A first-of-its-kind study that analyzed hundreds of conservation actions around the world has confirmed that efforts toward preserving wildlife are resulting in measurable achievements.

The international study, published in the journal Science, sought to assess whether conservation efforts were having any positive impacts on biodiversity. Researchers analyzed 186 studies, including 665 trials, and measured changes to biodiversity.

Overall, the researchers found that about two-thirds of the studied conservation actions at minimum slowed biodiversity declines or led to improved biodiversity. 

“If you read the headlines about extinction these days, it would be easy to get the impression that we are failing biodiversity — but that’s not really looking at the whole picture,” Penny Langhammer, co-author of the study and executive vice president of Re:wild, told the BBC. “This study provides the strongest evidence to date that not only does conservation improve the state of biodiversity and slow its decline, but when it works, it really works.”

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According to the study, some actions were particularly impactful on biodiversity. Some of the most effective efforts include controlling invasive species, reducing habitat loss, restoring wildlife habitats, establishing protected areas, and managing ecosystems in sustainable ways.

“What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” Landhammer said in a press release. “It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

The study highlighted multiple efforts that resulted in wins for biodiversity. For instance, the authors noted that managing invasive species as well as “problematic native species” on Cayo Costa and North Captiva, two islands of Florida, led to better nesting success rates for loggerhead turtles and least terns.

The study authors highlighted a conservation initiative that established a Forest Management Plan in the Congo Basin, which led to 74% lower rates of deforestation. 

In another example, the researchers showed that in the Brazilian part of the Amazon Rainforest, protected areas and Indigenous lands had lower rates of deforestation and human-caused forest fires; unprotected areas experienced deforestation rates up to 20 times higher and human-caused fires happened four to nine times more often.

In Idaho, a captive breeding and release program helped improve reproductive rates of Chinook salmon, which led to the restoration of the species’ natural population in the wild.

“Our study shows that when conservation actions work, they really work. In other words, they often lead to outcomes for biodiversity that are not just a little bit better than doing nothing at all, but many times greater,” Jake Bicknell, co-author of the study and senior lecturer at Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology of the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK said in a statement. “For instance, putting measures in place to boost the population size of an endangered species has often seen their numbers increase substantially. This effect has been mirrored across a large proportion of the case studies we looked at.”

However, the authors explained that conservation measures didn’t always help out as intended. In about one in every five cases, efforts actually led to declines for the target species; however, in some of these instances, the conservation actions still unintentionally benefited other species. 

All in all, the authors noted that global conservation efforts need additional funding, and a variety of conservation efforts need to be implemented in order to curb biodiversity decline. They estimated that a global conservation program would cost about $178 billion to $524 billion per year.

“Although high, these costs are dwarfed by the value that biodiversity provides to society through the delivery of ecosystem services,” the authors wrote in the study conclusion. “Thus, conservation actions are investments rather than payments — and, as our study demonstrates, they are typically investments that yield genuine, high-magnitude positive impacts.”

The post Conservation Efforts Are Succeeding Overall at Slowing Biodiversity Loss, Global Study Confirms appeared first on EcoWatch.

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About a year ago, the seas got unusually hot, even by our current, overheated standards. Twelve months of broken records later, the oceans are still more feverish than climate models and normal fluctuations in global weather patterns can explain.

When the seas turn into bathwater, it threatens the survival of the planet’s coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine life and a source of sustenance for many people living along the world’s coasts. Mostly clustered in the shallow waters of the tropics, coral reefs have one of the lowest thresholds for rising temperatures of all the possible “tipping points,” the cascading feedback loops that set off large, abrupt changes in the ecosystems, weather patterns, and ice formations on Earth. Stable, existing systems wind up in new, completely different states: The lush Amazon rainforest, for example, might collapse into a grassy savanna. Coral reefs might transform into seaweed-smothered graveyards. 

Earlier this month, the world officially entered its fourth — and probably worst — mass coral bleaching event in history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative. Hot water causes corals to expel the tiny algae that live in their tissues, which provide them with food (through photosynthesis) and also a rainbow of pigments. Separated from their algae, corals “bleach,” turning ghostly white, and start to starve. 

The Florida Keys, where water temperatures veered into hot-tub territory last year, saw its most severe bleaching event to date, with scientists “evacuating” thousands of corals to tanks on land. In Australia, the iconic Great Barrier Reef is also facing its biggest test yet. In the Indian Ocean, even coral species known to be resistant to hot temperatures are bleaching. 

“This is one of the key living systems that we thought was closest to a tipping point,” said Tim Lenton, a professor of climate change and Earth systems at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “This is sort of horrible confirmation that it is.” 

An estimated 1 billion people around the world benefit from coral reefs, which provide food and income, while also protecting coastal property from storms and flooding. The benefits add up to about $11 trillion a year. With some scientists worried that coral reefs may have already passed a point of no return, researchers are turning to desperate measures to save them, from building artificial reefs to attempts to cool down reefs through geoengineering.

Last year, the warmer weather pattern known as El Niño took hold of the globe, temporarily pushing global average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial times. That’s precisely the level at which scientists have predicted that between 70 and 99 percent of tropical reefs would disappear. With a cooler La Niña phase on the way this summer, it’s possible that corals will make it through the current bout of hot ocean temperatures. But each week high temperatures persist, another 1 percent of corals are predicted to bleach. By the early 2030s, global temperatures are on track to pass the 1.5 C threshold for good, compared to around 1.2 C today.

Bleaching doesn’t spell certain death, but the corals that survive struggle to reproduce and are more susceptible to diseases. Even when reefs do recover, there’s usually a loss of species, said Didier Zoccola, a scientist in Monaco who has studied corals for decades. “You have winners and losers, and the losers, you don’t know if they are important in the ecosystem,” he said.

For a coral reef, the tipping point would come when bleaching becomes an annual event, according to David Kline, the executive director of the Pacific Blue Foundation, a nonprofit working to preserve reefs in Fiji. Species would go extinct, leaving only the most heat-tolerant creatures, the “cockroaches” of corals that can survive tough conditions. Seaweed would start taking over. Parts of the world may be approaching this point, if not already past it: The Great Barrier Reef, for example, has gone through five mass bleaching events in the last eight years, leaving little chance for recovery. Florida has already lost more than 90 percent of its coral reefs.

“I think most scientists, myself included, would be very uncomfortable saying we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Deborah Brosnan, a longtime coral scientist who founded the reef restoration project OceanShot. “But in reality, are we very close to a tipping point? I believe we are, just judging by the scale of the bleaching that we’re seeing.”

Reefs around the world have already declined by half since the 1950s because of climate change, overfishing, and pollution. Some scientists argue that the world may have already passed the point of no return for corals long ago, as far back as the 1980s, yet there’s no consensus. “If we really want to have healthy, diverse coral reefs in the future, we need to do something about our greenhouse gas emissions, like, right now,” Kline said. 

Rising temperatures might have already set off other notable tipping points, such as the accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the thawing of the northern permafrost, which threatens to release vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Coral tipping points would unfold on a regional level, with giant blobs of hot ocean water wrecking reefs, what Lenton characterizes as a “clustered” tipping point.

Coral reefs are so vulnerable, in part, because their existence is fragile in the first palace. Reefs are “a verdant explosion of life in a nutrient desert,” Lenton said, only able to exist because of “really strong reinforcing feedback loops within the system.” An intricate web of corals, algae, sponges, and microbes move essential nutrients like nitrogen around, leading to a profusion of life. “It’s not surprising that if you push it too hard, or knock certain things out, you can tip it into a different ‘no coral’ state, or maybe several different states.”

Losing corals could lead to consequences you wouldn’t expect. For example, you can thank corals for the sand on many beaches — they help create it (coral skeletons turn into sand) and protect beaches from erosion, with the structure of the reef calming waves before they reach shore. Reefs contribute to medical breakthroughs — organisms found in them produce compounds used to treat cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer.

Researchers are racing to salvage what’s left of corals and the ecosystems they support. A restoration project in the Caribbean that Brosnan founded, called OceanShot, is building artificial reefs where natural ones have collapsed. The tiered structures provide habitat for creatures that live in the reefs, both the larger species that live on top and the smaller ones that like to hide in crevices lower down. The installations have had good results, with dozens of fish species moving in, alongside invertebrates like lobsters. Even finicky black urchins transplanted on the reef decided to stay. Brosnan’s team is also hoping to deploy them in places where beaches are being lost, since the artificial reefs can also help prevent sand from washing away.

Some preservation attempts are pretty out there. Scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., for example, are working on deep-freezing coral sperm and larvae through “cryopreservation,” Futurama-style, hoping that they can repopulate oceans of the future. In the Great Barrier Reef, researchers have experimented with brightening clouds with sea salt, a form of geoengineering, to try to protect corals from the hot sun.

Elsewhere, laboratories are breeding corals to withstand heat and ocean acidification. Zoccola works on one such project in Monaco, where scientists are using “assisted evolution” to speed up nature’s process, since corals can’t adapt fast enough in the wild. He calls it a “Noah’s Ark” for corals, hoping that species can live in the lab until, one day, they’re ready to return to the ocean.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Have the world’s coral reefs already crossed a tipping point? on Apr 29, 2024.

After three decades of work, advocates for developing countries scored a major win at last year’s United Nations climate change conference in Dubai: World leaders unanimously agreed to set up a climate reparations fund. As the planet warms, the poorest nations are being hit hardest by drought, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and a slew of other climate impacts — even though these countries did the least to cause global warming, compared to their early-industrializing peers. Enter the so-called loss and damage fund, which is supposed to compensate them for the unavoidable effects of climate change. So far, the international community has pledged more than $650 million to the venture.

Now the tedious, unsexy — and often boring — work of setting up the fund is just beginning. 

This week, a 26-member board is meeting for the first time to discuss the administrative and institutional policies required to operationalize the fund and dole money out to developing countries in need. The board’s to-do list is long. It ranges from the procedural — selecting co-chairs and agreeing on a host country for the fund — to the more substantive: deciding which countries are eligible to receive funding, how to fundraise and replenish the fund, and whether or not the World Bank will help manage the fund. 

The board was supposed to hold its first meeting at the end of January, but a stalemate among wealthy countries, including the U.S. and those of the European Union, about who to nominate to the board led to delays, putting the meetings three months behind schedule. Much of this work must be completed in just over six months, before the next United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“There’s a very large work plan for the year,” said Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns and head of international climate justice work at the nonprofit ActionAid USA. “They are still trying to squeeze in three meetings before COP29 to be able to stay on schedule.” Wu is attending the board meeting as an observer.

The stakes are high. The roughly $650 million that has been pledged so far is a sliver of the estimated need — which researchers have pegged at as much as $580 billion per year by 2030 — and is broadly seen as startup money sufficient only to establish the fund.  As the main contributors to the climate crisis, wealthy countries are expected to be the primary donors to the fund. But before the fund can begin allocating money to poorer nations in need, a number of decisions need to be made.

Key among them is whether the World Bank will serve as a trustee and help manage the operations of the fund. Wealthy nations believe that the bank, which houses several other environmental and climate funds, has the experience, reputation, and administrative know-how to best manage a financial endeavor of this size. But developing countries were initially opposed to the idea, citing the failures of the bank’s past programs and its role worsening debt crises in poor countries. Ultimately, developing countries reluctantly agreed to allow the World Bank to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis. But that decision was contingent on the bank meeting 11 conditions, including allowing recipients to directly access money from the fund instead of requiring that money pass through an intermediary international institution, such as a United Nations agency or multilateral development bank. The World Bank has until June to deliberate, and report on whether or not it can meet those conditions. 

Initial discussions about those conditions have already hit snags, according to reporting by E&E News. The loss and damage fund’s board and the bank can’t seem to agree on who should sign off on financial agreements when money is disbursed. The World Bank has a number of policies in place to ensure that the money it doles out isn’t misused and meets various environmental and social safeguards. Since the loss and damage fund is expected to hand out money to a range of national and subnational groups as a result of the direct access condition, the bank will likely work with hundreds of entities. That increases the chances that a recipient misuses the money or fails to pay back a loan, putting the bank on the hook. As a result, the bank wants the responsibility — and liability — to lie with the board, while the board has argued that as trustee, the bank should have final signing authority. 

If a project that receives money from the fund is unable to pay the bank back, the bank’s credit rating could be affected, which in turn could lead to a decrease in the bank’s borrowing power, said Michai Robertson, a lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States, a group representing 39 island nations. “They see this as a big cluster of issues,” he said. “If you have one entity from each developing country, that’s 140 countries that can access the fund directly and not use a go-between. The bank sees this as a huge risk.”

If the bank ultimately reports that it cannot meet the 11 conditions, countries will go back to the drawing board to establish an independent fund. Those decisions will be made at COP29 in Azerbaijan. 

Even if the stalemate between the board and bank is resolved, the board will still have many more thorny questions to work out, including which countries will be eligible to receive money from the fund. In the agreement inked in Dubai last year, countries agreed that the fund’s resources are meant for “developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” But the agreement did not define which countries qualify as “particularly vulnerable.” The phrase has typically referred to small island states and those classified as “least developed countries” in climate talks — but that leaves out countries like Pakistan, which faced catastrophic floods in 2022, and others that are widely seen as appropriate recipients for loss and damage funding. 

Hanging over these discussions is also the question of how the fund will raise the trillions of dollars that will be required in the coming years to address the loss and damage countries will face due to climate change. 

“There’s sort of the elephant-in-the-room question, which is when is the fund actually going to get meaningful amounts of money,” said Wu. If the fund receives very little money, the board will end up designing policies meant to facilitate the transfer of millions of dollars — not the trillions that are needed, he said. 

“The scope of the ambition of the fund is a big question,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world agreed to create a climate reparations fund. Now comes the hard part. on Apr 29, 2024.

In 2016, Tony Spaniola received a notice informing him that his family shouldn’t drink water drawn from the well at his lake home in Oscoda, Michigan. Over the course of several decades, the Air Force had showered thousands of gallons of firefighting foam onto the ground at Wurtsmith Air Force Base, which closed in 1993. Those chemicals eventually leached into the soil and began contaminating the groundwater.

Alarmed, Spaniola began looking into the problem. “The more I looked, the worse it got,” he said. Two years ago,  his concern prompted him to co-found the Great Lakes PFAS Action network. The coalition of residents and activists is committed to making polluters, like the military and a factory making waterproof shoes, clean up the “forever chemicals” they’ve left behind.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of nearly 15,000 fluorinated chemicals used since the 1950s to make clothing and food containers, among other things, oil- and water-repellent. They’re also used in firefighting foam. These chemicals do not break down over time, and have contaminated everything from drinking water to food. Research has linked them to cancer, heart and liver problems, developmental issues, and other ailments.

The U.S. Department of Defense, or DOD, is among the nation’s biggest users of firefighting foam and says 80 percent of active and decommissioned bases require clean up. Some locations, like Wurtsmith, recorded concentrations over 3,000 times higher than what the agency previously considered safe.

Today, the EPA considers it unsafe to be exposed to virtually any amount of PFOA and PFOS, two of the most harmful substances under the PFAS umbrella. Earlier this month, it implemented the nation’s first PFAS drinking water regulations, which included capping exposure to them at the lowest detectable limit. As of April 19, the agency also designated these two compounds “hazardous substances” under the federal Superfund law, making it easier to force polluters to shoulder the costs of cleaning them up. 

Meeting these regulations means that almost all of the 715 military sites and surrounding communities under Defense Department investigation for contamination will likely require remediation. Long-standing cleanup efforts at more than 100 PFAS contaminated bases that are already designated Superfund sites, like Wurtsmith, reveal some of the challenges to come.

“The heart of the issue is, how quickly are you going to clean it up, and what actions are you going to take in the interim to make sure people aren’t exposed?” said Spaniola. 

In a statement to Grist, the DOD says its plan is to follow a federal clean up law called the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, to investigate contamination and determine near- and long-term clean up actions based on risk. But many advocates, including Spaniola, say the process is too slow and that short-term fixes have been insufficient. 

The problem started decades ago. In the 1960s, the Defense Department worked with 3M, one of the largest manufacturers of PFAS chemicals, to develop a foam called AFFF that can extinguish high-temperature fires. The PFAS acts as a surfactant, helping the material spread more quickly. By the 1970s, every military base, Navy ship, civilian airport, and fire station regularly used AFFF. 

In the decades that followed, millions of gallons flowed into the environment. According to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, or EWG, 710 military sites throughout the country and its territories have known or suspected PFAS contamination. Internal studies and memos show that not long after 3M and the US Navy patented the foam in 1966, 3M learned that its PFAS products could harm animal test subjects and accumulated in the body. 

In a 2022 Senate committee hearing, residents from Oscoda testified about the health impacts, such as tumors and miscarriages, from the PFAS contamination at Wurtsmith. In 2023, Michigan reached a settlement after suing numerous manufacturers, including 3M and Dupont. Today, thousands of victims across the country are suing the chemical’s manufacturers. While some organizations and communities have tried to hold the military financially responsible for this pollution — farmers in several states recently filed suits in the U.S. District Court in South Carolina to do just that — the DOD says it’s not legally liable.

Congressional pressure on the Pentagon to clean these sites has been growing. In 2020, National Defense Authorization Acts required it to phase out PFAS-laden firefighting foam by October, 2023. Since passing that law, Congress has also ordered the department to publish the findings of drinking and groundwater tests on and around bases.

Results showed nearly 50 sites with extremely high levels of contamination, and hundreds more with levels above what was then the EPA’s health advisory. Following further congressional pressure, the military announced plans to implement interim clean-up measures at three dozen locations, including a water filtering system in Oscoda.

According to a report by the Environmental Working Group, it took an average of nearly three years for the Department of Defense to complete testing at these high-contamination sites. It took just as long to draft stopgap cleanup plans. Today, 14 years after PFAS contamination was discovered at Wurtsmith, the first site to be tested, no site has left the “investigation” phase, and there has yet to be a comprehensive plan to begin permanent remediation on any base.

The Department of Defense says any site found to have PFAS contamination exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s previous guideline of 70 parts per trillion will receive immediate remediation, such as bottled waters and filters on faucets. When a site is found to be contaminated, the EPA says, the department has 72 hours to provide residents with alternate sources of water.

After six years spent working with various clean up initiatives, Spaniola says waiting for the military to take action has taken a toll on the people of Oscoda. “The community had a really good relationship with the military,” he said. “I’ve watched that change from a very trusting relationship to a terrible one.” 

Dozens of states have mandated additional requirements to treat PFAS in municipal water systems, but such efforts often overlook private well owners. That’s leaving thousands of people at risk, given that in Michigan, where some 1.5 million people drink water from contaminated sources, 25 percent of residents rely on private wells.  

Nationwide, the Environmental Working Group found unsafe water in wells near 63 military bases in 29 states. While the DOD has tested private wells, it has not published the total number of wells tested or identified which of them need to be cleaned up. 

“For those who are on well water, it’s a real problem until there’s a bit of recognition for some sort of responsibility for the contamination,” said Daniel Jones, associate director of the Michigan State University Center for PFAS Research. He is advising cleanup efforts near Grayling, Michigan. “It sort of comes down to who has pockets deep enough to pay for the things that need to be done.”

The EPA’s recent decision to designate PFOA and PFOS “hazardous substances” under the federal Superfund law is unlikely to provide quick financial assistance to communities, even though the agency has made $9 billion available for private well owners and small public water systems to address contamination. Whether that support reaches private well owners is up to individual states, which can work with regional EPA offices to draft project plans before applying for grants to secure funding.

The agency has established a five-year window for water systems to test for PFAS and install filtering equipment before compliance with the newly tightened levels will be enforced. While EPA says the new PFOA and PFOS regulations do not immediately trigger an investigation or qualify them as Superfund sites on the National Priorities List, decisions for each site will be on a case-by-case basis.

“It is a tremendous win for public health, it is tremendously important and cannot cannot come soon enough, particularly for military communities who have been exposed for decades,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president of governmental affairs at the Environmental Working Group. Benesh hopes that the new rules help push the Defense Department to move more quickly.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US military bases teem with PFAS. There’s still no firm plan to clean them up. on Apr 29, 2024.

This story was originally published by Capital B.

At the edge of Saginaw Street, a hand-painted sign is etched into a deserted storefront. “Please help, God. Clean-up Flint.”

Behind it, the block tells the story of a city 10 years removed from the start of one of the nation’s largest environmental crises. 

Empty lot. Charred two-story home. Empty lot. Abandoned house with the message “All Copper GONE,” across boarded-up windows. 

John Ishmael Taylor, 44, was born in this ZIP code, 48503, and he’s seen firsthand the neglect of the place he loves, one he hopes will be reborn for his young children. 

“The water crisis, no more jobs, the violence,” Taylor said, has left Flint like a “ghost town — a ghost town with a whole bunch of people still here.” 

Over the past decade, Flint’s water crisis has revealed how government failures at every level could effectively kill a city while opening the country’s eyes to how an environmental crisis could wreak havoc on all facets of life, make people sick, destroy a public school system, and kill jobs. 

Four years after Flint residents reached the largest civil settlement agreement in Michigan history, Taylor and tens of thousands of other victims still haven’t received a penny from the $626.25 million pot. The only money doled out has gone to lawyers involved in the case, not those who’ve been haunted by the crisis’s true impacts. Still, even when residents ultimately receive the funding, most expressed doubts that the payouts will have any true benefits for their life.

In many ways, Taylor’s life shows the violent and widespread nature of America’s water crisis. After being born in Flint, he’d spent his preteen years living outside Jackson, Mississippi, where brown water has flowed through Black homes for decades. 

Taylor, a single father, moved back to Flint permanently in January 2014. Within a year, lead levels in the drinking water of three of every four homes in his ZIP code were well above federal standards.

His youngest son, Jalen, was born 52 days before the start of the water crisis, which is recognized as April 25, 2014, the day the city infamously switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. 

The rashes started immediately for baby Jalen, speckling the inside of his legs with coarse, red blotches. Within a few years, he was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and a form of autism spectrum disorder; both ailments are associated with lead poisoning. 

Taylor says he has battled with anxiety in the aftermath as 20 percent of the city’s residents and hundreds of businesses packed up and left. Flint’s unemployment rate is now 1.5 times higher than the national average as 70 percent of children grow up in poverty. 

He wonders what that means for his children. 

“I always wonder how they’re gonna do because this is a long-term effect — we’re talking about lead poisoning. This is going to be with them for most of their life. It’s depressing,” he said, and he’s felt no restitution. He believes it has led to a citywide mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of 5 Flint residents reported having poor mental health, which is nearly 40 percent higher than the U.S. average. 

Angela Welch, who has lived in Flint for four decades, understands the health implications intimately.  She recently tested for lead levels in her blood at 6.5 micrograms per deciliter. Anything above 5 micrograms is considered extremely dangerous for your health. 

Since the start of the crisis, Welch has developed chronic skin and cardiac issues, had multiple surgeries, and lost part of her leg to amputation. Her brother Mac showed Capital B the scars along his body from water-induced rashes.

Welch questions what repair looks like for her family. “We gotta be dead to get our money? They want us dead to receive anything from the crisis.” 

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and officials with Flint’s mayor’s and city attorney’s offices did not respond to multiple requests from Capital B for comment.

Residents argue that even though they’ve brought the country’s water woes to the forefront, they’re in a worse position today despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment — and they want you to know that your city can be next. 

“We’re seeing it happen to Jackson,” said Nayyirah Shariff, a community activist, whose water is still testing for lead at levels three times higher than federal limits. 

“It’s like they have the same playbook to decimate a city.”

What Flint tells us about the nation’s water crises 

Flint opened the nation’s eyes to a brewing water affordability and infrastructure crisis, ultimately leading to billions of dollars invested in cleaning the country’s drinking water, improving water plants and roads, and building climate resilience. 

There are roughly 9 million lead pipes in service across the U.S., and they’re everywhere, from the oldest cities across Massachusetts to Florida, which leads the country in lead pipes but where infrastructure and the average home is among the nation’s youngest. In November, the Biden administration outlined a plan to replace all 9 million within the next decade, making 50 percent of the $30 billion price tag available from the federal government.  

Yet Flint residents and experts told Capital B that the main flaws of the federal government’s plan have been realized in the city over the past decade: It is complicated, time-consuming, and costly to identify and replace water lines. Not to mention, as Shariff explained, replacing lead water lines is not the “magical silver bullet” to eradicate the issue. The lead service line in her home was replaced in 2017, yet her water is still filled with more lead than federal limits allow. 

As officials have claimed that the use of water filters and replacement of lead water lines has solved the crisis, including an infamous declaration by former President Barack Obama in 2016, some residents in Flint have felt confused about the true safety of their water. 

When approached by Capital B in April, James Johnson explained how a state-conducted test for lead in his drinking water in 2023 returned a clean bill of health. However, public records show Johnson’s property’s lead results were actually 19 parts per billion. The federal limit is 15.

“I don’t know what to think [about the water,]” Johnson said after Capital B explained the results. “We just use filters. We have been since ’14, but they said it’s all clean.”

Flint officials did not respond to Capital B’s request for data related to the status of its water line identification and replacement work. This month, a federal judge found the city in contempt of court for missing deadlines for lead water line replacement and related work in the aftermath of the water crisis.

In addition, as the nation focuses on drinking water, lead lines have created another crisis that rarely gets attention: how lead contamination has torn through kitchens and bathrooms. Flint residents told Capital B that since the crisis began, they’ve had corroded toilets fall through floors, and their shower heads turn black from buildup every few months. 

“Dirty water doesn’t just impact service lives,” explained Claire McClinton, a Flint resident and former autoworker. “It’s very naive to think that was the only thing that was impacted, and people do not have the money or support to fix these things.” 

All the while, Flint has had amongst the most expensive water bills in the country. A 2016 analysis revealed that the average household was paying more than $850 annually for water services, making it the most expensive average bill in the country. Today, the average bill is $1,200 annually.

McClinton is afraid that as the country chugs on with its focus on drinking water, Black communities will be harmed by efforts to cut costs, or worse, boxed out of their access to publicly run water systems. More than 20 percent of Americans now rely on private companies for drinking water, a substantial increase compared to 2019, according to the National Association of Water Companies. On average, private water utilities charge families 59 percent more on their water bills than public utilities. 

“We don’t want corporations to benefit from all this spending — we should want to keep our water public,” McClinton said. 

Still, public water systems have their challenges supporting Black communities as well. Failing public water systems are 40 percent more likely to serve people of color, and they take longer than systems in white communities to come back into compliance. Funding to reach these communities remains faulty despite the Biden administration’s goal of spending 40 percent of funds on “disadvantaged communities.” 

A Capital B analysis found that 27 percent of drinking water funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law went to “disadvantaged communities” in 2022, and the two states that received the most funds characterized for “disadvantaged communities” were Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where less than 10 percent of residents are Black. 

McClinton said it’s bittersweet to watch Flint purportedly influence the nation for the better while things remain “broken” for Black communities.  

“The system has failed us. We did all the things you’re supposed to do; we participated in water studies, and our water is still dirty, and our health is still bad,” she said. “There’s this thing where they say every generation lives better than the next generation, but all of that is turned upside down right now, and the water crisis is just a manifestation of it.” 

‘The start of the second civil war’

In a stream of whiteness, Confederate flags, and Make America Great Again signs, the 60 miles between Detroit and Flint tell the story of Black life in Michigan, Welch said. “Because we are a majority here and have conquered [Flint and Detroit], they want to get back at us,” she said. 

Over the past decade, as Detroit’s financial crisis peaked and Flint’s water crisis began, far-right white-led groups have surged and a white-led militia plotted to abduct the state’s governor.

“It feels like the start of the second civil war,” Welch said, all while Flint is “left behind.”  

It’s seeing this shift intensify that has led some residents to see deeper racial undertones in not only Flint’s battle over water affordability and rights, but also the nation’s.

“The power structure is coalescing over water,” McClinton said. 

Flint’s issues began primarily because of a plan that was concocted to save the city money during its water-delivery process. Similar situations are happening outside of Chicago in a majority Black and Latino town, and in Baltimore. 

Not to mention the glaring similarities between Jackson and Flint, both majority-Black cities where local Black leadership was overridden by white leaders at the federal and state levels. In Jackson, after an EPA lawsuit against the city allowed the federal government to take control of the water, residents are still fighting to be included in the process. 

The attack on Black life has also widened the racial gap within the city, Shariff said. 

In a commemorative event headlined by a public health researcher from Michigan State University and attended by roughly 50 people the week before the 10-year-anniversary, just five attendees were Black.

It’s events like these, Shariff says, that highlight the disconnect between local leaders, academic researchers, and those directly impacted by the crisis. “All this money these places are spending feels like for nothing,” she said. “People marching in the streets weren’t asking for book talks or community health assessments. We asked for reparations and resources for Black self-determination.”

The crisis is a chronic illness

For some residents, like Taylor, there is still hope that the settlement checks will hit their bank accounts and improve their lives. Children affected by the water crisis are expected to receive 80 percent of the record settlement.

As Flint schools have crumbled in the aftermath of the crises, in addition to experiencing an 8 percent increase in the number of students with special needs, especially among school-age boys, Taylor hopes to use the money to better their educational opportunities and put them through college.

However, for others, including Welch and Shariff, the expected payout of $2,000 to $3,000 for adults feels like a slap in the face. There is also a lot of confusion around the settlement process, with two residents telling Capital B they thought the money was already gone, which stopped them from attempting to be a part of the process. 

In a lot of ways, although harder to find, opportunities have reached the city in recent years, including through a guaranteed income program for every pregnant person and infant in the city. The new program “prescribes” a one-time $1,500 payment after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and $500 a month during the infant’s first year. 

Yet, it still remains challenging to remain confident in change. 

“With all the experiences we’ve had over the 10 years, our hopes have been dashed,” explained McClinton, who every April 25 helps to organize a day of commemoration for Flint residents.  As Capital B has reported, the water issues afflicting Black communities are violent in many ways, and it trickles down into increasing situations of despair around housing, mental and physical health, and communal violence. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic widened the racial death gap in Flint, Black residents’ death rate climbed at a rate that was more than twice the city’s death rate between 2014 and 2019, according to Capital B’s analysis of state data.

Several Flint residents explained how the mental health strain caused by the water crisis created a cycle of “disunity” and the inability to trust not just the government or the water flowing out of their pipes, but also the people around them. 

“Everyone is just on edge,” Taylor said, “and that has everything to do with the water.” 

In the city’s Black areas, it’s hard to find a block without an abandoned home or grassy field full of trash and plastic water bottles. Taylor said it’s depressing to drive through your neighborhood to see your former schools empty, graffitied, and boarded up, or parks closed and desolate.

As job opportunities have become harder to find, so has housing. Nearly all of the dozen residents Capital B spoke to for this story said they experienced housing insecurity at times over the past decade. 

Due to a lack of affordable housing options, the average stay at the city’s housing shelter has increased from less than two months to over five. The public housing waitlist has ballooned to two years, even as some public housing buildings still have high levels of lead in the water, including the Richert Manor homes where Welch lived for many years at the height of the water situation. 

In the meantime, as race, namely being Black in America, stands as the biggest risk factor for lead poisoning, more so than even poverty or poor housing, Flint residents say their home serves as a warning to other Black communities. 

Nationwide, Black children have the highest blood lead levels. As such, even as billions are pumped into fixing the issues, the next generation of Black Americans will remain altered by the impacts of lead poisoning. 

As Shariff said: “The water crisis is like having a chronic illness — I mean, it gave me a chronic illness — but it is basically like you’re dealing with it, and it never goes away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A decade later, Flint’s water crisis continues on Apr 28, 2024.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Blake Dollier spoke excitedly as he watched the construction crews pulverize concrete along a quarter-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 52 where it passes through West Lafayette, Indiana.

Soon, the Indiana Department of Transportation, or INDOT, where Dollier works as the public relations director, will install a series of copper coils under the highway’s surface to test a new technology Purdue University researchers developed that can provide power to electric vehicles wirelessly as they drive past.

“Wouldn’t it really be something if we could just drive over the road and catch your charge for your vehicle as you drive across it?” Dollier said during a phone interview, watching the progress from the parking lot of one of the department’s satellite offices in West Lafayette.

The state began construction of its new pilot project this month, and officials say they believe it could spur greater adoption of EVs and redefine the way people think about them. The project, they said, which is being done in partnership with Purdue and the engine manufacturer Cummins Inc., will be capable of providing power to vehicles even as they cruise by at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour.

Ultimately, Purdue researchers and state officials hope the project will open up EVs to a wider customer base, largely by reducing battery costs and quelling concerns over range anxiety — the fear that an electric vehicle will run out of juice before reaching its destination. One in four U.S adults say that they would seriously consider buying an EV for their next purchase, but more than half of those who don’t want to buy an electric vehicle blame range anxiety, according to a survey conducted by AAA last year.

While Indiana’s project wouldn’t be the first “dynamic EV charger” in the nation — Detroit installed a similar pilot project on a residential road last fall — it would be the first time the technology was installed on a highway.

If successful, the technology could also help to electrify long-haul trucks, which are among the most difficult vehicles to decarbonize, said Nadia Gkritza, a civil engineering professor at Purdue University and the project’s lead researcher. 

That’s because heavy-duty trucks would require significantly larger batteries due to their size, weight and the long distances they tend to travel, Gkritza said. However, she said, if they could receive power as they drive, it would allow those vehicles to carry smaller batteries, lowering overall costs and reducing the number of stops to recharge.

“Really the possibilities are endless,” INDOT’s Dollier said. “And we’re just hopeful that this is something that can really benefit a lot of people here in the state of Indiana and maybe even across the country going forward.”

INDOT says the pilot project should be complete by next summer, though private vehicles won’t be able to use it — at least not yet. Cars and trucks must be equipped with special receivers for the wireless charging to work, meaning current models are incompatible. The coils are installed underground and use magnetic fields to deliver the electricity wirelessly. Each coil only activates when a receiver is above it, Purdue researchers say, so the infrastructure won’t pose a threat to pedestrians, animals or other vehicles.

Kaylee Dann, executive director of Greater Indiana Clean Cities, a clean energy advocacy nonprofit that isn’t involved with the project, agrees that the new technology could spur greater EV adoption in Indiana and nationwide. In fact, she said, the project is coming at a time when more and more Hoosiers are choosing to go electric.

While Indiana’s overall EV adoption rates still pale in comparison to California and other leaders in the EV market, the state saw an astounding 1,200 percent increase in registered electric vehicles between 2016 and 2022, according to a state report published last year. Some 24,000 electric vehicles were registered in Indiana last year alone, according to the state’s Office of Energy Development.

Dann believes that leaning into EVs has been a smart financial move by the state as the nation pivots to cleaner transportation options. Two recent federal policies — the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the Environmental Protection Agency’s new tailpipe pollution standards, finalized last month — are expected to dramatically increase domestic production of EVs nationwide in the coming years.

Indiana is already experiencing some of that economic gain. According to a state report published last September, Indiana has received about $8.2 billion in investments related to EV production since 2021. Those include a $3 billion investment by General Motors and Samsung to manufacture EV batteries in the city of New Carlisle and an $803 million investment by Toyota to expand its EV production in the city of Princeton.

“We’ve seen a lot of investment from manufacturers,” Dann said. “So we’re gonna see a big influx of EVs being produced in the state.”

But the biggest benefits to the state could be environmental.

In its annual State of the Air Report, the American Lung Association ranked the Indianapolis metro area the 10th worst city in the nation for year-round particulate matter pollution known as PM2.5. Regular exposure to PM2.5, which is produced any time something combusts, has been linked to increased health risks, including greater risk of asthma attacks, cardiovascular and lung diseases and even premature death. 

Because EVs draw power from batteries, not from burning fuel, a higher adoption of them would lead to better air quality for any state. Gkritza said that reducing air pollution is one of the broader goals of Indiana’s pilot project. “Greenhouse gas emissions, air quality, these are really bad across those freight corridors, transit corridors — we have communities that are negatively impacted by freight movement,” she said.

More EVs also means fewer greenhouse gas emissions, Dann said, which helps to slow climate change. Transportation is America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA, making up nearly a third of the country’s carbon footprint.

In Indiana alone, EVs contribute 60 percent less carbon pollution than their fossil fuel counterparts, Dann said, despite the fact that the state’s electricity — the fuel for EVs — is predominantly produced by coal-fired power plants. More than half of the state’s electricity in 2021 was generated by coal, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. 

Having strong EV charging infrastructure in Indiana could be a boon nationwide, given the state’s centralized location in the U.S. 

Indiana has more interstate highways passing through it than any other state, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb touted in a 2021 report. It’s also home to the nation’s second largest FedEx hub and 41 freight railroads, he added, noting Indiana’s motto of being the “Crossroads of America.”

“Simply put,” Holcomb wrote, “the world moves through Indiana.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A highway in Indiana could one day charge your EV while you’re driving it on Apr 27, 2024.

To meet clean energy and net-zero targets by 2030, as set during COP28, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that rapid expansion of battery storage capacity is necessary.

According to the agency, a rollout of batteries needs to increase six-fold compared to current rates in order to meet global climate goals.

IEA reported that battery costs have decreased by more than 90% over the past 15 years. Last year, battery rollout increased over 130% compared to 2022, and globally, battery capacity increased 42 gigawatts (GW). The increase in battery storage has also contributed to an increase in electric vehicle sales, which have risen from 3 million in 2020 to nearly 14 million in 2023.

“The electricity and transport sectors are two key pillars for bringing down emissions quickly enough to meet the targets agreed at COP28 and keep open the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “Batteries will provide the foundations in both areas, playing an invaluable role in scaling up renewables and electrifying transport while delivering secure and sustainable energy for businesses and households.”

As The Guardian reported, the global investment in battery storage reached $150 billion in 2023, most of which (about $115 billion) went toward electric vehicle batteries. The biggest investments in EV batteries happened in China, the U.S. and across Europe. Investments in battery storage for electricity grids increased by about five times compared to the previous year as well.

According to the IEA’s Special Report on Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions, battery usage in the energy sector has increased, reaching about 2,400 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in 2023. This is about a fourfold increase over 2020.

While battery costs are falling, demand is increasing and storage capacity is rising, costs need to continue to decline and expansion must increase sixfold by the end of this decade to limit the worst impacts of climate change.

To increase utility-scale battery storage, IEA recommends policy changes to remove restrictions that keep battery storage from accessing energy markets as well as changes to taxing structures, which can sometimes cause double taxation on battery storage projects.

Additionally, the report addresses the need to improve recycling rates to reduce the need to extract raw materials, like lithium and cobalt, for batteries. Recycling improvements and investments in battery innovation will be needed to stabilize the supply chain and help bring costs down.

“The combination of solar PV and batteries is today competitive with new coal plants in India,” Birol said. “And just in the next few years, it will be cheaper than new coal in China and gas-fired power in the United States. Batteries are changing the game before our eyes.”

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Close to 20 billion pads, tampons, and applicators enter North American landfills every year. The…

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