Bolivia attend the forum to protest mining in their traditional lands. They left the forum after being harassed by the leader of a political party in Bolivia, and, coupled with health issues, have decided not to return. “The forum is meant to be for Indigenous peoples, but we really felt that that’s not what’s happening anymore and that at the end of the day, the states are the ones who have more power over our lives,” Flores said. “This struggle of defending their land against this extractive industry is really affecting them not only physically but also mentally, spiritually.”

That comprehensive toll is one of the central focuses of a key report by Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendant, former vice chair of the Permanent Forum, and board chair of the Indigenous Determinants of Health Alliance, an international Indigenous health advocacy nonprofit. “You can’t separate human health from the health of the environment, or our culture, or our language,” Roth said. “Indigenous people view health from a holistic perspective.” 

In his report, Roth outlines the Indigenous determinants of health, ranging from land tenure and governance authority that strengthen Indigenous well-being to risk indicators like land dispossession and exclusion from decision-making. Roth argues that fragmented approaches to Indigenous health frequently embraced by the U.N. system and state governments fail to adequately address health problems and underlying causes.

For example, biodiversity policies that ignore Indigenous rights miss opportunities to restore Indigenous land tenure that can both improve ecosystem outcomes and strengthen access to traditional foods. Mental health interventions that ignore state-sanctioned Indigenous language erasure overlook the potential to improve Indigenous mental well-being through language revitalization. “Indigenous health is not just about healthcare, it’s about land, culture, food systems, and community,” Roth said. 

The Coquille Indian Tribe in Oregon adopted the Indigenous determinants of health by ordinance last year, and Roth has been working with them as chairman of their executive health board to incorporate the determinants of health across their agencies. “They understand that when they take elders out on a monthly basis to do fishing activities, that is health for those elders,” he said. “It’s continuing their tradition as Coquille people, and it improves the mental health, behavioral health of those elders that are able to participate in that, let alone the food they catch.” 

Roth also calls on the U.N. to recognize the value of Indigenous midwifery, which has been frequently banned in favor of Western practices, forcing Indigenous women into conventional institutions where they often face racism and “obstetric violence,” such as procedures performed without their consent. “Indigenous people have been doing this for thousands of years, not only midwifery, but also caring for the environment and caring for our culture and preserving these food systems,” he said. 

In another report to UNPFII, former Permanent Forum chair Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, who is Indigenous Mbororo from Chad, warns that AI acts as a double-edged sword for Indigenous communities. While she urges governments to help Indigenous peoples develop AI tools to revitalize endangered languages and monitor their territories, she also warns of a looming era of digital extractivism as generative AI systems and tech companies actively scrape cultural content, such as medicinal knowledge, traditional stories, and even genetic data. 

Lydia Jennings, citizen of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe (Yoeme) and Huichol (Wixáritari), is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College. She said her advocacy for Indigenous data sovereignty — the movement ensuring communities retain the right to own and control their own data — began after a troubling discovery. She noticed a mining company had pulled information about Indigenous cultural practices from an environmental impact statement and was using it on its website to promote a mining project. “That was very alarming to me,” she said. “How much information do we share in efforts to protect our sacred homelands? And what are the ways that we can govern how and who uses that data?”

Like Ibrahim, she said AI can be an opportunity for tribes, noting some might be interested in hosting data centers or using AI to help with language preservation or synthesizing information. However, she remains wary of how much Indigenous data AI systems may be co-opting without consent, as well as the severe risks that massive data centers pose to tribal lands and water resources. “Who has the power and how do we redistribute that power?” she asked. “It can be a tool to power and a tool to harm, but how do we choose to wield it?” 

Jennings said there’s a growing movement to incorporate best practices of Indigenous data sovereignty on multiple levels, ranging from academic research to national and international policies. 

Another focus of this year’s Permanent Forum is the climate crisis. In a February report focusing on nomadic peoples, experts warned that rigid state borders and exclusionary “fortress conservation” models are curbing the traditional mobility of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, and seafarers, even as they deal with the fallout of both climate change and increasing lack of access to ancestral lands and waters.

The authors argue that mobility is a deliberate, knowledge-based climate adaptation strategy that state policymakers are actively erasing, citing an example of the Tuareg people in the Sahara Desert. “While the desert knows no borders, contemporary militarized frontiers increasingly restrict ancestral routes and undermine pastoral systems and access to services, rendering these lived realities of Indigenous peoples invisible in official data and policy frameworks,” the authors describe. 

That echoes sentiments expressed by Samante Anne, who is Indigenous Maasai from Kenya and recently spoke at a virtual panel on pastoralists’ legal rights on behalf of the Mainyoito Pastoralists Integrated Development Organization. Anne said although 60 percent of land in Kenya is considered communal, land is increasingly being subdivided for developments and claimed for carbon offset projects that limit pastoralists’ access to land and movement. 

“Mobility has everything to do with us adapting to climate change,” Anne said. “Mobility has everything to do with ensuring our livelihoods are secure, our food security is good.” 

Making progress on Indigenous health, artificial intelligence, and territorial rights is complicated by a persistent trend within the U.N.: lumping Indigenous peoples together with “local communities.” In official policies and initiatives, the two groups are frequently merged under the acronym “IPLCs” — Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. But while local communities represent a broad category of stakeholders, Indigenous peoples hold distinct, legally recognized rights under international law. Roth from the Indigenous Determinants of Health Alliance said he recently confronted this issue at the World Health Organization when the agency categorized an Indigenous initiative merely as an “equity” issue.

“This is not an equity issue,” Roth said he told the agency. “We are not just another one of your minority populations. We are rights holders, and this needs to be approached from a rights-based approach. 

“Conflating us with other populations really diminishes our rights and diminishes our ability to maintain our health in our communities,” Roth said. This grouping also actively hinders participation, he added, pointing to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity’s IPLC working group as an example.

“I’ve tried to participate in that group several times, and as an Indigenous person, I don’t feel welcome and I’m not able to participate,” he said. “These [IPLC] institutions are a way to lessen or dilute the voice of Indigenous peoples in these global mechanisms, and that, to me, is unacceptable.” 

He is far from the only one who feels that way. In 2023, the U.N.’s three top Indigenous rights bodies — the Permanent Forum, the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — issued a joint statement demanding that U.N. environmental treaties stop using the IPLC acronym entirely. “Indigenous Peoples should not be grouped with an undefined set of communities that may have very different rights and interests,” they wrote. 

For advocates on the ground, that debate is just one part of a growing disillusionment with the U.N. system itself. Cultural Survival’s Mariana Kiimi Ortiz Flores said that the institution has suffered from a willingness by member states to simply disregard its laws. 

“The United Nations as an international institution has been losing its influence and its power,” said Flores. But despite its bureaucratic hurdles, visa denials, and geopolitical hostility, she said she’s among the many Indigenous people determined to show up this week. 

“If we as Indigenous peoples don’t do it,” said Flores, “No one else will speak for us and defend us.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline War, climate change, and AI: What’s at stake at this year’s UN Indigenous forum on Apr 20, 2026.

Although these restrictions do seem to have hindered the wind industry, there are some signs that its fortunes are changing. But a year later, solar continues to boom. MAGA influencers are promoting it, there’s hope for legislation that would speed up approvals for new projects, and the industry has continued to expand over the last year as energy requirements from data centers demand fast, cheap power. The Trump administration has even signed off on some big solar projects: In February, the administration announced that it would allow several solar projects that had been blocked by the new Interior regulations to move forward. 

“I feel like there has been so much written that’s like, ‘The Trump administration is delaying this stuff. It’s holding it all up in red tape. Nothing’s getting built,’” said Hannah Hess, director of the Rhodium Group’s Clean Investment Monitor team. “When we look at the data, that’s not true.” Combined, solar and battery storage (which banks excess energy for use when the sun’s not shining) accounted for 79 percent of power generation brought online in 2025 and are expected to continue to grow by 49 percent before the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits expire at the end of 2027. 

Support for solar among rank-and-file-conservatives has fallen in recent years, caught up in partisan culture wars, but it could gain more traction in the party if it’s paired with affordability concerns. Some 69 percent of Republicans say they are supportive of solar, provided it lowered electricity costs, according to a recent poll from the research organizations GoodPower and NORC at the University of Chicago. The Solar Energy Industries Association, the industry’s primary lobbying group, has emphasized that its industry aligns with President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda and lowers energy costs for families and businesses. “Conservative voters are drawing a clear distinction between rhetoric and practical solutions that lower costs,” read a blog post from the association in February. 

Even prominent conservative figures seem to be softening toward solar. Katie Miller, a former Trump administration official and the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, has gone so far as to herald solar as the “energy of the future.” In February, she posted to X: “Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” That same month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who had been a vocal critic of solar power, started saying it could be beneficial. “Is there a commercial role for solar power that can add to the grid affordable, reliable energy?” he said. “Certainly there is.” 

Data center developers have begun looking to solar as a complement to oil and gas, rather than a competitor. The incoming demand “feels crazy,” said Jim DesJardins, executive director of the Renewable Energy Industries Association of New Mexico. “It’s scary, almost. Five years ago, we were talking about an increase in load from EVs and building electrification — we’re not talking about that anymore. It’s all data centers and how are you going to power them.” This year marked the first time, said DesJardins, that the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association reached out to sponsor the renewable energy association’s annual conference. 

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Solar is, by far, the cheapest and fastest way to bring energy online, especially as the shortage of gas turbines — internal combustion engines that convert fuel into a steady, reliable energy — in the U.S. creates yearslong delays to build new power plants that run on natural gas. The technology is crucial for data centers that need to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “The backlog alone [for turbines] is five to nine years,” said Mike Hall, CEO of Anza Renewables, an energy intelligence and procurement platform based in California. “Then you’ve got to permit it. Then you’ve got to be near a gas pipeline for fuel, and then you’ve got the climate and the carbon issues.” A recent study from the analytics company Sightline Climate found that half of data center deals were expected to be delayed due to power constraints and local opposition, and developers are beginning to realize that waiting in line for a gas turbine could spell doom for their operation. 

There are still some obstacles ahead for solar power, however. “We’ve definitely seen examples from our developer customers where the Department of Interior rules are creating challenges for their projects on federal land, but we haven’t seen that it’s really slowed down development on private land,” said Hall. “The bottlenecks are typically still local permitting and interconnection with utilities — those are still major challenges, and we haven’t seen a lot of improvement in either area yet.” 

Shortly before Congress adjourned for its winter recess in December, the House passed the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, also known as the SPEED ACT, a bipartisan bill that would streamline the permitting process for energy, infrastructure, and transportation projects by overhauling the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Signed by President Nixon in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider how proposed infrastructure projects or drilling permits would affect the environment before approving them. Permitting reform is the rare, bipartisan issue that has sparked real enthusiasm on both sides of the aisle. 

After a scuffle over the Trump administration’s decisions to shut down offshore wind projects, which judges ruled invalid, Democratic senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse are coming back to the negotiating table to hammer out a deal. “Right now, we’re leaving electrons on the table thanks to Trump’s deliberate attacks on clean energy — forcing Americans to pay higher electricity bills,” Heinrich’s office told Grist. “To lower costs, this administration needs to stop stalling and slow walking clean energy projects and take the politics out of permitting reform.”

The war in Iran, which has caused oil prices to skyrocket, may serve to boost interest in solar power even more — especially as a way to combat rising electricity costs and promote energy independence. “Energy poverty has always been a problem in the U.S., and it’s gotten significantly worse in recent years,” said Brad Townsend, vice president of policy and outreach at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, an environmental policy nonprofit. He pointed to a study from the nonprofit RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute, that found 1 in 3 households were struggling to pay their utility bills. “I think folks in the administration are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that we can’t turn away renewable energy.” 

In terms of the geopolitical reasons to support solar, “no one has fought a war over the sun,” DesJardins told Grist. “Not yet, anyways.” 

Editors Note: An earlier version of this article misstated the work Anza Renewables does.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The state of solar: Despite partisan rhetoric, the industry is still booming on Apr 20, 2026.

It’s under these conditions that the International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, is meeting this week to discuss reducing the climate change impact of the shipping industry, which is responsible for 3 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. For the last three years, the 176 countries that are members of the IMO have been working toward adopting the so-called net-zero framework, an international policy requiring shippers to pay a fee for every ton of greenhouse gas emissions above a certain threshold. These proceeds would then be used to drive the development of alternative, cleaner fuels and support lower-income countries. 

But last summer, just as nations were nearing a vote to formally adopt the framework, the Trump administration threw a wrench in those plans. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with the heads of other agencies, released a statement warning countries that voting for the framework would result in a number of punitive actions by the United States, including visa restrictions, additional tariffs, and port fees. Seemingly overnight, countries that were previously in favor of the net-zero goal seemed to lose their nerve. And at an October meeting where the framework was expected to be adopted, countries voted instead to delay the decision by at least a year. 

In the months since, technical work has continued, but the political backing required to adopt the international agreement has largely dissipated. The consensus that once seemed within reach has fractured. 

“The Iran war has certainly complicated things,” said Evelyne Williams, a research associate with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s tricky because if the U.S. does want to kill this thing, it has considerable leverage in its LNG market to threaten countries.”

Williams said the meeting this week will demonstrate where countries stand and what their priorities are, given the current crisis. Several countries have proposed alternatives to the framework in the past few months. One proposal from Japan seeking middle ground considers doing away with the fee structure altogether and allowing shippers that emit excess greenhouse gases to trade away their surplus with companies in compliance — essentially a carbon trading system. Another proposal — by Liberia, Argentina, and Panama — does away with the fees, too, eliminating the crux of the framework that incentivizes compliance. A group of petrostates is calling for the cancellation of the framework altogether, while island states, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change, are calling for the framework to be adopted as originally planned or a more ambitious carbon levy. 

For its part, the U.S. has maintained its position that the net-zero framework essentially functions as a carbon tax, a move it predicts will raise costs for American consumers. In a separate proposal, the Trump administration has called for scrapping the framework and calling for a new proposal that doesn’t penalize fuel types that are more carbon-intensive and does not include an “economic element,” such as a tax or levy. 

“The United States submits that the most appropriate path forward is to end consideration of the IMO Net-Zero Framework entirely,” it noted in the proposal. “This would be a logical development given the plethora of existing alternative proposals and clear lack of consensus over the IMO Net-Zero Framework.”

Doing away with the fee structure altogether would be “catastrophic,” said Em Fenton, a senior director at Opportunity Green, a U.K.-based climate group that has been closely tracking the IMO negotiations. The net-zero framework penalizes shippers whose carbon emissions are above a certain threshold. These fees, which independent analyses have estimated will range around $12 billion by 2030, are then expected to help with the development of clean technologies for the shipping industry. Doing away with the fee, Fenton said, would remove the policy’s “regulatory teeth” and jeopardize a just and equitable transition. 

“Nothing can replace an economic element in terms of the value it brings for leveraging investment, for creating certainty,” said Fenton. “Nothing can replace that.”

The shipping industry has largely continued to back the net-zero framework, despite the additional cost and the current geopolitical crises. Absent a unifying global policy, the industry fears that a patchwork of regulations will complicate logistics. The European Union already has a carbon pricing mechanism in place for the shipping industry. If other countries adopt their own policies, it would add logistical complexity for a shipper moving products, say, from Asia to the Middle East and Europe. 

The International Chamber of Shipping, the trade association representing shipowners and operators, and other industry groups have defended the IMO as the primary international shipping regulator. “The shipyards of tomorrow will not only build vessels; they will build confidence in the industry’s ability to meet its sustainability goals,” the International Chamber of Shipping Secretary General, Thomas Kazakos, said in a statement. 

Fenton, Williams, and other experts will be following the discussions this week to see where countries stand and whether political consensus is still possible. 

“As long as something is moved through the door, it can be iterated upon,” said Williams. “The fear for most parties is that this is abandoned in its entirety, and then you have to start from scratch.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world desperately needs to decarbonize shipping. Can nations find a consensus? on Apr 20, 2026.

The Maine House and Senate this week passed LD 307, which prohibits state and local governments from approving data centers with at least 20 megawatts of electricity demand until at least October 2027. The bill awaits a signature from Governor Janet Mills, who has not commented on whether she will sign it.

Maine is one of about a dozen states with legislative proposals this year to pause or ban data centers amid rising concerns about the projects’ size and energy and water consumption. Community opponents of data centers are grappling with what they view as intrusive development as the broader public worries that the rise of artificial intelligence — fueled by data centers — will lead to mass job losses.

Analysts who follow state-level discussions of data centers say Minnesota is also a good candidate to pass a bill on this subject, along with Illinois, even though there is not yet a bill pending in Illinois.

U.S. data centers had more than 50 gigawatts of electricity demand as of last year, which, for context, is about double the peak demand of the entire New England grid, which covers six states, including Maine. And this is before some supersized data centers that are still in early planning stages. It’s not clear how the electricity grid will build enough power plants to meet demand, or how residential ratepayers can be shielded from high electricity bills driven by data center demand.

The debate in Maine gives a sense of how this topic interacts with partisan politics. It passed the House, 79-62, and the Senate, 21-13.

The Democrats who control the House and Senate described the bill as providing breathing room to write rules to regulate data centers. The opponents, mainly Republicans, said the bill would discourage investment and harm the economy.

The measure calls for convening a special council to evaluate concerns about data centers and recommend new policies to the legislature.

Maine has had relatively little data center development, with about 10 sites, none of which are large “hyperscalers” that are inspiring backlash in Virginia, Texas, and other states.

The goal of the bill is to use the experiences in other states as “a cautionary tale that Maine could really learn from,” state Representative Melanie Sachs, a Democrat and lead sponsor of the bill, said in an interview.

“Let’s just make sure our regulatory framework can meet the moment,” she said.

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State Senator Matt Harrington, a Republican, was among the opponents. He said the bill would delay or cancel major projects, including data centers being discussed in the communities of Sanford and Jay.

“This is billions of dollars in potential investment in Maine,” he said during debate last week.

Mills had indicated she wanted the bill to include an exemption for the project in Jay, which would redevelop a former paper mill site. The bill does not contain such an exemption.

The governor could sign the legislation, veto it, or allow it to become law by taking no action within 10 days. Sachs said she doesn’t know what Mills will do, and her office did not respond to a request for comment.

Environmental advocates are praising the bill as a model for how states can take control of a wave of development that has outpaced regulators’ ability to protect the public.

“Voters do not want these facilities in their backyard,” said Sarah Woodbury, legislative director for Maine Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group. “In Maine, every time a community has tried to get [a data center], the town has rebelled and it has failed. So I think the politics around data centers are similar here [as] they are in other places.”

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Woodbury is proud that Maine would be leading the country in reining in data centers if the bill becomes law.

Lawmakers in 13 other states have introduced bills or resolutions that would pause development of data centers in some way, but none of these have passed a legislative chamber, according to the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.

Dozens of local governments across the country have also adopted bans and moratoria, and many others are in the works.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont; and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, have proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers.

“The politics of this are still evolving,” said Anthony Elmo, a researcher for Good Jobs First, a nonprofit watchdog organization that tracks government subsidies for corporations.

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Elmo cautions against characterizing data centers as a partisan topic. He has seen opposition to development from Democrats and Republicans, especially when talking about specific projects.

That said, he thinks data center restrictions are most likely in states where Democrats control the legislature and the governor’s office, in part because Republicans tend to be skeptical of regulation.

Asked which state is most likely to follow Maine, he said there is no clear answer, but he is watching Illinois and Minnesota as examples of places where a data center backlash is happening and elected officials are sympathetic to the concerns.

Regardless of what states do, he expects data center backlash to grow as the developments get bigger, expand to more places, and their backers continue to have difficulty answering basic questions from residents.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Maine presses pause on large data centers. Will other states follow its lead? on Apr 19, 2026.

These findings come from two major new studies that are reshaping our understanding of the threats posed by rising tides and sinking land and underlining the imminent risk of inundation facing tens of millions of people in some of the world’s largest megacities, say researchers not involved in the studies.

“The impacts of sea level rise under climate change have been systematically underestimated,” concluded Matt Palmer, a specialist on sea level rise at the U.K. Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. “We could see devastating impacts much earlier than predicted — particularly in the Global South.” 

“Taken jointly, these two papers paint a considerably more concerning picture than either would in isolation,” said Franck Ghomsi, an oceanographer at the University of Cape Town. “We are seeing an emerging body of research that rewrites the story of coastal vulnerability.” 

It has long been known that sea levels vary a lot globally, and have been rising more in some places than others. But now, a groundbreaking Dutch analysis of actual sea levels as measured by tidal gauges has found that almost the entire scientific literature has dramatically underestimated current sea levels. 

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Katharina Seeger and Philip Minderhoud, geographers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, said seas are on average almost 1 foot higher than standard estimates, which are based on global models that assume calm seas and ignore ocean currents and the effect of winds. Sea levels are not rising faster than thought, but the baseline for future rise is considerably higher in most places.

In many of the 385 cases the pair examined, previously accepted sea levels are 3 feet or more off — almost all of them too low. They conclude that around 80 million people are today living on land in coastal areas below sea level — almost twice previous estimates — dramatically increasing the numbers at risk as sea level rise accelerates in the coming decades. 

For many low-lying coastal areas, scientific forecasts of how soon they may flood as sea levels rise may be off by several decades, making planning to protect coastlines much more urgent than previously supposed by policymakers and funding bodies such as the World Bank that rely on scientific assessments of flooding risk. 

The other new study focused on the world’s river deltas. It has long been known that many deltas are sinking under the influence of groundwater pumping. But as Robert Nicholls, climate adaptation researcher at the University of East Anglia, noted, “There have been lots of different estimates.” Data were inconsistent and based on crude, delta-wide estimates. “Now at last we have a consistent data set, with high spatial resolution.” 

That data comes from Leonard Ohenhen, an Earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who used satellite-mounted radar to produce 3D maps of subsidence on 40 of the world’s biggest and most populous river deltas. He has found that subsidence afflicts more than half those deltas. Most startlingly, in 18 cases subsidence rates exceed those of rising tides — hence, more than doubling the effective yearly rise in local sea levels, and in some cases multiplying it tenfold.  

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This again puts tens of millions of people once thought safe from rising tides this century in imminent harm’s way, including those living on the deltas of the Nile in Egypt, the Mekong in Vietnam, the Mahanadi in India, and the Yellow River in China. If the current rate of subsidence persists, these areas will be flooded much sooner than thought.

Researchers say many deltas and other low-lying coastal areas not included in the two studies are at greater risk than believed and urgently require detailed investigation of both actual sea levels and the rate of land subsidence.

The two studies, conducted largely independently, show glaring gaps in past research tracking the severity of climate change impacts. Seeger said peer-reviewed studies and reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are almost all based on faulty methodology. 

One problem is that more than 90 percent of local studies estimating current sea levels and future rises cut-and-paste the results of mathematical models of the “geoid,” the shape of the Earth as calculated from the planet’s rotation and gravitational fields. They deliver approximate sea levels, but by assuming calm and uniform oceans, they result in significant local errors, said Seeger. Very few studies use actual measured data, even when it is available. 

In particular, Seeger said, this approach “ignores ocean dynamics” such as currents, water expanding from unusally high temperatures, and prevailing winds piling up water along shorelines. Her painstakingly assembled real-world data from tidal gauges shows that actual sea levels worldwide are on average 9.4 to 10.6 inches higher than predicted by geoid models. 

This discrepancy exceeds total global sea level rise since the start of the 20th century, noted Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol. 

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Higher-than-expected sea levels turn out to be greatest “in the Global South, where ocean dynamics tend to be stronger,” said Minderhoud. Tides along the coasts of Southeast Asia are 3 feet or more higher than geoid modeling predicts. Just a few places have lower levels — notably around Antarctica and the northern Mediterranean. 

“Our corrected calculations reveal that up to 37 percent more area and up to 68 percent more people will fall below sea level following [3.3 feet] of sea level rise,” said Seeger. That represents an additional area at risk of inundation the size of the United Kingdom — occupied by 132 million people, equivalent to the population of Mexico. 

Seeger said the “methodological blind spot” that she and Minderhoud have uncovered went undetected for so long in part because geoid estimates are most accurate in Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of North America, where the majority of published researchers are based. 

The fact that current sea levels are higher than supposed does not directly alter global projections of future rise. But it raises the baseline from which future rises will occur in most places, and the evidence of strong local variations in sea levels suggests that future rises in some places will be higher than in others. 

Minderhoud said the prevalence of geoid data in the scientific literature has led to complacency, by predicting that many heavily populated coastal regions have more leeway before flooding thresholds are crossed than now appears likely. 

A case in point is the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where Minderhoud began his own investigations into the reliability of sea level data in the scientific literature a decade ago. Published data predicted that “the land would start to become inundated if sea levels were to rise by [5 to 6.6 feet],” he said. “But I could see that the surface water level was already in many places … much higher.” Without urgent protection, the land was on the brink of becoming inundated. 

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Many deltas face a similar harsh confrontation with reality, because they are also sinking into the rising ocean. Some deltas subside naturally, if rivers do not supply enough sediment to replenish what is lost to erosion by the ocean. But “natural subsidence is rarely more than [0.1 inches] a year,” said Nicholls. That is a fraction of current rates, which mostly have an anthropogenic origin, he said. 

Parts of Shanghai, a megacity of 25 million people on the Yangtze Delta, have subsided by more than 6 feet, Bangkok by more than 5 feet, and Osaka and Tianjin by around 10 feet, said Nicholls.

Much of Jakarta, the megacity capital of Indonesia, has sunk by up to 13 feet since 1970, and it continues downward 10 times faster than seas are rising in the adjacent bay. The threat of widespread submersion was a primary reason for the Indonesian government’s 2019 decision to move its capital to Borneo. 

Ohenhen’s analysis confirms that subsidence of deltas is usually caused by pumping groundwater to fill city faucets and supply industry and agriculture. The dried-out subsurface loses volume, causing widespread sinking at the surface. 

Jakarta is just the largest of many coastal cities and farming areas threatened by groundwater withdrawal on Java, the world’s most populous island. Semarang, a booming coastal Javan city of 2 million people, pumps so much water that subsidence reaches between 20 and 50 times sea level rise, according to analysis by Ohenhen. Floods washed through the city in October 2025 and again in February this year. Waterlogged residents repeatedly rebuild their houses on ever higher stilts to avoid inundation. But whole neighborhoods are disappearing permanently beneath the waves. 

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A second cause of subsidence is dams and levees on rivers. These structures cut off sediment supplies that maintain deltas. Thanks to a total of more than 20 large dams on its main stem, China’s Yellow River is no longer so yellow from sediment. Ohenhen found that, as a consequence of the reduced sediment, its delta has been subsiding up to 10 times faster than the Yellow Sea, into which it empties, is projected to rise. 

In Europe, the Po Delta in Italy is sinking by between 2 and 4 inches per year, said Ohenhen. This after losing 71 percent of its sediment supply to dams. In North America, the Mississippi Delta has lost 1,900 square miles in the past century. It continues to sink by an average of 2 inches per year, said Ohenhen, as levees prevent the river from flooding across the delta and depositing sediment. The subsidence renders it ever more vulnerably to storm surges during hurricanes.

Sometimes subsidence has a range of causes, said Nicholls. The Nile Delta, which contains two-thirds of Egypt’s farmland, has been starved of sediment by the High Aswan dam, which was constructed in the 1960s, and undermined from beneath by groundwater pumping to irrigate crops. The new analysis found rates of subsidence were “much bigger than previously reported, with millions of people in harm’s way.” Nicholls said. It is the dominant cause of a retreat in the delta coastline that in places exceeds 300 feet per year, engulfing farmland, threatening the city of Alexandria, and poisoning palm trees as salty water infiltrates underground water. 

The new findings point to urgent problems for governments and aid agencies. In many parts of the world, authorities are acting to protect communities against rising tides without realizing either how high current sea levels already are or the extent of land subsidence. 

In Java, the Indonesian government and NGOs have been restoring coastal mangroves as a natural way to help hold back tides that have swamped whole villages. But as the work has progressed, it has emerged that groundwater pumping in Semarang and elsewhere is making this work much less impactful.

Still, the often-dominant role of land subsidence as a cause of coastal flooding is potentially good news. For, while rising sea levels can only be halted with global climate action, subsidence can be stopped quickly by local action, such as ending groundwater pumping, said Scott Jasechko, a hydrologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, and author of a new global study of groundwater recovery. 

Parts of Tokyo sunk by up to 15 feet between 1920 and 1960, as it became the world’s most populous metropolitan area. But then the city largely banned groundwater pumping, and land levels have been stable ever since, said Nicholls.

Elsewhere, the operation of dams can be altered, and levees removed, to restore sediment supplies to deltas. After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began turning the tides in the Mississippi Delta by diverting sediment-rich water to restore protective coastal marshes.

Still, the threats loom large, especially in Southeast Asia and Africa, where Ghomsi, of the University of Cape Town, sums up what faces countries with few resources to repel the tides: “The sea level baseline is higher than assumed, the land is sinking in many critical regions, the sea is rising faster, and extreme events now come on top, producing impacts that are greater than the sum of their parts.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A more troubling picture of sea level rise is coming into view on Apr 18, 2026.

Now, scientists say they’ve identified what’s behind this rise and sudden fall, thanks to an assist from deep-diving robots. It all comes down to salinity, winds, and churn. “One of the key takeaways from the study is that the ocean plays a huge role in sort of modulating how sea ice can vary from year to year, decade to decade,” said Earle Wilson, a polar oceanographer at Stanford University and lead author of a new paper describing the research. 

Doing the grunt work here was a network of data-gathering machines known as Argo floats. Torpedo-shaped and about the size of a human, they sink thousands of feet, sampling things like temperature and salinity, before popping back up to the surface and transmitting all that data to a satellite. Because they float passively, the instruments could for years gather data about how conditions were changing. 

Now, forget about robots and think about swimming in a lake. When you dive, you’re hit by a sudden rush of cold water. That’s because the sun warms the surface, while the depths stay cool. This also happens in the world’s oceans, though obviously the cold water goes much deeper.

The opposite happens in the waters around Antarctica. Because it’s so cold down there, the air cools the ocean surface, while warmer waters swirl below. (Argo robots could detect this in fine detail as they ascended and descended.) With warmer liquid kept away from the surface, more sea ice can form.

As sea ice expanded in the decades before 2016, increased precipitation made surface waters fresher, in contrast to saltier waters below, resulting in stratification. (The saltier a liquid is, the denser it becomes.) This trapped the warmth in the depths, allowing it to build up. 

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Then the atmosphere played yet another trick, as winds intensified and shifted. This pushed surface waters away from Antarctica and churned up that deeper warmth. “What we witnessed was basically this very violent release of all that pent up heat from below that we linked to the sea ice decline,” Wilson said.

This bluster was likely driven at least in part by climate change: As the planet warms, the atmosphere develops temperature gradients, which strengthen winds and change their patterns. Scientists, though, are still working out how much of this shift might be due to “natural variability,” or what might happen anyway if humans hadn’t released so much carbon since the Industrial Revolution.

Either way, the system shifted around 2016. Beyond bringing up warm waters, all that wind may have broken up the ice, both by pushing blocks together and by creating waves. “Recent research has shown that both atmospheric and oceanic warming is likely contributing to the sudden change in Antarctic sea-ice extent since 2016, and this paper helps to further develop the point that deeper ocean warmth is a significant player,” said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the research group Climate Central who studies Antarctic ice but wasn’t involved in the paper.

As sea ice has declined, it has imperiled far more ice elsewhere. The Antarctic ice sheet that rests on land is bolstered by ice shelves that float along the coast. These essential supports are already in serious trouble as warming seas and violent underwater storms erode their bellies, weakening them. If they also lose the sea ice floating around them, they lose a significant buffer, as the floating chunks absorb wave energy. In addition, a healthy amount of sea ice is quite bright, meaning it reflects a bunch of the sun’s warmth into space, reducing local temperatures. Because the ice shelves hold back the ice sheet, losing them would mean an accelerated decline of an extraordinary amount of frozen water sitting on the continent.

While the Argo floats provided invaluable data, scientists are scrambling to get still more measurements. “Overall, we need more international support to continue building observing networks across the Antarctic polar region, both for oceanic and atmospheric monitoring,” Labe said. “This is critical given the rapid changes we are beginning to observe in this part of the world in a warming climate, with potentially significant consequences for global sea level rise.”

The big question now is whether we’re witnessing a permanent state of low sea ice, or whether atmospheric and oceanic conditions might swing back enough to encourage years of growth. The promise of this new research is that it will help researchers refine their models to predict how much the waters around Antarctica might change, and how quickly. Perhaps sea ice will see years of sharp decline, followed by years of growth. “But the long-term, multidecade trend will be negative,” Wilson said. “That would be my guess, but we don’t know for sure.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Deep-diving robots help crack the mystery of Antarctica’s vanishing sea ice on Apr 17, 2026.