WASHINGTON — The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene has brought climate change to the forefront of the presidential campaign after the issue lingered on the margins for months.
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Georgia Wednesday to see hard-hit areas, two days after her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, was in the state and criticized the federal response to the storm, which has killed at least 180 people. Thousands of people in the Carolinas still lack running water, cellphone service and electricity.
President Joe Biden toured some of the hardest-hit areas by helicopter on Wednesday. Biden, who has frequently been called on to survey damage and console victims after tornadoes, wildfires, tropical storms and other natural disasters, traveled to the Carolinas to get a closer look at the hurricane devastation. He is expected to visit Georgia and Florida later this week.
“Storms are getting stronger and stronger,” Biden said after surveying damage near Asheville, North Carolina. At least 70 people died in the state.
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis any more,” Biden said at a briefing in Raleigh, the state capital. “They must be brain dead if they do.”
Harris, meanwhile, hugged and huddled with a family in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia.
“There is real pain and trauma that resulted because of this hurricane” and its aftermath, Harris said outside a storm-damaged house with downed trees in the yard.
“We are here for the long haul,” she added.
The focus on the storm — and its link to climate change — was notable after climate change was only lightly mentioned in two presidential debates this year. The candidates instead focused on abortion rights, the economy, immigration and other issues.
The hurricane featured prominently in Tuesday’s vice presidential debate as Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz were asked about the storm and the larger issue of climate change.
Both men called the hurricane a tragedy and agreed on the need for a strong federal response. But it was Walz, the governor of Minnesota, who put the storm in the context of a warming climate.
“There’s no doubt this thing roared onto the scene faster and stronger than anything we’ve seen,” he said.
Bob Henson, a meteorologist and writer with Yale Climate Connections, said it was no surprise that Helene is pushing both the federal disaster response and human-caused climate change into the campaign conversation.
“Weather disasters are often overlooked as a factor in big elections,” he said. “Helene is a sprawling catastrophe, affecting millions of Americans. And it dovetails with several well-established links between hurricanes and climate change, including rapid intensification and intensified downpours.”
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast in the last week, an amount that if concentrated in North Carolina would cover the state in 3 1/2 feet of water. “That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
During Tuesday’s debate, Walz credited Vance for past statements acknowledging that climate change is a problem. But he noted that Trump has called climate change “a hoax” and joked that rising seas “would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in.″
Trump said in a speech Tuesday that “the planet has actually gotten little bit cooler recently,” adding: “Climate change covers everything.”
In fact, summer 2024 sweltered to Earth’s hottest on record, making it likely this year will end up as the warmest humanity has measured, according to the European climate service Copernicus. Global records were shattered just last year as human-caused climate change, with a temporary boost from an El Niño, keeps dialing up temperatures and extreme weather, scientists said.
Vance, an Ohio senator, said he and Trump support clean air, clean water and “want the environment to be cleaner and safer.” However, during Trump’s four years in office, he took a series of actions to roll back more than 100 environmental regulations.
Vance sidestepped a question about whether he agrees with Trump’s statement that climate change is a hoax. “What the president has said is that if the Democrats — in particular Kamala Harris and her leadership — really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America. And that’s not what they’re doing,” he said.
“This idea that carbon (dioxide) emissions drives all of the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true just for the sake of argument. So we’re not arguing about weird science. If you believe that, what would you want to do?” Vance asked.
The answer, he said, is to “produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”
Vance claimed that policies by Biden and Harris actually help China, because many solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and other materials used in renewable energy and electric vehicles are made in China and imported to the United States.
Walz rebutted that claim, noting that the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ signature climate law approved in 2022, includes the largest-ever investment in domestic clean energy production. The law, for which Harris cast the deciding vote, has created 200,000 jobs across the country, including in Ohio and Minnesota, Walz said. Vance was not in the Senate when the law was approved.
“We are producing more natural gas and more oil (in the United States) than we ever have,” Walz said. “We’re also producing more clean energy.”
The comment echoed a remark by Harris in last month’s presidential debate. The Biden-Harris administration has overseen “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil,” Harris said then.
While Biden rarely mentions it, domestic fossil fuel production under his administration is at an all-time high. Crude oil production averaged 12.9 million barrels a day last year, eclipsing a previous record set in 2019 under Trump, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Democrats want to continue investments in renewable energy such as wind and solar power — and not just because supporters of the Green New Deal want that, Walz said.
“My farmers know climate change is real. They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods back to back. But what they’re doing is adapting,” he said.
“The solution for us is to continue to move forward, (accept) that climate change is real” and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, Walz said, adding that the administration is doing exactly that.
“We are seeing us becoming an energy superpower for the future, not just the current” time, he said.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Christopher Megerian in Augusta, Georgia, contributed to this report.
In comparison, North Carolina’s insurance market looks pretty good. No insurers have exited the state since 2008, while homeowners pay an average of $2,100 per year—high, but avoiding the sky-high rates of states like Florida, California, and Texas.
“What traditionally has happened is that there’s a rate increase every few years of 8 to 9 percent for homeowner’s insurance,” says Hornstein. “That has kept the market stable, especially when it comes to the coast.”
But as natural disasters of all kinds mount, it’s tough to see a way forward for insurance business as usual. The NFIP is undergoing a series of changes to update the way it calculates rates for flood insurance—but it faces political minefields in potentially expanding the number of homeowners mandated to buy policies. What’s more, many homeowners are seeing the prices for their flood insurance rise as the NFIP adjusts its rates for existing floodplains using new climate models.
Many experts agree that the private market needs to reflect in some way the true cost of living in a disaster-prone area: in other words, it should be more expensive for people to move to a city where it’s more likely your house will be wiped off the map by a storm. The cost of climate change does not seem to be a deterrent in Florida, one of the fastest-growing states in the country, where coastal regions like Panama City, Jacksonville, and Port St. Lucie are booming. (Some research suggests that the mere existence of the NFIP shielded policyholders from the true costs of living in flood-prone areas.)
Asheville, at the heart of Buncombe County, was once hailed as a climate haven safe from disasters; the city is now reeling in the wake of Helene. For many homeowners, small business owners, and renters in western North Carolina, the damage from Helene will be life-changing. FEMA payouts may bring, at best, only a fraction of what a home would be worth. Auto insurance generally covers all types of damage, including flooding—a small bright spot of relief, but not enough to offset the loss of a family’s main asset.
“People at the coast, at some point after the nth storm, they start to get the message,” Hornstein says. “But for people in the western part of the state, this is just Armageddon. And you can certainly forgive them for not having before appreciated the fine points of these impenetrable contracts.”
Marlett says that there are models for insurance that are designed to better withstand the challenges of climate change. New Zealand, for instance, offers policies that cover all types of damage that could happen to your house; while these policies are increasingly tailored price-wise to different types of risk, there’s no chance a homeowner would experience a climate disaster not covered by their existing policies. But it’s hard, he says, to see the US system getting the wholesale overhaul it needs, given how long the piecemeal system has been in place.
“I sound so pessimistic,” he said. “I’m normally an optimistic person.”
Updated 10-2-2024 10:00 pm BST: The date of Hurricane Ivan was corrected from 2024 to 2004.
On Monday, the UK saw the closure of its last operational coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been operating since 1968. The closure of the plant, which had a capacity of 2,000 megawatts, brought to an end to the history of the country’s coal use, which started with the opening of the first coal-fired power station in 1882. Coal played a central part in the UK’s power system in the interim, in some years providing over 90 percent of its total electricity.
But a number of factors combined to place coal in a long-term decline: the growth of natural-gas-powered plants and renewables, pollution controls, carbon pricing, and a government goal to hit net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
From Boom to Bust
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of coal to the UK grid. It was providing over 90 percent of the UK’s electricity as recently as 1956. The total amount of power generated continued to climb well after that, reaching a peak of 212 terawatt hours of production by 1980. And the construction of new coal plants was under consideration as recently as the late 2000s. According to the organization Carbon Brief’s excellent timeline of coal use in the UK, continuing the use of coal with carbon capture was given consideration.
But several factors slowed the use of fuel ahead of any climate goals set out by the UK, some of which have parallels to the situation in the US. The European Union, which included the UK at the time, instituted new rules to address acid rain, which raised the cost of coal plants. In addition, the exploitation of oil and gas deposits in the North Sea provided access to an alternative fuel. Meanwhile, major gains in efficiency and the shift of some heavy industry overseas cut demand in the UK significantly.
Through their effect on coal use, these changes also lowered employment in coal mining. The mining sector has sometimes been a significant force in UK politics, but the decline of coal reduced the number of people employed in the sector, reducing its political influence.
These had all reduced the use of coal even before governments started taking any aggressive steps to limit climate change. But, by 2005, the EU implemented a carbon trading system that put a cost on emissions. By 2008, the UK government adopted national emissions targets, which have been maintained and strengthened since then by both Labour and Conservative governments up until Rishi Sunak, who was voted out of office before he had altered the UK’s trajectory. What started as a pledge for a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 now requires the UK to hit net zero by that date.
These have included a floor on the price of carbon that ensures fossil-powered plants pay a cost for emissions that’s significant enough to promote the transition to renewables, even if prices in the EU’s carbon trading scheme are too low for that. And that transition has been rapid, with the total generations by renewables nearly tripling in the decade since 2013, heavily aided by the growth of offshore wind.
How to Clean Up the Power Sector
The trends were significant enough that, in 2015, the UK announced that it would target the end of coal in 2025, despite the fact that the first coal-free day on the grid wouldn’t come until two years after. But two years after that landmark, however, the UK was seeing entire weeks where no coal-fired plants were active.
To limit the worst impacts of climate change, it will be critical for other countries to follow the UK’s lead. So it’s worthwhile to consider how a country that was committed to coal relatively recently could manage such a rapid transition. There are a few UK-specific factors that won’t be possible to replicate everywhere. The first is that most of its coal infrastructure was quite old—Ratcliffe-on-Soar dates from the 1960s—and so it required replacement in any case. Part of the reason for its aging coal fleet was the local availability of relatively cheap natural gas, something that might not be true elsewhere, which put economic pressure on coal generation.
Section of Castries, Saint Lucia. Through ambitious NDCs, SIDS like Saint Lucia are hoping to shore up resilience and protect their economies and infrastructure. Access to adequate climate financing remains crucial to these efforts. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS
by Alison Kentish (saint lucia)
Inter Press Service
Buoyed by the collaboration and agenda established in their SIDS4 conference in May, small island developing states are preparing for COP29 with a focus on climate finance and collaboration. IPS spoke with an official from Saint Lucia about that nation’s climate action, preparation for COP29 and the importance of a united SIDS’ voice in negotiations.
SAINT LUCIA, Oct 01 (IPS) – Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change. When leaders of those islands met in Antigua and Barbuda in May, they let the world know that achieving climate justice hinges on comprehensive climate finance.
As they prepare for the 2024 United Nations climate change conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, Saint Lucia is prioritizing this issue, strengthening alliances with other SIDS, and seeking critical funding for adaptation and mitigation projects. With the recent enactment of its Climate Change Act of 2024, the island nation recognizes that securing climate finance is vital for safeguarding its future.
“This year’s COP has been dubbed the ‘Finance COP’,” Maya Sifflet, a Sustainable Development and Environment Officer for Saint Lucia told IPS. “The focus is to get the finance we need to mobilize and implement the ambitious climate action we’ve committed to.”
Saint Lucia, like many other SIDS, faces significant challenges in adapting to the impacts of climate change. Rising sea levels, more intense storms and shifting weather patterns are already threatening its economy and infrastructure. Sifflet explained that Saint Lucia has developed a comprehensive National Adaptation Plan (NAP), which integrates climate action into national development strategies. However, without adequate funding, even the most well-crafted plans risk falling short.
“Every year, countries submit their nationally determined contributions (NDCs), outlining the climate action they’re taking. We are encouraged to make them as ambitious as possible, stating what climate action we are taking. Our NDCs now capture not only our mitigation efforts, but our adaptation efforts as well,” Sifflet said.
Finance is crucial to those plans.
“We need to ensure our sectors are more resilient—agriculture, tourism, fisheries. Each sector was encouraged to assess its risk, assess vulnerabilities and explore what actions can be taken to build resilience. We have therefore developed several sectoral adaptation strategies and action plans.”
Saint Lucia has also developed a set of bankable project concepts, which aim to make the nation “finance-ready” when global funds become available. These initiatives are part of a broader effort to position the country to receive climate funding, whether through bilateral agreements or international mechanisms.
Sifflet emphasized that collective action through umbrella groups like the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is crucial to Saint Lucia’s success at COP29. “We negotiate in blocs. Our strength is in numbers,” she said. “Through AOSIS, we exchange knowledge, share experiences, and amplify each other’s voices in the negotiations. It’s a big arena, it’s very contentious and you need that collective presence to have power.”
One of the key areas Saint Lucia and AOSIS members will focus on during COP29 is the operationalization of the Loss and Damage Fund, which was a breakthrough agreement during COP27. The fund is designed to provide financial assistance to vulnerable countries for losses and damages resulting from climate change impacts that cannot be mitigated or adapted to.
“Operationalizing the Loss and Damage Fund would be a major success at COP29,” Sifflet noted. “It’s something SIDS have lobbied for over many years. This fund signifies that the global community is ready to put money where their mouth is.”
Saint Lucia, in anticipation of the fund’s formalization, has already conducted a Loss and Damage Needs-Based Assessment to ensure it is prepared to access financing once it becomes available.
“As vulnerable countries, we bear the brunt of climate change, often being forced to hit the reset button after every extreme weather event,” Sifflet added. “And it’s not just about economic losses—our cultural assets, things that can’t be quantified, are at risk. There is so much at stake for us as small islands,” she told IPS.
Sifflet concluded that while Saint Lucia’s preparation for COP29 has been extensive, the real measure of success will be securing the finance and global commitments needed to ensure the survival and prosperity of small islands in the face of climate change.
This week, the COP29 Presidency unveiled a group of programmes to propel global climate action. In a letter to all parties, President-Designate Mukhtar Babayev said it include the Baku Initiative on Climate Finance, Investment and Trade, noting that “climate finance, as a critical enabler of climate action, is a centrepiece of the COP29 Presidency’s vision.”
This year’s COP is expected to be a competitive negotiations stage for global climate change funding. Small island developing states will be looking to the large economies and major emitters of greenhouse gases to give the financial support needed for adaptation and mitigation measures to cope with a crisis that they did little to create. The stakes for Saint Lucia, and other SIDS, are high.
Until she was 9 years old, Aisha O’Neil grew up in Zion National Park, where her father was a ranger. “That place raised me just as much as my family,” she said. Her love of the park’s sandstone cliffs and caverns became the bedrock of her passion for the environment, and for securing a future where her own children could enjoy the same experiences that she did.
But O’Neil never learned much about climate change in school. What she did learn came from the news, and it was “dramatically horrifying,” she said. “I started seeing articles every day — this city’s on fire, these people were evacuated.”
As a senior in high school last year, in rural Durango, Colorado, O’Neil started a statewide climate action group called Good Trouble. She and fellow students campaigned for state legislation to create a “seal of climate literacy” that high school graduates across Colorado could earn.
Thanks in part to their lobbying, the bill passed with bipartisan support, and O’Neil became part of the first group of students to earn the seal on her diploma this spring. “An education without referencing climate change is not complete,” she said. “You can’t say you’re educating kids about our future without telling them what that future will look like.”
But just what is “climate literacy”? What are the ABCs, the grammar and vocabulary, of climate change?
The U.N. and other leading global organizations have identified education at all levels and across disciplines as a key strategy for fighting the climate crisis. The world is going through a historically rapid transition to clean energy and sustainable infrastructure, and the workforce is thirsty for people with the skills to do the necessary climate mitigation and adaptation work. Communities also need empowered citizens to push back against fossil fuel interests. But as of now, few states have comprehensive climate education, and most of the lessons that exist are confined to science classes — lacking in areas like justice and solutions.
Colorado’s seal of climate literacy, which high school graduates can earn through a combination of coursework and out of school projects, is one attempt to build support for more comprehensive climate education. Another attempt was on display in late September. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, with input from agencies including the State Department, NASA and the Department of Transportation, released a document called “Climate Literacy: Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change.”
The definition of climate literacy its authors arrived at, after 21 months of work, includes eight essential principles that I’m summarizing here:
1. How we know: climate science, interdisciplinary observations and modeling
During Climate Week NYC, dozens of educators crowded into a basement room beneath the grand marble Museum of the American Indian, in downtown Manhattan, to hear about the new guide. Standing at the front of the room was Frank Niepold, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He has been engaged in climate education within the federal government for 30 years, and he’s been as involved as anyone in helping this effort see the light of day. “This is a guide for educators, communicators and decision makers,” he said. “We’re not just talking to classroom teachers.”
This guide is technically a third edition. The first one appeared in 2008, during the George W. Bush administration; it was rapidly updated in 2009 when President Barack Obama took office. Then came the Trump administration, and, in Niepold’s words, the thinking was, “Don’t try to do this really complicated thing at that time.” Efforts restarted after Joe Biden was elected president, many new staffers who came in as part of the Inflation Reduction Act provided input to the new guide— and now here we are.
Niepold said that since the 2000s, there’s been a lot of evolution in our collective understanding of both the problem and the solutions. “Before, the document was called ‘essential principles of climate science literacy,’” he said. “We knew that was too narrow. We wanted something that gets you into an action, not just an understanding orientation.”
Still, earlier editions of the document were influential: They informed the Next Generation Science Standards, some version of which is now in use in 48 states. The previous guide was also incorporated into K-12 and college curricula and into museum and park exhibits.
With the new edition, Niepold hopes to see even more impact. The guide is unusually clear and accessible for a government report. The pages are laid out like a textbook, featuring artwork that depicts some of the core themes of climate literacy — as defined in the report – like climate justice and traditional and Indigenous knowledges (the plural s is intentional).
“Success means it would activate all forms of education, all stages, across all disciplines,” and outside the United States as well as within it, Niepold said. He wants to see more prominent NGOs taking on climate education as part of their purview — such as Planet Ed at the Aspen Institute, where, disclosure, I’m an advisor.
Niepold would like to see community-based climate efforts take public communication and workforce development seriously, and to see media coverage promote a fuller picture of climate literacy as well. “Success is: People, regardless of where they’re coming from, understand [climate change] and address it.”
His concern is similar to that of Aisha O’Neil in Colorado: that young people are currently learning about climate change primarily through the media, in a way that’s not solution-oriented, emotionally supportive, or trauma-informed. “That opportunity to be blindsided is high,” Niepold said. That’s why the guideline’s eighth principle unites urgency with hope. Said O’Neil:
“Being taught about issues in a way that emphasizes solutions is telling our youth that they can be part of progress and that the world isn’t doomed.”
Upgrading lessons to meet the moment is taking time. Even in New Jersey, known as a national leader for its comprehensive state-level climate education standards, teachers have shared concern about a lack of resources for implementation and training. Mary Seawell, whose organization Lyra campaigned for the climate literacy seal in Colorado, said her group wanted to take a grassroots, student-led approach. “We want to show demand. What the seal really is doing is creating an opportunity for youth to direct their own learning.”
In order to earn the seal of climate literacy, Colorado students have to take at least one science class in high school — which currently is not a general graduation requirement — and at least one other class that satisfies principles of climate literacy. They also have to engage in some kind of out-of-school learning or action. “This is opt-in,” said Colorado state Sen. Chris Hansen, who co-sponsored the legislation. “The state can’t tell districts what classes to offer. This is for districts that want to have something that is easily recognizable across the state and beyond.”
O’Neil, now a freshman at University of Colorado Boulder, said it’s a good start. Her student group at the college is campaigning for new state curriculum standards. “This is the only logical next move. “ she said. Although the climate seal of literacy encourages climate learning, “we need everyone to be educated, not just the ones who go out of their way.”
O’Neil thinks students could especially use tutelage on taking climate action, something she has had to figure out on her own, with some mentorship from her debate coach and from a state legislator. Planet Ed, for one, has just released a Youth Climate Action Guide with the Nature Conservancy that engages many areas of climate literacy, from mitigation to adaptation to justice.
“I feel like in an ideal world we would learn how climate impacts every element of our lives,” O’Neil said. “Not just the science, but social justice. Policy positions that have created it, and policies that can get us out. My goal right now would be to have students get to a place where they feel like they aren’t terrified by the climate crisis, but empowered by it.”
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.
LIGNORELLES, France — On a brisk late September morning in the heart of Chablis wine country, grape pickers haul large and heavy buckets over their shoulders, drenched in sweat as they climb the very steep slope of the Vau de Vey vineyard.
It’s the final day of the harvest at the Domaine Roland Lavantureux winery, and workers are handpicking the last of the prized Chardonnay grapes that will eventually be transformed into the bright and high-end Premier Cru that is bottled by the estate.
But wine lovers around the world may struggle to get their hands on the 2024 “millesime” — wine that comes from a single year’s harvest. It will be available in smaller quantities than usual.
Much of France’s wine country faced one of the wettest years on record in 2024 so far amid a changing climate, after years of challenges to vineyards and wine quality caused by drought and heat. At the Lavantureux estate, the picking lasted just nine days — about half the usual time — after a year of unpredictably harsh weather marked by frost, hail, record rainfall and the spread of a dangerous fungus that has left Chablis growers on edge.
“I have been working here since 2010. This is my most difficult year,” says winemaker David Lavantureux, who follows in the footsteps of his father Roland, a winemaker himself. “And all the old-timers will tell you the same thing. It’s been a very difficult year because the weather has been so unpredictable. We have not been spared a single thing.”
The ordeal began in April with the frost. Then in May, a double hailstorm pummeled the region. Then came relentless rain, right up to the harvest. According to the Burgundy wine federation, some 1,000 hectares (nearly 2,500 acres) of vines in the Chablis country were affected by the May storm. And the excess moisture allowed a destructive mildew fungus to thrive.
Once entrenched, the disease causes huge crop losses and can also affect wine quality. Together with his brother Arnaud, David fought hard to try and control mildew with various treatments, which were washed away by the rain and didn’t prove effective.
“On our estate, we’re looking at losses of 60 to 65%,” David Lavantureux said. “It’s going to be a low-yield year.”
The weather impact wasn’t confined to the Lavantureux estate. Wet conditions across France have wreaked havoc on many wine-growing regions this year. Mildew, combined with episodes of frost and hail, have reduced overall production. The French ministry of agriculture estimates that it will amount to 39.3 million hectoliters, below both 2023 levels (-18%) and the average for the past five years (-11%).
“It’s been a very tough year, both physically and mentally,” Arnaud says. “We’re relieved the harvest is over. I’m exhausted.”
The challenges of this year will inevitably influence the wines produced at the family winery, resulting in a 2024 vintage with distinct characteristics.
“Balances are not at all the same,” adds Arnaud. “There’s more acidity. Maturity is less optimal. But the goal is to craft the wine so that, in the end, the balance is as perfect as possible.”
Located in the northern part of the Bourgogne region, the vineyards of Chablis have traditionally benefited from a favorable climate — cold winters, hot summers and annual rainfall between 650-700 millimeters (25-27 inches).
But climate change is altering those conditions, bringing unseasonably mild weather, more abundant rainfall, and recurrent spring frosts that were less common in the past.
The frost damage is particularly frustrating. A similar phenomenon hit French vineyards in recent years, leading to big financial losses. And scientists believe the damaging 2021 frost was made more likely by climate change.
“There was a period when we thought that with global warming setting in, Chablis would be safe from frost,” David Lavantureux says. “And finally, over the last 15 years, it’s come back even stronger.”
To adapt, winemakers have been adopting creative solutions. Cutting the wines later helps delay bud burst and reduce the vulnerability to late frost, while keeping a larger foliage above the fruit shields the grapes from the scorching sun in hot summers.
During frost threats, many growers use expensive methods such as lighting candles in the vineyards. They also install electric lines to warm the vines, or spray water on the buds to create a thin ice layer that ensures the blossom’s temperature remains around freezing point but doesn’t dip much lower.
Throughout the Burgundy region, anti-hail devices have also been deployed in a bid to lessen the intensity of hailstorms.
“It helps reduce risk, but it’s never 100% protection,” David Lavantureux says. “We saw that again this year with several hailstorms, two of which were particularly severe.”
Fortunately for the Lavantureux family, two very good years in 2022 and 2023 should help mitigate the financial losses induced by the reduced 2024 harvest as international demand for Chablis remains solid, especially in the United States.
In June, the Burgundy wine association said that Chablis wine exports to the U.S. reached 3 million bottles, generating 368 million euros ($410 million), a 19% increase compared to the previous year.
“We’ve put this harvest behind us,” says Arnaud Lavantureux “Now it’s time to think on the next one.”
MERTARVIK, Alaska (AP) — Growing up along the banks of the Ninglick River in western Alaska, Ashley Tom would look out of her window after strong storms from the Bering Sea hit her village and notice something unsettling: the riverbank was creeping ever closer.
It was in that home, in the village of Newtok, where Tom’s great-grandmother had taught her to sew and crochet on the sofa, skills she used at school when students crafted headdresses, mittens and baby booties using seal or otter fur. It’s also where her grandmother taught her the intricate art of grass basket weaving and how to speak the Yupik language.
An abandoned home is locked up in Newtok, Alaska on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Permafrost melts on the coast in Newtok, Alaska on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Today, erosion and melting permafrost have just about destroyed Newtok, eating about 70 feet (21.34 meters) of land every year. All that’s left are some dilapidated and largely abandoned gray homes scraped bare of paint by salt darting in on the winds of storms.
“Living with my great-grandmother was all I could remember from Newtok, and it was one of the first houses to be demolished,” said Tom.
Ashley Tom tends to her plants at her home in Mertarvik, Alaska, Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
In the next few weeks, the last 71 residents will load their possessions onto boats to move to Mertarvik, rejoining 230 residents who began moving away in 2019. They will become one of the first Alaska Native villages to complete a large-scale relocation because of climate change.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a series on how tribes and Indigenous communities are coping with and combating climate change.
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Newtok village leaders began searching for a new townsite more than two decades ago, ultimately swapping land with the federal government for a place 9 miles (14.48 kilometers) away on the stable volcanic underpinnings of Nelson Island in the Bering Strait.
But the move has been slow, leaving Newtok a split village. Even after most residents shifted to Mertarvik, the grocery store and school remained in Newtok, leaving some teachers and students separated from their families for the school year.
Power poles lean in the village of Newtok, Alaska on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
A resident drives along a flooded boardwalk on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024, in Newtok, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
A young man drives an ATV on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Homes of people who relocated from Newtok, Alaska are visible in Mertarvik, Alaska on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator and Ashley’s uncle, called Newtok “not a place to live anymore.” Erosion has tilted power poles precariously, and a single good storm this fall will knock out power for good, he said.
For now, the rush is on to get 18 temporary homes that arrived in Mertarvik on a barge set up before winter sets in.
Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator, stands along the eroded coastline in Newtok, Alaska on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
It’s the same story across the Arctic, with permafrost degradation damaging roads, railroad tracks, pipes and buildings for 4 million people across the top of the world, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Arctic Institute. In the Russian Arctic, Indigenous people are being moved to cities instead of having their eroding villages relocated and across Scandinavia, reindeer herders are finding the land constantly shifting and new bodies of water appearing, the institute said.
About 85% of Alaska’s land area lies atop permafrost, so named because it’s supposed to be permanently frozen ground. It holds a lot of water, and when it thaws or when warmer coastal water hits it, its melting causes further erosion. Another issue with warming: less sea ice to act as natural barriers that protect coastal communities from the dangerous waves of ocean storms.
Calvin Tom, left, the tribal administrator, lifts his son Brady Tom into his boat in Mertarvik, Alaska on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
The Yupik have a word for the catastrophic threats of erosion, flooding and thawing permafrost: “usteq,” which means “surface caves in.” The changes are usually slow — until all of a sudden they aren’t, as when a riverbank sloughs off or a huge hole opens up, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
There are 144 Alaska Native communities that face some degree of infrastructure damage from erosion, flooding or permafrost melt, according to a report in January from the the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. Six of them — Kivalina, Koyukuk, Newtok, Shaktoolik, Shishmaref and Unalakleet — were deemed imminently threatened in a Government Accountability Office report more than two decades ago.
Communities have three options based on the severity of their situations: Securing protection to stay where they are; staging a managed retreat, moving back from erosion threats; or a complete relocation.
Water and patches of green are visible near Mertarvik, Alaska Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Moving is hard, starting with finding a place to go. Communities typically need to swap with the federal government, which owns about 60% of Alaska’s land. But Congress has to approve swaps, and that’s only after negotiations that can drag on: Newtok, for example, began pursuing the Nelson Island land in 1996 and didn’t wrap up until late 2003.
“That’s way too long,” said Jackie Qatalina Schaeffer, the director of climate initiatives at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
“If we look back a decade at what’s happened as far as climate change in Alaska, we’re out of time,” she said. “We need to find a better way to help communities secure land for relocation.”
Kivalina last year completed a master plan for relocation and is negotiating with an Alaska Native regional corporation for the land, a process that could take 3 to 5 years, Schaeffer said.
A girl plays with a dog on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, in Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Children play along the tundra on Friday, Aug. 16, 2024, in Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Another big hurdle is cost. Newtok has spent decades and about $160 million in today’s dollars on its move. Estimates to relocate Kivalina vary from $100 million to $400 million and rising, and there’s currently no federal funding for relocation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has disaster funding and programs, Schaeffer said, but that comes only after a disaster declaration.
In 2018, a resource for Alaska communities identified 60 federal funding sources for relocation, but according to the Unmet Needs report, only a few have been successfully used to address environmental threats. But an infusion of funding into these existing programs by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act could provide benefits to threatened Alaska communities, the report said.
About $4.3 billion in 2020 dollars will be needed to mitigate infrastructure damage over the next 50 years, the health consortium report says. It called for Congress to close an $80 million annual gap by providing a single committed source to assist communities.
Bosco and Jennifer Carl say grace with their children before a meal at their home on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024, in Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Marie Carl, 75, sits at the kitchen table at her home on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024, in Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
“Alaska Native economic, social, and cultural ways of being, which have served so well for millennia, are now under extreme threat due to accelerated environmental change,” the report said. “In jeopardy are not just buildings, but the sustainability of entire communities and cultures.”
After five years of separation and split lives, the residents of Newtok and Mertarvik will be one again. The school in Newtok closed and classes started in August for the first time in a temporary location in Mertarvik. A new school building should be ready in 2026. The Newtok grocery recently moved to Mertarvik, and there’s plans for a second grocery and a church, Calvin Tom said.
The new village site has huge benefits, including better health, Tom said. For now, most of the people of Mertarvik are still using a “honey bucket” system rather than toilets. But that method of manually dumping plastic buckets of waste should be replaced by piped water and sewer within the next few years. The new homes in Mertarvik are also free of black mold that crept into some Newtok homes on moisture brought by the remnants of Typhoon Merbok two years ago.
Girlie Carl, 4, plays with her grandmother Marie Carl, 75, on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024, Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
A young girl prepares to participate in an Indigenous drum and dance on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024, Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Marie Carl, 75, performs during an Indigenous drum and dance in Mertarvik, Alaska on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Tom said there’s talk of someday renaming the relocated town Newtok. Whatever the name, the relocation offers assurance that culture and traditions from the old place will continue. An Indigenous drum and dance group is practicing at the temporary school, and subsistence hunting opportunities — moose, musk ox, black bear, brown bear — abound.
A pod of belugas that comes by every fall should arrive soon, and that hunt will help residents fill their freezers for the harsh winter ahead.
Jennifer sits with her daughter Girlie, 4, at their home on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024, in Mertarvik, Alaska. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
Ashley Tom is excited by the arrival of the last Newtok residents in Mertarvik. Although their home will be different than what they’ve known for most of their lives, she’s confident they will come to appreciate it as she has.
“I really love this this new area, and I just feel whole here,” she said.
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Thiessen reported from Anchorage.
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This story was first published on Sep. 26, 2024. It was updated on Sep. 28, 2024 to correct the number of villages facing infrastructure damage from erosion, 144 not 114. It also corrects the name of the organization that authored the Unmet Needs report, and where Jackie Qatalina Schaeffer works as the director of climate initiatives. It is the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, not the Alaska Native Travel Health Consortium.
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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
BOSTON — The state is distributing nearly $28 million to communities and regional organizations to upgrade parks and preserve open space as part of broader efforts to blunt the impact of climate change.
The state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs said it has awarded $27.8 million for park improvements and open space acquisition through several grant programs to help 54 communities and trusts to protect land. The spending will help preserve nearly 2,400 acres of open space statewide, the agency said.
Gov. Maura Healey said the open space program’s projects will “boost public health, drive tourism, and strengthen our economy” and that the spending is part of a large effort “creating sustainable communities and safeguarding our natural resources for future generations.”
“Investing in parks and open space is critical for our state’s resilience against climate change, tackling issues like urban heat islands, flooding, sea level rise, and drought,” Healey said in a statement.
The funding includes $500,000 for Lawrence to cover upgrades to Campagnone Common, a 17.5-acre park in the city’s downtown that hosts festivals and other gatherings.
“By enhancing public spaces for recreation and community, we’re not only fostering a healthier, more vibrant Lawrence but also contributing to our city’s economic vitality as more people come to enjoy everything Lawrence has to offer,” state Sen. Pavel Payano, D-Lawrence, said in a statement.
Salem is receiving $500,000 from the Parkland Acquisitions and Renovations for Communities program for renovations at Curtis Memorial Park that will upgrade structures and a playing field, the agency said.
The Essex County Greenbelt Association will receive $300,000 through the Conservation Partnership Grants program to preserve 84 acres of farmland, wildlife habitat and headwaters to the East Meadow River, a tributary to the Merrimack River and a major source of drinking water for Haverhill, the agency said.
A 1972 amendment to the state constitution, approved by 82% of voters, gave the state Legislature the authority to order the purchase of land – by eminent domain or otherwise – for conservation, recreation or open space. It set a two-thirds vote requirement for lawmakers to approve or make changes to protections.
A 2022 amendment to the law declares that land preservation is considered a “public purpose” by the state government and that “people have the right to clean air and water, freedom from excessive and unnecessary noise, and the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic qualities of their environment.”
The law includes a provision that allows for a cash payment in lieu of replacement land, which must be at 110% of the property’s value.
Within three years of the transaction, the money must be deposited into a fund dedicated to the purchase of Article 97 land that is of “equal natural resource value and acreage.”
The Resilient Lands Initiative, a coalition of state agencies, nonprofit environmental groups and land trusts, wants to speed up land conservation in Massachusetts with a focus on climate resilience and environmental justice. The group has set a goal of conserving 30% of land statewide by 2030 and 40% by 2050.
Conservationists have faced a backlash from some local leaders who have raised concerns about the drain on their budgets when large tracts are taken off the tax rolls and made off limits to commercial development or housing projects that provide tax revenue.
The scramble for undeveloped land has also pitted advocates of open space against those of affordable housing, who argue that the need for low-income housing in many communities often takes a back seat to creating new parks, protecting forests and preserving wildlife habitat.
Christian M. Wade covers the Massachusetts Statehouse for North of Boston Media Group’s newspapers and websites. Email him at cwade@cnhinews.com.
The most recent major hurricanes to hit the U.S. left hundreds of people dead and caused billions of dollars worth of damage.
HURRICANE BERYL – 2024
Hurricane Beryl was the first of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Exceptionally warm ocean temperatures caused it to strengthen into a Category 5 storm rapidly in early July. It’s winds peaked at 165 mph (270 kph) before weakening to a still-destructive Category 4.
When hurricane Beryl hit Texas, it had dropped to a Category 1 storm. Beryl has been blamed for at least 36 deaths. The storm caused an estimated $28 billion to $32 billion in damages, according to AccuWeather’s preliminary estimates.
HURRICANE IDALIA – 2023
Hurricane Idalia slammed into Florida on Aug. 30, 2023 with 125-mph (201-kph) winds that split trees in half, ripped roofs off hotels and turned small cars into boats before sweeping into Georgia and South Carolina where it flooded roadways and sent residents running for higher ground.
The category 4 hurricane was the largest to hit Florida’s Big Bend region in more than 125 years. The storm left 12 dead and produced 5 to 10 inches of rain across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving damages topping $3.6 billion, according to the National Hurricane Center.
HURRICANE IAN – 2022
Hurricane Ian briefly reached maximum Category 5 status before weakening to a Category 4 storm as it blasted ashore in September 2022 in southwest Florida. The storm caused more than $112 billion in damage in the U.S. and more than 150 deaths directly or indirectly, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The agency reported that Ian was the costliest hurricane in Florida history and the third-costliest ever in the U.S. as a whole. In addition to Florida, Ian impacted Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas and Cuba before it fell apart Oct. 1, 2022.
HURRICANE IDA – 2021
Hurricane Ida roared ashore in Louisiana as a Category 4 storm with 150-mph (241-kph) winds in late August 2021, knocking out power to New Orleans, blowing roofs off buildings and reversing the flow of the Mississippi River as it rushed from the Louisiana coast into one of the nation’s most important industrial corridors.
At the time it was tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane ever to hit the mainland. At least 91 deaths across nine states were attributed to the storm – most from drowning, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Damages from the storm were estimated to be about $36 billion.
HURRICANE ZETA – 2020
Hurricane Zeta left millions without power when it hit southeastern Louisiana on October 29, 2020. It had weakened to a tropical storm after leaving the Yucatan Peninsula but intensified to a category 3 storm before making landfall.
The hurricane caused five direct fatalities and about $4.4 billion in damage in the United States, according to the National Hurricane Center.
HURRICANE DELTA – 2020
When Hurricane Delta slammed into Louisiana on Oct. 9, 2020, residents were still cleaning up from Hurricane Laura, which had taken a similar path just six weeks earlier. Delta was a category 4 storm before it made two landfalls – both at category 2 intensity, according to the National Hurricane Center.
It first hit the Yucatan Peninsula before coming ashore in southwestern Louisiana. Delta cost $2.9 billion in the United States and was linked to six deaths in the U.S. and Mexico, according to a report from the National Hurricane Center.
HURRICANE LAURA – 2020
Hurricane Laura, a category 4 storm, roared ashore in southwest Louisiana on Aug. 27, 2020, packing 150-mph (240-kph) winds and a storm surge as high as 15 feet (4.5 meters) in some areas. Laura was responsible for 47 direct deaths in the United States and Hispaniola, and caused about $19 billion in damage in the U.S., according to the National Hurricane Center.
The deaths included five people killed by fallen trees and one person who drowned in a boat. Eight people died from carbon monoxide poisoning due to unsafe operation of generators.
As Florida braced for Hurricane Helene, some weather and politics observers were mad about Project 2025.
“Reminder that Project 2025 would dismantle the National Weather Service and NOAA,” wrote the League of Conservation Voters on X.
NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, founded in 1970.
“As Florida prepares for a major hurricane to make landfall this week, don’t forget that Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would eliminate the National Weather Service and NOAA,” Brian Tyler Cohen, a liberal YouTube influencer, posted on Instagram.
“Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA, wants to get rid of the National Weather Service — the people that tell you the weather and help you prepare for hurricanes,” said Moskowitz, a past Florida emergency management director under Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla.
Moskowitz quipped about how hurricane forecasting would function under Project 2025 and a Trump administration.
“Maybe we will just do it with a Magic 8 ball or maybe with a Ouija board. Or maybe we will do hurricane cones like President Trump did, right where he just circled in another state that wasn’t in the cones,” Moskowitz said.
Moskowitz’s swipe at Trump referred to a Sharpie-doctored map Trump displayed in 2019, when he falsely said all hurricane models predicted Dorian would hit Alabama. (And Moskowitz wasn’t the first to come up with that Magic 8 ball line.)
Partisan jostling aside, what does Project 2025 say about NOAA and the National Weather Service?
A Moskowitz spokesperson, Keith Nagy, said “while Project 2025 does not call for the complete dismantling of the NOAA, it intends to undermine the agency’s independence from the executive branch and eliminate many of its internal departments. Any threats toward the NOAA or NWS jeopardizes life-saving information about hurricanes, heat waves, and other extreme weather events.”
A NOAA spokesperson declined to comment.
Project 2025 calls for breaking up NOAA, commercializing forecast operations
Project 2025 is the conservative Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint for a Republican administration. Trump has disavowed it, but it was written by several former Trump administration officials. In 2022, when Trump gave a keynote speech at a Heritage event in Florida, he said the organization would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Project 2025 includes about four pages on NOAA and the National Weather Service. That part was written by Thomas F. Gilman, who was an official in Trump’s Commerce Department.
The document describes NOAA as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”
The National Weather Service, one of six NOAA offices, provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. The National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service within NOAA.
Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
It said that “commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-efficient technologies for high quality research and weather data.” Investing in commercial partners will increase competition, Project 2025 said.
Project 2025 also said the National Weather Service should become a “performance-based organization” held accountable for achieving specific results, even if the head of the agency must “deviate from government rules” to achieve those results.
The document said little about the National Hurricane Center. It said the administration should “review the work of the National Hurricane Center” and that “data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
Experts criticized plans in Project 2025
We asked several experts who are familiar with the NOAA and the National Weather Service’s work about Moskowitz’s statement. They said Project 2025 doesn’t call for the National Weather Service’s termination, but limits its work.
Craig Fugate served as former President Barack Obama’s administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and as then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s emergency management director. He recently served on a federal advisory committee, the Space Weather Advisory Group under NOAA.
“While Project 2025 doesn’t call for the elimination of the NWS, it places restrictions on research, climate products, and potentially limiting access to the NWS forecasters and centers such as the National Hurricane Center,” Fugate said.
Private sector criticism of the National Weather Service isn’t new, Fugate said.
A 2005 bill by then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., Fugate said, would have eliminated the free dissemination of weather information provided by the National Weather Service. The bill drew no co-sponsors and foundered.
Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said Project 2025’s vague language made it difficult to assess whether it called for eliminating NOAA and the National Weather Service. But “the intent is clearly to cripple public weather forecasting,” he said.
Thoman cited examples of Project 2025’s vague phrasing on the National Weather Service:
“Should focus on its data-gathering services.” Thoman asked whether that means doing nothing but data gathering. If so, then the weather and climate models produced continuously by the National Weather Service that private companies rely on would go away, he said.
“Should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.” Thoman asked if that means the National Weather Service should charge for forecasts or abandon weather forecasting entirely.
Although Project 2025 seems to push collaboration with the private sector, that already happens. Private entities, including TV forecasters and AccuWeather, use NOAA data, Rachel Cleetus, policy director in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said. (AccuWeather said it did not support what Project 2025 recommended.)
“The reality is NOAA and the National Weather Service are already working with a lot of commercial partners so it is unclear what exactly is the intention there,” Cleetus said.
She also said dismantling NOAA could render the agency ineffective.
“The idea that it could be broken up and somehow still be able to do this essential work, it won’t be possible,” Cleetus said.
Our ruling
Moskowitz said, “Project 2025 wants to get rid of NOAA” and the National Weather Service.
Project 2025 has a few pages about NOAA and the National Weather Service and some of its phrasing is vague.
But it does call for major changes. It described NOAA as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”
It doesn’t explicitly call for getting rid of the National Weather Service, but it says it should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
About two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate change. Nearly 8 in 10 Americans support funding research into renewable energy, and 3 out of 4 support regulating carbon emissions. More than 60% believe Congress should do more to address climate change, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Even in Jack County, Texas, where Donald Trump received 90% of the vote in 2020, 58% support regulating carbon emissions. That’s the lowest of any U.S. county.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which the White House called “the most significant climate action in U.S. history,” provided nearly $400 billion for climate solutions. It passed Congress strictly along party lines, with no Republicans voting in favor.
In 2023, Democrats voted for pro-environmental legislation more than 90% of the time, while Republicans voted for pro-environmental legislation less than 5% of the time, according to voting data collected by the League of Conservation Voters.
“We see pretty much across the board, at all levels of government, that government officials dramatically underestimate the level of support from their own constituents,” Tony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told CBS News.
Answer the questions below — which are a selection of the same questions asked by the Yale program’s survey to create their Climate Opinion Maps — to see how your beliefs about climate change compare to others in your area and the nation.
WASHINGTON — Human-caused climate change doubled the likelihood and intensified the heavy rains that led to devastating flooding in Central Europe earlier this month, a new flash study found.
Torrential rain in mid-September from Storm Boris pummeled a large part of central Europe, including Romania, Poland, Czechia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Germany, and caused widespread damage. The floods killed 24 people, damaged bridges, submerged cars, left towns without power and in need of significant infrastructure repairs.
The severe four-day rainfall was “by far” the heaviest ever recorded in Central Europe and twice as likely because of warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists that run rapid climate attribution studies, said Wednesday from Europe. Climate change also made the rains between 7% and 20% more intense, the study found.
“Yet again, these floods highlight the devastating results of fossil fuel-driven warming,” said Joyce Kimutai, the study’s lead author and a climate researcher at Imperial College, London.
To test the influence of human-caused climate change, the team of scientists analyzed weather data and used climate models to compare how such events have changed since cooler preindustrial times to today. Such models simulate a world without the current 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming since preindustrial times, and see how likely a rainfall event that severe would be in such a world.
The study analyzed four-day rainfall events, focusing on the countries that felt severe impacts.
Though the rapid study hasn’t been peer-reviewed, it follows scientifically accepted techniques.
“In any climate, you would expect to occasionally see records broken,” said Friederike Otto, an Imperial College, London, climate scientist who coordinates the attribution study team. But, “to see records being broken by such large margins, that is really the fingerprint of climate change. And that is only something that we see in a warming world.”
Some of the most severe impacts were felt in the Polish-Czech border region and Austria, mainly in urban areas along major rivers. The study noted that the death toll from this month’s flooding was considerably lower than during catastrophic floods in the region in 1997 and 2002. Still, infrastructure and emergency management systems were overwhelmed in many cases and will require billions of euros to fix.
Last week, European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen pledged billions of euros in aid for countries that suffered damage to infrastructure and housing from the floods.
The World Weather Attribution study also warned that in a world with even more warming — specifically 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times, the likelihood of ferocious four-day storms would grow by 50% compared to current levels. Such storms would grow in intensity, too, the authors found.
The heavy rainfall across Central Europe was caused by what’s known as a “Vb depression” that forms when cold polar air flows from the north over the Alps and meets warm air from Southern Europe. The study’s authors found no observable change in the number of similar Vb depressions since the 1950s.
The World Weather Attribution group launched in 2015 largely due to frustration that it took so long to determine whether climate change was behind an extreme weather event. Studies like theirs, within attribution science, use real-world weather observations and computer modeling to determine the likelihood of a particular happening before and after climate change, and whether global warming affected its intensity.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
While Climate Discussions Focus on Decarbonization and Energy Transition — Both Incredibly Urgent to Address, Millions of Low-Income Women Remain Exposed to Rising Temperatures
NEW YORK, September 24, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– According to NOAA, August was Earth’s hottest month in 175 years, marking the 15th consecutive month of record-breaking global heat. Plus, Summer 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere is officially the hottest on record — a harsh warning of the climate crisis already expanding.
Extreme heat is a silent, invisible killer, responsible for more deaths than any other climate-driven hazard. A deeper understanding of its uneven effects reveals that women are disproportionately and significantly harmed by heat.
Women are nearly four times more heat intolerant than men and 14 times more likely to die in climate disasters. Many work outdoors in agriculture, street vending, waste recycling, and domestic labor without access to shade or cooling. This issue affects women globally — those in southern Europe die from extreme heat at twice the rate of men,and worldwide,60% more women than men lack adequate cooling, heightening their risk for heat-related illnesses.
The heat amplifies pre-existing inequalities. Female-headed households lose 8% more income to heat and women in agriculture, who make up the backbone of food production, produce up to 30% more food when given equal resources. Yet, 80% of agricultural policies ignore women’s climate challenges, according to FAO. These are just examples of how the effects of heat are felt across the work force and supply chains, affecting not only women in vulnerable regions but economies everywhere.
Global institutions are beginning to step up. UN Secretary General António Guterres issued a global “Call to Action” on extreme heat in August 2024, calling on nations, philanthropy, and the private sector to act.
A path forward exists. “Extreme heat is at the beginning, middle, and end of every recent climate story, and it’s time to address it at the pace and scale required. Women not only endure heat’s wrath, but as the backbone of communities and proven risk managers and problem solvers can also drive long-term change and deliver impact,” said Rachel Kyte, Board Chair of Climate Resilience For All, a global NGO working to protect the health and livelihoods of women and vulnerable communities from the impacts of extreme heat.
“We’ve implemented initiatives like the Women’s Climate Shock Insurance and Livelihoods Initiative in India that provides financial protection and women-centered early warning that save lives and enhance climate resilience,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, CEO of Climate Resilience for All. “Our call during this Climate Week is to focuson more tangible and immediate actions, policies, and financing for heat resilience. As the planet warms, the future of women is inseparable from the future of our world. We must act now before the heat becomes unbearable for all of us. Every life can be saved from extreme heat.”
Dr. Tshilidzi Marwala, USG and Rector of the United Nations University, and Ms. Kaoru Nemeto, Director of the United Nations Information Centre during a discussion ‘Building the Future: Synergetic Collaboration on Nuclear and Climate Crises.’ Credit: Naureen Hossain/IPS
by Naureen Hossain (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 (IPS) – Driving the Summit of the Future’s core messages of international solidarity and decisive action are young people who are determined to address the intersecting issues that the world contends with today.
During the Summit’s Action Days (20-21 September), it was young people who led the conversations of increasing and defining meaningful engagement, both on- and off-site from the United Nations Headquarters.
Not only are they driving the conversation, but in the Pact for the Future adopted by world leaders at the United Nations on Sunday (September 22), youth and future generations are at the forefront of global leaders’ concerns, and their role was clearly defined with the first ever Declaration on Future Generations, with concrete steps to take account of future generations in our decision-making, including a possible envoy for future generations.
This includes a commitment to more “meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level.”
Building the Future: Synergetic Collaboration on Nuclear and Climate Crises, a side event whose co-organizers included Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the Future Action Festival Organizing Committee, with the support of the United Nations University (UNU) and the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC), brought together young activists to discuss the intersection between two different crises and what will define meaningful youth engagement.
Kaoru Nemoto, the Director General of UNIC in Tokyo, observed that it was “ground-breaking” to see the agenda of the Summit’s Action Days largely led and organized by youth participants, as signified by the majority of seats in the General Assembly Hall being filled by young activists.
“There is an undercurrent, a common message, that the youth can make this world a better place to live,” said Nemoto. “No matter what agenda you are working on, be it climate change, nuclear disarmament, fighting inequality… youth issues are cross-cutting, very strong cross-cutting issues across the board.”
Nemoto further added that the United Nations needs to do much more to engage youth for meaningful participation. This would mean allowing youth to consult in decision-making and to be in positions of leadership. Youth presence cannot be reduced to tokenism.
The climate and nuclear crises are existential threats that are deeply connected, said Dr. Tshilidzi Marwala, the rector of the United Nations University. Climate instability fuels the factors that lead to conflict and displacement. Conflict, such as what is happening in Sudan, Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine, increases the risk of nuclear escalation. As leaders in the present day tackle the issues, Marwala called on the youth to continue raising their voices and to hold those powers accountable.
Marwala noted that the United Nations University would be committed to “realizing meaningful participation” in all parties. For young people, while they are motivated and demonstrate a care for deeper social issues, they face challenges in having their voices heard or in feeling galvanized to take action. Marwala noted that it was important to reach out to those young people who are either not involved or feel discouraged from getting involved in political work and activism.
Chief among the Summit of the Future’s agenda is increasing youth participation in decision-making processes. It has long been acknowledged that young activists and civil society actors drive greater societal change and are motivated to act towards complex issues. Yet they frequently face challenges in participating in policymaking that would shape their countries’ positions.
Among these challenges are representation in political spaces. Within the context of Japan, young people are underrepresented in local and national politics. As Luna Serigano, an advocate from the Japan Youth Council, shared during the event, there is a wider belief among young voters in Japan that their voices will go unheard by authorities.
This is indicated in voter turnout, which shows that only 37 percent of voters are in their 20s, and only 54 percent of voters believe that their votes matter. By contrast, 71 percent of people in their 70s voted in elections. People in their 30s or younger account for just 1 percent of professionals serving in government councils and forums. The Japan Youth Council is currently advocating for active youth participation in the country’s climate change policy by calling for young people to be directly involved as committee members to work on a new energy plan for the coming year.
Yuuki Tokuda, a co-founder of GeNuine, a Japan-based NGO that explores nuclear issues through a gender perspective, shared that young people are out of decision-making spaces. Although their voices may be heard, it is not enough. As she told IPS, the climate and nuclear crises are on the minds of young people in Japan. And while they have ideas on what could be done, they are not informed on how to act.
There is some hope for increasing participation. Tokuda shared within policymakers on nuclear issues, of which 30 percent include women, have begun to engage with young people in these discussions.
“It is time to reconstruct systems so that youth can meaningfully participate in these processes,” said Tokuda. “We need more intergenerational participation in order to work towards the ban of nuclear weapons and the climate crisis.”
During the event, what meaningful youth engagement should look like was discussed. It was acknowledged that efforts have gone towards giving a space to the perspectives of young people. Including young people in the discussions is a critical step. It was suggested that direction should shift towards ensuring that young people have the authority to take the action needed to resolve intersecting, complex issues. Otherwise, the inclusion is meaningless.
“The future-oriented youth is more needed than ever to tackle the challenges in building and maintaining peace,” said Mitsuo Nishikata of SGI.
“As a youth-driven initiative such as what the Future Action Festival demonstrates, youth solidarity can stand as a starting point for resolving and passing issues.”
Next year (2025) will mark 80 years since the end of World War II and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki atomic bombings. Nishikata pointed out that this will be a time for crucial opportunities to advance the discussions on nuclear disarmament and climate action, ahead of the Third Meeting of State Parties on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the 30th UN Climate Conference (COP30).
“We will continue to unite in our desire for peace, sharing the responsibility for future generations and expanding grassroots actions in Japan and globally.
Other commitments for the Pact for the Future included the first multilateral recommitment to nuclear disarmament in more than a decade, with a clear commitment to the goal of totally eliminating nuclear weapons.
It also pledged reform of the United Nations Security Council since the 1960s, with plans to improve the effectiveness and representativeness of the Council, including by redressing the historical underrepresentation of Africa as a priority.
The pact has at its core a commitment to “turbo-charge” implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including the reform of the international financial architecture so that it better represents and serves developing countries.
“We cannot build a future that is suitable for our grandchildren with a system that our grandparents created,” as the Secretary-General António Guterres stated.
This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.
WASHINGTON, September 23, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Hip Hop Caucus is proud to announce that President & CEO Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. has been named to Forbes’ first ever “Sustainability Leaders” list. This prestigious recognition highlights 50 entrepreneurs, scientists, funders, policymakers, and activists who are at the forefront of addressing the global climate crisis through innovative, impactful solutions.
Forbes’ decision to launch this list for the first time underscores the urgency of the climate and environmental challenges we face. Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.’s inclusion is a testament to his lifelong commitment to climate justice and the significant strides he has made in connecting climate change to racial justice and social equity.
“It is an honor to be recognized by Forbes among this group of incredible leaders who share a passion and dedication for solving our climate crisis,” said Hip Hop Caucus President & CEO Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.. “Hip Hop Caucus is committed to making the world more sustainable, equitable, and just, and this moment is a reminder that we must collectively continue pushing forward.”
Through his leadership of Hip Hop Caucus, Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. has mobilized young people, artists, communities of color and other marginalized groups to become active in the climate movement, advocating for policies and solutions that address both the climate crisis and systemic inequalities. His work aims to ensure that those most affected by environmental injustices are not just heard, but are leading the fight for change.
“This recognition is a reflection of Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.’s unwavering commitment to serving communities who are first and worst impacted by climate and environmental injustice, and creating a liveable planet for everyone. His leadership has been instrumental in shaping Hip Hop Caucus’ leadership in linking climate justice and racial justice solutions, and this honor reinforces the vital role he plays in the global movement for clean air, clean water and true community-based prosperity,” said Hip Hop Caucus’ Managing Director and COO Liz Havstad.
Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. is the host of the award-winning climate and environmental justice podcast ‘The Coolest Show,’ chair of Bloomberg Philanthropies Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign, and has been recognized by the Obama White House for his climate and sustainability leadership as a Champion of Change.
The Forbes “Sustainability Leaders” list features global climate and environmental justice leaders including the mayor of Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Whole Foods Market CEO Jason Buechel, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan.
Earlier this month, Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. delivered a keynote speech at the University of Maryland’s Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) 10th Annual Environmental Justice Symposium. CEEJH uses data and training to empower communities.
For more information on Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.’s work and Hip Hop Caucus, visit www.hiphopcaucus.org.
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About Hip Hop Caucus
Formed in 2004, the Hip Hop Caucus is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that leverages Hip Hop culture to encourage young people to participate in the democratic process. Through a collaborative leadership network, Hip Hop Caucus addresses core issues affecting underserved communities. Hip Hop Caucus programs and campaigns support solution-driven community organizing led by today’s young leaders.
Art, Technology, Science, and Fashion Speakers Join Forces to Fight for the Survival of Our Planet
NEW YORK, September 23, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Swissnex presents the Climate Ring, a pop-up boxing arena for the fight of the century: the one for planet Earth. Climate Ring will take place from September 25 – 27th at Performance Space New York, a leading venue for experimental performing arts in New York City’s East Village. Swissnex will transform the venue into a boxing arena and will hold 12 events over the course of the three days. Inspired by the 12 rounds of a boxing match, these 12 activations will feature an eclectic mix of discussions, exhibitions, and performances featuring rising stars and heavyweights from science, innovation, and the arts. From renowned ecologist Thomas Crowther of ETH Zurich to New York nightlife impresaria Susanne Bartsch, the Climate Ring showcases fresh perspectives on our planetary moment from Switzerland, the U.S., and beyond.
Climate Ring is an official event program of Climate Week NYC 2024, the world’s largest and most bustling climate festival. Referred to by The New York Times as a “Burning Man for climate geeks,” this annual rendez-vous for climate culture features over 600 events, from tech mixers and VIP dinners to concerts and Earth-inspired drag shows, taking place across New York in parallel with the UN General Assembly High-Level Week. It brings together climate leaders from government, business, technology, arts, creative industries, academia, and civil society.
The 12 events are free with registration. Visit Swissnex for more information and to register.
CLIMATE RING PARTNERS
Climate Ring is an initiative of Swissnex in Boston and New York organized in partnership with Performance Space NY, Climeworks, ETH Zurich, Greater Zurich Area, ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts, HEAD – Geneva, The New School Parsons, Institut auf dem Rosenberg, Studio 697 THz, Overthrow, Innosuisse – Swiss Innovation Agency, Climate Collider, the German Accelerator, Open Planet, the Villars Institute, Climate Words, SI – Swiss Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Giroux Impact, Choke Hole, Vitra, Vitra Circle Store, Foodhack, GGBa – Invest Western Switzerland, Switzerland Innovation, travel Switzerland, SBB CFF FFS, Swiss Business Hub USA, the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, and Presence Switzerland.
ABOUT THE THREE CLIMATE RING EXHIBITIONS
Alongside the 12 rounds of the Climate Ring, Swissnex presents three exhibits of student artwork addressing the climate crisis in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève), Institut auf dem Rosenberg, and Studio 697 THz.
In partnership with ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts, HEAD – Geneva, Institut auf dem Rosenberg and Studio 697 THz
Punch Prize Presented by ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts
Endless Wear: a New Take on Upcycling Presented by HEAD – Geneva
SolarSunflowers Presented by Institut auf dem Rosenberg and Studio 697 THz
America’s smallest banks face potentially destructive losses from climate-related weather disasters, according to a first-of-its-kind report from a climate change nonprofit. And they’re not even aware of the risk.
Property damage from floods, wind, storm surges, hail, or wildfires threatens a collective $2.4 billion across nearly 200 national banks, averaging 1.5% of these banks’ total portfolio value, according to First Street. Most of this risk is concentrated amid small regional or community banks. In fact, nearly one in three regional banks face significant climate risk. But large institutions aren’t immune, with one in four facing such risks too, the report found.
“Risk exposure varies, but no matter the size of the institution, all banks had some level of climate risk within their lending footprint,” Jeremy Porter, First Street’s head of climate implications, told Fortune. “The most vulnerable were regional, small, and community banks with highly concentrated portfolios in areas prone to flooding, wildfires, or hurricanes. However, even some of the larger banks faced significant enough risk to merit further scrutiny.”
First Street conducted its analysis by looking at extreme weather risks in banks’ physical locations and using it as a proxy for the commercial and residential properties on which banks have issued loans.
Nearly one-third of the nation’s banks are exposed to climate-related risks that could reduce the value of their holdings by 1%, a threshold the Securities and Exchange Commission has defined as material.
“If you have any line item, as a publicly traded company, with the potential to lose 1% of value… you have to report it,” First Street CEO Matthew Eby said. “On average, every single one of these small banks and community banks hold so much risk, they [would] all have to report it.”
Why banks don’t know
The SEC’s 1% rule is currently on hold while it faces legal challenges—but regardless, it and other financial reporting requirements exempt small banks. Experts say many of these institutions likely don’t know just how risky their portfolios are. And the ballooning costs of weather-related disasters, which are expected to rise dramatically as climate change worsens, show why it’s critical to understand such risks. Since the 1980s, floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and other weather disasters have caused an ever-rising amount of financial damage, much of it in areas previously immune to weather disasters.
Hurricane Debby, which pummeled Florida and the Carolinas last month before moving up the East Coast, caused an estimated $1.4 billion of property losses in the U.S. and over $2 billion in Canada, according to estimates. (It was the costliest event in the history of Quebec, Reinsurance News noted.) But an analysis by First Street found that nearly 8 in 10 of the damage was outside of historical FEMA flood zones, meaning the affected properties were unlikely to have flood insurance, and their owners less able to weather a catastrophic financial loss.
Repeated across hundreds or thousands of properties, such financial losses could spell disaster for small banks that have outstanding loans concentrated in a specific area. One bank flagged as high-risk by First Street has most of its branches across coastal New England, a region that has seen devastating back-to-back floods for the past two years and where climate change is expected to exacerbate extreme weather.
“If you lost, after insurance, 14 or 15% of your residential real estate portfolio or commercial real estate portfolio, there’s no way you have the reserves to withstand that, so you’re talking about potential bank failure,” Eby said.
He added, “financial institutions are really the big concern, because if they fail in financial crises, that impacts everyone else, as opposed to just a company failing by itself.”
Unknown unknowns
While climate risk is a growing concern for banks of all sizes, the smallest institutions are least able to establish and price that risk, said Clifford Rossi, a former Citigroup risk officer who now directs the Smith Enterprise Risk Consortium at the University of Maryland.
“So many other things are affecting small banks—they’re dealing with competitive pressure from the big guys that affect economies of scale, they’re fixated on how they’re managing their assets, interest rates are declining… those things are top of mind,” he said.
Rossi questioned First Street’s methodology and cautioned against putting numerical estimates on bank losses based on branch locations, saying they could provide wildly varying figures.
“There’s certainly a degree of risk in those portfolios, but we don’t know how much,” he said.
Every bank should do a loan-level analysis of their portfolio by putting data on addresses, longitude, latitude, and commercial real estate into a climate model to assess the physical risk, he added.
When it comes to estimates, he warned, “We need to be careful about saying the sky is falling when we still don’t have the best analysis in town.”
But that kind of analysis is time-consuming and difficult, even for the largest institutions. The Federal Reserve this spring published the results of a test to determine how aware America’s six largest banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo—were of their climate risks.
The answer: Not very.
According to the banks, they didn’t have reliable information on the types of buildings they held, their insurance coverage, weather exposure, or climate-modeling data.
The new analysis “underscores the need for all banks, financial institutions, and asset owners to proactively incorporate climate risk into their broader risk management frameworks,” First Street’s Porter said.
“Climate risk is present in these portfolios—and it’s measurable. The Federal Reserve, the SEC, and other regulatory bodies are already acknowledging this risk through stress tests, and it’s only a matter of time before mandatory reporting becomes standard practice.”
Every hiker in Los Angeles knows that sinking feeling.
You stare at the mountains (because that’s what we do when we have a moment) and see a dark column of smoke. Almost instantly you have a good idea of which trails might be burning and, depending on if it’s hot, dry and the right time of year, whether the fire will eventually reach your spot.
In 2020, the Bobcat fire blowtorched a few of my family’s beloved spots in the Angeles National Forest. Now, four years later, the 55,000-acre Bridge fire is taking out a few of our remaining L.A.-adjacent mountain retreats, upending lives in forest communities such as Wrightwood and imperiling mountain lions, bears, bighorn sheep, frogs and other wildlife.
To call this heartbreaking grossly understates the loss. Imagine if an earthquake wiped out Disneyland or Dodger Stadium — devastating, yes, and thankfully rebuildable. But when a mountain forest burns in the kind of extreme fires of late, nature probably won’t rebuild it in my lifetime. That most of these disasters have preventable human causes makes the loss obscene.
Human causes? Though climate change gets the attention, simple human recklessness or malice often lights the first spark, then drought and extreme heat take over.
Investigators haven’t determined what started the Bridge fire. But, police arrested an arson suspect in connection with the Line fire in the San Bernardino Mountains (39,000 acres), and the Airport fire in Orange County (24,000 acres) was sparked by a public works crew moving boulders with heavy machinery.
Other major fires have had more innocuous origins. In 2018, the Carr fire near Redding burned more than 1,000 structures and an area of forest roughly the size of the city of San Diego, killing eight people. That fire started on National Park Service land after a driver’s trailer had a flat tire, causing a rim to scrape the road and shoot sparks into tinder-dry brush.
There’s no argument: Humans present the clearest and most present fire danger to wildlands. And in the L.A. area, roughly 18 million of us live near more than 2 million acres of government-managed forests.
So here’s what the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and California State Parks ought to do when conditions are predictably ripe for cataclysmic fire: Close their forests.
When a major heat wave bears down on us — as one did before all the fires burning around us now, and before the Bobcat fire in 2020, and before the Carr fire in 2018 — tell drivers, hikers, hunters and everyone else looking to the mountains for relief: Don’t come here, because it’s too dangerous, and we don’t want you starting another fire.
This wouldn’t be without precedent. Just before Labor Day weekend in 2021, the Forest Service temporarily closed nearly all of its land in California. Though the mountains around Los Angeles were quiet at the time, the rest of the state was experiencing its second-worst fire season on record — second only to 2020, when more than 4% of California’s total land area burned. At a time of extreme danger, the Forest Service wanted to ensure resources could be used fighting fires rather than evacuating visitors.
For Southern California and other places spared another year of catastrophe, the closure was preventive. The Forest Service said as much when it announced its order: “The closure order will also decrease the potential for new fire starts at a time of extremely limited firefighting resources.”
I don’t recommend such preemption lightly. Access to public lands is soul food for outdoor-minded city dwellers like me, not to mention the right of every American. That we in Los Angeles have so much accessible wilderness in our backyard is an immense privilege.
Nor do I believe this would prevent every fire, or even most fires. The Line fire in San Bernardino County has burned mostly Forest Service land, but investigators believe an arsonist started it in an adjacent suburb. Power lines and lightning strikes have also wreaked havoc on our forests.
But managing access to forests needs to reflect the reality of climate change. That includes telling people to stay out for a week or two when the foliage is bone-dry and another hellish heat wave appears in the weather forecast. We’ve long had the tools to predict the conditions for extreme fire dangers; it’s a shame not to use those tools to better protect our struggling forests from us, and our way of life, from going up in smoke.
Shopoff Realty Investments got the nod to build 250 homes and a 215-room boutique hotel atop a former oil tank farm in Huntington Beach.
The Irvine-based developer led by Bill Shopoff was approved by the City Council to construct the 29-acre project on the former Magnolia Tank Farm west of Magnolia Street and north of the Huntington Beach Channel, the Orange County Register reported.
The project, just north of the Magnolia Marsh some 2,000 feet from the beach, was approved by the council in 2021. But it needed new council approval because of the commission changes.
Plans now call for 200 for-sale homes, a 50-unit affordable apartment complex, a 215-room boutique lodge, 19,000 square feet of shops and restaurants and a 4-acre park.
The apartment complex will set aside half its units for hotel workers, according to a request by the Coastal Commission. The hotel would also rent a quarter of its rooms at affordable rates.
Shopoff said in July that the earliest homes could finish construction is 2027. A cost and timeline for the rest of the project was not disclosed.
Shopoff bought the Magnolia Tank Farm north of Pacific Coast Highway in 2016 for $26.5 million, or $913,793 an acre.
Next to the project site is the former Ascon landfill, which until 1984 took in industrial, oil field and construction waste, now undergoing an environmental cleanup. State toxic regulators deemed the development safe from contamination from the former private dump.
The former oil tank farm is gone, the site remediated in recent years of soil contamination.
A coalition of environmental groups had opposed the project, saying the former wetland should be restored. They also said the housing and hotel development, if built atop a site raised to prevent flooding, would divert flood waters into nearby neighborhoods.
“We have some of the strictest environmental safety laws in the world here in California,” Councilman Tony Strickland said. “If this passed state muster, you can be assured that it is safe.”
Shopoff Realty Investments, founded by Bill Shopoff in 1992, had $3 billion in assets under management at the end of last year with $477 million in property sales and financing, up from $160 million in 2022, according to the Orange County Business Journal.
— Dana Bartholomew
Read more
Shopoff looks to build 250 homes and hotel in Huntington Beach
Shopoff Realty buys 55 acres in Desert Hot Springs for warehouse
Shopoff plans to add 1,200 homes to Westminster Mall
This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.
On a wet spring day in June, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land was mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors.
Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes.
“It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”
This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.
The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.
State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.
States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.
But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands.
To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations.
Tony Incashola Jr., Director of Tribal Resource Management for CSKT looks out at state-owned parcels from an airplane on August 8, 2024. Credit: Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.
However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.
The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”
Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so. Arlee High School is a public school on the Flathead Reservation. Six tribes, including CKST, have sued the state of Montana for failing to implement its Indian Education for All curriculum in public schools over the past few decades, despite a mandate to do so.
Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”
Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said.
The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.
The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.
Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.
The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.
Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.
“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”
A clear line divides forest managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe and recently harvested state-owned land. Credit: Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands.
Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.
While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands.
At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.
That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”
Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.
Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.
In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.
But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.
Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes.
Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.
By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.
“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights.
Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.
“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”
Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.
In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.
That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.”
Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”
While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.
The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.
“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.
On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”
Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”
But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.
In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.
“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,’” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”
Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back.
This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.
This story is a collaboration between Grist and High Country News and is reprinted with permission.
This story was reported and written by Anna V. Smith and Maria Parazo Rose. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose, Clayton Aldern, and Parker Ziegler. Aldern and Ziegler also produced data visuals and interactives.
Original photography for this project was done by Tailyr Irvine. Roberto (Bear) Guerra and Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Luna Anna Archey designed the magazine layout for High Country News. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.
This project was edited by Tristan Ahtone and Kate Schimel. Additional editing by Jennifer Sahn and Katherine Lanpher. Kate Schimel and Jaime Buerger managed production. Meredith Clark did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data. Copy editing by Diane Sylvain.
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