In a meeting of the Global Environment Facility (GEF)’s Seventh Assembly in Vancouver, Canada on Thursday, representatives from 185 countries agreed to launch a new global conservation fund, with Canada pledging 200 million Canadian dollars and the United Kingdom contributing 10 million pounds.
The United Nations is seeking contributions for the protection of 30 percent of terrestrial and coastal areas by 2030.
“The new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) has been designed to mobilize and accelerate investment in the conservation and sustainability of wild species and ecosystems, whose health is under threat from wildfires, flooding, extreme weather, and human activity including urban sprawl,” a press release from the Global Environment Facility said.
The GBFF is seeking monetary support from governments, philanthropic donations and the private sector.
As a trustee of the World Bank, the GBFF has not yet raised the $200 million it needs to get up and running by the end of the year, reported Reuters.
“The time for half-measures has passed,” said Oscar Soria, director of global activist nonprofit Avaaz. “Surely donors can come up with the paltry $40 million” still needed, as Reuters reported.
The GEF Assembly was attended by 1,500 people, including representatives of government, academia and business, Indigenous Peoples and environmental leaders.
The meeting, which is held every four years, comes during what is predicted to be an active hurricane season and the record wildfire season in Canada, which have been influenced by global heating and rising ocean temperatures.
“Countries have come together in Vancouver to turn things around for the health of the planet and its people. This is a hugely positive moment that will be remembered far into the future. We have shown at the Seventh GEF Assembly that even in difficult conditions – with wildfire smoke as our backdrop – we can move forward to build a more biodiverse planet for everyone’s benefit,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, CEO of GEF, in the press release.
The GBFF was set up in order to fund the implementation of the Kunming-Montréal Biodiversity Framework — ratified in December of 2022 — in order to tackle the intertwined biodiversity and extinction crises.
“Biodiversity is the critical foundation of our well-being and the health of our planet. The new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund will play a key role in addressing biodiversity loss. It will address it in developing countries, where the impacts of nature loss are highest; it will address it in a gender-responsive manner, including through cross-sectoral partnerships; it will address it in collaboration with Indigenous Peoples, the original guardians of the lands and seas. Canada is making a significant contribution to this new fund and continuing to show our support for the GEF’s eighth replenishment to ensure the protection of our planet’s biodiversity for generations to come,” said Canada’s Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen in the press release.
Contributions to the GBFF will go toward stopping and reversing biodiversity loss globally by 2030, as well as placing nature on a path to recovery by 2050.
“As we confront the critical challenge of halting and reversing biodiversity loss around the world, working together has never been more important. Our initial contribution to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund showcases the United Kingdom’s ongoing dedication to protecting our planet’s natural diversity – and through vital international cooperation we are paving the way for a more sustainable future for our planet,” said Trudy Harrison, UK environment minister, in the press release.
Up to 20 percent of the GBFF’s resources will be dedicated to supporting initiatives led by Indigenous Peoples, as well as to protecting and preserving biodiversity. More than one-third of its resources will go to supporting Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States.
“The creation of this fund and its commitment to supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities is an important and clear recognition of the fundamental role they have had for generations protecting biodiversity. We will only achieve the shared vision of a healthy planet and healthy people with collective, inclusive actions, and a human rights approach where we all hold hands together,” said Lucy Mulenkei, co-chair of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, in the press release.
The post Environmental Leaders From 185 Countries Launch Biodiversity Protection Fund appeared first on EcoWatch.
The first tribally nominated marine sanctuary has been proposed by the Biden administration in collaboration with the Chumash tribe. The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary would span 5,600 square miles off the coast of central California. The project is now undergoing a public comment period.
The sanctuary would include an area off a 156-mile stretch of coastline between Cambria in San Luis Obispo County and Gaviota Creek in Santa Barbara County. The area includes Lisamu’, a sacred Chumash site, along with a 3,000-meter-deep submarine canyon and feeding and migration areas for 13 whale and dolphin species.
“Sanctuaries uplift local participation in ocean management, and this sanctuary will put Indigenous communities in partnership with NOAA,” Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council and a nominator of the sanctuary, said in a statement. “The collective knowledge of the Central Coast’s First Peoples, as well as other local stakeholders, scientists, and policymakers, will create a strong foundation to have a thriving coast for generations to come.”
The Northern Chumash Tribal Council first began preparing a proposal in 2013 and submitted a finalized proposal for a 7,600-square-mile marine sanctuary in 2015. But as NPR reported, the application didn’t receive attention for years. Walker explained that her father, Fred Collins, had initially submitted the proposal. Collins died one month before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced it would consider the proposed region for dedication in 2021.
The proposal was reduced from 7,600 square miles to 5,600 square miles, because NOAA said the original proposed area may be used for wind energy development. The sanctuary protections would prevent energy and oil development within the boundary, but commercial fishing would still be allowed.
The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary may be managed via the Intergovernmental Policy Council, a group including federally-recognized tribes and potentially the California Natural Resources Agency and NOAA. This management plan was based on the IPC developed for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
“This sanctuary has support from the federal and state governments, but most importantly from the communities that have lived on its shores for thousands of years,” said Steve Palumbi, professor at Stanford Hopkins Marine Station who is working with the Northern Chumash Tribal Council for conservation efforts in the proposed sanctuary. “Combining Traditional Ecological Knowledge with new data from western science is a journey that enriches our view of the ocean and ourselves.”
NOAA has opened the project to public comment through Oct. 25, 2023 and is targeting the finalized designation in 2024.
The post New Chumash Heritage Marine Sanctuary Proposed off California Coast appeared first on EcoWatch.
The European Union recently passed the Deforestation Regulation, a groundbreaking law that requires companies to…
The post Europe’s Law Will Protect Forests. Can It Help You Do the Same? appeared first on Earth911.
Today’s inspiration is from writer, biologist, and environmentalist, Rachel Carson: “The more clearly we can focus…
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This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Inflation is finally easing. Americans are paying less for gas than they were a year ago. Furniture, television, and airfare prices have all fallen since last summer. Even the used car market is cooling off after its meteoric rise. But one unsuspecting staple in many American kitchens has become a prominent outlier: olive oil. The price of the already pricey liquid fat has soared to a record high this summer.
It’s the latest chapter in the annals of heatflation — when scorching temperatures harm crops and push food prices up. A yearlong drought and a spring of extreme heat in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, devastated the country’s olive groves. Spanish olive oil production fell by a half — from an estimated 1.3 million to 610,000 metric tons — over the past year. Now fears are mounting over the very real possibility that the country’s inventory will run out before the next harvest begins, in October.
“For Spaniards, this is a real crisis,” Bloomberg columnist Javier Bias recently wrote. “We generously coat our food in olive oil.”
It’s also a big deal for the rest of us, given that something like half of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain. As barrels run dry, cooks around the world are paying an almost unheard of premium for the nutty, liquid gold that makes lettuce more palatable and bread more nutritious. Worldwide, olive oil now costs $8,600 per metric ton, more than twice as much as it did a year ago and nearly 14 times more than crude oil. (It would set you back around $720 to fill up the typical car’s 12-gallon tank with olive oil found on Amazon.)
What’s happening is “not normal at all,” said Kyle Holland, a vegetable oils analyst at Mintec, a food market research firm. “It was just too hot and too dry for too long.”
Olive oil is one of many foods — one of many condiments, even — that are threatened by the severe and unpredictable weather brought on by climate change. As the global temperature ticks up, droughts are occurring more frequently, heat is getting harder for farmers to manage, and wildfires and floods are becoming more menacing to growers around the world. As a result, grocery store shelves aren’t getting stocked and food prices are going up. Ultra-dry conditions in Mexico have withered peppers, leading to a sriracha shortage in the United States. Record warming has decimated Georgia’s famed peaches, which require a few weeks of cool weather each winter to blossom. Ketchup, coffee, and wine all could end up on the chopping block, too.
Olive trees are no strangers to heat, and they don’t need much water compared to other crops, like tomatoes. Humans have been cultivating them in the Mediterranean’s warm climate — and crushing them for oil — for at least 6,000 years. But even hardy olives have their limits. Temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit can impair their ability to convert sunlight into energy, and prolonged dry spells can keep them from producing shoots, buds, flowers, and fruit.
Growers in the Mediterranean, a region warming 20 percent faster than the rest of the world and the source of 95 percent of olive oil production, are especially vulnerable. Drought caused Tunisia’s grain harvest to decline by 60 percent this year. And dry conditions led to poor yields for wheat and rice farmers last year in Italy, whose produce has helped build the country’s legacy of pizza, pasta, and risotto. This summer, they’ve had to contend with extreme heat, historic floods, and freak hailstorms, according to Davide Cammarano, a professor of agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. With such variability in weather, “it becomes very hard to manage a crop in the Mediterranean,” he said.
In a study published last year, Cammarano and his colleagues found that rising temperatures could cut the production of processing tomatoes — the sort used to make tomato sauce and ketchup — by 6 percent in Italy, the U.S., and other countries within the next three decades.
Perhaps no one this year has had it as bad as olive growers in Spain. Between October and May, the country received 28 percent less rain than usual, with the driest conditions in southern, olive-growing areas. “It’s a catastrophe,” Primitivo Fernandez, head of Spain’s National Association of Edible Oil Bottlers, told Reuters in March. Spain experienced its hottest April on record, with temperatures rising above 100 degrees F. And the heat has only gotten more punishing since, with the country now in the midst of its third heat wave of the year.
As a result, researchers predict that drought and heat waves associated with climate change will continue to take their toll on olives from the Iberian Peninsula to Lebanon. Hot and dry conditions last year scorched groves not only in Spain but also in Italy and Portugal, two of the world’s top four olive oil producers.
In the United States, too, severe weather is a concern for olive farmers, although unlike orchards in Spain that rely on rainfall, most in the U.S. are irrigated, which makes them more resistant to drought. Producers in California, the state that churns out the most olives but still contributes less than 3 percent of the olive oil consumed in the U.S., reportedly harvested one-fifth less than their historic average this season, following years of little rain that made some farmers’ wells go dry.
Winter and spring storms last spring in California eased the drought, but the cool weather and heavy precipitation slowed flowering and potentially lowered the amount of oil in each olive, according to Jim Lipman, chief operating officer at California Olive Ranch in Chico, the country’s biggest olive oil producer.
In an email to Grist, Lipman said that the high prices in Europe have increased demand for California oil and that California Olive Ranch has a strong crop heading into the upcoming harvest season, which starts in October. That said, early warming followed by frost has resulted in crop disasters in two of the last five seasons.
At Burroughs Family Farm in Denair, California, production has been fairly steady over the past few years, but “this year we are on the lower side” possibly as a result of an “incredible” amount of rain, said Benina Montes, managing partner at the regenerative almond and olive farm in California’s Central Valley. In a good year, the farm’s 10 acres of olives produce up to 40 tons of oil. This year, they yielded about three-quarters of that amount.
Montes said she hadn’t been following news of the shortage in Europe. But she figures the rise in demand caused by Spain’s low inventory might have helped her business. “No wonder our olive oil has been selling well on Amazon.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change is coming for your olive oil, too on Aug 25, 2023.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
A massive heat dome covered the central part of the United States on Thursday, stretching from Omaha down to New Orleans, putting 143 million people in 19 states under heat alerts.
In Chicago, temperatures reached 100 degrees F with a heat index of 120 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday, which is the highest heat index the city has recorded, according to CBS Chicago. Hot weather that dangerous hasn’t roasted Chicago since its infamous 1995 heat wave, which killed more than 500 people over five days. This comes after a record-breaking hot day on Wednesday at 98 degrees F with a heat index of 116 degrees F.
It feels as if most of the United States has been under a heat advisory at one point or another this summer, with Arizona and Texas especially hard hit. Temperatures have been breaking records all over the world, with July setting records as the hottest month that the planet has seen in 120,000 years.
The past few days have seen heat creep up into uncharted territory, with places like Lawrence, Kansas recording a heat index of 134 degrees F, earlier this week. An analysis of data from the nonprofit research organization, the First Street Foundation, found that the next few decades will see the emergence of an “extreme heat belt” stretching from Northern Texas up through Illinois and parts of Wisconsin. By 2053, these areas will experience temperatures above 125 degrees F, according to the research.
In pockets of Chicago though, the heat is bringing people together with neighbors who are looking out for one another and offering water, fans, and information about the city’s cooling centers. This is despite the fact that cooling centers have been historically underutilized.
In Pilsen, a Latino neighborhood on the city’s Near West Side, a bookstore offered up their space as an unofficial cooling center.
Mandy Medley, a co-owner and worker at Pilsen Community Books, said that it was intrinsic to the bookstore’s mission to provide resources in a city which has few public restrooms and rest areas.
“I think it’s a natural extension of the role we try to play in the community,” said Medley. “We’re open to the public, we have one of the very few public restrooms available in the neighborhood.”
Medley also mentioned that the store regularly tries to remain open to community members — even when there isn’t record-breaking heat outside.
“In general, the store is a place where people can come hang out, it doesn’t have to just be doing extreme weather,” said Medley. “We don’t force people to spend money or stay here only a certain amount of time. It really is open anytime.”
Elsewhere in Pilsen, Rabbit Schoen, an organizer with Rising Tide Chicago, an organization focused on fighting climate change, helped hand out frozen water bottles to people who were unhoused living under a highway underpass.
“So the main things are just getting items to people who are in our neighborhoods and communities that are unhoused, who are at most risk of heatstroke, or heat exhaustion, or even heat death,” said Rabbit Schoen. “The simplest way to do that is give people cold water.”
Additionally, Rising Tide volunteers have been working with homeless people to allocate necessary resources beyond the heat wave, since people who are unhoused remain vulnerable to other climate events, like wildfire smoke, long after the heat has subsided.
While scientists are hesitant to say that individual climate events like this one are tied to climate change, heat waves in general are highly correlated with the global warming caused by burning fossil fuels, according to Jonathan Patz, a professor of health and environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The climate crisis from burning fossil fuels that’s heating the planet, this is exactly what you expect: more frequent and more intense heat waves, said Patz. “All these extremes have been anticipated from human-induced climate warming for decades, you know, so we’ve been talking about this for a long time.”
During the scorching hot temperatures, a community group called My Block, My Hood, My City had volunteers that were crisscrossing the city’s neighborhoods on the South and West sides to pass out cases of water bottles and box fans to elderly folks who were in need.
“Our main thing is, taking care of people no matter what. And we know that some of the most vulnerable people in our communities are the senior citizens.” said Stephen Gilbert, Director of Youth and Community Development at My Block, My Hood, My City.
The group had nearly 400 requests for water and fans across the city, which they pivoted all their resources to try to meet.
“We don’t have a capacity to drop off 400 fans and waters today alone, we dropped off as many as we could,” said Gilbert. “And we’ll be back out there tomorrow doing the same thing.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Chicago broils, neighbors find ways to keep each other cool on Aug 24, 2023.
Japan has begun discharging treated water containing radioactive tritium from the decommissioned Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean. The move led to China announcing an immediate ban on all aquatic products from the island nation.
China’s customs bureau said in a statement that it was “highly concerned about the risk of radioactive contamination brought by… Japan’s food and agricultural products,” reported Reuters.
Last month, the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) gave its approval for Japan to discharge the radioactive water. An earthquake and a tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011.
China called Japan’s release of the water a “selfish and irresponsible act,” CNN reported.
The purpose of the Chinese customs department ban on all imports of aquatic products from Japan was to prevent “the risk of radioactive contamination of food safety caused by Japan’s Fukushima nuclear contaminated water discharge,” the department said.
China accused the Japanese government of not proving that the radioactive water was safe.
“The Japanese side should not cause secondary harm to the local people and even the people of the world out of its own selfish interests,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement, as reported by Reuters.
Japan said the water being released is safe, that the IAEA had concluded the water’s impact on the environment and humans would be “negligible” and that China was spreading “scientifically unfounded claims.”
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters that Japan had asked China to lift its aquatic products import ban immediately and would like to discuss the impact of the water’s release from a science-based perspective.
Japanese exports of aquatic products to China are Japan’s biggest exports market, worth about $600 million in 2022. According to government data, Japanese aquatic exports to Hong Kong and China made up 42 percent of the total last year.
Fukushima Daiichi plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said no abnormalities had been identified with the release of the water so far, Reuters reported.
According to TEPCO’s test results released today, the first discharge of 7,800 cubic meters — which will happen over about 17 days — contained approximately up to 63 becquerels (a becquerel is one unit of radioactivity) of tritium per liter, which is well below the drinking water limit set by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Additionally, a statement released by the IAEA said its own on-site analysis showed the concentration of tritium was well below the WHO limit of 10,000 becquerels per liter.
“There are not going to be any health effects… There is no scientific reason to ban imports of Japanese food whatsoever,” said Geraldine Thomas, a former London Imperial College professor of molecular pathology, as reported by Reuters.
Japanese fishing groups opposed the water’s release, their reputations having been damaged by years of radiation fears.
Macau and Hong Kong also instigated bans of seafood imports from 10 regions in Japan.
The area surrounding the release of the water will be monitored by Japan. It is estimated that the total discharge of the water will take about three decades, and Japan’s Minister of the Environment Akihiro Nishimura said weekly results will be published.
According to some experts, nuclear power plants — including in China — have been discharging diluted tritium into the ocean for years without issues, The Guardian reported.
“Nuclear power plants worldwide have routinely discharged water containing tritium for over 60 years without harm to people or the environment, most at higher levels than planned for Fukushima,” said Tony Irwin, an Australian National University honorary associate professor, as reported by The Guardian.
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Tropical forests are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems on the planet, as well as some of the biggest climate regulators. Now, a new study by an international team of researchers finds that the planet’s tropical forest canopies could be closer to crucial high-temperature thresholds than was previously believed.
For the study, the researchers used data from warming experiments conducted across Earth’s tropical forests, along with high-resolution thermal imaging data from an instrument located on the International Space Station, a press release from the UK’s University of Plymouth said.
The researchers discovered that some tropical leaves are beginning to reach, and sometimes even exceed, temperatures that stop them from functioning, and that as the climate crisis wears on, whole tree canopies could die.
“If we adopt a do-nothing response to climate change and tropical forest air temperatures increase by greater than 4C, there could be massive leaf death, possible tree mortality and species turnover across all tropical forests,” said Chris Doughty, a Northern Arizona University associate professor of ecoinformatics and the lead author of the study, as reported by The Guardian.
The research team said the findings of their study could have dire consequences since tropical forests are one of the main climate regulators and house almost all of the biodiversity on Earth, the press release said.
Data from the work of Dr. Sophie Fauset — an associate professor in terrestrial ecology at University of Plymouth and one of the authors of the study — on leaf temperatures in West Africa, Brazil, China and the UK showed that the temperatures of individual leaves could get as warm as 18 degrees Celsius above the air temperature in a montane forest in Brazil.
“Trees are a critical part of our planet’s response to climate change, and tropical forests play a key role in housing species diversity and regulating the planet’s climate. If they are damaged by increases in temperatures, we are losing a key line of defence and limiting nature’s ability to mitigate the impacts of human activity,” Fauset said. “Other research I have been involved in has looked at the sensitivity of tropical forests to climate, and shown that tree carbon stock is reduced at maximum temperatures above 32°C during the hottest part of the year. If we don’t do more to address climate change, the consequences could be severe.”
The study, “Tropical forests are approaching critical temperature thresholds,” was published in the journal Nature.
From their understanding of current leaf temperatures in tropical forests around the globe, the research team was able to model how the leaves might respond to ongoing human-caused global heating.
In order to estimate what proportion of leaves might come close to critical temperatures if air temperatures increase by two, three and four degrees Celsius, the researchers combined data on canopy top leaf warming from experiments in Puerto Rico, Brazil and Australia.
The results revealed that greater than one percent of the canopy’s leaves exceeded critical threshold temperatures — estimated to be 116.06 degrees Fahrenheit — a minimum of once each year.
“We should do all we can to avoid high-emissions scenarios. Under low-emissions scenarios, almost all tropical forest tree leaves can avoid death from overheating and the trees will survive,” said Simon Lewis, a global change science professor at University College London, as The Guardian reported.
The researchers also simulated how tropical forests would fare under future planetary warming scenarios and explored the impact of hotter temperatures and more frequent droughts.
The results showed that the plants’ ability to cool themselves with evaporation would be reduced, and that the hotter, drier temperatures would speed up leaf temperature increases and potential tree mortality.
“Given that tropical forests’ key role in housing species diversity and regulating the planet’s climate, insights into their future can build an understanding of the trajectory of the planet. But our model is not fate. It suggests that with some basic climate mitigation, we can address this issue, and helps pinpoint a few key areas that need further research,” Doughty said in the press release. “It also shows that by avoiding high-emissions pathways and deforestation, we can protect the fate of these critical realms of carbon, water, and biodiversity.”
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After years spent fighting independent repair, Apple appears to be throwing in the towel.
On Tuesday, the most valuable company in the world delivered a letter to California Senator Susan Eggman expressing its support for SB 244, a “right-to-repair” bill that would make it easier for the public to access the spare parts, tools, and repair documentation needed to fix devices.
“Today, Apple writes in support of SB 244, and urges members of the California legislature to pass the bill as currently drafted,” D. Michael Foulkes, Apple’s director of state and local government affairs, wrote in the letter.
It was a dramatic turnaround for a company that has played a key role in quashing right-to-repair bills in statehouses around the country, including California. As recently as 2022, Apple asked New York Governor Kathy Hochul to veto a right-to-repair bill. (Hochul wound up signing that bill into law, but not before revising the text to make it more corporate friendly.) But advocates say that Apple recognized it was on the losing side of the fight over repair access. Its decision to support a right-to-repair bill in its home state reflects the growing pressure Apple faces from shareholders, lawmakers, federal regulators, and the public to end monopolistic restrictions that limit consumers’ ability to fix their devices.
“Right to repair is here to stay, and they know it,” Nathan Proctor, who heads the U.S. Public Research Interest Group’s right-to-repair campaign, told Grist.
That wasn’t always the case. For years, Apple’s position was that making parts and repair tools available to the public is a bad idea. Over the years, the company has repeatedly claimed that right-to-repair laws create safety and cybersecurity risks and could force manufacturers to divulge trade secrets. Despite the U.S. Federal Trade Commission concluding in 2021 that there was “scant evidence” to support these claims, Apple, along with trade associations it’s a member of, continued making them. In a letter to Hochul last August, the company wrote that New York’s electronics right-to-repair bill, which had recently passed the state legislature, would “harm consumer security, privacy, safety and transparency … and do nothing to advance New York’s environmental goals.”
Repair advocates counter these arguments by pointing out that it is in Apple’s financial interest to ensure its customers only get their devices fixed on the company’s terms. When consumers have limited ways to repair damaged or malfunctioning gadgets, they often choose to replace them, ensuring a steady stream of sales for manufacturers like Apple. Greater access to independent repair, advocates say, benefits consumers, who often are able to fix things more conveniently and more affordably at home or via an independent shop. According to both advocates and tech industry-backed research, it also benefits the planet: With more repair options, consumers are able to keep their current devices in use for longer, reducing electronic waste and the carbon emissions tied to manufacturing new ones.
Apparently, Apple now agrees with repair advocates. “In recent years, Apple has taken significant steps to expand options for consumers to repair their devices which we know is good for consumers’ budgets and good for the environment,” Foulkes wrote in the letter.
Apple’s about-face didn’t come out of nowhere. As Foulkes’ letter points out, the company began shifting its public position on independent repair a few years back, as the right-to-repair movement was garnering national media attention and high-level support.
In 2019, Apple launched its “Independent Repair Provider” program, granting independent shops access to the repair documentation and original parts that were previously only available to Apple “authorized” repair partners. In 2022, it announced “Self Service Repair,” a program that allows customers to purchase genuine Apple parts and tools to make common repairs on newer iPhones and Macs. Both programs have their flaws — the Independent Repair Provider program required independent shops to sign an onerous contract, while Self Service Repair, by many accounts, is an expensive and clunky way to fix a device. But advocates also hailed both as symbolic victories, considering Apple’s influence on the broader consumer tech industry.
Voicing support for a right-to-repair bill in California, the largest economy in the country and the central nervous system of Big Tech, may be Apple’s biggest symbolic concession yet. Unlike in the past, when Apple has simply asked lawmakers to shoot down right-to-repair bills, Proctor said that this time the company came to the negotiating table. Working with the office of bill author Eggman, Apple pushed for some changes to the text. Ultimately, the bill reached a place where the company was comfortable supporting it.
The bill requires that manufacturers of electronics and appliances make parts, repair tools, and documentation available to the general public, for devices first sold on or after July 1, 2021. For devices costing between $50 and $99.99, manufacturers must provide repair access for at least three years after the product is no longer manufactured; for those costing more than $100, that number rises to seven years. In its letter, Apple lists a few bill provisions that were crucial for the company’s support, including language that clearly states manufacturers only have to offer the public the same parts, tools, and manuals available to authorized repair partners, and the bill’s exclusive focus on newer devices.
“Apple’s support for California’s Right to Repair Act demonstrates the power of the movement that has been building for years and the ability for industries to partner with us to make good policy to benefit the people of California,” Eggman told Grist in an emailed statement. “I’m grateful for their engagement on this issue and for leading among their peers when it comes to supporting access to repair.”
By choosing to work with lawmakers on SB 244, Apple is following in the footsteps of Microsoft, which negotiated the details of a recent Washington state right-to-repair bill before supporting it publicly. (Ironically, that bill stalled out in the state Senate after failing to gain the support of a key Democrat who is a former Apple executive.) While it’s unclear whether Microsoft’s cooperative approach on right to repair in Washington directly influenced the iPhone maker’s strategy in California, advocates previously told Grist that Microsoft’s leadership helped bring the entire tech industry to the negotiating table. Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The California Senate passed SB 244 by a vote of 38-0 in May. The state Assembly’s appropriations committee is expected to vote on the bill next week, after which it could go to the Assembly floor for a vote.
California appears to have a good shot at becoming the fourth state to sign a right-to-repair bill into law over the past year, following New York, Colorado, and Minnesota. A strong right-to-repair law in California has the potential to become the de facto standard, potentially leading to a national agreement between Big Tech and the repair community similar to what happened in the auto industry after Massachusetts passed a right-to-repair law for cars.
But regardless of this bill’s fate, advocates are taking a moment to celebrate their latest victory.
“It’s a huge win for the whole coalition that were dogged in their pursuit of legislation, and a proud moment for all of us watching the big guns fall,” Repair.org executive director Gay Gordon-Byrne said in a statement.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a historic about-face, Apple publicly supports right-to-repair bill on Aug 24, 2023.
