For much of its 53-year history, the Environmental Protection Agency let civil rights complaints languish. From Flint, Michigan, to the industrial corridors of the Deep South, communities attempting to use federal civil rights law to clean up the pollution in their neighborhoods were largely met with years of silence as their cases piled up in the agency’s backlog. That changed in 2020, after a federal judge ruled that the EPA must conduct timely investigations of civil rights complaints, and staffers began looking into cases where they identified potential discrimination.
Now, a slate of red-state attorneys general are trying to stop the EPA from taking race into account at all. Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a petition with the Biden administration’s EPA last week asking the agency to stop using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to regulate pollution. Advocates described the move, spearheaded by Florida’s Ashley Moody, as an attempt to strip the EPA of an avenue for tackling environmental justice, which the agency defines as “the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability, in agency decision-making.” In their petition, the Republican attorneys general argued that in practice, environmental justice “asks the states to engage in racial engineering.”
The petition “reads as the next step in a series of actions designed to undermine our civil rights laws,” said Debbie Chizewer, an attorney at Earthjustice leading the organization’s efforts on Title VI. She described petitions to the EPA as important legal mechanisms to compel the agency to act. “It’s a real tool,” she said. “This is an abuse of that tool.”
Moody’s office told the Associated Press that the attorneys general would sue the EPA if it didn’t change its ways.
The most recent high profile civil rights complaint submitted to the EPA came from residents of Cancer Alley, the stretch of land on the lower Mississippi River in southeast Louisiana home to hundreds of industrial facilities, including a notorious plant owned by the Japanese chemical giant Denka. Starting in the fall of 2022, the EPA spent months negotiating with Louisiana’s environmental and health regulators about how to ease the toxic pollution around Denka and other plants that surround the region’s predominantly Black towns. But the whole process was called off after then-Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (now the state’s governor) filed suit in May 2023.
Landry’s lawsuit attacked decades-old policies on environmental racism, challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate under Title VI. Even though the EPA dropped the complaint in June, the state pursued its litigation, and a federal judge ruled in Louisiana’s favor in January. Judge James Cain said that Louisiana and its “sister states” had found themselves “at the whim of the EPA and its overreaching mandates.”
Considered one of the most important provisions of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in any program that receives funding from the federal government. This includes state agencies, which use federal dollars to administer pollution prevention laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Chizewer described the provision as vital, because “our environmental laws are not protecting all communities. ZIP codes determine your exposure to environmental harms and Title VI provides a backstop to eliminate that.”
Recent attacks on the EPA’s use of Title VI can be traced back to the final days of the Trump administration, when the Department of Justice attempted to push through a rule that would have changed the interpretation of Title VI to only cover intentional discrimination. For decades, federal agencies like the EPA have interpreted Title VI to include in their definition of discrimination “disparate impacts,” the idea that a policy or an agency decision can disproportionately hurt a specific group of people, regardless of whether it’s deliberate. The legal argument underpinning the Trump administration’s rule, as well as the Louisiana lawsuit and the most recent petition, is based on the Supreme Court case Alexander v. Sandoval. The 2001 decision, written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, said that private citizens do not have the right to sue parties under Title VI, meaning the law’s protections could only be advanced by agencies like the EPA. The Republican attorneys general now want to peel back the agency’s ability to use Title VI, too.
Claire Glenn, a criminal defense attorney with a background in civil rights law, told Grist that the disparate impact interpretation of Title VI is necessary for keeping communities safe, since companies are wary of appearing discriminatory.
“We’re in an era where intentional discrimination is increasingly hard to prove, but discriminatory impacts are not going away,” Glenn said.
Title VI is one of a handful of federal regulations that can be used to protect communities from toxic pollution. The Clean Air Act requires states to regulate plants by industry, with each type of facility required to abide by certain standards that limit their emissions. But when companies try to build plants in already polluted areas, Title VI can be used to stop local governments from granting them permits. Over the past five years, the chemical industry has made a concerted effort to expand its footprint in Louisiana. Since the EPA dropped its Title VI case there, residents and advocates have had to find new ways to fight the expansion.
The EPA has not yet acknowledged Florida’s petition publicly. Chizewer said that the agency could choose to reject it out of hand, or accept it and start a process to change its own regulations.
“I think it’s a test for the EPA,” Chizewer said. “The EPA needs to stand firm and show the importance of this tool.”
For the first quarter of 2024, electricity generation from wind power sources exceeded the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuel sources in the UK. Further, electricity from fossil fuels reached a record low on April 15.
According to data from Ember, a not-for-profit energy think-tank, electricity generation from wind energy sources reached 25.3 terawatt hours (TWh), or about 39.4% of total electricity generation, in the first three months of 2024. By comparison, electricity from fossil fuel sources reached 23.6 TWh, about 36.2% of total electricity generation, during the same time period, Reuters reported.
In January, electricity generation from wind energy was at 9.07 TWh, followed by 8.24 TWh in February and 7.96 TWh in March. Electricity generation from coal reached 0.48 TWh (January), 0.22 TWh (February) and 0.34 TWh (March), while gas contributed to 9.65 TWh, 6.27 TWh and 5.90 TWh for January, February and March, respectively. Other fossil fuel sources made up 0.25 TWh in January, 0.24 TWh in February and 0.23 TWh in March.
As Reuters reported, wind and solar energy combined to provide 27.1 TWh of electricity generation in the UK during the first quarter of 2024, leading to a record high of 42.2% share of electricity generation from renewable energy sources.
Progress appears to continue into the second quarter, as electricity generation from fossil fuels in the UK reached a record low on April 15, according to a report from Carbon Brief. The report showed that electricity output from fossil fuel sources made up an all-time low of 2.4% for one hour on April 15.
These milestones are moving the needle on a target from the National Grid Electricity System Operator (NGESO) to run the electrical grid in the UK without fossil fuels, at least for short periods, by 2025, Carbon Brief reported.
“This hasn’t just happened overnight. It’s been a culmination of a significant amount of effort over a number of years,” Craig Dyke, director of system operations at NGESO, told Carbon Brief. “That’s not just us [NGESO] operating in isolation, that’s planning and collaboration with industry, with [energy regulator] Ofgem and with the government… It’s not just about technologies, it’s about hearts and minds and processes and systems and people working together.”
The UK has targeted net-zero by 2050, including through the transition to renewable energy sources.
According to Ember, in 2010, about one-third of the UK’s energy generation came from coal, and by 2022, coal power generation fell to only 2%. As Carbon Brief reported, about one-third of electricity generation in England, Scotland and Wales was from all fossil fuels as of 2023, while renewables made up about 40% of electricity generation.
The more plastic a company makes, the more pollution it creates.
That seemingly obvious, yet previously unproven, point, is the main takeaway from a first-of-its-kind study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Researchers from a dozen universities around the world found that, for every 1 percent increase in the amount of plastic a company uses, there is an associated 1 percent increase in its contribution to global plastic litter.
In other words, if Coca-Cola is producing one-tenth of the world’s plastic, the research predicts that the beverage behemoth is responsible for about a tenth of the identifiable plastic litter on beaches or in parks, rivers, and other ecosystems.
That finding “shook me up a lot, I was really distraught,” said Win Cowger, a researcher at the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research and the study’s lead author. It suggests that companies’ loudly proclaimed efforts to reduce their plastic footprint “aren’t doing much at all” and that more is needed to make them scale down the amount of plastic they produce.
Significantly, it supports calls from delegates to the United Nations global plastics treaty — which is undergoing its fourth round of discussions in Ottawa, Canada, through Tuesday — to restrict production as a primary means to “end plastic pollution.”
“What the data is saying is that if the status quo doesn’t change in a huge way — if social norms around the rapid consumption and production of new materials don’t change — we won’t see what we want,” Cowger told Grist.
That plastic production should be correlated with plastic pollution is intuitive, but until now there has been little quantitative research to prove it — especially on a company-by-company basis. Perhaps the most significant related research in this area appeared in a 2020 paper published in Environmental Science and Technology showing that overall marine plastic pollution was growing alongside global plastic production. Other research since then has documented the rapidly expanding “plastic smog” in the world’s oceans and forecasted a surge in plastic production over the next several decades.
The Sciences Advances article draws on more than 1,500 “brand audits” coordinated between 2018 and 2022 by Break Free From Plastic, a coalition of more than 3,000 environmental organizations. Volunteers across 84 countries collected more than 1.8 million pieces of plastic waste and counted the number of items contributed by specific companies.
About half of the litter that volunteers collected couldn’t be tied to a specific company, either because it never had a logo or because its branding had faded or worn off. Among the rest, a small handful of companies — mostly in the food and beverage sector — turned up most often. The top polluters were Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, Altria — the parent company of Philip Morris USA — and Philip Morris International (which is a separate company that sells many of the same products).
More than 1 in 10 of the pieces came from Coca-Cola, the top polluter by a significant margin. Overall, just 56 companies were responsible for half of the plastic bearing identifiable branding.
The researchers plotted each company’s contribution to plastic pollution against its contribution to global plastic production (defined by mass, rather than the number of items). The result was the tidy, one-to-one relationship between production and pollution that caused Cowger so much distress.
Log-log linear regressions and point plot for the relationship between the percent of global plastic mass produced by companies (x axis) and the mean percent of the total branded plastic found in the audit events (y axis). Courtesy of Win Cowger
Many of the top polluters identified in the study have made voluntary commitments to address their outsize plastic footprint. Coca-Cola, for example, says it aims to reduce its use of “virgin plastic derived from nonrenewable sources” by 3 million metric tons over the next five years, and to sell a quarter of its beverages in reusable or refillable containers by 2030. By that date the company also aims to collect and recycle a bottle or can for each one it sells. Pepsi has a similar target to reduce virgin plastic use to 20 percent below a 2018 baseline by the end of the decade. Nestlé says it had reduced virgin plastic use by 10.5 percent as of 2022, and plans to achieve further reductions by 2025.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola listed several of the company’s targets to reduce plastic packaging, increased recycled content, and scale up reusable alternatives. “We care about the impact of every drink we sell and are committed to growing our business in the right way,” the spokesperson said.
Similarly, a PepsiCo representative said the company aims to “reduce the packaging we use, scale reusable models, and partner to further develop collection and recycling systems.” They affirmed Pepsi’s support for an “ambitious and binding” U.N. treaty to “help address plastic pollution.”
Three of the other top polluting companies did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s worth noting that many of the companies’ plans involve replacing virgin plastic with recycled material. This does not necessarily address the problem outlined in the Science Advances study, since plastic products are no less likely to become litter just because they’re made of recycled content. There’s also a limit to the number of times plastic can be recycled — experts say just two or three times — before it must be sent to a landfill or an incinerator. Many plastic items cannot be recycled at all.
Richard Thompson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Plymouth in the U.K., commended the researchers for making “a very useful contribution to our understanding about the link between production and pollution.” He said the findings could shape regulations to make companies financially responsible for plastic waste — based on the specific amount they contribute to the environment.
The findings could also inform this week’s negotiations for the U.N. global plastics treaty, where delegates are continuing to spar over whether and how to restrict production. According to Cowger, if the treaty really aims to “end plastic pollution” — as it states in its mandate — then negotiators will need to think beyond voluntary measures and regulate big producers.
“It’s not going to be Coca-Cola or some other big company saying, ‘I’m gonna reduce my plastic by 2030, you’ll see,’” Cowger told Grist. “It’s gonna be a country that says, ‘If you don’t reduce by 2030, you’re going to get hit with a huge fine.’”
This story has been updated to include a response from PepsiCo.
Hey there, Looking Forward fam. Happy Earth Day (and Earth Week, and Earth Month) — a time of year when sustainability is elevated in the global consciousness, and my inbox is full of vaguely greenwashy PR pitches.
Each April, I (and every other climate journalist) revisit the same debate: whether to “cover Earth Day” in some way, or ignore it on account of the fact that we’re immersed in these issues every day. But it struck me that Earth Day 2024 has a particularly timely theme: Planet vs. Plastics. The official Earth Day organization has been assigning yearly themes since at least 1980, and Planet vs. Plastics is hitting in the year when U.N. members are supposed to be finalizing a global treaty to address plastic pollution.
“We’ve had research for 30 years now saying that plastics are dangerous to our health,” said Aidon Charron, director of End Plastic Initiatives at EarthDay.org. But he and others at the organization chose plastics as this year’s focus because they saw a gap in public knowledge, both about the harm that plastics can cause and about the policy solutions that are currently being debated on an international stage. Discussions about plastic tend to focus on individuals doing their part by reducing, reusing, and recycling, Charron said — but “we’re not going to simply recycle our way or technology our way out of this problem.”
Charron and other advocates have been pushing for ambitious targets in the global plastics treaty, and EarthDay.org is circulating a petition, which currently has over 22,000 signatures, for some of its key objectives, which include banning the export and incineration of plastic waste and a “polluter pays” principle. “What we don’t want to see is something similar to the Paris Climate Agreement,” said Charron. “While that was a great agreement, the issue is it’s voluntary, and so countries can opt in and opt out. And there’s also no punishment if somebody doesn’t meet the standards they set for themselves.”
On Sunday, EarthDay.org and other campaigners organized a march in Ottawa, demanding a strong and ambitious global plastics treaty. EARTHDAY.ORG
But the negotiations on the treaty have been fraught with competing interests — and even as the deadline nears, much remains to be sorted out. This week, delegates and advocates are gathering in Ottawa, Canada, for the fourth intergovernmental negotiating committee, or INC-4 — the second-to-last session on the books before the U.N.’s self-imposed deadline to finalize the agreement at the end of this year. As the parties have failed to make significant progress at the previousthreemeetings, the stakes at INC-4 are high.
So, today, I’m turning the newsletter over to the capable hands of my colleague Joseph Winters, who covers the plastics industry and has been following the negotiations of the global plastics treaty for the past two years. Read on a primer on the history of the treaty, the solutions being proposed in it, and where things stand as negotiators head into another round of discussions this week.
— Claire Elise Thompson
To understand the global plastics treaty, it’s helpful to go back to the 2022 U.N. Environment Assembly meeting, where delegates agreed to write it. By then, plastics had long been considered an environmental scourge. The world was — and still is — producing more than 400 million metric tons of the material every year, almost entirely from fossil fuel feedstocks. Just five years prior, researchers had shown that 91 percent of the world’s plastics were not recycled due to high costs and technological barriers.
Agreeing to write some kind of treaty was seen as a big success, but the icing on the cake was the promise to address not only plastic litter, but “the full life cycle” of plastics. This opened the door to discussions around limiting plastic production, which most experts consider to be a nonnegotiable part of an effective mitigation strategy for plastic pollution. They liken it to an overflowing bathtub: better to “turn off the tap” — i.e., stop making plastic — rather than try to mop up the floor while the water’s still running.
Experts see the treaty as a critical opportunity to stop the fossil fuel industry’s pivot to plastic production, as the world begins to phase out oil and gas from transportation and electricity generation. None of the details are even close to being finalized — but observers have called the treaty the “most significant” international environmental deal since 2015, when countries agreed to limit global warming under the Paris Agreement. And advocates hope that this agreement will ultimately have even more teeth.
Under a very optimistic scenario, it could include global, legally binding plastic production caps for all U.N. member states, plus some details on how rich countries should help poorer ones achieve their plastic reduction targets. The treaty might ban particular types of plastic, plastic products, and chemical additives used in plastics, and set legally binding targets for recycling and recycled content used in consumer goods. It could also chart a path for a just transition for waste pickers in the developing world who make a living from collecting and selling plastic trash. But such a far-reaching agreement is by no means guaranteed; some countries and industry groups are working hard to water down the treaty’s ambition, and have thus far limited negotiators’ progress.
When delegates first met in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in November 2022, it became clear that a vocal minority of countries — mostly oil-producing states including Saudi Arabia and Russia, as well as the U.S., to some extent — wanted to bend the treaty away from plastic production limits by focusing instead on better recycling and cleanup efforts. Petrochemical companies are also pushing for a focus on recycling, despite their trade groups knowing since the 1980s that plastics recycling would be unable to keep up with booming production.
This disagreement — production versus pollution — has been central to each meeting since then, stalling progress at every turn. Although delegates have held important discussions on plastic-related chemicals and the impact of the treaty on frontline communities, by the end of INC-3 last November, negotiators still hadn’t written anything beyond a so-called “zero draft,” basically a laundry list of options and suboptions for various parts of the treaty. They also failed to agree on an agenda for “intersessional” work between INC-3 and INC-4, meaning they could not use those intervening months to continue formal discussions, although several countries arranged unofficial meetings.
In a provisional note released ahead of this week’s negotiations, INC chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso made paring down the revised zero draft a key priority for delegates at INC-4. The committee should “streamline” the document, he wrote, and set an agenda for intersessional work to be completed in the months between INC-4 and INC-5.
“INC-4 is going to be likely the most important of all the INCs,” said Ana Rocha, global plastics program director for the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.
The march on Sunday began with a rally outside of Parliament Hill, where crowds heard from activists and Indigenous leaders who traveled from all over the world to join the demonstration. EARTHDAY.ORG
One of the key priorities for advocates is some kind of quantitative production limit. “If the goal is to end plastic pollution, it’ll be really hard to do without a cap on virgin plastic production,” said Douglas McCauley, an associate professor of ecosystem ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
A so-called “high-ambition coalition” of countries — including Norway, Rwanda, Canada, Peru, and a host of small island and developing states — say they support production limits as part of the plastics treaty, although they have not yet rallied around a particular target. It’s also possible that the treaty will have to rely on indirect measures to restrict plastic production, like bans on single-use plastics or a tax on plastic packaging.
Public health has emerged as another major, and surprisingly popular, priority for the treaty. Even in the two short years since world leaders first agreed to broker a treaty, lots of new evidence has emerged to highlight the human and environmental health risks associated with plastics. Last month, scientists raised the number of chemicals known to be used in plastics from 13,000 to 16,000. More than 3,000 of these substances are known to have hazardous properties, while a much larger fraction — about 10,000 — have never been assessed for toxicity. According to one recent analysis from the nonprofit Endocrine Society, plastic-related health problems cost the U.S. $250 million per year.
As of last November, more than 130 countries supported incorporating human health into the treaty’s primary objective, and many explicitly said they wanted the agreement to somehow control problematic chemicals. This is currently reflected in the zero draft, in proposals to prioritize “chemicals and polymers of concern,” putting them first in line for bans and restrictions. Some substances that would likely be included on this list are polyvinyl chloride, or PVC — the plastic used to make water pipes and some toys — as well as endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates, bisphenols, and PFAS.
Bjorn Beeler, general manager and international coordinator for the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, said that chemicals are the most “matured” part of the treaty.
Other sections, however — like the financial details of how countries will pay for the provisions of the agreement — have been largely unaddressed. With so much left to negotiate and so little time, questions are swirling around whether there will have to be an additional meeting after INC-5, or perhaps an INC-4.1 during the summer.
For now, many environmental advocates say it’s important that negotiators stick to the original schedule, running INC-4 under the assumption that they can and will finish the treaty by 2025. Should they need an extension, they can consider how best to coordinate that at a later date. Rocha, with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, said she’d rather extend the timeline than rush through a weak agreement.
“More important than an ambitious timeline is an ambitious treaty,” she said.
Last call for the Looking Forward drabble contest! This is the final week to share your 100-word vision for a clean, green, just future, for a chance to win presents.
To submit: Send your drabble to lookingforward@grist.org with “Drabble contest” in the subject line, by the end of Friday, April 26 (two days away)!
Here’s the prompt: Choose ONE climate solution that excites you, and show us how you hope it will evolve over the next 100 years to contribute to building a clean, green, just future. We’ve covered a boatload of solutions you could draw from (100, in fact!) — so if you need some inspiration, peruse the Looking Forward archive here.
Drabbles offer little glimpses of the future we dream about, so paint us a compelling picture of how you hope the world, and our lives on it, will evolve.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
Descriptive writing that makes us feel immersed in the scene and setting.
A sense of time. You don’t have to put a specific timestamp on your piece, but give us some clue that we are in the future (not an alternate reality), approximately 100 years from now, and that certain things have changed.
A sense of feeling. Is this vignette about joy? Frustration? Excitement? Nervousness? The mundane pleasure of living in a world where needs are met? Make us feel something!
100 words on the dot.
The winning drabbles will be published in Looking Forward in May, and the winners will receive presents! Some Grist-y swag, and a book of your choice lovingly packaged and mailed to you by Claire.
A parting shot
On Monday (Earth Day), in collaboration with a conservation organization called Oceana Canada, EarthDay.org projected an illuminated message onto the Canadian Supreme Court building in Ottawa, reading “plastic is toxic.” Similar messages were also projected onto Parliament Hill and the Canadian National Arts Centre, sending a clear message to leaders ahead of the treaty negotiations this week.
Manzanita, with its peeling red bark and delicate pitcher-shaped blossoms, thrives on the dry, rocky ridges of Northern California. The small, evergreen tree or shrub is famously drought-tolerant, with some varieties capable of enduring more than 200 days between waterings. And yet here I was, gently lowering an 18-inch variety named for botanist Howard McMinn into the damp soil of Tacoma, a city in Washington known for its towering Douglas firs, bigleaf maples, and an average of 152 rainy days per year.
It’s not that I’m a thoughtless gardener. Some studies suggest that the Seattle area’s climate will more closely resemble Northern California’s by 2050, so I’m planting that region’s trees, too.
Climate change is scrambling the seasons, wreaking havoc on trees. Some temperate and high-altitude regions will grow more humid, which can lead to lethal rot. In other temperate zones, drier springs and hotter summers are disrupting annual cycles of growth, damaging root systems, and rendering any survivors more vulnerable to pests.
Dead larch trees, a result of bark beetle infestation, stand amidst a city forest in Hagen, Germany. In addition to pests, high temperatures and drought have created stress for the native forest. Jonas Güttler / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Dead Joshua trees in the eastern Mojave Desert as seen in 2022. Scientists say that climate change will likely kill virtually all of California’s iconic Joshua trees by the end of the century. David McNew / Getty Images
The victims of these shifts include treasured species from around the globe, including certain varietials of the Texas pecan, the towering baobabs found in Senegal, and the expansive fig trees native to Sydney. In the Pacific Northwest, I’ve seen summer heat domes turn our region’s beloved conifers into skeletons and prolonged dry spells wither the crowns of maples until the leaves die off in chunks.
The world is warming too quickly for arboreal adaptation, said Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, an ecologist at Western Sydney University who researches the impact of climate change on trees. That’s especially true of native trees. “They are the first ones to suffer,” he said.
People take refuge under a shady tree amid an intense heat wave in the summer of 2022 in Calexico, California. Ariana Drehsler / Getty Images
While the best solution would be to stop emitting greenhouse gases, the world is locked into some degree of warming, and many regional governments have begun focusing on building resilience into the places we live. Urban botanists and other experts warn that cities are well behind where they should be to avoid overall tree loss. The full impact of climate change may be decades away, but oaks, maples, and other popular species can take 10 or more years to mature (and show they can tolerate a new climate), making the search for the right varieties for each region a frantic race against time.
In response, scientists and urban foresters are trying to speed up the process, thinking strategically about where to source new trees and using experiments to predict the hardiness of new species. Beyond that, many places are moving past the idea that native species are the most sustainable choice by default.
“Everybody is looking for the magic tree,” said Mac Martin, who leads the urban and community forestry program at Texas A&M’s Forest Service. He went on to say that one kind of tree isn’t enough. We need “a high number of diverse trees that can survive.”
In other words, a whole new urban forest.
In late 2023, that quest took Kevin Martin, no relation to Mac, to the arid forests of Romania. As the head of tree collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he spent a week hiking through pine-scented forests to gather beech acorns. He brought seeds from seven species back to the U.K. and planted them in individual pots at the botanical garden’s nursery. Now, he waits.
He hopes the trees will thrive in London’s drier springtime soils, which are making it hard for old standbys like the English oak to survive the hotter summers that follow. The research is part of a bigger change for the botanical garden, Martin said, which historically focused on collecting rare plant specimens. “We’re flipping that on its head and looking at what we want to grow,” he said. “We want a good outcome for humanity.”
A group of people trek through a wooded area of Romania looking for trees for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew that might thrive in a future London climate. Thomas Freeth / Courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Under normal conditions, trees are among the best defenses against heat, and not just because they provide a shady place to rest. As their leaves transform sunlight into energy, trees give off water vapor through tiny holes called stomata, cooling the air around them with “nature’s own air conditioning,” Martin said.
But increasingly hot temperatures can shut down this process. In extreme dry heat, the cells slacken and the stomata close, stopping water from escaping. The point at which this happens is called the turgor loss point, and it’s like the leaves on a houseplant wilting. If a stressed tree doesn’t get water, its leaves will overheat and die before the fall, sometimes across entire sections of the crown. In highly humid conditions, the air holds too much water vapor to absorb any more, leaving leaves waterlogged and beckoning rot. Even if a tree in this condition looks healthy, it can’t cool cities as well as it used to. Making matters worse, distressed plants are more vulnerable to pests like the borer beetle.
Native trees are particularly at risk for climate stress, and in many cities, they make up a significant chunk of urban tree cover. Eighty-seven percent of the trees in Plano, Texas, are native species, for example. That number is 66 percent in Santa Rosa, California, and 30 percent in Providence, Rhode Island.
To be sure, non-native trees have been a part of human settlements for a long time. Plants often spread with human migration, and European colonists brought many species to other continents. Many of these newcomers grow faster than the indigenous varieties, and some have proven better suited to urban areas.
Dead leaves hang on a holly tree branch in London in August 2022 as a result of stress caused by heat and lack of rain.
Mike Kemp / In Pictures via Getty Images
However, flora introduced from far away can also experience climate shock. Currently, non-native trees typically come from climates similar to those trees they now stand alongside. Until the seasons started going haywire, this made them well-suited to their adopted homes. For example, the London plane, a cross between an American sycamore and a plane tree from western Asia, lines streets in temperate zones around the world. Now, scientists are worried about the tree’s future in its namesake city as dry springs and hot summers leave them weak and susceptible to pests.
To find solutions, researchers are studying which trees could do better than those currently struggling in rapidly warming cities, with an eye toward species that have already adapted to drier regions hundreds or even thousands of miles away. In Canada, for example, scientists have matched trees from the northern United States with the expected climates in cities including Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Ottawa. Urban foresters in Sydney are considering the trees in Grafton, an Australian city about 290 miles closer to the equator.
A researcher from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew bends over his notes while hunting for beech acorns in Romania. Thomas Freeth / Courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Thinking of a future U.K., Kevin Martin started evaluating trees from the steppes of Romania more than 1,000 miles away. To find the right places to collect acorns, Martin looked at both temperature and the amount of water available in the soils of Romanian forests, explaining that trees in moist soils in tropical rainforests or near rivers will keep going even in hot conditions.
He will have to wait two years for the acorns to sprout and grow into saplings. Only then can he begin stress-testing the specimens to see if the trees are a good fit for the growing conditions of London in 2050 and beyond. Martin plans to study at what point the trees’ leaves hit turgor loss in dry, hot conditions. But crucially, the trees must also be able to adapt to London’s cold winters, which are expected to stay freezing even as drought and heat waves increase.
Seedlings grow in the arboretum at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Courtesy of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Examining leaf turgor loss can’t be used to assess trees for every neighborhood in a city. Parts of Sydney are facing increasingly humid summers in an otherwise temperate climate. With this in mind, the municipal forestry department used a database that matches a far-off location’s current humidity with what experts expect for the city in 2050. In addition to considering temperature, officials hope to increase tree canopy to cover 27 percent of the city in the next quarter century. They are also mindful that the climate will change gradually and have laid out a phased planting plan. Trees that thrive in the Sydney of 2060 may struggle in 2100.
Such factors are on Mac Martin’s mind as his department updates Texas A&M’s online tree selector, a statewide database that recommends species, to include varieties that are likely to flourish in the future.
Texas is slated to experience a triple climate whammy of hotter summers, colder winters, and changing humidity, with some places becoming intolerably dry and others getting more muggy. It’s a complex weather pattern to plant for — and that’s assuming cities are prepared to adapt once the right species are identified.
As risky as it may seem to hold on to endemic species in the face of climate change, some governments continue to create policies that favor native trees over non-natives. Canada, for example, has funded the planting of thousands of native trees in urban areas through its 2 Billion Trees project.
Botanists like Henrik Sjöman, who oversees collections at the Gothenburg Botanical Gardens in Sweden, say native-only thinking can leave cities unprepared to adapt to climate change. But he doesn’t believe cities must completely abandon native species. He hopes that some species can be saved with a process he calls “upgrading.” The idea is to find trees from the same species that are already growing in harsher conditions, and propagate seeds from those plants. To grow more resilient English oaks in the U.K., for example, scientists could grow them from acorns sourced from western Asia, where the tree also grows. These acorns would come from trees thriving in a more arid region, so they could potentially yield hardier varietals that will one day thrive in a drier London.
Additionally, locale-adapted native species might continue thriving in woodlands like large city parks or green spaces. Sjöman said it’s possible that trees in undeveloped areas will have more time to adapt to climate change, because rainfall more easily soaks into the ground and fills the water table. That’s not the case in highly paved and built-up neighborhoods, where decreasing rainfall hurts trees more.
“Everything’s pushed to its limit in urban environments,” Sjöman said.
That reality has many locales taking a “block-by-block” approach to planting guidelines. Toronto, for example, plants trees from the region’s ecosystem whenever possible, said Kristjan Vitols, the city’s supervisor of forest health care and management. That’s especially true of its iconic ravines, where newly planted trees must be endemic — and raised from locally sourced seeds when possible. But the city is also open to non-native species where plants face harsh conditions along streets.
The rules for Toronto’s ravines are based on the idea that a species will develop traits specific to a location as they grow over many generations. As a result, trees grown from seeds gathered in Toronto may be more likely to blossom when native pollinators are active than seeds from the same species grown at a lower latitude.
Foresters say there’s another valid argument for trying to keep as many native trees as possible. For some First Nations and Indigenous people with deep ties to particular varieties, phasing them out could add to the long history of cultural and physical dispossession.
In the Pacific Northwest, for example, the Western redcedar (written as one word because it’s not a true cedar) is central to Native American cultural practices for many local tribes. Some groups refer to themselves as the “people of the cedar tree,” using the logs for canoes, basketry, and medicine.
A dead branch is visible on a Western redcedar tree in Oregon in October 2023. Amanda Loman / AP Photo
But drying soils mean the tree is no longer thriving in many parts of Portland, Oregon, said Jenn Cairo, the city’s urban forestry manager. The city has faced deadly heat domes and drier conditions in recent years. As a result, Portland only recommends planting the species in optimal conditions in its list of approved street trees. “We’re not eliminating them,” she said, “but we’re being careful about where we’re planting them.”
A similar tactic is being used in Sydney, where the Port Jackson fig tree is struggling, but a close relative, the Moreton Bay fig, is thriving. Head of urban forestry Karen Sweeney said the city is looking at irrigated parklands as potential homes for native species that are dying elsewhere in the city. “We often say we’re happy to do it where we can find a location,” she said.
When introducing new tree species to supplement the urban canopy, they must be sure any newcomers won’t spread invasively — dominating their new habitats and causing damage to native species.
There are plenty of examples of what to avoid. The Norway maple, native to Europe and western Asia, has escaped the bounds of North American cities, creating excessive shade and crowding out understory plants — they’re one of the invasive species pushing out natives in the ravines of Toronto. Tree of heaven, native to China, deposits chemicals into the soil that damage nearby plants, letting it establish dense thickets and drive out native species; it is illegal to plant in parts of the U.S., including Indiana, where residents are urged to pull it up wherever they see it. The highly flammable eucalyptus, native to Australia, has put down roots all over the world, bringing increased wildfire danger along with it.
Urban tree experts don’t expect introduced species to cause major disruptions to native wildlife. Done right, adding some variety to cities dominated by one kind of tree could reduce the problems caused by waves of pests or disease. A patchwork of species could create a buffer against tree-to-tree infection among the same species. While it’s possible that new plant species displace plants used by animals that depend on one kind of plant to survive, those cases are the exception, Esperon-Rodriguez, the ecologist at Western Sydney University, said.
Some native animals do surprisingly well alongside their new plant neighbors. Introducing trees that are closely related to what’s already there could provide additional food and shelter for the local fauna. Animals might already be eating fruit from a new tree that grows somewhere else in their range.
The manzanita tree in my yard is still growing strong as of April 2024.
Laura Hautala
If it thrives, my Howard McMinn manzanita could attract Anna’s hummingbird with its pale blossoms in the Pacific Northwest, just as it would in its native California hills.
For now, my manzanita is a small bush. (Manzanita straddles the line between shrub and tree, which is not a clear-cut distinction. The definition of a tree is something that ornithologist David Allen Sibley said “one could quibble endlessly over.”) The plant made it through a cold snap this winter, and I was happy to see the bright green new leaves growing at the tips of its little branches after temperatures warmed.
Eager for a sign of spring, I leaned in close and found what I was looking for: clusters of tiny, unopened flower buds.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
In a case that could impact other lawsuits on voting rights, Black voters who sued over Georgia’s elections for key utility regulators are appealing their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Those elections for the Georgia Public Service Commission, or PSC, have been on hold for years and while last week a federal appeals court lifted an injunction blocking the elections from taking place, there is little chance the elections will happen this year.
Public Service Commissioners have enormous sway over greenhouse gas emissions because they approve how electric utilities get their power. They also set the rates consumers pay for electricity.
Grist and WABE are collaborating to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission through ongoing reporting, community workshops, printable resources, and local journalism training.
In Georgia, the commissioners have to live in specific districts. But unlike members of Congress who are only elected by residents of their district, the Georgia commissioners are elected by a statewide, at-large vote. A group of Black voters in Atlanta argued in a lawsuit that this violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it dilutes their votes, preventing them from sending the candidate of their choice to the commission.
In one example the plaintiffs cited, the former commissioner for District 3, which covers Metro Atlanta, “was elected to three terms on the PSC without ever winning a single county in District 3.”
That commissioner — along with four of the five current commissioners — is a white Republican. Georgia’s population is one-third Black, with a much higher proportion in District 3. Georgia voters elected Democrat Joe Biden and two Democratic U.S. Senators in 2020, and Atlanta voters tend to choose Democrats for seats ranging from mayor and city council to U.S. Congress.
A federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs in 2022 and suspended PSC elections until the state legislature could devise a new system. However, in November 2023, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision.
The appeals court ruling took issue with the proposed fix of single-member district elections, arguing a federal court can’t overrule the state’s choice to hold at-large elections because it would violate the “principles of federalism.”
“It’s kind of an upside-down view,” said Bryan Sells, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs. “What the 11th Circuit’s ruling says is that Georgia is allowed to discriminate against Black voters.”
The plaintiffs are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court decision, though there’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will take up the case.
In their petition for Supreme Court consideration, the plaintiffs argue that if it’s upheld, the appeals court decision “would upend decades of settled law and have a cascading effect far beyond the reach of this case.”
“[The appeals court panel] simply decided that whatever rationales Georgia might tender for the at-large scheme…automatically trump any amount of racial vote dilution, no matter how severe,” the petition argues. “If a State’s interest can prevail in this case, there is no case in which it won’t.”
The Georgia secretary of state’s office declined to comment on the appeal.
In the meantime, PSC elections have been on hold since 2022, when the federal judge who found for the plaintiffs imposed an injunction blocking the secretary of state from holding or certifying those elections. The 11th Circuit issued an order last week lifting the injunction, though its effect was not immediately clear.
Sells and a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office both said they were reviewing the order. In a text message, Sells also expressed surprise at what he called “the court’s unilateral action that no one asked for.”
Under the injunction, elections for two PSC seats that were scheduled for November 2022 were canceled. Despite not facing voters, those commissioners continue to serve and vote on PSC decisions, including rate increases and the three new fossil fuel-powered turbines the commission just approved.
PSC elections are also not on the 2024 ballot. A third commissioner’s term will expire at the end of the year.
A bill that passed the Georgia General Assembly before the Supreme Court appeal was filed or the injunction was lifted lays out a schedule for elections to resume, still following the current model of statewide voting. Governor Brian Kemp signed it into law last week.
The law schedules those elections to begin in 2025.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
More than 20 years ago, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, held its annual meeting with a focus on youth, and educating and nurturing them. This year, the forum’s 24th gathering, the emphasis was again on youth — but this time on listening to them.
Meet seven of the young leaders who spoke at this year’s forum.
Taylar Stagner / Grist
Name: Michael Severin Bro
Age: 32
Peoples: Inuit
Home: Ilulissat, a small town on the western coast of Greenland. His family calls him Mikaali.
What he wants people to know: Bro believes Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities are especially vulnerable in Greenland.
“We have been struggling within society, and we need to be included in decision-making,” he said. “I refer to myself as Sipineq, which is our word in Inuit language defining everything about queerness, or all letters of the LGBTQIA+.”
Advocating for both issues is complicated. “It’s like wearing two hats,” he said.
More: As climate change warms the Arctic four times faster than global temperatures, Bro said that Greenland’s Inuit are facing difficulties in seal hunting.
Taylar Stagner / Grist
Name: Gervais NdIhokubwayo
Age: 30
Peoples: Batwa
Home: Bujumbura, Burundi
What he wants people to know: Batwa children need more support for their education, including infrastructure and school supplies.
The Batwa are one of the oldest Indigenous cultures in Africa. In Burundi, they receive little support from the government. The Batwa in Uganda experience health disparities due to climate change.
More: The focus on youth at this year’s forum was exciting.
“Compared to last year, there’s a noticeable advancement in prioritizing youth perspectives, fostering collaboration, and advocating for Indigenous rights on a global scale,” he said.
Taylar Stagner / Grist
Name: Kseniia Bolshakova
Age: 24
Peoples: Dolgan
Home: Popigai in Siberia, Russia
What she wants people to know: Her community in Siberia has difficulties getting access to fresh drinking water, because of colonization and climate change. Bolshakova would like to seek help to get a salination station near her village that converts sea water into fresh water.
“There is no funding for this,” she said through a translator. “This challenge is very costly and that’s why the problem has not been solved.”
She’s writing a book on language revitalization, and the effects of climate change on her homeland.
More: When she was still in Russia, she participated in a protest against the war in Ukraine. Afterward, she felt under threat and left the country, and believes it would be unsafe for her to return. She currently lives in New Hampshire.
Courtesy of Jakirah Telfer / Grist
Name: Jakirah Telfer
Age: 21
Peoples: Kaurna
Home: Aldelade, on the coast of southern Australia
What she wants people to know: She feels responsible for fixing climate change brought on by colonialism, but also powerless if Australia won’t listen to Aboriginal people. She started to cry in frustration during a panel discussion at the UNPFII, because she was reminded of her grandmother who was part of the Stolen Generation, a dark chapter in Australia’s colonial history when Aboriginal children were taken from their parents to be assimilated into colonial society.
“I sort of had to reflect, because I hated myself for crying. I think one thing the U.N. is missing is emotion and vulnerability,” she said. “I hated myself for crying, but I also felt so nurtured and safe in that space with so many other Indigenous peoples. I just feel like youth brings that passion.”
More: She thinks about her relationship with the land as a language.
“When we listen to the land, the land will listen to us. It’s a language. Climate change is creating a language barrier.”
Taylar Stagner / Grist
Name: Nilla-Juhán Valkeapää
Age: 19
Peoples: Sámi
Home: Helsinki, Finland
What he wants people to know: Finland is forcing the Sámi Parliament to redo an election and include some 70 residents of the homeland who are not Sámi, a move that leaves Valkeapää concerned. The Sámi believe this is an infringement on their self-determination.
If the Sámi Parliament is treated with so little respect, then Valkeapää feels especially invisible because of his youth.
“People are like, ‘Youth are the future, listen to the youth.’ But when it comes to actually listening to us they are like, ‘Nah let the adults do this stuff,’” he said.
He is proud of being Sámi in Finland, so this recent infringement on the Sámi electoral process makes him nervous about the future. Especially after a recent U.N. report outlined that Finland still needs to do more to address the historical removal of the Sámi from their lands and suppression of their language.
More: Green energy projects have threatened the Sámi homeland over the last few years, including an illegal wind farm in Norway.
Taylar Stagner / Grist
Name: Majo Andrade Cerda
Age: 29
Peoples: Kichwa
Home: Puyo, Ecuador
What she wants people to know: She’s an activist who wants to better protect the Amazon rainforest, a place very important to the Kichwa. While she believes there has been progress in getting more young people involved in the United Nations, she still sees barriers, especially with people for whom English is a second or third language.
“I recognize my privilege in being able to learn English, so if [member states] want to help, they would help with the language barrier,” she said.
More: Cerda is a member of Yuturi Warmi, the first Indigenous women guard that protects the Ecuadorian rainforest, and she is also a community organizer for Escuela Runa Yachay.
Taylar Stagner / Grist
Name: Morgan Brings Plenty
Age: 29
Peoples: Cheyenne River Sioux
Home: Eagle Butte, South Dakota
What they want peolpe to know: Brings Plenty is two-spirit, an umbrella term that encompasses an array of Indigenous gender identities. An activist since they were 12, they are critical of the push for electric cars as a way to stop using fossil fuels, since few people think about the burden that puts on tribal lands through mining.
“People say ‘go green,’ but there are a lot of false solutions,” they said. “Like there’s electric cars, but you have to mine lithium.”
“[It] goes into the water and gets into Indigenous communities,” they said. “There are health concerns there,” they said.
More: Brings Plenty wanted to make sure their colleagues also got credit for their work at the U.N. — Annalee Yellowhammer, 20, and Maya Runnels, 22, from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
“We are a team. We are a group effort,” they said.
Grist and WABE are collaborating to demystify the Georgia Public Service Commission through ongoing reporting, community workshops, printable resources, and local journalism training.
