Nominated by readers, the 2023 Grist 50 list of climate changemakers celebrates the grit, determination, and creativity of all kinds of people who share one goal: putting us all on a path to an equitable, cleaner future.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 50 climate leaders to know right now on Sep 8, 2023.
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About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.
But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.
According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation.
It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.
“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.”
A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.
Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly.
“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”
The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.
But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities.
The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.
“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.”
Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes.
When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning.
“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren.
This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.
Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.
In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home.
A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.
Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach.
“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”
On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly.
This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills.
Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.
Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.
Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.”
Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered.
In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson.
“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”
Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners.
This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change.
“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.”
Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.
“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mobile homes could be a climate solution. So why don’t they get more respect? on Sep 8, 2023.
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An initiative at Africa’s first climate summit to boost production of the continent’s carbon credit program by nearly 20 times by 2030 brought pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars.
United Arab Emirates (UAE) investors pledged to purchase $450 million worth of Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) credits. ACMI was launched at COP27 in Egypt last year.
“We must see in green growth, not just a climate imperative but also a fountain of multi-billion dollar economic opportunities that Africa and the world is primed to capitalise,” said President of Kenya William Ruto, as Reuters reported.
Market-based financing mechanisms like carbon offsets are being encouraged by leaders in Africa. Carbon credits can be created by projects in developing countries that help keep emissions in check like transitioning to green energy or tree planting. The “credits” are then purchased by companies to help them meet their climate goals. One credit equals one ton of carbon dioxide saved.
Environmental groups denounced the focus on carbon credits at the Africa Climate Summit (ACS) in Nairobi, Kenya, which was attended by almost 25,000 delegates and more than 30 heads of state.
“[I]t is regrettable that the Africa Climate Summit is becoming a bazaar for carbon credit speculators and propagandists that serve to greenwash rather than reduce harmful emissions,” said Thandile Chinyavanhu, Greenpeace Africa climate and energy campaigner, as Climate Home News reported. “They are risky diversions from real climate and biodiversity action that requires ending fossil fuel expansion and industrial destruction of our ecosystems.”
Governments in Africa view carbon credits and the like as essential ways to obtain hard-to-come-by funding from wealthy donors, reported Reuters.
“There hasn’t been any success for an African country in attracting climate finance,” said Bogolo Kenewendo, a United Nations climate adviser, as Reuters reported.
In 2021, the carbon offset market was worth about $2 billion and has been projected to climb to from $10 to $40 billion by 2030.
In addition to the $450 million from the UAE Carbon Alliance, an investment pledge of $200 million for ACMI credit projects was made by Climate Asset Management, a partnership between climate change advisory and investment firm Pollination and HSBC Asset Management.
Britain also planned to announce $62 million in UK-backed projects, and a $64 million debt swap was announced by Germany with Kenya that would make money available for renewables.
African Development Bank Vice President Kevin Kariuki told Reuters that African countries would advocate for the expansion of International Monetary Fund special drawing rights at COP28 in Dubai later this year. The drawing rights could make $500 billion in climate financing available, which could also be leveraged as many as five times.
“The private sector really remains an untapped opportunity that now must be seized,” said Commonwealth of Nations Secretary-General Patricia Scotland, as reported by Reuters.
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The Great Salt Lake, home to millions of migratory birds and the source of $2.5 billion in annual economic activity in Utah, has been rapidly shrinking for years. A new lawsuit filed by conservation groups on Wednesday says the Utah government directly contributed to the lake’s decline by authorizing excessive diversions of water for agriculture, industry, and other uses.
The lawsuit hinges on the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that says states shoulder the responsibility to protect public resources like shared waters and lands. The plaintiffs have asked a district court in Utah to declare the state’s actions a violation of that public trust duty and to direct officials to restore the lake to healthy water levels. Without immediate action, they warn, heavy metals and sediments from the drying lakebed will blow downwind and into the lungs of Utah residents, turning the lake into a “toxic dust bowl.”
“Wherever you have an environmental nightmare, if you look hard enough or wait long enough, you’re going to have a public health nightmare,” Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the plaintiff groups in the case, told Grist. “And that’s exactly what we fear.”
The lake relies on upstream water flowing from several rivers and streams to maintain its water levels. But out of the approximately 3 million acre-feet of water that would normally flow into the lake each year, more than 2 million acre-feet are diverted for various purposes. Around three-quarters of that water is used for irrigating alfalfa and other crops. The industrial extraction of minerals, including salt, directly from the lake accounts for another 9 percent. Other industries and cities use another 9 percent, with 90 percent of citybound water destined to water lawns and other decorative outdoor plants. Meanwhile, climate change has increased evaporation and worsened drought in the Southwest, accounting for about 10 percent of the lake’s overall decline.
Researchers warned earlier this year that the Great Salt Lake may completely disappear in five years if water loss continues at current rates. As of last year, the Great Salt Lake had lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area compared to baseline historical levels.
Moench and other health advocates worry that without intervention, the Great Salt Lake will end up like the Aral Sea, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, today it is now almost completely dried up after decades of water diversions for agriculture. Toxic dust and water pollution, along with declining economic conditions, led to a significant rise in respiratory illnesses, cancer, and other chronic diseases in the region. According to a 2003 study, overall life expectancy for nearby residents dropped 13 years as the lake shrank.
In Utah, the drying lakebed has already led to deadly dust storms in the region. While in the short term, dusty air may only lead to itchy eyes, a cough, and difficulty breathing, Moench says that long-term exposure to air pollution raises the risk of many leading causes of death, including heart disease, lung disease, strokes, and cancer. Sediment from a dried up Great Salt Lake also contain pollutants like arsenic, mercury, lead, and nickel — potent neurotoxins that can impair brain function and development and cause cancer.
In addition to the public health risks, a depleted lake would also harm the Utah economy and environment. The Great Salt Lake supports brine shrimp fishing, recreation, and other industries. The ecosystem sustains around 9,000 local jobs and even boosts Utah’s skiing businesses by increasing annual snowfall through its evaporation.
Scientists and even Utah state officials say that for the Great Salt Lake to return to sustainable water levels, the government would need to reduce the amount of upstream water allocated toward agriculture, mineral extraction, and other activities. But the plaintiffs say the state’s Department of Natural Resources, Division of Water Rights, and Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands have been reluctant to adopt any strategy that limits existing uses of water. Utah leaders have also failed to include tribal nations in formal discussions about protecting the Great Salt Lake, even though Indigenous peoples including the Ute, Shoshone, and Paiute nations have lived near and managed the lake for thousands of years.
Stu Gillespie, an attorney at Earthjustice and lead counsel for the lawsuit, told Grist that as climate change and human activities continue to deplete water resources, state governments will be held increasingly accountable for their responsibility to protect public waters like the Great Salt Lake. Reminding them of their obligations under the public trust doctrine, he said, could be a viable way to get state governments like Utah’s to finally act.
“The public trust is being increasingly called upon to address this crisis, and it’s up to the courts to enforce it,” said Gillespie.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Environmentalists sue Utah for failing to protect the shrinking Great Salt Lake on Sep 7, 2023.
August was another month of relatively good news for the Amazon rainforest: The rate of deforestation has continued to decline significantly.
Earlier this week, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, announced a 66.1 percent decrease in Amazon deforestation compared to last August. That amounted to a loss of about 217 square miles, according to Reuters. These figures come during a time of year when destruction of the rainforest is usually quite high, and follows a similar trend seen in July.
So far this year, the rate of deforestation is 48 percent lower than in 2022 and is at levels not seen since 2018. The numbers are another victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has made protecting the Amazon a policy priority.
“These results show the determination of the Lula administration to break the cycle of abandonment and regression seen under the previous government,” Marina Silva said, according to the BBC.
The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covers some 2.5 million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions and home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Some scientists fear that if deforestation continues, the rainforest could reach a point beyond which it cannot recover and would become a grassy savannah.
The tenure of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, saw a roll back of environmental regulations and enforcement, and a spike in deforestation. Since taking office in January, Lula has, among other steps, renewed efforts to combat illegal clearing and reactivated the $630 million Amazon Fund, which is aimed at supporting the government’s push to protect the rainforest.
“This shows the importance of governments acting on climate change,” Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate focused on the Amazon at Oxford University, said of the figures released this week. She is currently doing field work in the rainforest, and says the decreasing rate of deforestation is an important signal for voters.
“Often people vote and feel disempowered,” she said. “This shows how an election can change the fate of the Amazon.”
Some scientists, however, prefer to follow the annual rather than monthly deforestation data. “It’s a hopeful story,” said Alexandra Tyukavina, a geographer at the University of Maryland who focuses on tropical forest loss. But she adds that there could be a lag in capturing deforestation via satellite imagery and “there is quite a bit of deforestation happening in the second half of the year.”
While the progress so far has been critical, Berenguer calls it “low-hanging fruit” that largely revolved around getting back to where the country was before Bolsarano. “Then you have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees and it’s much more difficult,” she said. “The question becomes what we do to reduce rates even more from what they were pre-Bolsonaro.”
The Lula administration has set a goal of zero deforestation by 2030. But whether he meets that goal, or how close he comes, remains an open question and there is at least some cause for skepticism. A meeting of Amazon nations early this year, for example, failed to reach an agreement on important barriers to progress, such as deforestation targets and the future of oil and gas development in the rainforest.
“We cannot just give ourselves a pat on the shoulder and be happy about it,” said Berenguer. “We cannot get too comfy.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amazon deforestation continues to plummet on Sep 7, 2023.
Google Maps is expanding with three new tools to help map rooftop solar potential, air quality and pollen. The tools utilize Google’s artificial intelligence, machine learning, environmental data and aerial imagery to provide more information on the environment.
The company first started its Project Sunroof in 2015 to estimate solar potential. On Aug. 28, Google announced a new Solar API that maps resources for detailed data on rooftop solar potential. The new tool will share the solar potential for over 320 million buildings in 40 countries, according to a company press release.
Google’s Solar API was trained to pull data on roof geometry, trees and shading from aerial imagery, in addition to other factors like weather patterns and energy costs. The tool shows users potential energy savings and is designed to make the process of solar panel installation quicker and easier.
“The Solar API is a key input — it instantly gives us the data we need to analyze rooftops to determine how much sunlight they get to create customer proposals within the same workflow,” said Walid Halty, co-founder and CEO of Mona Lee Solar, a solar installation company, in a statement. “By doing this remotely and instantly, we have greater cost savings and can provide a better customer experience, helping our business grow quickly in this space.”
In addition to the Solar API, Google also announced Air Quality API, which provides in-depth air quality information to users. This project pulls from data sources including government monitoring stations, sensors, meteorological data, satellites, live traffic data and more to produce location-specific and highly detailed air quality information.
The tool shows the air quality index (AQI), the dominant pollutant, hourly history of air quality in an area and even a breakdown of the major pollutants in an area. According to Google, this information can help users make decisions regarding their health, from determining when it’s safe to spend time outdoors to planning a travel route with the best air quality.
The company announced a third tool, Pollen API, which offers information on pollen count from top pollen sources. It relies on land cover, climatological data, annual pollen production for different plants and other data to determine pollen levels and risks. This could help the around 400 million people globally who have allergic rhinitis, according to the World Health Organization, and the 67 million adults in the U.S. who have seasonal allergies.
According to Google, these new tools can help developers and businesses plan sustainable solutions and help users lessen their environmental impact.
“Looking ahead, we aspire to drive both short-term progress and long-term breakthroughs. No company — no matter how ambitious — can solve a challenge as big as climate change alone,” wrote Saleem Van Groenou, product manager for Google Maps Platform. “One of the most powerful things we can do is build technology that allows us, our customers, and individuals around the world to take meaningful action. We’re optimistic about what’s possible with the Solar API and our suite of Environment APIs.”
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