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Tag: Climate change

  • Brazil’s Biofuel Potential Set to Expand Thanks to Sustainable Aviation Fuel

    Brazil’s Biofuel Potential Set to Expand Thanks to Sustainable Aviation Fuel

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    An Air Force plane brings home Brazilians who managed to escape the war in Gaza as part of a humanitarian operation. Airplanes shorten distances but pollute the atmosphere and aggravate the climate crisis by emitting two percent of greenhouse gases. Sustainable biofuels can mitigate that damage. CREDIT: FAB
    • by Mario Osava (rio de janeiro)
    • Inter Press Service

    RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 13 (IPS) – Brazil is counting on biofuels to assert itself as an energy powerhouse in the near future, as a decisive supplier of low-carbon jet fuel, a requirement of the climate crisis.

    The electrification of automobiles has tended to curb the strong ethanol and biodiesel agribusiness developed in the country since the 1970s. But demand for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) now offers the possibility of significant new expansion for many decades to come.

    Electrically powered airplanes are not viable with current technology, and will not be for a long time. “Batteries are very heavy and store little energy,” said Arnaldo Walter, a mechanical engineer and professor at the University of Campinas.

    Nor is green hydrogen, the fashionable ecological fuel, an alternative for aviation, because of the difficulty of storage and the need for temperatures of more than 250 degrees Celsius below zero to keep it in a usable liquid form. In addition, the entire design of aircraft would have to be changed, a process that could only be achieved in the long term.

    Brazil has everything it needs to become a major producer of green hydrogen, which is generated by electrolysis of water, but requires abundant electricity from renewable sources. That is the case in this country, especially in the Northeast region, which has huge potential in wind and solar energy, in addition to ports closer to Europe than those of other competitors.

    The solution is biomass-derived fuel, which does not require altering the format of aircraft or their turbines, by naturally replacing aviation kerosene, the use of which generates two percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

    Climate requirements

    “Not just any biofuel will do, it has to meet the requirements for environmental, social and economic sustainability certification,” Walter told IPS by telephone from the southern city of Campinas, with a population of 1.1 million people located 90 kilometers from São Paulo.

    Deforestation, for example, is one of Brazil’s Achilles’ heels, given the reports of forests being cleared to grow soybeans, whose oil will probably be one of the main raw materials for SAF. It is not enough to decarbonize the fuel, but also the whole process of its production.

    The goal is to meet the target set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

    “SAF is the only economically viable and available alternative, despite its sustainability challenges,” argued Amanda Ohara, a chemical engineer and fuel specialist with the non-governmental Climate and Society Institute, in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro.

    Soybean monoculture represents half of agricultural production and is the main Brazilian export. It occupies extensive areas of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, and part of the Amazon rainforest, after extensive deforestation. It can now provide the oil for the production of sustainable aviation fuel, known as SAF. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
    Soybean monoculture represents half of agricultural production and is the main Brazilian export. It occupies extensive areas of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannah, and part of the Amazon rainforest, after extensive deforestation. It can now provide the oil for the production of sustainable aviation fuel, known as SAF. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

    Soybeans and sugarcane, abundant but disputed

    Brazil is the world’s largest soybean producer, with an output of 154 million tons in 2023, about half of which was exported to China. Its oil is the main raw material for biodiesel, which is blended with fossil diesel in this country at a current proportion of 14 percent. Congress is discussing the possibility of raising it to 25 percent in the future.

    In addition to its thriving agriculture, based largely on oilseeds and sugarcane, which can supply SAF plants, the country has ample potential for expansion.

    “Brazil has favorable conditions for biofuels, such as available land, good climate and rainfall, although they are now more uncertain than before,” said Walter. Tens of millions of hectares of land degraded by extensive cattle ranching in the past can be used to recover production.

    In Latin America’s largest country, with 850 million hectares of territory, only 61 million hectares were dedicated to agriculture and 164 million to cattle pastures in 2022, according to MapBiomas, a monitoring platform of a network of organizations focused on climate change.

    The government set a goal of recovering 40 million hectares of degraded land in 10 years, almost the same as the area planted with soybeans today: 44.6 million hectares.

    Soy already has a well-established market and consumers. Dedicating part of its oil to SAF competes with these uses and will require a large expansion of its cultivation, that is to say, new lands and the risk of deforestation, which together with changes in land use constitute the great source of greenhouse gases in the country.

    They represent economic and environmental costs that drive the search for alternatives.

    The macauba, a tropical palm tree whose scientific name is Acrocomia aculeata, is attractive because of its high oil productivity and its presence in almost all of Brazil, as well as in other Latin American countries under various names, such as coyol, corojo, grugru or macaw palm.

    It has not yet been commercially produced, nor has it been domesticated, making it a long-term, risky bet.

    But Acelen, a company controlled by the Mubadala Investment Company of the United Arab Emirates, is promoting a project to grow macauba palm trees on 200,000 hectares of land in northeastern Brazil to produce SAF as of 2026.

    To this end, it has an oil refinery in Mataripe, 70 kilometers from Salvador, capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, acquired in 2019 from the state-owned oil company Petrobras.

    Ethanol is another alternative raw material, which, like soybean oil, has the advantage of large-scale production, but competes with other uses. In Brazil, sugarcane is the main source of ethanol, whose consumption as a fuel is almost as high as that of gasoline.

    In its anhydrous form, it currently accounts for 27 percent of gasoline sold, a mix that is expected to rise to 30 percent or even 35 percent. But ethanol is also used alone, in its hydrated form. In Brazil today, almost all cars have flexible engines, powered by gasoline or ethanol, or by a mixture of any proportion.

    A photo of the monotonous landscape of sugarcane in one of the plantations in the interior of the state of São Paulo, which provides almost half of the sugar and ethanol produced in Brazil. The 31 billion liters of ethanol in 2023 could be tripled in 20 years by increasing productivity and monoculture, to provide surpluses for the production of SAF. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
    A photo of the monotonous landscape of sugarcane in one of the plantations in the interior of the state of São Paulo, which provides almost half of the sugar and ethanol produced in Brazil. The 31 billion liters of ethanol in 2023 could be tripled in 20 years by increasing productivity and monoculture, to provide surpluses for the production of SAF. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS

    Cane and corn ethanol

    Ethanol lags behind vegetable oils in the production of SAF, but will benefit from a production boom expected in the coming years. It will be able to triple its annual production, which totaled 31 billion liters in 2023, without the need to greatly expand the cultivated area, according to industry leaders.

    Brazil is already the country that grows the most sugarcane in the world, which allows it to lead the sugar market and occupy second place in ethanol, surpassed only by the United States, where corn is the main source.

    Raízen, a joint venture between the British oil transnational Shell and Brazil’s Cosan, is studying the new biofuel, also in partnership with universities, while expanding its ethanol production, of which it is the national leader.

    It is a pioneer in second-generation ethanol, extracted from sugarcane bagasse and other cellulose-based waste. This ensures up to 50 percent more ethanol, without the need for more crops. The company has already started up eight plants of this type and expects to have 20 in operation by 2030, despite the fact that they are more expensive than conventional plants.

    Sugarcane productivity should also increase in the coming years, according to agronomic researchers, who expect to see production rise twofold mainly due to the planting of new varieties with genetic improvements.

    In addition, second-crop corn, generally planted after soybeans in the same area, has allowed an increasing production of ethanol, especially in the midwest region of Brazil. It already represents 17 percent of the national total.

    There are other alternatives, such as fossil derivatives but with reduced greenhouse gas emissions, wood from trees that grow faster in tropical countries such as Brazil, animal oils, and even cooking oil.

    Each one requires different technologies, with their own costs, maturation times and environmental effects, said Walter. Logistical conditions, dispersion or facilities for collecting raw materials can also determine the most promising alternatives.

    “There is no single solution, no silver bullet. We will have to combine various alternatives, depending on the intended or possible scale,” Ohara said. The choice is no longer purely economic, but also responds to the climate emergency, because “gas emissions must be reduced as a matter of urgency,” she added.

    The expansion of monocultures will be inevitable in a country like Brazil, which aims to ensure a sustainable supply, but the damage can be mitigated with agroforestry systems, combining oilseeds with other crops, which diversify the vegetation and conserve the soil, proposed the chemist and environmentalist who worked for six years with biofuels in the state-owned Petrobras consortium.

    © Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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    Global Issues

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  • Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health, Wherever You Are

    Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health, Wherever You Are

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    Extreme heat kills roughly half a million people worldwide each year, but at the current rate of global warming it could be close to five times as deadly by 2050. Then there are the indirect health risks of climate change: Chaotic weather and higher temperatures generate deadly natural disasters, bring diseases into new areas, and drive up economic insecurity and poor mental health.

    Governments need to act, and the Lancet Countdown—an international research collaboration that tracks how health is being impacted—is giving decisionmakers undeniable evidence that change is needed right now. “When we talk about climate change, we’re not talking about the future. The cost of inaction is that we pay with people’s lives,” says Marina Romanello, the organization’s executive director.

    But, she says, we shouldn’t see this just as a doomsday scenario. “Much of tackling climate change is what we need to do to have a better quality of life,” Romanello says. The byproducts of action are greener cities, cleaner air, and healthier, more affordable diets. Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health this month, Romanello sat down with WIRED to talk about what we do and don’t know about the health risks of inaction, and why acting now is for the good of everyone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    WIRED: How is climate change impacting health right now?

    Marina Romanello: Each year, the impacts of climate change on health are getting worse, across every single indicator we measure. We’re seeing extreme heat events, extreme storms, floods, and droughts increasingly affecting people’s health, both through direct harm but also indirectly—they impact food systems, water quality, and the transmission of infectious diseases like dengue and malaria, which are spreading into new parts of the world.

    Climate change also influences socioeconomic conditions. Heat exposure lowers labor productivity, which undermines many people’s incomes and in turn their ability to sustain good mental and physical health.

    That’s a lot. How are you keeping track of all of that?

    We monitor over 50 indicators, using different techniques, tools, and models according to the type of risk that we’re monitoring. Sometimes we’re monitoring changing environmental hazards—so the changing occurrence, frequency, and intensity of extreme events that threaten people’s health.

    We also measure some indirect health impacts of climate change. For example, we monitor self-reported food insecurity. And then sometimes, we combine measures together. For instance, we’ve been able to link self-reported food insecurity to the increased frequency of heat waves, to show that 127 million more people reported food insecurity in 2022 compared to the 1990s average, because of climate change.

    How are these impacts distributed? Are there any parts of the world where climate change isn’t affecting health?

    No part of the world is safe, but hazards and effects aren’t evenly distributed. Europe, for example, is warming rapidly, and because it has a large elderly population and a high incidence of non-communicable diseases, it has the highest rate of death from extreme heat in the world.

    Elsewhere, extreme droughts are affecting people, for example in the Horn of Africa, where it’s causing acute hunger. Then in South America, dengue is spreading. In parts of Africa and Asia more areas are becoming suitable for malaria transmission. So the impacts of climate change are being felt everywhere but in different ways.

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    Rob Reddick

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  • Cleveland Selected for Bloomberg Sustainable Cities Initiative, Will Receive Millions to Fight Climate Change

    Cleveland Selected for Bloomberg Sustainable Cities Initiative, Will Receive Millions to Fight Climate Change

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    click to enlarge

    Mark Oprea

    Lakeview Terrace, one of the oldest public housing projects in the country, has long been a site struggling with air pollution.

    Cleveland will be one of 25 U.S. cities in the sights of Michael Bloomberg’s years-long fight against climate change.

    The city is set to receive part of a $200 million pot, an announcement Tuesday proclaimed, from Bloomberg’s American Sustainable Cities initiative to “pursue transformative solutions in the buildings and transportation sectors.”

    Those dollars, a release from the city said, will also fund a Cleveland-based team of three that will evaluate how handle the city’s climate worries through a marriage of data analysis and a concern for social equity.

    Cleveland was one of four Ohio cities—including Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton— to join the initiative. From Mayor Justin Bibb’s perspective, it will allow the city to hone in on the more impoverished, majority Black neighborhoods that could use that dollar lift the most.

    Bloomberg’s grant “will support equitable and more rapid implementation of historical funding at the neighborhood level, enhancing resources in our historically disadvantaged communities and reducing the racial wealth gap,” Bibb said in a release. “Through this collaborative effort, we will continue to work with residents and key stakeholders to achieve a more equitable and environmentally resilient city for all Clevelanders.”

    Millions of dollars should provide a major lift to Cleveland’s Public Works and transportation sectors to help actualize a myriad of projects in the pipeline, the grant language suggests. Theoretically, ongoing concepts and in-progress builds with climate perks—like Ohio City’s Irishtown Bend Park, Canal Basin Park, or the dozens of streets downtown that NOACA believes could use bike lanes—could receive funding.

    As for the other areas of climate concern, the potential for this cash to help is a lot more vague. Regional problems with air quality, flooding and a disappearing tree canopy continue.

    Nationally-speaking, Cleveland is a lot less of a thorn in the side of climate activists than other industrial cities, like those in Pennsylvania and California. Cleveland didn’t even touch the top 25 of the American Lung Association’s “most polluted cities” in its 2023 State of the Air report. (It ranked as one of its Cleanest Cities, minding ozone and particle pollution.)

    As for Michael Bloomberg himself, this initiative represents the former New York mayor’s long-running battle to bring down the fossil fuel industry, while injecting money into climate-focused cities worldwide with billions of dollars since 2013. A recent report from the Sierra Club stated that Bloomberg’s $500 million of climate activism in recent years “helped retire” 370 coal and gas plants nationwide.

    He’s now, according to a New York Times article from last September, going after petrochemical plants, while propping up cities that want bike lanes and healthier air.

    “If there’s something that can destroy the Earth and kill all living people, then it’s hard to argue you shouldn’t focus on that,” Bloomberg told the NYT. “I want my kids, your kids, to be able to have a life.”

    Bloomberg’s initiative team chose Cleveland, a release said, “based on its leadership and ambition to build resilient, equitable communities.”

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    Mark Oprea

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  • COLUMN: Should schools teach climate activism? – The Hechinger Report

    COLUMN: Should schools teach climate activism? – The Hechinger Report

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    Yancy Sanes teaches a unit on the climate crisis at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx – not climate change, but the climatecrisis. He is unequivocal that he wants his high school students to be climate activists.

    “I teach from a mindset and lens that I want to make sure my students are becoming activists, and it’s not enough just talking about it,” the science and math teacher said. “I need to take my students outside and have them actually do the work of protesting.”

    The school partners with local environmental justice organizations to advocate for a greener Bronx. Sanes recently took some students to a rally that called for shutting down the jail on Rikers Island and replacing it with a solar energy farm, wastewater treatment plant and battery storage facility.

    Sanes gets a lot of support for this approach from his administration. Social justice is a core value of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, and the school also belongs to a special assessment consortium, giving it more freedom in what is taught than a typical New York City public high school.

    For Sanes, who grew up in the neighborhood and graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer himself, getting his students involved in activism is a key way to give them agency and protect their mental health as they learn what’s happening to the planet. “This is a topic that is very depressing. I don’t want to just end this unit with ‘things are really bad,’ but ‘what can we do, how are we fighting back’.” Indeed, climate anxiety is widespread among young people, and collective action has been identified as one way to ameliorate it.

    Related: Teaching ‘action civics’ engages kids – and ignites controversy

    Sanes is at the far end of the teaching spectrum when it comes to promoting climate activism, not to mention discussing controversial issues of any kind in his classroom. Conservative activists have already begun branding even basic instruction about climate change as “left-wing indoctrination.” The think tank Rand recently reported in its 2023 State of the American Teacher survey that two-thirds of teachers nationally said they were limiting discussions about political and social issues in class. The authors of the report observed that there seemed to be a spillover effect from states that have passed new laws restricting topics like race and gender, to states where no such laws are on the books. 

    The current level of political polarization is having a chilling effect, making civics education into a third rail, according to Holly Korbey, an education reporter and the author of a 2019 book on civics education, “Building Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All.” “We are living in this time where there’s increased scrutiny on what schools are telling kids,” she said.

    She said that, as a mom living in deep-red Tennessee, she wouldn’t be happy to have a teacher bringing her kids to protests. “I really don’t want schools to tell my kids to be activists. I think about how I personally feel about issues and flip that around.  Would I be okay with teachers doing that? And the answer is no.”

    Even Sanes has a line he won’t cross. He taught his students about Greta Thunberg and her school strikes, but he stopped short of encouraging his students to do the same. “I specifically cannot tell students, you gotta walk out of school,” he said. “That goes against my union.”

    Yancy Sanes (front left, with green sign) brings his students to rallies to advocate for a greener Bronx. Credit: Image provided by Yancy Sanes

    And yet, there is a broad bipartisan consensus that schools have an obligation to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy. And, emerging best practices in civics education include something called “action civics,” in which teachers in civics and government classes guide kids to take action locally on issues they choose. Nonprofits like Generation Citizen and the Mikva Challenge, Korbey said, cite internal research that these kinds of activist-ish activities improve knowledge, civic skills, and motivation to remain involved in politics or their local community. Others have argued that without a robust understanding of the workings of government, “action civics” provides a “sugar rush” without enough substance.

    Related: The climate change lesson plans teachers need and don’t have

    Even at the college level, it’s rare for students to study climate activism in particular, or political activism more generally. And this leads to a broader lack of knowledge about how power works in society, say some experts.

    “Having visited many, many departments in many schools over the years, I’m shocked at how few places, particularly policy schools, teach social movements,” said sociologist Dana Fisher. Fisher is currently teaching a graduate course called “Global Environmental Politics: Activism and the Environment,” and she also has a new book out about climate activism,“Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.”She’s taught about social movements for two decades at American University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maryland-College Park.

    “It’s crazy to me that, given that the civil society sector is such a huge part of democracy, there would not be a focus on that,” she added.

    When she got to college, Jayda Walden discovered urban forestry and climate activism. “I am a tree girl,” she said. “The impact that they have is very important.” Credit: Image provided by Jada Walden

    Through empirical research, Fisher’s work counters stereotypes and misconceptions about climate activism. For example, she’s found that disruptive forms of protest like blocking a road or throwing soup on a masterpiece are effective even when they’re unpopular. ”It doesn’t draw support for the disruption. It draws support for more moderate parts of the movement,” she said. “And so it helps to expand the base.”

    As an illustration of the ignorance about disruptive action and civil disobedience in particular, Fisher noted K-12 students rarely hear about the topic unless studying the 1960s era, and “a very sanitized version. They don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement was really unpopular and had a very active radical flank that was doing sit-ins and marches.”

    In 12 years of public school in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, Jada Walden learned very little about activism, including environmental activism. She learned a bit in school about the Civil Rights Movement, although most of what she remembers about it are “the things your grandmother teaches you.”

    Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

    Walden didn’t hear much about climate change either until she got to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge. “When I got to college, there’s activism everywhere for all types of stuff,” she said.

    She’d enrolled with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. “When I first got there. I just wanted to hit my books, get my degree,” she recalled. “But my advisors, they pushed for so much more.” She became passionate about climate justice and the human impact on the environment, and ended up majoring in urban forestry. She was a student member of This Is Planet Ed’s Higher Education Climate Action Task Force (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor.) 

    If it were up to her, Walden would require all college students to study the climate crisis, and do independent research to learn how it will affect them personally. “Make it personal for them. Help them connect. It will make a world of difference.”

    Korbey, the “Building Better Citizens” author, would agree with that approach. “Schools exist to give students knowledge, not to create activists,” she said. “The thing we’re doing very poorly is give kids the knowledge they need to become good citizens.”

    This column about teaching climate activism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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

    Join us today.

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    Anya Kamenetz

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  • Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World’s Groundwater Supply

    Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World’s Groundwater Supply

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    That is certainly the case in Yemen, on the south flank of the Arabian Peninsula, where the desert sands have a new look these days. Satellite images show around 100,000 solar panels glinting in the sun, surrounded by green fields. Hooked to water pumps, the panels provide free energy for farmers to pump out ancient underground water. They are irrigating crops of khat, a shrub whose narcotic leaves are the country’s stimulant of choice, chewed through the day by millions of men.

    For these farmers, the solar irrigation revolution in Yemen is born of necessity. Most crops will only grow if irrigated, and the country’s long civil war has crashed the country’s electricity grid and made supplies of diesel fuel for pumps expensive and unreliable. So, they are turning en masse to solar power to keep the khat coming.

    The panels have proved an instant hit, says Middle East development researcher Helen Lackner of SOAS University of London. Everybody wants one. But in the hydrological free-for-all, the region’s underground water, a legacy of wetter times, is running out.

    The solar-powered farms are pumping so hard that they have triggered “a significant drop in groundwater since 2018 … in spite of above average rainfall,” according to an analysis by Leonie Nimmo, a researcher who was until recently at the UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory. The spread of solar power in Yemen “has become an essential and life-saving source of power,” both to irrigate food crops and provide income from selling khat, he says, but it is also “rapidly exhausting the country’s scarce groundwater reserves.”

    In the central Sana’a Basin, Yemen’s agricultural heartland, more than 30 percent of farmers use solar pumps. In a report with Musaed Aklan, a water researcher at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, Lackner predicts a “complete shift” to solar by 2028. But the basin may be down to its last few years of extractable water. Farmers who once found water at depths of 100 feet or less are now pumping from 1,300 feet or more.

    Some 1,500 miles to the northeast, in in the desert province of Helmand in Afghanistan, more than 60,000 opium farmers have in the past few years given up on malfunctioning state irrigation canals and switched to tapping underground water using solar water pumps. As a consequence, water tables have been falling typically by 10 feet per year, according to David Mansfield, an expert on the country’s opium industry from the London School of Economics.

    An abrupt ban on opium production imposed by Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers in 2022 may offer a partial reprieve. But the wheat that the farmers are growing as a replacement is also a thirsty crop. So, water bankruptcy in Helmand may only be delayed.

    “Very little is known about the aquifer [in Helmand], its recharge or when and if it might run dry,” according to Mansfield. But if their pumps run dry, many of the million-plus people in the desert province could be left destitute, as this vital desert resource—the legacy of rainfall in wetter times—disappears for good.

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    Fred Pearce

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  • International Womens Day, 2024 – Inside Women Dominated Seaweed Farms in Kenyas Indian Ocean Waters

    International Womens Day, 2024 – Inside Women Dominated Seaweed Farms in Kenyas Indian Ocean Waters

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    Seaweed farming using the off-bottom seaweed farming approach—tying algal fonds or seaweed seeds to ropes attached between wooden pegs driven into the ocean sediment. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    • by Joyce Chimbi (mwazaro beach, kenya)
    • Inter Press Service

    MWAZARO BEACH, Kenya, Mar 08 (IPS) – As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, IPS brings a story of women who are both creating economic opportunities for themselves and helping to reduce the impact of climate change.Nearly two kilometers into the Indian Ocean from the Mwazaro beach coastline in Lunga Lunga Sub-County, Kwale County, women can be spotted seated in the shallow ocean waters or tying strings to erected poles parallel to the waves. It is a captivating sight to see rows of seaweed farms in the Indian Ocean.

    Seaweeds are a group of algae found in seawater and come in green, red, and brown species. The seaweed farms are a predominantly female-dominated form of aquaculture and their owners can only be spotted during low tide, especially in the morning. Once the tide comes in, the women will begin their journey back to the shores as the waters slowly rise.

    Saumu Hamadi tells IPS that in 2016, residents of Mwambao village along the Mwazaro beach coastline started a community-led, community-driven initiative to conserve mangroves, protect the environment, and restore their fisheries, which had been destroyed by significant mangrove forest degradation.

    “We realized that the more our mangroves disappeared, the fish ran away and so did the fishermen. We rely on fish for food and money. Men sell the big fish, such as the kingfish, shark, and rayfish, to the beach hotels, and women sell crabs and prawns by the roadside or in small village markets. The situation was threatening our daily bread and we decided to volunteer as a community to restore and protect our mangroves,” Hamadi explains.

    Rehema Abdalla walking to her seaweed farm, located nearly 1.7 km away from Mwazaro Beach coastline. Seaward farming is conducted in the ocean during low tides. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    Rehema Abdalla walking to her seaweed farm, located nearly 1.7 km away from the Mwazaro Beach coastline. Seaward farming is conducted in the ocean during low tides. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    Rehema Abdalla and Saumu Hamadi walking to their seaweed farms, where other women are already hard at work, sorting and packing their harvests. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    Rehema Abdalla and Saumu Hamadi walking to their seaweed farms, where other women are already hard at work, sorting and packing their harvests. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    Rehema Abdalla and Saumu Hamadi weigh seaweed using a home scale. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    Rehema Abdalla and Saumu Hamadi weigh seaweed using a home scale. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
    Women at work at the seaweed farm. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

    “There were too many people cutting down mangrove trees, destroying the places that the fish we depend on call home. There was also a lot of soil erosion and the water flowing along the River Hamisi that pours into the Indian Ocean within this village’s coastline carried the soil into the ocean, polluting it. We formed two community groups: Mwambao Mkuyuni Youth and Bati Beach Mwambao. Women make up 80 percent of the members in both groups.”

    Abdalla Bidii Lewa, a community coordinator on mangrove restoration in Pongwe Kikoneni ward where Mwambao village is located and chair of Bati Seaweed Farmers, tells IPS, “Mangroves have protected our villages and surrounding areas from extreme weather and disasters such as those that affected large parts of the coastal region during the heavy floods in November and early December 2023. Where houses were swept away and farmlands destroyed, we were safe from the disaster.”

    Seaweed farming.Credit: Joyce Chimbi and Cecilia Russell/IPS
    Seaweed farming.Credit: Joyce Chimbi and Cecilia Russell/IPS

    Research shows mangroves significantly prevent the progression of climate change while also playing a major role in limiting its impact. This is critical as temperatures rise dangerously, sea level shoots to alarming levels, and coastal climate-induced disasters become frequent, intense, and severe, with catastrophic results.

    To avert coastal climate hazards and secure mangrove-related benefits for present and future generations, the community undertook mangrove conservation and restoration activities in earnest.

    Then, in 2017, a scientist conducting research into seaweed farming using the off-bottom seaweed farming method—tying algal fonds or seaweed seeds to ropes attached between wooden pegs driven into the ocean sediment—approached women in the community.

    “Of the two seaweed strains that grow on Kenya’s south coast, cottonii and spinosum, the scientist recommended that we plant spinosum and gave us the seeds. Seaweeds do not need something to grow on. We erect sticks into the ground inside the ocean water during low tides and plant seaweed seeds by tying them to strings fastened on these sticks. We harvest every 45 days. We have to tie the strings and place the sticks properly so that they are not swept away during high tides,” says Rehema Abdalla, a seaweed farmer in Mwambao village.

    On concerns that aquaculture could form the entry point for mangrove degradation, Hamadi says, “It is not the case with seaweed. The mangroves are important to the survival of our seaweeds by ensuring that we have normal, safe tides and waves. When seaweeds are swept away, they stay trapped within the roots of the mangroves and we collect them from there. It is rare, but once in a while, the tides can be very strong.”

    Lewa says seaweed farming is emerging as a new and sustainable climate change mitigation strategy while offering communities adjacent to mangroves and coastlines an alternative livelihood, reducing dependency on fishing and natural resources inside mangrove forests and the oceans. Seaweeds are superfoods, highly nutritious, can be used in sushi, soups, salads, and smoothies, and are an asset in the feed industry, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.

    “The amount of seaweed harvested depends on the amount planted and every 45 days, you will get a harvest. At the moment, one kilogram of seaweed goes for USD 22 (Ksh 35). I am currently targeting making USD 467 (Ksh 75,000) every 45 days from seaweed. We also sell seaweed seeds to other women doing mangrove conservation, such as Imani Gazi and the Gazi Women Mangrove Restoration Group, from within Kwale County,” Hamadi says.

    Seaweeds compliment mangroves by absorbing nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon dioxide. They do not require soil, fertilizer, freshwater, or pesticides, and they significantly improve the environment in which they grow. Seaweeds efficiently absorb carbon dioxide, using it to grow and even when harvested, the carbon remains in the ocean.

    Research shows that seaweed can pull more greenhouse gases from the water compared to seagrass, salt marshes, and mangroves based on biomass. Mwazaro’s beach community is on track to add seaweed as part of their blue carbon sink, setting the pace for other coastal communities.

    All the same, the women are facing challenges such as a lack of mortar boats to help transport their harvest to the shore. Currently, they use a tedious process whereby they tie sacks of seaweed on their waste and wait for the onset of high tide in the early afternoon to push them from the seaweed farms to the shore. They are also struggling to access a larger market, currently relying on one major large-scale buyer and small buyers within the village and other mangrove conservation groups from neighboring villages.

    IPS UN Bureau Report

    This feature is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.

    © Inter Press Service (2024) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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  • Everything Can Be Meat

    Everything Can Be Meat

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    Recently, a photo of rice left me confused. The rice itself looked tasty enough—fluffy, well formed—but its oddly fleshy hue gave me the creeps. According to the scientists who’d developed it, each pink-tinged grain was seeded with muscle and fat cells from a cow, imparting a nutty, umami flavor.

    In one sense, this “beef rice” was just another example of lab-grown meat, touted as a way to eat animals without the ethical and environmental impacts. Though not yet commercially available, the rice was developed by researchers in Korea as a nutrition-dense food that can be produced sustainably, at least more so than beef itself. Although it has a more brittle texture than normal rice, it can be cooked and served in the same way. Yet in another sense, this rice was entirely different. Lab-grown meat aims to replicate conventional meat in every dimension, including taste, nutrition, and appearance. Beef rice doesn’t even try.

    Maybe that’s a good thing. Lab-grown meat, also widely known as cultivated meat, has long been heralded as the future of food. But so far, the goal of perfectly replicating meat as we know it—toothy, sinewy, and sometimes bloody—has proved impractical and expensive. Once-abundant funding has dried up, and this week, Florida moved toward becoming the first state to ban sales of cultivated meat. It seems unlikely that whole cuts of cultivated meat will be showing up on people’s plates anytime soon—but maybe something like beef rice could. The most promising future of lab-grown meat may not look like meat at all, at least as we’ve always known it.

    The promise of cultivated meat is that you can have your steak and eat it too. Unlike the meatless offerings at your grocery store, cultivated meat is meat—just created without killing any animals. But the science just isn’t there yet. Companies have more or less figured out the first step, taking a sample of cells from a live animal or egg and propagating them in a tank filled with a nutrient-rich broth. Though not cheaply: By one estimate, creating a slurry of cultivated cells costs $17 a pound or more to produce.

    The next step has proved prohibitively challenging: coaxing that sludge of cells to mature into different types—fat, muscle, connective tissue—and arranging them in a structure resembling a solid cut of meat. Usually, the cells need a three-dimensional platform to guide their growth, known as a scaffold. “It’s something that is very easy to get wrong and hard to get right,” Claire Bomkamp, a senior scientist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit supporting meat alternatives, told me. So far, a few companies have served up proofs of concept: In June, the United States approved the sale of cultivated chicken from Upside Foods and Good Meat. However it is virtually impossible to come by now.

    The basic science of lab-grown meat can be used for more than just succulent chicken breasts and medium-rare steaks. Cells grown in a tank function essentially like ground meat, imparting a meaty flavor and mouthfeel to whatever they are added to, behaving more like an ingredient or a seasoning than a food product. Hybrid meat products, made by mixing a small amount of cultivated-meat cells with other ingredients, are promising because they would be more cost-effective than entire lab-grown steaks or chicken breasts but meatier than purely plant-based meat.

    Already, the start-up SciFi Foods is producing what has been described as a “fatty meat paste” that is intended to be mixed with plant-based ingredients to make burgers. Only small amounts are needed to make the burgers beefy; each costs less than $10 to make, according to the company—still considerably more than a normal beef patty, but the prices should come down over time. Maybe it sounds weird, but that’s not so different from imitation crab—which doesn’t contain much or any crab at all. A similar premise underlies the plant-based bacon laced with cultivated pork fat that I tried last year. Was it meat? I’m not sure. Did it taste like it? Absolutely.

    Meat can be so much more than what we’ve always known. “We don’t have to make meat the same way that it’s always come out of an animal,” Bomkamp said. “We can be a little bit more expansive in what our definition of meat is.” Beef rice, which essentially uses rice as a miniature scaffold to grow cow cells, falls into this category. It isn’t particularly meaty—only 0.5 percent of each grain is cow—but the scientists who developed it say the proportion could change in future iterations. It’s framed as a way to feed people in “underdeveloped countries, during war, and in space.”

    Eventually, cultivated meat could impart a whiff of meatiness to blander foods, creating new, meat-ish products in the process that are more sustainable than regular meat and more nutritious than plants. Beef rice is one option; meat grown on mushroom roots is in development. Even stranger foods are possible. Bomkamp envisions using the technology to make thin sheets of seafood—combining elements of salmon, tuna, and shrimp—to wrap around a rainbow roll of sushi. In this scenario, cultivated meat probably won’t save the planet from climate change and animal suffering. “It wouldn’t serve its original function of being a direct replacement for commercial meat,” Daniel Rosenfeld, who studies perceptions of cultivated meat at UCLA, told me. But at the very least, it could provide another dinner option.

    Of course, it’s in the interest of the cultivated-meat industry to suggest that cultivated meat isn’t just outright doomed. No doubt some vegetarians would cringe at the thought, as would some dedicated carnivores. But considering how much meat Americans eat, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which cultivated cells satisfy people searching for a new kind of meat product. Imagine the salad you could make with chicken cells grown inside arugula, or bread baked with bacon-infused wheat. But should those prove too difficult to produce, I’d happily take a bowl of beef rice, in all its flesh-tinged glory.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • February 2024 was the hottest on record, with global temperatures surpassing critical climate threshold

    February 2024 was the hottest on record, with global temperatures surpassing critical climate threshold

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    The world has marked yet another consecutive month of record-breaking heat. New data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change monitoring service, shows that last month was the hottest February on record globally, with “exceptionally high” temperatures in both the air and sea. 

    The record heat comes as the U.S. continues to battle weather extremes. In recent weeks, communities across the nation have seen spring- and summer-like temperatures, extreme rain and flooding, massive snowfall, and fire weather conditions that drove Texas’ largest-ever wildfire that quickly became one of the biggest in U.S. history. Those kinds of extremes are a byproduct of the climate change-fueled rise in global temperatures, and are only expected to become more frequent and intense as warming continues. 

    Daily temperature chart showing warming
    Daily global average surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to estimated values for 1850-1900 plotted as time series for each year from Jan. 1, 1940 to March 3, 2024.

    C3S/ECMWF


    According to Copernicus, the average global surface air temperature in February was 13.54 degrees Celsius (roughly 56.4 degrees Fahrenheit). That is 1.77 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for February, leading it to become the ninth consecutive month where each month was the warmest on record globally. That comes after 2023 broke the record for the warmest year.

    The highest February temperatures, deemed “exceptionally high,” were seen within the first two weeks of the month, Copernicus found. Scientists with the group said that the daily global average temperature during that time reached 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average on four consecutive days, from Feb. 8 to 11. 

    pr-fig4-timeseries-era5-sst-daily-60s-60n-1979-2024.png
    Daily sea surface temperature (°C) averaged over the extra-polar global ocean (60°S–60°N) for 2015 (dark blue), 2016 (light blue), 2020 (yellow), 2023 (red), and 2024 (black line). All other years between 1979 and 2022 are shown with grey lines. 

    Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF


    The world’s oceans — which absorb 90% of Earth’s heat — also saw record high temperatures. Copernicus found that the average global sea surface temperature for February was 21.06 degrees Celsius (69.9 degrees Fahrenheit), which the agency said is “the highest for any month in the dataset.” 

    Such high ocean temperatures only add to the cycle of global warming. Warming oceans lead to melting sea ice, which is vital in reflecting the sun’s rays to help maintain cooler temperatures. Without the ice, sea levels continue to rise and temperatures continue to increase, two factors that fuel extreme weather events. 

    Warmer oceans also lead to rampant coral bleaching, further threatening marine ecosystems and economies.

    global map of sea surface temperatures

    Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF


    Climate scientists have long warned of several climate thresholds that put the world at further risk of weather extremes that threaten people worldwide, primarily those who live along coasts and on islands. Those thresholds include reaching several years of global temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or an even more dire 2 degrees of warming. January marked the first time on record that global average temperatures reached the 1.5 degree warming threshold over a 12-month period. 

    February surpassing those milestones does not mean the world as a whole has surpassed the threshold, but it does indicate that human activities are continuing on a path of doing so. 

    Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said that while the data is “remarkable,” it’s “not really surprising as the continuous warming of the climate system inevitably leads to new temperature extremes.” 

    “The climate responds to the actual concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he said. “So unless we manage to stabilize those, we will inevitably face new global temperature records and their consequences.” 

    The recent records come amid an ongoing El Niño event that started last summer. The system occurs every two to seven years when the Pacific Ocean experiences “warmer-than-average” surface temperatures. The most recent El Niño peaked in December, and at that peak, the World Meteorological Organization said it was “one of the five strongest on record.” 

    “It’s now gradually weakening, but obviously it will continue to impact the global climate in the coming months,” WMO spokesperson Clare Nullis said at a recent briefing. “So even after it disappears completely, we will still feel the impacts of this event.” 

    This El Niño in particular was at least partially fueled by human activity, she said, as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, releasing greenhouse gases that essentially blanket the atmosphere, trapping in heat from the sun. 

    “El Niño is a naturally occurring event, but everything now, all El Niño events, all La Niña events, take place in the context of a climate which has been radically changed by human activities,” Nullis said. “We do expect above-normal temperatures in the coming months.” 

    Li Cohen


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    Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.

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  • Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea-Level Rise: They’re Also Sinking

    Cities Aren’t Prepared for a Crucial Part of Sea-Level Rise: They’re Also Sinking

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    Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical tap is still on—as rapid warming turns more and more polar ice into ocean water—and at the same time the tub is sinking into the floor.

    An alarming new study in the journal Nature shows how bad the problem could get in 32 coastal cities in the United States. Previous projections have studied geocentric sea-level rise, or how much the ocean is coming up along a given coastline. This new research considers relative sea-level rise, which also includes the vertical motion of the land. That’s possible thanks to new data from satellites that can measure elevation changes on very fine scales along coastlines.

    With that subsidence in mind, the study finds that those coastal areas in the US could see 500 to 700 square miles of additional land flooded by 2050, impacting an additional 176,000 to 518,000 people and causing up to $100 billion of further property damage. That’s on top of baseline estimates of the damage so far up to 2020, which has affected 530 to 790 square miles and 525,000 to 634,000 people, and cost between $100 billion and $123 billion.

    Overall, the study finds that 24 of the 32 coastal cities studied are subsiding by more than 2 millimeters a year. (One millimeter equals 0.04 inches.) “The combination of both the land sinking and the sea rising leads to this compounding effect of exposure for people,” says the study’s lead author, Leonard Ohenhen, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech. “When you combine both, you have an even greater hazard.”

    The issue is that cities have been preparing for projections of geocentric sea-level rise, for instance with sea walls. Through no fault of their own—given the infancy of satellite subsidence monitoring—they’ve been missing half the problem. “All the adaptation strategies at the moment that we have in place are based on rising sea levels,” says Manoochehr Shirzaei, an environmental security expert at Virginia Tech and a coauthor of the paper. “It means that the majority—if not all—of those adaptation strategies are overestimating the time that we have for those extreme consequences of sea-level rise. Instead of having 40 years to prepare, in some cases we have only 10.”

    Subsidence can happen naturally, for instance when loose sediments settle over time, or because of human activity, such as when cities extract too much groundwater and their aquifers collapse like empty water bottles. In extreme cases, this can result in dozens of feet of subsidence. The sheer weight of coastal cities like New York is also pushing down on the ground, leading to further sinking.

    Courtesy of Leonard Ohenhen, Virginia Tech

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    Matt Simon

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  • Downers Grove North hosts Climate of Hope conference, helping empower science teachers in classroom

    Downers Grove North hosts Climate of Hope conference, helping empower science teachers in classroom

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    DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. (WLS) — Glaciers are melting, coral reefs are disappearing, and storms are becoming more intense.

    “Sometimes climate change seems gloom and doom and we don’t want that to be the case because oftentimes people just shut down,” said Jeff Grant, a science teacher at Downers Grove High School.

    That gloom and doom makes it hard to be a science teacher these days. But on Friday they got a little bit of hope at the first-ever Climate of Hope conference.

    Held at Downers Grove North High School, science educators Jeff Grant and Mike Heinz brought bright scientific minds together to arm teachers with knowledge and new hands-on classroom activities.

    “We’re empowering teachers to go out and teach this because it’s going to be the next generation that has to solve it,” said Heinz, the school’s science department chair.

    READ ALSO: Loyola University Chicago students fueling shuttle buses with biodiesel made by used vegetable oil

    “Teachers need to see the actual lessons, they need to feel the actual lessons before they’re willing to try it out their own, because it takes a lot of time to incorporate something into a classroom,” said Grant. “They don’t want a dud, so to speak.”

    One of the “coolest” parts of the conference was this show-stopping ice core from an ice sheet in Greenland.

    The precious cargo was shipped in from a U.S. Geological Society facility in Colorado where thousands more are stored.

    “This one, according to the data that they sent to us, appears to have been laid down on the earth in 725 A.D., so a little over 2000 years old. And so we’re very lucky to have it,” explained Heinz.

    They were also lucky to have glaciologist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Richard Alley, who helped explain why ice cores are so important to understanding earth’s history.

    “In there are bubbles of old air that show how much CO2 once was in the atmosphere. There are indicators of how dusty it was. There are indicators of how many cosmic rays there were there indicators just all kinds of things,” said Alley. “And you can read the history of the climate in these two-mile time machines that are coming out of the ice cores.”

    In addition to ice cores and climate change, the goal of the conference was to give teachers some peace of mind and to help them keep their cool when educating the next generation.

    “To empower these teachers so that they feel confident and collected and ready to tackle the next day and climate change at the same time,” said Grant. “We don’t want them to be hot we want them to be cool, right, like climate change.”

    MAKING HEADLINES: Man suffers scorpion sting while sleeping at Las Vegas hotel: lawsuit

    Copyright © 2024 WLS-TV. All Rights Reserved.

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    Tracy Butler

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  • California man is first in the US to be charged with smuggling greenhouse gases, prosecutors say

    California man is first in the US to be charged with smuggling greenhouse gases, prosecutors say

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    SAN DIEGO — A Southern California man was arrested Monday on suspicion of smuggling refrigerants into the U.S. from Mexico and federal prosecutors said he’s the first person to be charged with violating regulations intended to curb the use of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

    The indictment alleges Michael Hart, of San Diego, smuggled the ozone-depleting chemicals across the border concealed under a tarp and tools in his vehicle. He posted them for sale on the internet, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

    Hart was arraigned Monday afternoon and pleaded not guilty to 13 charges including conspiracy, sale of prohibited materials and illegal importation, the statement said.

    It’s the first prosecution in the U.S. to include charges related to a 2020 law that prohibits the importation of hydrofluorocarbons, commonly used as refrigerants, without permission from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to prosecutors.

    “This is the first time the Department of Justice is prosecuting someone for illegally importing greenhouse gases, and it will not be the last,” U.S. Attorney Tara McGrath said in a statement. “We are using every means possible to protect our planet from the harm caused by toxic pollutants, including bringing criminal charges.”

    Hydrofluorocarbons are regulated under the Clean Air Act. They are used in applications such as refrigeration, air-conditioning, building insulation, fire extinguishing systems and aerosols.

    Hart was ordered to return to court March 25.

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  • One of the world’s most populated cities is nearly out of water as many go “days if not weeks” without it

    One of the world’s most populated cities is nearly out of water as many go “days if not weeks” without it

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    Mexico City is home to nearly 22 million people. But for months, the sprawling city has been suffering from diminishing water supplies — and now, one of the world’s most populated cities is on the verge of a “day zero” where it will no longer have enough water to provide residents.  

    Citing the Water Basin Organization of the Valley of Mexico, local outlet La Razón de México reported last week that officials fear this “day zero” — when the Cutzamala System will no longer have enough water for residents — could come on June 26 and last until September. Locals are already struggling to have enough water, with many going “days, if not weeks, without running water in their houses,” CBS News contributor Enrique Acevedo said. 

    “There’s been water scarcity, water management, in the city that we haven’t seen in at least a decade,” he said. “Gyms here in Mexico City and other public parks had to start limiting the number of guests they have taking showers and using their facilities because a lot of people were taking advantage of their memberships to use water at those facilities.” 

    Local resident Juan Ortega told Reuters in January that among the rules implemented to try and conserve water is “cars are no longer washed.” 

    “The garden, the grass, is never watered, only the plants so that they don’t die,” he said. “We are going to start reusing water from washing machines for watering.” 

    One of The World's Most Populated Cities On The Edge of Water Scarcity
    A woman fills a bucket with bottled water at an apartment unit in the Las Peñas neighborhood in Iztapalapa on February 27, 2024 in Mexico City, Mexico.

    TOYA SARNO JORDAN / Getty Images


    Arturo Gracia, who runs a coffee shop in the area, said that his business has to pay for a water truck to supply water to toilets and other essentials. 

    “It’s affecting us a lot,” he said. “And I don’t think it’s just us. This is happening in several neighborhoods.” 

    These issues have been exacerbated as Mexico City battled high temperatures last week. Mexico City’s water system SACMEX said on Feb. 27 that temperatures were recorded as high as nearly 85 degrees Fahrenheit. This week, temperatures are expected to reach nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit with minimal cloud coverage, according to The Weather Channel. 

    It’s an “unprecedented situation,” Rafael Carmona, director of SACMEX, told Reuters, with a lack of rain being a major factor. Rainfall in the region has decreased over the past four to five years, he said, leading to low storage in local dams. A lack of overall water in the supply systems, combined with the high population, created “something that we had not experienced during this administration, nor in previous administrations,” he said. 

    Most of Mexico is experiencing some form of drought, with many areas experiencing the highest levels of “extreme” and “exceptional,” according to the country’s drought monitor. In October, 75% of the country was experiencing drought, the Associated Press reported, while the country’s rainy season doesn’t start until around May. 

    One of The World's Most Populated Cities On The Edge of Water Scarcity
    Women wash clothes on the dry banks of the Villa Victoria dam, which is at 30.5 percent of its capacity on February 28, 2024 in Villa Victoria, Mexico. 

    / Getty Images


    On top of the drought, Acevedo said that “poor water management” has also been a major contributor to the problem. 

    “We’ve had a lot of underwater leaks. … Some figures say up to 40% of the water that’s been wasted in the city comes from underground leaks. There’s also some residential leaks,” he said. 

    Several leaks were reported by SACMEX at the beginning of February, which the supplier said it was working to correct. Many of those leaks were “caused by variations in the pressures of the hydraulic network,” SACMEX said. 

    Not everyone, however, believes “day zero” will come so soon. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the government will be able to increase the water supply enough to avoid such an event this year, La Razón de México reported. Other researchers believe it’s something that could happen in the years ahead. 

    “It’s not that we have a day zero coming up,” Acevedo said, “but certainly we haven’t seen things be as bad as they are right now in a while.”  

    Li Cohen


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    Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.

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  • The Hidden Health Costs of Climate Change

    The Hidden Health Costs of Climate Change

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    Climate change kills. Since 2000, nearly four million people worldwide have lost their lives due to floods, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and other extreme weather events that have been linked to a steadily warming planet, according to a recent estimate in the journal Nature. That sweeping number can make it hard for any of us to grasp how the problem is touching health in our own small part of the world. Now, a new study in Nature Medicine provides some of that granular insight for people living in the U.S., exploring how climate-linked disasters affect visits to hospital emergency departments in counties nationwide, as well as related deaths in the aftermath of the disasters. The numbers, the researchers found, are troubling, with the hardest-hit communities showing mortality rates as much as 3.8 times higher than those in surrounding areas.

    “This could be a significant strain for hospitals and emergency departments, especially if they are damaged, lack power, or are short-staffed,” says Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study.

    To conduct their work, Salas and her co-authors surveyed health records in emergency departments of major hospitals in more than 4,800 counties nationwide that had suffered billion-dollar storms—measured by property loss, insurance claims, the cost of government recovery efforts, and more—from 2011 to 2016. They focused their research on Medicare patients only, for a number of reasons. People with private insurance may pick up or lose coverage as they change jobs, making for an incomplete dataset, while Medicare coverage, once begun, is typically continued for life. What’s more, senior citizens make up the population most vulnerable to death, injury, or illness related to climate change. Finally, Medicare is taxpayer funded, and studying the health effects of climate change—and the hit on the public pocketbook that results—is important in establishing policy going forward.

    “Health costs are not currently incorporated into the total economic costs of these disasters,” says Salas.

    In counties that sustained the most damage from any climate-related event, emergency department use and mortality remained elevated by 1.22% and 1.4% respectively for at least one week after the event, compared to surrounding counties that suffered less damage. Those numbers may seem relatively small. But in counties for which followup data were available, the study found that those hospital visits and deaths remained elevated for up to six weeks, leading to a mortality rate 2.5 times higher than in counties that suffered less damage from the event.

    Read More: Climate Change Isn’t Just a Global Threat—It’s a Public Health Emergency

    Acute health problems—like smoke inhalation from wildfires, dehydration, or heat stroke from soaring temperatures—led to the greatest number of immediate visits to emergency departments or deaths. But other kinds of harm played out more slowly. Contaminated water or mold-related infections can damage health, as can loss of power that cuts off air conditioning and such essential health devices as CPAP machines. Closures of hospitals and the inability to access needed medicines may play a role too.

    “People are likely to be harmed over the longer term by the things the extreme weather event caused,” says Salas. Most of the time, she adds, reports of deaths and injuries do not consider “the long tails these events appear to be having on some of the most vulnerable.”

    The climate events themselves can have their own kind of long tails. Wildfires and droughts that were documented in the study tended to last about 200 to 300 days, causing elevated sickness and injury the entire time. As time goes on, those kinds of mega-crises are becoming more common. Data cited in the study and drawn from the National Centers for Environmental Information and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that billion-dollar events account for up to 80% of all climate-related damage in the U.S. Still, the remaining 20% is not without risks. The new study, says Salas, did not provide “a complete picture of all extreme weather events.”

    The world is bracing for a miserable few months when it comes to climate change. According to another study just published in Scientific Reports, a combination of greenhouse gasses and an especially intense El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean will result in a 90% likelihood of record-breaking global mean surface temperatures through the end of June. The areas that are predicted to see the greatest impact are the Philippines, the Caribbean, and the Bay of Bengal region; should the heating be even worse than what the model predicts, the Amazon and Alaska will suffer acutely too. The authors of the paper warn of wildfires, cyclones, and heatwaves that will challenge the ability of local populations to adapt to or mitigate the crises—especially populations in lower income parts of the world that lack the medical infrastructure of the U.S. and other highly industrialized nations.

    “Our longer-term findings are happening in a high-income country with a relatively robust health system,” says Salas. ”Death rates in low- and middle-income countries following tropical cyclones have been shown to be even greater, revealing that they may not be able to cope as well with these major climate-related disasters.”

    Climate change is a planet-wide problem. It also touches the health of every one of us—nation by nation, county by county, and person by person.

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    Jeffrey Kluger

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  • OPINION: How to help children cope with ‘climate anxiety’ in a warming world – The Hechinger Report

    OPINION: How to help children cope with ‘climate anxiety’ in a warming world – The Hechinger Report

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    Samantha, 11, asks her seventh grade teacher’s permission to leave the classroom each time the subject of climate change comes up.

    Samantha, from a small town in Massachusetts, sees stories about climate change on social media and in the news. She has asked her family about it, and while not wanting to scare her, they acknowledge the disastrous impact that climate change is increasingly having on our planet, including the connection between Earth’s rising temperatures and the increase in extreme storms and wildfires.

    It is because Samantha knows all of this that the mere mention of climate change triggers her anxiety. Samantha’s parents are at a loss about how to help her. Unfortunately, a growing number of children and their parents are grappling with similar emotions.

    Mental health clinicians and researchers have begun to notice and document what they call climate anxiety or eco-anxiety, which is defined as chronic stress caused by concern over the effects of climate change. According to an international group of researchers, specific symptoms of this phenomenon among children and young adults include intense feelings of sadness, anger, powerlessness, helplessness and guilt — all of which can fuel more general and severe anxiety or depression. Therefore, while combatting climate change itself, we must also address the anxiety that it is causing.

    Another study confirms the finding that depression, general and severe anxiety and “extreme emotions such as sadness, anger and fear” are all mental health outcomes associated with eco-anxiety. These mental health challenges are not pathological, but considered to be normal human responses to a rapidly changing world.

    Related: How the effects of climate change threaten student mental health

    Meanwhile, they can contribute to inaction: A national survey found that nearly 50 percent of Americans age 18 and over are fatalistic when it comes to climate change, believing that individual actions make no difference in changing its course. Yet actions are, of course, vital.

    Is the solution to climate change to hide its harms from children to protect their mental health? Of course not. Climate change is a real threat, one that needs immediate solutions involving people across the globe working together. In fact, the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change cites climate education as a key component of the global campaign to address this issue.

    One solution is to teach about climate change by focusing on strategies to address its consequences. The goal of climate education should not only be to teach students the scientific basis of climate change but also to empower them to address it — not thrust them into a state of despair.

    To this end, we need a climate education framework that provides facts about the problem, describes mitigation and adaptation strategies and fosters the resilience youth need to navigate their changing world and act. Below, we sketch out what this framework looks like.

    Solution-focused instructional design

    The framework’s academic content must include science classes that encourage students to explore the science of climate restoration and environmental protection — not just the impact of climate change. It must also include civics lessons about the role students can play, now and in the future, in influencing government policy related to climate adaptation and mitigation. Project-based learning, citizen science learning — such as NASA’s GLOBE program — and service-learning are positive, solution-oriented approaches that can be drawn on to inspire youth and prepare them to be tomorrow’s environmental stewards.

    Deeply integrated social and emotional learning

    But such academic content alone is not enough, even when focused on solutions. It is also essential to include social and emotional learning (SEL) in all aspects of climate change education.

    SEL is a much-discussed, research-based approach to helping students build emotional intelligence, acquire emotional agility and foster meaningful relationships. These emotional skills are key to young people’s success in school and in a rapidly changing world and include nonacademic skills such as regulating emotions, perspective-taking and setting and achieving goals.

    Some of SEL’s core social-emotional competencies can help students manage their climate change-related stress and prepare them to act. For example, SEL helps build capacity to manage emotions amid adversity; fosters social awareness skills, such as understanding group behaviors and influences; develops relationship skills, such as communicating effectively and collaborating with others; and nurtures self-management skills, such as channeling strong emotions into productive behaviors. Weaving SEL approaches into instruction could help bring a sense of agency to the many young people who are feeling anxiety and concern.

    We need to develop this climate education framework today, and we need to roll out curricula quickly and widely. There is no time to waste.

    Related: One state mandates climate change education in almost all subjects – even PE

    Around the world, kids like Samantha are sitting in class, haunted by images of a disintegrating planet. We can and must provide them with a sense of purpose — a known driver of positive youth development and a protective factor against mental health struggles. We can and must prepare them to be capable climate restoration champions who know how to preserve both our planet and their own mental health.

    Shai Fuxman is a behavioral health expert and senior research scientist at Education Development Center, where he leads initiatives promoting the positive development of youth.

    Chelsey Goddard is an expert in prevention science and vice president at Education Development Center, where she leads the organization’s U.S.-based health, mental health and behavioral health work.

    This op-ed about climate anxiety was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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

    Join us today.

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    Shai Fuxman and Chelsey Goddard

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  • Sperm whale’s slow death trapped in maze-like Japanese bay raises alarm over impact of global warming

    Sperm whale’s slow death trapped in maze-like Japanese bay raises alarm over impact of global warming

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    Tokyo — The slow demise of a stray whale that spent its last days circling Osaka Bay not only saddened TV viewers across Japan, it also alarmed cetacean experts who called the whale the latest casualty of a warming planet.

    “Whales used to lose their way every three years or so,” Yasunobu Nabeshima, a visiting researcher at the Osaka Museum of Natural History, told CBS News. “Until now it was a rare phenomenon. But these incidents have increased.”

    Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), side view
    A file photo shows a sperm whale swimming near the Ogasawara Islands, Tokyo Prefecture, Japan.

    Getty


    This month’s tragedy marked the second case in as many years.

    Nabeshima said global warming has reduced the temperature differential between the Pacific Ocean and Osaka Bay, rendering the powerful Kuroshio Current “a warm-water conveyor belt” that propels whales from their usual deep ocean haunts into the shallow waters along the coast.

    The most recent episode began in mid-January, when the sperm whale — one of the world’s heaviest animals — was first sighted off the coast of Nishinomiya City in Hyogo Prefecture. TV cameras and local authorities intently tracked the doomed whale as it swam futilely eastward toward Osaka.

    Deprived of its primary food, giant squid, the whale’s spout grew noticeably listless.

    Unlike Japan’s easy-to-navigate harbors like Kobe, Osaka Bay, which serves Japan’s third-largest city, is a maze of artificial islands and landfilled peninsulas, packed with theme parks and shopping malls as well as warehouses and industrial plants. It’s effectively a death trap for marine mammals, with numerous nooks and crannies and bounded by wharves and breakwaters that can make it impossible for the creatures to find their way back out to the blue water.

    Osaka Bay in Japan aerial view from airplane
    An aerial photo shows some of the inlets, wharves and reclaimed islands of Japan’s Osaka Bay.

    Taro Hama/Getty


    Another sperm whale died near the mouth of the Yodo River in Osaka in January 2023. Nabeshima, of the Osaka museum, told CBS News that a pod of short-beaked common dolphins ended up stuck in Osaka Bay last fall and they could be seen from Yumeshima, an artificial island and site for Expo 2025, which opens in April. Sea turtles have also become stranded in the area.

    The severely emaciated body of the latest sperm whale casualty, a male that weighed over 30 metric tons and measured 50 feet in length, was recovered and temporarily buried after officials decided it would be cheaper than hauling the carcass out to sea. After two years, the skeleton will be recovered and donated to a local museum.

    Stray whales can be a jumbo-sized headache for local governments. The cost to taxpayers of the offshore burial for last year’s stranded sperm whale was more than half a million dollars — 10 times the cost of a land burial, according to the Mainichi daily newspaper.

    TV viewers watched in real time as the whale, lying on its side, its enormous jaws open in a “V,” was tethered to the wharf and then carefully placed in an enormous sling. In a delicate procedure lasting over an hour, an oceanside crane gingerly lifted the carcass and placed it onto a flatbed truck, which carried it to its temporary resting place.

    A researcher told the local network MBS TV that the creature would first undergo a forensic analysis to determine its cause of death, age, history of injuries and illness and a DNA test to determine its origin. The whale that became trapped last year was 46 years old. Sperm whales have been recorded to live as long as 62.

    Experts also planned to search the creature’s intestines for chunks of ambergris, an extremely rare and strange waxy substance produced in sperm whales from undigested pieces of squid and other cephalopods. Known as “floating gold” and found in only 1 to 5% of sperm whales, ambergris is used in French perfumes. In 2021 one chunk sold for $1.5 million.

    Cityscape of Osaka bay
    Osaka bay, Japan.

    Getty


    Scientists have been calling for new measures to keep the mighty animals out of harm’s way, including sensor-activated “acoustic deterrent devices” placed at the Kii Strait, the entryway to the Inland Sea from the Pacific Ocean, to prevent the whales venturing near the coastline. 

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  • In water-stressed Singapore, a search for new solutions to keep the taps flowing

    In water-stressed Singapore, a search for new solutions to keep the taps flowing

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    SINGAPORE — A crack of thunder booms as dozens of screens in a locked office flash between live video of cars splashing through wet roads, drains sapping the streets dry, and reservoirs collecting the precious rainwater across the tropical island of Singapore. A team of government employees intently monitors the water, which will be collected and purified for use by the country’s six million residents.

    “We make use of real-time data to manage the storm water,” Harry Seah, deputy chief executive of operations at PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency, says with a smile while standing in front of the screens. “All of this water will go to the marina and reservoirs.”

    The room is part of Singapore’s cutting-edge water management system that combines technology, diplomacy and community involvement to help one of the most water-stressed nations in the world secure its water future. The country’s innovations have attracted the attention of other water-scarce nations seeking solutions.

    A small city-state island located in Southeast Asia, Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries on the planet. In recent decades the island has also transformed into a modern international business hub, with a rapidly developing economy. The boom has caused the country’s water consumption to increase by over twelve times since the nation’s independence from Malaysia in 1965, and the economy is only expected to keep growing.

    With no natural water resources, the country has relied on importing water from neighboring Malaysia via a series of deals allowing inexpensive purchase of water drawn from the country’s Johor River. But the deal is set to expire in 2061, with uncertainty over its renewal.

    For years Malaysian politicians have targeted the water deal, sparking political tensions with Singapore. The Malaysian government has claimed the price at which Singapore purchases water — set decades ago — is too low and should be renegotiated, while the Singaporean government argues its treatment and resale of of the water to Malaysia is done at a generous price.

    And climate change, which brings increased intense weather, rising seas and a rise in average temperatures, is expected to exacerbate water insecurity, according to research done by the Singaporean government.

    “For us, water is not an inexhaustible gift of nature. It is a strategic and scarce resource,” Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at the opening of a water treatment facility in 2021. “We are always pushing the limits of our water resources. And producing each additional drop of water gets harder and harder, and more and more expensive.”

    Seeking solutions to its water stresses, the Singaporean government has spent decades developing a master plan focusing on what they call their four “national taps”: water catchment, recycling, desalination and imports.

    Across the island, seventeen reservoirs catch and store rainwater, which is treated through a series of chemical coagulation, rapid gravity filtration and disinfection.

    Five desalination plants, which produce drinking water by pushing seawater through membranes to remove dissolved salts and minerals, operate across the island, creating millions of gallons of clean water every day.

    A massive sewage recycling program purifies wastewater through microfiltration, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet irradiation, adding to drinking supply reservoirs. Dubbed “NEWater”, the treated wastewater now provides Singapore 40% of its water, with the government hoping to increase capacity to 55% of demand in years to come. To help build people’s confidence in the safety, Singapore’s national water agency collaborated with a local craft brewery to create a line of beer made from treated sewage.

    Innovation has been possible partially because of the involvement of private businesses, Seah said.

    “Sometimes private sectors may have a different way of doing things, and you can learn from them. Industry involvement in us is very important,” Seah said.

    Getting community participation and buy in has been an effective method to improved awareness and conservation as well, Seah said.

    In 2006 the government launched the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters Program, which transformed the country’s water systems into more public areas. Through the program, residents can kayak, hike and picnic on the reservoirs, giving a greater sense of ownership and value to the country’s water supplies. Several water facilities now have public green spaces on the roofs where the public can picnic amid big lush green lawns.

    In schools, children are taught about best practices for water use and conservation. Schools hold mock water rationing exercises where water taps are shut off and students collect water in pails.

    The international community has tapped into Singapore’s water innovation as well. The country has become a global hub for water technology, as home to nearly 200 water companies and over 20 research centers and hosts a biennial International Water Week.

    Water technology developed and used in Singapore, such as portable water filters, water testing technology and flood management tools, have been exported to over 30 countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia and Nepal.

    But not all of the solutions used in Singapore will relevant to other countries, especially those with less-developed infrastructure concedes Seah.

    Despite the leaps that Singapore has made in its journey for water security, Seah warns that continued progress is essential for the island.

    “After more than two decades we are still constantly analyzing the water,” he said. “We can never be complacent.”

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  • What is the UN Environment Assembly and why does it matter?

    What is the UN Environment Assembly and why does it matter?

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    Set up as a sort of ‘world parliament on the environment’, UNEA aims to define priorities for environmental policies and develop international legislation on the matter.

    Why is UNEA important?

    The 2024 Environment Assembly, or UNEA-6, is expected to host a record 6,000 delegates, including seven Heads of State and 139 Ministers and Vice-Ministers, as well as experts, activists, and industry representatives.

    UNEA was created in 2012, as an outcome of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), held in Brazil. Since its establishment, the Assembly has ushered in a new era of multilateralism with environmental issues given the same level of importance as such global concerns as peace and security, and health.

    Over the years, UNEA has approved important resolutions on topics such as combating illegal wildlife trafficking, protecting the environment in areas of armed conflict, sustainable urban mobility, among others.

    Due to the discussions at the Environment Assembly’s 2022 session, negotiations have begun on the first legally binding international instrument to end plastic pollution, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2024.

    What’s at stake for UNEA-6?

    The central theme of UNEA-6 will be multilateral environmental agreements and how they can help overcome the triple planetary crisis of climate chaos, biodiversity loss and pollution.

    Despite the socio-economic uncertainties that arose in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current growing geopolitical tensions, the last two years have been marked by very important victories for environmental cooperation.

    For instance, in 2022, the UN General Assembly recognized the universal human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, opening space for constitutional and legal changes at the country levels in favor of the environment and humanity.

    That same year, the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was approved, with measures to protect 1 million species of animals and plants that are on the verge of extinction.

    In June 2023, the 193 UN Member countries signed the so-called High Seas Treaty, to conserve marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdictions.

    Last November, a long-awaited agreement on ‘loss and damage’ financing for vulnerable countries hard-hit by climate change was announced at the UN climate conference, COP28.

    UNEA-6 has set aside a day during its session that will be dedicated to discussion of these and other successes, and consideration of how governments can take broad and unified actions, including adequate financing, to implement the multilateral agreements they have signed.

    At the same time, UNEA-6 will not just focus on new commitments, but on fulfilling all those that already exist.

    UNEP

    What are the priority topics?

    Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), has highlighted the six priority areas for UNEA-6: Water scarcity; responsible mining; mineral management, especially phosphorus; climate-altering technologies; financing environmental actions; and implementation of the Kunming-Montreal framework.

    According to Ms. Andersen, “All we need to do is get together and deliver on these global solutions that we have promised to each other so that we can secure the future for all of humanity, living on a healthy and thriving planet.”

    Negotiations ahead of and during the event are focused on the proposed resolutions presented by Member States and the ministerial declaration that will be adopted at the conclusion of the Assembly. The resolutions aim to identify and prioritize common challenges and possible solutions. They also define priority areas of work for UNEP.

    At UNEA-6, 20 resolutions and 2 decisions will be debated, covering topics such as solar radiation modification, mining, desertification, circularity of the sugar cane agroindustry, highly dangerous pesticides, increasing the resilience of ecosystems and communities to drought, regional cooperation for air quality, among others.

    Single-use plastic bag floating by a coral reef, Bali.

    © Ocean Image Bank/Naja Bertolt

    What’s up with the negotiations?

    In the Environment Assembly, resolutions are expected to be approved by consensus. In practice, this means that every member present has the right to veto a decision. Therefore, the week leading up to the conference is essential for delegations to review draft texts and avoid or overcome impasses. Negotiations often extend into the week of the conference, with closed-door sessions that can go on late into the night.

    As the world’s highest decision-making body on the environment, UNEA aims to help restore harmony between humanity and nature, improving the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people.

    UNEP will purchase certified carbon credits to offset travel emissions from funded participants as part of its annual environmental inventory process to offset greenhouse gas emissions, as well as several other measures to reduce the environmental impact of the conference.

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  • PolitiFact – Cloud seeding not connected to California storms

    PolitiFact – Cloud seeding not connected to California storms

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    Heavy rain pounded much of California beginning Feb. 18, leaving about 37 million people across the state under flood alerts at one point, according to news reports.

    Some social media users baselessly tied the wet weather to a pilot cloud seeding program — a type of weather modification — that’s intended to increase precipitation and thus, the state’s water supply.

    A Feb. 19 Instagram post shared a video with sticker text that read, “The rain in California.”

    “California, check this out. This may be the reason your weather is off lately,” a man in the video said.

    The video shows a woman speaking at a public meeting about a Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority cloud seeding program. She said there could be unintended consequences of cloud seeding, such as an increase in urban flooding and said the silver iodide used in the process is toxic.

    The original video received more than 2 million views on TikTok. We found other social media posts making similar connections between the storms and the cloud seeding program.

    This Instagram post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

    The Watershed Project Authority launched a four-year cloud seeding pilot program in November that will target four mountain areas in Southern California chosen for their contribution to seasonal runoff. Its goal is to increase the water supply in the Santa Ana River watershed, the region’s largest river basin. Cloud seeding works by releasing silver iodide particles into the clouds during storms to increase precipitation.

    But the Instagram post misleads both about the cloud seeding program’s  connection to recent storms and silver iodide’s safety.

    A storm fueled by an atmospheric river — narrow corridors packed with water vapor that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls “rivers in the sky” — dumped buckets of rain, heavy winds and snow across California for three days beginning Feb. 18. In early February, similar back-to-back storms pummeled California, the second of which triggered hundreds of landslides in Los Angeles and killed at least nine people.

    However, no cloud seeding took place during the two most recent severe storms, said Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority spokesperson Melissa Bustamonte.

    “Cloud seeding was not performed during the Feb 3-8 storm events. These storm events were determined to be either too large or too close in succession to cloud seed,” Bustamonte said. “Also, the storm event of Feb 18-19 was not seeded either.”

    The authority’s website lists the dates and areas where cloud seeding took place. The last cloud seeding happened Feb. 1, the website shows. Southern California that day was drenched by a storm dubbed a “Pineapple Express” — meaning an atmospheric river originating from Hawaii.

    “During the February 1 storm event, cloud seeding operations occurred in target areas within the San Gabriel Mountains, San Bernardino Mountains, and San Jacinto Mountains to increase snowpack,” Bustamonte said in an email.

    The pilot program targets four mountainous areas surrounding the watershed in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties to enhance snowpack at those high elevations during storms, Bustamonte said.

    The program does not seed areas in Los Angeles, Ventura or San Diego counties, she said.

    The pilot program has “suspension criteria,” safeguards that prevent cloud seeding when there are potentially hazardous weather conditions, according to a report produced for the Watershed Authority in 2020.

    “The objective of suspension is to eliminate the real and/or perceived impact of weather modification when any increase in precipitation has the potential of creating or contributing to a significant flood hazard,” the report said. 

    Experts told PolitiFact the recent storms have no connection to the cloud seeding program, and that the silver iodide used in the process is considered safe.

    “You only have to look at a satellite image to see where the rain is coming from,” said Gudrun Magnusdottir, a University of California, Irvine earth system science professor. She pointed to massive weather systems that have associated atmospheric rivers.

    “No attempts at cloud seeding in some mountain region would cause such widespread precipitation as we are witnessing all over California,” Magnusdottir said.

    Adele Igel, an associate professor in the University of California, Davis’ Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, said cloud seeding does not change general weather patterns.

    She said estimates from the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority feasibility study show that ground-based seeding could increase precipitation by up to 4.5%.

    “This means that if an area would have received one inch of precipitation without seeding, it would instead receive 1.045 inches with cloud seeding,” Igel said. “The cloud seeding then is not the determining factor for heavy rain.”

    Igel also said the silver iodide used in the cloud seeding “is harmless to the environment.”

    A pilot program fact sheet said more than 50 years of research has shown no “measurable human or environmental effects resulting from the use of silver iodide.” The concentration of silver iodide in water or snow from a seeded cloud “is nearly 1,000 times less than the Environmental Protection Agency standards,” the fact sheet said.

    Our ruling

    An Instagram post connected recent California storms and flooding to a pilot cloud seeding program underway in the state.

    But the cloud seeding didn’t take place during the two most recent storms, and experts said it couldn’t cause the storms and heavy rainfall seen across the state. The claim is False.

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  • Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

    Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

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    Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

    The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

    With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

    Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There’s going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

    Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

    Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea.

    As the American West and other regions dry out, they’re searching for ways to produce more water themselves, instead of importing it by aqueduct. (That strategy includes, by the way, recycling toilet water into drinking water so cities reduce water usage in the first place.) At the same time, climate change is supercharging rainstorms, counterintuitively enough: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold 6 to 7 percent more water, meaning there’s often more moisture available for a storm to dump as rain. Indeed, studies have found that the West Coast’s atmospheric rivers, like the one that just hit LA, are getting wetter.

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    Matt Simon

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  • All That Rain Is Driving Up Cases of a Deadly Fungal Disease in California

    All That Rain Is Driving Up Cases of a Deadly Fungal Disease in California

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    This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Last week, a long, narrow section of the Earth’s atmosphere funneled trillions of gallons of water eastward from the Pacific tropics and unleashed it on California. This weather event, known as an atmospheric river, broke rainfall records, dumped more than a foot of rain on parts of the state, and knocked out power for 800,000 residents. At least nine people died in car crashes or were killed by falling trees. But the full brunt of the storm’s health impacts may not be felt for months.

    The flooding caused by intensifying winter rainstorms in California is helping to spread a deadly fungal disease called coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever. “Hydroclimate whiplash is increasingly wide swings between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Humans are finding it difficult to adapt to this new pattern. But fungi are thriving, Swain said. Valley fever, he added, “is going to become an increasingly big story.”

    Cases of valley fever in California broke records last year after nine back-to-back atmospheric rivers slammed the state and caused widespread, record-breaking flooding. Last month, the California Department of Public Health put out an advisory to health care providers that said it recorded 9,280 new cases of valley fever with onset dates in 2023—the highest number the department has ever documented. In a statement provided to Grist, the California Department of Public Health said that last year’s climate and disease pattern indicate that there could be “an increased risk of valley fever in California in 2024.”

    “If you look at the numbers, it’s astonishing,” said Shangxin Yang, a clinical microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “About 15 years ago in our lab, we only saw maybe one or two cases a month. Now, it’s two or three cases a week.”

    Valley fever—named for California’s San Joaquin Valley, where the disease was discovered in a farmworker in the late 1800s—is caused by the spores of a fungus called Coccidioides. When inhaled, the spores can cause severe illness in humans and some animal species, including dogs. The fungus is particularly sensitive to climate extremes. Coccidioides doesn’t thrive in regions of the US that get year-round rain, nor can it withstand persistent drought.

    Patients in California undergo treatment for valley fever.

    Photograph: Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

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    Zoya Teirstein

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