Claudia Sheinbaum won a commanding victory in last month’s Mexican presidential election, winning almost 60 percent of the vote and securing legislative majorities for her left-wing Morena party. A former climate scientist and mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum dominated the polls after emerging as the successor to the popular outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Even as Sheinbaum prepares to take office, the city she ran between 2018 and 2023 is making global headlines as it suffers through an historic water crisis. Millions of low-income residents across the city rely on intermittent deliveries of contaminated groundwater, and even wealthier neighborhoods have seen their taps shut off as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Not only that, but the city loses around 40 percent of its water supply to leaks in its underground pipes.

Sheinbaum tried to tackle these problems as mayor, pursuing projects to capture rainwater, restore depleted aquifers, and replace and upgrade aging pipes. But water experts and public officials who worked with Sheinbaum say she lacked the resources to turn around a crisis that has been decades in the making. The new power she will have as president, plus a wave of new leadership in the local and regional governments of Mexico City, could usher in a sweeping change in how one of the world’s most populous countries manages its water and adapts to climate-fueled drought.

“Water is her main concern,” said Armando Alonso Beltrán, the head of the water department for the state government in the Mexico City region and a friend of Sheinbaum’s. “It’s in her top priorities, and it always has been.”

Enrique Lomnitz, an engineer whose company, Isla Urbana, has built rainfall harvesting systems across the city, agreed that Sheinbaum made significant progress as mayor, but said the city still has a long way to go.

“She has a very good record, and she started a lot of paradigm-shifting programs that opened new possibilities for approaching the water crisis,” he told Grist. “But these are still very small things compared to the scale of the problem.”

That’s because Mexico’s water crisis is really several different crises. The shortage that captured global headlines this spring came about due to an extreme drought caused by the El Niño climate phenomenon. When spring rains failed to arrive, several key reservoirs that supply water to the city emptied out, forcing city officials to implement rotating water shutoffs in the wealthy neighborhoods that are fortunate enough to have consistent running water.

But these reservoirs only supply around 30 percent of Mexico City’s water, most of which goes to the wealthier neighborhoods in the city center. The rest of the metropolis draws water from underground aquifers that have been dwindling for decades, so much so that parts of the city have sunk by several feet. The water that does still come out of these aquifers is often contaminated with toxic chemicals.

The problem is not that there isn’t enough water to recharge these aquifers over time: Mexico City gets around 34 inches of rainfall a year, similar to Midwest states like Iowa. But the city has grown by millions of people in recent decades without investing in infrastructure to capture and distribute all that water. The critical forest that recharges the aquifer, known as the “Bosque del Agua” or “water forest,” has diminished over the past century due to logging and development. Meanwhile, the water authority has failed to maintain the residential water system, which has resulted in an astonishing amount of water being lost to leaks — more than 40 percent of the total water supply, one of the highest rates in the world.

Sheinbaum faced all these problems as mayor of Mexico City. In 2019, less than a year into her tenure, she announced a major effort to control these leaks, deploying dozens of “leak response brigades” that would locate and plug holes in the water grid. It’s hard to gauge how successful she’s been, said Lomnitz, because fixing a leak in one part of the system can increase water pressure in another part of the system and thus cause more leaks. And as the city sinks thanks to aquifer subsidence, more leaks appear.

“There’s like a Whac-a-Mole kind of thing happening,” said Lomnitz. “You fix the leaks here and they increase over there.” Despite Sheinbaum’s investment, the city is likely billions of dollars away from meaningful water savings from leak reduction.

“There were mixed results, mostly positive, from her time as mayor,” said Alonso. “But it’s hard to tell the final results, because the drought came last year and there was less water.”

Making the city “spongy” enough to catch and store falling rain is even harder given Mexico City’s idiosyncratic history. The city lies on a former lakebed that early Spanish colonists drained in the seventeenth century, and as a result it is prone to frequent flooding. The city’s leaders have spent the equivalent of billions of dollars over the past hundred years to build tunnels that can drain this floodwater away from the metropolis, including a massive 38-mile tunnel project that opened in 2019.

“Our issue has always been how to take out water from the city, and as we had this very rich aquifer and this amount of rain which is quite good, we never had this problem of scarcity,” said Loreta Castro Reguera, an architect who has worked on a number of water projects in Mexico City. The city also has a problem of “technological inertia” as it seeks to capture and harvest rainwater, added Castro Reguera: It uses the same tunnel system to flush out stormwater and sewage, which makes it almost impossible to treat and reroute rainwater for residential usage.  

Since building a parallel pipe system for stormwater would be almost unthinkably expensive, the city’s best option is to start smaller, capturing rainwater at the household or neighborhood level. Sheinbaum started doing this as mayor through a number of innovative nature-based projects. For instance, the city transformed a former landfill near the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant into a restored wetland that filters and treats captured stormwater, yielding a new high-quality water supply. She also worked with Lomnitz’s Isla Urbana to install thousands of household catchment systems and boosted the budget for infrastructure repairs.

Another model comes from Sheinbaum’s incoming successor as the mayor of Mexico City, fellow Morena member Clara Brugada, who has her own record tackling water issues. Brugada, who will take office later this year, has served for almost a decade as the mayor of Iztapalapa, a large impoverished borough in the eastern part of the city. Iztapalapa has struggled for decades with crime and water shortages, but Brugada took major steps to replace faulty infrastructure and created several community spaces known as “utopias” that combine green space with free public services and recreational areas.

One of the banner projects in the borough was La Quebradora, a “hydraulic park” designed by Castro Reguera’s firm with support from the local government. The park captures stormwater to reduce flooding in nearby areas and funnels that water down into the aquifer, recharging groundwater and easing the local water shortage. 

“The impulse needs to come from the government,” said Castro Reguera, describing the need for more projects like the one in Iztapalapa. “This might be a chance to put more of these projects in place.”

Sheinbaum, however, will have to worry about water issues in areas far from Mexico City, because the country’s northern states are facing a very different water problem than the capital. In these states, which are much drier than the region around Mexico City, the problem is less poor management than it is a lack of supply. The vast majority of water in these areas goes to irrigate crops such as avocados and alfalfa, and another share supplies numerous mining operations, leaving very little leftover for residential use. 

Sheinbaum and her predecessor López Obrador have tried to tackle this problem by curbing so-called water concessions, which grant farms and mines the exclusive right to tap rivers and aquifers. Before the election, López Obrador pushed a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the government to cut off water to mines during a drought, and Sheinbaum has signaled she too will support that measure. She has also reportedly called for a revamp of the national water law that would limit water use by farms, though this effort will likely face opposition from powerful agricultural interests. (Neither the president’s office nor the campaign offices of Sheinbaum and Brugada responded to Grist’s interview requests.)

In these northern states as well as in Mexico City, the water crisis is as much a problem of governance as it is one of physical shortage. The country’s national water authority has faced accusations of bribery and corruption for years, and the local authority in Mexico City has faced criticism as well for a lack of transparency about water quality. These are the same utilities that Lomnitz says have underinvested in infrastructure for decades.

But the conditions are ripe for a surge of investment. Sheinbaum holds the presidency, which will give her access to a much larger budget to invest in water storage and treatment projects. Brugada has promised to continue her focus on rainwater harvesting and environmental justice as the mayor of Mexico City. The new head of Mexico City’s regional government is also a member of the Morena party, and which means all the levels of government are aligned for the first time in decades.

Victor Magaña Rueda, an environmental scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who has studied climate impacts in Mexico City, told Grist that he believes Sheinbaum has the political will to turn around the trend of disinvestment and delay.

“She has a very profound knowledge of what the water crisis in Mexico is,” said Magaña. “She is more interested in environmental problems I would say than our president right now. But the important thing is that she knows that we cannot go on in a situation like we lived in for the past few years.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can Claudia Sheinbaum solve Mexico’s water crisis? on Jun 26, 2024.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up a case challenging how Georgia elects its powerful energy regulators, clearing the way for delayed Public Service Commission elections in the state to resume. The elections had previously been impugned by voting rights and clean energy advocates, who argued the existing system diluted Black votes. The case could affect future legal challenges based on the Voting Rights Act. 

“The court has spoken,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, said in a statement. “We are on track to resume elections for the Public Service Commission in 2025.”

The advocates who sued said they’re considering how to proceed — the commission’s decisions, which include everything from energy rates and discounts to building new power plants, remain as important as ever, they told Grist and WABE.

“People are not able to pay rent, they’re not able to feed their families,” said James Woodall, a public policy associate at the Southern Center for Human Rights and one of the plaintiffs in the case. “So when I think about the decision, or lack thereof, to take on this case, I thought about those people.”

Each of Georgia’s Public Service Commissioners has to live in a specific district, but unlike members of congress they’re elected by statewide vote. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, all Black voters in Atlanta, argued this system dilutes their votes and therefore violates the Voting Rights Act. While a federal judge agreed, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees courts in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, overturned that decision. With the announcement that the U.S. Supreme Court will not consider the case, the 11th Circuit ruling will stand, leaving the system as-is.

Public Service Commission, or PSC, elections in Georgia, meanwhile, have been on hold since 2022, when the original judge issued a stay blocking any election until a new system could be devised — a decision the Supreme Court upheld. Two elections were canceled that year, and those commissioners were allowed to continue to serve and vote; a third commissioner who was up for reelection this year will also continue to serve without facing voters.

Read Next

Want clean electricity? These are the overlooked elected officials who get to decide.

Emily Jones

“We have had these commissioners sitting in their seats pretty much unelected,” said Brionté McCorkle, another plaintiff and the executive director of the nonprofit Georgia Conservation Voters. “They’re making incredibly important decisions that are impacting the lives of Georgians and also impacting the climate crisis.”

The five-member Public Service Commission has final approval over most steps taken by Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, including how much the company charges for energy and how it makes that power. Since the cancellation of the 2022 elections, the commissioners have approved the construction of new natural gas turbines as well as bill increases to cover natural gas costs and construction of the newest nuclear reactor at Plant Vogtle. Next year, they’ll make all-important decisions about Georgia Power’s future energy plans, including possible expansions of renewable energy and closure of coal plants, and the next several years of power rates — all before voters have the chance to send new representatives to the commission.

Under a state law passed this year, PSC elections would resume in 2025 with votes for two seats. The law lays out an election schedule for all five seats that would leave the current commissioners in power beyond their original six-year terms.

The plaintiffs are considering a challenge to that law, McCorkle said, though they’ve made no final decisions.

“We definitely feel like that is all very problematic,” she said of the law’s election schedule. “We’re gonna keep fighting for the people of Georgia.”

While McCorkle called the Supreme Court’s decision “a bummer,” she said she also felt “a little bit of relief” because there was no guarantee the high court would side with the plaintiffs.

Voting rights advocates are concerned about the implications of the 11th Circuit’s ruling, which didn’t weigh in on whether the plaintiffs had proven their votes were unfairly diluted. Rather, the appeals court argued a federal court can’t overrule the state’s choice to hold at-large elections because it would violate the “principles of federalism.”

“They endorsed the notion that the state has a vested interest in disenfranchising Black Georgians,” Woodall said. “For me, it is an endorsement that reflects over generations and generations of discrimination.”

Woodall, McCorkle, and others said they plan to continue educating Georgians about the PSC, as well as holding commissioners accountable.

“We’re gonna make sure people know who you are and what you do and that they can call you, call the commissioners, and make sure their voices are heard and represented in the decisions that they’re making,” McCorkle said of the commissioners. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After SCOTUS decision, Georgia will keep ‘problematic’ voting system for energy regulators on Jun 26, 2024.

An aerial survey conducted by wildlife NGO African Parks has revealed the largest land mammal migration on Earth.

The Great Nile Migration of six million antelope from the Boma-Badingilo Jonglei Landscape (BBJL) in South Sudan to Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park is more than twice the size of the annual “great migration” of two million zebras, wildebeest and gazelle from Tanzania’s Serengeti to Kenya, reported The Guardian.

“The migration in South Sudan blows any other migration we know of out the water,” said David Simpson, park manager for Boma and Badingilo national parks with African Parks, as The Guardian reported. “The estimates indicate the vast herds of antelope species… are almost three times larger than east Africa’s great migration. The scale is truly awe-inspiring.”

African Parks used two aircraft equipped with cameras that gathered detailed documentation of the migration by taking a picture every two seconds, producing 330,000 total images. Graduates of University of Juba then examined the photos and counted the wildlife using computer software.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by African Parks | Conservation NGO (@africanparksnetwork)

“Seeing these animals here at such scale is something I could have never fathomed still existed on the planet,” said Mike Fay, African Parks’ landscape coordinator for Boma and Badingilo, as reported by The Guardian. “From the air, it felt like I was watching what Earth might have been like millennia ago, when nature and humans still existed together in balance.”

The region’s animal species have survived alongside decades of instability and civil war in South Sudan.

From April 28 to May 15 of last year, the pilots flew the researchers over the entire 122,774 square kilometers of known antelope range in the BBJL. Some of the landscape they covered had never been surveyed before. In addition to antelope, they also documented lions, giraffes, buffalo, elephants and other species.

“The BBJL aerial survey is the first comprehensive survey of this region. This historic survey has highlighted the scale of the migration, and aided in informing strategic conservation efforts to ensure sustainability for both the wildlife and people who depend on the landscape,” a press release from African Parks said. “A comparison with surveys done in the 1980s shows that there have been declines in most sedentary species — such as elephant and giraffe — which need year-round access to water and which do not exhibit a migratory pattern, further highlighting the need for proper protection of the landscape outside Boma and Badingilo national parks.”

The animals in the Great Nile Migration are on the move year-round, likely driven by the availability of quality grazing conditions, The Guardian reported. The survey estimates included four species of antelope: five million white-eared kob, 350,000 Mongalla gazelle, a little less than 300,000 tiang and 160,000 bohor reedbuck.

The results surprised scientists, since despite wildlife decreasing in many parts of the planet due to climate change and human development, the Great Nile Migration has endured and expanded, reported CNN.

“If the numbers are right with these species, it looks like they’ve increased since 2007. It looks like they’ve increased since the 1980s even,” Fay said, as CNN reported.

Simpson said the findings of the survey are “a gamechanger for conservation efforts in South Sudan” and have the potential to be “one of the greatest conservation opportunities on the planet,” as reported by The Guardian.

Currently, South Sudan is not considered a safe destination for international tourists, but Simpson believes it has great potential.

“Having the world’s largest land mammal migration could put South Sudan on the map as a must-visit ecotourism destination. But the migration’s current critical value is food security for local communities,” Simpson said, as The Guardian reported.

Simpson pointed out that, in addition to demonstrating the vast numbers of wildlife in the world’s largest land mammal migration, the survey also exposed threats to the animals, including “the expansion of roads, agriculture, charcoal production, commercialisation.”

“These activities can lead to habitat loss, resource depletion and disruption of migration routes, ultimately threatening the survival of the migration and the livelihoods of local people,” Simpson said. “By ensuring the health of the ecosystems the migration depends on, the livelihoods of people across the migration landscape can be secured.”

For more than four decades, Fay has been exposed to magnificent wildlife while working on conservation projects in Africa, but when he saw the incredible display of antelope galloping together across the Nile floodplain, he was stunned, reported CNN.

“How is it even possible that there can be this many wild animals?” Fay said. “It’s not so much a sentimental thing for me, it’s more about the biological and ecological capacity of this land to produce so much wildlife. It’s truly phenomenal.”

The post ‘Awe-Inspiring’ Migration of 6 Million Antelope in South Sudan Is Largest Land Mammal Movement on Earth appeared first on EcoWatch.

According to a new analysis by a group of conservationists and researchers, expanding another 1.2% of Earth’s land-based protected areas would stop the extinction of most threatened animal and plant species.

The coalition of experts identified 16,825 potential conservation sites that need to be prioritized in the next five years in order to save thousands of rare species.

“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Dr. Eric Dinerstein, the study’s lead author and senior biodiversity expert at NGO RESOLVE, in a press release from Frontiers in Science. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, we found that we need only about 1.2% of the Earth’s surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.”

Between 2018 and 2023, an additional 1.2 million square kilometers were protected to meet the world’s conservation targets. However, the research team asked whether the new conservation areas were adequately protecting essential biodiversity.

The scientists estimated that the new protected lands only covered a small portion of the habitat of threatened and range-limited species — 0.11 million square kilometers. They emphasized the importance of planning protected areas so that resources and conservation efforts are targeted as effectively as possible.

The team mapped the entire planet using six levels of biodiversity data. They identified the remaining rare and threatened species habitat using satellite images and combined them with maps of existing conservation areas. They termed current unprotected biodiversity hotspots Conservation Imperatives. These serve as the world’s blueprint to assist regions and countries with planning locally based conservation efforts.

If adequately protected, the sites they identified — covering roughly 405.25 million acres — could prevent all projected extinctions. Protecting only sites located in the tropics could avert most of them.

The research team found that 38 percent of Conservation Imperatives are near areas that are already protected, making it easier to make them part of current conservation sites or find additional means of protecting them.

“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world’s most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” said co-author of the study Andy Lee, a senior program associate and enterprise development manager at RESOLVE, in the press release. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi, Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”

In calculating the cost of these protections, the scientists used data from 14 years of land protection projects, as well as accounted for the amount and type of land acquired and country-specific economic factors.

Professor Neil Burgess, head of the science program at the United Nations Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, said the paper was a reminder “that achieving 30% coverage by protected and conserved areas on its own is not enough, and that it is the location, quality and effectiveness of these protected and conserved areas that will determine whether they fulfil their role in contributing to halting biodiversity loss,” as The Guardian reported.

Indigenous Peoples and communities with jurisdiction over the Conservation Imperative sites, along with worldwide stakeholders and other civil society members, will need to give their input on what is most effective for them.

“Our analysis estimated that protecting the Conservation Imperatives in the tropics would cost approximately $34 billion per year over the next five years,” Lee said. “This represents less than 0.2% of the United States’ GDP, less than 9% of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”

Protecting biodiversity is essential to tackling the climate crisis. In order to do so, the scientists underscored the importance of keeping the planet’s forests intact, as they are not only home to abundant wildlife, but act as vital carbon sinks.

“What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on,” Dinerstein said. “So we’ve got to get going. We’ve got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that.”

The post Protecting 1.2% of Earth’s Land Would Stop ‘Sixth Great Extinction,’ Scientists Say appeared first on EcoWatch.

Scientists from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), along with professionals in the chocolate industry, have found a way to make better use of cocoa fruit to produce not only more sustainable, but also healthier chocolate.

Currently, to make chocolate, producers use the beans found inside the cocoa fruit, but not the pulp or endocarp, an outer shell inside the exterior husk of the cocoa fruit.

However, the ETH researchers, along with experts from the cocoa-recycling company Koa and the confectionery company Max Felchlin AG, realized that they could also use the pulp, its juice and even the endocarp to create chocolate with less waste. The exterior husk could then be composted or reused for fuel.

According to the study, published in the journal Nature Food, the endocarp is rich in pectin. As such, the team was able to produce a gel from the endocarp by making this material into powder and mixing it with the fruit’s pulp and juice.

The resulting gel can be used as an alternative to powdered sugar in chocolate production and results in chocolate that still tastes like a sweet treat, but comes with around 30% less saturated fat and a 20% boost of fiber compared to conventional European dark chocolate.

“Fiber is valuable from a physiological perspective because it naturally regulates intestinal activity and prevents blood sugar levels from rising too rapidly when consuming chocolate,” Kim Mishra, lead author of the study, explained in a statement. “Saturated fat can also pose a health risk when too much is consumed. There’s a relationship between increased consumption of saturated fats and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases.”

The scientists found that it was difficult to achieve the right texture for their chocolate made with the entirety of the cocoa fruit, since it could become too clumpy if it had too much of the juice from the flesh. In tests with less of the cocoa fruit juice, the resulting chocolate wasn’t sweet enough to compete with conventional chocolate.

Eventually, the researchers found that adding around 20% of their cocoa-based gel provided the right texture and taste for the resulting chocolate. As Food & Wine reported, trained panelists from the Bern University of Applied Sciences were tasked with tasting the chocolates from the study experiments to help find the right balance.

The experiments worked, as evidenced by the team filing for a patent for their chocolate recipe made from cocoa fruit. According to the scientists, the resulting recipe will allow farmers to increase their income and offer more products by using more parts of the cocoa fruit.

“This means that farmers can not only sell the beans, but also dry out the juice from the pulp and the endocarp, grind it into powder and sell that as well,” Mishra said. “This would allow them to generate income from three value-creation streams. And more value creation for the cocoa fruit makes it more sustainable.”

As Food & Wine reported, if this approach to chocolate production scales up, it could reduce the amount of land needed for producing dark chocolate. But it will require updated tools and infrastructure for farmers, like drying facilities, that will need more time and money to develop before the scientists’ chocolate can become widely available.

“Although we’ve shown that our chocolate is attractive and has a comparable sensory experience to normal chocolate, the entire value creation chain will need to be adapted, starting with the cocoa farmers, who will require drying facilities,” Mishra said. “Cocoa-fruit chocolate can only be produced and sold on a large scale by chocolate producers once enough powder is produced by food processing companies.”

The post Scientists Invent a Chocolate That’s More Sustainable and Healthier appeared first on EcoWatch.

Native species are struggling to keep pace with invasive species in range expansion, which is important for adaptation and survival, a new study has found.

According to researchers, species need to be able to shift at least 3.25 kilometers per year to keep up with climate change. However, they found that native species are only moving at an average rate of around 1.74 kilometers per year.

In general, invasive species are spreading 100 times faster than native plants and animals, and even some that seem more sedentary are moving at least three times faster than native species, according to the study, published in the journal Annual Reviews of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.

“We’ve known for a long time that native species aren’t moving nearly fast enough, but there are still some that are able to keep up,” Bethany Bradley, lead author and professor of environmental conservation at University of Massachusetts Amherst, told EcoWatch. “We hadn’t necessarily looked at non-native species specifically as a group of whether they were able to keep up or not. I think this analysis basically says that not only are non-native species really able to keep up, but the reason behind it is because we’re moving them around. They’re non-native species for a reason — because humans are moving them.”

The study revealed that invasive species were moving at a rate of around 35 kilometers per year without human actions. But when factoring in the ways humans contribute to the spread of invasive species, the shift can happen at a rate of around 1,883 kilometers per year, or around 1,000 times faster than native plants and animals.

To compare how human actions drove range expansion, the researchers analyzed data for 249 native species, 242 non-native species, and 192 non-native species introduced through human actions. For example, shipping containers or ships can spread invasive species, and the pets people keep can contribute to invasive species growth. Even hiking can contribute to spreading invasive plant seeds.

One challenge is a lack of regulations on invasive species. As Bradley explained, it can take a long time to establish policies that restrict the spread of invasive species through human actions, so these species can continue their expansion as humans continue moving them.

On the other hand, Bradley said that native species will actually need human intervention to help them adapt to climate change and the competition from non-native species.

“If we want native species to survive, then we have to choose there, too. We have to make an active choice to try to help,” Bradley told EcoWatch. “This is called assisted migration or managed relocation of trying to allow for native species to shift their ranges actively with climate change. That requires our help.”

Bradley recommended for gardeners to “not only think about native species so that you avoid introducing invasive species, but also think about native species because our gardens can serve as stepping stones to help those populations survive climate change,” and suggested using tools like Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s native plant website and the Missouri Botanical Garden website for finding native plants.

In a previous study, Bradley and colleagues found that horticulture, including plant nurseries, was contributing to the spread of invasive plant species. Bradley noted that while nurseries were not setting out to spread invasive species, some popular ornamental plants sold in nurseries can contribute to their rapid spread. 

As part of that study, the researchers compiled a list of regionally invasive plant species as well as alternative, native options to raise public awareness. 

For example, the list noted that pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) is an invasive species that can outcompete native plants and disrupt wetland habitats. For those in the northeastern U.S. who want a similar look in their garden, the list recommended planting golden feather grass (Sorghastrum nutans) as a native alternative.

To help prevent the spread of invasive species other than plants, Bradley recommended people who enjoy boating to thoroughly wash their boats to minimize spreading aquatic invasive species and for people who keep pets like snakes, fish and lizards to prevent those pets from getting loose or avoid releasing them into the environment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has an interactive map resource on invasive species information and news by state for the public. In the U.S., some of the most invasive species include emerald ash borers, hemlock woolly adelgid, wild boars and domesticated cats.

The post Invasive Species Expanding Their Ranges 100x Faster Than Native Species, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Microplastic pollution is everywhere on the planet, from the bottom of the ocean to the…

The post We Earthlings: Reduce Plastic Waste appeared first on Earth911.

When selecting produce at the grocery store, do you avoid the oddly shaped, inconsistently sized,…

The post Imperfect Groceries Help Reduce Food Waste appeared first on Earth911.

Initially designed for military and civil security use for emergency lighting, glow sticks have applications…

The post The Problems With Glow Sticks appeared first on Earth911.

The government of Hawaiʻi and a group of young people have reached a historic settlement that requires the state to decarbonize its transportation network. The agreement is the first of its kind in the nation and comes two years after 13 Hawaiian youth sued the state Department of Transportation for failing to protect their “constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment.” 

The settlement, announced last Thursday, requires the department to develop a plan and zero out greenhouse gas emissions from all transportation sectors by 2045. The agency is also required to create a new unit tasked with climate change mitigation, align budgetary investments with its clean energy goals, and plant at least 1,000 trees a year to increase carbon absorption from the atmosphere. 

“It’s historic that the state government has come to the table and negotiated such a detailed set of commitments,” said Leinā‘ala L. Ley, a senior associate attorney at Earthjustice, one of the environmental law firms representing the youth plaintiffs. “The fact that the state has … put its own creativity, energy, and commitment behind the settlement means that we’re going to be able to move that much quicker in making real-time changes that are going to actually have an impact.”

According to a press release from the office of Hawaiʻi Governor Josh Green, the settlement represents the state’s “commitment … to plan and implement transformative changes,” as well as an opportunity to work collaboratively, instead of combatively, with youth plaintiffs, “to address concerns regarding constitutional issues arising from climate change.”

“This settlement informs how we as a state can best move forward to achieve life-sustaining goals and further, we can surely expect to see these and other youth in Hawaiʻi continue to step up to build the type of future they desire,” Green said in a statement.

The 13 teenagers who brought the suit, Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, have cultural practices tied to the land. They are divers, swimmers, beachgoers, competitive paddlers, and caretakers of farms and fishponds. Many are Native Hawaiian. In the lawsuit filed in 2022, they alleged that the state’s inadequate response to climate change diminished their ability to enjoy the natural resources of the state. Since they filed, at least two plaintiffs were affected by the Lāhainā wildfire, the deadliest natural disaster in the state’s history.

Hawaiʻi has been a leader in recognizing the effects of climate change. The archipelago is battling rising sea levels, extreme drought, and wildfires among other climate calamities. In 2021, it became the first state in the nation to declare a “climate emergency” and committed to a “mobilization effort to reverse the climate crisis.” But the non-binding resolution did not translate directly into statewide transportation policies that reduced greenhouse gas emissions, according to the youth plaintiffs. 

Between 1990 and 2020, carbon dioxide emissions from the transportation sector increased despite advances in fuel efficiency, and now make up roughly half of all greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The plaintiffs argued that the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation is largely to blame. Instead of coordinating with other agencies to meet the state’s net-zero targets, it has prioritized highway construction and expansion. The agency operates and maintains the state’s transportation network in such a way that it violates its duty to “conserve and protect Hawai‘i’s natural beauty and all natural resources,” the plaintiffs noted. 

Other similar constitutional climate cases are pending across the country. Our Children’s Trust, a public interest law firm that represented the Hawaiian youth with Earthjustice, has also brought cases against Montana, Alaska, Utah, and Virginia on behalf of young people. Ley said Hawaiʻi is a “great model” for other states to follow. “This settlement shows that these legal obligations have real effects,” she said. 

The settlement requires the state transportation department to meet a number of interim deadlines and to set up a decarbonization unit. The agency has already hired Laura Kaakua, who was previously with the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, to lead the unit. Ley said that they plan to monitor every report the agency publishes, submit comments, and educate their young clients on how they can stay involved. 

“Often in the climate field, young people feel betrayed by their government,” Ley said. “But this settlement affirms for these young people that working with the government can be effective and that this is a way that they can make a difference in their lives and in the world.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A group of young people just forced Hawaiʻi to take major climate action on Jun 24, 2024.