“Stamping an end date on the coal era is precisely the kind of leadership we need from the world’s wealthiest countries. This decision provides a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, showing the transition away from coal can happen much faster than many thought possible,” said Jennifer Layke, global energy director of WRI, in the press release. “Putting an end to the world’s dirtiest fuel will provide cleaner air and massive health benefits to communities throughout these countries. It’s now imperative that these countries prioritize just transition measures to support the workers and communities who have relied on coal for decades.”
The communiqué, published following talks between climate, environment and energy ministers in Turin, said the G7 nations would “phase out existing unabated coal power generation in our energy systems during the first half of 2030s,” reported CNN.
The reference to “unabated” coal left room for the use of coal beyond 2035 if countries captured their carbon pollution before it entered the atmosphere.
Another caveat to the agreement was that nations can decide upon “a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of 1.5°C temperature rise within reach, in line with countries’ net-zero pathways.”
This language also seems to allow coal use after 2035 if countries’ overall emissions do not contribute to a global temperature increase higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Anonymous sources said the stipulation was to give extra room to Japan and Germany, which rely heavily on coal, Reuters reported.
Germany has committed to shutting down all of its coal plants by 2038. Meanwhile, its current government said it wants to phase coal out completely by 2030.
According to UK thinktank Ember, coal makes up 32 percent of the energy mix in Japan, 27 percent in Germany and 16 percent in the U.S., reported CNN.
“As some of the largest emitters — and with the greatest concentrations of wealth — the G7 countries have a unique ability to steer the world’s course toward a clean energy future. This commitment says to the rest of the planet that this transition is possible — and international cooperation is critical to getting us there. It marks a profound shift in thinking from last year’s G7 meetings when countries failed to reach an agreement to move away from fossil fuels,” Layke said in the press release.
Scientists have said that by limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius we can avoid the most extreme effects of climate change.
Some G7 nations have almost ceased to use coal power entirely. In Italy, Canada and the UK, coal accounts for less than six percent of electricity use, while France’s coal use is almost nonexistent.
“Many of these countries have already publicly committed to phase out dates ahead of 2030, and only have a small amount of coal capacity anyway,” said Jane Ellis, climate policy leader at Germany’s Climate Analytics, as CNN reported.
Ministers from the G7 nations said $600 billion in investments for electricity distribution and transmission would be needed annually by 2030 while renewable energy development was being ramped up, reported Reuters.
“Today these countries have taken positive steps toward building a zero-carbon energy system that will transform the global economy. Now the G7 countries should back this political will with the critical finance needed to rapidly transition the world away from fossil fuels and toward zero-carbon energy, both in their own countries and abroad,” Layke said in the press release.
A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has found that Tyson Foods dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of pollutants into U.S. waterways from 2018 to 2022. The pollutants came from company facilities including slaughterhouses and processing plants.
UCS analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and found that Tyson Foods processing plants released 371.72 million pounds of pollutants into waterways from 2018 to 2022. Half of the pollutants were dumped in waterways of Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri. The group published the findings in a report titled Waste Deep: How Tyson Foods Pollutes US Waterways and Which States Bear the Brunt.
“As the nation’s largest meat and poultry producer, Tyson Foods plays a huge role in our food and agriculture system and has for decades exploited policies that allow big agribusiness corporations to pollute with impunity,” Omanjana Goswami, co-author of the report and an interdisciplinary scientist with the Food and Environment Program at UCS, said in a press release. “In 2022, the latest year for which we have data, Tyson plants processed millions of cattle and pigs and billions of chickens, and discharged over 18.5 billion gallons of wastewater, enough to fill more than 37,000 Olympic swimming pools.”
Waterways in Nebraska had the most wastewater pollutants dumped by Tyson Foods plants, about 30% of the total or 111 million pounds, UCS reported. The pollutants dumped in Nebraska included 4.06 million pounds of nitrate, which a 2021 study linked to increased risks of central nervous system cancers in children.
According to the National Provisioner, Tyson Foods is one of the top meat and poultry processing companies in the U.S. From 2018 to 2022, it generated 87 billion gallons of wastewater, based on EPA data. This wastewater can include pathogens and microorganisms (such as E. coli) and slaughterhouse byproducts, such as body parts of animals, feces and blood.
As noted in the report, the dumped pollutants contained high amounts of nitrogen (34.25 million pounds) and phosphorus (5.06 million pounds), which can contribute to algal blooms in waterways. As UCS pointed out in its analysis, many Tyson Foods facilities are located near waterways that are home to threatened and endangered species.
The facilities are also positioned near historically underserved communities, leading to additional pollution near and burden on vulnerable populations.
“Pollution from these plants also raises environmental justice concerns,” Stacy Woods, co-author of the report and research director for the Food and Environment Program at UCS, said in a press release. “We know from previous research that almost 75% of water-polluting meat and poultry processing facilities are located within one mile of communities that already shoulder heavy economic, health or environmental burdens. In mapping these plants, we found Tyson largely fit that pattern, with many plants located near communities where people live with more pollution, less socioeconomic and political power, and worse health compared to other areas of the United States.”
The report provides insight into a larger problem. As The Guardian reported, meat processing pollution in the U.S. is much higher and goes beyond Tyson Foods.
“There are over 5,000 meat and poultry processing plants in the United States, but only a fraction are required to report pollution and abide by limits,” Goswami told The Guardian. “As one of the largest processors in the game, with a near-monopoly in some states, Tyson is in a unique position to treat even hefty fines and penalties for polluting as simply the cost of doing business. This has to change.”
This story was produced by Grist and was co-published with Fast Company.
When office workers stopped working in offices in 2020, trading their cubicles for living room couches during COVID-19 lockdowns, many began questioning those hours they had spent commuting to work. All those rushed mornings stuck in traffic could have been spent getting things done? Life was often lonely for those stuck in their homes, but people found something to appreciate when birdsong rang through the quiet streets. And the temporary dip in travel had the side effect of cutting global carbon emissions by 7 percent in 2020 — a blip of good news in an otherwise miserable year.
Emissions bounced back in 2021, when people started resuming some of their normal activities, but offices have never been the same. While remote work was rare before the pandemic, today, 28 percent of Americans are working a “hybrid” schedule, going into the office some days, and 13 percent are working remotely full-time.
Recent data suggest that remote work could speed along companies’ plans to zero out their carbon emissions, but businesses don’t seem to be considering climate change in their decisions about the future of office work. “In the U.S., I’m sad to say it’s just not high on the priority list,” said Kate Lister, the founder of the consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics. “It gets up there, and then it drops again for the next shiny object.” Commuter travel falls under a company’s so-called “Scope 3” emissions, the indirect sources that routinely get ignored, but represent, on average, three-quarters of the business world’s emissions.
A 10 percent increase in people working remotely could reduce carbon emissions by 192 million metric tons a year, according to a study published in the journal Nature Cities earlier this month. That would cut emissions from the country’s most polluting sector, transportation, by 10 percent. Those findings align with other peer-reviewed research: Switching to remote work instead of going into the office can cut a person’s carbon footprint by 54 percent, according to a study published in the journal PNAS last fall, even when accounting for non-commute travel and residential energy use.
“It seems like a very obvious solution to a very pressing and real problem,” said Curtis Sparrer, a principal and co-founder of the PR agency Bospar, a San Francisco-based company where employees have been working remotely since it started in 2015. “And I am concerned that this whole ‘return to office’ thing is getting in the way.”
Many companies are mandating their employees show up for in-person work regularly. Last year, big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta told employees that they had to come back to the office three days a week or face consequences, like a lower chance of getting promoted. Even Zoom, the company that became a household name during the pandemic for its videoconferencing platform, is making employees who live within 50 miles of the office commute two days a week.
Amazon employees in Seattle watch as others join a walkout to protest the company’s return-to-office policies in May 2023. Organizers called attention to the climate impact of commutes, saying it runs counter to the company’s climate pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2040.
AP Photo / Lindsey Wasson
Of course, there are many benefits that come with heading into the office to work alongside other humans. Interacting with your coworkers in person gives you a social boost (without the awkward pauses in Zoom meetings) and a compelling reason to change out of your sweatpants in the morning. From a climate change standpoint, the problem is that most Americans tend to jump in their cars to commute, instead of biking or hopping on the bus. A recent poll from Bospar found that two-thirds of Americans are driving to work — and they’re mostly in gas-powered cars. Even though purchases of electric vehicles are rising, they still make up roughly 1 percent of the cars on the road.
The climate benefits start falling off quickly when people are summoned into the office. Working from home two to four days a week cut emissions by between 11 and 29 percent compared with full-time office work, according to the study in PNAS by researchers at Cornell University and Microsoft. If you only work remotely one day a week, those emissions were only trimmed by 2 percent. Another big factor is that maintaining physical office space sucks up a lot of energy, since it needs to be heated and cooled.
So should companies be allowed to claim they’re going green when they’re forcing employees to commute? Many Americans don’t think so, according to Bospar’s survey. Well over half of Millennials and Gen Zers said it’s hypocritical for companies to observe Earth Day while requiring employees to attend work in-person.
“We are entering a time of magical thinking, where people seem to think that this is enough, and it’s not,” Sparrer said. “And the frustration I have is that we all got to experience what it’s like to work from home, and we know how it works, and we know how it can be improved.”
Working from home, though, could present some environmental challenges. Recent research that looked at trends before the pandemic found that if 10 percent of the workforce started working remotely, transit systems in the U.S. would lose $3.7 billion every year, a 27 percent drop in fare revenue, according to the study in Nature Cities, conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Florida, and Peking University in Beijing. Some experts worry that remote work could push people into the suburbs, where carbon footprints tend to be higher than in cities.
Right now, there are many employees who want to work at home full-time but are forced to go into the office, Lister said. She sees the return-to-office mandates as a result of corporate leadership that wants to go back to how things used to be. “As that generation retires,” she said, “I think that a lot of these conversations will go away.”
A first-of-its-kind study that analyzed hundreds of conservation actions around the world has confirmed that efforts toward preserving wildlife are resulting in measurable achievements.
The international study, published in the journal Science, sought to assess whether conservation efforts were having any positive impacts on biodiversity. Researchers analyzed 186 studies, including 665 trials, and measured changes to biodiversity.
Overall, the researchers found that about two-thirds of the studied conservation actions at minimum slowed biodiversity declines or led to improved biodiversity.
“If you read the headlines about extinction these days, it would be easy to get the impression that we are failing biodiversity — but that’s not really looking at the whole picture,” Penny Langhammer, co-author of the study and executive vice president of Re:wild, told the BBC. “This study provides the strongest evidence to date that not only does conservation improve the state of biodiversity and slow its decline, but when it works, it really works.”
According to the study, some actions were particularly impactful on biodiversity. Some of the most effective efforts include controlling invasive species, reducing habitat loss, restoring wildlife habitats, establishing protected areas, and managing ecosystems in sustainable ways.
“What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” Landhammer said in a press release. “It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”
The study highlighted multiple efforts that resulted in wins for biodiversity. For instance, the authors noted that managing invasive species as well as “problematic native species” on Cayo Costa and North Captiva, two islands of Florida, led to better nesting success rates for loggerhead turtles and least terns.
The study authors highlighted a conservation initiative that established a Forest Management Plan in the Congo Basin, which led to 74% lower rates of deforestation.
In another example, the researchers showed that in the Brazilian part of the Amazon Rainforest, protected areas and Indigenous lands had lower rates of deforestation and human-caused forest fires; unprotected areas experienced deforestation rates up to 20 times higher and human-caused fires happened four to nine times more often.
In Idaho, a captive breeding and release program helped improve reproductive rates of Chinook salmon, which led to the restoration of the species’ natural population in the wild.
“Our study shows that when conservation actions work, they really work. In other words, they often lead to outcomes for biodiversity that are not just a little bit better than doing nothing at all, but many times greater,” Jake Bicknell, co-author of the study and senior lecturer at Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology of the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK said in a statement. “For instance, putting measures in place to boost the population size of an endangered species has often seen their numbers increase substantially. This effect has been mirrored across a large proportion of the case studies we looked at.”
However, the authors explained that conservation measures didn’t always help out as intended. In about one in every five cases, efforts actually led to declines for the target species; however, in some of these instances, the conservation actions still unintentionally benefited other species.
All in all, the authors noted that global conservation efforts need additional funding, and a variety of conservation efforts need to be implemented in order to curb biodiversity decline. They estimated that a global conservation program would cost about $178 billion to $524 billion per year.
“Although high, these costs are dwarfed by the value that biodiversity provides to society through the delivery of ecosystem services,” the authors wrote in the study conclusion. “Thus, conservation actions are investments rather than payments — and, as our study demonstrates, they are typically investments that yield genuine, high-magnitude positive impacts.”
About a year ago, the seas got unusually hot, even by our current, overheated standards. Twelve months of broken records later, the oceans are still more feverish than climate models and normal fluctuations in global weather patterns can explain.
When the seas turn into bathwater, it threatens the survival of the planet’s coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine life and a source of sustenance for many people living along the world’s coasts. Mostly clustered in the shallow waters of the tropics, coral reefs have one of the lowest thresholds for rising temperatures of all the possible “tipping points,” the cascading feedback loops that set off large, abrupt changes in the ecosystems, weather patterns, and ice formations on Earth. Stable, existing systems wind up in new, completely different states: The lush Amazon rainforest, for example, might collapse into a grassy savanna. Coral reefs might transform into seaweed-smothered graveyards.
Earlier this month, the world officially entered its fourth — and probably worst — mass coral bleaching event in history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative. Hot water causes corals to expel the tiny algae that live in their tissues, which provide them with food (through photosynthesis) and also a rainbow of pigments. Separated from their algae, corals “bleach,” turning ghostly white, and start to starve.
“This is one of the key living systems that we thought was closest to a tipping point,” said Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth systems at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “This is sort of horrible confirmation that it is.”
An estimated 1 billion people around the world benefit from coral reefs, which provide food and income, while also protecting coastal property from storms and flooding. The benefits add up to about $11 trillion a year. With some scientists worried that coral reefs may have already passed a point of no return, researchers are turning to desperate measures to save them, from building artificial reefs to attempts to cool down reefs through geoengineering.
Last year, the warmer weather pattern known as El Niño took hold of the globe, temporarily pushing global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial times. That’s precisely the level at which scientists have predicted that between 70 and 99 percent of tropical reefs would disappear. With a cooler La Niña phase on the way this summer, it’s possible that corals will make it through the current bout of hot ocean temperatures. But each week high temperatures persist, another 1 percent of corals are predicted to bleach. By the early 2030s, global temperatures are on track to pass the 1.5 C threshold for good, compared to around 1.2 C today.
Tourists snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef in early April, swimming above bleached and dead coral. David Gray / AFP via Getty Images
Bleaching doesn’t spell certain death, but the corals that survive struggle to reproduce and are more susceptible to diseases. Even when reefs do recover, there’s usually a loss of species, said Didier Zoccola, a scientist in Monaco who has studied corals for decades. “You have winners and losers, and the losers, you don’t know if they are important in the ecosystem,” he said.
For a coral reef, the tipping point would come when bleaching becomes an annual event, according to David Kline, the executive director of the Pacific Blue Foundation, a nonprofit working to preserve reefs in Fiji. Species would go extinct, leaving only the most heat-tolerant creatures, the “cockroaches” of corals that can survive tough conditions. Seaweed would start taking over. Parts of the world may be approaching this point, if not already past it: The Great Barrier Reef, for example, has gone through five mass bleaching events in the last eight years, leaving little chance for recovery. Florida has already lost more than 90 percent of its coral reefs.
“I think most scientists, myself included, would be very uncomfortable saying we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Deborah Brosnan, a longtime coral scientist who founded the reef restoration project OceanShot. “But in reality, are we very close to a tipping point? I believe we are, just judging by the scale of the bleaching that we’re seeing.”
Reefs around the world have already declined by half since the 1950s because of climate change, overfishing, and pollution. Some scientists argue that the world may have already passed the point of no return for corals long ago, as far back as the 1980s, yet there’s no consensus. “If we really want to have healthy, diverse coral reefs in the future, we need to do something about our greenhouse gas emissions, like, right now,” Kline said.
Rising temperatures might have already set off other notable tipping points, such as the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the thawing of the northern permafrost, which threatens to release vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Coral tipping points would unfold on a regional level, with giant blobs of hot ocean water wrecking reefs, what Lenton characterizes as a “clustered” tipping point.
Coral reefs are so vulnerable, in part, because their existence is fragile in the first palace. Reefs are “a verdant explosion of life in a nutrient desert,” Lenton said, only able to exist because of “really strong reinforcing feedback loops within the system.” An intricate web of corals, algae, sponges, and microbes move essential nutrients like nitrogen around, leading to a profusion of life. “It’s not surprising that if you push it too hard, or knock certain things out, you can tip it into a different ‘no coral’ state, or maybe several different states.”
Losing corals could lead to consequences you wouldn’t expect. For example, you can thank corals for the sand on many beaches — they help create it (coral skeletons turn into sand) and protect beaches from erosion, with the structure of the reef calming waves before they reach shore. Reefs contribute to medical breakthroughs — organisms found in them produce compounds used to treat cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer.
Researchers are racing to salvage what’s left of corals and the ecosystems they support. A restoration project in the Caribbean that Brosnan founded, called OceanShot, is building artificial reefs where natural ones have collapsed. The tiered structures provide habitat for creatures that live in the reefs, both the larger species that live on top and the smaller ones that like to hide in crevices lower down. The installations have had good results, with dozens of fish species moving in, alongside invertebrates like lobsters. Even finicky black urchins transplanted on the reef decided to stay. Brosnan’s team is also hoping to deploy them in places where beaches are being lost, since the artificial reefs can also help prevent sand from washing away.
Some preservation attempts are pretty out there. Scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., for example, are working on deep-freezing coral sperm and larvae through “cryopreservation,”Futurama-style, hoping that they can repopulate oceans of the future. In the Great Barrier Reef, researchers have experimented with brightening clouds with sea salt, a form of geoengineering, to try to protect corals from the hot sun.
Elsewhere, laboratories are breeding corals to withstand heat and ocean acidification. Zoccola works on one such project in Monaco, where scientists are using “assisted evolution” to speed up nature’s process, since corals can’t adapt fast enough in the wild. He calls it a “Noah’s Ark” for corals, hoping that species can live in the lab until, one day, they’re ready to return to the ocean.
After three decades of work, advocates for developing countries scored a major win at last year’s United Nations climate change conference in Dubai: World leaders unanimously agreed to set up a climate reparations fund. As the planet warms, the poorest nations are being hit hardest by drought, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and a slew of other climate impacts — even though these countries did the least to cause global warming, compared to their early-industrializing peers. Enter the so-called loss and damage fund, which is supposed to compensate them for the unavoidable effects of climate change. So far, the international community has pledged more than $650 million to the venture.
Now the tedious, unsexy — and often boring — work of setting up the fund is just beginning.
This week, a 26-member board is meeting for the first time to discuss the administrative and institutional policies required to operationalize the fund and dole money out to developing countries in need. The board’s to-do list is long. It ranges from the procedural — selecting co-chairs and agreeing on a host country for the fund — to the more substantive: deciding which countries are eligible to receive funding, how to fundraise and replenish the fund, and whether or not the World Bank will help manage the fund.
The board was supposed to hold its first meeting at the end of January, but a stalemate among wealthy countries, including the U.S. and those of the European Union, about who to nominate to the board led to delays, putting the meetings three months behind schedule. Much of this work must be completed in just over six months, before the next United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
“There’s a very large work plan for the year,” said Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns and head of international climate justice work at the nonprofit ActionAid USA. “They are still trying to squeeze in three meetings before COP29 to be able to stay on schedule.” Wu is attending the board meeting as an observer.
The stakes are high. The roughly $650 million that has been pledged so far is a sliver of the estimated need — which researchers have pegged at as much as $580 billion per year by 2030 — and is broadly seen as startup money sufficient only to establish the fund. As the main contributors to the climate crisis, wealthy countries are expected to be the primary donors to the fund. But before the fund can begin allocating money to poorer nations in need, a number of decisions need to be made.
Key among them is whether the World Bank will serve as a trustee and help manage the operations of the fund. Wealthy nations believe that the bank, which houses several other environmental and climate funds, has the experience, reputation, and administrative know-how to best manage a financial endeavor of this size. But developing countries were initially opposed to the idea, citing the failures of the bank’s past programs and its role worsening debt crises in poor countries. Ultimately, developing countries reluctantly agreed to allow the World Bank to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis. But that decision was contingent on the bank meeting 11 conditions, including allowing recipients to directly access money from the fund instead of requiring that money pass through an intermediary international institution, such as a United Nations agency or multilateral development bank. The World Bank has until June to deliberate, and report on whether or not it can meet those conditions.
Initial discussions about those conditions have already hit snags, according to reporting by E&E News. The loss and damage fund’s board and the bank can’t seem to agree on who should sign off on financial agreements when money is disbursed. The World Bank has a number of policies in place to ensure that the money it doles out isn’t misused and meets various environmental and social safeguards. Since the loss and damage fund is expected to hand out money to a range of national and subnational groups as a result of the direct access condition, the bank will likely work with hundreds of entities. That increases the chances that a recipient misuses the money or fails to pay back a loan, putting the bank on the hook. As a result, the bank wants the responsibility — and liability — to lie with the board, while the board has argued that as trustee, the bank should have final signing authority.
If a project that receives money from the fund is unable to pay the bank back, the bank’s credit rating could be affected, which in turn could lead to a decrease in the bank’s borrowing power, said Michai Robertson, a lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a group representing 39 island nations. “They see this as a big cluster of issues,” he said. “If you have one entity from each developing country, that’s 140 countries that can access the fund directly and not use a go-between. The bank sees this as a huge risk.”
If the bank ultimately reports that it cannot meet the 11 conditions, countries will go back to the drawing board to establish an independent fund. Those decisions will be made at COP29 in Azerbaijan.
Even if the stalemate between the board and bank is resolved, the board will still have many more thorny questions to work out, including which countries will be eligible to receive money from the fund. In the agreement inked in Dubai last year, countries agreed that the fund’s resources are meant for “developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” But the agreement did not define which countries qualify as “particularly vulnerable.” The phrase has typically referred to small island states and those classified as “least developed countries” in climate talks — but that leaves out countries like Pakistan, which faced catastrophic floods in 2022, and others that are widely seen as appropriate recipients for loss and damage funding.
Hanging over these discussions is also the question of how the fund will raise the trillions of dollars that will be required in the coming years to address the loss and damage countries will face due to climate change.
“There’s sort of the elephant-in-the-room question, which is when is the fund actually going to get meaningful amounts of money,” said Wu. If the fund receives very little money, the board will end up designing policies meant to facilitate the transfer of millions of dollars — not the trillions that are needed, he said.
“The scope of the ambition of the fund is a big question,” he said.
