The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has found that as much as half of the natural pasture land on Earth has been degraded by the impacts of climate change and overexploitation, putting a sixth of the planet’s food supplies at risk.

The new UNCCD report — Global Land Outlook Thematic Report on Rangelands and Pastoralists — emphasizes the importance of rangelands and points to ways to better manage and restore them while protecting pastoralism.

“Degradation of Earth’s extensive, often immense natural pastures and other rangelands due to overuse, misuse, climate change and biodiversity loss poses a severe threat to humanity’s food supply and the wellbeing or survival of billions of people,” a press release from UNCCD said.

Most pastures are lost or compromised by conversion to cropland and other changes due to urban expansion and population growth and their accompanying rise in food and fuel demands; excessive grazing; policies that incentivize overexploitation; and the abandonment of land by pastoralists.

These land use changes lead to diminished soil nutrients and fertility, salinization, alkalinization, erosion and soil compaction, which inhibits plant growth. These effects all contribute to fluctuations in precipitation, drought and biodiversity loss on the surface of the land and belowground.

“To have any chance of meeting global biodiversity, climate and food security goals, we simply cannot afford to lose any more of our rangelands, grasslands and savannahs. Our planet suffers from their ongoing conversion, as do the pastoralists who depend on them for their livelihoods, and all those who rely on them for food, water and other vital ecosystem services,” said Joao Campari, WWF’s global food practice leader, in the press release.

Rangelands consist primarily of the natural grasslands livestock and wild animals use to graze and forage. They also include savannas, wetlands, tundra, shrublands and deserts.

Rangelands make up 54 percent of all land on the planet.

“When we cut down a forest, when we see a 100-year-old tree fall, it rightly evokes an emotional response in many of us. The conversion of ancient rangelands, on the other hand, happens in ‘silence’ and generates little public reaction,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of UNCCD, in the press release. “Sadly, these expansive landscapes and the pastoralists and livestock breeders who depend on them are usually under-appreciated. Despite numbering an estimated half a billion individuals worldwide, pastoralist communities are frequently overlooked, lack a voice in policy-making that directly affects their livelihoods, marginalised, and even often seen as outsiders in their own lands.”

The UNCCD report was launched by the authors in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. In 2026, Mongolia will host the meeting of the UNCCD Conference of the Parties — the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP).

“As custodian of the largest grasslands in Eurasia, Mongolia has always been cautious in transforming rangelands. Mongolian traditions are built on the appreciation of resource limits, which defined mobility as a strategy, established shared responsibilities over the land, and set limits in consumption,” said H.E. Bat-Erdene Bat-Ulzii, Mongolia’s environment minister, in the press release.

Two billion people worldwide — small-scale farmers, herders and ranchers — depend upon healthy rangelands.

In many states in West Africa, 80 percent of the population is employed in livestock production. And in Mongolia and Central Asia, grazing rangelands make up 60 percent of land area, with livestock herding supporting almost a third of the population.

The report points out that efforts to bolster productivity and food security through the conversion of rangelands to crops in regions that are mostly arid have led to lower agricultural yields and land degradation.

The undermining of rangelands is due to “poorly implemented policies and regulations,” “weak and ineffective governance,” and “the lack of investment in rangeland communities and sustainable production models,” the report said.

More than 60 experts from over 40 countries contributed to the report.

The report details an approach to enable policymakers to restore, manage and stabilize rangelands backed by case studies that describe lessons learned from the missteps and successes of rangeland management.

One of the authors’ primary recommendations is to protect pastoralism — “a mobile way of life dating back millennia centred on the pasture-based production of sheep, goats, cattle, horses, camels, yaks, llamas or other domesticated herbivores, along with semi-domesticated species such as bison and reindeer,” the press release said.

“From the tropics to the Arctic, pastoralism is a desirable default — and often the most sustainable — option that should be incorporated into rangeland use planning,” Thiaw said.

Among the report’s other key recommendations are integrating climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies with sustainable plans for rangeland management to boost the resilience of rangeland and pastoralist communities while increasing carbon sequestration and storage.

The authors also recommend avoiding or reducing the conversion of rangelands and changes to land use that diminish the multifunctionality and diversity of rangelands, especially on communal and Indigenous lands.

“Imbalance between the supply of and demand for animal forage lands leads to overgrazing, invasive species, and the increased risk of drought and wildfires – all of which accelerate desertification and land degradation trends around the world,” said Maryam Niamir-Fuller, co-chair of the UN IYRP International Support Group, in the press release. “We must translate our shared aspirations into concrete actions – stopping indiscriminate conversion of rangelands into unsuitable land uses, advocating for policies that support sustainable land management, investing in research that enhances our understanding of rangelands and pastoralism, empowering pastoralist communities to preserve their sustainable practices while also gaining tools to thrive in a changing world, and supporting all stakeholders, especially pastoralists, to implement measures that effectively thwart further degradation and preserve our land, our communities, and our cultures.”

The post Half of Pasture Lands on Earth Degraded by Climate Change and Overuse, Threatening Food Supply of Billions: UN Report appeared first on EcoWatch.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced $300 million in grants from the Biden administration’s Investing in America agenda to assist Tribal Nations, States, nonprofit organizations and local governments with assessing and cleaning up the country’s former industrial sites, known as brownfields, a press release from the EPA said.

There are an estimated 450,000-plus brownfields in the U.S., according to the EPA.

“Far too many communities across America have suffered the harmful economic and health consequences of living near polluted brownfield sites,” said President Joe Biden in the press release. “I’ve long believed that people who’ve borne the burden of pollution should be the first to see the benefits of new investment.”

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said on Monday that $2 million would be put toward the transformation of the Kingsessing neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia — a former oil station that officials said is contaminated with semi-volatile organic compounds and lead — into office buildings and a waterfront bike trail, reported The Guardian.

For more than 60 years, the oil terminal along Bartram’s Mile in Philadelphia was filled with petroleum storage tanks, the press release said.

“Brownfields have, across the neighborhood, impacted the quality of our water, the quality of our air and the quality of our soil,” said Maitreyi Roy, executive director of public park Bartram’s Garden, as The Guardian reported. “These types of toxins impede a healthy lifestyle.”

The city has been working to turn the brownfield sites in the area into places where residents can bike, hike, garden and fish, the EPA said.

“With this funding, Philadelphia will be able to work with this site and reconnect Kingsessing to the riverfront,” Regan said, as reported by The Guardian.

EPA’s Brownfields Program furthers President Biden’s Jutice40 Initiative, which has a goal of directing 40 percent of the total benefits of particular federal investments toward disadvantaged communities overburdened by pollution and marginalized by underinvestment, the press release said.

Through the EPA’s Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) Grant Programs and Brownfields Multipurpose, Assessment and Cleanup (MAC) Grant Programs, the investments will help turn once-abandoned and polluted properties into assets for overburdened communities while creating jobs and stimulating economic revitalization.

“The Brownfields Program strives to meet this commitment and advance environmental justice and equity considerations in all aspects of its work. Approximately 86% of the MAC and RLF Supplemental program applications selected to receive funding proposed to work in areas that include disadvantaged communities,” the EPA said.

A total of 181 grants of $231 million will be awarded to 178 communities through MAC Grant Programs, along with $68 million in additional funding for 31 “high-performing” Brownfields RLF Grant Programs. Another approximately $3 million in grants will go toward economic and community development nonprofit Grow America.

Another brownfield site that is being reshaped into a community hub is the Bay Mills Indian Community (BMIC) in Chippewa County, Michigan. The soil and groundwater in the area has long been contaminated by lead paint and asbestos. With the help of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, Tribal Manager Rachel Lyons and BMIC President Whitney Gravelle are working to convert the site into a recreational space with docks for canoeing and kayaking.

Communities of color across the U.S. are disproportionately burdened by brownfields.

Roughly one in 10 people live within a half-mile of a brownfield, with Black Americans about two times more likely than white Americans to be in such close proximity to the hazardous sites, EPA data shows. Hispanic communities are also overburdened by living close to brownfields.

Since 1995, the EPA’s Brownfields Program has provided almost $2.7 billion in grants to clean up contaminated properties for productive reuse. More than 50 percent of funds available during the current grant cycle — roughly $160 million — comes from $1.5 billion provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“President Biden sees contaminated sites and blighted areas as an opportunity to invest in healthier, revitalized communities,” Regan said in the press release. “That’s why he secured historic funding under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, supercharging EPA’s Brownfields program to clean up contaminated properties in overburdened communities and bring them back into productive use.”

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Honeywell International is one of the largest companies in the world, ranking 115th in the…

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A new report on the macroeconomic effects of climate change has estimated that these damages are as much as six times larger than previous estimates. According to the report, each 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperature can be linked to a 12% decline in global gross domestic product (GDP).

The report, “The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature,” is a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). It found that the “Social Cost of Carbon” could be around $1,056 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. 

The findings are much higher than previous estimates; the Interagency Working Group estimated the cost to be about $51 per metric ton, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated $190 per metric ton of carbon emissions, E&E News reported.

According to Statista projections, the amount of global carbon emissions for 2023 was about 37.55 billion metric tons.

Further, the new NBER report found that if the world continues at a business-as-usual warming scenario, it could lead to a welfare loss of about 31%, emphasizing the economic importance of reducing emissions.

“There will still be some economic growth happening but by the end of the century people may well be 50% poorer than they would’ve been if it wasn’t for climate change,” said Adrien Bilal, co-author of the report and an economist at Harvard, as reported by The Guardian. “I think everyone could imagine what they would do with an income that is twice as large as it is now. It would change people’s lives.”

According to NASA, the world has already experienced about 1.36 degrees Celsius in warming as of 2023 when compared to the pre-industrial average global temperature from 1850 to 1900. In February 2024, a controversial study was released that predicted the world has already surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, the target outlined in the Paris Agreement to curb the worst impacts of climate change. 

In a poll by The Guardian published earlier this month, hundreds of top climate scientists from around the world indicated that they expected global warming to reach at least 2.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Even if the world does keep warming to the 1.5 degree Celsius limit, the global GDP could still decrease by about 15%, the report found.

“That is still substantial,” Bilal told The Guardian. “The economy may keep growing but less than it would because of climate change. It will be a slow-moving phenomenon, although the impacts will be felt acutely when they hit.”

The post Climate Change Costs the World 12% in GDP Losses for Every 1°C of Warming, Report Says appeared first on EcoWatch.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

Like many buildings in this part of rural northern Michigan, the Tsuber Auto garage in the Village of Mesick is heated with propane, delivered by truck once or twice a month to the tank outside. 

On a recent morning, owner Vyacheslav Tsuber was sitting behind the counter of a small, brightly lit lobby with his son — one of eight kids. As Tsuber walked to the cavernous shop in the back, the smell of drip coffee mixed with rubber and grease. 

On average, he said, it costs anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000 a year to heat the shop. But that could soon change. DTE Gas Company, a subsidiary of Michigan’s largest utility, is expanding its natural gas network to the area, giving over 1,000 homes and businesses the choice to switch to natural gas. 

Natural gas is more climate-friendly than the propane and wood used in much of the region, according to DTE. The switch could also slash heating bills. 

“If the cost of natural gas is going to be nearly half of what propane costs, for a lot of people, this is an easy decision,” Tsuber said. 

The choice many see is between propane and natural gas, because that’s how DTE presented the project. What’s left out of that equation, say climate advocates, is a third option: electrification. Instead of locking in fossil fuels for decades to come — and reducing the incentive for people to electrify their homes — why not make it easier to switch to electric heating instead? 

Supporters of natural gas see it as a bridge fuel, something consumers can use on their way to a sustainable future.

But critics say we don’t have that kind of time.

As Sam Stolper, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Sustainability puts it: “We have really ambitious [climate] goals for good reason. They’re needs, not just goals, and we’re not going to hit them if we keep making decisions to switch to natural gas … instead of going straight to electrification.”

To him, the solution is clear. “It’s on governments to make it so that households are able to choose that option,” he said. 

Natural gas is a fossil fuel made up mostly of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas that is much more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. 

There have been major efforts to encourage more home electrification. The federal Inflation Reduction Act is providing tax credits and rebates for technologies like heat pumps.  

Still, getting off natural gas can be lengthy, pricey, and complicated, as Grist’s own reporters have experienced, requiring a deep dive into federal tax incentives and equipment upgrades.

The way homes are heated in the United States varies by region. In Michigan, natural gas is the primary heat source for more than three-quarters of households and the leading source of electricity. It also has the most natural gas storage of any state. That makes natural gas an especially attractive option for utilities since they can buy it from elsewhere during the summer, store it, and sell it for less in the winter. To make electricity more affordable, utilities’ rates would have to change substantially, said Parth Vaishnav, an assistant professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan.

“Relative to natural gas, electricity is really expensive in Michigan — more expensive than it is in many other states,” he said. “If you go from natural gas to a heat pump, it would raise almost everybody’s bills by quite a lot, and the problem would be worse for people on low incomes than for people on high incomes.”

Financial considerations and logistical legwork can make the prospect of adopting cleaner heating daunting. For some, it’s not really an option at all. 

“Not everyone, unfortunately, has the luxury to worry about a lot of environmental concerns,” said Conor Harrison, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina.

“Sometimes we are too quick to think about individual choices,” he said. “Changing a heating system in a house, like that is a major, major project. And it’s one that people typically don’t do until they have to.”

Then there are factors like the strength of the power grid and the resilience of its infrastructure, which experts say could complicate electrification. 

“Of course, you have freedom to choose how you heat your home, but frankly, only up to a point,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist with Columbia Business School. “If the electric grid isn’t capable of sending more power to your home, then you’re up a creek when it comes to installing a heat pump.”

Local initiatives have proved key to encouraging communities to embrace renewable energy in some cases. In others, municipal governments have moved to ban natural gas altogether. 

But sometimes it’s not just about choosing the cleanest option. Places like Mesick and Buckley have worked for years to make natural gas a reality, eyeing economic benefits for the community. 

“Propane was good, but natural gas is so much cheaper. That’s why it becomes, really, the frontrunner,” said Takis Pifer, the mayor of Buckley.

Pifer, who previously worked as an analyst for DTE, acknowledged that other energy systems can work — he had a heat pump installed in his home — but said it made sense to give consumers more choices.

There’s also hope that the addition of natural gas will give a boost to businesses in the area. 

“It’s exciting. It’s a good thing for town,” said Debbie Stanton, who has worked as Mesick’s village clerk for over two decades. 

Stanton isn’t against renewable energy; she got a grant to install a heat pump for the village office. But she said natural gas will create additional options for people living there; in the past, businesses looking to set up shop in Mesick opted to go to places that had a gas hookup. And with rising prices, saving on heating bills could help residents. 

“I raised three kids, and I spend more on groceries right now for the two of us than I did when I had my three kids at home,” she said. “You listen to people that have families, they’re spending $500 a week on groceries. So there’s not a lot of money left over for other things, and maybe being absolutely green isn’t their priority at this time.”

Oil and gas companies have long promoted natural gas as a clean energy source, despite knowing that it was a major contributor to climate change. 

Despite Michigan’s goal of economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050 and calls for reducing reliance on fossil fuels, it has by no means shunned natural gas.

Last year, the state awarded $50 million in grants for “low-carbon energy infrastructure” — much of which went to expanding biogas and natural gas. As Planet Detroit reported at the time, utility and gas industry lobbyists donated tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to legislators who wrote and sponsored the bills behind the funding. 

DTE received $7.28 million as part of that, making the roughly $17 million gas main extension project possible, said Scotty Kehoe, the utility’s director of gas operations for Greater Michigan.

“Natural gas is one of those ways that we’re reducing our carbon footprint,” he said. “While natural gas might not be a renewable energy source, it is a very clean energy source.”

Despite utilities continuing to push forward with natural gas, the energy landscape is changing. 

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After a major methane leak at a Pennsylvania storage reservoir in 2022, the federal government began rolling out new rules for gas storage facilities, along with plans to fine companies for leaking methane.

More homeowners are buying heat pumps than gas boilers. Federal incentives for heat pumps and energy-efficiency measures may help reduce the demand for natural gas heating. 

Some places, like a remote community in Washington state, have created a cooperative finance model to fund heat pump installations. 

And Michigan is harnessing federal incentives to start offering home-energy rebates for efficiency upgrades and electrification this fall — right around the time DTE is planning to finish its natural gas project. 

Back at the auto shop in Mesick, mechanic Vyacheslav Tsuber is considering all this. Some of his heating equipment will have to be replaced in the next few years, and natural gas would be convenient. Still, he said, he has more homework to do. 

“We are very conscious to make sure that our decisions [are] environmentally friendly,” he said, “Or [are] at least better than what we use right now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Northern Michiganders are getting off propane — and on to natural gas on May 22, 2024.

Could changing the way you cook help fight global warming? If you’ve considered this question and you live in a rich country, you’ve probably been thinking about whether to ditch your gas stove for an electric or induction cooktop. But for nearly a third of the world’s population, even that gas stove would be a big step up from the preindustrial cooking methods still in wide use across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Some 2.3 billion people regularly cook their meals over open fires or on makeshift stoves using fuels like wood, animal dung, charcoal, and coal — methods that generate deadly local air pollution and are far more carbon-intensive than the electric and gas stoves enjoyed by the relatively wealthy of the world.

The lack of access to these “clean cooking” technologies is responsible for 3.7 million premature deaths annually, due to the harms of breathing smoke from cooking fires (which often accumulates indoors), according to a report from the International Energy Agency, or IEA. Fortunately, the total number of people without access to clean cooking is falling, largely due to progress in Asia and Latin America. But in Africa, that number is trending in the opposite direction, as campaigns for clean cooking have not been able to keep up with massive population growth in sub-Saharan Africa. In an effort to address this, representatives of 55 nations convened in Paris last week for the Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa, organized by the IEA. The marquee announcement of the conference was a $2.2 billion pledge by governments and the private sector to increase access to clean cooking in Africa.

While cooking disparities have been recognized for decades as a health crisis and driver of gender-based inequality in the world’s poorest regions — given that women are typically responsible for cooking in these households and thus most directly exposed to indoor air pollution — the climate crisis has given the issue additional urgency in recent years. Darby Jack, a professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University, attended last week’s summit and told Grist that “there was a fair amount of focus on clean cooking as a low-hanging climate fix,” in contrast to the issue’s longstanding framing as primarily a public health crisis.

Smoke-spewing cookstoves and fires are responsible for around 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — roughly equivalent to the carbon contribution of global air travel. But besides being an easier problem to solve than the notoriously difficult-to-decarbonize aviation sector, universal access to clean cooking would bring a litany of attendant health and welfare benefits, and help preserve ecosystems and biodiversity threatened by unsustainable wood-harvesting methods.

At the summit, a host of signatories including countries, civil society organizations, and corporations issued a declaration “making 2024 the pivotal year for clean cooking.” But conspicuously absent from the declaration was any mention of what Jack described as a “perennial debate” among advocates of clean cooking: the question of what kind of stoves count as appropriate improvements on preindustrial methods and, in particular, the role of liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, in addressing the crisis.

“Is it smart, is it ethical, is it good for the Earth to promote a fossil fuel, when in other domains we’re trying to move away from fossil fuels?” asked Jack, whose own answer to this question, and that of many other experts, is yes — for now.

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“Long term, we want to electrify everything and have renewable energy, but that’s a long way away,” Jack added.

In the U.S., Jack’s work has involved advocating for moving people from gas to electric stoves, but he believes Africans can’t afford to wait for the infrastructure and investment necessary to avoid using LPG as a “transition fuel.”

“The ideal thing would be cooking with electricity from a clean grid, and that’s just really far away in Africa. It’ll take billions of dollars to get the grid ready for electric cooking, and further billions to get the grid clean,” Jack told Grist. And in the meantime, he noted, the industrialized world is busy building out natural gas infrastructure. “The idea we should tell Africa they can’t use gas for environmental reasons, while we’re not just using it but further developing it, is a profound hypocrisy,” he added.

Other researchers disagree. One of them is Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Although he considers Jack a friend with a reasonable position on the issue, Kammen contends that the adoption of LPG stoves “slows down the process for us to switch to electric cooking” in Africa, and he argues that the rapidly increasing cost-effectiveness of electric cooking is underappreciated by health researchers.

Kammen told Grist that he sees the enthusiasm for LPG stoves as stemming from their role as “a lifeline being thrown to the fossil fuel companies — fossil fuel companies want to keep them on the agenda.”

Indeed, the Paris summit was heavily attended by gas companies, and despite the lack of official recognition of LPG in the event’s declaration, some in the industry celebrated the attention as a “turning point” for the fuel. At the conference, the Dutch commodities trading multinational Vitol announced $550 million worth of clean cooking investments in Africa, partly in the form of LPG infrastructure. The interest in clean cooking as a climate solution has also given rise to a growing carbon credit market in which polluters such as airlines buy “cookstove credits” that pay for some portion of the transition from older to newer forms of household cooking — though a study Kammen co-authored this year showed that such credits often dramatically overestimate the emissions reductions that the new stoves achieve.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Billions of people cook over open fires. Are gas stoves the solution? on May 22, 2024.

Eating your vegetables is one of the best things you can do for your body…

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If you’re planning a green renovation or remodeling project, you now have more green-friendly products…

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Island nations in the Pacific, Caribbean and West Indies won a major international legal victory this week that puts more pressure on large governments like the European Union and China to curb their carbon emissions.   

On Tuesday, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, Germany, unanimously ruled that state parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea have an obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The 169 parties to the treaty include several of the world’s top emitters: China, India, the European Union, and Russia. The United States, also a big polluter, is not a party to the convention. 

The tribunal said in its advisory opinion that greenhouse gases count as marine pollution and that state parties to the convention must “take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce and control marine pollution.” 

“The ITLOS opinion will inform our future legal and diplomatic work in putting an end to inaction that has brought us to the brink of an irreversible disaster,” said Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister, according to Reuters.

Nikki Reisch from the Center for International Environmental Law, which supported the island nations’ case, said the advisory opinion lays the foundation to hold big polluters accountable by clarifying their obligations under international law. Reisch said this is the first time an international court has commented on the intersection of oceans and climate change. 

“It’s a landmark decision in that it adds great weight to the growing body of case law and legal interpretations underscoring states’ legal duties to urgently and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect the environment and human rights,” she said. “It’s a testament to the persistent courage and leadership of small island states that have really been at the forefront of the struggle for climate justice and accountability and the forefront of legal developments.” 

In 2022, island nations including Palau and Vanuatu first brought the case before the tribunal. They wanted to know what are the obligations of state parties “to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment in relation to the deleterious effects that result or are likely to result from climate change.” 

The island countries have been dealing with storms, heavy rainfall, coral bleaching, and other negative effects of climate change despite contributing relatively little carbon emissions. In islands like Vanuatu, the climate effects particularly harm Indigenous Pacific Islanders, some of whom are already facing dislocation from their ancestral villages. 

Reisch said the sweeping opinion is particularly significant because it makes clear that complying with the Paris Agreement, the 2015 international treaty on climate change, isn’t enough. 

The opinion said countries should also “take all measures necessary” to ensure their carbon emissions don’t damage other states or their environments. 

State parties to the convention also have an obligation to support developing states with climate adaptation, especially those particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. That includes giving them “preferential treatment in funding, technical assistance and pertinent specialized services from international organizations,” the tribunal wrote. 

The tribunal found state parties also have the legal obligation to monitor greenhouse gas emissions; to report on their observations and analyses, and to protect oceans from acidification. States may even need to restore marine habitats if they’ve been degraded, the tribunal concluded. 

Sarah Cooley from the Ocean Conservancy who gave expert testimony in the case, praised the tribunal’s embrace of climate science. 

“Today’s judgment from (International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea)  is a massive victory for our ocean, communities impacted by climate change, and science in general,” she said.  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Small island nations get big climate victory in international maritime court on May 21, 2024.