Today, 30-year-old garment factory worker Khadiza Akhter lives in Savar, a suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Her small concrete house is clean and organized. Green shutters frame the windows, and clothes hang on lines outside her front door. A water spigot sticks out of the concrete next to the drying laundry, and the turn of a white plastic knob is all it takes for clear, clean water to rush out. Akhter calls it “a blessing of God.”

Akhter grew up some 180 miles south of Savar, in Satkhira — a district home to 2.2 million people on a river delta where, in recent decades, fresh water has become scarce. As sea levels rise, rivers dry up, and cyclones become more severe, Satkhira and the other low-lying districts that surround it have been among the first in the world to experience the sting of climate change-driven saltwater intrusion — the creep of seawater inland. 

The memory of drinking water tainted with salt is burned into Akhter’s mind. “It felt like swallowing needles,” she told Grist and Vox in Bengali. “It doesn’t quench your thirst.” The water was so salty Akhter couldn’t properly clean herself with it. The sodium in the water prevented soap from forming bubbles and left powdery streaks on her skin as it dried. Her hair fell out, and she itched all over. 

When she hit puberty, she had to wash her cloth menstrual pads in salty water. The monthly exposure to salt in her pads made her break out in sores. Akhter’s menstrual cycle became erratic. “One month, it showed up unexpectedly early, catching me completely off guard,” she said. “The next month, it seemed to disappear altogether.” She sought medical advice at the Shyamnagar Upazila Health Complex, the local hospital in Satkhira, but there was no long-term fix available to her, beyond stopping her period altogether with hormonal birth control pills. She left Satkhira a decade ago, when she was a teenager, and moved to Savar, known for having some of the cleanest water in Bangladesh. 

When Akhter first arrived in Savar, she had trouble adapting to city life. She wasn’t used to eating food cooked on a gas stove, and went to extreme lengths to avoid it. “I used to buy biscuits or cakes from the office canteen and sometimes starved,” she said. But, Akhter, who knew she wanted children someday, pushed through. “All I ever wanted was a better life for my kids — a life where they wouldn’t have to worry about food or clean water,” she said.

Studies have shown that saltwater consumption has negative, long-lasting effects on nearly every stage of a woman’s reproductive cycle, from menstruation to birth. Akhter knew that if she stayed in Satkhira and started a family of her own there, she’d be putting herself in real danger. She’s not the only person in her region to leave in search of cleaner water. Millions of Bangladeshis have been internally displaced by flooding in the past decade, and experts say saltwater intrusion is one of the factors driving migration from rural regions of Bangladesh to urban centers. 

In some ways, Akhter is one of the lucky ones. She got out of Satkhira before saltwater consumption led to high blood pressure, a hysterectomy, or worse. But the women, and other people with uteruses, who remain in Satkhira are suffering from reproductive health effects — issues that could become common elsewhere in the coming years. As sea levels rise and intensifying storms stress infrastructure systems along coasts around the world, salt water threatens to infiltrate freshwater drinking supplies in countries like Egypt, Italy, the United States, and Vietnam. The issue, a 2021 study stated, “has become one of the main threats to the safety of freshwater supply in coastal zones.” The health of women living in these areas is on the line. 

Southwestern Bangladesh is accustomed to encroaching salt water. The region sits adjacent to where the Padma River — known as the Ganges in India — empties into the Bay of Bengal. Most of the Bangladesh delta is less than 2 meters, or 6.5 feet, above sea level, with some areas at or even below the tide line. When cyclones wheel into the bay, storm surge pushes salt water inland, flooding the area.

For generations, communities in Satkhira adapted to the ebb and flow that defines the delta ecosystem. In the late 1960s, when a catastrophic period of cyclone-driven storm surge submerged rice paddies in salt water and ruined livelihoods, Satkhira was one of the first districts in Bangladesh to turn those paddies into shrimp farms. Small-scale farmers took advantage of storm surge — trapping seawater in ponds and paddies to cultivate shellfish — and paved the way for other parts of coastal Bangladesh to do the same. Today, shellfish farms have expanded into roughly 675 square miles of land, most of it in southern Bangladesh. Annual shellfish exports are valued in the hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, and the industry employs more than a million people directly, and millions more indirectly. 

But the district’s legacy of hard-fought resilience is being undone by climate change. 

Already, sea level rise has pushed the saline front more than 62 miles inland along the country’s 450-mile coastline. Climate models indicate that a 380-square-mile area in coastal Bangladesh, home to 860,000 people, could be under the high tide line by the end of this century. Every millimeter of sea level rise contributes to more expansive and intense saltwater intrusion in soil and freshwater resources. 

Between 2000 and 2020, the country was hit by eight major cyclones. One of these powerful storms, 2007’s Cyclone Sidr, produced a 16-foot-high storm surge, rainfall, and tidal waves that flooded an area home to 3.45 million people. This week, a storm of similar proportions, Cyclone Remal, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and trapped thousands of people in the country’s low-lying areas. Nearly 40 percent of the country’s seaside soil already has salt in it, but storms like Sidr and Remal — the severe cyclones that are projected to become more common as climate change worsens — supercharge salinization by spreading unprecedented quantities of salt water deeper inland.

The Bangladeshi government has inadvertently contributed to the problem. In the 1960s, the government built a series of embankments around reclaimed land in southern Bangladesh. These areas, called polders, were meant to protect communities and agriculture from storm surge. But the embankments, which stand up to 13 feet high, are not tall enough to keep major surges out. Seven cyclones with storm surge of more than 13 feet hit Bangladesh between 1970 and 2008. Once the embankments have been overtopped, the seawater can’t flow out again. 

The trend is made worse by the region’s growing shrimp and prawn industry. Black tiger shrimp, the main species of shrimp farmed in Bangladesh, thrive in brackish water — water that is saline but not quite as salty as seawater. When Satkhira began to embrace aquaculture and shrimp farming, the government neglected to study the potential risks of adding saline to freshwater ponds in order to make them suitable for shrimp farming. Over time, salt from the shrimp fields leached into ponds and other in-ground freshwater containers, further contaminating limited drinking water supplies. A 2019 report that tested salinity in 57 freshwater ponds in Satkhira found that 41 of them contained water that was too salty for drinking. 

The Padma River, which carries fresh water from Nepal through India to Bangladesh, is another source of salinity. The river supplies much of the fresh water Bangladeshis use for irrigation, farming, freshwater fishing, and drinking. But the Padma’s flow into Bangladesh is restricted seasonally by India, which controls a dam in West Bengal called the Farakka Barrage. During dry periods, the flow of water coming into Bangladesh from India slows and the volume of river water going into the ocean weakens, allowing seawater to work its way up the Padma. When heavy rain falls, the river swells and salt water is pushed back out, expunging the river of its salinity and transforming the river back into a freshwater resource. 

Families collect rainwater during the winter to use throughout the dry season, but climate change is scrambling those delicate calculations, too. The seasonal rains start later and stop earlier than they did a decade ago, and when it does rain, it rains harder. These compounding issues force Bangladeshis to pull more fresh water from groundwater aquifers, which are rapidly dwindling.

“The people are trapped,” said Zion Bodrud-Doza, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Canada who studies saltwater intrusion in Bangladesh. “When you don’t have water to drink, how do you live?”

In 2008, Aneire Khan, a researcher at Imperial College London, visited Dacope, a division of the Khulna district, which borders Satkhira in southwest Bangladesh. She met a gynecologist there who told her that an unusual number of pregnant women were coming to him with gestational hypertension and preeclampsia. 

The former is defined as two separate blood pressure readings of greater than 140 over 90 in the second half of the pregnancy. The latter occurs when those high blood pressure readings are accompanied by high levels of protein in the urine. 

Both conditions affect how the placenta develops and embeds into the uterine wall, said Tracy Caroline Bank, a maternal fetal medicine fellow physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Patients with either condition “have a higher risk of things like a preterm delivery, of fetal loss,” she said, in addition to “a higher risk of the baby growing too small.” Premature babies are dealt a bad hand before they take their first breaths: Low birth weights are linked to poor development, cognitive impairments, cerebral palsy, and psychological disorders. 

The gynecologist Khan spoke to said that high blood pressure readings, especially in women, were occurring with more frequency. Other medical professionals Khan spoke to in Khulna confirmed that observation. They thought salt water may be the culprit. 

People who drink water with small amounts of salt in it can grow acclimated to moderate salinity over time. Khan, who was traveling between London and Bangladesh at the time, tasted the water in Khulna and was surprised to encounter immediate, undeniable salinity. It was “very, very salty,” she said. She conducted a survey of blood pressure levels in pregnant women living along the coast and compared the data to blood pressure in women living inland. More than 20 percent of the women living in coastal zones had been diagnosed with a hypertensive disorder, compared to less than 3 percent of women living in Dhaka. It was clear that a serious public health threat was growing along the coast, but no formal epidemiological study of saltwater intrusion and reproductive health in Bangladesh existed at the time. Khan set out to change that. 

In 2011, three years after she spoke to the gynecologist in Khulna — the man who became her co-author — Khan published a study that showed that hypertension, or high blood pressure, in Dacope occurred seasonally. Out of the 969 pregnant women they analyzed, 90 presented with hypertension. In the wet monsoon months, heavy rains filled ponds with fresh water and diluted salt concentrations in rivers. During the dry season, lack of rainfall caused people to turn to other sources of drinking water that became steadily saltier over the course of the season. Of the 90 cases of gestational hypertension that Khan documented, 70 occurred during the months of November and April, the periods with the least amount of rainfall. 

The World Health Organization recommends that adults consume no more than 5 grams of salt per day, about a teaspoon worth. Khan ultimately discovered that women in Dacope were getting more than three times that amount per day from their drinking water alone during the dry months. 

Consumption isn’t the only way that salt water endangers women’s reproductive health. As Akhter learned as an adolescent, using salt water to wash cloth menstrual pads presents additional dangers. The water “doesn’t clean well,” said Mashura Shammi, a professor at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh who studies saltwater intrusion and the effects of pollutants on health. “The salt makes the cloth very hard,” she added, and can cause scratches in the vagina that lead to infection. 

Other women in southwestern Bangladesh, particularly those who make a living working in shrimp aquaculture or fishing in the rivers, suffer even more intense health repercussions. Standing in salt water every day can produce chronic uterine infections and uterine cancer. The International Centre for Climate Change and Development, a research institute, interviewed women from Bangaldesh’s coastal zones and found anecdotal evidence of a host of saltwater-linked health outcomes. “I have cut off my uterus through surgery due to my severe infections,” one 32-year-old woman said. “And I am not the only one, there are many like me.” In the same report, a doctor from the Shyamnagar Upazila Health Complex said she had noticed “an increase in infertility, irregular periods, and pelvic inflammatory disease.” The doctor said that the majority of her female patients over the age of 40 have had hysterectomies or have undergone procedures to eliminate the lining of the uterus in order to lessen heavy menstrual bleeding. 

Roughly 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 60 miles of a coast, and more than 100 countries are at risk of saltwater intrusion. By the end of 2019, 501 cities around the world had reported a saltwater intrusion crisis of some degree — more than a fifth of them home to more than 1 million people each. “Bangladesh isn’t the only country that’s going to be affected by salinity,” Khan said. “Vietnam, China, the Netherlands, Brazil — salinity in the coastal areas is going to be a huge issue, and is already a problem.”

The Mekong Delta, where the Mekong River flows into the ocean, is Vietnam’s breadbasket. Every year during the dry season, seawater flows up the mouth of the river from the South China Sea, turning the river salty for a month or two. People living in the delta — 20 percent of Vietnam’s population, many of them farmers — collect rainwater during the wet season to compensate for the seasonal salinity. But recent years have marked a departure from the norm. Yearslong droughts, more erratic rainfall patterns, and a network of Chinese dams upstream have produced a saltwater intrusion crisis in the Mekong River. The creep of saltwater upstream could lead to $3 billion in agricultural losses per year, and thousands of residents could see their drinking water cut off this year. 

A similar story is unfolding in the Nile Delta in Egypt, where farmers are pumping groundwater to supplant increasingly salty water from the Nile River. Overreliance on coastal groundwater upsets the natural balance between freshwater aquifer and ocean. As groundwater levels drop, the pressure keeping salt water out weakens, allowing the ocean in. If aquifers are drained too quickly, and past a certain point, pumping water out of the ground can actually suck ocean water into the aquifers like a vacuum. Some 15 percent of the most fertile land in the Nile Delta is contaminated with salt water due to drought, sea level rise, and overpumping. 

Nearly every solution to saltwater intrusion hinges on trying to keep seawater out of fresh water to begin with. Armoring coastlines with sea walls, levies, sandbags, and other hard infrastructure is the first line of defense in many countries. Those with water and money to spare can artificially “recharge” underground freshwater aquifers to preserve the natural tension between fresh water and salt water. Governments can also put restrictions on how much water farmers can pull from underground resources. 

Preventative measures are more effective than fixes put in place after the fact. It’s nearly impossible to clean salt out of fresh water without the aid of expensive and energy-intensive desalination equipment, which most countries do not have. A medium-size desalination plant, which is an incredibly energy-intensive piece of infrastructure, costs millions of dollars to build and then millions more in annual operation costs. Even in very rich nations, runaway saltwater intrusion poses risks to infrastructure and people. Most water supply networks’ intake stations in the U.S., for example, are not outfitted with desalination technology. Once saltwater intrusion reaches those stations, they have to be shut off to avoid pulling the water in.

The creep of seawater inland

While global salinity monitoring is spotty, evidence of saltwater intrusion continues to grow.

Electrical conductivity value (µS/cm)

10K–100K

100K–1M

1M–10M

Bangladesh

U.S. Atlantic Coast

U.S. Gulf Coast

Australia

Source: Thorslund & van Vliet 2020 | Clayton Aldern / Grist

Last year, drought in the Mississippi and the Ohio River valleys weakened the flow of water in the Mississippi River, and a massive wedge of seawater from the Gulf of Mexico started to creep north. As the wedge moved upstream along the bottom of the river, intake stations in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, started sucking it in. More than 9,000 residents couldn’t drink water from their taps, and local officials started distributing bottled water. Rainwater eventually eased the drought and forced the wedge back toward the ocean. Water in Plaquemines Parish is currently safe to drink again, though experts warn salt water poses a long-term threat to drinking water in southeast Louisiana.

Saltwater intrusion “is an issue along most of the coastline in America,” said Chris Russoniello, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Rhode Island. California, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island are some of the states that are already confronting intrusion. But exactly how much of a threat it poses to communities “varies drastically from place to place,” Russoniello said. How much funding states direct to keeping saltwater intrusion at bay will determine the extent to which people feel the burden of intrusion. Many states already lack sufficient drinking water protections and infrastructure, particularly in low-income and minority areas. Saltwater intrusion is likely to exacerbate existing drinking water inequities. But, in general, the U.S. is much better equipped to address saltwater intrusion than other countries grappling with similar issues. 

“The places where this will really be felt are places where the resources are not available,” Russoniello said. In Bangladesh, the government has tried to leverage billions in international and domestic resilience funding to try to protect communities in the southern parts of the country. The solutions often do more harm than good. The embankments are susceptible to breaching, shrimp and prawn farmers have further contaminated soil and drinking water with salt, and an expensive network of gates, locks, and sluices meant to control ocean water are decaying due to lack of regular maintenance. District governments and nongovernmental organizations distribute rainwater collection tanks to a small percentage of families every year, which provide some measure of relief. But none of these fixes are permanent. 

“If the water is saline, you cannot make it fresh water in the blink of an eye,” Bodrud-Doza said. “People are trying to survive, but people need to leave.” Coastal Bangladesh and southeast Louisiana have that, at least, in common. Sea level rise will force a substantial portion of the population in both places to migrate inland. In areas where the encroaching tide, deadly storm surge, and widespread saltwater intrusion are inevitable, there will eventually be no option but retreat. “It’s something we need to think about as a society,” Russionello said. For the women already living on the front lines of a crisis that robs them of their health, reproductive organs, and pregnancies, retreating from the coastline is no longer a question of if, but how. 

Akhter and her husband, Shamim, grew up in adjacent villages and met when they were children. They began dating in high school and later indicated to their families that they wanted to be married. Akhter was living in Savar when her marriage to Shamim was arranged by her parents. After they were married in a traditional ceremony in Satkhira, Akhter temporarily moved to Shamim’s village, where the salt levels in the drinking water were even higher than they had been in her home village. The couple tried purifying the water with aluminum sulfate powder and boiling the water with herbs. As a last resort, Shamim installed a water filter he obtained in Dhaka. Nothing helped. 

Akhter permanently relocated to Savar with Shamim, and, soon after, became pregnant and gave birth to her first daughter, Miftaul. Two years later, she gave birth to a second healthy girl, Muntaha. At first, the family lived together in Savar. But Akhter and Shamim both work full time, and they couldn’t afford day care for both children. Their older daughter, Miftaul, who is now 5, lives in Satkhira with her grandparents for most of the year, and Akhter worries about the impact that saltwater intrusion will have on her young daughter’s life. 

“It’s not ideal for her health, especially now that she’s growing,” Akhter said. “She already has trouble showering with salty water.” Miftaul has begun attending school in Satkhira, but Akhter and Shamim plan to bring her back to the city, where the schools and water quality are better, as soon as possible. 

Akhter doesn’t want her children to relive a version of her own difficult childhood. A piece of her heart will always live in Satkhira, she said, but her future, and her daughters’ futures, are anchored in Savar. “I don’t want them to go through the struggles we faced.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Salt in the womb: How rising seas erode reproductive health on May 30, 2024.

When Rupa Basu was pregnant with her second child, her body temperature felt out of control — particularly as her third trimester began in the summer of 2007. It wasn’t particularly hot in Oakland, California, with high temperatures reaching 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, she felt uncomfortably warm even as her colleagues and friends were unbothered.

As her October due date approached, she drank extra fluids and avoided going outside during the hottest stretch of the day. “This is really weird,” she recalls thinking. She wondered if there could be a biological mechanism at work. 

That notion had troubling implications. “If this is a biological response, imagine what’s happening in places like India and Africa where the heat can get to an unbearable 130 degrees Fahrenheit,” Basu remembers thinking. As a researcher at the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, Basu knew that other vulnerable populations, notably the elderly, were particularly susceptible to heat. 

But she couldn’t find any answers to one fundamental question: do higher temperatures lead to premature births or other pregnancy complications? 

As Basu prepared for her second baby’s delivery, she began gathering state weather data and birth records to identify preterm births, those that occur prior to 37 weeks of gestation. Preterm birth is linked to a wide variety of health conditions, including anemia, respiratory distress, jaundice, sepsis, and retinopathy — and, at worst, infant mortality.

Researchers, including Basu, had already documented the impacts of air pollution on adverse pregnancy outcomes. But heat was, at the time, uncharted terrain — and the suggestion that it might have an effect was met with skepticism. Colleagues, particularly those who had not ever been pregnant, implied she was wasting her time. But when Basu published her study, her findings spurred similar research all over the world. 

Basu analyzed 60,000 summertime births — those taking place between May and September — from 1999 to 2006, across 16 California counties. She found higher rates of preterm births during higher temperatures. She published the research in 2010, and even though she focused on California, it was the first large-scale epidemiological study looking at preterm delivery and temperature conducted anywhere in the world. 

What was especially shocking, Basu said, was how much greater the risk was for Black mothers — 2.5 times higher than for white populations.

“How did we miss this for so long?” Basu asked. “Women are often the last to get studied. But the most vulnerable people are those who are pregnant.”

Those vulnerabilities are intensifying. In the last year, the hottest on record, 6.3 billion people — notably in South and East Asia and the African Sahel — experienced at least 31 days of extreme heat, hotter than 90 percent of documented temperatures between 1991 and 2020, according to a new report. 

As human-caused climate change continues, the number, intensity and duration of heat waves will only get worse. Without intervention, those heat waves will cause millions of babies around the world to be born preterm. Higher temperatures will also have knock-on impacts to gestational and fetal health. As temperatures rise, so does drought and air pollution, which also increases the risk of preterm birth or low birthweight babies. Pollutants from vehicle combustion, including nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, react in sunlight to form ozone. And the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculated that extreme heat events will also lead to more wildfires, leading to air pollution that is expected to cause thousands of additional preterm births. 

Basu began research on pregnant people because they are woefully understudied and they represent one of the most vulnerable populations. Now that there is strong evidence that heat exacerbates adverse birth outcomes, she hopes it will instigate policy change, promote awareness, and ultimately, decrease risk and disparities. “We need to take more action,” she said. “This is preventable.”

In the 14 years since Basu’s initial paper, dozens of studies have confirmed that higher temperatures and heat waves are linked to preterm birth as well as stillbirth. 

In 2020, Basu co-authored a review of 57 studies that found a significant association between air pollution and heat exposure with preterm birth and low birth weight. Scientists have found an association between heat exposure and preterm birth rates in every developed nation, and in the few developing nations to conduct studies so far. 

While it’s not yet clear how heat triggers preterm birth, there are several hypotheses — including dehydration, hormonal releases that rupture membranes surrounding the fetus, or poor blood flow between parent and unborn child.

This research has taken place against a backdrop of a worsening maternal health crisis in the U.S., particularly in marginalized communities. The U.S. has the highest rate of preterm births in the developed world. Kasey Rivas, associate director of strategic partnerships at the March of Dimes and a co-author of a recent report on birth outcomes and disparities, told me that maternal health disparities in the U.S. stem largely from systemic racism and are worsening due to climate change.

A 2023 study found that the average preterm birth rate was 7.9 percent across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe in 2020; but the United States’ preterm birth rate was higher — 10 percent. By comparison, the highest population-wide preterm birth rate in the world is 13.2 percent in South Asia. U.S. rates of preterm birth increased 4 percent between 2020 and 2021 — and rates were far higher in Black women (14.8 percent) compared to white women (9.5 percent), according to the March of Dimes report. “The data were disturbing and disheartening,” Rivas said.

In 2023, a team of scientists decided to take a closer look at a notoriously deadly heat wave in Chicago in 1995 during which over 700 died as high humidity made 106 degrees feel like a hellish 120. “If we didn’t see a racial effect during this event, we won’t see it anywhere,” study co-author Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, recently told me. 

Casey and her colleagues found convincingly stark racial disparities. The mean monthly incidence of preterm birth rose 16.7 percent beyond what was expected for Black mothers six months after the heat wave. No such link was seen in non-Hispanic white births. 

Further, a study conducted in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, the fourth largest U.S. city, found that the risk of preterm birth was 15 percent higher following extremely hot days — and had the greatest impact on communities of color that lived in neighborhoods with more concrete than trees.

That finding points to the reasons behind the racial gap in preterm births linked to heat waves. Preterm birth has been linked to a number of factors including inadequate nutrition, exposure to air pollution, lack of access to quality health care, lack of air conditioning, or having a job working outdoors — or several of these at once. Heat only worsens existing risks.

And communities of color are more likely than white communities to face all of these risk factors, including heat. Predominantly Black neighborhoods were redlined, or deemed most risky, beginning in the 1930s when insurance companies created maps assigning investment risk levels based on race. Today, those redlined areas have more industrial facilities, excessive truck traffic, and a heavier pollution burden — and often, the least shade or green space. Areas dominated by concrete, asphalt, and buildings experience hotter temperatures due to the urban heat island effect, the phenomenon in which gray infrastructure absorbs and holds more heat than forests or waterways.  

Fresno County, California, which has some of the worst air pollution in the United States, exemplifies this pattern. Venise Curry, a consultant for community-based organizations collaborating with the UC San Francisco California Preterm Birth Initiative and others on a prenatal research study designed to lower preterm birth rates, told me that the county’s highest preterm birth numbers are in Southwest Fresno — a formerly redlined, predominantly Black neighborhood of color.

Black and white “women experience broadly similar climate changes, but are seeing drastically different outcomes — so something else must be at play,” said Bryttani Wooten, a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied racial disparities in preterm birth rates. “That something else is systemic racism, including legacies of residential segregation.” 

Obstetric providers in low-income communities of color describe preterm birth as a crisis. “Preterm birth is a 24/7, 365-days-a-year public health emergency in my community,” said Nneoma Nwachuku Ojiaku, an obstetrician in Sacramento. Madeleine Wisner, who was the only midwife provider serving low-income residents in the Sacramento Valley through the state Medicaid program for seven years until recently, described something similar. “A course of maternity care where nothing abnormal happens doesn’t exist any longer in the populations I was serving,” Wisner said. She’s seen a range of birth complications — including abnormally implanted placentas, umbilical cord abnormalities, and preeclampsia — in patients who were exposed to heat, air pollution, or wildfire smoke during pregnancy.

Black doulas and midwives are a small but growing population determined to improve Black maternal health, said Maya Jackson, the founder of Mobilizing African American Mothers through Empowerment, or MAAME. She said that while Black midwives were once at the forefront of birthing health care for Black and white mothers post-slavery, their systematic exclusion from medical institutions changed that. Today, Jackson is seeking funding to do community-based research on heat impacts on people of color to make sure that their lived experiences and the impacts of policies that shape housing, green spaces, or industrial pollution in brown and black neighborhoods are documented. 

“Somehow living has become a political issue,” she said.

In recent years, researchers have turned their attention to poorer, hotter regions of the world — and the findings are grim. In March, a study conducted among outdoor workers in India found that exposure to heat stress above 81 degrees F doubled the risk of miscarriage. Overall in India, 8.5 percent of pregnancies in urban areas and 6.9 percent in rural areas end in miscarriage. 

Ana Bonell, a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, studies heat and birth outcomes in western Africa and Pakistan. She said it’s difficult to conduct research on maternal climate exposure and adverse birth outcomes in most places in Africa because they often don’t have electronic health records or the equipment needed to accurately determine how far along a pregnancy is — information necessary to determine if a birth is, in fact, preterm. Instead, she looked at acute physiological changes in pregnant farmworkers and their fetuses in The Gambia, a country in West Africa where the average temperature is 83 degrees F. In 2022, she published data showing that the farmworkers exhibited a 17 percent increase in fetal stress, defined by a fetal heart rate either above 160 or below 115 beats per minute or decreased placental blood flow, for each degree Celsius of heat.

“[These are] populations that have contributed almost nothing to climate change and are at [the] front lines of the climate crisis,” Bonell said. Research in Ghana, published last year, also found that exposure to temperatures 87 degrees F or higher throughout a pregnancy resulted in an 18 percent increased risk of stillbirth. 

“There seems to be this myth of endless adaptation,” said Chandni Singh, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. “In tropical countries that are already very hot, there is this continuous expectation to adapt, which is not feasible. You can’t adapt to 45 C” (113 degrees F). And heat has knock-on impacts. “Heat doesn’t come alone; it comes with water scarcity and wildfires,” she said, emphasizing the need to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

Singh has reviewed a number of heat action plans created by city and state governments globally to improve heat advisory messaging or build cooling spaces and environments. She said there is an increasing but still insufficient focus on women, particularly addressing the fact that people who are pregnant or lactating have unique heat adaptation needs. 

“We know this is a problem, and certain women are affected more,” said Singh. “How do we deal with that? That’s the next challenge.”

While research has established the link between heat and preterm birth, the next steps are to figure out how it happens in the body, and more importantly, how to prevent  it.  

On an individual level, Ojiaku advises her patients, as early as possible in their pregnancies, to keep cool, stay hydrated, and limit work-related heat exposures as much as possible. 

But other policies are needed to right racial inequities. In 2022, Ojiaku called on Sacramento leaders to improve public health messaging about heat risks — and to appoint a chief heat officer, akin to those in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami, whose job it would be to include pregnant people as at-risk populations in heat advisories. 

A March study of 17 federal, 38 state, and 19 city websites with heat-health information found that only seven websites listed pregnant people as vulnerable or at-risk populations. 

“We are more likely to see information on how to take care of pets during heat waves than pregnant women,” Ojiaku told me.

In addition, she said, creating green spaces such as parks in neighborhoods that have been subject to systemic racism and redlining can offer shade, cool spaces to exercise, and a buffer against air pollution. 

“Sacramento is called ‘the city of trees,’ but that’s for a select few in the predominantly wealthier sections of Sacramento,” Ojiaku said. “Other areas are a concrete jungle.” 

In 2023, UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, published a dossier describing measures needed to protect women and children from heat waves. It stressed prevention and preparedness, including training frontline workers to identify heat-related illness and local government adaptations such as providing cooling centers and shaded areas.

“We need to get prepared and take heat waves just as seriously as other disasters,” Ojiaku said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘How did we miss this for so long?’: The link between extreme heat and preterm birth on May 30, 2024.

When it comes to greening your wardrobe, a lot depends on what you do with…

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A new study by researchers at University of Michigan (UMichigan) has concluded that almost half of food waste globally — roughly 620 million metric tons — could be saved by food supply chains being fully refrigerated.

Each year, approximately a third of worldwide food production goes to waste, a press release from UMichigan said. Meanwhile, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly 800 million people go hungry.

By fully refrigerating food supply chains — creating “cold chains” — greenhouse gas emissions related to food waste would be reduced by 41 percent globally, the study said.

“I was surprised to find the scale of our opportunity for reducing food loss and waste globally,” said Aaron Friedman-Heiman, the study’s lead author and a master’s student at UMichigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, in the press release. “Approximately half of the roughly 1.3 billion tons of food that goes to waste annually can be solved through food supply-chain optimization.”

Parts of Asia could see a food loss reduction of 45 percent, as well as 54 percent lower associated emissions under optimized refrigeration conditions, the study said. And food loss in Sub-Saharan Africa could be reduced by 47 percent, while their emissions could drop by 66 percent in an optimized refrigeration scenario.

The researchers said the actual greenhouse gas emissions reductions would depend on cold-chain technology efficiency, as well as the carbon intensity of electrical grids, since emissions from refrigeration can be significant.

The researchers found that, in many situations, the development of less industrialized and more local “farm-to-table” supply chains could result in food savings comparable or even exceeding optimized cold chains.

The study compared the benefits of “farm-to-table” food systems with those of technologically advanced and globalized food-supply chains.

“Hyper-localized food systems resulted in lower food losses than optimized global, refrigerated supply chains,” said Friedman-Heiman in the press release. “The results help quantify the value of maintaining and supporting local food chains.”

The study, “The impact of refrigeration on food losses and associated greenhouse gas emissions throughout the supply chain,” was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Roughly eight percent of greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans are from food losses, UMichigan said.

The study focused on losses that were part of the post-harvest to retail part of the supply chain, rather than on at-home or on-farm losses.

While the research accounted for food production emissions, it did not take into account emissions tied to supply-chain operations, refrigeration or landfilled food waste.

The researchers found that most food gets wasted at the household level in Europe, North America and other industrialized regions. This means improvements to cold chains would not significantly impact total food losses.

The study underscored the importance of food losses related to meat products, as their climate-related emissions were consistently more significant than those of any other type of food, mostly because of the intensity of greenhouse gases associated with meat production.

The pair of researchers from UMichigan found that meat makes up more than half of greenhouse gas emissions from food loss, despite its food losses by weight being less than 10 percent globally. They also discovered that optimizing meat’s refrigeration could lead to a reduction in emissions of 43 percent from meat loss.

The study modeled food losses at every stage in the supply chain, highlighting where cold chains could be optimized to lower emissions and food losses. They then looked at the effects of moving to an optimized system — one with refrigeration of high quality at every stage — from the currently inconsistent cold chains of variable quality all over the globe.

“Although cold chain infrastructure is rapidly increasing worldwide, an optimized cold chain will likely develop at different rates and in different ways across the globe,” said Shelie Miller, co-author of the study and a professor at the UMichigan School for Environment and Sustainability, in the press release. “This analysis demonstrates that while increased refrigeration should lead to improvements in both food loss and greenhouse gas emissions associated with food loss, there are important tradeoffs associated with cold chain improvements by food type and region.”

The post Improved Refrigeration Could Reduce Global Food Waste by 41%, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

According to allegations by a former research fellow for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the EPA’s own documents indicate that false information may have been presented to the public regarding the agency’s testing of harmful contaminants in pesticides.

In May 2023, the EPA issued a press release stating that it had found no per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) “forever chemicals” in samples of particular insecticides, reported The Guardian. However, the press release contradicted a former study by an EPA researcher that had found PFAS in the cited pesticide products.

“It’s pretty outrageous,” said Kyla Bennett, director of scientific policy at PEER. “You don’t get to just ignore the stuff that doesn’t support your hypothesis. That is not science. That is corruption. I can only think that they were getting pressure from pesticide companies.”

The allegations by PEER, which is led by former employees of the EPA, were made on Tuesday.

Bennett said PEER obtained the contradictory pesticide testing data after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The opportunity to comment was declined by the EPA. The agency said “because these issues relate to a pending formal complaint process, EPA has no further information to provide.”

Recently, the EPA recognized that PFAS have the potential to contaminate pesticides and recently classified two PFAS as hazardous.

PFAS are used in various industries and consumer goods like nonstick cookware, food packaging, paints, electronics and cleaning products. Some of the chemicals have been linked to health problems such as immune system damage, cancer, birth defects and delayed development in children.

In a letter submitted to the EPA by PEER, the watchdog group demanded a correction to the public statement and retraction of the EPA’s research memorandum.

In its complaint, PEER said that by seeking to refute the study’s findings, the EPA was “guilty of numerous departures from both accepted scientific and ethical practices” and “provided misinformation to a national audience and intentionally damaged Dr. [Steven] Lasee.”

The study by Lasee from 2022 said the toxic PFAS perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) had been detected in six of 10 insecticides used on cotton and other crops.

The EPA responded by saying it had gotten samples of the same pesticides, as well as purchased other products with the same registration numbers. The agency said its scientists had not found any detectable PFOS.

PEER and Lasee said the new findings raised immediate questions of testing validity due to a number of deviations from scientific norms and other flaws discovered in the EPA’s testing analyses.

“When you cherrypick data, you can make it say whatever you want it to say,” Lasee said, as The Guardian reported.

The post Watchdog Group Accuses EPA of Misconduct in Testing Pesticides for PFAS appeared first on EcoWatch.

Mexico City could be just weeks away from Day Zero, the day when the city runs out of water supplied by the Cutzamala water system. Water reservoirs in the city recently hit historic lows, and amid ongoing drought conditions and a heat dome, the city could face Day Zero by June 26.

The Cutzamala water system supplies about 25% of Mexico City’s water, while about 60% comes from underground aquifers that are over-exploited and have had issues dating back to the 16th century, CNN reported.

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“When the Spaniards arrived on the continent, they drained the lakes on which the city was was built,” said Caroline Houck, senior editor at Vox, as reported by Marketplace. “And so all of the impervious surfaces that have been built on top of those don’t really allow for the rainwater that does fall to replenish the aquifers.”

As of March 2024, the Cutzamala water system reached a historic low of about 38% capacity, NPR reported.

Starting October 2023, Mexico City began tightening the amount of water supplied by the Cutzamala system and reducing the flow rate. The city has also called on citizens to drastically cut back on water usage.

However, while water conservation by the public has helped in similar crises, including one made famous in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018, Mexico City also faces major water losses from its infrastructure. As Fast Company reported, about 40% of the city’s water is lost through leaks, and additional water is lost to theft, as organized crime groups steal public water for agricultural use or to resell back to the public at inflated rates.

Without rain, Day Zero is expected to come by June 26, Mexico Business News reported. 

“This problem has worsened in the last four years, there has been no rain, and for this reason the dams have very low levels,” Alejandra Margarita Méndez Girón, general coordinator of the National Meteorological Service, said in a press release. “We have had up to 93 percent of the region with severe to moderate drought.” 

But even with rain, Mexico Business News reported that a 2022 study by the National Water Commission (CONAGUA) found only about 42.5% of the country’s groundwater was fit for human consumption. Further, experts fear that rainfall will bring false hopes, when the infrastructure still needs attention to prevent future shortages.

Officials noted that the El Niño climate event, heat waves and a decline in rainfall have all contributed to the current water shortages, although some politicians have argued there is no “Day Zero” ahead. 

The rainy season is expected to begin in June. But many citizens have already reported water shortages, and some neighborhoods have experienced water scarcity for years, CNN reported.

“There is a clear unequal access to water in the city and this is related to people’s income,” Fabiola Sosa-Rodríguez, head of economic growth and environment at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City, told CNN.

The post Mexico City Nears Day Zero, When It Could Run Out of Water appeared first on EcoWatch.

The vision

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”

Photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams

The spotlight

As a writer, I obviously have a fondness for words. I believe in their power — while also recognizing their limitations. Much as we try to “show, not tell” through the written word, an article can’t quite approximate letting someone see or experience something for themselves. Photos and videos, on the other hand, come pretty darn close.

Visual storytellers have to be immersed in the scenes they capture, up close to the people, animals, plants, and landscapes they create images of. They document things that many people otherwise wouldn’t get to see with their own eyes. It’s a powerful medium, with a well-established history of stirring viewers to care about climate change and conservation. But high-quality, thought-provoking photography and film is also time-consuming and expensive to create, putting it out of reach for many would-be climate communicators and storytelling organizations.

It’s a problem that Kogia, a nonprofit media library, is attempting to solve. The library offers photos and video clips, free of charge, to scientists, conservation organizations, artists, activists, and others.

“Our mission has been to democratize access to this media in a way, and to elevate the voices of those who are on the front line of conservation and just give them the best tools possible for them to tell their stories,” said Nessim Stevenson, a filmmaker and photographer who founded the project along with his cousin, and fellow photographer, Karim Iliya. They saw a great need to make high-quality images more readily available to conservationists and mission-driven organizations as an essential communication tool.

“I had a lot of nonprofits that were asking me for photos and videos to use as I was photographing underwater worlds — whales and turtles and manta rays and coral reefs, from the big animals to the little tiny creatures,” Iliya said. He knew other environmental photographers must be getting the same types of requests, and wanted to create a platform that would enable these organizations to get the resources they needed to further their work, while easing some of the strain on individual creators fielding these requests. The pair published a beta form of the project in the spring of 2023, which Stevenson describes as a “clunky version that we made ourselves in Squarespace.” Still, they quickly garnered more than 100 members, from over 40 countries. This year, on Earth Day, they launched Kogia 2.0 — a more robust library that they built out with the help of a volunteer web developer, featuring the work of over a dozen creators.

The library also creates an opportunity to divert a certain type of waste. Only a tiny fraction of the images a photographer creates in the field will actually get licensed for prints or articles or other uses. The rest tend to sit on hard drives, essentially becoming “digital trash,” as Iliya put it. “It’s difficult to make money off of it, because it’s like the 10th best photo of a clam or a whale or a clownfish, and not the best one.” But these excess images are still good quality, and can be a gold mine for small organizations and individuals that don’t have the budget to license or commission original photos or film. “So we’re trying to reuse and recycle — basically put to use this stuff that would’ve just sat and rotted away,” Iliya said.

Kogia is ocean-focused right now, but Iliya and Stevenson ultimately plan to expand the library to include land ecosystems as well. They’re also starting a fellowship program that will involve sending out camera kits to young photographers and videographers all over the world who want to document conservation stories from a local perspective.

“The way we’ve been seeing some of the media used, from the anti-whaling movement in Iceland to student-led groups educating young kids about nature and their environment in South Asia, it’s been really surprising and exciting,” Iliya said.

Stevenson and Iliya shared a selection of their favorite images from the gallery, gathered below. These come from some of the most threatened ecosystems on Earth — like Palau, part of a coalition of small island states that have banded together to hold large nations accountable for climate impacts (and recently won a major victory from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea). Although some of the images in Kogia’s library offer a look at the impacts of climate change, industry, and pollution on ocean ecosystems, the majority, including these, focus instead on their beauty and how much there is to protect.

— Claire Elise Thompson

A freediver in a cave in Vava’u, Tonga.

Blacktip reef sharks in Palau.

Golden jellyfish in Palau.

A green turtle swimming over seagrass in Puerto Rico.

A humpback whale tail in Antarctica.

A paddle boarder on an expedition in Greenland.

A shrimp in North Sulawesi, Indonesia.

A polar bear near Churchill, Canada.

An aerial view of the coastline of Maui, Hawaiʻi.

More exposure

• Read: about the famous “Earthrise” photo that galvanized the environmental movement in the late 1960s (BBC)
• Read: about some of the pitfalls that environmental photography has historically fallen into — including an overreliance on charismatic megafauna, like the polar bear (Grist)
• Read: about efforts to document and preserve some of the world’s most threatened ecosystems through the use of 3D mapping, VR, and other tools (Grist)
• Browse: Kogia’s Instagram, for more photos and video of marine wonders (and if you’re a storyteller, consider signing up for access to the library)

A parting shot

While showing the vibrance and beauty of marine wildlife and ecosystems, visual storytelling can also introduce a harsh juxtaposition with the threats those ecosystems face. This photo, for instance, shows an overhead view of an oil refinery off the coast of Long Beach, California. At first glance it looks peaceful, almost pretty. But a closer look reveals its sheer scale, and its nearness to the shoreline — where residents face some of the worst pollution in the country.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Grist

Spotlight: Karim Iliya; Nessim Stevenson; Pier Nirandara, Sophie Hart, Kieth Ladzinski, Cedric Dageville, Michel Zoghzoghi, Raja Iliya

Parting shot: Karim Iliya

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Photos help tell climate stories. This media library lets conservation orgs access them for free. on May 29, 2024.

When Cortni Borgerson thinks about the trillion or so periodical cicadas emerging from underground, she sees more than clumsily flying insects flitting from tree to tree in search of a mate. She sees lunch.

Some may find that idea revolting, a belief often, if unknowingly, steeped in colonialism and the notion that eating insects is “uncivilized.” But Borgerson, an anthropologist at Montclair State University, is among those eager to change that perception. She’s a big fan of dining on bugs of all kinds, but finds cicadas particularly appetizing. “It’s one of the best American insects,” she says.

Their texture, she says, is something like peeled shrimp, and their taste akin to what you’d experience “if a chicken nugget and a sunflower seed had a baby.” She recommends first timers cook them like any other meat and try them in tacos.

Borgerson’s not alone in her fascination with edible insects. In the lead up to this spring’s dual-brood emergence, a flurry of cicada recipes, sweet treats and culinary odes have sung the bulky bugs’ praises. The interest is part of a growing social movement in favor of alternative proteins among consumers increasingly demanding a more sustainable food system. 

“They’re this magical-looking insect that crawls up, that people are excited and interested in,” she says. “People are more excited about eating it than they might be about other types of insects.” 

The buzz around this cicada emergence provides an opportunity to break down misguided stereotypes and misconceptions about eating insects, Borgerson says. If you ask her, the creatures are more than tasty. They’re a sustainable alternative to carbon-intensive proteins like beef and an effective way of addressing rising rates of food insecurity. 

“Some insects have an incredible opportunity, and a potential, to reduce our carbon footprint in a delicious, but sustainable, way,” she says. 

Roughly 30 percent of the world’s population considers insects a delicacy or dietary staple, a practice that goes back millennia. A study published earlier this year found that over 3,000 ethnic groups across 128 countries eat 2,205 species of Insecta, with everything from caterpillars to locusts appearing in dishes of every description. These invertebrates are a rich source of protein, fat and vitamins. The creatures are most commonly eaten by consumers in Asia, North America — predominantly Mexico, where people enjoy 450 varieties  — and Africa.

The idea remains a novelty in the United States, where just six species are regularly consumed (crickets being the most popular). Consumer attitudes, based on old stigmas, remain a hurdle to broader acceptance.

Julie Lesnik, an anthropologist at Wayne State University who studies the Western bias toward eating things like beetles, calls the “ick” response many Americans have toward the idea a cultural byproduct of colonization.

“Disgust is felt very viscerally and biologically,” she says. “So to tell somebody their aversion to insects is cultural and not physiologically programmed is a difficult thing to wrap your head around, because you can feel your stomach turn, you can feel the gag reflex come up if you are disgusted by the idea of eating insects. But disgust is one of the few learned emotions. So we are disgusted by the things our culture tells us to be disgusted by.” 

Such a reaction also can be a sign of internalized prejudice, she says. Indigenous peoples throughout North America once consumed a variety of insects, a practice European colonists deemed “uncivilized” — a way to “other” nonwhite communities and cultural practices. “Is it racist? Yes, simply put,” Lesnik says. 

The racialized foundation of that ideology has garnered scrutiny in the wake of viral right wing claims that a shadowy global elite will make people eat insects. Politicized conspiracy theories — like the suggestion that Bill Gates will take away meat and force everyone to eat insects — are insidious misinformation that Joseph Yoon fights daily. 

“The very notion of edible insects, I believe, has people think about the lowest denominator,” says Yoon, the founder of Brooklyn Bugs and chef advocate for the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development. “It’s for the apocalypse. It’s for poor people. It’s for marginalized communities in developing nations. And so the very notion of this creates a sense of fear, anger, resentment. Instead of putting insects in a silo because you don’t understand … we can work together to provide solutions for our global food systems.”

Eleven years ago, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization called bugs a promising alternative to conventional meat production. In the decade since, a surge of North American startups have launched to make insects into a primary food source for humans, an ingredient (flour is common), or as feedstock for cattle and pets. The market for such things in the United States is expected to hit $1.1 billion by 2033; globally, the figure is more than three times that. 

Still, for an industry in its infancy, the viability of scaling insect protein into a legitimate climate solution remains a burning question, one Rachel Mazac has studied intently. Mazac, a sustainability researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, is among the scientists that have attempted to quantify the carbon footprint of producing things like crickets, mealworms and black soldier flies on an industrial scale. So far, she’s found that insects make “extremely efficient” use of land and water compared to conventional livestock. Although she acknowledges the dearth of data on the subject, Mazac thinks insects warrant further consideration as a feasible alternative to more common — and carbon-intensive — meats. 

Not everyone sees insects as a climate solution, however. Matthew Hayek, an environmental researcher and assistant professor at New York University, co-authored a 2024 survey of more than 200 climate and agricultural scientists that showed widespread support for greater efforts by governments and the private sector to incentivize alternatives to meat and dairy. But he doesn’t believe insects belong on the slate of urgent solutions. Among other things, he questions the environmental impact of feeding them to livestock, and whether the creatures can be raised and harvested humanely.

“It’s a worthwhile area of investigation for fundamental science and research and development,” he says. “It is not worthwhile as an actual climate solution at a market level for somebody to invest in a climate solution.” 

Jeffery Tomberlin, an entomologist at Texas A&M University and director of the Center for Environmental Sustainability through Insect Farming, doesn’t buy that. He says every possible alternative protein needs to be on the table because meeting the climate crisis requires reforming the global food system. “We should be looking at all options when we talk about how to be better stewards of our planet,” he says. “We need to diversify as much as possible.”

Doing that, however, will require consumers and policymakers to put aside old ideas and consider new possibilities. That, Tomberlin says, would prompt the kind of research and funding needed to “safely and efficiently” develop the processing and production practices needed to make insect protein a viable, scalable alternative to other meats. Only then will the idea of eating insects be more than a flurry of trendy headlines, and cicada tacos more than a fleeting novelty.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cicadas à la carte? Here’s why it’s so hard to get Americans to eat bugs. on May 29, 2024.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration unveiled new guidelines on “responsible participation” in the voluntary carbon market, or VCM — the system that allows companies to say they’ve canceled out their greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of carbon credits. Theoretically, every carbon credit a company buys represents one metric ton of CO2 that has been reduced or avoided through projects that wouldn’t have happened without the funding — like tree-planting or the installation of wind turbines.

The guidelines, signed by President Joe Biden’s top climate and economic advisers, as well as the secretaries of Treasury, Energy, and Agriculture, are intended to boost the market’s credibility following a series of investigations that revealed numerous credits to be ineffective. 

One guideline calls for credits to meet “credible atmospheric integrity standards,” and another says companies should complement offsetting with the reduction of their own carbon footprints. The guidelines also call for environmental justice safeguards to ensure that credit-generating activities — many of which are in the Global South — do not harm local communities.

For the most part, the 12-page document reflects existing guidance from informal overseers of the voluntary carbon market, including the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity initiative. In this way, the guidance is a sort of endorsement of the work those nonprofit governance bodies have already been doing — and of carbon markets themselves.

The new guidelines are intended to help address a crisis of confidence in carbon credits, many of which have been found by recent studies and investigations to be ineffective. Some credits come from renewable energy projects that would have been built anyway, even without funding from the VCM. Others are generated by protecting natural ecosystems that were never under threat. Still others are based on projects that store carbon in ways that are unlikely to last more than a few years. Last year, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — a federal regulator — created a new task force to address potentially widespread fraud and market manipulation within the VCM.

Read Next

As the UN designs a new carbon market, experts call for a different approach

Joseph Winters

According to a 2022 analysis from the World Economic Forum, less than one-fourth of 137 global companies surveyed planned to use carbon credits to achieve their emissions reduction targets; 40 percent of them cited the risk of reputational damage.

Some environmental groups hailed the Biden Administration’s guidance as a way to add legitimacy to the voluntary carbon market. Amanda Leland, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement that the Biden administration’s “vote of confidence” could help the VCM reach $1 trillion by 2050, implying that this growth would funnel money into green jobs and climate resilience in the developing world. 

The global VCM is currently valued at around $2 billion. It grew rapidly in 2021 before declining in 2022 and 2023.

Critics said the new rules fail to address more fundamental concerns about the effectiveness of carbon credits. Some VCM offset projects send only a small fraction of the funds they generate to the communities they’re supposed to benefit, while the rest of the money gets gobbled up by traders, registries, investors, and other middlemen. And for a number of reasons, scientists say it’s inaccurate to equate a ton of carbon stored in biological systems with a ton of carbon released from the burning of fossil fuels — yet this assumption undergirds the VCM.

Proponents of carbon markets are still trying to “fit the circle of climate science into the square of carbon accounting,” Steve Suppan, a policy analyst for the nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told Grist.

Peter Riggs, director of the nonprofit Pivot Point and a co-coordinator of the Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance, said the federal guidelines are more concerned with creating a smooth market environment than with the integrity of carbon credits. 

“Generating rules for secondary markets and the clearing of credits may help with carbon market liquidity,” he told Grist. “But if the underlying accounting is still flawed, these moves just create systemic risk — in much the same way that credit default swaps did during the financial crisis.”

Instead of carbon markets, Riggs and others have advocated for a system of climate finance that allows countries, companies, and other polluters to support conservation and carbon-sequestering activities without claiming them as offsets.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can carbon offsets actually work? The Biden administration thinks so. on May 29, 2024.