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  • At least 170 U.S. hospitals face major flood risk. Experts say Trump is making it worse.

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    LOUISVILLE, Tenn. — When a big storm hits, Peninsula Hospital could be underwater.

    At this decades-old psychiatric hospital on the edge of the Tennessee River, an intense storm could submerge the building in 11 feet of water, cutting off all roads around the facility, according to a sophisticated computer simulation of flood risk.

    Aurora, a young woman who was committed to Peninsula as a teenager, said the hospital sits so close to the river that it felt like a moat keeping her and dozens of other patients inside. KFF Health News agreed not to publish her full name because she shared private medical history.

    “My first feeling is doom,” Aurora said as she watched the simulation of the river rising around the hospital. “These are probably some of the most vulnerable people.”

    Covenant Health, which runs Peninsula Hospital, said in a statement it has a “proactive and thorough approach to emergency planning” but declined to provide details or answer questions.

    Peninsula is one of about 170 American hospitals, totaling nearly 30,000 patient beds from coast to coast, that face the greatest risk of significant or dangerous flooding, according to a months-long KFF Health News investigation based on data provided by Fathom, a company considered a leader in flood simulation. At many of these hospitals, flooding from heavy storms has the potential to jeopardize patient care, block access to emergency rooms, and force evacuations. Sometimes there is no other hospital nearby.

    Much of this risk to hospitals is not captured by flood maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which have served as the nation’s de facto tool for flood estimation for half a century, despite being incomplete and sometimes decades out of date. As FEMA’s maps have become divorced from the reality of a changing climate, private companies like Fathom have filled the gap with simulations of future floods. But many of their predictions are behind a paywall, leaving the public mostly reliant on free, significantly limited government maps.

    “This is highly concerning,” said Caleb Dresser, who studies climate change and is both an emergency room doctor and a Harvard University assistant professor. “If you don’t have the information to know you’re at risk, then how can you triage that problem?”

    The deadliest hospital flooding in modern American history occurred 20 years ago during Hurricane Katrina, when the bodies of 45 people were recovered from New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center, including some patients whom investigators suspected were euthanized. More flooding deaths were narrowly avoided one year ago when helicopters rescued dozens of people as Hurricane Helene engulfed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

    Rebecca Harrison, a paramedic, called her children from the Unicoi roof to say goodbye.

    “I was scared to death, thinking, ‘This is it,’” Harrison told CBS News, which interviewed Unicoi survivors as part of KFF Health News’ investigation. “Alarms were going off. People were screaming. It was chaos.”

    The investigation — among the first to analyze nationwide hospital flood risk in an era of warming climate and worsening storms — comes as the administration of President Donald Trump has slashed federal agencies that forecast and respond to extreme weather and also dismantled FEMA programs designed to protect hospitals and other important buildings from floods.

    When asked to comment, FEMA said flooding is a common, costly, and “under appreciated” disaster but made no statement specific to hospitals. Spokesperson Daniel Llargués defended the administration’s changes to FEMA by reissuing an August statement that dismissed criticism as coming from “bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency.”

    Alice Hill, an Obama administration climate risk expert, said the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change and worsening floods would waste billions of dollars and endanger lives.

    In 2015, Hill led the creation of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which required that hospitals and other essential structures be elevated or incorporate extra flood protections to qualify for federal funding.

    FEMA stopped enforcing the standard in March.

    “People will die as a result of some of the choices being made today,” Hill said. “We will be less prepared than we are now. And we already were, in my estimation, poorly prepared.”

    “Flood risk is everywhere”

    The KFF Health News investigation identified more than 170 hospitals facing a flood risk by comparing the locations of more than 7,000 facilities to peer-reviewed flood hazard mapping provided by Fathom, a United Kingdom company that simulates flooding in spaces as small as 10 meters using laser-precision elevation measurements from the U.S. Geological Survey.

    Hospitals were determined to have a significant risk if Fathom’s 100-year flood data predicted that a foot or more of water could reach a considerable portion of their buildings, excluding parking garages, or cut off road access to the hospital. A 100-year flood is an intense weather event that has roughly a 1% chance of occurring in any given year but can happen more often.

    The investigation found heightened flood risks at large trauma centers, small rural hospitals, children’s hospitals, and long-term care facilities that serve older and disabled patients. At least 21 are critical access hospitals, with the next-closest hospital 25 miles away, on average.

    Flooding threatens dozens of hospitals in coastal areas, including in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and New York. Farther inland, flooding of rivers or creeks could envelop other hospitals, particularly in Appalachia and the Midwest. Even in the sun-soaked cities and arid expanses of the American West, storms have the potential to surround some hospitals with several feet of pooling water, according to Fathom’s data.

    These findings are likely an undercount of hospitals at risk because the investigation overlooked pockets of potential flooding at some hospitals. It excluded facilities like stand-alone ERs, outpatient clinics, and nursing homes.

    “The reality is that flood risk is everywhere. It is the most pervasive of perils,” said Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, who reviewed the findings. “Just because you haven’t experienced an extreme doesn’t mean you never will.”

    Dresser, the ER doctor, said even a small amount of flooding can shut down an unprepared hospital, often by interrupting its power supply, which is needed for life-sustaining equipment like ventilators and heart monitors. He said the most vulnerable hospitals would likely be in rural areas.

    “A lot of rural hospitals are now closing their pediatric units, closing their psychiatry units,” Dresser said. “In a financially stressed situation, it can be hard to prioritize long-term threats, even if they are, for some institutions, potentially existential.”

    Urban hospitals can face dangerous flooding, too. Fathom’s data predicts 5 to 15 feet of water around neighboring hospitals — Kadlec Regional Medical Center and Lourdes Behavioral Health — that straddle a tiny creek in Richland, Washington.

    By Fathom’s estimate, a 100-year flood could cause the nearby Columbia River to spill over a levee that protects Richland, then loosely follow the creek to the hospitals. Some of the deepest flooding is estimated around Lourdes, which was built on land the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set aside in 1961 as a “ponding and drainage easement.”

    At the time, this land was supposed to be capable of storing enough water to fill at least 40 Olympic-size swimming pools, according to military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. A mental health facility has occupied this spot since the 1970s.

    Both Kadlec and Lourdes said in statements that they have disaster plans but did not answer questions about flooding. Tina Baumgardner, a Lourdes spokesperson, said government flood maps show the hospital is not in a 100-year flood plain.

    This is not uncommon. Of the more than 170 hospitals with significant flood risk identified by KFF Health News, one-third are located in areas that FEMA has not designated as flood hazard zones.

    Sometimes the difference is stark. For example, at Ochsner Choctaw General in Alabama — the only hospital for 30 miles in any direction — FEMA maps suggest a 100-year flood would overflow a nearby creek but spare the hospital. Fathom’s data predicts the same event would flood most of the hospital with 1 to 2 feet of water, including the ER and the helicopter pad.

    Ochsner Health did not answer questions about flooding preparations at Choctaw General.

    FEMA flood maps were launched in the ’60s as part of the National Flood Insurance Program to determine where insurance is required and building codes should include flood-proofing. According to a FEMA statement, the maps show only a “snapshot in time” and are not intended to predict where flooding will or won’t happen.

     FEMA spokesperson Geoff Harbaugh said the agency intends to modernize its maps through the Future of Flood Risk Data initiative, which will enable the agency to “better project flood risk” and give Americans “the information they need to protect their lives and property.”

    The program was launched by the first Trump administration in 2019 but has since received sparse public updates. Harbaugh declined to provide a detailed update or timeline for the program.

    Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said it is unknown whether FEMA is still trying to upgrade its maps under Mr. Trump, as the agency has cut off communications with outside flooding experts.

    “There has been not a single bit of loosening of what I’m calling the FEMA cone of silence,” Berginnis said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

    Floods are expected to worsen as a warming climate fuels stronger storms, drenching areas that are already flood-prone and bringing a new level of flooding to areas once considered lower risk.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that 2024 was the warmest year on record — more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 20th-century average. Scientists across the globe have estimated that each degree of global warming correlates to a 4% increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall.

    “Warmer air can hold more moisture, so this leads us to experience heavier downpours,” said Kelly Van Baalen, a sea level rise expert at the nonprofit Climate Central. “A 100-year flood today could be a 10-year flood tomorrow.”

    Intensifying storms raise concerns about Peninsula Hospital, which has operated for decades mere feet from the Tennessee River but has no known history of flooding.

    Peninsula spokesperson Josh Cox said the river is overseen by the Tennessee Valley Authority, which uses dams to manage water levels and generate electricity. Estimates provided by the TVA suggest the dams could keep Peninsula dry even in a 500-year flood.

    Fathom, however, said its flood simulation accounts for the dams and stressed that a large enough storm could drop more rain than even the TVA could control. These predictions are echoed by another flood modeling firm, First Street, which also says an intense storm could cause more than 10 feet of flooding in the area around Peninsula.

    “It’s a hospital right on the banks of a major American river,” said Wing, the Fathom scientist. “It just isn’t conceivable that such a location is risk-free.”

    Jack Goodwin, 75, a retired TVA employee who has lived next to Peninsula for three decades, said he was confident the dams could protect the area. But after reviewing Fathom’s predictions, Goodwin began to research flood insurance.

    “Water can rise quickly and suddenly, and the destruction is tremendous,” he said. “Just because we’ve never seen it here doesn’t mean we won’t see it.”

    “All the elements of a real disaster”

    One year ago, as Hurricane Helene carved a deadly path across Southern Appalachia, Angel Mitchell was visiting her ailing mother at Unicoi County Hospital in the tiny town of Erwin, Tennessee.

    Swollen by Helene, the nearby Nolichucky River spilled over its banks and around  the hospital, which was built in a flood plain. Staff tried to bar the doors, Mitchell said, but the water got  in, trapping her and others inside. The lights went out. People fled to the roof, where the roar of rushing water nearly drowned out the approach of rescue helicopters, Mitchell said.

    Angel Mitchell

    Angel Mitchell and her mother were rescued from catastrophic flooding at Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tennessee, during Hurricane Helene in September 2024. 

    Chance Horner/CBS News


    Ultimately, 70 people, including Mitchell and her mother, were airlifted to safety on Sept. 27, 2024, narrowly escaping the hospital without a single death. The hospital remains closed, and the company that owns it, Ballad Health, has said its reopening is uncertain.

    “Why allow something — especially a hospital — to be built in an area like that?” Mitchell told CBS News. “People have to rely on these areas to get medical help, and they’re dangerous.”

    Beyond Unicoi, KFF Health News identified 39 inland hospitals — including 16 in Appalachia — that Fathom predicts could flood when nearby rivers, creeks, or drainage canals overspill their banks, even in storms far less intense than Helene.

    For example, in the Cumberland Mountains of southwestern Virginia, a 100-year flood is projected to cause Slate Creek to engulf Buchanan General Hospital in more than 5 feet of water.

    Near the Great Lakes in Erie, Pennsylvania, LECOM Medical Center and Behavioral Health Pavilion could become flooded by a small drainage creek that is less than 50 feet from the front door of the ER.

    Neither Buchanan nor LECOM responded to questions about flooding or preparations.

    And in West Virginia’s capital of Charleston, where about 50,000 people live at the junction of two rivers in a wide and flat valley, a single storm could potentially flood five of the city’s six hospitals at once, along with schools, churches, fire departments, and other facilities.

    “I hate to say it,” said Behrang Bidadian, a flood plain manager at the West Virginia GIS Technical Center, “but it has all the elements of a real disaster.”

    At the largest hospital in Charleston, CAMC Memorial Hospital, Fathom predicts that the Kanawha River could bring as much as 5 feet of flooding to the ER. Across town, the Elk River could surround CAMC Women and Children’s Hospital, cutting off all exits.

    And in the center of the city, where the overflowing rivers are predicted to merge, Thomas Orthopedic Hospital could be besieged by more than 10 feet of water on three sides.

    WVU Medicine, which owns Thomas Orthopedic Hospital, did not respond to requests for comment.

    CAMC spokesperson Dale Witte said the hospital system is aware of its flood risk and has prepared by elevating electrical infrastructure and acquiring flood-proofing equipment, like a deployable floodwall. CAMC also regularly revises and drills its disaster plans, Witte said, although he added that hospitals there have never been tested by a real flood.

    Shanen Wright, 48, a lifelong Charleston resident who lives near CAMC Memorial, said many in the city have little worry about flooding in the face of more immediate problems, like the opioid epidemic and the decline of manufacturing and mining.

    Tugboats and coal barges sail past his neighborhood as if they were cars on his street.

    “It’s not to say it’s not a possibility,” he said. “I’m sure the people in Asheville and the people in Texas, where the floods took so many lives, they probably didn’t see it coming either.”

    Shanen Wright of Charleston, West Virginia

    Shanen Wright has lived in Charleston, West Virginia, nearly five decades and says he has never seen the Kanawha River rise above its banks. Located at the junction of two rivers in a wide and flat valley, Charleston is at risk of a single storm potentially flooding the city’s five largest hospitals at once, according to flood data from the company Fathom. 

    Daniel Chang/KFF Health News


    “The water is coming”

    Despite wide scientific consensus that climate change fuels more dangerous weather, the Trump administration has taken the position that concerns about global warming are overblown. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Mr. Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

    The Trump administration has made deep staff and funding cuts to FEMA, NOAA, and the National Weather Service. At FEMA, the cuts prompted 191 current and former employees to publish a letter in August warning that the agency is being dismantled from within.

    Daniel Swain, a University of California climate scientist, said the administration’s rejection of climate change has left the nation less prepared for extreme weather, now and in the future.

    “It’s akin to enforcing malpractice scientifically,” Swain said. “Imagine making a medical decision where you are not allowed to look at 20% of the patient’s vital signs or test results.”

    Under Mr. Trump, FEMA has also taken actions critics say will leave the nation more vulnerable to flooding, specifically:

    • FEMA disbanded the Technical Mapping Advisory Council, which had repeatedly pushed the agency to modernize its flood maps to estimate future risk and account for the impacts of climate change.
    • FEMA canceled its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which provided grants to help communities and vital buildings, including hospitals, protect themselves from floods and other natural disasters.
    • And after stopping enforcement early this year, FEMA intends to rescind the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which was designed to harden buildings against future floods and save tax dollars in the long run.

    Berginnis, of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said the administration’s unwillingness to prepare for climate change and worsening storms would result in a dangerous and costly cycle of flooding, rebuilding, and flooding again.

    “The president is saying we are closed for business when it comes to hazard mitigation,” Berginnis said. “It bugs me to no end that we have to have reminders — like people dying — to show us why it’s important to make these investments.”

    FEMA did not answer specific questions about these decisions. In the statement to KFF Health News, spokesperson Llargués touted the administration’s response to flooding in Texas and New Mexico and said FEMA had provided billions of dollars to help people and communities recover and rebuild. He did not mention any FEMA funding for protecting against future floods.

    Few hospitals understand this threat more than the former Coney Island Hospital in New York City, which has suffered catastrophic flooding before and has prepared for it to come again.

    Superstorm Sandy in 2012 forced the hospital to evacuate hundreds of patients. When the water receded, fish and a sea turtle were found in the building.

    Eleven years later, the facility reopened as Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital, transformed by a FEMA-funded $923 million reconstruction project that added a 4-foot floodwall and elevated patient care areas and utility infrastructure above the first floor.

    It is now likely one of the most flood-proofed hospitals in the nation.

    But, so far, no storm has tested the facility.

    Svetlana Lipyanskaya, CEO of NYC Health+Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health, which includes the rebuilt hospital, said the question of flooding is “not an if but a when.”

    “I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” she said, “but frankly, I’d be surprised. The water is coming.”

    CBS News correspondent David Schechter and photojournalist Chance Horner contributed to this report.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

    Methodology

    After Hurricane Helene made landfall a year ago, a raging river flooded a rural hospital in eastern Tennessee. Patients and employees were rescued from the rooftop. Floods have hit hospitals from New York to Nebraska to Texas in recent years. We wanted to determine how many other U.S. hospitals face similar peril. Ultimately, we found more than 170 hospitals at risk.

    For this analysis, we used data from Fathom, a United Kingdom-based company that specializes in flood-risk modeling across the globe. To assess the United States’ vulnerability, Fathom uses sophisticated computer simulations and detailed terrain data covering the country. It accounts for environmental factors such as climate change, soil conditions, and many rivers and creeks not mapped by other sources. Fathom’s modeling has been peer-reviewed and used by insurance companies, the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. The Iowa Flood Center has validated Fathom’s U.S. data.

    Through a data use agreement, Fathom shared its U.S. mapping data that predicts areas with at least a 1% chance of flooding in any given year. Fathom’s data estimates the effects of three main types of flooding: coastal, fluvial (from overflowing rivers, lakes, or streams), and pluvial (rainfall that the ground can’t absorb). The data also accounts for dams, reservoirs, and other structures that defend against floods.

    To identify at-risk hospitals, we used a publicly available Department of Homeland Security database containing the GPS coordinates of more than 7,000 short-term acute, critical access, rehab, and psychiatric hospitals — basically any hospital with inpatient services. (DHS under the Trump administration has discontinued public access to the database, so data for hospitals and other infrastructure is no longer widely available.)

    Using GPS coordinates as the centerpoint, we created a circle with a 150-yard radius around each hospital, which in most cases captured the building plus nearby grounds and access roads. We then mapped Fathom’s flood-risk data to see where it overlapped with these circles. We started by looking for hospitals where at least 20% of the circle’s area had a predicted flood depth of at least 1 foot. That gave us an initial list of more than 320 hospitals across the U.S.

    From there, we visually inspected those hospitals using mapping software and Google Maps, both satellite and street view. We trimmed our list to only the hospitals where a considerable portion of the building or all access roads were predicted to have at least a foot of flooding.

    If two hospitals were mapped to the same building — for instance, a small rehab facility within a large hospital — we counted only one hospital. We also excluded hospitals recently converted to nursing homes or for other uses.

    We ended up with a list of 171 hospitals across the U.S. That is most likely an undercount. Some hospitals could still face significant impact from flooding that is not deep enough or widespread enough to fit our methodology. Our analysis also does not account for how flooding farther from a hospital could affect employees or patients. And it does not assess what steps hospitals may have already taken to prepare for severe weather events.

    We also ran a spatial analysis comparing Fathom’s data with flood hazard maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which in many cases are incomplete or haven’t been updated in years. We found that about a third of hospitals identified as flood risks by Fathom’s data did not overlap at all with FEMA’s 100- or 500-year hazard areas.

    Fathom provided guidance and feedback as we developed our analysis.

    David Schechter and

    Chance Horner

    contributed to this report.

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  • Swiss Glaciers Melted Sharply After Light Snowfall and Heatwave, Scientists Say

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    By Cecile Mantovani and Denis Balibouse

    OBERGOMS, Switzerland (Reuters) -Switzerland’s glaciers melted considerably over the past 12 months to log their fourth-largest reduction in ice volume on record, monitoring body GLAMOS said on Wednesday.

    A winter with little snow, especially in the northeastern part of the Swiss Alps, followed by heat waves in June, caused the glaciers to lose 3% of their total ice mass, according to this year’s report by GLAMOS and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation.

    “This is really a lot,” said Matthias Huss, the director of GLAMOS, whose reports cover the October-September hydrological year.

    Although the ice melt was not as extreme as in 2022 and 2023, when the glaciers lost 5.9% and 4.4% respectively, the trend is clear.

    Switzerland has had its worst decade of ice melt on record, with one quarter of glacier volume lost since 2015, Huss added, speaking with Reuters during a visit to the Rhone Glacier in Valais canton.

    The Rhone Glacier was the biggest glacier in Europe during the Ice Age, but has rapidly shrunk, losing on average about 1.5 meters in thickness this year.

    According to GLAMOS, about one hundred glaciers in Switzerland have vanished between 2016 and 2022, and it says that most could disappear by the end of the century.

    “Unfortunately, there is not much we can do to save the glaciers … They will continue retreating anyway, even if the climate is stabilised today,” said Huss.

    But if carbon dioxide emissions were to fall to zero globally over the next 30 years, then up to 200 Swiss glaciers at high elevation could be saved, he added.

    Swiss glaciers below 3,000 metres above sea level suffered in particular this year. The once healthy Silvretta Glacier in northeastern Switzerland had a huge ice melt following the lowest amount of snowfall for the area since measurements began some 100 years ago, the report found.

    Huss also warned that the shrinking of glaciers contributes to the destabilisation of mountains. That can trigger avalanches of rock and ice, such as the devastating glacier collapse that destroyed the village of Blatten in Valais in May of this year.

    (Reporting by Cecile Mantovani and Denis Balibouse; Writing by Olivia Le Poidevin in Geneva; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

    Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

    Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

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    Reuters

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  • Giz Asks: Do We Really Need a Category 6 for Hurricanes?

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    For more than 50 years, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center used the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (SSHWS) to classify hurricane strength. This scale, which ranks hurricanes from Category 1 to Category 5, is based on only one metric: maximum sustained wind speed.

    That wasn’t always the case. Until 2012, the SSHWS also took central pressure and storm surge into account, but the NHC eliminated these factors to reduce public confusion. The trouble is, rising global temperatures are exacerbating multiple hurricane hazards, not just wind speed. In recent years, exceptionally intense storms, such as Milton, Patricia, and Typhoon Haiyan, have sparked a debate over whether it’s time to create a Category 6.

    For this Giz asks, we asked multiple experts which side of that debate they’re on. While some are more open to the idea than others, all agreed that simply adding a Category 6 to the SSHWS isn’t the answer—even though several past hurricanes have exceeded Category 5 wind speeds. Instead, some argue that communicating hurricane risks in a warming world may require rethinking the scale entirely, while others believe the existing system should remain unchanged.

    Jennifer Collins

    A professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida who co-developed an alternative to the SSHWS.

    The current SSHWS—as the name implies—is just based on wind. Regarding that scale, my thoughts on a Category 6 is that it is not needed when a Category 5 on that scale would lead to total destruction anyway. There was a lot of discussion about this in the scientific community about a decade ago, and I believe that to be the general consensus.

    Our newly proposed scale, the Tropical Cyclone Sensitivity Scale (TCSS), considers that wind generally only accounts for 10% of fatalities. Storm surge accounts for roughly 50% and rain about 30%. Our scale includes all three of these hurricane hazards, assigning each one a category between 1 and 5. Then, it gives an overall category which can never be lower than the highest category given to the hazards.

    For example, Hurricane Florence in 2018 would be a Cat 1 at landfall for wind, a Cat 4 for storm surge, and a Cat 5 for rainfall. So, its overall score would be a Cat 5. If you consider the flooding and loss of life, I believe people who lived through it would agree that calling it a Cat 1—which the SSHWH did—does not adequately reflect the other hazards they experienced. People underestimate the risk of a low-category hurricane, or even a tropical storm, when they consider their evacuation decision, according to my previous evacuation research.

    The proposed TCSS also reflects the high potential risk of two or more hazards. We consider a hazard high risk when its category is classified as a 3 or higher (equal to the definition of a Major Hurricane on the SSHWS). Whenever at least two high-risk hazards have the same category and the third hazard has a lower category, this bumps the hurricane’s overall category up by 1. So, a tropical cyclone with a Cat 3 score for both wind and storm surge, but a Cat 1 score for rainfall, would be classified as a Cat 4.

    As such, a high-risk tropical cyclone can be classified as a Cat 6 on the TCSS in two scenarios. Either at least two of the hazards are Cat 5s, or two hazards are Cat 4s and one is a Cat 5. This is intended to warn the public of a hurricane with multiple extreme hazards.

    Brian McNoldy

    A senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science who has tracked and written about tropical Atlantic activity since 1996.

    My general thought is that adding a Cat 6 is not necessary and would not add any value to the current suite of information out there.

    Since 1980, Cat 5 hurricanes have only accounted for about 5% of all named storms globally.  In the Atlantic specifically, they have accounted for 4%. I’m not convinced that splitting that tiny number of storms into even smaller bins has any advantages.

    The most intense Atlantic hurricane on record is Allen was Allen in 1980, with maximum sustained winds of 190 miles per hour. None have reached that mark since then. If the threshold for a Cat 6 is at least 193-mile-per-hour winds as proposed in this study, for example, no Atlantic hurricanes to-date would qualify.

    Furthermore, partitioning those small numbers into even smaller numbers does not change risk communication. The National Hurricane Center describes the aftermath of a landfalling Cat 5 hurricane as such: “Catastrophic damage will occur: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.”

    What additional risk communication would there be for a Category 6 if one should make landfall?

    Liz Ritchie-Tyo

    A professor at Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment who also serves as deputy director of the university’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Weather of the 21st Century.

    The answer is “no.”

    The SSHWS was developed in the U.S. by a hurricane specialist and a wind engineer to put maximum sustained wind thresholds on levels of damage at landfall. If a hurricane is a Cat 5 on the SSHWS, that means catastrophic damage is expected. Thus, a new “Cat 6” just doesn’t make sense in terms of communicating threat levels.

    All hurricane classification systems for all tropical cyclone basins are based on maximum sustained wind speeds. Whether it’s the SSHWS in the north Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific, or other scales in the western North Pacific, Indian Ocean, and South Pacific, but the main idea is the same: once a hurricane reaches the top category, catastrophic damage is likely if the hurricane makes landfall.

    The main limitation of the current classification systems is not that they don’t go high enough to adequately communicate the threat, it’s that they are based solely on that wind threshold, which does not capture all the possible hazards associated with a landfalling hurricane.

    What we really need is a new “multi-factor” categorization system that can communicate the threat of multiple hazards, namely wind, storm surge, rainfall, flooding, and landslides. Depending on the location of landfall, different hazards will be more important. Along coastlines, wind, waves, and storm surge are extremely important, while flooding and mudslides caused by heavy rain are more important further inland.

    What’s more, maximum sustained wind speed does not capture the aerial extent of the storm-force winds that create waves and storm surge. The larger the area of these damaging winds, the greater the potential impact of storm surge. Similarly, the maximum wind intensity is not directly correlated with heavy rainfall. Though it’s true that Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes produce heavy rain, Cat 1 hurricanes can also produce heavy rain.

    Therefore, a multi-factor categorization system that can communicate the risk of various hazards would be more useful than adding an extra category to the current scale.

    Daniel Brown, NHC Hurricane Specialist Branch Chief

    NHC Hurricane Specialist Branch Chief. In this role, he oversees the unit that issues tropical cyclone forecasts and warnings for the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific hurricane basins.

    Currently, there are no efforts underway within NOAA to modify the SSHWS or add a new Category 6.

    Storm categories only communicate the wind hazard. When warning the public about the dangers associated with tropical systems, the National Hurricane Center communicates the wide range of hazards, including storm surge, wind, rainfall, tornadoes and rip currents.

    We do not over-emphasize the wind hazard by placing too much focus on the category, because most deaths caused by tropical cyclones are due to a water hazard. Storm surge, rainfall and inland flooding, and hazardous surf cause about 90% of tropical cyclone direct fatalities in the U.S.

    Further, the Saffir-Simpson scale’s Category 5 already captures the worst possible damage, which is labeled as “Catastrophic Damage.” Regardless of whether storms are getting stronger, the damage can’t get any worse than “Catastrophic.”

    Mark Bourassa

    Professor of meteorology at Florida State University’s Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies with expertise in air/sea interactions, surface water waves, identification of tropical disturbances, and possible precursors to tropical cyclones.

    One could make an argument that better scale construction and improved measurements would allow us to classify storms as stronger than Cat 5, but would that be helpful for any reason other than keeping a more detailed record?

    I find any major hurricane worrisome enough that I doubt a new category would have any impact on public response. People who won’t or can’t evacuate for a Cat 3 or 4 storm usually won’t or can’t evacuate for a stronger storm either.

    There are other types of information that forecasters are trying to communicate clearly, and this is more useful than defining a new storm category. Storm surge forecast maps are one good example of impactful improvements to hurricane hazards communication.

    I hope to see clear messages about the odds of various wind speeds reaching the area where I live and work. I’d also welcome more information on projected inland flooding. This information would be much more useful than distinguishing between a Cat 5 and Cat 6 storm, both for the public and for emergency management.

    That said, the arguments I’m making against creating a Cat 6 aren’t particularly fair because the goal of such a designation seems to be record keeping rather than providing a lot of additional information. There’s no reason that we can’t pursue all these options, but speaking as someone living near the Gulf Coast, I’d like to see better probabilistic maps of key hurricane hazards.

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    Ellyn Lapointe

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  • Sustainability Is Built Through Collaboration, Not Imposition 

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    When we talk about sustainability in business, the focus immediately falls on emissions. Reducing environmental impact has become one of the most visible and urgent metrics on corporate agendas worldwide. The emphasis is on carbon footprints, reduction targets, and the clean technologies implemented internally. 

    And this is no coincidence. Climate change is, without doubt, one of the greatest challenges we face as humanity. It is completely redefining what it means to be competitive and resilient, forcing us to look beyond our own operations. 

    In this new context, the value chain has taken center stage. After all, this is where most of the impact occurs, from raw material extraction to final distribution. It is no surprise that supplier decarbonization is now seen as a strategic challenge. 

    A KPMG survey confirms it. Three out of ten CEOs say that the complexity of transforming their supply chains is the biggest barrier to meeting their climate commitments. 

    The problem, in my view, is not recognizing the challenge but how it is addressed.  

    Instead of seeing suppliers as allies, many companies have chosen a simpler path: imposing requirements and shifting responsibility. They demand detailed reports, require certifications, and set strict deadlines. Yet this process rarely comes with real support or shared investment. 

    A Model That Weakens the Foundation 

    This unilateral approach carries serious consequences. A recent study found that, out of more than one thousand sustainability targets across nearly 700 global companies, only 12 percent focused on the people in their value chains. Moreover, most targets still follow a top-down pressure model directed at suppliers. 

    This imbalance poses a huge risk. Most suppliers are small and medium-sized businesses that operate on tight margins. They have limited access to capital, technology, or the expertise required to implement deep changes. Facing these new demands without adequate support can push them out of the system. 

    When a critical supplier is excluded, the ripple effects reach the buying company. Supply chains are disrupted, product quality suffers, and delays can compromise climate goals. Sustainability managed under this logic may show progress, but at the cost of weakening the social foundation that holds the entire chain together.  

    It is a fragile structure that sooner or later creates vulnerabilities. 

    Rebuilding Collaboration as a Strategy 

    There are inspiring examples that show collaboration is the true driver of transformation. They remind us that progress happens when we work together. 

    Take Mars, for instance. The company did not simply ask mint farmers in India to change their practices. It worked alongside them, providing technical support and training. The result was higher incomes and productivity for farmers. This not only strengthened local communities but also improved the quality and stability of Mars’ supply chain. 

    Or look at Tony’s Chocolonely, the brand known for its ethical cocoa. Instead of keeping its model for traceability and fair pricing secret, the company shared it openly with other industry players. 

    IKEA’s initiatives also illustrate this commitment. To help suppliers transition to renewable energy, the company created a program that gave them collective access to these resources. This broke down one of the highest barriers for SMEs: high costs and the difficulty of negotiating contracts individually. 

    These examples teach us that sustainability becomes stronger when it is built hand in hand with the value chain, sharing benefits instead of shifting burdens. 

    The rush to showcase progress has led many companies to forget the importance of collaboration. The urgency of meeting indicators has been prioritized over the need to co-create solutions with suppliers and communities.  

    This is why I like to think of three guiding questions: Who is most affected by the transition? What benefits do suppliers and workers receive? Where is it best to invest to create mutual advantages? 

    Framing goals through these questions changes the dynamic entirely. They stop being perceived as demands and become shared commitments that strengthen capacities across the chain. 

    This shift not only makes it easier to achieve climate targets but also reinforces operational resilience, builds stronger trust among business partners, and opens new opportunities in markets that value corporate consistency. 

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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    Antonio Vizcaya

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  • Fires, floods and other disasters are multiplying. Schools are adding training for workers to combat them

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    WATSONVILLE, Calif. — Gavin Abundis watched as firefighter Adrian Chairez demonstrated how he uses pulleys and harnesses to rappel down buildings. “You’ve probably seen it in the movies where they’re going down ‘Mission: Impossible’ style,” Chairez said with a laugh one day this past winter as he prepared to step off a tower. “We get to do that.” 

    Abundis, a then-senior at Aptos High School in Santa Cruz County’s Pajaro Valley Unified School District, has a friend whose home burned down a few years ago in a fire sparked by lightning. He said it’s pretty common to know someone who has been affected by fires in California, especially as they become more frequent and intense because of climate change. That drew him to this class on fire technology, and may steer his career. 

    “Knowing that there’s something that I can do about it to serve my community definitely encourages me to pursue this career,” said Abundis. 

    Demand for the course has grown so much in recent years that the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, which jointly runs the class with the Watsonville Fire Department, doubled the number of classes offered, from two to four, this school year. “There was a time when we would go into the schools and recruit students,” said Rudy Lopez Sr., fire chief of the Watsonville department. “Now, they just sign up.” 

    As climate change alters the environment and economies, the need is growing for jobs that help prepare for, respond to and lessen damage caused by fires, floods and other natural disasters. That’s led schools and community colleges to explore how to prepare students for careers in such fields as fire science, protecting and restoring watersheds and other ecosystems, forestry management and search and rescue. In some cases, student interest is driving the new courses — surveys show teenagers and younger adults are more environmentally conscious than older people and more likely to support action on climate change. 

    Watsonville, Calif., Fire Chief Rudy Lopez Sr. talks with students during a Fire Youth Academy class at Watsonville Fire Station No. 2. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    Kate Kreamer, executive director of Advance CTE, a nonprofit that supports state leaders who oversee career and technical education programs, said more school districts are offering climate-related CTE courses, but it’s challenging to find statistics because the issue is so politicized and because what the classes are called differs by school, district and state. One example of that growth: A “resiliency careers in forestry” program, which trains people as foresters, fire program managers and log truck drivers at five California community colleges, enrolls some 700 students compared with 37 when it launched three years ago, according to the Foundation for California Community Colleges. 

    Students in Santa Cruz’s yearlong fire science course say they love that it’s so hands-on. They practice putting on and taking off more than 70 pounds of equipment in under 90 seconds, watch water cannons blast from the top of fire engines and get a chance to hold “attack lines,” 200-foot-long water hoses. They also learn about the specialized vocabulary of firefighting, the range of jobs available and the certifications that are required. The course helps expose students to careers in firefighting, which is facing a significant shortage of people to fill jobs in California and some other regions of the country. In the state, entry-level jobs pay between roughly $50,000 and $100,000 per year, according to the statewide group California Professional Firefighters.  

    Charlotte Morgan, a soft-spoken then-senior from Aptos in the Watsonville class, said she wanted to take this course specifically because of her interest in climate change: “Growing up in Santa Cruz, we spend so much time outside and we care so much about it, and I want to protect that.” 

    Her friend Bellamy Breen said she felt the same way, though she’s interested in working on water conservation issues. “With climate change there’s more droughts, there’s more saltwater intrusion, and with all the agriculture here, it’s very important,” she said.

    Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

    Watsonville firefighter Adrian Chairez rappels from the top of a building during a Fire Youth Academy class in Watsonville. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    President Joe Biden championed such initiatives as the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which invested billions of federal dollars in supporting jobs that tackle climate change, including clean energy manufacturing, water infrastructure projects and wildfire prevention and preparedness efforts. Under President Donald Trump, who calls climate change a hoax, there has been a swift reversal of those initiatives. In recent months, the federal government has let go of hundreds of climate scientists, halted research funding and canceled 400 grants to help communities prepare for more extreme weather events. 

    Yet for communities that have been hit with natural disasters, there is a demand for jobs that transcends politics, even in conservative communities where climate change is sometimes dismissed as fake science. 

    John Gossett, president of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in North Carolina, said that after Hurricane Helene devastated his region last year, college presidents in Mississippi and Louisiana who have endured catastrophic natural disasters told him to expect an enrollment drop of 40 percent to 50 percent. But Gossett said that while enrollment in several programs has remained flat, courses in fields that were highly visible during the hurricane — such as fire and rescue, EMT and paramedics and nursing — have drawn more interest from students. 

    Police officers played a big role during the disaster, participating in search and rescue missions and directing traffic. Gossett said the college had to double its number of basic law enforcement training cohorts from two to four this semester in response to the unexpected demand. It also reinstated a course in geomatics, or land surveying, and added a class in agri permaculture, an approach to land management that imitates natural ecosystems in rebuilding. The college’s construction program offers additional environmentally friendly certifications, including in green buildings and solar technology.  

    Gossett sees a strong link between these in-demand courses and economic development of the region, even though there is no mention of climate change in course descriptions. “It’s in our mission, it’s what we do,” he said. “We’re trying to help people get to a better place in life, where they can make more money and have more options. And all of that is wrapped around workforce development.”

    Related: Apprenticeships for high schoolers are touted as the next big thing. One state leads the way

    Southeastern Kentucky has also been hit recently by disasters, including catastrophic floods in 2021, 2022 and 2025 that led to a devastating number of deaths, unsalvageable homes and mud-filled businesses and school buildings. It’s the region served by Hazard Community and Technical College, with 4,400 students across campuses in Central Appalachia. “You just can’t believe how much water there was, there was 6 feet of water in one of our buildings,” recalled its president, Jennifer Lindon. 

    Students wait as firefighters prepare a demonstration during a Fire Youth Academy class in Watsonville. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    She said the college is rethinking course offerings to be more responsive to the disasters. Hazard offers an annual firefighter training, but water rescue is becoming such an important part of the job that the college is adding a swift water rescue component, focused on saving people from fast-moving floods, for first responders from across the state. Its classes in construction are changing too, to incorporate information on how to rebuild homes on higher ground to better withstand winds and floods. Because of the demand, Hazard now runs several construction courses simultaneously, and the curriculum is accelerated — what would have taken 16 weeks now takes six. 

    Lindon said there are waiting lists for Hazard’s heavy equipment and line worker classes, as the community clears debris and rebuilds infrastructure. The college is also designing a new course on water treatment systems, after a plant flooded, leaving several counties with no drinking water for days. Lindon said the county is building a new treatment facility, which means there will be several jobs available. 

    “It’s time to really sit down and think about how we plan for 10 years, 20 years, because I don’t think that these disasters are one-offs,” she said. “What we thought was a 1,000-year flood has happened in three of the last five years. So it’s a different time for sure. Most of us all really love this area. We want to stay here, so we need to figure out how to better protect it.” 

    Other institutions are seeing the need to reach out to students to get them interested in these careers early on. John Boyd leads Mayland Community College, about an hour’s drive from Asheville, North Carolina, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene. 

    Boyd’s community is still cleaning up from the storm, and the college has lost students as many residents moved out of the area. But it hired a firefighter instructor to teach the area’s all-volunteer firefighters and work with K-12 schools to expose younger students to careers important in the region. The college is also building an environmental science center featuring exhibits for children to give them a better understanding of local environmental changes, like how physical damage during Hurricane Helene caused rivers to become permanently wider and deeper. 

    In this deep red area, no one mentions climate change. “We’re a very, very conservative area here,” said Boyd. “We focus on what it is and what we do now, not how it got there.” 

    The college is also training operators of large machinery like backhoes and bulldozers. Half of the trees in one local county were downed in the storm, and other debris still needs to be cleared. “That timber in another year is going to become a massive fire hazard,” said Boyd. “For the next few years we’re going to have a lot of fuel laying on the ground.” 

    Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for fighting climate change

    Kreamer, with Advance CTE, said disaster-related coursework is one piece of a bigger shift, with high schools around the country altering courses in fields as diverse as construction, HVAC, fashion technology and cooking to adapt for climate change. Matt Siegelman, president of Burning Glass Institute, which analyzes labor market data, said many traditional jobs now require an understanding of green technology. Construction, for example, increasingly relies on sustainable materials, energy-efficient designs and newer construction techniques. Green jobs are growing at about 2 percent a year, but traditional construction jobs that require some green skills are growing much faster, he said. 

    Kreamer said that as demand for these roles grows, a number of challenges must still be overcome, including improving collaboration between education and industries and between community colleges and K-12 schools. “You can only do so much by reskilling,” she said. “Adults have to look at the next generation as part of that pipeline strategy,” by introducing students to career options in elementary and middle school. 

    Jack Widman is dragged on the floor during a demonstration on how a firefighter would rescue someone during the Fire Youth Academy class in Watsonville. Credit: Minh Connors for The Hechinger Report

    In firefighting, career opportunities differ by geography, with rural areas often relying on volunteer squads and larger cities on paid workers. Concerns about the health risks facing wildfire firefighters have also been intensifying. 

    In California, more than 6,500 wildfires have broken out so far in 2025, putting this on pace to be one of the worst years for fires on record. In Santa Cruz, district administrators expect more than 110 students to complete the fire science program this school year, compared with 57 last year. 

    Students say they learn not just about fighting fires, but also about standing up for others, persevering and not getting discouraged. “It’s super-valuable life advice,” said Jack Widman, a then-senior, during last winter’s class at the Watsonville fire station. Like his classmate Gavin Abundis, Widman is considering a career in firefighting.

    “Firefighting doesn’t solve climate change,” added Abundis, “but I feel I’m part of the solution.” 

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org. 

    This story about climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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    Kavitha Cardoza

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  • ClimateWatch: Extreme flooding in the U.S.

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    ClimateWatch: Extreme flooding in the U.S. – CBS News










































    Watch CBS News



    In this episode of “ClimateWatch,” CBS News national environmental correspondent David Schechter looks at the floods that have devastated communities in the United States over the past two years.

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  • AGs urge EPA not to scrap climate change findings

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    BOSTON — Attorney General Andrea Campbell is leading a group of Democrats demanding that the Trump administration scrap a controversial proposal to repeal a key scientific finding on climate pollution.

    In comments submitted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Campbell and 22 other Democratic attorneys general criticized the federal agency for its “illegal” and “fundamentally flawed” plans to ax a 2009 “endangerment finding” that concluded the accumulation of greenhouse gases pose a “serious threat” to public health.


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    By Christian M. Wade | Statehouse Reporter

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  • UNESCO designates 26 new biosphere reserves amid biodiversity challenges and climate change

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    An Indonesian archipelago that’s home to three-fourths of Earth’s coral species, a stretch of Icelandic coast with 70% of the country’s plant life and an area along Angola’s Atlantic coast featuring savannahs, forests and estuaries are among 26 new UNESCO-designated biosphere reserves.

    The United Nations cultural agency says the reserves — 785 sites in 142 countries, designated since 1971 — are home to some of the planet’s richest and most fragile ecosystems. But biosphere reserves encompass more than strictly protected nature reserves; they’re expanded to include areas where people live and work, and the designation requires that scientists, residents and government officials work together to balance conservation and research with local economic and cultural needs.

    “The concept of biosphere reserves is that biodiversity conservation is a pillar of socioeconomic development” and can contribute to the economy, said António Abreu, head of the program, adding that conflict and misunderstanding can result if local communities are left out of decision-making and planning.

    The new reserves, in 21 countries, were announced Saturday in Hangzhou, China, where the program adopted a 10-year strategic action plan that includes studying the effects of climate change, Abreu said.

    The new reserves include a 52,000-square-mile (135,000-square-kilometer) area in the Indonesian archipelago, Raja Ampat, home to over 75% of earth’s coral species as well as rainforests and rare endangered sea turtles. The economy depends on fishing, aquaculture, small-scale agriculture and tourism, UNESCO said.

    On Iceland’s west coast, the Snæfellsnes Biosphere Reserve’s landscape includes volcanic peaks, lava fields, wetlands, grasslands and the Snæfellsjökull glacier. The 1,460-square-kilometer (564 square-mile) reserve is an important sanctuary for seabirds, seals and over 70% of Iceland’s plant life — including 330 species of wildflowers and ferns. Its population of more than 4,000 people relies on fishing, sheep farming and tourism.

    And in Angola, the new Quiçama Biosphere Reserve, along 206 kilometers (128 miles) of Atlantic coast is a “sanctuary for biodiversity” within its savannahs, forests, flood plains, estuaries and islands, according to UNESCO. It’s home to elephants, manatees, sea turtles and more than 200 bird species. Residents’ livelihoods include livestock herding, farming, fishing, honey production.

    Residents are important partners in protecting biodiversity within the reserves, and even have helped identify new species, said Abreu, the program’s leader. Meanwhile, scientists also are helping to restore ecosystems to benefit the local economy, he said.

    For example, in the Philippines, the coral reefs around Pangatalan Island were severely damaged because local fishermen used dynamite to find depleted fish populations. Scientists helped design a structure to help coral reefs regrow and taught fishermen to raise fish through aquaculture so the reefs could recover.

    “They have food and they have also fish to sell in the markets,” said Abreu.

    In the African nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, a biosphere reserve on Príncipe Island led to restoration of mangroves, which help buffer against storm surges and provide important habitat, Abreu said.

    Ecotourism also has become an important industry, with biosphere trails and guided bird-watching tours. A new species of owl was identified there in recent years.

    This year, a biosphere reserve was added for the island of São Tomé, making the country the first entirely within a reserve.

    At least 60% of the UNESCO biosphere reserves have been affected by extreme weather tied to climate change, which is caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gas, including extreme heat and drought and sea-level rise, Abreu said.

    The agency is using satellite imagery and computer modeling to monitor changes in coastal zones and other areas, and is digitizing its historical databases, Abreu said. The information will be used to help determine how best to preserve and manage the reserves.

    Some biosphere reserves also are under pressure from environmental degradation.

    In Nigeria, for example, habitat for a dwindling population of critically endangered African forest elephants is under threat as cocoa farmers expand into Omo Forest Reserve, a protected rainforest and one of Africa’s oldest and largest UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. The forest is also important to help combat climate change.

    The Trump administration in July announced that the U.S. would withdraw from UNESCO as of December 2026, just as it did during his first administration, saying U.S. involvement is not in the national interest. The U.S. has 47 biosphere reserves, most in federal protected areas.

    ___

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Plant-Powered Pups: New Study Shows Dramatic Environmental Gains From Plant-Based Dog Food in the UK

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    LONDON, UK, September 25, 2025 (Newswire.com)
    –
    A new life cycle assessment of 31 dry dog foods in the UK reveals that plant-based diets consistently outperform meat-based alternatives across every major environmental measure. Conducted by University of Nottingham veterinary researchers Rebecca Brociek and Professor David Gardner, and published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, the study underscores a major opportunity for pet owners and the pet food industry to shrink their ecological “pawprint.”

    Key Results

    • Greenhouse gas emissions: Plant-based foods produced just 2.82 kg CO₂-eq per 1,000 kcal, compared to 31.47 kg for beef-based formulas – over ten times higher.

    • Land use: Plant-based diets required 2.73 m² per 1,000 kcal, versus 102.15 m² for beef-based products.

    • Water use: Plant-based options consumed 249 L of freshwater per 1,000 kcal, far less than beef (575 L) or lamb (684 L).

    • Nutrient and acidification pollution: Beef-based diets generated 14-16 times more acidifying and eutrophying emissions respectively, than plant-based equivalents.

    • Middle ground: Poultry-based and semi-synthetic veterinary formulas had lower impacts than red meat, but still much higher than plant-based foods.

    Over a typical nine-year lifespan, feeding a 20 kg Labrador exclusively on plant-based dry food would require 8,964 m² of land and emit greenhouse gases equal to 2.8 London-New York return flights. The same dog fed on beef-based food would need 334,851 m² of land and emit the equivalent of 31.3 such flights.

    Why It Matters

    With pet ownership on the rise worldwide and demand for pet foods increasing, the environmental impact of animal-based ingredients can no longer be overlooked. The researchers conclude that increasing plant-based ingredients in pet diets provides a practical and scalable way to reduce land use, emissions, nutrient pollution, and water stress – without compromising caloric value.

    They note, “feeding your dog plant-based will significantly improve a households’ environmentally sustainability”, and that, “… lower-impact pet food ingredients will be essential in reducing the [pet food] sector’s ecological paw print.”

    While some suggest that using meat by-products like ‘meat meals’ is more sustainable, the study found these often ranked among the highest-impact ingredients, failing to bridge the gap.

    Broader Context

    This work supports earlier research. In 2023, veterinary professor Andrew Knight demonstrated that switching pet dogs worldwide to nutritionally sound vegan diets could save greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.5 times the UK’s annual output, while providing enough food energy to feed 450 million people, equivalent to the EU population. By late 2025, at least 11 peer-reviewed studies had also shown positive health outcomes for dogs fed plant-based diets.

    As Prof. Knight explained, “Higher proportions of plant-based ingredients, or nutritionally complete plant-based diets, can substantially reduce the ecological footprints of companion animals. As awareness grows, such diets may shift from niche to mainstream – aligning our care for pets with responsibility for the planet.”

    Source: Sustainable Pet Food Foundation

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  • Massachusetts cranberry farmers choosing to restore their bogs into wetlands amid economic headwinds

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    Carver, Massachusetts — For Jarrod Rhodes, a fourth-generation cranberry farmer in Carver, Massachusetts, a 30-acre state project is taking a portion of his family’s land back in time.

    “In 10 years, I hope it looks like a natural swamp,” Rhodes told CBS News of the project’s outcome. “And just, kind of, everything that it may have looked like, you know, before we were here.” 

    As cranberry prices fall due to global competition and costs increase due to labor issues, higher utility costs and extreme weather, cranberry farmers like Rhodes are part of the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration’s Cranberry Bog Program that pays farmers to turn unproductive bogs back into wetlands.

    The restoration project for the bogs owned by the Rhodes family is about 95% complete. It will be only a matter of time before native plants begin to return. 

    Massachusetts has restored over 500 acres of wetlands over the past 15 years through the program, with another 500 acres planned. 

    According to the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration, the state has about 13,250 acres of cranberry farms. Massachusetts is the second-largest grower of cranberries in the U.S. behind Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    The state allocates around $1 million a year to the restoration program, while leveraging other local and federal grants to do these restorations. 

    For Massachusetts cranberry farmers, the program is one way to preserve their land as a generation of farmers nears retirement.

    “They want to make sure that the land that they’ve tended to for so long is like, in good hands, whether that be a restoration program, or passing it on to the next generation,” said Karen Cahill, deputy executive director of the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association, a trade group which represents cranberry farmers in the state. 

    Under the program, the farmers keep the land, but the public can enjoy it too. An example of a restoration process that worked was the Eel River headwaters in Plymouth in 2010, where 60 acres of former bogs are now beautiful wetlands, filtering water, storing carbon and providing storm resilience. They are also open for hiking and wildlife.

    Beth Lambert helps oversee the state’s restoration program, including the projects at Eel River and Carver.

    “Many of the cranberry farms in Massachusetts were constructed on wetlands,” Lambert said. “And what we’re doing is, we’re restoring those underlying drivers of water, the soil, and then we let Mother Nature take it from there.”

    Back on Rhodes’ farm, streams now wind through areas where cranberry vines once grew.

    “It’s cool to see it kind of all bare,” Rhodes said. “Just kind of waiting for it to grow back and see if it actually works the way that it was supposed to.” 

    Jacob Wycoff

    Jacob Wycoff is a meteorologist at WBZ-TV and will contribute to weekend morning newscasts. Jacob is a member of the National Weather Association and the American Meteorological Society.

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  • Climate Week underway as Trump calls climate change

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    It’s Climate Week in New York City. The annual event partners with the United Nations Global Assembly and brings together business, political and civil leaders from around the world to collaborate on climate action and police. Bill Ritter, former governor of Colorado, joins “The Daily Report” to discuss.

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  • Energy Department to return $13 billion in unused climate funds to taxpayers

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    The Department of Energy says it will return more than $13 billion in unobligated funds once set aside for the Biden administration’s climate agenda, calling it “wasteful spending.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright joins “CBS Mornings Plus.”

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  • The World’s Oceans Are Hurtling Toward Breaking Point

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    For life on Earth, the oceans are essential. Not only do they supply us with food and resources, they also play a big role in maintaining a stable climate: between one-quarter to one-third of all CO2 emitted by humans, which would otherwise stay in the atmosphere to further intensify climate change, is captured and stored by the sea.

    But the oceans are in trouble. Already facing an onslaught of human pressures—including overfishing, pollution, rising temperatures, and acidification—the world’s seas could see the burden placed on them double over the next couple of decades. This would have huge negative consequences for biodiversity as well as for humans around the world.

    An international team, led by the National Center for Ecosystem Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has modeled how the pressure placed on the world’s oceans could change in the future. Their analysis projects that by around 2050, the cumulative pressure on the oceans could increase 2.2- to 2.6-fold compared to today. The most rapid increases in impact will occur near the equator, at the poles, and in coastal areas.

    “Our cumulative impact on the oceans, which is already substantial, is going to double by 2050—in just 25 years,” Ben Halpern, marine ecologist and director of NCEAS, explained in a university statement. “It’s sobering. And it’s unexpected, not because impacts will be increasing—that is not surprising—but because they will be increasing so much, so fast.”

    Halpern and his team, in cooperation with Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, integrated 17 datasets from around the world to create a comprehensive global model of the extent and intensity of the impacts of human activities on the ocean. Past studies have often dealt with the impacts of specific activities in isolation; the current study integrates these activities to more clearly highlight the future vision of the marine environment.

    What emerges is a picture of further deterioration in already heavily impacted areas, such as coastal waters, as well as rapidly expanding impacts across the high seas, which have been relatively stable until now. In equatorial regions, the impact of human activities could increase nearly three-fold between the 2040s and 2050s.

    Specific major impacts include rising sea temperatures, declining marine resources due to fishing, rising sea levels, acidification of seawater (which is a consequence of CO2 dissolving in the sea), and algal blooms due to the influx of nutrients that flow into the ocean, principally from farms. While these burdens are each serious in isolation, their combined effects could exceed the resilience of ecosystems and lead to irreversible losses.

    Researchers warn that this cumulative impact will then hit society—for instance, by lowering food supplies, killing off jobs in tourism and fishing, flooding low-lying lands, and destroying coral reefs that protect coastlines from storm surges and tsunamis. There will be direct impacts on human livelihoods and economies, leading to regional economic instability, Halpern said.

    Developing countries and small island nations in particular do not have the economic wherewithal to take adaptation measures, despite their often heavy dependence on marine resources. The cumulative effects will therefore appear unevenly across countries. Oceanic change is not just an environmental issue; it is an issue that concerns the stability of the international community as a whole.

    However, the projections of this study are only possibilities; such a future does not have to arrive. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to lessen climate change and ocean acidification, systematically managing fisheries resources, avoiding coastal pollution, and preserving coastal mangroves and salt marshes may help to mitigate the deterioration. There is still room to minimize the impact.

    This story originally appeared on WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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    Ritsuko Kawai

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  • Seed Global Health CEO Vanessa Kerry reacts to Trump’s U.N. comments about climate change

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    President Trump criticized efforts to fight climate change while addressing the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday. Vanessa Kerry, CEO of Seed Global Health and WHO special envoy for climate change and health, joined CBS News to discuss the president’s remarks.

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  • Arctic Rivers Are Turning an Eerie Orange, and This Might Be Why

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    Researchers have long believed that frozen environments slow chemical reactions, but new research challenges this belief.

    In a study published last month in the journal PNAS, researchers have demonstrated that ice can dissolve iron minerals better than liquid water, with implications for the many Arctic rivers mysteriously turning orange as the planet warms.

    Specifically, Jean-François Boily, a co-author of the study and a chemist at Umeå University, and his colleagues revealed that ice at 14 degrees Fahrenheit (-10 degrees Celsius) unlocks more iron from common minerals than liquid water at 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius).

    Iron dissolves more efficiently

    “It may sound counterintuitive, but ice is not a passive frozen block,” Boily said in a university statement. “Freezing creates microscopic pockets of liquid water between ice crystals. These act like chemical reactors, where compounds become concentrated and extremely acidic. This means they can react with iron minerals even at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius.”

    They investigated goethite (a common iron oxide mineral) with a natural organic acid, revealing that repeated cycles of freezing and thawing dissolve the iron more efficiently. That’s because organic compounds formerly trapped in the ice are released during the freezing and thawing, generating additional chemical reactions. The team also noted that while brackish and fresh water furthered the dissolution, salty seawater can subdue it.

    These results carry important applications for acidic environments, according to the researchers, including mine drainage sites, frozen dust in the atmosphere, acid sulfate soils on the coast of the Baltic Sea, or any acidic frozen environment where iron minerals and organics interact. Moving forward, Boily and researchers are working to discover whether their results apply to all ice containing iron.

    “As the climate warms, freeze-thaw cycles become more frequent,” said Angelo Pio Sebaaly, a graduate student in chemistry at the university and first author of the study. “Each cycle releases iron from soils and permafrost into the water. This can affect water quality and aquatic ecosystems across vast areas.”

    Ice is an active player

    Notably, it might also have something to do with why rivers in the Arctic are turning an alarming orange. “By resolving the chemical controls on mineral dissolution in ice, this work can help explain how freeze-thaw events are supplying new fluxes of soluble iron to nature,” the researchers wrote in the study.

    The paper also highlights ice as an “active player,” according to the statement, as opposed to a “passive storage medium,” confirming yet another element we should keep a close eye on as climate change disrupts environments around the world.

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    Margherita Bassi

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  • Trump in speech to UN says world body ‘not even coming close to living up’ to its potential

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    President Donald Trump returned to the United Nations on Tuesday to boast of his second-term foreign policy achievements and lash out at the world body as a feckless institution, while warning Europe it would be ruined if it doesn’t turn away from a “double-tailed monster” of ill-conceived migration and green energy policies.His roughly hour-long speech was both grievance-filled and self-congratulatory as he used the platform to praise himself and lament that some of his fellow world leaders’ countries were “going to hell.”The address was also just the latest reminder for U.S. allies and foes that the United States — after a four-year interim under the more internationalist President Joe Biden — has returned to the unapologetically “America First” posture under Trump.“What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump said. “The U.N. has such tremendous potential. I’ve always said it. It has such tremendous, tremendous potential. But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential.”World leaders listened closely to his remarks at the U.N. General Assembly as Trump has already moved quickly to diminish U.S. support for the world body in his first eight months in office. Even in his first term, he was no fan of the flavor of multilateralism that the United Nations espouses.After his latest inauguration, he issued a first-day executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization. That was followed by his move to end U.S. participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council, and ordering up a review of U.S. membership in hundreds of intergovernmental organizations aimed at determining whether they align with the priorities of his “America First” agenda.Trump escalated that criticism on Tuesday, saying the international body’s “empty words don’t solve wars.”Trump offered a weave of jarring juxtapositions in his address to the assembly.He trumpeted himself as a peacemaker and enumerated successes of his administration’s efforts in several hotspots around the globe. At the same, Trump heralded his decisions to order the U.S. military to carry out strikes on Iran and more recently against alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela and argued that globalists are on the verge of destroying successful nations.The U.S. president’s speech is typically among the most anticipated moments of the annual assembly. This one comes at one of the most volatile moments in the world body’s 80-year-old history. Global leaders are being tested by intractable wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, uncertainty about the economic and social impact of emerging artificial intelligence technology, and anxiety about Trump’s antipathy for the global body.Trump has also raised new questions about the American use of military force in his return to the White House, after ordering U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June and a trio of strikes this month on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea.The latter strikes, including at least two fatal attacks on boats that originated from Venezuela, has raised speculation in Caracas that Trump is looking to set the stage for the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.Some U.S. lawmakers and human rights advocates say that Trump is effectively carrying out extrajudicial killings by using U.S. forces to lethally target alleged drug smugglers instead of interdicting the suspected vessels, seizing any drugs and prosecuting the suspects in U.S. courts.Warnings about ‘green scam’ and migrationTrump touted his administration’s policies allowing for expanded drilling for oil and natural gas in the United States, and aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration, implicitly suggesting more countries should follow suit.He sharply warned that European nations that have more welcoming migration policies and commit to expensive energy projects aimed at reducing their carbon footprint were causing irreparable harm to their economies and cultures.“I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the ‘green energy’ scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said. “If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before that you have nothing in common with your country is going to fail.”Trump added, “I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer.”The passage of the wide-ranging address elicited some groans and uncomfortable laughter from delegates.Trump to hold one-on-one talks with world leadersTrump touted “the renewal of American strength around the world” and his efforts to help end several wars. He peppered his speech with criticism of global institutions doing too little to end war and solve the world’s biggest problems.General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock on Tuesday said that despite all the internal and external challenges facing the organization, it is not the time to walk away.“Sometimes we could’ve done more, but we cannot let this dishearten us. If we stop doing the right things, evil will prevail,” Baerbock said in her opening remarks.Following his speech, Trump met with Secretary-General António Guterres, telling the top U.N. official that the U.S. is behind the global body “100%” amid fears among members that he’s edging toward a full retreat.The White House says Trump will also meet on Tuesday with the leaders of Ukraine, Argentina and the European Union. He will also hold a group meeting with officials from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.He’ll return to Washington after hosting a reception Tuesday night with more than 100 invited world leaders.Gaza and Ukraine cast shadow over Trump speechTrump has struggled to deliver on his 2024 campaign promises to quickly end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His response has been also relatively muted as some longtime American allies are using this year’s General Assembly to spotlight the growing international campaign for recognition of a Palestinian state, a move that the U.S. and Israel vehemently oppose.France became the latest nation to recognize Palestinian statehood on Monday at the start of a high-profile meeting at the U.N. aimed at galvanizing support for a two-state solution to the Mideast conflict. More nations are expected to follow.Trump sharply criticized the statehood recognition push.“The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists,” Trump said. “This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including Oct. 7.”Trump also addressed Russia’s war in Ukraine.It’s been more than a month since Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and key European leaders. Following those meetings, Trump announced that he was arranging for direct talks between Putin and Zelenskyy. But Putin hasn’t shown any interest in meeting with Zelenskyy and Moscow has only intensified its bombardment of Ukraine since the Alaska summit.European leaders as well as American lawmakers, including some key Republican allies of Trump, have urged the president to dial up stronger sanctions on Russia. Trump, meanwhile, has pressed Europe to stop buying Russian oil, the engine feeding Putin’s war machine.Trump said a “very strong round of powerful tariffs” would “stop the bloodshed, I believe, very quickly.” He repeated his calls on Europe to “step it up” and stop buying Russian oil.Trump has Oslo dreamsDespite his struggles to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump has made clear that he wants to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, repeatedly making the spurious claim that he’s “ended seven wars” since he returned to office.“Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Prize — but for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who live to grow up because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless wars,” Trump offered.He again highlighted his administration’s efforts to end conflicts, including between Israel and Iran, India and Pakistan, Egypt and Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Cambodia and Thailand.“It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them,” Trump said. “Sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them.”Although Trump helped mediate relations among many of these nations, experts say his impact isn’t as clear cut as he claims.___AP journalists Tracy Brown and Darlene Superville in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

    UNITED NATIONS —

    President Donald Trump returned to the United Nations on Tuesday to boast of his second-term foreign policy achievements and lash out at the world body as a feckless institution, while warning Europe it would be ruined if it doesn’t turn away from a “double-tailed monster” of ill-conceived migration and green energy policies.

    His roughly hour-long speech was both grievance-filled and self-congratulatory as he used the platform to praise himself and lament that some of his fellow world leaders’ countries were “going to hell.”

    The address was also just the latest reminder for U.S. allies and foes that the United States — after a four-year interim under the more internationalist President Joe Biden — has returned to the unapologetically “America First” posture under Trump.

    “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump said. “The U.N. has such tremendous potential. I’ve always said it. It has such tremendous, tremendous potential. But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential.”

    World leaders listened closely to his remarks at the U.N. General Assembly as Trump has already moved quickly to diminish U.S. support for the world body in his first eight months in office. Even in his first term, he was no fan of the flavor of multilateralism that the United Nations espouses.

    After his latest inauguration, he issued a first-day executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization. That was followed by his move to end U.S. participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council, and ordering up a review of U.S. membership in hundreds of intergovernmental organizations aimed at determining whether they align with the priorities of his “America First” agenda.

    Trump escalated that criticism on Tuesday, saying the international body’s “empty words don’t solve wars.”

    Trump offered a weave of jarring juxtapositions in his address to the assembly.

    He trumpeted himself as a peacemaker and enumerated successes of his administration’s efforts in several hotspots around the globe. At the same, Trump heralded his decisions to order the U.S. military to carry out strikes on Iran and more recently against alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela and argued that globalists are on the verge of destroying successful nations.

    The U.S. president’s speech is typically among the most anticipated moments of the annual assembly. This one comes at one of the most volatile moments in the world body’s 80-year-old history. Global leaders are being tested by intractable wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, uncertainty about the economic and social impact of emerging artificial intelligence technology, and anxiety about Trump’s antipathy for the global body.

    Trump has also raised new questions about the American use of military force in his return to the White House, after ordering U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June and a trio of strikes this month on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea.

    The latter strikes, including at least two fatal attacks on boats that originated from Venezuela, has raised speculation in Caracas that Trump is looking to set the stage for the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

    Some U.S. lawmakers and human rights advocates say that Trump is effectively carrying out extrajudicial killings by using U.S. forces to lethally target alleged drug smugglers instead of interdicting the suspected vessels, seizing any drugs and prosecuting the suspects in U.S. courts.

    Warnings about ‘green scam’ and migration

    Trump touted his administration’s policies allowing for expanded drilling for oil and natural gas in the United States, and aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration, implicitly suggesting more countries should follow suit.

    He sharply warned that European nations that have more welcoming migration policies and commit to expensive energy projects aimed at reducing their carbon footprint were causing irreparable harm to their economies and cultures.

    “I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the ‘green energy’ scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said. “If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before that you have nothing in common with your country is going to fail.”

    Trump added, “I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer.”

    The passage of the wide-ranging address elicited some groans and uncomfortable laughter from delegates.

    Trump to hold one-on-one talks with world leaders

    Trump touted “the renewal of American strength around the world” and his efforts to help end several wars. He peppered his speech with criticism of global institutions doing too little to end war and solve the world’s biggest problems.

    General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock on Tuesday said that despite all the internal and external challenges facing the organization, it is not the time to walk away.

    “Sometimes we could’ve done more, but we cannot let this dishearten us. If we stop doing the right things, evil will prevail,” Baerbock said in her opening remarks.

    Following his speech, Trump met with Secretary-General António Guterres, telling the top U.N. official that the U.S. is behind the global body “100%” amid fears among members that he’s edging toward a full retreat.

    The White House says Trump will also meet on Tuesday with the leaders of Ukraine, Argentina and the European Union. He will also hold a group meeting with officials from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.

    He’ll return to Washington after hosting a reception Tuesday night with more than 100 invited world leaders.

    Gaza and Ukraine cast shadow over Trump speech

    Trump has struggled to deliver on his 2024 campaign promises to quickly end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His response has been also relatively muted as some longtime American allies are using this year’s General Assembly to spotlight the growing international campaign for recognition of a Palestinian state, a move that the U.S. and Israel vehemently oppose.

    France became the latest nation to recognize Palestinian statehood on Monday at the start of a high-profile meeting at the U.N. aimed at galvanizing support for a two-state solution to the Mideast conflict. More nations are expected to follow.

    Trump sharply criticized the statehood recognition push.

    “The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists,” Trump said. “This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including Oct. 7.”

    Trump also addressed Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    It’s been more than a month since Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and key European leaders. Following those meetings, Trump announced that he was arranging for direct talks between Putin and Zelenskyy. But Putin hasn’t shown any interest in meeting with Zelenskyy and Moscow has only intensified its bombardment of Ukraine since the Alaska summit.

    European leaders as well as American lawmakers, including some key Republican allies of Trump, have urged the president to dial up stronger sanctions on Russia. Trump, meanwhile, has pressed Europe to stop buying Russian oil, the engine feeding Putin’s war machine.

    Trump said a “very strong round of powerful tariffs” would “stop the bloodshed, I believe, very quickly.” He repeated his calls on Europe to “step it up” and stop buying Russian oil.

    Trump has Oslo dreams

    Despite his struggles to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump has made clear that he wants to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, repeatedly making the spurious claim that he’s “ended seven wars” since he returned to office.

    “Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Prize — but for me, the real prize will be the sons and daughters who live to grow up because millions of people are no longer being killed in endless wars,” Trump offered.

    He again highlighted his administration’s efforts to end conflicts, including between Israel and Iran, India and Pakistan, Egypt and Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Congo, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and Cambodia and Thailand.

    “It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them,” Trump said. “Sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them.”

    Although Trump helped mediate relations among many of these nations, experts say his impact isn’t as clear cut as he claims.

    ___

    AP journalists Tracy Brown and Darlene Superville in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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  • 96,700 gallons of diesel fuel on Lowell’s Council agenda

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    LOWELL — Almost 168,000 gallons of diesel fuel will be stored at the Markley Group’s data center in Lowell’s Sacred Heart neighborhood if the company’s most recent application for fuel storage is approved by the City Council Tuesday night.

    The fuel powers the facility’s backup generators that provide emergency power to the state-of-the-art data-storage and cloud-computing company in the case of a grid failure.

    “As part of this phase of construction they [Markley] are proposing to install additional emergency generators, each with an aboveground diesel fuel belly tank,” Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. PE Senior Project Manager William Taber said in a letter dated Sept. 5. “This will increase the on-site diesel fuel storage from 71,100 gallons to 167,800 gallons.”

    The storage of greater than 10,000 gallons of combustibles in Massachusetts requires a license from the City Council, a permit to store combustibles from the Fire Department, and the fuel storage must also be registered with the City Clerk. All emergency generators have already gone through the appropriate Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection air quality permitting process before being presented to the council for consideration.

    Markley purchased the former Prince pasta plant parcel for $4 million in 2015 and embarked on a dramatic renovation of the foreclosed property that had been vacant since 1998.

    The company started its operations with four diesel generators, but as its mission-critical operations have expanded, the plant’s energy infrastructure has, too. Its systems power and provide routing to a wide variety of private companies, state and local governments, universities and internet companies.

    Drone footage shot by Lowell residents John McDonough and William Palermo show the scope of the work being done on the 14-acre site in what is zoned as light industrial.

    At its June 24 meeting, a majority of councilors approved Markley’s license for four diesel-powered generators holding 24,000 gallons of fuel, despite resident and community concerns around ongoing construction projects, equipment noise and air pollution.

    But several councilors stated approval of future fuel storage applications would be weighed against Markley meeting with the city’s Sustainability Director Katherine Moses to explore non-fossil fuel alternatives for backup power generation, as well as better communication with the neighbors living on its vast periphery.

    Moses presented a report to the Sustainability Council at its Aug. 28 meeting, where she said it was important for the city to have conversations with Markley to “make sure we’re all going in the same direction.”

    “I had an initial conversation with them,” Moses told the Sustainability Council members. “I felt a little better after that conversation. I think they do recognize that they can’t indefinitely bring diesel generators on site… .”

    The Sustainability Council’s function is to advocate for green design, construction and development practices in the city of Lowell that will increase sustainability and reduce the environmental impacts of building and other development activity.

    Moses told the Sustainability Council that the biggest emissions category in Lowell are buildings, “and it is split almost half and half between commercial industrial kinds of buildings and residential buildings.”

    Reducing carbon emissions has proved challenging as the city has also embarked on an economic development plan that embraces large-scale technology-driven companies like Draper Labs that relies on data centers like Markley to power its work. And UMass Lowell continues to build out its microelectronics program that also relies on Markley’s technology.

    Resident Mary Burns, who is chair of the UMass Building Authority, told the council in June that the university’s Lowell Innovation Network Corridor project depends on a data center presence in Lowell.

    “In order for LINC to happen, we need Markley,” she said. “They store the data that these companies looking at coming to our campus – it’s required. They can’t come here if we don’t have Markley.”

    That development is both in contrast to and aligned with the city’s selection as Frontrunner City by the Urban Economy Forum, an international organization that collaborates with the United Nations, municipal leaders, partners such as the World Urban Pavilion, and the private sector to reshape urban economies through the implementation of the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

    UMass Lowell Chancellor Julie Chen met the UEF delegation when they visited Lowell in July and addressed the group via a remote link during an August signing ceremony at the United Nations Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Academic partnerships are integral to UEF’s develoment goals in Lowell.

    Although the MassDEP greenlights Markley’s diesel generators based on compliance to its regulations, the city is working other angles to move toward a carbon-free emissions future.

    The City Council sent a letter to the state and federal delegation to encourage the availability of sustainable non-fossil fuel alternative to diesel for use in emergency backup power generation to help Lowell meet its climate goals.

    Moses said Markley has agreed to meet with her on a quarterly basis.

    “I also encouraged them to think about creating a plan to move away from all this onsite diesel storage and find other ways to provide the backup generation,” she said.

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    Melanie Gilbert

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  • Philippe Cousteau on climate change and the ocean

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    Philippe Cousteau, oceanographer, environmentalist and grandson of the French explorer Jacques Cousteau, joins CBS News to discuss climate change and its effect on the ocean.

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  • New Hampshire’s snowpack is shrinking. Researchers are still uncovering the scope of what it means.

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    Researcher Pamela Templer and her team removed snow from this study plot in Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest to simulate the increased freezing and thawing cycles created when snowpack recedes. Snowpack decline in the Northeast stresses trees and can reduce their ability to sequester carbon, Templer said. (Photo by Emerson Conrad-Rooney/Templer Lab)

    New England residents know that snow is disappearing from our landscape, and scientists have proven that climate change is to blame. But the effects of snowpack decline go far beyond what’s visible, and researchers working in the forests of New Hampshire and the Northeast are learning more about just how far the phenomenon stretches across seasons and landscapes. Their findings reveal how much tracking snow can tell us about the health of our forests and our world, and what is still to learn.

    The average amount of snow that accumulates on the ground throughout the winter season, or snowpack, is shrinking from year to year across the Northeast. While data has captured that effect (and linked it to human-caused climate change), many who live and recreate in the region have noticed it in their own lives — including the researchers who later took up the matter in their work.

    “I grew up cross-country skiing with my family,” said Emerson Conrad-Rooney, a doctoral student at Boston University whose work focuses on the effects of climate change on northern forests. Conrad-Rooney, who grew up in western Massachusetts, said the places they had grown up skiing through the winter were, in recent years, open only a handful of days all season long. “That’s been kind of separate from this research I’m doing, but just something that me and my family have seen … We’re, I think, definitely feeling that change,” they said.

    Eric Kelsey, a meteorologist and researcher at Plymouth State University, also grew up an enthusiastic winter recreator in Nashua. A love of snow and weather led Kelsey to learn more about the integral role of snowpack to the water cycle. But as he read more, Kelsey was struck by the relative lack of cohesive, long-term snowpack data, especially compared to other weather datasets tracking things like daily high and low temperatures and rainfall.

    “We just don’t have a climatology of snowpack — that was surprising to me,” Kelsey said.

    The problem, Kelsey said, was not necessarily a lack of data. For more than a century, people across the Northeast have logged information about snowfall, from dam operators attempting to predict how snowmelt would affect their rivers to farmers and ski slope proprietors.

    Appalachian Mountain Club employee Maddie Ziomek uses National Weather Service instruments to measure snowpack in the White Mountain National Forest. (Photo by Maddie Ziomek/Appalachian Mountain Club)

    Most tracked snow depth and snow water equivalent (the amount of water contained in that snow, a measure that fluctuates with snow density). Their observations, taken as a whole, are a rich collection of information about snowfall in New England, Kelsey said. But the records were also scattered and disparate, making it difficult for scientists to unlock the information they contained.

    Now, Kelsey and Plymouth State graduate student David Zywiczynski are halfway through a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant-funded effort to unify and clean that data, which includes measurements taken over yearslong periods from more than 400 sites. Then, they hope, scientists will be able to use it to make sense of long-term patterns in local snowpack, from general decline to years of snow drought — or abnormally low snowfall conditions.

    Because snowpack plays an important role in replenishing streams, lakes, and aquifers when it melts each spring, a tool to identify snow drought with more certainty could help forecasters anticipate the dry conditions that will likely persist later in the year, Kelsey said. The “snow drought index” Kelsey and Zywiczynski are working on to facilitate that may be the first tool of its kind in the nation.

    As historic data is put to work at Plymouth State, elsewhere in New Hampshire, scientists are tracking ongoing changes in forests as they unfold.

    Just beneath Mount Washington in Pinkham Notch, Appalachian Mountain Club Senior Scientist Georgia Murray oversees the collection of daily snowpack depth and snow water equivalent measurements. Data collected in the notch and above at the Mount Washington Observatory stretches back to the 1930s, Murray said, constituting one of the longer sets of continuous snowpack observations available in the region.

    Measurements from the two relatively close sites are often very different on the same day, highlighting how difficult it can be to assess snowpack, Murray said. Unlike rain, snow blows around once it falls, clearing off some areas completely and piling up in others. Having data from as many sites as possible is desirable for a more comprehensive understanding, Murray said, so she also works to encourage citizen scientists to measure and submit snowpack data across the region through a smartphone app.

    “It’s complex with snowpack, because you have, you know, nooks and crannies across the mountain, and so you have so many ways that snow is distributed differently. Having citizen science data fill in the gaps is something we really value in the mountain ecosystem, where we can’t be everywhere,” Murray said.

    Citizen science data also helps keep track of the downstream effects of snowpack decline, including its impact on plant life. Plants rely on natural cues to time their life cycles; when some cues, like the presence of snow, change while others, like day length, do not, they may be negatively impacted, Murray said.

    “In climate change, there can be these mismatches of synchronicity,” she said.

    Furthermore, as snow melts in spring, the water it releases carries nutrients through the soil, making them more available to the roots of hungry and thirsty young plants. But data shows that the timing of snow melt is changing, too, starting earlier and lasting for longer. Murray hopes citizen data will help shine a light on what that could mean for White Mountain plants, from delicate spring ephemeral wildflowers to alpine trees.

    “The snowmelt timing has a strong impact in the spring, and can have a ripple effect over the growing season,” she said.

    Understanding those and other ripple effects of snowpack decline is crucial to making informed predictions about what the future might bring for New England, researchers said.

    Pamela Templer, chair of the Biology department at Boston University and a researcher who has studied northern forests for more than two decades, established a set of three research plots at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, in the White Mountains, about 10 years ago. The goal of the study, entitled “Climate Change Across Seasons Experiment,” or CCASE, was to assess how seasonal changes play off each other in yearly cycles.

    Before that study, researchers had shown that in summer, temperate forests experienced some positive effects from growing seasons that were stretching longer, Templer said. Separate studies, including in Templer’s own work, had revealed the negative impacts on temperate forests from warming winters. But Templer wanted to assess those two phenomena together.

    “We didn’t know at that point what the net effect of those two changes in climate were on the forest,” Templer said.

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    To do so, Templer and her team — including Conrad-Rooney and “a village” of other researchers — simulated the freeze-thaw cycle, which can occur in the forest floor when it is not protected by an insulating layer of snow, by removing snow in some plots and heating the ground before allowing it to re-freeze. Precise measurements of the trees within the plot, taken over the 10 years the study has run so far, tracked the forest’s growth and the amount of carbon it was storing away over that period.

    The work is a demonstration of one of the many ways snowpack decline can add stress into an ecosystem, said Kelsey, who was not involved in the study.

    To a tree, damage from repeated freezing and thawing “is, you know, like getting a cut on your finger,” Kelsey said. “It hurts, it will take some resources from your body to heal it, that could be doing other things… And as we know, if there’s too many stressors on a tree, it will die. So this is just adding another stressor to the trees. That’s not good.”

    Ultimately, Templer, Conrad-Rooney, and researcher Andrew Reinmann concluded in a study published this July that the benefits to trees from longer growing seasons were outweighed by the damage those trees suffered from repeated freeze-thaw cycles in the winter. That finding, they said, reveals that previous models projecting forests’ role in helping sequester carbon may have overestimated their role in absorbing greenhouse gas.

    “If we think that forests are actually storing more carbon than is actually happening, then that means that, maybe, more carbon would be going into our atmosphere than we realize,” Conrad-Rooney said.

    This realization has implications for scientists’ ability to model ecosystem changes into the future. It could also inform land conservation decisions, Templer said.

    “We need an accurate accounting,” she said. “If we’re going to use forests as nature-based solutions to climate change in terms of sequestering carbon, then we need to know how much they’re sequestering.”

    Researchers expect that as they continue to examine historic and current snowpack data, more effects and ripples of snowpack decline will emerge.

    From its role in keeping lakes cool through the summer to protecting the landscape from wildfire, snow impacts the water cycle all year long, Kelsey said. And – as is evident both in the origin of the field’s data and its implications – the study of snow brings together many interests, including those of industry, agriculture, tourism, homeowners with wells, and more.

    “It touches our lives in so many ways,” Murray said. “… We hope that people see the science that we’re doing, so that they can understand what’s happening, and how it links to their lives and the outdoors.”

    This story was originally published by New Hampshire Bulletin. Like Maine Morning Star, New Hampshire Bulletin is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com.

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  • Thousands protest on NYC streets ahead of climate week

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    Thousands of climate activists marched through Manhattan streets today as part of a coordinated global wave of protests demanding urgent environmental change.

    The demonstration took place on the eve of Climate Week NYC, the world’s largest climate event, which runs September 21-28 across all five boroughs of New York City.

    Why It Matters

    The timing of these protests underscores growing tensions between grassroots climate activism and institutional climate discussions.

    As world leaders, business executives, and policy makers prepare to gather for Climate Week NYC’s official programming, activists are demanding more aggressive action from those with the greatest economic and political power.

    Climate Week NYC bills itself as a platform for “inspiring heads of government, ministers and climate envoys, and some of the most prominent leaders from the world of business, tech, academia, and civil society.”

    Protestors march through Manhattan up to Central Park at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis
    NYC Climate protests
    People march through Manhattan in the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

    What To Know

    Protesters specifically targeted Billionaires’ Row and Trump Tower, chanting “Make Billionaires Pay” while connecting climate justice to broader social and political issues. The march linked environmental concerns with calls for democracy, gender equality, free speech, immigration reform, and a ceasefire in Gaza.

    Climate Week NYC features hundreds of events across New York’s five boroughs, from policy gatherings and climate fintech discussions to community-led initiatives and art installations. Most official events are free and designed to be accessible to all participants.

    The week addresses what organizers call “the biggest challenges of our time,” focusing on competitive strategies in a changing world, cost reduction, barrier removal, and clean technology investments.

    However, protesters argue that current approaches remain insufficient given the urgency of the climate crisis.

    NYC climate protest
    People carry a “Climate Polluters Bill” the length of an Olympic swimming pool (50 meters long) through Manhattan at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis
    NYC climate protest
    A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty marches through Manhattan in the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

    What People Are Saying

    Climate Week NYC Organizers: “The need for immediate climate progress grows every year, every month, every day. There has never been a more important time than right now.”

    NYC climate protest
    Protestors sit for a moment of silence for the Global South at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis
    NYC climate protest
    An art piece of Jeff Bezos with bloody hands carrying the globe is marched through Manhattan at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

    What Happens Next?

    Climate Week NYC continues through September 28, with events scheduled across Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Staten Island.

    The week’s programming includes both high-level policy discussions and community-focused initiatives.

    NYC climate protest
    People march through Manhattan at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025, in New York.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis
    NYC climate protest
    An effigy representing Elon Musk with a bloody hand holding a globe is marched through Manhattan at the “Make Billionaires Pay” climate protest in New York, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2025.

    AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

    Reporting from the Associated Press contributed to this article.

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