The UN’s latest Food Waste Index Report, compiled in collaboration with the charity WRAP, reveals that food waste has skyrocketed, with over 1 billion meals wasted per day and over $1 trillion worth of food waste generated per year around the world.
The report found that 783 million people lived with hunger in 2022, and about one-third of the global population faced food insecurity.
“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, said in a press release. “Not only is this a major development issue, but the impacts of such unnecessary waste are causing substantial costs to the climate and nature.”
In total, about 1.05 billion metric tons of food waste, both edible and inedible parts, were generated in 2022, according to the report. This makes up nearly 20% of available food. Further, the report found that food waste reached 132 kilograms per capita, with most food waste (60%) happening in households, followed by 28% of food waste happening in food services and 12% in the retail sector.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 aims to cut food waste in half by 2030, as this waste contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. According to the UN, food waste makes up about 8% to 10% of global emissions. This is even higher than the aviation industry, which contributed about 2% of global carbon emissions in 2022, as reported by the International Energy Agency.
The report noted that the EU, Australia, Japan, UK and the U.S. are the only G20 countries with adequate food waste estimates for tracking progress to the 2030 goal of cutting food waste by 50%. The report authors said they hope other countries will utilize the report to improve food waste tracking in order to work toward reducing the numbers.
Some countries are already making meaningful progress on food waste reduction targets, with Japan reducing food waste by 31% and the UK by 18%.
“The good news is we know if countries prioritise this issue, they can significantly reverse food loss and waste, reduce climate impacts and economic losses, and accelerate progress on global goals,” Andersen said.
The authors of the report recommended a collaborative approach to address food waste and food insecurity, including through public-private partnerships, which have already helped reduce food waste per capita in Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and the UK.
“With the huge cost to the environment, society, and global economies caused by food waste, we need greater coordinated action across continents and supply chains. We support UNEP in calling for more G20 countries to measure food waste and work towards SDG12.3,” said Harriet Lamb, CEO of WRAP. “This is critical to ensuring food feeds people, not landfills. Public-Private Partnerships are one key tool delivering results today, but they require support: whether philanthropic, business, or governmental, actors must rally behind programmes addressing the enormous impact wasting food has on food security, our climate, and our wallets.”
There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined. Within walking distance of the Grist office in downtown Seattle, there’s a pinball museum, an NFT museum, a Jimi Hendrix-inspired museum of pop culture, and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, just to name a few. From tiny mom-and-pop museums dedicated to niche topics to massive institutions like The Met and The Smithsonian, museums are widely viewed as some of the most trustworthy sources of information, and also as trusted stewards of cultural artifacts.
But, in part because of the treasured objects they house, museums often have outsize carbon footprints — and they are also uniquely vulnerable to climate impacts.
“It’s because we have these really strict regulations on keeping temperature and relative humidity at certain levels in the name of preserving the collections,” said Caitlin Southwick, a former art conservator who now runs an organization called Ki Culture that helps museums transition to more sustainable practices.
As purveyors of a public good, museums, galleries, and other cultural entities have often been excused from the climate conversation, she said, and in some cases even from regulation. But, she added, museums can actually be some of the most carbon-intensive buildings in cities.
The field of cultural preservation has other environmental issues as well, like the use of toxic chemicals to clean or restore artworks. But climate control represents a particularly bedeviling problem, since more energy use contributes to climate change, which in turn causes greater temperature extremes that necessitate even more energy use to maintain a controlled indoor environment (sometimes known as the “doom loop” of AC).
As climate change increasingly leaves no city untouched, museums are confronting the reality that rising temperatures and volatile weather threaten their conservation efforts — and they’re turning to new technologies, and, in some cases, challenging conventional conservation wisdom, to stay ahead and minimize their impact.
A view of the outside of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. Charles H. Wright Museum
When Leslie Tom first came to The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, nearly a decade ago, there was relatively little funding for sustainability efforts. She became the museum’s chief sustainability officer in 2015, as a Detroit Revitalization Fellow through Wayne State University. And, with her background in architecture and design, one of the first things she noticed was that the museum didn’t have blueprints. “The architect’s office had a fire,” Tom said, and a few other record-keeping issues meant that “there was just no accurate documentation.”
In 2019, the museum’s leaders secured funding to begin a project of digitally mapping the 125,000 square-foot space, to answer the question of documentation with modern tools. They wanted to make The Wright a “smart museum” — and Tom saw an opportunity to help lead this effort and bring sustainability goals into it.
They began with 3D laser scans of the building, which fed into a digital building information model. Then, about a year ago, using software called Tandem from the company Autodesk, The Wright created what’s known as a digital twin — a detailed replica of the building that draws on near real-time data from sensors installed around the facility.
“Being in a museum, for me, it’s like a small city,” Tom said. “And so now, to have a representation of that, it really helps us to design the visitor experience, vendor experience, volunteer experience, as we start to all work together to think about how we can layer environmental sustainability into all of our processes.”
The Wright used laser scanners to create a detailed map of the facility, shown here in the museum’s central rotunda. Autodesk
Although the team is just at the start of this digitization journey, Tom is excited about what the data can do for energy efficiency — for instance, gradually pre-heating and cooling spaces, based on models of how many people will be in the space at a given time. And while digital infrastructure does create additional energy needs for things like running servers, for Tom and the rest of the team at The Wright, the need for comprehensive data about their building, and the appeal of doing it digitally, outweighed the energy cost of the technology.
Some museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, have reduced energy use by simply broadening the range of temperature and humidity fluctuations they’ll allow in their buildings. “They just made a decision,” Southwick said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna go from plus or minus 2 [degrees Celsius] to plus or minus 5.’ They saved 20,000 euro a month on their energy bill.” Now, the museum is recalibrating its systems to allow plus or minus 10 degree C swings, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine has done the same, Southwick said.
It’s a somewhat radical challenge to the orthodoxy around conservation, and in the case of the Guggenheim, the changes have made at least one institution hesitant to lend its work for special exhibits — although other lenders have been supportive of the shift, one of the museum’s deputy directors told The New York Times. “The changes might result in a lengthier conversation [about lending], but the more people do it, the more widely accepted the practice is,” Southwick said. “In my opinion, It will be the standard within the next year.”
She also sees an opportunity for museums to begin acclimatizing artifacts to shifting temperatures. While some truly sensitive objects do need to be kept under very precise conditions, other materials can actually adapt, Southwick said. She offers wood as an example — when it’s kept in warm, humid environments, it expands, and then if it gets dry, it will crack. “But if you gradually increase or decrease the relative humidity over a certain amount of time, then the material has time to react to it without damaging it,” she said. This approach is already used in the course of museum loans between institutions in different climates.
The same strategy “may also be a way that we can preemptively and controllably prepare our objects for the effects of climate change,” Southwick said. While it’s difficult to predict the climate conditions of the future with absolute certainty, she sees this as an important area of exploration for conservation science. “I think that it’s really important for us to make sure we never get into a situation where we regress and we’re increasing our HVACs, or we’re increasing our climate-control programs, because that’s not going to do anybody any good.”
At The Wright, the new sensors are gathering data on temperature and humidity, and monitoring things like potential leaks, which will help the team be more responsive to environmental shifts that could pose a risk to the 35,000 artifacts The Wright has in its care.
“For any museum or cultural institution, the objects are the most sacred,” Tom said.
Although Michigan is something of a climate refuge, The Wright has already had to contend with extreme weather impacts, like the intense storms that caused flooding throughout the Midwest in the summer of 2021. “Those floods hampered and did damage to every cultural institution in this district,” said Jeffrey J. Anderson, the museum’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. He made a decision to move The Wright’s entire collection off-site — and it was only last week that the last few items were returned.
Other cultural institutions are facing similar challenges, and figuring out how best to confront them. “Over a third of museums in the U.S. are cited within a hundred kilometers [62 miles] of the coast,” said Elizabeth Merritt, the “in-house futurist” at the American Alliance of Museums and the founding director of the organization’s Center for the Future of Museums. “And a quarter are in zones that are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and severe storms,” she added.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. is building flood gates and stormwater systems even as it evacuates the basement collection of its American History museum. In a more extreme example, the island nation of Tuvalu announced plans to create a digital replica in the metaverse to ensure its culture lives on if the physical country is subsumed by rising seas.
The Wright currently has no plans to use its digital twin as a backup for the museum itself. But it is reckoning in other ways with the role of a museum during the climate crisis — driven in part by the understanding that Black Americans and other communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change and targeted by environmental racism. “From our perspective, we look at this as an opportunity for us to be a leader in racial justice, sustainability, climate justice,” particularly for the Detroit community, Anderson said.
In 2020, The Wright’s board of directors officially adopted sustainability into the institution’s strategic goals. And, building on existing climate-themed exhibitions and programs, Tom said, she’s eager to explore how data from the digital twin system can be used to communicate with the public about the museum’s sustainability efforts and goals.
“Museums are among the most trusted sources of information in the U.S.,” Merritt said. Among the general public, they rank second, only behind friends and family. “So they can use that power to help communicate to the public what’s going on and what the public can do about it.” She argues that steps like revisiting policies on air conditioning are just one piece of how museums should think about a multifaceted commitment to their communities, which could also include climate-themed exhibits and even serving as public cooling centers.
Southwick agrees. Through her organization’s work, she’s seen firsthand a growing interest in sustainability, but some hesitation to project that interest outward. “Can you imagine the impact if every museum had an exhibition about climate?” she said. “It’s just extraordinary, what the power of the museum sector is.”
The Climate Museum in New York City is the first museum in the U.S. dedicated to the climate crisis. The organization first launched in 2014; it currently has a pop-up space in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, while the team continues to look for a permanent home. In this photo, director Miranda Massie stands in front of an installation called “Someday, all this,” by artist David Opdyke — a collage of vintage postcards with a somewhat apocalyptic message.
America’s “fescue belt,” named for an exotic grass called tall fescue, dominates the pastureland from Missouri and Arkansas in the west to the coast of the Carolinas in the east. Within that swath, a quarter of the nation’s cows — more than 15 million in all — graze fields that stay green through the winter while the rest of the region’s grasses turn brown and go dormant.
But the fescue these cows are eating is toxic. The animals lose hooves. Parts of their tails and the tips of their ears slough off. For most of the year, they spend any moderately warm day standing in ponds and creeks trying to reduce fevers. They breathe heavily, fail to put on weight, and produce less milk. Some fail to conceive, and some of the calves they do conceive die.
The disorder, fescue toxicosis, costs the livestock industry up to $2 billion a year in lost production. “Fescue toxicity is the most devastating livestock disorder east of the Mississippi,” said Craig Roberts, a forage specialist at the University of Missouri Extension, or MU, and an expert on fescue.
By the early 20th century, decades of timber-cutting and overgrazing had left the ranching region in southern states barren, its nutrient-rich native grasses replaced by a motley assortment of plants that made poor forage. Then, in the 1930s, a University of Kentucky professor spotted an exotic type of fescue growing in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, which seemed to thrive even on exhausted land. Unlike most native grasses, Kentucky-31, as it was called, stayed green and hearty through the winter. Ranchers found the species remarkably resilient and, if not beloved by cattle, edible enough to plant. Over the next 20 years, much of the country’s southern landscape was transformed into a lush, evergreen pasture capable of supporting a robust cattle industry.
Cattle in Elk Creek, Missouri, submerge themselves in a pasture pond to cool off in between grazing on non-native fescue grass, which can raise a cow’s temperature and give them a constant fever, one of the symptoms of fescue toxicity. Terra Fondriest via FERN
As early as the 1950s, however, ranchers began to notice tall fescue’s disturbing effects: One study showed that cattle had to be fenced out of other grasses before they’d touch fescue. When they did eat it, the cows saw only one-sixth of their normal weight gain and lost eight pounds of milk production a day.
Between the cells in fescue grows an endophyte, a fungus living symbiotically inside the grass. The endophyte is what makes the fescue robust against drought and overgrazing, but it’s also what makes it toxic. When scientists engineered a version of fescue without the fungal endophyte, in 1982, its hardiness disappeared and ranchers saw it die out among their winter pastures. Farmers learned to live with the health impacts of the toxic version, and today it remains the primary pasture grass across 37 million acres of farmland.
It’s a longstanding problem, and it’s spreading. Warming temperatures from climate change are now expanding the northern limit of the fescue belt, and the grass is marching into new areas, taking root on disturbed land, such as pastures. Northern Illinois and southern Iowa could already be officially added to the fescue belt, Roberts said, introducing toxicosis to new farming regions.
“It’s becoming not just present but part of their normal pastures,” he said, noting that he increasingly gets calls from farmers in this region who are wondering what to do.
Amelia Bates / Grist
As more farmers find themselves facing the challenges of toxic fescue, there are two strategies emerging to finally solve the decades-old problem, though in diametrically opposed ways. One involves planting a modified version of tall fescue — called “friendly fescue” — in which the toxic endophyte has been replaced by a benign one that still keeps the grass hearty and green all winter. Another would abandon fescue altogether and restore the native grasses and wildflowers that once dominated the region, as well as help revitalize natural carbon sinks and fight climate change.
For a variety of reasons — some economic, some cultural — neither solution has really taken hold with most fescue belt ranchers. But the debate embodies the agricultural industry in the era of climate change: As ecosystems shift and extreme weather makes farming even more precarious, ranchers are facing tough decisions about how to adapt their land use practices. What is best for business, and will that ultimately be what’s best for the land and for the changing climate?
Friendly fescue hit the market in 2000, developed by Pennington Seed Inc. It looks identical to toxic fescue and behaves almost identically, thus requiring little change to the ranching habits of fescue belt farmers over the last 70 years.
It would seem an ideal fit for an industry focused on maintaining the status quo amid climate challenges. But ranchers have been slow to embrace it. For one thing, friendly fescue, formally known as “novel endophyte fescue,” costs twice as much as the toxic variety — $4 for a pound of seed versus $2. And replacing one grass with another is labor-intensive; a 2004 report by the University of Georgia said it would take farmers who made the switch about three years to break even. Matt Poore, a professor of animal science at North Carolina State University, chairs the Alliance for Grassland Renewal, a national organization dedicated to eradicating toxic fescue. Yet Poore, who also raises cattle, has only converted 30 percent of his fields, preferring to do it slowly. “The fear of failure is a big deal,” he said. “You’re sticking your neck out there when you go to kill something that looks really good.”
Many farmers would like to avoid the risk of total pasture makeovers, if they can. Until now, toxic fescue ranchers have found ways to scrape by, and a parade of treatments have come out through the decades, promising relief from toxicosis.
They can supplement their cows’ diets with grain (an expensive remedy), or cut and dry their fescue and feed it to them as hay, which reduces its toxicity somewhat. They can dilute the toxicity of their fields by planting clover among the fescue, or clip the especially toxic seed heads before cows can graze them. They can try to genetically select cows with moderate fescue tolerance, which can salvage as much as a quarter of their losses.
Poore counts over 100 such remedies. “If you do enough of those things you can tell yourself you don’t really have a problem,” he said. Meanwhile, the lush ground cover that fescue displays in winter is seductive.
An overgrazed non-native fescue pasture in Elk Creek, Missouri. Terra Fondriest via FERN
A lack of trust, too, is a problem. In the early 1980s, when researchers introduced endophyte-free fescue, it was hailed as the answer to toxicosis, a way to save the industry. Ranchers trusted the scientists, and they lost a lot of money when that version withered in the fields. The sting of that debacle persists as researchers try to convince ranchers to trust friendly fescue. “The sins of the past have come back to haunt us,” MU’s Roberts said. “It’s going to take a while to overcome that screwup.”
Every March, Roberts and other scientists travel around the fescue belt giving workshops on friendly fescue to anyone who will listen. He tries to assuage farmers who are worried about the expense and labor of pasture conversion.
There aren’t good numbers on adoption rates, because seed companies are guarded about how much they sell. But Robert says he knows it’s rising. Some states promote it more than others, by offering cost-shares, for example, and hosting workshops like those Roberts leads.
It doesn’t help that endophyte-free fescue — the one that fails in the winter — remains on the market. The state of Kentucky even provides cost-share funding for ranchers who switch from toxic fescue to endophyte-free fescue. And several Kentucky ranchers said they were still unclear on the differences among toxic fescue, endophyte-free fescue, and friendly fescue. Farm supply stores often don’t even stock friendly fescue seed, as it’s less shelf stable.
Roberts noted that toxic fescue exudes fluids that “pretty much destroy the food web,” poisoning insects that quail and other creatures feed on. A 2014 study showed that climate change could increase the endophyte’s toxicity. Friendly fescue soil, by contrast, has more microbes than toxic fescue soil. And water quality is better with friendly fescue, since sick cows don’t have to congregate in streams and ponds to stay cool.
Despite the confusion and slow uptake, Roberts is optimistic, noting the 30 years it took for farmers to embrace the revolution of hybrid corn in the early 20th century. And he can point to some wins. Darrel Franson, a Missouri rancher who remembers the endophyte-free fescue debacle, nevertheless decided to take the risk, converting his 126 acres to friendly fescue. He loves the results. “It’s hard to argue with the production potential of tall fescue and the length of season it gives us,” he said.
Roberts’ employer, the University of Missouri, is betting that a modified version of exotic fescue will appeal to ranchers more than the idea of converting to native grasslands. “What we’re promoting is environmentally friendly as well as economically sound,” he said. “When you seed a nontoxic endophyte and add legumes [to dilute pasture toxicity], that works as well as anything, and we have a lot of data on it. It may take another 20 years for it to catch on, but it’s not going away. It’s too good.”
For decades, Amy Hamilton and her late husband, Rex, fought fescue toxicosis in Texas County, Missouri, the heart of the Ozarks. They watched their and their neighbors’ cows lose tail switches, hooves, and parts of their ears to gangrene. Finally, they’d had enough.
But the Hamiltons didn’t reach for an artificially modified version of an exotic grass. Instead, in 2012, they converted 90 acres of pasture to native warm-season grasses, using their own money and cost-share funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, or NRCS. The effects were immediate; the next year they documented increased conception and weaning rates in their cows and calves. Since then, they’ve converted another 75 acres. A former soil conservationist with a degree in agronomy, Hamilton’s mission became to annihilate fescue, on her property and across the fescue belt.
Amy Hamilton stands in a patch of prairie blazing star in one of the Hamilton family’s native grazing fields in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
I visited Hamilton’s ranch in November 2022. She and her family run about 45 cows and 150 bison. She and her daughter Elizabeth Steele, who helps run the family’s native seed company, walked through a pasture where fescue grew 15 years ago. Now big bluestem, little bluestem, and sunflowers fill the main body of the pasture, and freshwater cordgrass and ironweed decorate a creek’s edge. Quail have returned for the first time in decades.
Unlike the Hamiltons’ neighbors’ pastures, however, this field was not green; most of the plants had gone dormant for winter. Hamilton reached through a thick mass of bluestem and pointed to two diminutive, green plants: wild rye and a sedge species, cool-season grasses that provide a native analogue to fescue — and, crucially, winter forage.
“This is what would have been here pre-settlement,” said Steele, referring to the land before Europeans arrived. “A functioning grassland with different plants serving different functions. Nature’s design is not for monocultures.”
To understand the fescue-native debate requires an understanding of the ecological tradeoff between warm- and cool-season grasses. Simply put, warm-season grasses grow in the summer, harnessing the strong sunshine to grow tall and robust; then they go dormant in the winter. Cool-season grasses do the opposite, putting their evolutionary resources into frost-tolerance. As a result, they tend to be smaller than their warm-season counterparts, providing less biomass and less food per plant for the cows that graze them.
Cattle belonging to the Hamiltons graze on freshly cut eastern gamagrass that was harvested for seed on the family’s land in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
Hamilton and Steele have decided to bet on biodiversity. Instead of a year-round monoculture of fescue, they have a biodiverse mix of warm- and cool-season grasses, along with wildflowers. It’s not as visibly lush as a fescue field, but the benefits to cattle health, soil health, and climate resistance make it worth it. “It is a kind of faith that these prairies evolved for the good of the native species that were here,” Hamilton said.
Even with the leaner cool-season grasses, their native fields produce twice as much forage as the old fescue fields and generate a much higher amount of organic matter, enriching the soil and allowing the pasture to hold more water. A soil-health specialist from NRCS tested their soil’s organic matter content before the 2012 restoration, then again five years later. The result was pastureland that holds up to a half gallon more water than a typical fescue field.
In a warming climate with more extreme droughts — much of the Ozarks was in severe drought last year — that extra water storage can make a critical difference for cattle and soil health. The southeastern U.S., the heart of the fescue belt, faces a future of more intense drought and floods. The Hamiltons’ biodiverse style of ranching helps address both extremes, and they expect their native ecosystems will be more resilient to climate change.
“[The extra water] trickles into our stream through the year, as opposed to running off in a flood,” said Steele.
From left: Elizabeth Steele, her niece Scout Kipp, and sons Otis Ray and Jacob work on making a native flower bouquet near Amy Hamilton’s home in Elk Creek last July. Terra Fondriest via FERN
The roots of native grasses also reach three times deeper than fescue roots, making them drought-resistant as well as efficient carbon sinks. Grasslands are uniquely good at carbon sequestration. Unlike forests, they store more than 80 percent of their carbon underground, where it’s more safely sequestered than in aboveground trees where the carbon can potentially volatilize and return to the atmosphere.
What’s more, intensive grazing of monocultures makes it hard to sequester carbon. A 2019 study, published in the journal Nature,showed that native, biodiverse, restored grasslands hold more than twice as much carbon as monocultures. The deep roots of the Hamiltons’ native species lock carbon deep underground, where it can take hundreds or even thousands of years to return to the atmosphere.
In the years since the Hamiltons converted their fields, the use of native warm-season grasses has gained momentum in the ranching industry. The University of Tennessee — firmly in the fescue belt — opened the Center for Native Grasslands Management in 2006 aimed at getting ranchers to incorporate native warm-season grasses, known as NWSGs, into pastureland. The Missouri Department of Conservation conducts workshops to familiarize ranchers with NWSGs. Research by the center found that pastures of native switchgrass financially outperform fescue pastures.
And Patrick D. Keyser, the center’s director, says native grasses significantly outperform fescue in climate resiliency. Fescue, he says, wants it to be 73 degrees and rainy every other day. “Think Oregon or Scotland,” he said. Native warm-season grasses in the fescue belt, on the other hand, can go weeks with blistering heat and drought without a problem. “To them, the worst climate projections that we’re getting really aren’t a big deal. From a resiliency standpoint, they absolutely win.”
If replacing fescue with natives is moving slowly in general, replacing it with native cool-season grasses, to get year-round forage, remains nearly unheard of. As with friendly fescue, cost is partly to blame. Elizabeth Steele’s “cowboy math” estimates that a native conversion today would cost around $365 per acre, a scary number for ranchers.
Amy Hamilton holds seed from a native grass within a savannah restoration area on Hamilton family land in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
Proponents of native conversion also face a more complicated obstacle than cost as they seek buy-in from ranchers. The debate over how beef cattle are raised is caught up in the culture war over climate change. By some estimates, meat production accounts for nearly 60 percent of the greenhouse gases generated by the food system, with beef as the leading culprit. Even as the concept of “regenerative ranching,” a method of cattle farming that tries to restore degraded soil and reduce emissions, has secured a toehold in the industry, “climate change” remains a political term in farm country, one that is largely avoided.
Ranchers like Amy Hamilton risk being marginalized as “progressives.” So while she believes diverse native grasslands will make pastures more resilient to climate change, she doesn’t mention that when proselytizing to fellow ranchers. Insead, she talks about increased water infiltration, more abundant wildlife, and improved soil health — things that matter to ranchers no matter their thoughts on climate change.
She also tells them that native conversion pencils out. Hamilton doesn’t fertilize her pastures, and she rarely uses hay, as most ranchers do to supplement their cows’ fescue diet. And Steele estimates that, because native pastures produce more forage than fescue monocultures, increased forage and resulting weight gain makes up for the initial conversion costs in less than two years. “The more you emulate natural systems, the less money you have to spend on stuff like baling machines, herbicides, toxicosis effects, and fertilizer,” she said. That extra forage also allows ranchers to feed more cows. So if a rancher wants to expand their herd size, they can either expand their fescue acreage, for $3,000 an acre, or spend $365 an acre to convert the land they already have to natives.
Saving money matters in the fescue belt. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 60 percent of farms in Texas County, Missouri, run a deficit, and every state in the fescue belt loses money on agriculture, except for Illinois, which is largely a crop state.
“Agriculture is so hard that if you don’t do it with your pocketbook in mind, you can cause people to go broke. I don’t want to do that,” Hamilton said.
Amy Hamilton stands in one of the cooled seed storage rooms at the headquarters of Hamilton Native Outpost in Elk Creek. Terra Fondriest via FERN
Hamilton estimates that more than 100 other fescue belt ranchers she’s in touch with are in the process of converting some or all of their pasture to native grasses. One of them, Steve Freeman, co-owns Woods Fork Cattle Company with his wife, Judy, in Hartville, Missouri. Freeman has converted 80 acres of fescue to natives, with plans to convert 180 more in three years. In total, that will make a third of his pasture diverse native grasslands.
“Almost all my inspiration has come from going to [the Hamiltons’] field days every year and seeing what this land could be,” Freeman told me on the phone. For him it’s not just about eradicating fescue toxicosis, it’s about the whole suite of benefits for biodiversity, soil health, and water retention. “I realized we’re not going to get there with the grasses we have.”
Freeman notes the power imbalance between the informal effort to promote native grasses and the universities and beef industry groups that are pushing modified fescue. “There’s no money that backs this,” he said of native restoration. “The novel endophytes and those kinds of things, there’s a lot of money to be made. They’ve helped the universities. I think [Hamilton] is starting to change people’s minds, but it’s been 15 years of doing this.”
For his part, MU’s Roberts hears the subtle dig at his work. “Friends of mine in conservation groups think the university professors are hooked on fescue,” he said. “They’re not. What they’re hooked on is a long grazing season, good yield, and good quality. They’re hooked on criteria, not on a species.”
Either way, change on this scale takes time. The University of Missouri claims that 98 percent of pastures in the state are still toxic, with ranchers slowly opening up to either friendly fescue or native forage. “I’m sure there are ranchers out there that think we’re absolutely nuts,” Hamilton said. “But some of them are interested in thinking about new ways of doing things.”
As we drove out to visit her cows, we passed some of her neighbors’ fields. In one, a herd of emaciated cattle had grazed a fescue field down to stubble. In another, all but a few cows stood in the middle of a pond, trying to cool themselves on a mild, cloudy day.
“These are good people,” Hamilton said. “They’re just trying to make a living.”
Roberto Borrero will never forget standing in the United Nations General Assembly on the day that countries voted to approve the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It was September 13, 2007 in New York City, and Borrero had spent years roaming those halls on behalf of the International Indian Treaty Council, urging country representatives to adopt the new human rights standard.
As he watched his fellow Indigenous advocates hugging one another and celebrating, he thought of how many times their peoples had been denigrated as savages and animals. Here was a new standard enshrining Indigenous rights as human rights. “The world is finally looking at Indigenous peoples as humans,” he thought.
The vote was a pivotal point for Indigenous advocacy. For decades, people like Borrero had turned to the United Nations to hear their pleas when colonial governments refused to do so.
Today, nearly two decades after that vote, Borrero senses Indigenous peoples are approaching another critical moment.
World leaders are pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to address climate change. At least 190 countries have committed to conserving 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by 2030. Once again, Native advocates are flying to New York and Geneva to ensure that their voices are heard and their peoples’ rights and territories are respected. But increasingly, Borrero and other advocates have been unnerved by one particular acronym that keeps popping up in multilateral discussions: IPLC, which stands for Indigenous peoples and local communities.
If you study international conservation, you may have seen it before. It pops up in treaties, in scholarly works, in studies about what lands Indigenous peoples own and what solutions exist to climate change. It’s a phrase that seems to have originated in conservation treaties, but advocates like Borrero are noticing it more often across various international venues.
It sounds innocuous, but to Borrero it feels insidious. Indigenous people have spent decades fighting for their rights and recognition. To him, lumping them in with the very broad, amorphous term “local communities” threatens to roll back the progress that they have made.
It’s one thing for state governments to be expected to get the consent of Indigenous peoples before carving out a new protected area. It’s quite another if states can say that they need “IPLC” consent, and can argue that local communities’ support outweighs Indigenous opposition, effectively drowning out the voices of Native peoples and diminishing their rights.
Supporters of linking the two say doing so doesn’t diminish Indigenous rights, but Borrero and others who have seen their land stolen and communities decimated are bracing themselves for the worst.
“You’re really setting up a possibility for one of the biggest land grabs since colonization, since the beginning of colonization,” he said. “That’s what we’re raising the alarm about.”
“We, the U.N. mechanisms of Indigenous Peoples, urge all U.N. entities in their methods of work to refrain from conflating, associating, combining, or equating Indigenous Peoples with non-Indigenous entities, such as minorities, vulnerable groups, or ‘local communities,’” they wrote.
“We further request that all U.N. Member State parties to treaties related to the environment, biodiversity, and climate cease using the term ‘local communities’ alongside ‘Indigenous Peoples,’ so that the term ‘Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ is no longer used.”
Not everyone agrees. In a meeting of United Nations working groups in Geneva last September, Borrero listened as Daniel Mukubi Kikuni, a representative for a group of African nations, argued that linking Indigenous peoples with local communities in conservation treaties is necessary for achieving biodiversity objectives.
Kikuni is the head of the Office of Biodiversity Conservation at the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He’s one of the main negotiators at the United Nations for the Congo on climate change and conservation issues.
He said in an interview that in Africa, it’s difficult to separate Indigenous peoples from local communities. In his mind, they have the same rights. “To separate them is like to have an elephant without ivory,” he said. “There is no elephant without ivory.”
He sees this work well in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Congo, where he said Indigenous Mbuti and Efe are mainly hunters while local community members are mainly farmers. The communities rely on each other, trading bushmeat and farm products. It’s this kind of mutual reliance that makes him think the two can’t be separated.
“At the global level, we have shown that the two are linked and contribute immensely to achieve our goals and targets,” he said.
But not all local communities have strong connections with the land. In other countries, local communities may be equated with civil society in general, said Borrero. And the potential for tension between the two is what’s causing Indigenous advocates to be concerned.
Few people know this as well as Andrea Carmen, who has led the International Indian Treaty Council for the last 30 years. The organization was founded 50 years ago at Standing Rock in the wake of numerous protests in the 1970s to raise awareness of Native rights. Frustrated by North American governments and their lack of response to Indigenous issues, thousands gathered in solidarity and decided to take their voices to the international arena.
Carmen joined the organization in the 1980s, pushing for the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and raising two children and grandchildren in the process of trying to get the declaration approved. She said that in the countless meetings she attended about the writing of that declaration, no one ever suggested that it be called the rights of “Indigenous peoples and local communities.”
She said the first time she came across the linking of the two was in the 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The conservation treaty, signed by nearly 200 countries (excluding the United States), was a commitment by countries to recognize the importance of conserving biological diversity. In Article 8(J), the treaty acknowledges “the close and traditional dependence of many Indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles on biological resources.”
At the time, the fact that countries were recognizing the value of Indigenous peoples at all was significant. But the wording still raised red flags, said Nicole Schabus, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University in Canada.
Schabus said that in international negotiations, single words or even letters — such as the word “people” versus “peoples” — carry major implications. United Nations documents used to refer to Indigenous populations, which she said implied, “‘Let’s look at the problem of Indigenous populations being so poor, how can we help?’ not ‘Let’s look at Indigenous peoples and how can they have standing and be empowered?’”
In recent decades, Indigenous advocates like Borrero and Carmen have been lobbying international organizations to use the term “Indigenous peoples.” The term “peoples” suggests that Indigenous groups have a defined identity with the right to self-determination, instead of just being another population or community.
In 2014, they found success at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, where parties agreed to add the word peoples to future writings, using the term “Indigenous peoples and local communities.” But the countries involved also made clear that they weren’t changing their legal obligations under the 1992 agreement. And still, the linking of Indigenous peoples with local communities rankled Native advocates.
“‘IPLC’ is problematic because it implies Indigenous peoples and local communities, they’re all the same. They’re not,” Schabus said. In international law, Indigenous peoples have different rights and standing from local communities. Local communities may be knowledge holders, but they don’t have the same rights laid out in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They don’t have their own declaration of rights.
“It’s important to keep those terms and concepts separate,” Schabus said. Part of the problem is that there’s a lot of confusion about what “local communities” means.
There’s ambiguity around both terms, but there’s much more clarity around what makes someone Indigenous, according to Elissavet Tsioumani, an international legal scholar at the University of Trento in Italy. Indigenous peoples are generally considered to have some connection to pre-colonial cultures and land bases and to have the right to determine their national identity. There’s also a growing body of international law around the rights of Indigenous peoples, such as the right to free, prior, and informed consent to projects on their lands.
Local communities don’t explicitly have that same right. At the same time, there’s often conflict between local communities and Indigenous peoples, said Galina Angarova, former executive director of the Indigenous advocacy group Cultural Survival.
“In many cases around the world, local communities actually represent the mainstream society,” she said, adding their interests may be in direct opposition to Indigenous peoples especially when it comes to resources and territorial claims.
To Monica Magnusson, an attorney and human rights advocate in Belize, the issue is not theoretical. She’s a member of Laguna, a community of Maya people in southern Belize.
For years, her community has fought for recognition of their ancestral ties to territories in Belize. They won a major victory in 2015 at the Caribbean Court of Justice affirming their land claims. But she said the Belize government still resists granting the Laguna people rights to their territories.
Magnusson thinks acronyms like IPLC give state governments an excuse to diffuse Indigenous rights.
Local communities and Indigenous peoples might have some similarities, she said, and local communities should be free to organize and advocate for their own rights. But any reference to Indigenous peoples should recognize their distinct rights and not conflate them with another group.
“What’s being created here in these spaces are policies and protocols that will have a direct impact on Indigenous peoples’ lands and resources,” she said. “For governments like Belize, who already don’t want to acknowledge the rights we have, they’re going to jump at any opportunity to water it down.”
Sometimes climate change appears where you least expect it — like the grocery store. Food prices have climbed 25 percent over the past four years, and Americans have been shocked by the growing cost of staples like beef, sugar, and citrus.
While many factors, like supply chain disruptions and labor shortages, have contributed to this increase, extreme heat is already raising food prices, and it’s bound to get worse, according to a recent study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. The analysis found that heatflation could drive up food prices around the world by as much as 3 percentage points per year in just over a decade and by about 2 percentage points in North America. For overall inflation, extreme weather could lead to anywhere from a 0.3 to 1.2 percentage point increase each year depending on how many carbon emissions countries pump into the atmosphere.
Though that might sound small, it’s actually “massive,” according to Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School. “That’s half of the Fed’s overall goal for inflation,” he said, referencing the Federal Reserve’s long-term aim of limiting it to 2 percent. The Labor Department recently reported that consumer prices climbed 3.2 percent over the past 12 months.
The link between heat and rising food prices is intuitive — if wheat starts withering and dying, you can bet flour is going to get more expensive. When Europe broiled in heat waves in 2022, it pushed up food prices that were already soaring due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (known as the breadbasket of Europe), researchers at the Europe Central Bank and Potsdam Institute in Germany found in the new study. Europe saw a record-breaking 9.2 percent inflation that year, and the summer heat alone, which hurt soy, sunflower, and maize harvests, might have been responsible for almost a full percentage point of that increase.
To figure out how climate change might drive inflation in the future, the researchers analyzed monthly price indices for goods across 121 countries over the past quarter-century. No place on the planet looks immune. Countries in North Africa and the Middle East, where hot temperatures already push the comfortable limits of some crops, are expected to see some of the biggest price shocks.
The study’s results were striking, Wagner said, but at the same time very believable. He thinks the calculations are probably on the conservative end of the spectrum: “I wouldn’t be surprised if follow-up studies actually came up with even higher numbers.”
It adds up to a troubling picture for the future affordability of food. “The coronavirus pandemic demonstrated how sensitive supply changes are to disruption and how that disruption can awaken inflation,” David A. Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown University Law Center, wrote in an email. “The disruptive effects of climate change are orders of magnitude greater than those of the pandemic and will cause economic dislocation on a far greater scale.”
The world began paying attention to the dynamic between climate change and higher prices, or “climateflation,” in March 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, when the German economist Isabel Schnabel coined the term in a speech warning that the world faced “a new age of energy inflation.” A few months later, Grist coined the term “heatflation” in an article about how blistering temperatures were driving up food prices.
The difference between the terms is akin to “global warming” vs. “climate change,” with one focused on hotter temperatures and the other on broader effects. Still, “heatflation” might be the more appropriate term, Wagner said, given that price effects from climate change appear to come mostly from extreme heat. The new study didn’t find a strong link between shifts in precipitation and inflation.
The research lends some credibility to the title of the landmark climate change bill that President Joe Biden signed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act. While it’s an open joke that the name was a marketing term meant to capitalize on Americans’ concerns about rising prices, it might be more fitting, in the end, than people expected. “We shouldn’t be making fun of the name Inflation Reduction Act, because in the long run, it is exactly the right term to use,” Wagner said.
Additives in cool paint coatings reflect the sun, reducing the absorption and emission of surface heat, a press release from NTU Singapore said. They are a method of combating the “urban heat island (UHI) effect” — when cities get warmer than the areas that surround them.
“Our study provides evidence that cool paint coatings reduce heat build-up and contribute to the cooling of the urban environment,” said lead author of the study Dr. E V S Kiran Kumar Donthu, a former research fellow at NTU’s Energy Research Institute, in the press release. “This is a minimally intrusive solution for urban cooling that has an immediate effect, compared to other options that often require major urban redevelopment to deploy. Moreover, by reducing the amount of heat absorbed in urban structures, we also reduce heat load in buildings, consequently reducing indoor air-conditioning energy consumption.”
Most previous research into cool paint coatings used scaled-down models or was based on simulations, rather than being conducted in the real world.
The NTU study was conducted in an industrial part of Singapore and looked at how well the coatings worked against the heat of the city.
The research team coated road pavements, roofs and walls with cool paint coatings and discovered that — compared with an adjacent environment that had not been coated — the coated area was as much as two degrees Celsius cooler in afternoon heat. The team used the Universal Thermal Climate Index and found that the thermal comfort level of pedestrians was up to 1.5 degrees Celsius better.
“Findings from the study are not just relevant for cities in Singapore where it is hot all year round, but for other urban areas around the world too. With global warming, people will increasingly look for ways to stay cool. Our study validates how cool paint coatings can be a strategy to reduce the urban heat island effect in future,” said Wan Man Pun, the study’s lead investigator and an associate professor at NTU’s School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE), in the press release.
The study, “Dynamics of cool surface performance on urban microclimate: A full-scale experimental study in Singapore,” was published in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society.
For the study, the team chose four rectangular buildings that formed a pair of parallel “street canyons” in a west Singapore industrial estate managed by JTC Corporation.
One of the canyons — the “cool canyon” — had cool paints coating the pavement, walls and roofs, while the “conventional canyon” acted as the control, with no paint being applied.
“Using environmental sensors, the NTU team monitored the conditions in the two canyons over two months, which included air movement, surface and air temperature, humidity, and radiation, to see how well the cool paint coatings worked in reducing city heat,” the press release said.
Over a period of 24 hours, the researchers discovered that the cool canyon released 30 percent less heat from its built-up surfaces, making its air temperature as much as two degrees Celsius cooler than the conventional control canyon at around 4 p.m. — the hottest time of day. This resulted in cool canyon pedestrians feeling up to 1.5 degrees Celsius cooler.
The team also discovered that the cool canyon’s air temperature was lower due to less heat being absorbed and stored in roads, walls and roofs, which would have been otherwise released, leading to hotter temperatures in the interior of the building or the surrounding air.
In comparison with conventional roofs, cool paint-coated roofs absorbed as much as 40 percent less heat and reflected 50 percent more sunlight during the hottest period on a sunny day. Additionally, most of the heat was prevented from entering the buildings because of the coated walls.
“Our study showed that cool paint coating on the road significantly helped lower the hottest temperatures in the cool canyon, confirming that cool paint coating can be a promising way to make urban areas cooler and more comfortable, especially during hot weather. We hope findings from our study will encourage more urban planners to adopt cool paint coatings on more built-up surfaces, on a large scale,” said Ng Bing Feng, co-author of the study and an assistant professor at NTU’s School of MAE, in the press release.
Aruba has drafted a constitutional amendment that would make it the second country in the world to recognize that nature has inherent rights. The amendment also affirms that people are entitled to a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” reported Inside Climate News.
The draft bill was announced by the country’s nature minister Ursell Arends earlier this month. It would require the government to “take preventive measures to protect against the negative consequences of climate change.”
If the amendment is approved, Aruba will be the second nation in the world after Ecuador to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution. About 30 countries — including Uganda, Bolivia and Spain — have recognized the inherent rights of particular species or ecosystems.
The public will be able to submit written comments through April 4, after which time the draft of the bill will be sent to the country’s advisory council. The government will have the opportunity to revise it before a final version is sent to the legislature, where it must be approved by a two-thirds majority.
If the amendment passes, it will be the first time Aruba has altered its constitution since 1986.
“By incorporating the Rights of Nature, possibly within Aruba’s Constitution, it provides every citizen with the legal [basis] to be a voice for nature. Rights of Nature can become an environmental justice tool for communities unduly impacted by unsustainable practices and its cumulative impact on nature as well as the general wellbeing of local inhabitants,” the United Nations said. “If successful, the constitution will reflect changing social mores in the increased protection of the local environment.”
Arends expressed hope that a final bill will be drafted by this summer, Inside Climate News reported.
“Everyone in Aruba is aware of the magnitude of environmental destruction that has taken place and the importance of nature to our economy and island,” Arends said.
Two million tourists visiting Aruba’s white sand beaches and coastal ecosystems annually make up a large part of the country’s $4 billion economy.
“The ecosystems in Aruba that we rely on are degraded to such an extent that they can’t function like they used to,” Arends said, as reported by Inside Climate News.
An “Explanatory Memorandum” to the draft amendment said the legislation strives for a higher and more broad level of protection than laws like the country’s Nature Conservation Regulation, which protects individual species.
“In an ecosystem everything is connected,” the memorandum states, as Inside Climate News reported. “Protection at the system level is necessary because it takes into account the interrelationships between species and their abiotic environment.”
Humans have the right to an environment that is “clean, healthy and sustainable,” according to the memorandum, which depends upon healthy ecosystems as well. The memorandum referred to the recognition of the right by the United Nations General Assembly in July of 2022.
The right of humans to a healthy environment is now reflected in laws passed by more than 150 countries, and is being used more and more in litigation to force governments to address climate change.
Aruba’s constitutional amendment would also require that the government periodically look at the state of the environment and issue reports every five years.
“I want to thank all those who have worked tirelessly to protect our environment,” Arends said previously, as reported by Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. “Together, we can restore the balance between people and Nature, and [take] care of what belongs to us. We are not giving any rights to Nature. Nature has rights. This is a first step toward acknowledging that.”
The maple tree outside your bedroom window may be a pretty sight to see first thing in the morning, but it could also be helping you get a good night’s sleep, according to new research.
A global study conducted in 18 countries found a link between people who live within view of a green street or blue spaces and better, longer sleep. The study analyzed six different types of nature exposure to what is considered insufficient sleep, or fewer than six hours of sleep in a night, for more than 16,000 people.
The six types of nature exposure considered in the study included streetscape greenery, views of blue space from home, green space within one kilometer of the home, coast within one kilometer of the home, visits to green spaces and visits to blue spaces.
The researchers did not find that green space or coast within one kilometer of the home had any significant effect on insufficient sleep, but they did find that streetscape greenery and visible blue spaces as well as visits to green and blue spaces both were associated with fewer cases of insufficient sleep.
“People that lived in greener streets reported better mental health, which was the driving factor behind getting a better night’s sleep,” Dr. Leanne Martin, lead author of the study and a lecturer and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health, said in a statement. “Streetscape greening initiatives already exist in urban cities to tackle environmental risks like flooding and heat island effects, but our findings suggest policymakers should extend that to residential areas to support public health by promoting healthier sleep habits.”
In total, the study found that only about 17% of people who had streetscape greenery experienced insufficient sleep, while 22% of people without streetscape greenery did not get enough sleep. The results were published in the journal Environmental Research.
“Whilst a five percent difference may seem small, these findings are comparable to the difference in sleep between people who are coping on their present income and those under financial strain,” said Dr. Mathew White, co-author of the study and a senior scientist at the University of Vienna’s Cognitive Science HUB. “With money worries widely recognised as an important determinant of sleep, we think this demonstrates street greenness should be recognised by governments as an important public health issue.”
The research adds to existing studies on the benefits of green space, including that people living in neighborhoods with more green space tend to have better mental health and that living near greenery can improve cognitive functioning.
But the authors noted some limitations to the study, including how other factors like air pollution, noise and light pollution could impact sleep.
Further, it’s important to note the inequity when it comes to access to these spaces around the world; the European Environment Agency reported reported that in the EU, green space is generally less accessible in low-income communities. Sustainable Earth reported that Buenos Aires, a major city with relatively low green space, has about 0.2 square meters of green space per person in densely populated areas, while high-income areas in the city have about 22.9 square meters of green space per person. The study authors did include factors like coping on present income and population density as control variables.
The authors hope that initiatives to incorporate more greenery in urban areas to help reduce the urban heat island effect and reduce flood risks can also consider improvements for mental health and sleep for residents.
“If further evidence can corroborate that these associations are causal, then improved provision and maintenance of residential blue and green spaces may offer a viable strategy of improving mental wellbeing and promoting healthier sleep duration at the population-level,” the study concluded. “Further, more targeted nature-based interventions may be an appropriate strategy to assist people who are most affected by insufficient sleep.”
