Monitored by Earthwatch Europe volunteers, the survey found that waterways in the basin of the famed River Thames — as well as other rivers in the East Anglia and southeast regions of England — were in the worst shape, reported The Guardian. In those parts of the country, 89 percent were found to be in poor ecological health.
“The picture around London and the Thames river basin is particularly dire,” said Dr. Sasha Woods, Earthwatch Europe’s director of science and policy, as The Guardian reported.
The worst water quality was found in the counties of Cambridgeshire, with 89 percent of rivers having unsatisfactory nutrient pollution levels, and Hertfordshire with 91 percent.
“Unsurprisingly, counties in the Thames region — Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire — and counties in the Anglian region — Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire — are some of the counties with the highest percentage of unacceptable water quality measurements,” the report said.
Gwent and Northumberland had the lowest levels of nutrient pollution with water quality of 100 percent.
The results of the report back up Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) findings that the country’s waterways are not in an acceptable state and that the government is not on course to satisfy the European Union’s Water Framework Directive (WFD), which has been incorporated into British law, reported The Guardian.
Since the 2016 Brexit vote, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency (EA) has only been testing the water quality of rivers every three years instead of annually. The results of the survey have been given to the EA.
The WFD requires all rivers to have “good” ecological quality by 2027. However, Parliament lowered the requirement to 75 percent of waterways, which experts think is unlikely to be achieved without drastic measures.
The citizen science monitoring — conducted from June 7 to 10, 2024 — involved thousands of volunteers collecting more than 1,300 samples. They measured levels of phosphates and nitrates, nutrients commonly found in sewage — both untreated and treated — and in fertilizers from agricultural runoff.
Elevated nutrient levels can lead to uncontrolled plant and algal growth, high bacteria levels and lower water oxygen levels, all of which can kill plants and animals such as fish, mammals and insects.
“These results are truly disturbing – there are no parts of the UK unaffected by nutrient pollution… our rivers have been historically stressed by farming, and we’re seeing this being made worse by inappropriate or limited sewage treatment,” Woods said, as The Guardian reported. “There is a pressing need for both improvements to wastewater treatment processes and reductions in agricultural pollution to reduce threats to vulnerable freshwater systems. The government has committed to protect 30% of land for nature by 2030 – that will be meaningless if the rivers and streams running through the land, the arteries of life, are diseased.”
Jane Stewart, a citizen scientist born in Colchester who participated in the study, recalled growing up near the River Colne.
“I played on the banks of the young river, upstream in Halstead as I grew up in the 70s, using river clay to make pinch pots and catching minnows and sticklebacks in the shallow river with my friends. More recently I lived on the estuary of the river in both Brightlingsea and Wivenhoe, known for herrings and boat building. I have gone from seeing the river running clear and full as a young person, to now, in my old home town the river being clogged with plants and algae due to the run-off of nitrates. Old mills are sold on for luxury properties and the river has lost its purpose,” Stewart said in the report.
Woods emphasized that the report was only possible because of the support of citizen scientists across the UK, reported The Guardian.
“This event has enabled people to better understand the health of their local rivers and catalysed grassroots action,” Woods said. “We want to see more citizen science testing and better use of this data by bodies such as the Environment Agency to help build a more positive future for our rivers.”
According to Saudi Arabia, at least 1,301 people lost their lives due to intense heat during the Hajj pilgrimage.
Most of those making the pilgrimage did not have permits and were left exposed to the scorching elements.
“Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83% being unauthorised to perform hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the Saudi Press Agency said, as reported by AFP.
Arab diplomats said 658 of those who perished were Egyptian, 630 of whom were not registered as pilgrims.
“The rise in temperatures during the hajj season represented a big challenge this year,” said Fahd al-Jalajel, Saudi Arabia’s health minister, as The New York Times reported. “Unfortunately — and this is painful for all of us — those who didn’t have hajj permits walked long distances under the sun.”
The Hajj is a spiritual journey Muslims are encouraged to take once in their lives if they are able. Almost two million people perform the ritual annually, many of them losing their lives due to heat stress, chronic disease or illness.
Last year, 774 of those making the pilgrimage died from Indonesia alone. It was not clear if this year’s death toll was higher than normal, since Saudi Arabia does not provide those statistics on a regular basis.
According to Saudi officials, this year 1.8 million people made the pilgrimage, 1.6 of whom were from abroad, reported The Guardian.
Temperatures in Mecca were as high as 125.2 degrees Fahrenheit during this year’s Hajj.
Egypt’s cabinet said the higher number of unregistered Egyptian pilgrims dying on the journey was due to some companies that “organised the hajj programmes using a personal visit visa, which prevents its holders from entering Mecca” through official channels.
Egypt’s prime minister Mostafa Madbouly on Saturday ordered that the licenses of 16 tourism companies be taken away over illegal pilgrimages, according to the cabinet. Madbouly also referred the managers of the companies to the public prosecutor.
Permits for the Hajj are given to countries based on a quota system, then distributed to individuals via a lottery. However, the high costs of the Hajj — which can be thousands of U.S. dollars — leave many without a permit, risking arrest and deportation.
The pilgrimage involves rituals in and around Mecca that often include hours of walking in the hot sun.
Madbouly offered his “sincere condolences and sympathy” to the deceased pilgrims’ families and committed to giving them the necessary support, CNN reported.
Ahmed from Indonesia recounted seeing many getting ill and dying from the unbearably hot temperatures, adding that he did not see any health workers or ambulances on the roadway.
“Along the way home, I saw many pilgrims who died. Almost every few hundred meters, there was a body lying and covered with an ihrom [white fabric] cloth,” Ahmed told CNN. “Every time there is a distribution of water from local residents or certain groups, it is immediately overrun by the pilgrims.”
The death toll could still rise, as governments become aware of unregistered pilgrims from their countries.
A ban on single-use plastic items like bags and straws is closer to becoming reality in Massachusetts after the state Senate approved a broad bill addressing plastics last Thursday. The Senate passed the bill by 38-2.
The ban, which has now moved to the state House of Representatives, would ban plastic bags at retailers, charge a $0.10 fee per paper bag used and require straws and plastic utensils to be made available only by request. The $0.10 fee per paper bag would allocate 50% of the collected fee toward retailer expenses and the other 50% for environmental initiatives, South Coast Today reported.
The bill would also establish a recycling program for large plastic items, like car seats, according to a report from The Associated Press.
“This vital legislation is another step forward towards eradicating plastics, a top environmental offender, in our everyday life,” said Sen. Michael Rodrigues, chair of the Senate Committee on Ways and Means, as reported by The Associated Press.
In addition, the bill will make a previous executive order from Gov. Maura Healey, banning state agencies from buying single-use plastic bottles, into law. That executive order was signed in September 2023, PBS reported.
If the bill passes, it will make Massachusetts the 13th state to establish a plastics ban. The state already has many plastic restrictions in place locally, with around 70% of the population across over 160 towns and cities under bans on single-use plastic bags.
According to the Sierra Club, Massachusetts threw out about 900,000 tons of plastic in 2022 alone, and a ban on single-use plastics could help reduce the amount of plastic going to the state’s landfills each year.
In a report published in early 2024, researchers found that plastic bans, particularly bans on plastic bags, have made a big impact in the U.S. Bans in New Jersey, Philadelphia and Vermont — along with bans in Portland, Oregon and Santa Barbara, California — have cut single-use plastic bag consumption by around 6 billion bags per year.
“Today, state leaders have chosen to take a big step toward reducing waste and protecting our neighbors and local wildlife from the dangers of excessive plastic usage,” Jess Nahigian, state political director for Sierra Club Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Plastics harm our ecosystems and communities. Cutting down on plastics is a necessary step toward achieving our state climate goals and creating a more sustainable home for future generations of Massachusetts residents. This is an important and vital step in plastic reduction, and Sierra Club Massachusetts encourages the Massachusetts House to pass this bill.”
The Hajj is a time of great reverence for the Muslims who embark upon the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in adherence with a pillar of Islam. But this year’s gathering was tinged by sorrow as a sustained wave of extreme heat pushed temperatures in the desert city as high as 125 degrees, leading to the deaths of at least 1,301 worshippers.
The government of Saudi Arabia released an official accounting of the fatalities on Sunday. It noted that 83 percent of those killed by the heat were unauthorized pilgrims — meaning they were not among the 1.8 million visitors who had been granted visas. Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdurrahman Al-Jalajel said identifying and tallying the casualties was delayed because many of them did not have identification, the Associated Press reported.
Officials said the death toll may continue to rise as more unauthorized pilgrims are identified. Although deaths are not uncommon during the Hajj — at least 774 died last year — this year’s pilgrimage occurred during a global heatwave that saw more than 1,000 temperature records fall on five continents, the Washington Post reported. The ongoing heat has killed 275 people in Delhi as of Sunday.
“It should be obvious that dangerous climate change is already upon us,” Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told the Post. “People will die because of global warming on this very day.”
As one of the five pillars of Islam, the Hajj is foundational to Muslim life. Every practicing adherent with the physical and financial means to do so is expected to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, a city about 50 miles from the Red Sea, at least once. Because there are more than 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provides each country with a quota of visas, which can cost the equivalent of several thousand U.S. dollars. Each year, countless pilgrims make the trip without the proper permits; Saudi officials estimate that “around 400,000 people” did so this year, according to AFP.
Pilgrims with visas typically have access to air-conditioned buses, cooling tents, and other amenities that unauthorized pilgrims often cannot use. The Saudi government noted that many of them “walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” according to CNN. “Several elderly and chronically ill individuals” were among the deceased.
One of them, a 70-year-old mother of five, sold her jewelry to make the trip, but couldn’t use the cooling tents and buses the Saudi government provides to registered pilgrims, the BBC reported. On the second day of the Hajj, as temperatures hit 118 degrees, she was left to walk almost 7.5 miles to Mount Arafat, where the faithful congregate to pray and hear a sermon at the last place the Prophet Muhammad preached. She later died on a street corner and was buried in Mecca.
Other pilgrims told CNN that there was not enough water, shade, or medical assistance to support the throngs visiting holy sites in and around the city. They reported regularly seeing people lose consciousness, and of walking past bodies covered in white sheets.
“To me, it felt like there are too many people, there are not enough medics, so they are just waiting for the worst of the worst to happen and then they will step in,” Zirrar Ali, 40, who returned to London on Friday from his pilgrimage with his 70-year-old father, told CNN.
The Hajj is held during the twelfth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, which means the dates relative to the Gregorian calendar shift about 11 days every year, causing the pilgrimage to cycle through the seasons roughly every 33 years. Before the late 2010s, the Hajj had occurred in fall, winter, and spring months, giving the Saudi government ample time to prepare heat-mitigation strategies in response to the last wave of heat-related deaths in the 1980s.
In 1985, the Hajj took place in August and drew just over 1 million pilgrims as temperatures reached a reported 130 degrees, causing more than 1,000 people to die from heat-related causes. In response, Saudi authorities began to implement and expand measures to help visitors handle the heat, including air-conditioned tents and transportation, sprinklers, and free water and umbrellas. In a study published in March, researchers noted that these measures have lead to a significant drop in the rate at which pilgrims die from heat stroke, but also make clear that, as temperatures in Mecca increase at a rate roughly double the global average, “the intensifying heat may be outpacing current mitigation efforts.” This makes clear that ample work must be done for the Hajj to continue to be a viable option for Muslims worldwide — especially since many pilgrims are elderly, able to attend only after a lifetime of saving, and more vulnerable to the heat.
In the near future, the calendrical shift of the Hajj means that the next few years will see the pilgrimage happening in spring, winter, and fall, with reduced likelihood of severe heat. But, eventually, the pilgrimage will once again take place during the summer. At that point, two or so decades from now, the world will be even hotter than it is at present, turning the rituals of the Hajj into a life-threatening ordeal for just about anyone that enters the holy city of Mecca.
Isobelle McClements was 13 when she came home from school and told her parents she was going vegan. Reading one book that delved into meat processing was all it took to convince her it was time for a lifestyle upheaval. The logistics of seamlessly feeding a family is a big reason her parents followed suit.
That was a decade ago. Nowadays, the freezer often stocks plant-based meatballs, sausages, or nuggets. When dining out, a faux burger sometimes makes the cut. Her father, David Julian McClements, is a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies how to make such things healthier and tastier.
Still, everyone in the family prefers to prepare meat-free fare using fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains, and other ingredients. They can afford the more planet-friendly options now common in grocery stores, but have the time and means to make them from scratch. Most people, of course, can’t do either of those things, which presents an impediment to broader adoption of beef, pork, and chicken alternatives that could help the nation hit its climate targets.
“Finding good quality ingredients [and] being able to bring them all together and combine them into something that tastes great but is also affordable, healthy and sustainable is very, very challenging,” McClements said.
Pound for pound, plant-based mock meats cost an average 77 percent more than their conventional counterparts. These proteins are typically heavily processed as they’re manufactured from things like soy and pea protein. “That’s partly why it’s so expensive.”
When thinking about who is buying these pricey proteins, an affluent, urban, Tesla-driving white woman who has sworn off all animal products might come to mind. The high tax bracket often rings true, but the rest of that mental picture is a trite misconception. Even the idea that it’s only vegans or vegetarians buying it isn’t entirely the case.
Young and non-white consumers are the most likely to eat plant-based meats, according to a May 2024 survey commissioned by alt-meat advocacy nonprofit the Good Food Institute. Roughly 38 percent of Gen Z and 35 percent of Millennials report dining on such alternatives at least once a month, which is around twice the number of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers doing so. About one-third of Black and Latino consumers regularly eat meat substitutes, compared to one-fourth of white consumers. And just 2.79 percent of households toss only plant-based proteins into the shopping cart. Almost 95 percent of them buy the real deal as well.
Income is where the most striking disparities lie. U.S households with an income approaching $100,000 are most likely to purchase plant-based alternatives, but most of those making less than $45,000 rarely do. One reason is federal assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, often provides too little financial help to make them affordable.
“It’s just a question of cost, and if that is going to be feasible for them, to make sure they make it through the month,” said Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy who studies nutrition and poverty.
About 12.5 percent of Americans are enrolled in SNAP, which provides a monthly benefit based on income, family size and certain expenses. In April 2023, the average benefit was $181.72 for a single person or $343 for a household. Making that last is a challenge when food prices have climbed 25 percent in four years. Those who work to reduce hunger argue that safety nets like SNAP have failed to keep pace with inflation, dietary shifts, and all the ways climate change impacts the food supply chain. When low-income residents struggle to purchase meat with food stamps, it reinforces the fact that costlier plant-based alternatives are only for the affluent.
“SNAP has already fallen short in terms of supporting traditional diets, so adding other non-traditional items may be even more difficult,” she said. “There are a lot of lower-income people who do want to consider non-traditional protein products or meats, but these products are more expensive, and so we have to account for that.”
Of the plant-based meats, beef substitutes have the smallest premium at 20 percent more per pound than the real thing. That’s because they have been around the longest, relatively speaking — hamburger analogues arrived about 15 years ago. Beef also tends to cost more than other meats (and has been getting pricier as climate change impacts herd sizes), which makes the financial jump to its plant-based versions smaller.
And yet even those who can afford the alternatives seem to be cooling on them amid concerns about their sustainability, nutritional value, and even their taste and texture. The $8.1 billion fake meat industry, which experienced soaring sales during the pandemic as the supply chain for conventional meats collapsed, struggled last year. The industry’s sales volumes dropped 9 percent between 2022 and 2023, with a 2 percent decline in revenue.
Of all the plant-based proteins, beef substitutes have the smallest premium at 20 percent more per pound than the real thing. One reason is because they are the most established of the faux meats. ANGELA WEISS / Getty Images
Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University, manages the Meat Demand Monitor, a database that surveys the meat-buying habits of consumers monthly. The trend he’s seeing suggests that changing eating habits might have something to do with the market decline. In May, plant-based patties held 2 percent of the retail market and 4 percent of the food service market, which is respectively half and a quarter of the market portion they controlled in May of 2021, Tonsor said.
Dwindling volumes don’t help prices, either. Conventional meats are commodities that have been sold at a vast scale for more than a century through a well-established and robust supply chain, with the benefit of government subsidies. All of that keeps costs down.
“Right now, plant-based meat products are not commodities, so that means that plant-based brands tend to sell lower volumes,” said Daniel Gertner, a business analyst at Good Food Institute. “They might, with those lower volumes, in certain cases make higher net profits, but then much of that profit is reinvested into things like overhead, research and development, [and] marketing. With any nascent category, there’s this need to just build the infrastructure from the ground up.”
The Bezos Earth Fund wants to give the industry a boost by finding ways of reducing the cost of plant-based alternatives to animal proteins.
“The food we’re eating is one-third of global emissions. And if you look at where that comes from, half of it is coming from animal-sourced foods, from livestock. So it’s a huge piece of the emissions puzzle,” said Andy Jarvis, director at the fund.
In an effort to solve that puzzle, the fund has earmarked $100 million toward the creation of three research centers — the first of which opened last month at North Carolina State University — focused on sustainable protein alternatives like plant-based products, precision fermentation and cultivated meat.
But the largest hurdle to making plant-based proteins a more viable alternative for everyone is the U.S. government’s deep investment in the status quo. Washington spends up to $38 billion subsidizing the meat and dairy industries each year, a move that keeps prices artificially low. Meanwhile, nations around the world have invested a grand total of little more than $1 billion in the alternative protein industry.
“There’s no surprise that it’s not at price parity, when you certainly don’t have a level playing field on the government support,” said Jarvis.
Barring a major federal intervention, one akin to the financial support that catalyzed explosive growth in renewable energy, getting plant-based meats to a point where they can compete with conventional counterparts will take quite some time. Until that happens, it won’t matter if plant-based chicken tastes just like the real thing. Only when it’s more affordable will more people be able to make a major lifestyle change, much like the McClements household once did.
On February 3, 2023, a freight train owned by Norfolk Southern carrying thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals derailed in the town of East Palestine, Ohio.. For days, flames engulfed the rail cars, which contained highly hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, used in the production of plastic. A thick, tall plume of black smoke billowed from the accident site and forced the evacuation of thousands of residents. Now, scientists say that traces of this pollution was found across 16 states, spanning 540,000 square miles from Wisconsin to Maine to South Carolina.
“Everybody expected a local contamination issue,” said David Gay, coordinator of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the new study. “But I think what most people don’t understand about this fire is how big it was and how wide-ranging the implications are.”
Gay and his colleagues tracked the pollution from the fire by testing rain and snow samples from approximately 260 sites across the country in the two weeks following the derailment. The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, estimates that the fire in eastern Ohio impacted about 14 percent of U.S. land area and one-third of the country’s population, or 110 million people.
Across these areas, researchers recorded some of the highest soil pHs, or alkaline soil, and levels of chloride ions in the past decade following the fire in East Palestine. Gay said that the elevated measurements documented during the two-week spike, while certainly unusual, were not dangerous. “It was jumping out like a red light,” said Gay. “I never would have guessed it would have been in Wisconsin, no way in hell.”
“This study is unique and elegant as it clearly documents the impact that these kinds of accidents can have,” Juliane Beier, a leading expert on the effects of vinyl chloride at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study, told the Washington Post. “I think we should be concerned,” she continued, noting this isn’t the first time researchers have observed far-researching pollution from local disasters.
Of the 38 train cars that derailed in East Palestine, at least 11 were carrying highly toxic chemicals. To prevent a potential explosion, officials approved the controlled burn of five-cars worth of vinyl chloride, a colorless, flammable gas and known carcinogen.
East Palestine residents were allowed to come back home about a week later. On their return, there were reports of strong chemical odors pervading the town. Testing at nearby creeks and rivers revealed high levels of toxic compounds, including vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate. A year on, the environmental cleanup in and around East Palestines has already cost Norfolk Southern close to $800 million.
Gay recalls seeing a picture of the plume rising over East Palestine and poking through the clouds. “When I saw that, I was like, oh yeah, this stuff’s going to go a long way,” he said.
When Gay and his colleagues began their research, they expected pollution in western New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The reality, he said, was much more extensive. A low pressure system helped push pollution over parts of Michigan and Wisconsin. Pollution likely made its way into all the Great Lakes, except Lake Superior, he noted.
The most extreme measurements were recorded on the New York border with Canada, near the town of Freedonia —- downwind and about an hour and half fromEast Palestine.
The researchers also found traces of the train derailment pollution as far south as Virginia and South Carolina. There’s a whole strip of the region, running from Illinois through Maryland where it was too dry to collect pollution data. Even so, Gay maintains that chemical traces from the fire likely made their way to those areas too, just not through the rain or snow.
“This accident wasn’t just in Ohio,” said Gay. “It touched a lot of people.”
When Lucas George Wendt arrived in Lajeado in late May, the water had already started to recede.
Just days before, the peaks of roofs and the tops of trees were some of the only things visible above the murky brown water that had covered his hometown. Located in the Taquari Valley, Lajeado, population 85,000, was one of the communities hit hardest by the historic flooding that tore through Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, between late April and mid-May, displacing more than 650,000 people, killing 173, and injuring 806.
When Wendt arrived, 38 people were still missing. Backhoes were scooping mud from blocked roads, city workers were clearing sidewalks with pressure washers, and volunteers were sorting through donations of clothing, food, personal hygiene products, and bottled water.
Wendt — who now lives in the state capital of Porto Alegre and is studying for his master’s degree in information science while working in communications at the University of Taquari Valley (Univates) — had come home to check in on family and friends. But he also wanted to do something to help while there.
Last September, he had heard about a Univates mapping project led by researcher Sofia Royer Moraes, an environmental engineer who studies extreme flooding events in the Taquari-Antas River Basin. At the time, the Taquari River, which runs through Lajeado, had overflowed, leaving the region to deal with the worst flooding in 82 years, the displacement of at least 359,000 people, and the deaths of 48. Residents of the Taquari Valley were used to dealing with annual flooding, but this event was different. Studies showed that climate change had worsened the flood, which meant that future floods would bring even more deaths.
It was then that Moraes decided she could do something to help. She created what is known as a Citizen Map, using Google Maps as a platform for ordinary people using their smartphones to pinpoint the floodwaters’ reach. These so-called citizen scientists were instructed to take photos of what they saw and send them, along with their geolocation, to a WhatsApp group monitored by Moraes and her team. Combining that information with historic flood data from the area, the team could model what might happen during future floods, helping residents who had already lost everything to decide where it would be safest to rebuild their lives. The models could also give authorities the information they needed for better urban planning and allocation of resources.
Fascinated by the potential of the project, Wendt knew he wanted to pitch in. By now, Univates was partnering with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, and this time, the goal was to map the entire state of Rio Grande do Sul.
Lucas Wendt took these photos of Lajeado after the floods in May. Left to right: A white cross smeared with mud; a house left standing among the wreckage; a wall mark indicating the height of floodwaters. Lucas George Wendt
As he drove around his hometown, Wendt snapped photos of everything he thought would benefit the Citizen Map: a white cross smeared with mud where a church once stood; a lone house standing among pieces of hundreds of others that had washed away; markings on a wall in the city center that registered the water’s height.
Wendt’s more than 20 data points collected at the end of May are now among the more than 600 on the constantly updated Citizen Map, a contribution he knew would help others but that he was surprised to see helped him as well.
“It helped me understand all of these connections,” he said. “If it’s raining in one place, what is the impact that’s going to have downriver? Someone who participates in this type of citizen science initiative ends up being more aware, more secure, and more empowered to deal with this type of situation, which, unfortunately, we know we can expect more of in the near future.”
In the context of climate change, the team behind the Citizen Map wants Brazilian authorities to use this data to rethink everything from urban planning and post-disaster recovery to the availability of health care and clean drinking water in the aftermath of climate-change-induced catastrophes. They also hope that by educating people about what’s going on around them, they’ll not only become more interested and invested in participating in solutions to local flooding, but also feel prepared to face what’s to come.
Firefighters rescue a man and his dog from a flooded area in the Brazilian city of Sao Sebastiao do Cai on May 2. Anselmo Cunha / AFP
Experts have attributed the severity of the recent flooding in southern Brazil to human-driven climate change. An analysis carried out by researchers at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute’s Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory showed that extreme weather events in Rio Grande do Sul that occurred between 2001 and 2023 delivered up to 15 percent more precipitation than events that occurred between 1979 and 2001.
A recent study also found that “the highly densely populated regions [in] Southern and Southeastern Brazil as well as the coastal section of Northeast Brazil are the most exposed to landslides and floods,” and that these impacts will continue to worsen with more warming. and increased the intensity of the rainfall between 6 and 9 percent.
The first record-setting flood to wash out the Taquari Valley and other parts of Rio Grande do Sul took place in 1941. That event, which also occurred in April and May, left the region’s population, living mostly in rural areas at the time, without food, water and shelter. The only record of the floodwaters’ height was a mark scratched into the wall of a school.
“That memory is isolated there,” says Wendt of the marker. “It doesn’t contribute as much as it could if it had happened nowadays, with the technology we have.”
A screenshot of the Citizen Map. Blue icons mark the extent of recent flooding in Porto Alegre. University of Taquari Valley / Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul
The first Citizen Map that Moraes created last September collected data only on the perimeter of the affected area to determine what parts of the Taquari Valley would be considered at high risk of future flooding. Around 600 data points were sent in by 150 citizen scientists.
Some neighborhoods that participated heavily in mapping the September floods haven’t been involved in creating the new map, but that’s likely because those areas are still difficult to access, or not accessible at all. And while the state continues to recover from the emergency — it initially focused on saving people and animals from fast-moving waters and collapsing buildings and is now setting people up in shelters and other more permanent housing — data collection is expected to be slow.
“Data will likely start to come in quicker in another two or three weeks,” says Moraes. “The actual modeling of the Citizen Map should happen in July and August, and it will be available for consultation then too.”
In addition to using perimeter data, which shows the horizontal spread of water, the new map will also use data related to the height of floodwaters, often measured by water and mud stains left on the walls of people’s homes and local businesses.
The Citizen Map is currently very simple and powered by Google, but the team plans to partner with the the open-mapping nonprofit Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to improve the visuals of their final product. “Google Maps has good visuals, but they’re fairly standard,” says Wendt. “We want our map to be as easy to understand as possible to make sure it can be used by anyone who wants to consult it to keep themselves safe and make the best decisions possible for their future.”
On May 2, when the second of this year’s three rain and flood episodes began in Rio Grande do Sul (the other two were on April 29 and May 13), Moraes and her team had to move out of the university building where they worked. The water had, again, started to rise, and this time it made its way inside.
They ended up setting up shop at A Hora, a local radio station that gave them space to work and talked about their project on the air, providing its WhatsApp number for anyone who wanted to send data or ask questions.
A man wades through a flooded street in the historical city center of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, on May 14. Anselmo Cunha / AFP
Soon, messages started to pour in. Some 200 people sent their locations to the Citizen Map team on May 2, and the team spent all afternoon and night analyzing data to determine who was in or near an area of risk and who ought to evacuate. For people living downstream, information on what was happening farther upstream was crucial in making such decisions.
“It’s so important for people to understand their surroundings, to know if they’re in an area of risk,” says Moraes. “And they want to understand. They want to be engaged.”
While anyone with a smartphone can collect data for the newest edition of the Citizen Map, most participants so far are professors and their students from universities around the region. The hope is that more people will join in once the situation on the ground starts to improve.
“I really support citizen science initiatives because they are exactly what people need to learn and feel empowered,” says Marta Angela Marcondes, an expert in water resources and coordinator of the Water Pollutant Index Project at the Municipal University of São Caetano do Sul. “I really believe in processes of prevention and not remediation, and civil society is a key component in making this happen.”
The culture of prevention is important to Moraes, too. She wants the Citizen Map not only to help residents of Rio Grande do Sul keep themselves safe and informed, but also for it to guide authorities to do the same. By using the map to define areas of risk, she says, decision makers can improve urban planning, creating better mitigation plans for future flooding — like improving stormwater drainage and management systems — and allowing new homes, schools, and health care facilities, among others, to be built in safer areas.
Moraes wants the Citizen Map to keep growing, eventually mapping the lack of drinking water and access to basic health care, as well as instances of disease, in the aftermath of climate-related crises.
“With that information, I can see the big picture by municipality, region, or state,” she says. “As a decision maker, I can then use this information to determine which areas are more fragile and direct the necessary public policies to those that need them most.”
Two to five years after the original event, Moraes hopes she will be able to map where those public policies have ended up and measure their success. “In this new context of climate change, people need to be prepared,” she says. “We can’t stop these events from happening, but we can make sure we’re ready to deal with them in the best way possible.”
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, one of the largest rural cooperative utilities in the U.S., is bringing the energy transition home to its massive western service territory. It’s acquiring its first large-scale solar power plants as it prepares to shift away from its current dependence on coal power.
Tri-State generates and transmits power to 41 member cooperatives, which retail to 1 million customers in rural Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Nebraska (four states, despite the name). The customer base spans 200,000 square miles, more land than the entirety of California, with an average density of just five customers per mile of power line. Just a few years ago, two member cooperatives quit Tri-State to seek cheaper, cleaner power elsewhere. Since then, Tri-State has rolled out a series of clean energy commitments that it says will deliver 50 percent renewable electricity by the end of 2025, up from 33 percent in 2023.
The cooperative announced last week it will buy the forthcoming Axial Basin Solar, a 145-megawatt project in Moffat County, Colorado, and Dolores Canyon Solar, a 110-megawatt project in Dolores County, Colorado. Both projects are still under construction, but they are slated to deliver power by late next year. Tri-State also signed three new power purchase agreements from solar plants that will come online by the end of this year.
Within days of that announcement, Tri-State also reported that electricity was flowing from the largest third-party solar project it has contracted for thus far, a 200-megawatt site developed by Origis Solar at the former Escalante Station coal-fired power plant in New Mexico. The cooperative also filed an innovative proposal with federal regulators to collaborate with its members that wish to generate clean energy for themselves locally.
“In the past several months and years, Tri-State has been a very significant leader in the cooperative space in identifying ways to bring the benefits of clean energy to their members, and use the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act to a maximum degree,” said Uday Varadarajan, a senior principal at climate think tank RMI who tracks rural cooperative decarbonization. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
This embrace of the energy transition was by no means guaranteed. America’s cooperative utilities, which deliver about 12 percent of the country’s electricity but serve 56 percent of its landscape, were at serious risk of getting left behind by the clean energy transition. The U.S. incubated its renewables industry with tax credits, which don’t do much good for the many federal, municipal, or cooperative utilities that generate power as not-for-profit corporations, and thus owe little to the IRS. Many cooperatives also signed very long-term contracts, which left them committed to paying for coal plants even after they might’ve wanted to switch to cleaner, cheaper alternatives.
Those conditions are changing now, thanks to the landmark climate policies passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Chief among them is a “direct pay” option that lets nonprofits access the same generous clean energy tax credits as their for-profit peers — even with little to no tax burden. Once Tri-State’s leadership saw clarity on the tax rules, they decided this was the time to strike.
“Not-for-profit cooperatives simply could not take advantage of those [renewable tax credits] because we did not have the tax liability to offset,” said Lee Boughey, vice president of communications at Tri-State. Now, though, he added, “We are pursuing the maximum amount of funding available for cooperatives.”
From incumbent to change agent
Back in 2016, at least a few local co-ops that buy power from Tri-State were chafing at its pace of decarbonization. New Mexico’s Kit Carson Electric Cooperative cut ties that year, paying a $37 million exit fee in order to buy power from a company called Guzman Energy and generate more clean energy locally. Colorado’s Delta-Montrose Electric Association soon followed suit. Guzman won them over with renewables-heavy portfolios that it said would save them money over time, compared to staying with Tri-State.
Tri-State kicked off a clean energy planning effort in 2019, and in late 2020 promised to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030 and shut down several coal plants. The latest solar investments represent strides toward that promise.
Clean energy technologies and prices reached a different stage of maturity in the early 2020s compared to where they were in 2016, Boughey said. Now the utility sees ample savings and benefits for its customers in maximizing low-cost renewable generation, while ensuring it has enough “firm” power — today provided by coal and fossil gas plants — to keep the lights on. The utility recently hit a new record for instantaneous renewable production on May 24, when wind and solar delivered 87 percent of its generation for half an hour.
Cooperative customers are also shareholders, so the people who get to vote on the utility’s leadership are the same ones benefiting from lower-cost renewables. By investing in projects within its territory, Tri-State also supports economic development for its customer-owners.
“You can pursue an energy transition and still retain that reliability and resilience even in the face of the challenging weather that utilities in the western U.S. can face,” said Boughey.
Inflation Reduction Act breaks down barriers for cooperatives
The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, finally gave cooperatives a chance to avail themselves of the renewable power discounts that for-profit corporations with large tax burdens could access. But it also included a program specially designed to help rural co-ops deal with closing coal plants without burdening their customers with higher power prices.
Co-ops can’t raise money in quite the same ways as Wall Street–owned for-profit utilities do — they don’t issue stock to profit-hungry investors, for instance. To build new plants without piling steep rate hikes on customers, co-ops often borrow low-cost debt and pay it off over decades using the revenue from generating or transmitting power. Many co-ops, Tri-State included, are still paying off coal plants that they expected to run for decades more; shuttering them early, for climate or economic reasons, leaves customers saddled with an outstanding debt for something that no longer generates any value.
This turns out to be one of the many obscure decarbonization challenges that the IRA tackled. It created a program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Empowering Rural America (New ERA for short), which offered up $9.7 billion to help rural utilities finance the transition from coal and support coal communities in the process. The program drew proposals for $93 billion worth of energy transition investment, from public and private sources (winning projects have not yet been announced).
“It did break down some of these barriers to make it easier than it was, and rural America showed up,” Varadarajan said. “It is pretty remarkable what has been proposed post-IRA by rural cooperatives.”
Tri-State used the new federal funding opportunity as a springboard for imagining the next phase of its clean energy transition. Its late-2023 proposal to Colorado utility regulators argues that federal funding, if awarded, could help move up the closure of coal plants Craig Station in 2028 and Springerville in 2031. Tri-State would fill the gap with 1,250 megawatts of wind, solar, and energy storage, including conventional lithium-ion batteries and novel iron-air batteries for multiday energy storage. The plan would also add a 290-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant with plans for carbon capture and sequestration.
“We have to have the dispatchable capacity for when those renewable resources aren’t available,” Boughey said, noting that Tri-State goes beyond industry-standard reliability metrics to prepare the grid for extreme weather events, hot or cold.
Renewables purists may balk at the nod to carbon capture at a fossil-fueled plant, which has little precedent for economic success in the real world. But Tri-State frames that plant as more of a backup for moments when renewables can’t carry the day; and even with that new gas, the portfolio is projected to lower carbon emissions from Tri-State’s Colorado electricity generation by 89 percent by 2030, compared to the 2005 baseline. That reduction exceeds what Colorado requires of its utilities, the company noted — and the pace of many of the most progressive utilities nationwide.
