A new study by a team of scientists with the Conservation Ecology Research Unit at South Africa’s University of Pretoria has found that the best way to keep elephant numbers stable is to let them roam freely in protected areas connected to buffer zones, rather than in “fortress” conservation areas where they have less space.

The conservation of wildlife habitat is essential for the protection of endangered species like the African savannah elephant. One of the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is for 30 percent of the land on Earth to be protected by 2030. Thus far, 16 percent has been preserved around the world, with Africa having designated 20 percent as protected.

Approximately 410,000 savannah elephants live in Africa, most of whom live in the southern part of the continent, said two of the study’s authors — Celesté Maré, a Ph.D. candidate at Aarhus University, and Robert A.R. Guldemond, a researcher with the Conservation Ecology Research Unit — in The Conversation.

More than 290,000 of the endangered mammals — 70 percent — live in 103 protected areas of differing connectivity, size and protection.

“African savannahs cover 13.5 million km2, almost half of the continent, of which 10% is protected and 2.2 million km2 (16%) sustain globally Endangered savannah elephants,” the authors of the study wrote. “These savannahs are also home to half a billion people, leading to high levels of human-wildlife conflict.”

In their paper, Maré, Guldemond and colleagues examined how populations of southern Africa’s elephants responded to various approaches to conservation.

The study covered approximately 123,553 square miles and was the most extensive growth analysis of any large mammal population in the world.

It revealed that, from 1995 to 2020, the elephant population across southern Africa increased at an average yearly rate of 0.16 percent. That means elephant numbers are the same as they were a quarter century ago.

“This is promising given that globally, savannah elephants are still listed as endangered, meaning that their numbers declined by over 50% within three generations,” Maré and Guldemond said in The Conversation. “Our analysis led us to conclude that the best way to keep overall numbers stable was to allow elephants to roam freely. Keeping elephants in small ‘fortress’ conservation parks may lead to spikes in elephant numbers, but this does not mean the numbers will be stable (more or less the same over time).”

Two approaches are normally used in the establishment of protected areas. One is to create isolated conservation fortresses that keep animals inside while protecting them from people.

The researchers discovered that elephant populations in these small patches of habitat boomed, sometimes to the extent that birth control or translocation became necessary. The potential of these conservation areas to become too packed meant the health of the elephants and the environment were put at risk.

The other model is to form groups of protected habitat linked to buffer areas that have less protection, like communal lands and forestry and subsistence farming areas.

The latter strategy means elephants are protected inside the core areas, with resources available to be shared by wildlife and humans in buffer zones.

“Our findings showed that elephants in large, well-protected core areas were more stable – neither increasing nor decreasing significantly. These populations enjoy strict protection and minimal human impact, while their connectivity to buffer areas allows for natural movement. Links between clusters of protected areas allow elephants to move into buffers when the core populations [get] too high and to return when their environments become unsuitable, or when they face other threats, such as poaching,” Maré and Guldemond said.

The study, “Protecting and connecting landscapes stabilizes populations of the Endangered savannah elephant,” was published in the journal Science Advances.

Maré and Guldemond pointed out that the safety and livelihoods of local communities also need to be taken into consideration in the creation of buffer zones.

“Conservation fortresses often exclude local people and may spark resentment. But buffer areas that surround core protected areas can be established in cooperation with local communities, who can then also benefit economically,” Maré and Guldemond said in The Conversation.

Creating connected protected areas not only gives African savannah elephants more room to roam and a better chance at survival, but it benefits other species of animals and plants as well.

“Populations with more options for moving around are healthier and more stable, which is important given an uncertain future from climate change,” Maré and Guldemond said.

The post The Best Way to Keep Elephant Populations Stable Over Time Is to Allow Them to Roam Freely, Scientists Find appeared first on EcoWatch.

China is the world leader in renewable energy, including 40 percent of the planet’s entire solar capacity, reported Rystad Energy. The United States comes in second place with 12 percent.

Last year, China installed more new solar capacity than the total amount ever installed in any other country, Bloomberg reported.

“China’s solar sector is set to break records in the coming years. When installed capacity crosses the 500 gigawatts (GW) mark by the end of 2023, it will have taken 13 years to reach that milestone. That total, however, will be doubled to 1 terawatt (TW) in just three additional years,” Rystad Energy said.

According to China’s National Energy Administration (NEA), the country increased its solar capacity by 216.9 GW last year, eclipsing its record of 87.4 GW from the previous year, reported Bloomberg. That’s more than the U.S. total of 175.2 GW, estimates by BloombergNEF said.

In 2023, China’s new energy investments rose more than 34 percent, said NEA spokesperson Zhang Xing in a press release from the State Council.

“The remarkable surge in investments in China’s renewable energy sector, particularly in solar and wind, underscores the country’s strategic focus on diversifying its energy portfolio and reducing reliance on traditional sources,” said Lin Boqiang, head of Xiamen University’s China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy, in the press release. “China’s global leadership in renewable energy is evident not only in the scale of investments but also in the widespread adoption of innovative technologies and practices.”

An International Renewable Energy Agency report said photovoltaic power and wind generation costs have gone down by more than 80 and 60 percent, respectively, over the course of the past decade, in large part due to China’s innovation, engineering and manufacturing, the press release said.

NEA data showed China’s installed solar power generation capacity increased by 55.2 percent last year, while its overall capacity for power generation went up by 13.9 percent to a total of 2,919 GW, Reuters reported. Wind power generation capacity in the country grew by 20.7 percent.

Government targets have driven the fast growth in capacity. Beijing has plans to reach peak emissions by the end of the decade and become carbon-neutral by 2060.

The government’s goal of building 1,200 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030 is on track to be met five years ahead of schedule.

“In terms of investments, Chinese enterprises have extended their reach across major countries and regions, investing in wind power, photovoltaic generation and hydropower, leveraging their expertise and know-how,” said Pan Huimin, deputy head of the NEA’s international cooperation department, in the press release. “So far, Chinese wind and solar products worth over $33.4 billion and $245.3 billion, respectively, have been exported to more than 200 countries and regions.”

The post China Installed More Solar Panels Last Year Than the U.S. Has in Total appeared first on EcoWatch.

An analysis of data from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has found that fewer wild birds are visiting gardens in the UK. 

RSPB analyzed data from its annual Big Garden Birdwatch, which kicks off in late January each year since 1979. The Big Garden Birdwatch asks participants to spend at least one hour observing and counting birds during the event’s specified timeframe. Participants then send their findings to RSPB as part of a citizen science project.

According to RSPB, house sparrows were the No. 1 spotted bird in the 2023 survey, which recorded over 9.1 million birds in total, including 1,401,338 house sparrows. But even that species is in decline by 57% compared to the number of house sparrows counted in the first survey in 1979.

The song thrush species has also seen drastic losses, with the 2023 count down by 80% compared to the 1979 survey.

“Sadly this snapshot is a reminder of how many of our most loved birds are at the forefront of the nature and climate emergency,” RSPB’s chief executive Beccy Speight told the BBC.

The findings weren’t all negative, though. Goldfinches have increased since the survey began, in part thanks to a surge in birdfeeders, the BBC reported. Woodpigeons and long-tailed tits are also on the rise.

Birds around the world are facing many problems that have contributed to their decline. Extreme weather and climate change have been linked to declines in breeding of Antarctic seabirds, and a 2022 study found that birds across Europe are being affected by climate change in a variety of ways. Some of these problems included body changes linked to heat stress, shifts in egg-laying dates and decreases in the number of offspring.

Pollution is also affecting birds in ways that are still being studied. A study published in 2023 linked light pollution to shrinking eye sizes of birds, and another study from last year found that birds around the world were incorporating trash like cigarette butts and plastic waste into their nests.

Research from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) estimated a loss of 73 million birds in Britain since 1970, including 30 million house sparrows.

These losses have experts urging people to spend more time birding and making their yards more welcoming to birds by providing native plants, especially plants that can provide shelter and food to birds.

“With birds facing so many challenges, it’s more important than ever to get involved in the Birdwatch,” RSPB said on its website. “Every bird you do — or don’t — count will give us a valuable insight into how garden birds are faring.”

The 2024 count has just wrapped up, with this year’s Big Garden Birdwatch taking place from January 24 to January 28. The results will help RSPB further track bird populations, making note of declining and vulnerable species that could benefit from further protections.

The post Fewer Wild Birds Are Visiting Gardens in the UK, Survey Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Food waste is a big problem – more than one-third of the world’s annual food…

The post Apps and Business Services that Rescue Food Waste appeared first on Earth911.

As we enter 2024, closing the books on 2023’s record heat, economic and geopolitical turmoil,…

The post Earth911 Podcast: Project Censored’s 25 Under-Reported Environmental Stories of 2023 appeared first on Earth911.

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete. 

On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change. 

The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: Plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”

A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant 1 million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat. 

But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees — and the rest of the country’s — didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too? 

That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of  “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage. 

“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. 

“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.” 

There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”

Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”

She pointed to the Philadelphia Orchard Project as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.

Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables — a whole range of things,” Jordan said. 

The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.

The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour — a process that requires a big hammer mill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite-pancake cook-off, using the fresh flour.

Merchant is drawing on a model of tree-planting that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster — who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996 — has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more — all plants that have edible parts.

“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.” 

The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “living pantry.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats — and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats — is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water — a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert — by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.  

Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce — ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons — gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project. 

“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not, ‘Leave a dollar, and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple, and eat your apple.”

Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick — and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Hot? Hungry? Step inside these food forests. on Jan 29, 2024.

Natalia, a 58-year old veteran farmworker from Florida, gets paid by the hour to work in a greenhouse, subjecting her and coworkers to a wretched humid heat that grows worse every summer. She gets two 10-minute breaks and one half-hour lunch each day, which recently have been moved from wherever she could find a corner to an air-conditioned lunchroom, a change she said has made a world of difference. No federal laws regulate heat exposure in the workplace, leaving employers free to do whatever they deem appropriate to protect workers; other farms Natalia has worked at lacked a bathroom and didn’t provide drinking water. 

Failing to provide such things could soon become illegal. Later this year, a new rule from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, could for the first time provide federal protection to heat exposure and require companies to invest in employees’ well-being during the hottest parts of the year.

Over the past several months, the agency held dozens of public meetings and collected more than 1,000 comments, many from workers but also a number from businesses and business associations worried about the impact any rule might have on their bottom line. But new research says employers might want to think twice about opposing a heat standard, because unprotected workers will deliver diminishing returns in an ever-hotter world. Meanwhile, labor advocates are trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to push state and local versions of a rule.

Natalia’s testimony was recorded by Jeannie Economos, who coordinates health and safety programs for an organization called Farmworker Association of Florida. Economos has been using that interview and countless others from the Sunshine State’s field, greenhouse, and construction workers to advocate for local, state, and federal workplace heat standards. An ideal guideline, she said, would at the very least guarantee sufficient access to cold, clean water and “not having to walk a mile down the fields to get water to drink when you’re hot, not having to wait until a break or you’re on the verge of fainting.”

OSHA is considering various components to the proposed standard, which it plans to publish later this year, an agency official told the Washington Post. (When asked about the timeline, OSHA referred Grist to a posting in the Federal Registry, which does not specify a timeline.) Mandatory workplace education programs would teach both workers and managers how to recognize and respond to heat illness and take its risks seriously. The rule also could mandate that employers consider heat stress a medical emergency, and prohibit retaliation against employees who complain or report violations. The measure almost certainly will require that employers provide regular breaks; clean, accessible water; and protective equipment like hats and cooling vests. Another possibility is a requirement that employees be allowed to acclimate to intense heat by working only 20 percent of a typical workday during the first day of a heat wave and incrementally increasing their hours each day. 

Over the past 15 years, OSHA received three petitions to implement a federal heat standard. The rulemaking process finally began in 2021 but could stall again if President Biden loses this year’s election. “OSHA has to be balanced and there’s a lot of pressure on OSHA to do something, so we’ll just wait and see,” Economos said. “It could take three to eight years to get a [final] rule.”  

She had hoped a state heat standard in Florida could prevent deaths in the meantime. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 387 workers lost their lives to heat illness between 2013 and 2022, and because heat illness is often misattributed as heart failure or stroke, that’s almost certainly an undercount. State-level heat standards already exist in California, Washington, Minnesota, and Oregon, and one has been proposed in Colorado. California’s guideline only protects outdoor workers, but the state is planning to introduce rules for indoor workers this year. However, right-to-work states in the South have shown more opposition to such ideas. Texas preempted municipal attempts to regulate heat exposure last year. In Florida, attempts at a state heat standard were stymied by Republican lawmakers. Miami-Dade County officials were to consider a measure last fall but pushed it to March amid complaints that it was unfair to local business.

The federal rulemaking process is complicated and crowded, and OSHA is facing immense pressure from all sides. Any regulation must cover wildly varying conditions of a vast labor pool in multiple sectors, from electricians working in stuffy attics to construction workers framing houses to farmworkers harvesting vegetables in the full sun. Meanwhile, an equally staggering array of business interests have largely condemned, and in many cases actively lobbied against, attempts to do something, stating that employers already follow voluntary — and in some cases, state-level — heat-stress guidance and that further regulation would be burdensome. Segments of the construction and agricultural industries, along with chambers of commerce, have opposed the standard. “We firmly believe employers should be responsible or address heat hazards at individual facilities,” representatives of the National Grain Association and the Agricultural Retailers association wrote in a joint public comment directed to OSHA.  

Their opposition may be short-sighted, however. In order to weather climate change in the long term without severe economic damage, research shows, governments and employers will have to find ways to protect people from the heat. For agricultural workers, that’s particularly vital. A study released last week in the journal Global Change Biology found that heat exposure doesn’t only impact crop yields — it also impairs the productivity of the people who plant and and harvest the crops, and limits their ability to work in the field. Already hot and humid Florida will heat up even more by the end of the century, reducing fieldworkers to around 70 percent of their current work capacity if working conditions do not improve.

Gerald Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the study’s lead author, said that feeding the world in a new and extreme era of climate crisis means caring for the people who put our food on the table. 

“At some point it’s gonna be too hot,” Nelson said, “and you’re going to have to do some kind of remediation.”

That could mean simple rest breaks and water breaks. It could also mean opportunities to work at night, or to find and invest in crop varieties that thrive in slightly cooler seasons. “The challenge is to figure out a system that’s both good today and good tomorrow,” Nelson said.

But in the short term, Economos said a federal heat-protection rule is urgent. “While we’re waiting for the federal government,” she said, “people are dying.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As summers grow ever hotter, OSHA appears ready to protect workers on Jan 29, 2024.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WBEZ and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for WBEZ newsletters to get local news you can trust.

Chicago could soon be the first major Midwestern city with an indoor-emissions standard that would make gas-powered appliances and heating systems a thing of the past. 

The Clean and Affordable Buildings Ordinance, introduced by Mayor Brandon Johnson during the first city council meeting of the year last week, would effectively phase out fossil fuel-based appliances and heating systems in new construction and substantially improved buildings. The new rule would take effect within a year of approval.

“This is an opportunity not just to address climate, but we can build an entire economy around it,” Johnson said.

Not everyone is convinced. 

Earlier this month, two aldermen successfully sidelined Chicago’s electrification ordinance by referring it to the rules committee, a tactic often used to obstruct ordinances with procedural delays. Once referred out of the rules committee,  the ordinance will have to make it through the zoning and environmental committees before heading to city council for a full vote. 

Some of the state’s most influential gas and construction unions are openly arrayed against the passage of the indoor-emissions standard. Together, they’re calling for further trials and studies into the costs of implementing the proposed rule.  

“Homeowners should not have to choose affordability over going green,” said Kristine Kavanagh, who is with International Union of Engineers Local 150. “They should have options for both clean and affordable energy.”

As the mayor and his allies see it, the push for building electrification in Chicago is part of a broader project to not just wean the city off fossil fuels, but also begin to address the cumulative health impacts of indoor air pollution and burdensome utility bills. The effort was a key recommendation of the city’s Building Decarbonization Policy Working Group back in 2022. The report determined that buildings are Chicago’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions — nearly 70 percent.  

“The Clean Affordable Buildings Act is the first step in a managed, planned process to move away from dirty, expensive gas and embrace a cheaper, cleaner energy future for all Chicagoans,” said Alderperson Maria Hadden, who represents the 49th Ward on the south side of the city. 

Cities across the country are looking at building electrification as a pathway to cutting planet-warming emissions. Since the first-of-its-kind electrification ordinance was introduced in Berkeley, California, in 2019, more than 100 local governments have adopted similar policies. Major metropolitan cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle have all gotten on board to rework building codes to prioritize electrification for new construction. Very soon, Chicago could be next. 

But the surge in local electrification policies has faced significant opposition. Berkeley’s electrification ordinance was overturned by a federal appeals panel last year. Over 20 states have passed legislation effectively prohibiting municipalities from banning natural gas connections.  

In a statement to Grist, Peoples Gas, the major gas utility that serves the Chicago area said, “This proposed ordinance would increase costs and risk reliability for everyone, especially during the coldest days of the year like Chicago has been seeing.” 

But Chicago’s utility bills are already unmanageable. This past November, the Illinois Commerce Commision approved a $302 million rate hike for Peoples Gas that is expected to make Chicago gas customers’ utility bills more expensive than they already are; approximately 1 in 5 Chicagoans are more than 30 days behind on their gas bills. 

“We don’t want to just trade one energy source for another,” Angela Tovar, the city’s chief sustainability officer said. She called the proposed policy “fuel neutral” — a key point for Tovar and others who helped draft the ordinance. They want to avoid the legal challenges that plagued the original iteration of electrification efforts, many of which were outright bans on gas hookups. A handful of those have already been withdrawn. 

Following the lead of New York City, Chicago’s workaround instead takes aim at indoor air pollution by limiting the combustion of any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy. In the process, the new standard would make natural gas-powered appliances obsolete and encourage the adoption of electric stoves and heating systems. The ordinance does, however, carve out a list of exemptions including emergency generators, health care facilities, and commercial kitchens. 

Illinois set a goal to sunset fossil fuels by 2050. Oak Park, a Chicago suburb with a population just over 50,000, took the lead last summer and passed the first electrification standards of any local government in the Midwest. Oak Park architect Tom Bassett-Dilley said enthusiasm for living fossil fuel-free is already obvious. 

“We don’t do any buildings that have gas lines in them anymore for the last three or four years,” Bassett-Dilley said. “There’s a lot of people out there looking for it, the demand has definitely skyrocketed.”

Allies of Chicago’s new emissions standard call it a reasonable first step toward hitting the state’s climate goals and mitigating the worst impacts of climate change. 

“Equitable decarbonization is a core principle that guides us in the introduction of this policy, as well as future actions as a city,” Tovar said. “We must design better outcomes that work for every building type and every neighborhood across Chicago. We must ensure that the benefits of transitioning to clean energy sources are accessible to all regardless of your zip code.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Chicago could be first major Midwestern city to ban gas in new construction on Jan 29, 2024.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

One by one, leaders from across Arizona gave speeches touting the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to preserve the declining Colorado River in November.

When Tao Etpison took the mic, his speech echoed those who went before him. Water is the lifeblood of existence, and users of the Colorado River Basin were one step closer to preserving the system that has helped life in the Southwest flourish. Then he brought up the elephant in the room: Arizona’s groundwater protection was lacking, and mining companies were looking to take advantage.

“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world intend to construct the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use, at a minimum, 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can this be in the best interests of Arizona?”

The question is one the state and the Southwest must answer. Mine claims for the elements critical to the clean energy transition are piling up from Arizona to Nevada to Utah. Lithium is needed for the batteries to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. Copper provides the wiring to send electricity where it will be needed to satisfy exploding demand. But water stands in the way of the transition, with drought playing into nearly every proposed renewable energy development, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest debates what to do with every drop it has left as the region undergoes aridification due to climate change and decades of overconsumption. 

Mining opponents argue the proposals could impact endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water—both its quantity and its quality. Across the Southwest, the story of 2023 was how water users, from farmers in the Colorado River Basin to fast-growing cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, needed to use less water, forcing changes to residential development and agricultural practices. But left out of that conversation, natural resource experts and environmentalists say, is the water used by mining operations and the amount that would be consumed by new mines.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe has fought for years to stop Resolution’s proposed mine. It would be built on top of Oak Flat, a sacred site to the Apache and other Indigenous communities, and a habitat of rare species like the endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus, which lives only in the Tonto National Forest near the town of Superior. The fate of the mine now rests with the U.S. District Court in Arizona after the grassroots group Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing its development would violate Native people’s religious rights.

But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big of an issue.

Throughout the mine’s lifespan, Resolution estimates it would use 775,000 acre feet of water—enough for at least 1.5 million Arizona households over roughly 40 years. And experts say the mine would likely need far more. 

“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable,” one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe reads. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congress, water consumption was estimated to be 50,000 acre feet a year—about 35,000 more than the company has proposed drawing from the aquifer.

The Resolution copper mine isn’t the only water-intensive mining operation being proposed. Many of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” like lithium and copper, are found throughout the Southwest, leading to a flurry of mining claims on the region’s federally managed public lands. 

“Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest but the mining industry is basically immune from all these issues,” said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups in mining-related lawsuits, including the case over Oak Flat.

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‘The Lords of Yesterday’

To understand mining in the U.S., you have to start with the Mining Law of 1872.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law as a way to continue the country’s development westward, allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. To do this, all one needs to do is plant four stakes into the ground where they think there are minerals and file a claim. Unlike other industries that make use of public lands—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from the lands owned by American taxpayers. 

Flynn referred to mining as the last of the “Lords of Yesterday”—a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a long-time environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year—referring to the industries like oil and gas drilling, ranching and logging that were given carte blanche by the federal government to develop the West after the Civil War and push Indigenous populations off the land. All of those industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, except mining. 

That’s led mining to be viewed as the top use of public lands by regulators who give it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.

“You don’t have to actually demonstrate that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there is a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Nevada that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious—and there’s a lot of suspicion going around.”

Most of Nevada is completely reliant on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, companies hunting critical minerals can’t mine, Hadder said, so they look to acquire water rights from other users, typically by buying up farms and ranches, changing the economics and demographics of a community. When the mines are developed, they can impact local streams, groundwater levels and the quality of the water as toxins seep into aquifers and surface supplies over the years. Now, with the clean energy transition gaining traction, there’s a new mining boom, prompting increasing concerns over how local ecosystems will be impacted. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 mining claims related to lithium, the biggest of which are, of course, drawing controversy.

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Water’s role in mine fights

In northern Nevada, companies have proposed two massive lithium mines—Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge—in groundwater basins that are already over appropriated. Both have drawn heavy scrutiny, the former for being proposed on a sacred site for local Indigenous tribes that is also range for area ranchers and endangered sage grouse, and the latter for threatening an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world. 

Now, Canada-based Rover Metals is looking to drill a lithium exploration project near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that supports a dozen endangered and threatened species and is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert.”

“Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge. “This is sort of compounding that already really complex challenge.”

Opponents of the proposal successfully sued the Bureau of Land Management over its approval of the drill site without consulting other agencies about the potential impact on the groundwater supply critical for the refuge. The BLM rescinded its approval, but the company behind it is still pursuing permitting. “A huge win in this world is basically a delay,” Voehl said.

In Utah, too, companies are looking to tap into dwindling water supplies to extract lithium. Compass Minerals planned to extract lithium from the Great Salt Lake, which in recent years has hit record lows, until pushback from regulators and environmentalists caused the company to announce in November it was pausing operations, at least for now. Along the Green River, the largest tributary of the Colorado River, Australia-based Anson Resources is looking to extract lithium from brine buried deep underground. The plan to drill wells 9,000 feet deep and use Colorado River water to extract the brine drew the attention of local environmentalists and the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the management of the river, both of which disputed the company’s claim that their process wouldn’t reduce the amount of water available for other uses. 

“We see that [the company] claimed this water is going to be nonconsumptive,” said Tyson Roper, a civil engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees hydropower and water in the West, at a hearing over Anson’s water right. “All the data out there says water will be consumed.”

That could have big implications for other users and water programs in the region, he said, a concern other federal agencies and environmentalists have raised as well. 

“This has the potential to impact much larger operations and allocations established by not only the Green River Block Water Exchange but the Colorado River Storage project as well,” Roper said at the hearing. “The same project that provides water to 40 million people, 5.5 million acres of irrigation, 22 tribes, four recreation areas and 11 national parks.”

These and other proposed mines in the Southwest are critical pieces in U.S. efforts to puzzle together a domestic supply of critical minerals for the clean energy transition. But the mining projects also pose what many view as not only another serious burden on dwindling water supplies in the Southwest, but one that doesn’t face the same scrutiny that other major water users face. To some, the water for mines highlights a tension between the impacts and solutions of climate change as farmers and cities across the region are asked to accept dramatic cuts to their water supplies in the rapidly drying region, and clean energy developers endeavor to exponentially increase the amount the Southwest’s abundant solar and wind resources they harvest. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is the Southwest too dry for a mining boom? on Jan 28, 2024.

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and is republished with permission.

More than 140 insurance industry plaintiffs have joined the cascade of lawsuits filed against utilities and landowners related to the Maui wildfires, a move that could set up a battle over resources available to pay victims of the disaster that killed 100 people and destroyed much of Lahaina in August.

The global insurance industry has swept into Honolulu state court, seeking to collect reimbursements for claims paid to policyholders. Those total more than $1 billion in West Maui for residential property alone, according to the latest data from the Insurance Division of the Hawaiʻi Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.

The plaintiffs include names familiar to Hawaiʻi homeowners: insurers like State Farm Fire and Casualty Co., USAA Casualty Insurance Co., Island Insurance and Tradewind Insurance. 

Also included are scores of additional companies, such as the French and Australian branches of the giant Swiss Re, Japan’s Mitsui Sumimoto Insurance, and Lloyd’s, the London-based marketplace known for insuring everything from ship cargo, fine art and space satellites to Bruce Springsteen’s voice. 

Defendants include Hawaiian Electric, Hawaiian Telcom, Kamehameha Schools and other unnamed parties the insurers allege were negligent in allowing the fires to start and spread. 

It’s a predictable turn of events, says Robert Anderson, director of the Center for Risk Management Research at the University of California, Berkeley. 

When a company like State Farm issues a policy to a homeowner, Anderson said in an email, State Farm typically buys reinsurance from another company like Swiss Re to cover the risk from catastrophic events, such as a hurricane hitting an urban area “or a wildfire that spreads and takes out a large number of homes, as happened in Lahaina.”

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When such a catastrophe occurs, State Farm would typically pay claims to the insured property owners and get reimbursed by its reinsurers, Anderson said.

If the losses occurred because of negligence, the insurer and reinsurers can sue the negligent parties to recover the payments “in the same way that a health insurance company could seek to recover the costs of treating someone injured in an automobile accident,” he said.

Multiply that by thousands of claims, and it explains the enormous number of insurance company plaintiffs, spread out over 26 states and a half dozen countries, filing suit in Hawaiʻi. It’s also a sign that the global insurance market is functioning adequately to spread the risk of a major catastrophe in Hawaiʻi, said Sumner LaCroix, an economist with the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization.

“The last thing we want in Hawaiʻi is to find out that two or three companies bear the risk of having a hurricane hit Hawaiʻi,” LaCroix said.

Battle could ensue between victims and insurers

The suit could have major implications in the long run for plaintiffs seeking to recover claims for damages from Hawaiian Electric and the others, said Mark Davis, a Honolulu trial lawyer who is serving as a liaison for dozens of plaintiffs lawyers who have filed suits on behalf of victims in Maui court.

At this point, Davis said, the insurance companies and other plaintiffs have a common goal: to prove that the utilities or landowners or both acted negligently in allowing the fires to start and spread. The insurance industry has had its own teams of investigators, Davis said.

“For the most part their inquiries go hand in hand with the plaintiffs’ inquiries,” he said.

Indeed, the insurance industry’s factual allegations of what happened on Aug. 8 mirror the allegations in many of the negligence suits filed by residents.

But eventually, Davis said, Lahaina residents will find themselves competing with the insurance companies for the same pot of money. 

To the extent that the insurers have paid claims, they’ll likely try to assert priority over the homeowners, which happened after lawsuits related to California wildfires drove Pacific Gas & Electric Co. into bankruptcy in 2019, Davis said.

Still some states have adopted a legal principle known as the “made whole doctrine,” which means insurers can’t jump the line ahead of insured property owners until the insured property owners’ damages are completely covered. Otherwise, a property owner could collect from both their insurance company and the wrongdoer if negligence is proven. All of this sets the stage for a fight between the individual plaintiffs and the insurers if they can prove the utilities or landowners were negligent.

“Inevitably, that is a big struggle later on as they start to dole out resources,” Davis said. 

Hawaiian Electric and Hawaiian Telcom declined to comment. Paul Alston, an attorney for Kamehameha Schools trustees also declined to comment. Lawyers for the insurance companies did not return calls.

Hawaiian Electric, meanwhile, does not have the resources to reimburse the property insurers for the massive claims paid out so far, if the insurers were to prevail in their suit. The company’s stock price has plummeted since the fires. Rating agencies have slashed Hawaiian Electric’s bond rating, meaning it will cost more for the company to borrow money. And Hawaiian Electric has largely tapped out its lines of credit to raise cash.

The company is pursuing federal grant funds, which it hopes to steer to rebuilding infrastructure, but that money can’t be used to pay damages. Meanwhile, a big chunk of proceeds from a woefully inadequate insurance policy, worth $165 million, that could be used to reimburse the insurers has already been pledged to a settlement fund for people killed and injured in the fires.

The company has promised $75 million to the so-called Maui Recovery Fund. Makana McClellan, a spokesman for Gov. Josh Green, said the fund expects to have $175 million total when it becomes operational on March 1. Green previously announced the state, Kamehameha Schools and Maui County also would provide funding. McClellan said more details would be available this week. 

Each victim could receive more than $1 million from the fund if they choose to drop their legal claims, Green has said. 

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But the fund is not meant to address property damage. And how much money will be available to cover such claims isn’t clear. After putting $75 million in the recovery fund, the company theoretically would have $90 million. But Hawaiian Electric has been bleeding cash on lawyers.

When the company held its quarterly earnings call for the period ended Sept. 30, Hawaiian Electric revealed it had spent $27.6 million on fire-related expenses to that point, including $10.8 million – or about $1.5 million a week – on legal fees. And that was as the lawsuits had just begun pouring in. It remains to be seen how much Hawaiian Electric’s lawyers have cannibalized the company’s liability insurance at this point, 24 weeks after the fire.

Meanwhile, the staggering amount of insurance losses is becoming clear. According to the Hawaiʻi Insurance Division, as of Nov. 30, insurers reported 3,947 claims for residential property in West Maui, including 1,689 total losses. Estimated losses totaled $1.54 billion, of which insurers had paid $1.09 billion.

Perhaps the only good news in all of this, Davis said, is that insurance companies don’t appear to be squabbling about paying claims, which he said isn’t surprising given that so many homes were completely burned. 

“There’s not a lot to talk about if you bought ‘x’ amount of insurance and your house is dust,” he said. 

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Insurance companies are going after Hawaiian Electric to reimburse Lahaina fire claims on Jan 27, 2024.