As geoengineering moves from science fiction to reality, ecocide law offers a credible legal framework to protect the Earth and outer space from unpredictable climate technologies presented as solutions.

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By Anna F. Maddrick

Not long ago, the idea of humanity manipulating the planetary systems that regulate life on Earth belonged largely to science fiction. Today, it is the subject of serious policy debate.

Geoengineering proposals vary widely. Marine cloud brightening would spray salt particles into low-level clouds to increase their reflectivity, while stratospheric aerosol injection would release reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. There are schemes to fertilize the ocean with iron to stimulate algal blooms that absorb carbon dioxide, and the Seabed Curtain Project proposes anchoring an 80-kilometer barrier on the ocean floor in front of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier to block the warm waters accelerating its collapse. 

Make Sunsets, a US-based company, is already selling “cooling credits” and releasing balloons carrying sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Overall funding for solar radiation management research jumped almost three-fold in 2025.

For most of Earth’s history, only nature possessed the power to reshape planetary systems. Ice ages advanced and retreated, volcanoes, asteroids and even the emergence of new species radically impacted the atmosphere. Human societies could transform landscapes, but not the fundamental environmental systems that regulate life on Earth. 

Fossil fuels changed that relationship. By harnessing hundreds of millions of years of stored solar energy and combining it with increasingly powerful technologies, humanity acquired an influence once reserved for planetary forces themselves. Geoengineering, like existing weather modification practices such as cloud seeding, which has been employed for decades in countries including China, the US, the United Arab Emirates and Australia, takes that transformation one step further: from altering the climate unintentionally to attempting to manage it deliberately.

Unlike man-made mechanics, such as a jet engine, which are complicated but fundamentally knowable, the Earth’s climate is a complex system. Its behavior emerges from countless interactions and feedback loops, meaning that interventions in one part can trigger consequences elsewhere that cannot be fully predicted.

The impact of any planetary-scale intervention would necessarily be – well – planetary. 

Models suggest solar geoengineering could disrupt ocean currents and alter precipitation patterns across entire regions, with potentially profound consequences for ecosystems, water supplies and agriculture. Ocean fertilization risks promoting toxic algal blooms that create oxygen-free dead zones, devastating marine food chains. Even an intervention as apparently contained as an underwater barrier in front of a single glacier could interfere with oceanic circulation and disrupt marine life in ways that could well propagate far beyond the intervention site. Each of these proposals involves intervening in systems whose full complexity remains only partially understood. 

The High Stakes and Commercialization of the Global Commons 

The global commons are conventionally understood to refer to the high seas, the atmosphere and outer space: domains that lie beyond any state’s national ownership and form part of collective heritages of humankind, free from claims of territory or privatization. 

At the height of the space race in 1967, the international community responded with the Outer Space Treaty, declaring outer space the common heritage of mankind (CHM) – beyond national ownership, to be used for the benefit of all. While legal scope and application of the CHM principle remains subject to international debate, the principle at its core suggests that some places are too important to be reduced to the interests of individual states and that their governance should reflect responsibilities owed to humanity as a whole. In sustainably managing the increasingly commercialized and militarized global commons, upholding the CHM principle, as well as associated legal frameworks, remains critical.

That principle, however, is increasingly under pressure. The global space economy was valued at more than $600 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $1.8 trillion within a decade. More than 14,000 active satellites, often with dual military capacity, currently orbit the Earth, with most operated by private companies. Governments, meanwhile, increasingly treat space as a strategic domain, deploying surveillance satellites, developing anti-satellite weapons and competing for control of the space-based infrastructure upon which modern militaries depend. The existing lack of enforceable regulation, as well as close relationships between private and government actors, poses significant social and environmental concerns. 

No international body effectively governs what private companies can do with the commons they are rapidly colonizing. Reflect Orbital, a US start-up whose ambitions are commercial rather than climatic, is developing a constellation of satellites designed to redirect sunlight to paying customers. “Sunlight on demand,” as the company puts it, with plans to grow from two satellites in 2026 to more than 50,000 by 2035. 

Geoengineering like “sunlight on demand” operates in this same legal vacuum and involves deliberate manipulation of Earth’s radiation environment from space. Proponents of solar geoengineering argue that worsening climate change leaves humanity with little choice. But the fact that climate change presents grave risks cannot mean that every technological intervention becomes justified. The danger here is not simply the risk of unintended consequences, but rather that humanity is developing the power to manipulate planetary systems without any agreed framework for who may do so, under what conditions, and with what accountability. 

That is where ecocide law comes in.

Ecocide Law as a Shield for the Living World 

Every society draws lines around what it considers intolerable, and international criminal law gives expression to some of the most fundamental shared taboos by categorizing them as atrocity crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Ecocide law seeks to extend that framework to humanity’s relationship with the living world. 

In 2021, an Independent Expert Panel of international lawyers defined ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment.” Like the other core international crimes, ecocide law’s purpose is ultimately prevention: to deter the most serious forms of harm by establishing personal criminal liability for those in positions of power. 

What was once a largely academic and civil society proposal has since attracted active diplomatic and legislative engagement around the world. In 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa formally proposed amending the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to recognize ecocide as a fifth international crime. Meanwhile, regional initiatives are emerging across Latin America, Europe and Africa, while countries including France, Belgium and, most recently, Mauritius have already enacted standalone ecocide offences. Legislative proposals are advancing in jurisdictions as diverse as Scotland, Italy, the Netherlands, Ghana, India, the Philippines, Argentina and Peru.

Certain actors now have the power to engineer the sky but no legal framework to govern the consequences. Ecocide law would not prohibit scientific inquiry, nor foreclose future debate about geoengineering. What it would do is establish that the global commons are not a legal vacuum; that no actor, however powerful, can cause severe and widespread damage to the systems that sustain all life without facing personal criminal accountability. And at the very least, why invest trillions into developing technologies that have a substantial likelihood to exacerbate the very problems they were created to fix? 

Ecocide law has its historical basis in the Vietnam War, a time where using the environment as a weapon of war, including through weather modification practices, led to international declaration of such conduct as “ecocide” and the development of legal frameworks to protect the environment in armed conflict. 50 years on, the development of geoengineering poses similar international challenges. With a focus on deterrence, accountability and responsibility at the highest levels of governmental and corporate decision-making, ecocide law can explicitly embolden these historical legal frameworks with enforceable modern solutions. 

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About the author: Anna Faye Maddrick is Legal Adviser on Climate at the Permanent Mission of Vanuatu to the United Nations, New York, and PhD Candidate on Ecocide Law at the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy  

If treated as a country, data centers could rank sixth globally for electricity consumption by 2030. They would also require an amount of water equivalent to the annual needs of 1.3 billion people.

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By Martina Igini

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding at breakneck speed, used by hundreds of millions of users and processing billions of queries each day. AI is now one of the most significant drivers of that data center growth. But this growth comes at an unfathomable environmental toll that is at the center of a new United Nations report.

The report, compiled by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health and published on Wednesday, used primary data from a range of sources to quantify the carbon, water and land footprints of AI’s electricity use across the globe. The numbers are staggering.

The AI market is expected to grow 25-fold in the coming decade, from $189 billion in 2023 to nearly $5 trillion by 2033. Generative AI – the subfield of AI that autonomously generates text, images, video, audio and code in response to user prompts – already accounts for about 20% of the global market share; by 2030, it is expected to reach 40%.

To function, generative AI needs massive training datasets to learn from. Training these models is an extremely resource-intensive process, but nothing compared to what it takes for them to process billions of interactions each day – not just in terms of the electricity needed to run these centers, but also in terms of the amount of water needed to keep them cool and generate power as well as the land footprint from energy infrastructure and supply chains, including data centers, chips, cooling systems, land occupation, and eventual e-waste.

The report estimates that global data centers consumed some 448 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, with AI accounting for a fifth of the total. This would make them the world’s 11th largest electricity consumer, if they were a country. This amount of electricity would also be enough to supply the annual residential electricity needs of the 1.3 billion people living in Sub-Saharan Africa for 2.6 years.

This amount of electricity consumption carries an enormous carbon footprint – 189 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, which only 3.2 billion tree seedlings grown over 10 years would be able to offset.

In terms of water, data centers last year consumed enough to fill 1.8 million Olympic-sized pools – enough to cover the annual basic domestic water needs of over 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In terms of land, data centers’ electricity demand covered an area nearly 4.5 times the size of Greater London.

“The public debate still often treats AI as software, but AI is also physical infrastructure: data centres, electricity generation, cooling systems, transmission networks, chips, minerals, ​land and water,” said Kaveh Madani, the institute’s Director and lead author of the report.

But these staggering numbers are nothing compared to a scenario where AI’s share of data center electricity consumption indeed rises to 40% by 2030.

If that happens, the technology’s electricity consumption would make the AI industry one of largest consumers of electricity globally, accounting for 3% of the world’s electricity. AI-related water consumption would hit 9.3 trillion liters – enough to cover the annual basic domestic water needs of over 1.3 billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa for a full year. And the AI-related land footprint of data centers would be about twice that of the Jakarta metropolitan area, the most populous metropolitan area in the world, home to over 32 million people.

On top of that, the report also estimates e-waste from AI hardware to reach 2.5 million metric tons by the end of the decade – like discarding 250 Eiffel Towers every year.

“What we are showing here is probably just the tip of the iceberg,” Madani told AFP. “We need to require more transparency. We need the providers to provide that information.”

The report also calls on governments to require AI providers to disclose their environmental footprint and on users, organizations and public institutions to use AI intelligently by opting for low-footprint tasks – such as text generation over image or video – and conventional search tools.

Other more sustainable approaches to using generative AI tools include keeping prompts and outputs concise, batching related tasks, reusing previous results, and avoiding unnecessart iterations, according to the report. Meanwhile, AI providers should be transparent with users and inform them when their choices – such as asking for an image or video – can result in intensive energy demand.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.

Heat and salt threaten to end a tradition dating back hundreds of years. Farmers and scientists are fighting back.

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By Regina Lam

Away from the skyscraper clusters of Hong Kong’s business districts sits the weathered northern fishing village of Lau Fau Shan (Floating Mountain).

Chan Kwok Leung, known as “Brother Leung”, is a 58-year-old, sixth-generation oyster farmer. As a child he shucked oysters with his father during winters on the shore of Deep Bay where his village sits, on the eastern side of the Pearl River Estuary. 

The colder the weather, the fatter the oysters grow, farmers used to say. But chillier winters made harvesting harder. “The seawater felt icy cold and often numbed my hands,” says Chan. “It doesn’t feel like that any more.” 

Today’s subtropical Hong Kong rarely experiences the bitter cold days below 5C that Chan says he sometimes experienced while growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Driven by climate change, warming, saltier water has slowed oyster growth and contributes to die-offs every year. “Super typhoons” now batter the bamboo rafts used for farming for more hours per year, pushing increasing numbers of aging growers to retire their practice.

Similar problems are plaguing those who rely on oysters in other parts of the world. The animals filter large volumes of water as they feed on microalgae, boosting water quality. Their growing shells trap carbon and create reefs that protect coasts and create habitats for other species. 

But warmer waters, shifting weather patterns and more damaging storms are straining many who farm or collect them.

Despite the hardship, Chan has not left oysters. Instead, he joined a team of scientists working to help the sector adapt and trying to revive this piece of Hong Kong’s cultural heritage, which enriches marine biodiversity. 

One solution they have been working on is to breed a “super oyster” that can better survive Deep Bay’s increasingly salty waters.

An Ancient Practice 

Historical records show an oyster business in Lau Fau Shan as early as 1667, operated by the Tang clan. Oyster farming lineages go back further still. Some farmers, including Chan’s father, migrated to the area in the 1960s from the coastal town of Baoan in Shenzhen, about 20 kilometers away, where their ancestors had farmed oysters since the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

Today, around 10,000 bamboo rafts float across Deep Bay. From each rope, dozens of oysters hang in the currents and grow fat before being harvested and sold to Hongkongers, who prize their size and flavor.

Most oysters produced here carry a local identity in their scientific name: Crassostrea hongkongensis. These are plumper and grow better in less saline estuary waters than the more common commercial species, the Pacific oyster.

Some Hong Kong oysters are sold fresh, often for hotpots or deep-fried dishes. Many others are dried along the shore before being traded in a narrow lane in the village lined with seafood stalls or dispatched to other markets in the city. 

Air-dried oysters, including both semi-dried “golden oysters” and fully dried varieties, are a beloved delicacy symbolising prosperity in Cantonese culture. During the Lunar New Year, families usually pan fry or braise them with mushrooms, vegetables and other seafood to wish for good fortune in the year ahead.

Massive Die-Offs 

For the oysters to thrive, “the winds and rains must come in good time,” Chan says. Farmers follow the traditional 24 solar terms of the Chinese lunar calendar to track seasonal changes and guide their work. “It’s a practice passed down from our ancestors,” he says.

But climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions, has disrupted the longstanding rhythms that earned Hong Kong oysters their loyal following. 

Traditionally, farms began to yield good harvests from the mid-autumn festival, in September or October. But recent winters have arrived later and with higher temperatures, pushing the harvest to start in January and February, shortening the previous six-month harvesting season to three months. 

Worse than poor harvests are the die-offs that increasingly occur when Hong Kong enters spring in March and April. Over a decade ago, farmers began reporting more frequent oyster die-offs, which wipe out large swathes of the farms in Deep Bay, killing oysters string by string, raft by raft. 

Farmers told Dialogue Earth that such events, which cause over 70% loss of oysters, used to hit the bay once every decade. They now strike every three to six years. Smaller mortality events, which see over 30% of oysters dying, have become an annual problem.

Scientists at the University of Hong Kong believe climate change is the likely culprit. Southern China’s temperature now spikes up earlier and faster in spring, said Thiyagarajan Vengatesen, a Professor at the university’s School of Biological Sciences. ‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

The rainy season is also often arriving later, and does not dilute the salinity of waters in Deep Bay as it used to. This warming and high salinity, along with deoxygenation caused by nutrient pollution and limited sunlight in overcast spring, puts oysters under extraordinary stress. This leaves them more vulnerable to pathogen attacks. Once a group of oysters die, other follows, says Vengatesen. 

For farmers, this is devastating. “When you shuck the oyster, you can tell immediately something is wrong, as the flesh turns reddish,” Chan says. He still remembers vividly his first encounter with a mass mortality event in 2007. “It was unsettling. A whole year of my work was gone.” 

Die-offs of different levels of severity have happened almost every year since. Farmers now seek to harvest their shellfish before the high-mortality period and move rafts to less saline waters at the first sign of problems.

While this helps somewhat, Chan says a farmer’s life is “in the lap of the gods.”

Worse Typhoons Spell Disaster

Farmers feel even more powerless when intense typhoons hit. 

“We are seeing more super typhoons these days,” says Chan Shu Fung, an oyster grower in his 40s also from Lau Fau Shan, referring to the most intense tropical cyclones. Unlike mass-mortality incidents, “when typhoons hit right at the bay, there is nothing you can do about it.”

Last year, Hong Kong faced 14 tropical cyclones that either landed or passed close enough to trigger warnings, more than double the long-term average and the highest number in a single year since 1946.

Chan Shu Fung took over the family business when his father retired in 2014. Three years later, Super Typhoon Hato skirted Hong Kong. It was followed in 2018 by Super Typhoon Mangkhut. Together, the storms caused hundreds of injuries and billions of Hong Kong dollars’ worth of damage. 

Hato wreaked havoc on 60 operating oyster rafts that were now Chan Shu Fung’s responsibility, swallowing some half a million shellfish. After he rebuilt and reseeded nearly half of his rafts, the following summer he lost 90% of his crop again to Mangkhut.

Chan Shu Fung saw many elders in town hang up their shuckers after the storms, shrinking the scale of production in Deep Bay. At the industry’s peak in the 1960s and ‘70s, it supported around 300 oyster-farming households; today, about 70 remain, he says. 

Chan Shu Fung too thought of giving up after 2018. But he had just sunk new investment into the business after taking over from his father. “All I could do was hang in there, grit my teeth and carry on.”

Improving Survival Rates 

At his lab at the Swire Institute of Marine Science, Vengatesen is working with Chan Kwok Leung to investigate the struggles of the ancient industry and look for ways science can alleviate its modern problems. 

Vengatesen’s team of researchers have developed a way of predicting which oyster strains are more likely to survive under conditions of high salinity and other stressors, based on gene comparison and oyster survival data.

Commercial breeders can use this toolkit to analyze oyster DNA and identify parents with a better chance of surviving in the warming Hong Kong waters, which they can use to produce seeds in their hatcheries.

The team have also bred salt-tolerant shellfish themselves. Using their genomic selection technology, they have developed a more resilient animal they call the Hong Kong Super Oyster. 

This has a 30-40% survival rate in high salinity conditions, the team says, a significant improvement from the regular Hong Kong oyster’s less than 10%.  

Vengatesen aims to boost the survival rate to 80%. The more data that is entered to refine the models that predict survival, the more accurate it will become over time, he adds.

Chan Shu Fung began trialling the new strain on his rafts in September last year. “It will take a year for us to tell how good they are,” he told Dialogue Earth.  

Hemmed in By Concrete Jungle

Even if these new oysters can allow the village fishers’ traditions to continue, it is unclear how long Lau Fau Shan will remain as it is. A development project proposed by the Hong Kong government is set to transform the area into a hub for fintech, start-ups and residential buildings dubbed New Digi Bay. 

The initial proposal sparked concerns about the continuation of oyster farming. Chan Shu Fung, who frequently liaises with the government as the chair of farmers’ group the Deep Bay Oyster Cultivation Association, is hopeful though. He says the latest planning proposal pledges to conserve part of the bay and promote oyster traditions. Doing this while improving infrastructure could bring more tourists to experience its oyster culture, he hopes.

“If the urbanisation plan does not come into conflict with oyster farming and the ecosystem it depends on, it has more benefits than drawbacks,” he says.

Chan Kwok Leung fears the industry could decline further under seemingly unstoppable trends of urbanization, climate change and younger people reluctant to take up the hard life of an oyster farmer.

But he is determined to keep trying, adding modern innovations like the Super Oyster to an ancient tradition.

The forces battering Hong Kong’s oyster farms are strong, but Chan Kwok Leung cites a Chinese idiom that only gold remains after strong waves wash away the sand.

“We had our glory days,” he says. “I am trying to do something now. Hopefully, new technological breakthroughs may bring them back.” 

Featured image: The Swire Institute of Marine Science/University of Hong Kong.

This article was originally published by Dialogue Earth.

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About the author: Regina Lam is deputy ocean editor at Dialogue Earth, based in London. She joined in 2021 and has worked at major Hong Kong newspapers and has reported for the BBC World Service. She holds an MSc in global affairs from King’s College London. Regina is interested in global ocean governance, environmental justice and what makes compelling storytelling and robust investigation in environmental journalism. She speaks Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

Fewer than 1,000 Sumatran elephants remain in the wild. Every injury, every untreated wound, every avoidable death reduces that number even further. This is why, when a wild elephant was spotted in North Sumatra limping and in distress, a team mobilized without hesitation. 

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By Leif Cocks

That team is the Wildlife Ambulance, a mobile veterinary service that has become one of the most important forces standing between Critically Endangered Sumatran elephants and their extinction. Part rescue vehicle, part field hospital, part classroom, it operates across some of Sumatra’s most remote terrain, reaching elephants and other wildlife that would otherwise have no chance of survival. 

When the Wildlife Ambulance reached the distressed wild elephant in the forests of the Leuser Ecosystem in North Sumatra, Indonesia – one of the richest, most ancient tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia – they were able to safely sedate him to assess and treat his wounds. An examination of the animal revealed stab wounds at the base of his tail, his left hind quarter, and the pad of his left hind foot. The shape and depth of the injuries pointed almost certainly to a confrontation with a larger, tusked male. 

His wounds were serious. The gash on his foot was roughly 12 centimeters long, 20 centimetres deep, and severely infected. He was in agonizing pain. The team cleaned the wound, applied local antiseptic and administered antibiotics. For this elephant, urgent help may well have been the difference between survival and death. 

This scenario, however, is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern that repeats across Sumatra with sobering regularity. As forests are cleared for agriculture, mining, and expanding settlements, elephants are pushed into closer contact with each other and with humans, increasing the risk of injury, conflict, and death. Without trained wildlife veterinarians and equipped teams like the Wildlife Ambulance, injuries that are treatable become fatal. This wild elephant was one of the lucky ones.

“When an injured elephant is found, every hour counts. The Wildlife Ambulance exists because we refuse to accept that these animals should die from wounds we have the knowledge to treat,” said Leif Cocks, a Conservationist and Founder of the International Elephant Project (IEP).

The Next Generation of Wildlife Defenders 

Emergency rescues, though urgent, are only part of what the Wildlife Ambulance does. 

Sumatra has just one wildlife veterinary clinic, and opportunities for specialized wildlife training are extremely limited. When there are no people able to respond to these crises, no vehicle or equipment can fill the gap.

That’s why the Wildlife Ambulance, run in partnership with the International Elephant Project and Syiah Kuala University, and led by IEP Senior Veterinarian Christoper Stremme, has made education central to its mission.

In January, the team conducted a two-day seminar for final-year veterinary students completing their clinical internships. The first day covered classroom essentials, like safety procedures, clinical examination techniques, drug administration, and blood sample collection. The second day took students into the field for hands-on training with elephants, including elephant footcare. Indeed, maintaining healthy feet is critical to the long-term health of both captive and wild elephants, and one that requires real confidence and knowledge to perform safely. 

Over the past six months, the Wildlife Ambulance has delivered 19 two-hour lectures on elephant, primate, and wildlife medicine, reaching 180 veterinary students and covering topics like treatment, nutrition, and welfare. Two separate intensive practical training seminars were also held – one for 27 veterinary and paramedic students and another for 20 final-year vet students. The team also presented at a conference, delivered an online lecture, and hosted a webinar on deadly diseases that pose a serious and growing threat to elephant populations worldwide.

Each student who completes this training carries that knowledge forward – into the clinic, into the forest, and into the field to save lives. The Wildlife Ambulance is not just saving individual elephants; it is building a network of people who will protect them for generations.

“Saving elephants today is urgent. But training the next generation of wildlife vets is how we ensure elephants have a future beyond our own efforts,” said Cocks. 

A Species We Cannot Afford to Lose

Sumatran elephants are ecosystem engineers. They shape forests, disperse seeds, and support the biodiversity that countless other species, including people, depend on. Lose elephants, and the ripple effect extends far beyond a single species. 

Yet their future is increasingly fragile. Deforestation continues to fragment habitat, isolating herds and forcing elephants into dangerous proximity with humans. Snares, conflict injuries, and disease are threatening their survival. 

“Every elephant that survives means a chance for the species to survive. And every wildlife vet we train means a better chance of that happening,” said Cocks. 

The Wildlife Ambulance cannot reverse deforestation or end the pressures that drive conflict with elephants. But it can ensure that when an injured elephant is found in the forests of Sumatra, there are trained hands ready to respond, and that the next generation of wildlife veterinarians have the skills and experience to carry that work forward.

This male elephant in Sumatra received treatment. He walked away, he survived. And his survival is a reminder that in conservation, every single life is a victory worth fighting for.

Featured image: International Elephant Project

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Find out more about the International Elephant Project and how you can help at internationalelephantproject.org. Your support will help give urgent medical care to wild elephants, save their habitat, and protect them from deadly threats of poaching and conflict. 

For decades, the historic Black neighborhood of Ivy City in Northeast Washington, DC, has been treated as an industrial sacrifice zone, leaving its residents to battle severe environmental pollution alongside intense redevelopment pressures. As new investment pours into the area, grassroots resistance led by local organizers is fighting to ensure that community healing and environmental justice take priority over corporate gentrification.

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By Kaitlyn Sullivan

Fresh paint and spackle can do wonders for damaged walls, but they do little for a cracked foundation. For decades, residents of Ivy City have seen redevelopment follow this same deceptive pattern: new buildings rise like a coat of paint, masking the deep-seated pollution and housing pressures that have never been addressed.

In this northeastern Washington, DC neighborhood, residents have long battled pollution concerns and redevelopment pressures that threaten to price them out. This small area exemplifies who gets to shape neighborhoods during transitional periods and who bears the costs when investment arrives before justice.  

“It’s organized residents against organized money,” said Bob Bingaman, an organizer with local non-profit Empower DC who has worked with Ivy City residents on environmental justice and redevelopment issues.

Ivy City’s Contradiction

In 1873, Ivy City was designed as a suburban development for African Americans by real estate developer Frederick Jones. Business, entertainment, and employment flowed into the now predominantly Black, prosperous neighborhood.  

However, by the early 20th century, what had been built as a residential Black community was encroached upon by rail yards, warehouses, and industrial facilities that brought noise, pollution, and heavy infrastructure. These additions surrounded Ivy City, isolating residents from the rest of DC.

The fight against industrial encroachment, alongside civic organizations formed in response to discrimination and segregation in the mid-20th century, helped lay the foundation for modern Ivy City.

In an interview with Earth.Org, Bingaman rarely used the word “neighborhood” to describe Ivy City, instead referring to it as a “community”. And he is not alone; for many residents, Ivy City is more than just a zip code. 

Today, the neighborhood remains “sandwiched between major arteries, a train track, and industrial uses,” according to Alex Freedman, a Senior Community Planner at the DC Office of Planning.

Freedman helped develop the Small Area Plan in late 2024 for Ivy City – a city planning document meant to guide future land use, transportation, housing and development decisions. The document could shape whether redevelopment addresses existing environmental harms or simply builds around them.

Ivy City’s contradiction is not confined to its history. As new development arrives and housing prices climb, many of the neighborhood’s older environmental burdens remain unresolved. At the center of that debate is a small chemical plant that has become a flashpoint for residents and organizers.

What NEP Symbolizes

The National Engineering Products Incorporated (NEP) facility has become one of the clearest symbols of Ivy City’s unresolved contradictions. The plant manufactures adhesive sealants and electrical insulating compounds used by the US Navy, products designed to fireproof electrical systems and secure ship engines. It also happens to share a wall with a mother of three.

“[A] plastic assembly plant and a residential community seem an odd thing to have next to each other,” said Greg Casten, the current owner of the facility. However, this is more than a simple inconsistency or fluke. Residents have spent years describing odors, health fears, and the feeling that industrial priorities continue to outweigh community wellbeing. 

“Some of the chemicals they use are odorless and colorless. They are in our community, they cause cancer, they cause leukemia, they cause birth defects,” said Sabrina Rhodes, an organizer and leader at Empower DC, a grassroots, non-profit community organization that fights for racial, economic, and environmental justice in the US capital.

The dispute escalated into formal litigation in 2025, when neighboring residents filed suit alleging toxic exposure. Public testing had previously detected elevated formaldehyde near the site, adding urgency to longstanding complaints. That same year, Casten acquired the facility after the prior owner struggled to sell it. “Just give it to me and I’ll figure out what to do with it,” he said, recalling the purchase.

Casten, who owns “20 different operating companies in Ivy City,” presents himself as a longtime investor in the neighborhood. 

Recalling a failed bid for the historic, long-vacant Crummell School site, he explained his plan to install a 300-unit apartment complex, which he pitched to the city. An alternative plan was presented by residents and Empower DC, which called for a community recreational space. 

“The kids really need a playground within walking distance…where they can play and their parents can look out…and see that they are safe. Let them turn it into something constructive for kids, but keep them off the street. And there are seniors in this neighborhood, also. And they need places to go so they can do their arts and crafts,” Jackie Council said in a pamphlet distributed during Empower DC environmental justice tours of the neighborhood. Council is a Crummell School alumna and Ivy City oral history participant cited by Empower DC. 

The disputes over the NEP and Crummell School sites were not only about one facility or parcel of land. They were about who gets to define what investment and development should look like in Ivy City and who that development aims to serve. This manifests in a tension between repairing old harms and simply building around them.

Empower DC Resistance

For Ivy City residents, these battles have demanded organized resistance. Few groups have played a more integral role than Empower DC.

“It’s part of our job to educate the community about the threats in the community and then mobilize public support around those threats,” said Bingaman.  

A major responsibility of the organization involves leading environmental justice walking tours through Ivy City, which attract dozens of residents, advocates, officials and visitors from across the DMV, a shorthand term for Washington, DC, Maryland and Virginia. On these tours, Empower DC organizers and Ivy City residents guide participants to key sites, including Crummell School and the NEP facility, while explaining how pollution, land-use decisions and redevelopment pressures have shaped daily life in the neighborhood.

One of the primary objectives of the organization is to uplift the voices of the community. They do this by hosting open-access community forums and events. Casten even referenced attending one of these during his interview with Earth.Org.

“We talked to over 100 residents in Ivy City…we went door to door and talked to them,” said Bingaman, explaining how Empower DC aimed to represent the true sentiments and experiences of the community in their health survey. 

The group also focuses on protecting the community from displacement and ending housing insecurity. Freedman noted that just days prior to his conversation with Earth.Org, he had been in Ivy City and “every block had like a dozen for sale signs.” 

Despite opposition from well-financed developers like Casten, Empower DC says it helped secure city approval and millions in public funding to transform the long-vacant Crummell School site into a community center and park after a years-long campaign. Casten said he once lost $2 million on a previous Ivy City venture before later reinvesting in the neighborhood, illustrating the scale of capital often facing community organizers. 

But the resources and power that developers hold in this city have never discouraged Empower DC. In fact, Ms. Rhodes told Earth.Org that she has personally gone up against attorneys Holland & Knight, one of Washington’s largest law firms, which often represents corporate interests in land-use and environmental disputes. 

Rhodes and her colleagues’ work shows that organized residents can effectively shape planning and redevelopment decisions, even when facing far better-funded opposition.

A Global Issue

The case of Ivy City is far from isolated. Around the world, neighborhoods once treated as industrial sacrifice zones are now attracting new investment before older environmental harms are fully addressed. These transitions often coincide with pollution concerns, rising housing costs and the displacement of what are mostly low-income communities and communities of color.

In Chicago, researchers found that some environmental clean-ups and redevelopment efforts coincided with displacement pressures and demographic turnover, a phenomenon often described as environmental gentrification. Even in older cities such as London, studies suggest the geography of past industrial pollution still shapes inequality today. 

Across these cities, residents have also organized to demand clean-ups, affordable housing protections, and a greater voice in redevelopment decisions.

The struggle unfolding in Ivy City is playing out in cities worldwide, where redevelopment often arrives before repair. Ivy City stands out because residents and organizers have made it impossible to ignore who benefits from change and who it leaves behind.

Featured image: Kaitlyn Sullivan.

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About the author: Kaitlyn Sullivan is an undergraduate student at Georgetown University, pursuing a degree in Government with concentrations in Environment and Sustainability as well as Journalism. She is from Chicago but currently lives in Washington, DC, working for an Illinois congresswoman. Kaitlyn is interested in the intersection between social justice and government and hopes to use her degree in journalism to uplift the voices of communities most impacted by inequality and high-level policy decisions.

Unlike the visible devastation of hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes, extreme heat leaves no trace behind, making it a silent deadly threat, deadlier than all these extreme weather events combined. Countries where heat was never a problem are suddenly confronted with rising illnesses and casualties, with authorities struggling to keep count as people often misjudges and underplays the risks. As an unusually early heatwave scorches Europe this week, Earth.Org takes a look at how extreme heat affects the human body, and how socio-economic and physiological factors can exacerbate the risks.

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This article is part of an explainer series on extreme heat. Check out the other articles: How Cities Are Bracing for More Heat and How to Stay Safe in Extreme Heat

By Martina Igini

Every year between 2000-2019, approximately 489,000 people died from extreme heat around the world. 45% of these casualties happened in Asia, the world’s most disaster-hit region from weather and climate hazards; 36% were in Europe, the world’s fastest-warming continent. Here, heat-related mortality has increased by around 30% in the past two decades.

These estimates are often much higher than official data. This is because accurate tracking of heat-related deaths is challenging and many countries still lack proper record-keeping. Unsurprisingly, heat is often referred to as a “silent killer” and it has quickly become the deadliest extreme weather event in many parts of the world.

Understanding Extreme Heat

To understand why extreme heat is dangerous, we must first look at how our body reacts to it – a more or less straightforward process.

For optimal health, the human body requires an internal temperature of around 36.5C (97.7F). When exposed to heat, our body initiates cooling mechanisms to maintain its temperature stable, including sweating to dissipate heat through evaporation and dilating blood vessels to release heat.

In extreme heat conditions, when the environmental temperature exceeds our body’s temperature, these physiological processes are compromised. Elevated humidity levels can further complicate matters, hindering the evaporation of sweat from the skin and thus the body’s cooling down process.

For people living in places like Hong Kong and Singapore, elevated temperatures and high humidity are nothing new. Both regions see temperatures soar above 30C (86F) for most part of the year, which feel even higher when coupled with humidity. And yet, heat-related illnesses here are on the rise. A recently published study by the University of Hong Kong found that heatwaves in the city between 2014 and 2023 – 18 in total – may have contributed to 1,677 excess deaths.

As of 2022, Hong Kong had already warmed 1.7C compared to pre industrial times, according to Berkley Earth. 2025 was the city’s sixth-hottest on record, while the past winter was the city’s warmest ever. The same trends are occurring in most places around the world.

The rise in extreme heat is a direct result of our warming planet, which is driven by greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. This raises Earth’s surface temperature, leading to longer and hotter heatwaves.

Prolonged exposure to high temperatures without sufficient rest or cooling breaks can result in the accumulation of heat within the body, overwhelming its cooling mechanisms and leading to severe, sometimes deadly heat-related illnesses. Some of the most common are heat exhaustion – with symptoms including heavy sweating, weakness, dizziness – and heatstroke – which is marked by a high body temperature, confusion, and loss of consciousness and can be life-threatening if not promptly treated.

A New Threat

People living in urban areas, which often lack cool environments or natural shading, are particularly vulnerable. But in a rapidly warming world, another issue is emerging: nighttime heat.

High nighttime temperatures are detrimental to human health, as they prevent the body from recovering from daytime heat. This not only disrupts sleep, which can negatively affect physical and mental health, cognitive function, and life expectancy, but it also increases the risk of illness and mortality.

A 2020 study by the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that five consecutive “hot nights,” defined as when temperatures rise above 28C (82F), would raise the risk of death by 6.66%.

People without access to air conditioning – a huge proportion of the world’s population – are particularly at risk. While about 90% of households in the US and 60% in China have some sort of air conditioning system, the number is worryingly lower in rapidly warming places like Europe (10%) and India (8%), the most populous country in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the number is even lower.

Last week, a major report by the UK’s Climate Change Committee warned that British homes will need air conditioning to survive predicted levels of global warming. An estimated 4 million homes in the country now have air conditioning, double the figure from three years ago, the Guardian recently reported. But that is not enough, according to the report, which calls on the government to install air conditioning in all care homes and hospitals within the next decade, and in all schools within the next 25 years.

With climate change, nights are not just getting warmer; they are also heating up faster than days in many parts of the world. Between 2014 and 2023, 2.4 billion people experienced an average of at least two additional weeks per year where nighttime temperatures exceeded 25C, according to a Climate Central analysis. Over 1 billion people experienced an average of at least 2 additional weeks per year of nights above 20C and 18C.

Tracking Casualties Is Complicated

An ongoing, exceptionally early heatwave in Western Europe has so far directly and indirectly claimed at least seven lives in France and two in the UK. The continent has seen heat-related mortality rates rising by around 30% in the past two decades. Official tolls, however, are often inaccurate.

Despite our good understanding of physiological reactions to heat, there is a reason why we often talk about a “silent killer.” Unlike more immediate threats, such as severe storms or earthquakes, heat-related conditions can build up gradually. They also affect vulnerable populations disproportionately, and may not be perceived as imminent dangers until symptoms like heat exhaustion or heatstroke manifest suddenly and severely, leading to heat-related illnesses and fatalities without obvious warning signs.

To further complicate matters, heat-related illnesses and deaths can be multifactorial, involving a combination of heat exposure, individual susceptibility, and underlying health conditions.

In individuals with pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, kidney disease, respiratory or cardiovascular conditions, heat-related stress can trigger or worsen symptoms, leading to serious health complications and, in severe cases, mortality. In these cases, determining the exact contribution of heat to a death can be complex, as it less likely that fatalities in which temperatures played an indirect role are classified as heat-related deaths.

Who Is at Risk?

While no one is truly immune to extreme heat, there are factors that can increase an individual’s vulnerability.

Susceptibility to heat, and how effectively the human body regulates its temperature in extreme conditions, is influenced by a combination of physiological aspects such age and health condition, as well as exposure variables, including occupation and socio-economic circumstances.

Generally speaking, studies show that women – particularly pregnant women, children, and the elderly are especially at risk of developing severe heat-related symptoms.

In 2024, UNICEF said that one in five children – or 466 million – will experience double the number of extremely hot days than their grandparents’ generation. The UN body said that rising temperatures across Europe and Central Asia killed an estimated 377 children in July 2021.

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russel explained that children’s bodies are “far more vulnerable” to extreme heat. “Young bodies heat up faster, and cool down more slowly. Extreme heat is especially risky for babies due to their faster heart rate, so rising temperatures are even more alarming for children,” she said, before calling on governments “to get rising temperatures under control.”

According to the same UNICEF statement, extreme heat has been linked to pregnancy complications, including “gestational chronic diseases and adverse birth outcomes including stillbirth, low birth weight, and preterm birth.” Heat stress on pregnant women can also lead to child malnutrition and leave infants more vulnerable to contracting infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue, which spread in high temperatures.

The number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially due to climate change in all regions. Between 2000-2004 and 2017-2021, heat-related deaths among individuals aged 65 and older surged by around 85%. Age-related physiological changes, such as a decrease in the body’s ability to regulate its temperature and reduced sweating capacity, make older adults less efficient at dissipating heat. Pre-existing health conditions and medications can further compromise their ability to cope with high temperatures. Social isolation, limited mobility, and inadequate access to cooling resources only exacerbate these vulnerabilities.

Other factors heightening heat vulnerability have to do with race and ethnicity. Pre-existing health conditions that are more prevalent in certain ethnic or racial groups can increase susceptibility to heat-related illnesses. Examples include diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. But besides this, socio-economic circumstances also play a role.

Ethnic and racial minorities often face higher rates of poverty and may live in urban areas with fewer green spaces and more concrete surfaces. Temperatures in these neighborhoods are generally significantly higher.

In the US, an Environmental Protection Agency review of multiple studies revealed that low-income neighborhoods and those with larger populations of people of color often experience higher temperatures compared to wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods within the same city.

Another striking example where this is an issue is Hong Kong. The city’s infamous subdivided flats and “cage homes” are becoming increasingly greater health risk factors as the city faces higher temperatures in the warm seasons. In 2024, the Society for Community Organisation (SoCO) warned of extreme temperatures in subdivided flats, which house more than 220,000 people. The local anti-poverty non-profit surveyed 308 people living in “inadequate housing,” who often do not have access or cannot afford ventilation or air conditioning. Over 90% of them said they “felt ill because their apartments were too hot.”

“The heat makes it very hard for me… I feel tired,” 84-year-old Chun Loi, who lives in a windowless, poorly ventilated, one-room flat in Hong Kong told AFP on a hot summer day this month. “I try to stay in as much as possible with my fans… Otherwise, where can you go? It’s embarrassing to stay in restaurants and malls if I am not eating anything,” Chun said, as the temperature crept past 32C (90F).

As Eva Yeung of Red Cross Hong Kong put it: “Climate change affects everyone. But the impact is not equal because some people, due to their living conditions and physical conditions, are affected more than others.”

You might also like: ‘I Can’t Sleep’: Hong Kong’s Rising Nighttime Heat Exposes Inequalities

Outdoor workers are another highly vulnerable category. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that more than 2% of the world’s total working hours could be lost to climate-induced extreme temperatures by 2030.

A 2022 Oxfam Hong Kong study on working conditions in waste collection centers in the city revealed that temperatures inside these facilities averaged 32.2C (90.0F), surpassing the July average by two degrees. Issues such as poor ventilation, heat, humidity, pests, foul odors, and a lack of rest areas are prevalent in both existing and renovated waste collection centers. Under these circumstances, over 60% of cleaners expressed experiencing discomfort while on duty. More than 70% indicated that they must stay in cooler and shaded areas along the streets for breaks and meals. Upon returning home from work, these workers may also have to endure extreme hot weather. 

Street cleaners face a similar threat. According to interviews conducted by Hong Kong-based group Concern for Grassroots’ Livelihood Alliance in August 2024, 90% of the street cleaners reported experiencing fatigue, thirst, headaches, dizziness, increases in body temperature, and nausea while working, despite their employers providing portable fans.

“I have to drink seven bottles of drinks a day, including water, homemade herbal tea, energy drinks, and more,” Pattie, a 55-year-old cleaner, told Hong Kong Free Press in July. “Sometimes, when it’s too hot, even the taste of water makes me feel nauseous,” she added.

Irreversible Trend?

An October 2023 study warned that heat and humidity levels will reach lethal levels for hours, days, and even weeks in some parts of the world by the end of the century – even below 2C of warming – making it impossible to stay outdoors. 

While shocking, this finding is nothing we did not already hear before. Since the 1970s, climate scientists have warned us that the relentless burning of fossil fuels is heating up our planet, and that crossing a specific warming threshold could lead to irreversible impacts.

The world has been largely slow at reacting to these warnings and what we are experiencing now is the result of this inaction.

The past eleven years have been the hottest on record. While 2024 stands as the warmest year globally and 2025 follows closely as the third-warmest, the imminent return of El Niño conditions this summer threatens to push temperatures even higher, putting 2026 and 2027 on track to be among the hottest years ever recorded.

With further global warming, we can expect an increase in the intensity, frequency and duration of heatwaves, and unless we prepare societies to deal with it, extreme heat will continue to claim millions of lives every year.

This story was originally published on August 19, 2024. It was updated and republished on May 28, 2028.

After four decades of sweeping overviews of societal impact on our planet, a California-based historian has produced a sensitive, thoughtful portrait of the unique ecosystem in his backyard, and the dramatic changes it has undergone in the past ten millennia.

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While inland lakes such as the Great Salt Lake are familiar to many, there are several less-famous saline lakes in the so-called Great Basin, a geologically-defined area located west of the Rockies. Their stories can fascinate when told by a historian with an appreciation for both biological and geological nuance as well as human tragedy and hope.

Marks lives near Mono Lake, which sits in northeastern California just inside the Nevada border. In this saline lake and its surroundings, an unusual ecosystem has sustained humans for thousands of years. 

Throughout the first section of this book, Marks offers a comprehensive overview of the region’s inhabitants, from its algae, alkali flies, sagebrush, and pronghorns to its most recent Indigenous residents, the Kootzaduka’a people. This section will appeal to readers with an interest in how people interact with biological systems. It also sets out heartbreaking (and often infuriating) details of how the Kootzaduka’a and other people in the area were dispossessed of their land and their lives. This explanation demonstrates in microcosm the larger context of how the land of the American West was ravaged by the Euro-American quest to exploit the area for agriculture or for gold. A unique and extraordinary part of the book is a chapter of in-depth testimony from a number of Kootzaduka’a who applied for federal land allotments in the early 20th century, related in their own voices.

In the second section, an ugly new element emerges: the theft of the region’s water to serve the needs of the city of Los Angeles and its hydroelectric industry. This action was spearheaded by a man named J.S. Cain, who is described dispassionately but whose devastating impact is felt even today. The book becomes a legal and corporate drama at this point, explaining and exposing a series of fraudulent corporate shenanigans that ultimately scarred the region, lowering the water level of the Mono Lake to below its pre-industrial state.

The third and final section of the book, however, is hopeful. Starting from the 1990s, defenders of the Mono Lake Basin began to win back its rights – in some cases with trout fishers as their fiercest backers. Ironically, because of the legal consolidation of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, it was easier for environmental activists to use the legal system to bring about binding regulatory decisions. 

One of the book’s greatest achievements is that it leverages a vast variety of untapped primary and secondary sources. These range from physical evidence analyzed by archeologists to contemporary written accounts that the author discovered languishing in local archives. 

The book’s images include numerous detailed maps of the region, some prepared by the author himself, as well as photographs of the landscape and its inhabitants. Additional pictures of the natural environment and the lake itself would have been welcome; the reader is left wondering what exactly an alkali fly looks like (let alone how a dish of their larvae might taste). 

Likewise, while the personal accounts are excellent, some of the legal and business drama lacks juicy details – for example, we know what J.S. Cain did but not who he was as a person. 

The book’s scope is geographically narrow, but its lessons are universal. By examining the story of a single saline lake basin and its people, the reader learns how to understand our own role on the planet.

Deep Time in the Mono Lake Basin: Nature and History over the Last 10,000 Years
Robert B. Marks
2026, University of California Press, 384pp

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Check out more Earth.Org book reviews here.

From the birth of modern environmentalism in the 1970s to the protectionist trade wars of 2026, the EU-US climate relationship has evolved from a shared mission into a volatile cycle of leadership, retreat, and deep-seated friction.

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In the 1970s, the US emerged as a global environmental leader. A series of disasters, including the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, galvanized public opinion and made environmental protection a domestic political priority. Building on legislation like the Clean Air Act, the US created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and adopted more legislation such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. At the international level, it also played a central role in shaping environmental governance, ratifying major agreements including the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

In contrast, the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the European Union (EU), initially lagged behind. Without an environmental mandate under the founding 1957 Treaty of Rome, its early actions were limited and often a result of external pressures. Nevertheless, the bloc launched its first Environmental Action Programme in 1973 and adopted the aforementioned agreements largely under US leadership. By the 1990s, however, the EU began asserting itself as a climate leader. Specifically, during Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1997, the bloc leveraged its “economic and diplomatic arms” to encourage ratification by key states, most notably Russia in 2004. The EU itself committed to the most substantial reductions called for under the protocol. Their leadership reflected the EU’s broader strategy of asserting itself on the international stage and exercising “soft power” by regulating areas such as sustainable development.

Meanwhile, US climate policy grew increasingly inconsistent from the 1990s onwards. Weakened public support and domestic political divisions constrained international commitments, most notably in its failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol due to intense partisan opposition. The US’ stance limited the effectiveness of global climate governance and widened the transatlantic gap, as the EU pursued more ambitious approaches.

A Fragile Equilibrium

Under president Barack Obama, the US re-engaged in global climate governance, strengthening cooperation with the EU through initiatives like the EU-US Energy Council. Their collaboration contributed to the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and led to the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, legally binding countries to limit global warming well below 2C above pre-industrial levels. These agreements demonstrated that advancing global climate governance relies heavily on strong transatlantic cooperation.

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 marked a sharp reversal. In 2017, Trump announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, undermining global efforts and straining relations with the EU, which deeply regretted the decision. It also revived a “decades-long distrust” of the US, which had previously backed out of the Kyoto Protocol. Domestically, the administration dismantled over 100 environmental regulations, which worsened air and water quality and increased greenhouse emissions. 

During Trump’s first presidency, the EU capitalized on reduced US engagement to advance its own agenda. In 2019, it launched the European Green Deal, a comprehensive roadmap to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. Supported by the European Climate Law and initiatives like the “Fit for 55” package, the EU strengthened its emissions reduction targets, benefiting from strong broad cross-party and public support.

The elections of Ursula von der Leyen as President of the European Commission in 2019 and of Joe Biden as the 46th US President in 2021 seemingly revived transatlantic climate cooperation. Biden quickly rejoined the Paris Agreement and re-engaged the US in multilateral climate diplomacy. His administration actively participated in UN climate summits and committed to one of the most ambitious emissions reduction targets of any developed economy. The administration also launched initiatives such as the 2021 Leaders Summit on Climate, showing its efforts to reintegrate into the existing global climate governance framework rather than pursuing a unilateral path. On the other side of the Atlantic, von der Leyen identified climate action and a strengthened transatlantic partnership as core priorities for EU foreign policy going forward.

This renewed alignment partly unfolded amid major crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which shifted attention toward economic recovery and energy security. As a result, the 2021-2025 period combined cooperation with growing tensions. Joint initiatives, such as the EU-US Energy Council and Trade and Technology Council, strengthened collaboration, particularly on energy security. 

At the same time, frictions emerged around Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest investment in climate and clean energy in US history. The $369 billion investment to fight the climate crisis raised European concerns that they would draw investment away from the EU and undermine the Green Deal. These concerns culminated in the Net-Zero Industry Act, a plan to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness “by loosening state aid rules and pouring its own money into projects to offset the impact of some of the measures from the [Inflation Reduction Act] on European firms.” 

Despite these tensions, both sides continued to influence each other: the EU ultimately adopted more subsidy-based approaches, while the US showed interest in the bloc’s regulatory tools such as its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, a tool to price carbon in imported goods and a central pillar of the European Green Deal.

Trump 2.0: Governing With ‘Carte Blanche’

Upon returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump immediately initiated a sweeping rollback of US climate policy. His administration dismantled a broad range of regulations and refocused energy policy on fossil fuels, particularly coal. It also terminated over 400 Inflation Reduction Act grants and weakened environmental protections such as the Endangerment Finding, which since 2009 had provided the legal framework for the EPA to regulate emissions. Presented and openly boasted about by the administration as the “largest deregulation in American history,” the decision has been widely criticized by environmental groups, which called it the most significant setback for US climate policy to date.

The government went as far as instructing the deletion of climate change-dedicated websites and effectively banning words including “climate change”, “green”, “emissions”, and “decarbonization”.

Trump’s anti-climate agenda sent shockwaves far beyond US borders. On his first day in office, he withdrew from the Paris Agreement for a second time. The US was notably absent from last November’s COP30 summit in Brazil – the first time the country lacked official representation since the inaugural COP in 1995. It also disengaged from key institutions such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and stepped back from climate finance initiatives, including the 2022 Loss and Damage Fund established at COP27 in 2022.

The EU’s Dwindling Climate Ambitions

While the EU has remained formally committed to the green transition, internal and external pressures have significantly slowed its climate ambitions and progress in recent years. Climate-related investments in the EU are stalling after years of growth owing to economic strain. Last year, the European Commission introduced the Omnibus Simplification Package to streamline corporate sustainability rules by reducing reporting requirements and boost Europe’s competitiveness amid economic stagnation. 

Externally, diplomatic ties with the US have deteriorated significantly. The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to influence and weaken Europe’s climate and energy ambitions by interfering in European politics to save it from “civilizational erasure,” as stated in the US’s National Security Strategy published in November. Trump has long expressed hostility toward the EU, frequently criticizing its stringent trade and energy policies and claiming it was formed to “screw” the US.

After the US imposed a 20% “blanket tariff” on most EU imports last April and the EU retaliated, both sides reached an agreement which includes a commitment for the EU to import $750 billion worth of US energy by the end of 2028, mainly oil and gas, raising concerns about renewed EU fossil fuel dependence and its climate targets. While the European Parliament has approved the US-EU trade deal, it now enters the final phase of negotiations between the European Commission, the European Parliament and member states, leaving its ultimate impact shrouded in uncertainty.

US influence has also extended to EU regulatory frameworks, with pressure contributing to weakening corporate sustainability laws such as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), two central pillars of the European Green Deal. Interestingly, these laws were already simplified in the EU’s Omnibus Simplification Package. Lobbying efforts from US corporations like oil and gas giant ExxonMobil and banking multinational JPMorgan targeted European governing bodies, while US Ambassador to the EU, Andrew Pulzner, reportedly characterized the CSDDD as “economic suicide” for Europe. This external pressure intensified internal divisions within the EU, resulting in a major split within the European People’s Party, the bloc’s largest political group, and ultimately in the dismissal of key elements of these laws.

Despite these constraints and highly contested backtracking on several fronts, the EU has, in some respect, continued to pursue climate leadership, notably through its long-awaited 2040 climate target. Adopted in March, it commits the bloc to a 90% net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels. In parallel, several member states, including France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, have recently supported multilateral environmental initiatives such as the UN High Seas Treaty, designed to accelerate global ocean conservation efforts. France played a key diplomatic role in mobilizing countries to ratify the agreement, helping clear the minimum threshold of 60 ratifications required for the treaty to come into force. 

What’s Next? 

The trajectory of transatlantic climate policy has shifted from a shared mission into a volatile geopolitical tug-of-war. While the 20th century saw the US and Europe trade roles as the primary architect of global environmental governance, the current era is defined by a climate of friction. As Washington pursues a path of aggressive deregulation and fossil fuel expansion under Trump, the EU finds itself at a crossroads: forced to choose between its ambitious 2040 climate mandates and the pragmatic pressures of economic survival and energy security. Ultimately, the success of global efforts like the High Seas Treaty and the Paris Agreement may no longer hinge on a unified transatlantic front, but on whether the EU can maintain its regulatory soft power in the face of an increasingly adversarial American agenda.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.

For much of the past decade, discourse around renewable energy has been shaped by persistent concerns over cost, reliability, and environmental trade-offs. While some of these critiques reflected genuine limitations during the early stages of deployment, the global energy landscape has since evolved significantly.

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Criticism of and skepticism surrounding renewable energy have for years revolved around the same talking points: it is too expensive to build, the supply is too unreliable, and the environmental cost is under wraps. While some of those concerns were justified during the early stages of industry development, the latest evidence tells a different story.

The world installed 692 gigawatts of new renewable capacity in 2025, pushing the total global renewable power to over 5,149 gigawatts, or nearly half of all installed power capacity on Earth. 

Against this backdrop, Earth.Org debunks five of the most persistent myths about clean energy and explains what the data actually shows.

Myth 1: Renewable energy is too costly

One of the most persistent debates in energy policy has been the assertion that renewable energy cannot pass the commercial test without hefty state subsidies. However, a 2024 International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) report found that 91% of new renewable power projects commissioned globally were less expensive than the cheapest new fossil fuel option available. 

The shift has been staggering. Since 2010, the cost of solar PV has plummeted from being five times more expensive than fossil fuels to being 41% cheaper. Similarly, onshore wind has moved from a 23% premium over coal and gas to a 53% discount. This transition isn’t just about labels; in 2024 alone, the shift to renewables saved an estimated US$467 billion in global fuel expenditures. 

Unlike fossil fuels, which remain tethered to the volatile pricing of natural gas – which has swung from under $2 to over $9 per million British Thermal Units (MMBtu) in the last decade – wind and solar offer price certainty. Once installed, their “fuel” is free, insulating economies from the geopolitical shocks that routinely rock global energy markets. 

Myth 2: Renewable energy is not reliable

Historically, the most persistent technical critique of wind and solar has been intermittency. However, the rise of advanced battery storage has fundamentally changed the equation. According to IRENA, the cost of fully installed battery storage plummeted by 93% between 2010 and 2024. These grid-scale batteries act as a high-speed buffer: they react to supply shifts in milliseconds, soaking up midday solar surges and discharging that power during the evening peak.

This technological shift has sparked a massive wave of industrial confidence. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that 24 gigawatts of new utility-scale storage will come online in the US in 2026 – shattering the record of 15 GW set just last year. Most tellingly, renewables combined with storage now account for 93% of all new utility-scale capacity in the US, leaving natural gas with a meager 6.3 GW share.

In addition to stability, domestic renewable generation enhances energy security. With renewed Middle East tensions, as IRENA observed in April, governments are actively moving towards solar and wind since they cannot be targeted by export embargoes or commodity price shocks.

More on the topic: Iran War Drives Massive Surge in Planet-Heating Emissions Amid Calls to Accelerate Transition to Renewables

Myth 3: Renewable energy infrastructure has a large environmental footprint 

The claim that renewable energy has considerable hidden costs to the environment in terms of manufacturing and extraction of materials is not unfounded. The extraction of the raw materials used in the production of panels and turbines has actual ecological effects and the production process may require alternative energy. These are valid spheres of constant examination and enhancement.

The footprint, however, is nowhere near what critics suggest. Research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows that wind turbines emit just 13 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour. Solar comes in at 43 grams. By contrast, natural gas produces 486 grams, and coal generates a massive 1,001 grams. In other words, coal is nearly 80 times more carbon-intensive than a wind turbine.

The upper-bound estimates of solar and wind – the highest emission values reported for a technology across credible lifecycle studies – are not as high as the lower-bound estimates of gas. An average wind turbine or solar panel will pay back the carbon cost of its production in a few months of operation and operate with almost zero emissions over 25 to 30 years. 

Myth 4: Clean energy kills jobs

The disruption the energy transition brings to workers in coal mining communities or oil and gas regions is real, and the policy response to that disruption has frequently been inadequate. What the employment data does not support is the broader claim that clean energy is a net destroyer of jobs across the energy economy.

Globally, the number of people working in clean energy rose from 30 million in 2019 to 35 million by 2023, surpassing fossil fuel employment for the first time. Under current policies, clean energy is projected to add 10 million more jobs by 2030, while fossil fuels are expected to shed roughly 3 million. 

In the United States, clean energy jobs grew three times faster than the overall workforce in 2024, according to the Clean Jobs America 2024 report, which compares job growth during calendar year 2024 with growth in total US employment over the same period.

In other good news, the IEA estimates that about half of the fossil fuel employees who will be facing redundancy in the next decade have skills that can be directly applied to clean energy jobs.

Myth 5: The transition is happening too slowly

Installation figures from recent years suggest that the technology rollout is proceeding faster than most forecasts anticipated. In May 2025, China added 93 gigawatts of solar capacity in a single month, a rate equivalent to roughly 100 solar panels per second. Combined wind and solar capacity in the country surpassed total thermal power capacity for the first time in early 2025, and China hit its 2030 wind and solar target in 2024, six years ahead of schedule.

On a global level, the IEA projects that renewables will surpass coal as the world’s largest electricity source by mid-2026. Electricity output from renewables is forecast to reach 16,200 TWh in 2030, up 60% from 2024. 

While global efforts still fall short of the Paris Agreement climate goals, the argument that renewable energy is too slow to reshape the world’s power systems has been overtaken by a massive surge in industrial momentum. 

Adoption of Clean Energy Around the World

Asia is the place where the transformation is taking place the fastest. In 2025, 74% of the total new renewable capacity added globally was in Asia, with 513 GW of additions increasing at 21.6% annually, with China accounting for by far the largest share. In 2024, India invested around $100 billion in clean energy, placing it among the world’s largest clean energy investors. In 2025, India also crossed a major milestone by surpassing 50% of installed electricity capacity from non‑fossil fuel sources, five years ahead of its Paris‑Agreement target. Southeast Asia is ramping up clean energy development as well, but grid and financing continue to be major challenges.

Europe has restructured its energy supply considerably since the disruption of Russian gas exports. In 2024, renewables generated 50% of the European Union’s total electricity, while fossil fuels fell to just over 25% of the electricity generation mix. The ratio of renewable to fossil fuel power investment in the EU reached 35-to-1 in 2024, compared to 6-to-1 a decade earlier. Grid permitting delays and the residual dependence on liquefied natural gas imports remain significant policy challenges.

In the US, clean energy accounted for more than 90% of new electricity capacity added in 2025, and this March, renewables briefly became the largest source of US power generation, surpassing natural gas for the first time on a monthly basis. US developers plan to add 43.4 GW of utility-scale solar and 11.8 GW of wind capacity in 2026, but that momentum is hitting a political wall. Policy uncertainty under the Trump administration – ranging from threatened tariff hikes to the freezing of federal grants – has already triggered the delay or cancellation of over $14 billion in renewable projects.

Due to its deep hydroelectric reserves, Latin America is already producing 65% of its electricity from clean sources, which is far more than the world average of 41%. Solar and wind power supply over 40% of power in Chile. In 2024 alone, wind and solar generation in Brazil grew by 36 TWh. At the regional level in Latin America and the Caribbean, the REnewables in Latin America and the Caribbean (RELAC) initiative complements these national efforts by setting a region‑wide target of at least 70% renewable electricity by 2030, although grid integration and access to finance remain key constraints.

Africa holds the starkest contrast between potential and deployment. The continent possesses an estimated 60% of the world’s best solar potential as measured by solar irradiance and 1,300 GW of high-wind capacity, yet it accounts for just 1% of global installed solar PV. Despite this, the continent recorded its highest-ever annual renewable capacity increase in 2025, adding 11.3 GW continent-wide, driven by Ethiopia, South Africa and Egypt. The barriers are structural: project financing is difficult to secure at scale, grid infrastructure is fragmented, and policy frameworks vary widely across the continent. Closing that gap is among the most urgent and least resourced challenges in the global energy transition.

What’s Next For Clean Energy?

While the transition is accelerating, we cannot ignore the friction: absolute fossil fuel use has climbed over the last decade, and grid infrastructure is struggling to keep pace with the surge in renewable capacity. Meanwhile, the capital flowing to developing nations remains a fraction of the actual opportunity. These are significant hurdles. But the evidence now shows something conclusive: renewable energy is no longer a future technology. It is already cheaper, more consistent, and more reliable than the fossil fuels of the past. 

Investment in clean energy globally in 2025 was $2.2 trillion, over two times higher than investments in fossil fuels. Whether the transition is viable or not is no longer in question. What matters now is the speed at which the appropriate financing, policy framework and grid investment can be delivered.

Earth Day reminds us of the biggest environmental issues and their drivers. Here are 5 interesting Earth Day facts and how we can all do our part to help and support the environment.  

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Earth is home to more than 8 billion people, 300,000 plant species, over 600,000 species of fungi, and about 10 million animal species. Ecosystems around the world provide precious services and resources to sustain all life on Earth, yet humanity continues to take them for granted. Anthropogenic climate change is threatening the planet, and we need to do everything we can to conserve and protect our home.

Earth Day, celebrated annually on April 22, is a global event dedicated to raising awareness about environmental protection and sustainability. Keep reading to learn about fascinating Earth Day facts and discover actionable ways to get involved in preserving our planet for future generations.

1. Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970

Prior to the first Earth Day, Americans were guzzling up vast amounts of leaded petrol – the global use of which has since been eradicated. Deadly smog and polluting smoke were also accepted daily occurrences. However, following a series of oil spills and emerging public consciousness about the detrimental impacts of air and water pollution, people’s attitude changed.

Inspired by the energetic student-led, anti-Vietnam war protest movement, US Senator Gaylord Nelson introduced a teach-in on college campuses on environmental awareness, which eventually snowballed into the global movement know today as Earth Day. 

2. Earth Day is the largest secular observance in the world

Despite being celebrated almost exclusively in the US for almost 20 years, Earth Day has now become an internationally recognized day and is celebrated across more than 192 countries. Every year, one billion individuals across the globe are united and mobilised for the same cause – greater environmental awareness and climate action.

3. Earth Day always takes place on April 22 

Senator Nelson originally picked April 22 as the first Earth Day as it fell right between Spring Break and final exams, maximizing student participation and turnout for the event. It has been kept on the same day to encourage even more college students to join in celebrations and protests, and every year, thousands of rallies, concerts, and outdoor activities are organized worldwide.

4. Earth Day cemented many major environmental policies

The first edition of Earth Day kicked off the national conversation on the lack of environmental laws in the country, which led to the adoption of some of the most important and comprehensive federal laws on environmental protection. This included the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act amendment (1972), and the 1973 Endangered Species Act.

In 2016, the United Nations also chose Earth Day to sign the Paris Agreement, the world’s most important and comprehensive climate agreement for limiting global warming to below 1.5C or at least “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels.

You might also like: 10 Years of the Paris Agreement: How the Climate Has Changed, in 4 Charts

5. Earth Day wants us all to take action for the planet

The theme for Earth Day 2026, “Our Power, Our Planet,” reflects a fundamental truth: environmental progress does not depend on any single administration or election. It is sustained by the daily actions of communities, educators, workers, and families protecting the places where they live and work.

Read this next: This Earth Day, Defend the Truth By Supporting Earth.Org

How You Can Get Involved

Climate change is undoubtedly the biggest environmental issue we face today, and we are running out of time to reverse it. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that global temperatures will very likely rise 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2040, and it is “now or never” to limit global warming.

We have all the tools and options to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is time we make use of them. 

1. Civil action

Public pressure and civil society mobilization are the greatest tool in global shed to drive institutional and systemic changes. Hold politicians, governments and companies across sectors accountable for their actions – target organisations and businesses that are linked to fossil fuel industries, deforestation, and harmful activities to the environment that could lead to the loss of habitats and biodiversity.

Whether it is the fast fashion industry that is generating millions tonnes of textile waste and wastewater, or the companies that recklessly generate emissions and pollute the environment, you can use your voice and make a difference. From local petitions and advocacy to large-scale boycotts and protests, there is no action too small. 

2. Individual action

We can achieve a sustainable future for us with our combined efforts, if every individual in the world make changes to their lifestyles. You can make it a habit to join in community reforestation efforts or beach cleanups.

On an individual level, simple switches to plant-based diets (or at least reduce meat consumption) can alleviate significant stress on deforestation and emissions in the agricultural sector; eliminating single-use plastics and replace them with reusable and recyclable materials; giving up fast fashion in support of sustainable fashion; opting for public transportation and low-emission means of transport such as biking and electric cars can all go a long way.

Don’t forget, daily acts of composting and recycling are not to be underestimated in reducing your carbon footprint.

3. Support independent journalism

In the current climate of denial and climate retreat, independent, factual journalism is the only way to hold power to account. With more than 4,000 stories published since our inception, annual readership surpassing 8 million last year, and new voices joining our global network every week, authentic storytelling remains the heartbeat of our mission.

Independent journalism is a public good, but it is not free to produce. While we remain free from corporate and political influence, we rely on readers like you to keep our reporting accessible to everyone, everywhere.

If you like what we do, consider supporting our journalism.