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As climate change reshapes the Blue Ridge, Appalachia’s native trout are losing ground — but dedicated anglers and scientists are racing to save them.
On a startlingly beautiful day high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Thomas Champeau waded into Yellowstone Prong hoping to catch the elusive Southern Appalachian brook trout. A pull-off along Blue Ridge Parkway had led him to a short path lined with mountain laurel. He and a smattering of afternoon anglers followed it to a rocky creekbed running cold and clear toward the Pigeon River. Champeau, already in waders, left a cooler on the bank in case of a lucky catch and stepped in. Rod in hand, he treaded lightly from one smooth rock to another, carefully staying out of sight of his quarry. Brook trout are, like Champeau, alert, cautious, and observant, hanging tight in the shaded pools where they make their home.
“Your approach has to be low, quiet, and so it’s a little bit like hunting ‘cause you’re kind of stalking as opposed to just fishing blindly,” Champeau, a former biologist who runs communications for a local chapter of Trout Unlimited, said. After an unsuccessful cast he reeled the line back in and moved upstream.
All around, the landscape was blooming and greening with summer. It still bears the scars left by Hurricane Helene, which tore through the region in September 2024. Trillions of gallons of rain turned placid streams into raging torrents that overran homes and forests. The storm upended streams and radically remade trout habitat. Researchers and anglers looking for the fish have navigated eroded streambanks, downed logs, and debris. “Rocks bigger than a refrigerator have been pushed around,” Champeau said while casting into a calm pool.
The upheaval was particularly hard on the Southern Appalachian brook trout, a fragile, cold-water native that has endured more than a century of logging, development, and competition from introduced species. Once abundant across the region for which it is named, the fish has lost roughly 80 percent of its range since 1900. Because the animal is so sensitive to pollution and temperature changes, biologists consider it a bellwether for the region’s forests and streams. They find its rapid decline alarming — not only because they care about trout, but because trout can only survive in healthy waterways. Helene’s damage raises the larger question of whether one of Appalachia’s most iconic fish — and the ecologies, economies, and traditions tied to it — can adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
“When it comes to climate change, sometimes it’s going to be a death by a thousand cuts,” Champeau said. “And it may not be one big storm that says, ‘Oh, well, you know, this big storm caused this to happen.’ But, you know, it’s the losses that happen over time.”
For all their individual frailty, as a species, the Southern Appalachian brook trout has endured immense ecological change. The iridescent fish, olive-colored, speckled, and red-bellied, has been adapting to the region’s cold-water rivers for thousands of generations, having evolved in isolation in high mountain habitats from Georgia to Southern Virginia since the Ice Age. Though they are usually no more than 6 or 8 inches long, these small predators are a keystone species, and their loss would disrupt those ecosystems.
The Industrial Age has proven a far tougher challenge for them. Extensive deforestation in the early 20th century took away shade that keeps streams cool and led to ongoing habitat encroachment and development. The introduction of larger, nonnative trout species like browns and rainbows — both popular with anglers — left them competing for food and territory. Now, climate-induced vacillations between extreme rain and long, dry months when streams run lower and warmer further threaten the brookie, as the fish is affectionately known among locals.
Climate change poses a particularly serious threat to Salvelinus fontinalis. The fish favor cold, shaded forest streams and do best in water no warmer than 68 degrees Fahrenheit. They tend to spend their entire lives within a few hundred yards of where they hatched, making them highly vulnerable to even small changes in their habitat.
Researchers have observed startling declines in places like Shenandoah National Park in southwestern Virginia, where one study found they plummeted by 50 percent in nearly all of the park’s 90 streams in just the last three decades. Those who had seen hundreds of them in some waterways in the 1990s have been shocked to see single digit populations today. In at least three cases, brook trout had vanished entirely. Scientists worry that the fish, which is not federally listed as endangered or even threatened, could be pinched out at the southern end of its range as waterways grow warmer. An average stream temperature increase of just 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit could eliminate another 20 percent of Southern Appalachian brook trout habitat. “They need to adapt quickly,” Champeau said.
Compounding the threat are storms like Helene, which dumped as much as 30 inches of rain on parts of the Blue Ridge. The floods overwhelmed hundreds of streams and sent about 7 million cubic yards of debris flowing into waterway ecosystems. Biologists fear the inundation washed brook trout away from their home pools and interrupted their spawning season.
Champeau is working to educate local anglers on the risks. Many of them aren’t thinking about climate change on the daily, and aren’t predisposed to worry about it. But when storms threaten trout, that can change.
As brook trout vanish, the loss runs deeper than the eddies and pools where they once thrived. Brookies are more than a fish. They’re a cultural touchstone “as important as bluegrass,” Champeau said. Climate change and storms like Helene threaten not only a species but an identity and economy. Trout fishing generates $1.4 billion for Western North Carolina alone. People come from far and wide hoping to reel in rainbows and browns, but longtime residents cherish brookies, which also are called specks for the red dots that cover their backs and sides. Hooking one of the wary, cautious creatures demands patience and skill. Locals balance their love for them with the understanding that it’s the larger, flashier species that pay the bills.
“The native brook trout was the first trout I ever caught,” said Mitch Carter, a fishing guide from Asheville who’s currently out of work after Helene. But “an 8-inch brook trout doesn’t sell licenses, right? Native brook trout protection is honestly an emotional thing, I feel like you kind of have to be from here, and even if you’re not from here, you have to have a deep understanding of what it means to have this fish here.”
Kevin Howell understands that. He owns Davidson River Outfitters, a beloved shop at the mouth of the Pisgah River in Brevard, North Carolina. Helene hasn’t made that work easy, though. The flooding scoured away access to many spots or cluttered them with fallen trees, and he turned the shop into a recovery supply depot for a couple of weeks. “We did lose our two busiest months of the fall,” Howell said. It’s a large shop and could sustain the loss, but others couldn’t. “A lot of the smaller guides were significantly impacted and it hurt their income for the year. Some of them even left guiding, or they moved.”
Howell grew up fishing the local waters and thought he knew them well. But Helene rendered them unrecognizable, and the cleanup further damaged streams and the trees that keep them cool during hot summers. “[It added] to the sedimentation and the warmer temperatures, which again results in less fishable water and less fish and less habitat,” Howell said.
Even a short-term increase in water temperature can threaten brookies, which experience heat stress at 68 degrees Fahrenheit and stop growing once it hits 70. That’s why fishing is strictly a catch-and-release endeavor during the summer. But warmer water also holds less oxygen, meaning trout that have been reeled in and tossed back are less likely to survive the shock. “We had to make the decision today to stop fishing at noon because in the afternoons it’s getting to 68 degrees already in June,” Howell said. “Which is very early.”
Most of Howell’s customers are after brown and rainbow trout. Though he loves brookies, he worries scientists are fighting a losing battle trying to save them. He doesn’t feel that efforts to reintroduce them have been successful. Competition from the larger, more aggressive varieties is too great. Given their dwindling numbers and mounting threats, he doesn’t tell anglers where to find the native fish, in hopes people will leave them well enough alone.
The interplay between economics and emotion has driven decades of brook trout conservation by the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. Mike LaVoie, the tribe’s director of natural resources, said healing their habitat is part of healing the long history of extraction and colonization that has left the Cherokee people with a fraction of their original territory.
“Cherokee have always viewed the river as a long person, so it was an embodied identity and given human attributes,” LaVoie said. “There’s just centuries of reverence and respect that was given to the long person based on Cherokee science, really. It’s all about understanding how to live within that landscape and waterscape and how to ensure that that remains healthy.”
Brook trout suffered in the initial years of logging when the timber barons gained steam in the 1890s, but they thrive in about 10 miles of high-elevation streams on tribal land, which is fiercely protected. “Most headwater populations of these fish are in our tribal reserve area, which has been set aside by the tribe for tribal member use,” LaVoie said.
This protection co-exists with a healthy culture of fishing and hunting, one the tribe relies on. Annual tournaments, gear shops, guiding, and hatchery work all thrive on the Qualla Boundary between North Carolina and Tennessee. Fishing brings the tribe $93 million and about 45,000 visitors annually, LaVoie said, much of that revenue from permit sales. They don’t stock fish in the headwaters in order to avoid conservation conflicts.
The tribe has initiated or collaborated on a number of studies and resiliency plans to assess how climate impacts could change the region and the fish so central to the local economy. Storms, fires, and increasing heat are changing the composition of the forests on the Qualla Boundary; LaVoie hopes a return to traditional controlled burns, an ancient Indigenous science, can restore the shady forests that keep the brookies’ waterways cool enough to sustain them.
Even as the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians looks to the future, biologists are assessing just what Helene has done to the brook trout population. Crews with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission spent the summer counting fish and talking to anglers. “It doesn’t take long to find somebody that tells you a story about a grandparent or great grandparent fishing for specks,” Jacob Rash said as he led a team about a mile into the Pisgah National Forest.
The biologists stepped into their waders to ford the stream, which they zapped with low-voltage current. Fish floated to the surface, stunned but unharmed, and the crew carefully put them in buckets. Each was counted, weighed, and measured, then released. Most were browns and rainbows. After an hour of zig-zagging up the stream, the team crew caught an iridescent, red-finned brookie, which swam placidly in a bucket before its turn on the scale. They’ll keep doing this work for many years to understand Helene’s impact on spawning season, tracking generations of brook trout visiting the streams they inhabit, and restoring the habitat they rely upon. They missed some of that work last fall after Helene, and have been playing catch-up.
At the end of the day, the team released that lone brookie. It woke from its stupor and quickly darted away. It was the only one they saw, but still a positive sign, according to Rash. “I never stop being amazed at what these fish can do,” he said. “It’s just cool to see them persist and knowing they’ve been here for so long and they still find a way to make it.”
Back on the Yellowstone Prong, Thomas Champeau didn’t have the same luck. “But you never know!” he said, packing up. ”That’s why they call it ‘fishing’ and not ‘catching,’ right?”
For him, though, it’s not about catching or not catching. The time he spends in the streams is a sort of communion. Getting to share a home with this ancient species on mountains worn down from Himalayan heights over millions of years is reward enough. He only hopes he can help shepherd brookies through this tumultuous moment toward whatever might come next.

Where the Appalachian brook trout vanish, something human goes missing, too

A new report shows that fossil fuel companies own less than 2 percent of renewable energy projects worldwide.
Every year, United Nations member states gather together at the Conference of the Parties, better known as COP, to negotiate international climate agreements and assess global progress toward emissions reduction. The 30th annual COP will begin November 7 in Belém, Brazil, a city of about 2.5 million on the edge of the Amazon. Depending on who you ask, COP is either the world’s best attempt to date at collective climate action or a massive forum for greenwashing: At last year’s COP29, the human rights NGO Global Witness found that oil and gas lobbyists significantly outnumbered negotiating officials from the 10 countries most threatened by climate change.
“We genuinely believe that COPs have been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry, to such an extent that we’re seeing thousands of lobbyists turn up each year,” said Patrick Galey, the head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness. “And they are not lobbying for green energy.”
One long-running argument for giving oil and gas companies a seat at the table at COP has been that, as the providers of the lion’s share of the world’s energy, they must be partners in global decarbonization. “Coalitions have to include the incumbent energy companies, and specifically the oil and gas companies,” Ernest Moniz, who was energy secretary under former president Barack Obama, told CNBC at COP28 in 2023.
But a new study in the academic journal Nature Sustainability appears to bolster Galey’s side of the argument, by demonstrating exactly how little fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energy. The study’s authors analyzed data from Global Energy Monitor, an open source database that tracks oil, gas, coal, and renewable energy use worldwide, to figure out just how involved major fossil fuel companies are in the deployment of renewables.
The researchers fully expected measures of fossil fuel producers’ investment in renewable energy to be low — but not this low: Of the 250 largest oil and gas companies, they found, only 20 percent were operating any renewable energy projects at all. Overall, fossil fuel producers own only 1.42 percent of global renewable energy projects, and those projects are responsible for a measly 0.1 percent of their total energy production.
Marcel Llavero Pasquina, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who authored the study along with Antonio Bontempi, admits that he was surprised by how little renewable energy activity is supported by oil and gas companies, despite going into the research with low expectations. “They’ve been hammering this message that they are part of the transition, that they are an ally in the fight against the climate crisis for so long,” he told Grist. “I was expecting [oil and gas companies to own] around 5 percent.”
Llavaero Pasquina said that he hoped his research would be used to support excluding fossil fuel producers from any role in setting international climate goals.
The research comes as the World Meteorological Association announces that planet-warming carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached record highs this year. It also arrives on the heels of the oil major BP’s decision, earlier this year, to cut renewable energy investment by roughly 70 percent.
“We continually see fossil fuel producers over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to renewable energy spending,” said Galey from Global Witness. “Every COP we have that continues to allow thousands of people who are advocating for the continued use of oil and gas puts the Paris Agreement goals further out of reach. Every COP we allow them to infiltrate incurs a debt to future generations that will be paid in climate impacts.”

Fossil fuel companies say they support the energy transition. New numbers suggest otherwise.

Why one of the world’s greenest countries is betting its future on oil

After the Trump administration threatened countries with tariffs and visa restrictions, a first-ever global carbon tax is left to an uncertain future.
With relatively little fanfare, the first-ever global carbon tax was poised to be formally adopted as an international agreement this year.
The International Maritime Organization, or IMO, the United Nations agency overseeing global shipping, had drafted a net-zero framework to move the sector toward cleaner fuels — a crucial step in the energy transition, since the industry that handles around 90 percent of global trade also accounts for 3 percent of the world’s emissions.
The framework would require shippers to pay a fee per ton of greenhouse gas emissions if their emissions rose above a certain threshold. The fees would then be pooled into a fund and distributed to support the development and uptake of alternative fuels and decarbonization in developing countries. The shipping industry, which had been seeking a consistent regulatory environment and level playing field, was largely supportive of the plan. So were the vast majority of U.N. member countries.
Then, in April, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew from IMO negotiations. As a vote over the framework approached this month, the administration began pressuring other nations to abandon the deal. The administration also released a statement, warning that the U.S. was considering additional tariffs, visa restrictions, additional port fees, and sanctions on officials from countries that voted for the framework. President Trump himself took to Truth Social, calling the proposal a “global green new scam tax on shipping.”
The campaign succeeded. Last week, at the tail end of negotiations, Saudi Arabia abruptly called for a vote to adjourn the IMO meeting for one year without making a decision on the net-zero framework. Since IMO rules dictate that a call to adjourn precedes all other considerations, the proposed delay was voted on immediately and passed with 57 countries in favor and 49 against. (Twenty-one countries abstained from the vote.) That means that it will be another year, at least, before the framework can be officially inked.
Close observers of the IMO’s decarbonization efforts told Grist that U.S. obstruction was a decisive factor in preventing the framework’s adoption.
“It’s fair to say that the retaliatory measures and punitive threats that were shared by the U.S. administration in advance of the meetings played their part,” said Em Fenton, a senior director at Opportunity Green, a U.K.-based climate group that has been closely tracking the IMO negotiations. “The outcome last week is a devastating blow for climate multilateralism.”
The IMO has been inching toward emissions rules for several years, but the effort ramped up in 2023 when the agency’s 176 member countries agreed to a greenhouse gas strategy that would commit them to net-zero emissions by about 2050. In order to reach that goal, countries began negotiations on legally binding measures that included a standard capping the carbon-intensity of fuel used by shipping companies, as well as an economic measure to enforce that standard, which could take the form of a levy or carbon trading mechanism.
On the economic measure, countries were split. An ambitious coalition of more than 64 countries, including European Union countries, the United Kingdom, Pacific and Caribbean nations, and African countries, proposed a relatively high flat tax on all maritime emissions. Under their proposal, every ton of their greenhouse gas emissions would be priced at the same level across the board. Another set of countries led by China, however, were in favor of a carbon trading mechanism that allowed countries to offset their emissions through carbon credits. (China and other emerging economies are large exporters, and a flat fee, they argued, would hurt businesses and reduce their competitiveness.)
Ultimately, the countries landed on a compromise with a two-tier system: High emitters in the top tier could engage in some amount of carbon trading. Those in the bottom tier would pay the levy based on a fee per ton of emissions. And those who comply with the zero or near-zero emissions fuel requirements would receive financial rewards. This approach became the net-zero framework that was supposed to be voted into effect this year.
The shipping industry largely welcomed the framework. For one, the industry has had record profits in recent years. A report by Opportunity Green found that 139 of the world’s largest shipping companies, which make up more than 90 percent of the global fleet, made $340 billion in profits from 2019 to 2023. The 10 largest companies were effectively taxed at less than 10 percent on average — far lower than the average global corporation tax rate of 21.5 percent.
The industry was also eager for regulatory certainty. Ahead of the meeting last week, a group of trade organizations representing the shipping industry issued a statement calling for the adoption of the framework. “Only global rules will decarbonize a global industry,” they noted. “Without the framework, shipping would risk a growing patchwork of unilateral regulations, increasing costs without effectively contributing to decarbonization.”
With the framework now in jeopardy, the path forward is unclear. Although the shipping talks won’t resume for another year, Fenton said countries should push for additional technical clarity during other interim meetings to reach a consensus and ensure the framework is adopted next year.
Meanwhile, cities and ports across the world have been taking steps to green their infrastructure. Alisa Kreynes, a director of the ports and shipping program at C40, a global network of mayors taking climate action, pointed to various initiatives already underway to reduce carbon emissions from the shipping industry. Cities have built green shipping corridors, which are trade routes where ports and other partners work together to transition to zero or near-zero emission fuels. Ports have also begun establishing stricter emission standards for trucks, and supported the development of offshore wind.
“The way we are reacting is that cities continue to deliver a just maritime transition, despite what happened at the IMO last week,” Kreynes said. “The cities will continue to push forward with advancing equitable port and shipping decarbonization.”
But those measures won’t put a significant dent in the industry’s primary source of emissions, which is the massive, fuel-hungry boats that crisscross the globe delivering goods. And the collapse of IMO negotiations rings as a warning about the fragility of international cooperation. The dynamic could continue at COP30, the international climate conference taking place in Belém, Brazil, next month.
“The sort of playbook of delay-and-obfuscate is more likely to be on the table and visible at COP30 than it would have been if it had not prevailed here at the IMO,” said Fenton. “And that is hugely disappointing.”

The entire world was ready to reduce shipping emissions. Then Trump stepped in.

Clean energy expansion could destroy this crucial climate solution.
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some from as far south as Antarctica, to breed and lay their eggs.
The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.
Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.
Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.
The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”
“It’s the world’s temperature regulator,” said Valérie Courtois, executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which works on Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada. “It’s like we have a big fridge on top of the planet that is helping keep everything the way that it should be.”
But now, the fridge is hanging open.
Though they cover only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, peatlands store nearly one-third of the world’s carbon. And these ecosystems around the world are vulnerable to development and destruction. Today, only 17 percent of the world’s peatlands fall within a protected area, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society.
The world’s peatlands are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
In northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat conservationists is mining for rare-earth minerals. Part of the Hudson Bay peatland sits atop the Ring of Fire, a mineral deposit containing nickel, chromium, and other metals used in clean energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries. Some experts see the minerals there as key to Canada’s clean-energy transition and a crucial part of the fight against climate change. And it’s true; minerals like the ones found around Hudson Bay are necessary for solar panels, batteries, and other technologies we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.
But in the process of mining them, we may just destroy a crucial climate regulator.
The government of Ontario, where the Ring of Fire is located, sees mining in the area as necessary for Canadian energy independence, especially amid President Donald Trump’s trade wars. “This is how we make ourselves less reliant on the United States,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this summer.
And already, the area’s peatlands are at risk from mining expeditions, which experts say have disturbed the ecosystem even though no mineshafts have yet been sunk. First Nations and conservation groups are working to protect the lands around Hudson Bay, but it’s a race against the clock as mining exploration ramps up with support from the Canadian government.
The carbon stored in the Hudson Bay peatlands took thousands of years to build up, said Lawrence Martin, director of lands and resources for the Mushgewok Council, a group representing several First Nations in the area. If it’s released now, it could take thousands of years to replace. And if humans want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we don’t have that kind of time.
“These are the lungs of the earth,” Martin told me. “If you start tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.”
The power of peat
Peat is a kind of soil that forms whenever organic matter builds up faster than it can decompose, said Dan Zarin, executive director for forests and climate change at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The bogs of northern Europe, famous resting places for uncannily preserved bog bodies, are made of peat. But peat can also be found in the United States, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York and the huge Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.
The soil also forms in the tropics, often in damp, forested areas where layers of different plant species stack on top of one another. In Panama, for example, peat can form giant domes, several meters deep and thousands of years old.
In colder climates like northern Canada, peatlands are usually created by colonies of sphagnum moss — a simple, easily overlooked plant that’s also a climate hero.
The structure of sphagnum includes large, empty cells that make the plant into a kind of sponge, absorbing up to 20 times its weight in water. Moss was so well-known for its absorbent properties that First Nations peoples once used it for menstrual products and diapers, Courtois said. That absorbency helps create the wet, low-oxygen conditions that slow down decomposition and aid in carbon capture.
There’s more carbon stored in peatlands than in all the trees in the world — or about two-third of the world’s petroleum reserves — Zarin said. The peatlands in the Congo Basin store the equivalent of several years’ worth of carbon emissions for the entire world. That’s why peat is so critical to the world’s climate future, Zarin said, and yet, “it’s not really getting anything near the attention it deserves.”
Around the world, ecosystems like tropical forests and mangroves are much more likely to be protected than peatlands, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. And nearly a quarter of peatlands are under heavy pressure from human development.
In Indonesia, for example, forested peatlands are being cleared, drained, and planted with palms to feed the rapidly growing global demand for palm oil, a common ingredient in products from toothpaste to peanut butter. In Patagonia, they’re threatened by urban development, Jorge Hoyos-Santillán, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, told me. Around the world, peat is harvested and sold for use in potting soil — an 8-quart bag retails for less than $10 at US hardware stores, where Americans can purchase it for their berry patches and flower beds.
And now, increasingly, peatlands are at risk, as governments and private industry seek new sources of the minerals needed for the batteries and related technologies that will likely power the world in the future.
Why damaging peatlands is so dangerous
Around Hudson Bay, conservation groups are watching with concern as mining companies begin to survey fragile wetland ecosystems. “People focus on the mining, but there’s a lot of damage that occurs before mining,” Sumner of the Wildlands League told me.
Mining exploration requires test drilling and the use of heavy machinery on a sensitive landscape, which can change its hydrology, causing areas of peatland to dry out, Sumner said.
When peat dries out, its carbon-storing superpower becomes a liability.
As water leaves the environment, decomposition starts again, and the soil begins to release all the carbon it’s stored up over thousands of years. You can think of it like the burning of fossil fuels, Julie Loisel, a professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me. “It took a long time to put that carbon down into the soil, and then you really quickly release it back to the atmosphere.”
Drying peat also turns it into a frighteningly powerful fuel for fires — in fact, communities in Ireland and elsewhere have long burned peat as an alternative to coal. Today, peatland fires can be especially insidious, because even when they appear to be extinguished, they can continue to burn underground for months and re-spark — a phenomenon known as a “zombie fire.”
Peatland fires can release 100 times the carbon of a wildfire and produce large amounts of noxious smoke. In Indonesia in the 2010s, peat fires released as much carbon in a single day as the entire emissions of the United States, Zarin of the Wildlife Conservation Society told me. Fires are already burning in the peatlands of northern Canada, spurred on by climate change, and experts fear they’ll only become more devastating if the landscape isn’t protected.
And now, research indicates we may have entered a new age of fire — where massive blazes around the world will be more frequent and destructive. It’s even more urgent to prevent peatlands from drying out and becoming fuel for these conflagrations.
“We want to keep the peatlands doing what they do, which is breathing for the planet,” Sumner said.
Protecting the world’s climate regulator
The carbon calculus involved in trading peatlands for EV batteries is a complicated one.
But conservation groups say mining in Canada’s Ring of Fire is less important for the clean energy transition than proponents have claimed. One issue is the remoteness of the area: the mining sites are currently accessible only by ice-road or float-plane, and a plan to build a major road to the area could take a decade, Sumner, of the Wildlands League, said.
Other sites in Ontario have more critical minerals, are more accessible, and are located in areas that are already environmentally degraded, Sumner said. Mining in the Ring of Fire “feels more like a dream than it does a reality, and it’s not going to meet the need for energy transition in any short timeline, which is what we need,” Sumner said.
Meanwhile, First Nations have been at work for years on their own plans for the Hudson Bay lowlands. The Mushkegowuk Council is leading an effort to establish an Indigenous-led conservation project in northern Ontario that could protect peatlands and other ecosystems, as well. The Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation has also proposed a protected area including peatlands around the Fawn River in northern Ontario.
“What makes an Indigenous approach to planning is that you look at what you need to keep in those ecosystems as opposed to looking at what you can take,” Courtois of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative said. Under such an approach, Indigenous leaders can also identify less vulnerable areas where activities like mining could occur.
“The more that provinces embrace the practice of land use planning — or land relationship planning as we like to call it — the better the conditions are for the exploration of potential development,” Courtois said.
Representatives of the Mushkegowuk Council have also said mining could potentially coexist with conservation. “You do need to reach into the ground to pull out the resources necessary to keep us fed,” the Council’s Martin told me. “But we need to do this with great conscience.”
The fate of the conservation project remains unclear, however, and Martin says the Council is still working to get the Ontario government on board.
Meanwhile, peatlands around the world remain at risk, as lack of knowledge and political will collide with economic development. In some parts of the world, they’ve “been treated as wasteland areas,” Zarin said. Indeed, the swampy bogs of the global north are a common setting for horror stories, seen as a place humans should avoid and fear.
The first step toward changing that is a better understanding of peatlands, experts say. These ecosystems are often in remote locations that are difficult for humans to navigate, and since peat lies beneath the surface, it’s often invisible even to researchers. The peatlands in the Congo Basin, for example, were only documented by scientists in the 2010s, and their full size — as big as England and Wales combined — was revealed only in 2023. Those discoveries have helped drive funding and conservation efforts to the area, said Hoyos-Santillán, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Beyond understanding, people around the world need an appreciation of peatlands and their value, conservationists say. “My hope is that the province of Ontario and other places that have these sorts of landscapes look at them not just as some sort of breadbasket for the development of the province, but also see it as a feature of who they are,” Courtois said.
“You can’t destroy everything for capitalism,” Martin said. “You have to be able to save enough for your children, for your future generations, for them to enjoy life.”

The humble plant that could save the world — or destroy it

Applications are open until October 31 to receive funding to attend major Indigenous gatherings in New York and Geneva next year.
The United Nations has opened up a new round of funding to support Indigenous peoples to attend two major convenings in New York City and Geneva next year.
The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, happens every year in New York and is scheduled for April 20-May 1, 2026. Representatives of Indigenous nations and peoples from all over the world gather to discuss issues ranging from language loss to climate change. It’s a unique opportunity for Indigenous advocates to bring global attention to the challenges facing their communities, strengthen relationships with other Native peoples, and influence global policy. This year’s theme is focused on the health of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the context of conflict, and participants are also expected to discuss a report on the rights of Indigenous peoples in the midst of the climate crisis.
The Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or EMRIP, holds another convening scheduled for July 13-17 next summer in Geneva. The Expert Mechanism is made up of seven experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, and its annual meeting provides another chance for Indigenous advocates to raise concerns about rights violations.
The U.N. Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples has limited grant funding to pay for attendees’ transportation, accommodation, and registration fees for either of these gatherings. The Voluntary Fund wants to hear from applicants who have a track record of advocating on behalf of their communities and are eager to share their perspectives internationally.
“Your community’s wisdom and advocacy deserve to be heard where decisions affecting Indigenous peoples are made,” the Voluntary Fund’s call for applications says. “This fund exists specifically to ensure financial barriers don’t silence Indigenous voices in international spaces.”
What to know about the application process
You can apply online
You will need a resume, a copy of your passport, and a letter of recommendation from a leader in your community or organization
The deadline is October 31
Applicants with financial need will have priority as well as those who can show they represent their communities and have a record of working on Indigenous rights issues
People with disabilities and LGBTQ+ individuals are especially encouraged to apply
For more information on the criteria and process, check out the call for applications
Further questions can be directed to Morse Caoagas Flores, secretary of the U.N. Voluntary Fund for Indigenous Peoples, at morse.flores@un.org.
Curious about what happens at UNPFII?
Grist and other Indigenous outlets cover the U.N. Permanent Forum in New York every year, and our archives can help you learn about what to expect:
Indigenous delegates at the UN raise alarm on voluntary isolated peoples (2025)
Indigenous advocates at the UN say the green transition is neither clean nor just (2024)
The largest global gathering of Indigenous leaders begins today at the UN. Here’s what you need to know. (2023)
The plan to ensure Indigenous peoples have a voice at the UN (2022)
The United Nations and several nongovernmental organizations also offer training sessions for people who want to learn about how to effectively engage at the forum. Last year, Project Access Indigenous Partnership held training sessions for both UNPFII and EMRIP in partnership with the U.N. The organization also provides a free, self-directed online course on Indigenous advocacy at the United Nations.
In his recent book, Nothing More of This Land, Aquinnah Wampanoag writer and former Grist fellow Joseph Lee wrote about what it was like to attend the permanent forum, where he observed both the potential depth and limitations of global Indigenous advocacy.
“The forum itself, which has been around for over 20 years, came after decades of international advocacy for Indigenous people to have a more prominent role on the international stage,” he wrote. “There’s nowhere else in the world where so many Indigenous people from around the world can come together to share stories, ideas, and community with one another.”

Want to go to the UN’s biggest gathering of Indigenous peoples? Here’s how.

Make way for the "cheap energy" agenda.
Nearly a year after the 2024 election, Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong. In the midst of this soul-searching, a new piece of advice has appeared: “Don’t say climate change.”
That’s the takeaway from a recent poll by the Searchlight Institute, a new Democratic think tank. Americans said they see climate change as a problem, but it’s rarely one of their top issues — voters in battleground states are more concerned with affordability and health care. But when asked which issue they think the Democratic Party prioritizes, climate change was number one.
This mismatch might explain, at least in part, why Democrats often get portrayed as out of touch. “Advocates and elected officials should understand that their messages are actively weakened by a focus on ‘climate’ over affordability and low energy prices, and that voters are looking for immediate help with rising costs rather than solutions to abstract problems,” Searchlight’s post about the polling said.
The results didn’t surprise Representative Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat and longtime climate champion who’s been making the case that clean energy can lower electricity bills. Casten recently unveiled draft legislation called the Cheap Energy Agenda, along with Representative Mike Levin, a California Democrat.
“There’s no obvious electoral upside in being really smart on energy and climate policy,” Casten said. But he’s still talking about climate change all the time. “Polling doesn’t tell you what you talk about,” he said. “It tells you how you talk about it.”
Advocacy groups are on board, too, with the League of Conservation Voters, Climate Power, and others running an ad blitz this summer blaming Republicans for increasing energy costs.
Over the last decade, activists and organizations pushed Democratic politicians to take climate change seriously. The youth-led Sunrise Movement rose to prominence as a force in climate politics in 2018, when activists stormed into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding a Green New Deal. They eventually succeeded in helping to elevate climate change in the party’s platform. Democrats even passed the country’s most ambitious climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, in 2022 to accelerate the adoption of clean energy through tax credits and incentives — a sweeping effort dismantled by Republicans this year.
Searchlight’s pragmatic, follow-the-polls approach has been interpreted by some Democrats as a push to abandon what they believe in. Tré Easton, vice president for public policy at Searchlight, sees it differently. “It’s not that Democrats should just jettison their long-held policy beliefs and their values,” he said. “It’s that there needs to be a recalibration of how they make those pitches to voters. Because clearly, I think the results of the 2024 election would demonstrate that something’s not working.”
In fact, it appears that climate change had already started to vanish from the national conversation, well before Searchlight’s poll came out. Media coverage of the topic has dropped roughly in half since 2023, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. His group’s polling has found that compared to previous years, Americans say they are hearing less about climate change in the news, on social media, and from people they know. They’re not seeking out as much information on their own, either: There’s been a sharp decline in Google News searches for “climate change” since 2023.
What climate change?
Google News search interest in “climate change,” percent change from January 2023
 Jan 2023Jul 2023Jan 2024Jul 2024Jan 2025Jul 2025–60%–40%–20%+0%+20%+40%+60%
Source: Google Trends
Clayton Aldern / Grist
“The fact is that we talk about the things that we collectively say are important,” Leiserowitz said. “The conclusion most people then will draw is that if nobody’s talking about climate change, then it can’t be that important.” It’s out of sight, out of mind.
Leiserowitz argues that the 2024 election was not a referendum on climate change. Most Americans are still worried about global warming, according to the Yale program’s most recent polling. “They had not changed their views and concerns about climate change at all,” Leiserowitz said. “What has changed is elite discourse about it.”
It’s not just Democratic politicians who are talking about climate change less. The progressive left is also turning its attention to other pressing concerns. The Sunrise Movement, for example, has switched its focus from climate change to fighting for the right to free speech and protest under President Donald Trump, training its members in nonviolent resistance tactics. Progressive activists are pushing back against the administration’s crackdown on immigration, protesting outside ICE facilities, and the deployment of the National Guard in cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C. Over the weekend, an estimated 7 million people participated in “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration, according to the organizers.
“At least for us — and I don’t know how many others are thinking the exact same way — but it’s like the terrain of authoritarianism, the terrain of fascism, is the thing that we are trying to address, so that we can actually be able to fight for everything else that we’re trying to fight for,” said Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s executive director. Still, she said, it’s important not to lose sight of their signature issue.
“Nobody wants to walk away from the issue of climate change,” Shiney-Ajay said. “I think everyone is pretty clear-eyed that we need to constantly be reminding people that we are doing this because we are young people fighting for a livable future.”
Leiserowitz said that Searchlight’s advice (“How to Talk about Climate Change: Don’t”) fails to distinguish between climate advocates and Democrats running for office in swing states. It might make sense for a politician in a tight race to tailor their message to the polls, but climate organizations have different goals besides getting Democrats elected, he said. “If your goal is to get overall societal action on climate change, it’s crazy not to talk about it.”
Searchlight and others dispute the idea that Democrats have to talk about climate change to get political action on it, arguing that it’s easier to pass legislation on an issue that hasn’t been dragged into a polarizing national discussion. “There’s a lot of action that was very important for climate change, for example, that happened in what’s been called ‘secret’ or ‘quiet Congress,’ behind the scenes,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. He pointed to the growth of bipartisan support for nuclear power legislation as an example. Last year, members of Congress from both parties overwhelmingly backed the ADVANCE Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden, aimed at speeding up the development of new reactors.
There’s increasing recognition that the way politicians have talked about climate change, full of jargon and abstract language, is also part of the problem. “The way to victory is to talk about price,” said Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawai‘i Democrat who has been a vocal advocate for climate action, at a recent New York Times event. “You could talk about the planetary emergency and mitigation and adaptation, and you could throw in some environmental justice rhetoric, and by the time you’re done talking, people think you don’t care about them.”
While the “cheap energy” argument is in vogue, not everyone is convinced it’s resonating with voters. “Voters can tell when affordability is an afterthought, and it doesn’t neutralize the toxicity of the term ‘climate,’” Searchlight’s post says.
“We framed it in a particularly provocative way to sort of get conversation going,” Easton said. But he thinks there’s still room for Democrats to talk about the subject. “If you have an issue that’s as important as climate change, but it’s become polarized, you have to think creatively about how you address it from a policy perspective.”

Why Democrats aren’t talking about climate change much anymore

After a political standoff between President Trump and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, the state is now moving ahead with a billion-dollar project to contain invasive carp.
This story is a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.
The silver carp is big, unwieldy, and requires Joe Greendyk to use both his hands to measure it before tossing the fish overboard into the Illinois River. The nearly 2-foot-long invasive fish, which now overruns the river, has become the centerpiece of a state-run monitoring program to rein in its exploding numbers.
“They’re pretty slimy and pretty strong,” Greendyk, a seasonal fisheries technician with the Illinois Natural History Survey, or INHS, said with his hands caked in fish slime. “So if you don’t grip them right, they’re pretty hard to control.”
For decades, local, state, and federal officials have worried that the voracious filter feeder, which can outeat and outgrow native fish, could bypass Chicago and breach the Great Lakes. The fear is that the carp, which leap out of the water and startle boaters, could reduce populations of native species that locals like to fish for and wreak havoc on the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem and the multibillion-dollar tourism, boating, and fishing industries that rely on it.
But the fight to keep the carp under control and out of the Great Lakes may now be getting easier. Last week, the state of Illinois announced it had acquired land needed to move along the Brandon Road Interbasin Project, a $1.15 billion barricade aimed at keeping the aquatic menace from entering the channel that connects the Mississippi River Basin with the Great Lakes.
The Brandon Road Interbasin Project, or BRIP, is an underwater defense system long hailed as the solution to the carp problem. The project, designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is slated to be built in the Des Plaines River, which connects the Illinois River to Chicago’s shipping canal, near suburban Joliet. The lock and dam upgrade will deploy a bubble wall, acoustic blasts, an electric barrier, and a flushing mechanism to keep the carp from passing through.
The infrastructure project hit a wall earlier this year amid friction between President Trump and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker over federal funding and immigration enforcement. Trump froze more than $100 million in federally appropriated funds promised to Illinois. In response, Pritzker delayed an initial land transfer of a 50-acre stretch of riverbed from Midwest Generation, the former operator of a coal-fired power plant near the site of the proposed project, to the state. Without it, the Army Corps couldn’t begin site preparation for the project.
But by the spring, the Army Corps told Illinois officials it had secured funds to begin clearing riverbed rocks, and Pritzker and the White House resumed efforts to get the project off the ground. Allen Marshall, a spokesperson for the Army Corps’ Rock Island District, confirmed that phase of the project was completed in July.
Tensions rose again at the end of the summer over Trump’s threats to send in the national guard into Chicago to address crime and increase immigration enforcement. In late August, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Pritzker was not cooperating on efforts to get rid of the carp. “The governor of Illinois is affected maybe more than anybody else,” Trump said. “I think until I get that request from that guy, I’m not going to do anything about it.”
Nonetheless, the megaproject is on the move. Last week, Illinois officials announced they had reached a deal on September 30 for the two small upland parcels totaling 2.75 acres required for the project. The donation may, however, end up costing Illinois taxpayers.
Previous reporting from WBEZ and Grist revealed longstanding concerns from state officials over coal ash contamination, the toxic byproduct of burning coal, at the site. Pritzker cited concerns about the cost of cleaning up the toxic mess in a 2024 letter to the Corps.
“It would be irresponsible to write a blank check to the Corps of Engineers or any other project manager without having a better understanding of what we’re agreeing to for the long term,” Pritzker’s spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources confirmed that state officials are currently developing a plan to investigate the site and are reviewing whether any additional land is needed.
But despite these concerns, regional leaders are pushing funding for the project forward. Earlier this month, Pritzker joined six other Great Lakes state governors in submitting a letter to Congress, calling BRIP a “national priority” and urging lawmakers to provide full federal financing for the project.
The invasive carp — a family of fish that also includes the bighead carp, black carp, and grass carp — first turned up in the Mississippi River about 50 years ago. Experts say fish began overwhelming the waterway after escaping Arkansas fish farms, where they were imported to help limit algae and weed growth. In the intervening years, the fish expanded their range throughout the river and its tributaries and began dominating the Illinois River in the 1990s.
In 2019, the INHS partnered with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to establish a multiagency program to track the relative abundance of the carp up and down the Illinois River. As part of the program, crews of ecologists catch and track the health of the carp and native fish every year between June and October.
The data helps the state stay ahead of the carp. If carp populations are surging in one stretch of the river, Illinois officials can adapt the incentivized harvesting efforts, the state’s main form of carp control. The program includes contracting with commercial fishermen for targeted catches and paying an extra 10 cents per pound of carp. The effort appears to be working.
“We’re making an increasingly large dent in the population, according to these data,” said Michael Spear, a quantitative ecologist with the INHS. “That incentive seems to be paying off.” He pointed to the area near Starved Rock State, one of the northernmost stretches of the over 270-mile-long river, where he has noted drastic declines in the carp population over the last five years. The state’s Department of Natural Resources did not provide detailed estimates of the carp’s decline at the time of publication.
Spear watched from the back of the sampling boat as Greendyk and the rest of the crew wrapped up their work for the day. While the data is promising, he said that nobody wants to find out what happens if the carp make it upstream of Chicago.
“The carp may not be in some of these other Great Lakes states,” Spear said. “But there’s a lot of attention from those states, because if they get into the Great Lakes, it’s going to become a much more regional problem.”

Racing against time, Illinois clears a major hurdle in containing an invasive fish

Advocates are questioning why so many applicants from the flood-ravaged county in Texas have not received federal disaster help. Nonprofits are trying to fill in the gaps.
This story was originally published by the Texas Tribune.
Only about one-fifth of applicants for federal disaster assistance from Texas’ Kerr County have been deemed eligible to get financial help so far, leaving hundreds without governmental aid more than three months after deadly floods ravaged the county on July 4.
As of October 11, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials had referred only 46 percent of Kerr County applications for its Individuals and Households Program to the next stage, where they are evaluated to receive money, a Texas Tribune analysis of federal data shows.
That means 1,749 applications out of 3,228 still hadn’t been reviewed past the initial stage.
And among those from Kerr County that officials did review for specific funding, FEMA found only 704 applications eligible — or about 22 percent. The agency denied 775, largely because people weren’t responding or were withdrawing their applications.
By comparison, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace researcher Sarah Labowitz found that following 170 disasters from 2015 through May 2024, FEMA found 39 percent of applicants for individual and household aid were eligible.
The low proportions of referrals and approvals stand in contrast to nine other central Texas counties that saw significant flood damage around the holiday weekend. The other counties had fewer applicants and reported less extensive damage, and have received a higher proportion of approvals from FEMA. The agency has approved $37 million so far.
The disparity has advocates questioning what’s going on in Kerr County, where most of the flood deaths occurred when the Guadalupe River surged up in the early morning hours of July 4.
Kerr’s FEMA aid approval rates lowest among affected counties
As of Oct. 11, more than half of applications from Kerr County for FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program were not referred for aid. Of the more than 1,700 applications, 46% were referred and only about 22%, or 704, have been approved, the lowest among counties affected by the July floods.
Of the 3,228 applications from Kerr County,
1,749, or 54%, of applications were not referred for FEMA aid.
REFERRED
24%
22%
54%
Only 704 applications, or 22%, have been approved for aid.
Four other counties affected by the floods have higher referral and approval rates.
Tom Green County
Travis County
1,922 applications
1,177 applications
70%
23%
27%
38%
35%
Williamson County
Burnet County
748 applications
726 applications
25%
71%
43%
36%
Of the 3,228 applications from Kerr County,
1,749, or 54%, of applications were not referred for FEMA aid.
REFERRED
54%
24%
22%
Only 704 applications, or 22%, have been approved for aid.
Four other counties affected by the floods have higher referral and approval rates.
Not referred
Referred but not approved
Referred and approved
Tom Green County
1,922 applications
23%
70%
Travis County
1,177 applications
27%
38%
35%
Williamson County
748 applications
43%
36%
Burnet County
726 applications
25%
71%
Source: FEMA Individuals and Households Program
Credit: Carla Astudillo
FEMA did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The agency is not fully operational during the federal government shutdown; the White House earlier this year called for “a full-scale review” of FEMA, which President Donald Trump has threatened to eliminate.
After a disaster, FEMA money is meant to help cover costs for hotels or rent, fixing homes to make them liveable, and medical and transportation needs. Without it, people lose an important resource, especially if they don’t have insurance, savings, or credit, said Maddie Sloan, director of the Disaster Recovery and Fair Housing Project with the nonprofit policy and advocacy group Texas Appleseed, which has also been tracking the approvals.
“If you have lost everything and you don’t have access to other resources, this is where you can get help with housing, where you can get help with the car you need to get to work, with the computer and books your kid needs to go back to school,” Sloan said.
In Kerr County, nonprofits are helping to fill the gaps. First Presbyterian Church of Kerrville has given out $250,000 that it received in private donations for repairing rooftops, replacing vehicles, or covering rent, among other things. It got an additional $557,500 from the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, which raised a whopping $100 million and counting to help the area recover.
Bailey Havis, a case manager at the church, has heard agonizing stories from flood victims as she helps them: a mom who survived by clinging to what she called “the tree of life”; people whose family reunion happened to be at the River Inn, among the first places hit by the flooding; a travel nurse staying in a travel trailer whose husband invited his parents to stay nearby for the July 4 holiday. His parents died. They also lost the trailer.
“These are our people and we want to get them to full recovery — which is many years down the road — but physical recovery as soon as possible,” Havis said.
The foundation is now covering the salary for Havis, a Kerrville native who grew up going to the church. She’s a pediatric nurse by training whom the church hired soon after the flooding to help connect people with resources. She said the foundation could help without requiring them to wade through a mountain of paperwork.
Even people who have received FEMA aid have felt some disappointment at what they received compared to their need, said the church’s pastor, Jasiel Hernandez Garcia.
For some, he said, “It’s really minimal.”
Most denials because of non-response or voluntary withdrawal
Why FEMA isn’t referring Kerr County applications for evaluation is not revealed in the data, but they have some commonalities.
They are predominantly over 50 and largely applying online, as opposed to through a call center, the Tribune’s analysis found. Most of them reported damage in Kerrville.
For those who have been denied aid by FEMA, the top reason is failing to respond to the agency or voluntary withdrawal.
Advocates say cell service in the area is spotty and not everyone has easy access to the internet and computers to communicate with FEMA. People may not even have a phone after the disaster or may not be comfortable navigating online forms. They may not be emotionally prepared to gather all the necessary information.
Without federal assistance, people may leave the area because they can’t afford to make it liveable again, said Brittanny Perrigue Gomez, an attorney and disaster benefits team manager with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. Being short on money for home repair can also snowball into other problems if people get behind on other bills to pay.
“Individuals need to be able to start to financially recover, and the first way you do that is by getting yourself back into a safe place to live,” Gomez said.
The organization isnow working on more than 140 cases from Kerr and the surrounding counties, many of them needing help with FEMA applications. Common issues include people lacking clear titles to their manufactured homes or RVs, or homes they informally inherited. Others have told the group they feel they aren’t getting enough money to make their homes safe to live in, Gomez said.
FEMA no longer sends people knocking door-to-door to tell flood victims how they can sign up for help and answer questions on what is needed to apply, Sloan said. It’s also not clear if those who are denied understand why, or that they can appeal FEMA’s decision. And FEMA now requires an email address for people to apply — which not everyone has.
“It’s yet another burden on somebody who has just been through one of the worst days of their life,” Sloan said.
Nonprofits jumped to action
Austin Dickson, the community foundation’s chief executive officer, had been hosting family at his home in the Kerrville area for the July 4 holiday. The night before the storm, they played board games and went to sleep late. By the time Dickson woke up, had a cup of coffee, and looked at his phone, he saw lots of texts and alerts. He started to realize something bad had happened.
The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country staff knew from helping after past disasters that philanthropy could play an important role. They created a relief fund at 9:48 a.m. on July 4.
“We had no idea what was to come,” Dickson said.
The fund took off as the scope of the devastation became clear, Dickson said. More than 100 people died in Kerr County, including generations of families spending the holiday by the river and 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic.
The foundation worked with attention and speed; it doled out $11.9 million by the end of July to local nonprofits to provide cash assistance to victims and small businesses and to help volunteer fire departments and shelters. Families on average got $5,000 in those first weeks.
“Help got where it needed to go,” Dickson said, adding: “The [financial aid] resources of government are not in operation in week one and week two, and so there is a need in those early days, where there’s resources, for philanthropy to step in early. That was what we chose to do, and I think it was the right call.”
Next the foundation supported various long-term housing, mental health, and community resources. It gave out money to help repair homes, replace RVs used as primary residences, pay rent for temporary housing, and fund 28 case managers to be hired by various nonprofits. Those case managers would aim to work with the 673 flood victims who signed up with the foundation to get help.
“Every dollar matters,” said Michelle Meyer, an associate professor at Texas A&M and director of the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. “The folks that usually end up in the nonprofit system are usually folks who are uninsured, underinsured. They might have folks in their house with disabilities. Elderly [folks] a lot of times end up in the nonprofit recovery space. You need every dollar to try to get folks back.”
Airbnb.org, a nonprofit that Airbnb founded five years ago, provided emergency housing for several hundred first responders and people with flooded homes. The foundation gave the group $1.6 million to set up housing for up to a year for 60 people or families with flood-damaged homes, especially those with tight finances.
“It’s those people who really we want to make sure that they don’t fall through the cracks,” said Christoph Gorder, the nonprofit’s executive director.
Disclosure: Texas Appleseed has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations, and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

FEMA has denied or not advanced most Kerr County aid applications after deadly July 4 flood

Dominion Energy’s 2.6 GW project off Virginia’s coast is progressing fast. The utility has a new, more definitive target to plug into the grid: March 2026.
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
About 30 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia, workers have been building America’s largest offshore wind farm at a breakneck pace. The project will start feeding power to the grid by March — the most definitive start date provided by its developer yet.
“First power will occur in Q1 of next year,” Dominion Energy spokesperson Jeremy Slayton told Canary Media. ​“And we are still on schedule to complete by late 2026.”
In an August earnings call, Dominion Energy CEO Robert Blue provided a vague window of ​“early 2026” when asked when the 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, or CVOW, project would start generating renewable power for the energy-hungry state.
As of the end of September, Dominion had installed all 176 turbine foundations — ​“a big, important milestone,” per Slayton. That accomplishment involved pile-driving 98 foundations into the soft seabed during the five-month stretch when such work is permitted. Good weather helped the work move along quickly, as did the Atlantic Ocean’s unusually quiet hurricane season.
Speed is key when building wind projects under the eye of a president who has called turbines ​​“ugly” and ​​“terrible for tourism” — and who has followed up with attempts to dismantle the industry.
Had CVOW not finished foundation installation by the end of this month, turbine construction would have been delayed until next spring. Federal permitting restricts pile-driving to a May-through-October window to protect migrating North Atlantic right whales. Such a delay would have made CVOW more vulnerable to the wrath of the Trump administration, which has already issued stop-work orders to two offshore wind farms under construction.
But Slayton said the threat of President Donald Trump’s interference doesn’t concern him. CVOW is, after all, 1 of only 2 in-progress offshore wind projects that hasn’t been directly attacked by the president.
“Our project has enjoyed bipartisan support from the beginning,” he said, pointing to backing from some of the state’s leading Republicans, including Governor Glenn Youngkin and U.S. Representative Jen Kiggans.
Kiggans, who represents the politically moderate Virginia Beach area, brought her concerns about Trump’s escalating war on wind to the House floor last month, when Congress returned from recess. She called CVOW ​“important to Virginia,” and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, later told reporters that he relayed Kiggans’ message directly to Trump.
“I understand the priority for Virginians and we want to do right by them, so we’ll see,” Johnson told Politico​’s E&E News, in a comment that broke from an anti–offshore wind narrative that’s taken root among many of his fellow House Republicans.
The project is crucial for helping the state meet a deluge of new electricity demand, as Virginia is at the center of the nationwide boom in data-center construction. CVOW will provide a huge amount of carbon-free power to the state and Dominion, its largest utility — helping both keep pace with rising demand without having to burn more polluting fossil fuels.
Kiggans also tied the success of CVOW to the needs of Virginia’s military installations.
“I always speak about that project in light of the national security benefit and that benefit to Naval Air Station Oceana,” Kiggans said last month in an interview with WAVY, a Virginia news station, noting that a partnership with Dominion is ​“giving Naval Air Station Oceana a $500 million power grid upgrade.”
Dominion has already spent $6 billion on the monumental effort to build CVOW, which has been 12 years in the making. Almost $1 billion of that investment has flowed to the local economy, creating 802 full- and part-time jobs in the state’s Hampton Roads region, according to G.T. Hollett, Dominion Energy’s director of offshore wind.
CVOW’s benefits are being felt nationwide too.
“The project has already created 2,000 direct and indirect American jobs and generated $2 billion in economic activity, strengthening the nation’s manufacturing supply chains and our regional economy,” said Katharine Kollins, president of Southeastern Wind Coalition.
Now Dominion will turn to the final phase of construction: turbine installation. The work is made possible by Charybdis — the first U.S.-built, Jones Act–compliant wind-turbine installation vessel — which arrived in Virginia’s Portsmouth Marine Terminal last month.
“When Charybdis is loaded up, it will have all the components to install four turbines with each trip,” said Slayton, who noted that the pace of the build is well timed given Virginia’s data center boom. The state is facing ​“record growth and energy demand … maybe you’ve heard.”

America’s biggest offshore wind farm will be online in 6 months

A pilot project in Maryland is using EVs to create a cleaner, more resilient, and more affordable energy supply.
Depending on whom you’re asking, renewable energy and electric vehicles will either destroy the grid or save it. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, true enough, while a gas-fired power plant can generate electricity any time. That supposed precarity of renewables will get even shakier, critics argue, as Americans ditch conventional vehicles for electric ones, which will draw ever more power from an already strained grid.
Luckily, that’s not a realistic scenario because of what renewables and EVs have in common: giant batteries. Solar and wind farms are plugging into huge banks of them to store energy to use as needed, fixing their intermittency challenge. (Engineers are turning Earth itself into an even bigger battery.) And a growing number of cars with cords feature vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, also known as bidirectional charging. They can draw clean power when renewables are humming on the grid, and their owners get paid to send some back to a utility to meet growing demand — creating a vast distributed network that could make the electrical system more reliable, not less. Research has found that globally, less than a third of EV owners would have to opt into such a system to meet the rising need for energy storage.
Until now, we’ve been customers of utilities — with power flowing one way to homes — but more and more we’ll be active participants in the grid, sending extra battery power the other way. That shift is getting a head start in Maryland, where last month the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company partnered with Sunrun, which provides home solar and batteries, and Ford, which makes the electric F-150 Lightning, to activate the nation’s first residential V2G pilot project.
“This is the first time there are actual customers who are off-boarding power from their electric vehicles to the grid, and we’re doing it at peak times in the evening,” said Chris Rauscher, vice president of grid services at Sunrun, referring to the periods of greatest need for electricity. “So we’re actually reducing the stress and the demand on the grid — crushing the curve, crushing the peak — which helps lower costs for everyone.”
To understand how this works, think of EVs less like vehicles, and more like immense batteries on wheels. In fact, the Lightning’s battery is 10 times bigger than a residential pack, Rauscher said. “There’s more energy capacity deployed today in electric vehicle batteries on the road in the U.S. than in all stationary batteries combined,” Rauscher added. “This is a massive resource.” And it’s only getting more massive: The Natural Resources Defense Council has estimated that if California V2G’ed all of the 14 million EVs it’s expected to have by 2035, they could power every home in the state for three days.
In these early days of the tech, though, only a handful of models sport V2G capabilities, but the number is growing. The hardware and software aren’t wildly complicated. A special charger juices up the vehicle’s battery, then draws from the car to power a house, in the case of vehicle-to-home systems, or sends it back to the utility, in the case of vehicle-to-grid.
Utilities will have to communicate with anyone participating in such a program, for instance with an app that allows a customer to, say, ask that their vehicle never be discharged below a certain percentage. Each utility will also need to figure out how much to compensate people for their power in order to incentivize them to join in. That might mean paying for the amount of energy provided, the same principle behind net metering, in which residential solar customers are reimbursed for the energy they give to the grid. “We’re still in a bit of an early stage here,” said Divesh Gupta, director of clean energy solutions at Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. “There are a lot of things that need to be worked out, particularly on the customer experience side.”
That battery power need not go all the way back to the grid, though, to help utilities. For years now, owners have been using their Ford Lightning trucks to power their homes. These batteries are mammoth — the extended-range version can go 300-plus miles — and powering a home with one uses just five or six miles of that range per hour.
So say an owner returns home at 6 pm, when demand on the grid is skyrocketing as everyone else is knocking off work and switching on air conditioners and other energy-hungry appliances. Because consumption is rising, so too is the price of electricity. But a Lightning owner doesn’t have to pay that if they’re using their battery to power their home for five hours until they go to bed, using 25 to 30 miles of range on their battery. “It basically makes the house disappear, effectively, from the grid,” said Ryan O’Gorman, Ford’s business lead for vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home.
Then the owner can charge again when demand, and electricity prices, are lower. If they work from home, for example, they can charge during the day, when lots of solar power is coursing through the grid.
More homes tapping EV batteries also eases demand on the grid, which is especially welcome during a heat wave when everyone’s running their AC units. Those heat waves will only get worse from here — a growing challenge for utilities to provide the power that keeps people cool and safe. At the same time, ever more data centers are devouring ever more power and stressing the grid to its limits. That infrastructure also must accommodate other forms of decarbonization, like heat pumps and induction stoves, that are essential for weaning us off fossil fuels.
Instead of sitting idly in a garage depreciating, V2G turns an EV into an asset for bolstering the grid and powering the home cheaply. “Cars are parked more than 22 hours a day,” O’Gorman said. “When we look at the advantages of an EV, now that vehicle can provide savings and potentially revenue flows for the customer.” (Interestingly, even electric trains can now send juice back to the grid and generate revenue, thanks to what they gain from regenerative braking: In the Bay Area, the Caltrain system is now being compensated for that energy, slashing its estimated annual power cost from $19.5 million to $16.5 million.)
The residential V2G program in Baltimore follows other experiments across the nation with larger vehicles. In Oakland, California, for instance, the utility Pacific Gas and Electric worked with the electric bus provider Zum to deploy vehicles that take kids home in the afternoon, return to the lot, and plug back into the grid. Because their batteries are so large, they have ample power left over, sending that extra energy to the grid just as demand is spiking. They charge overnight, take kids to school, and plug in again to charge.
This kind of predictability could make commercial fleets even more powerful for V2G than residential vehicles, experts say. A school bus is on a schedule a utility can rely on — it’s parked and available at certain times of day, and making the rounds at others. Plus, in the summer, they would be available almost constantly. Other fleets, like delivery and government vehicles, follow regular timetables as well.
Fleet managers can also procure large numbers of the appropriate chargers, buying into the system en masse, compared to a homeowner shelling out for just one. “In the short term, we see commercial-level V2G applications as more viable due to infrastructure costs, but we expect affordable domestic units to emerge as the market matures and demand grows,” said a spokesperson for Nissan, which has long included bidirectional charging in its electric Leaf.
Utilities are still figuring out how to coordinate this ballet between vehicle, charger, and grid on a citywide scale. But the payoff could be big, because all those EVs are existing infrastructure that could help reduce the need to build dedicated battery plants to store renewable energy. The less a utility has to build, the fewer costs it has to pass on to ratepayers. And with more V2G, a utility that has to import lots of electricity from a neighboring state can now store power locally.
Thus this technology could reduce energy bills. And for participants, their vehicles now provide transportation and energy storage. “It would seem pretty easy to imagine that that’s going to be cheaper than building just stationary battery storage facilities that do nothing but support the grid in times of need,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of VGI pilot implementation at Pacific Gas and Electric. “Because you’re not getting that secondary use with those batteries. They’re kind of sitting around a lot of the time.”
People are more complicated than battery banks, though. Folks with busy lives want the convenience of charging their cars whenever they like, and might not even realize how much prices fluctuate throughout the day, said David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the behavior of EV drivers. Many like the peace of mind of having a fully charged vehicle ready at all times. “I take from that that V2G is going to be really, really hard for fleets outside of professionally managed fleets,” Victor said, “that we know reliably are going to be available at the time that the V2G asset is going to be needed.”
Still, given the number of EVs out there, only a fraction of owners need to participate to make a sizable impact. And residential and commercial V2G can complement each other — and in turn, complement a utility’s larger battery facilities — a widescale diversification of energy storage that could accelerate the adoption of renewables. “I fundamentally believe that bidirectional electric vehicles are going to be something that no one’s ever heard of, until suddenly everyone has it,” Rauscher said. “Once we have enough customers enrolled and deployed out there, some percent of customers not plugging in and performing doesn’t really matter.”

How EVs can fix the grid and lower your electric bill

A pilot project in Maryland is using EVs to create a cleaner, more resilient, and more affordable energy supply.
Depending on whom you’re asking, renewable energy and electric vehicles will either destroy the grid or save it. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, true enough, while a gas-fired power plant can generate electricity any time. That supposed precarity of renewables will get even shakier, critics argue, as Americans ditch conventional vehicles for electric ones, which will draw ever more power from an already strained grid.
Luckily, that’s not a realistic scenario because of what renewables and EVs have in common: giant batteries. Solar and wind farms are plugging into huge banks of them to store energy to use as needed, fixing their intermittency challenge. (Engineers are turning Earth itself into an even bigger battery.) And a growing number of cars with cords feature vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G, also known as bidirectional charging. They can draw clean power when renewables are humming on the grid, and their owners get paid to send some back to a utility to meet growing demand — creating a vast distributed network that could make the electrical system more reliable, not less. Research has found that globally, less than a third of EV owners would have to opt into such a system to meet the rising need for energy storage.
Until now, we’ve been customers of utilities — with power flowing one way to homes — but more and more we’ll be active participants in the grid, sending extra battery power the other way. That shift is getting a head start in Maryland, where last month the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company partnered with Sunrun, which provides home solar and batteries, and Ford, which makes the electric F-150 Lightning, to activate the nation’s first residential V2G pilot project.
“This is the first time there are actual customers who are off-boarding power from their electric vehicles to the grid, and we’re doing it at peak times in the evening,” said Chris Rauscher, vice president of grid services at Sunrun, referring to the periods of greatest need for electricity. “So we’re actually reducing the stress and the demand on the grid — crushing the curve, crushing the peak — which helps lower costs for everyone.”
To understand how this works, think of EVs less like vehicles and more like immense batteries on wheels. In fact, the Lightning’s battery is 10 times bigger than a residential pack, Rauscher said. “There’s more energy capacity deployed today in electric vehicle batteries on the road in the U.S. than in all stationary batteries combined,” Rauscher added. “This is a massive resource.” And it’s only getting more massive: The Natural Resources Defense Council has estimated that if California V2G’ed all of the 14 million EVs it’s expected to have by 2035, it could power every home in the state for three days.
In these early days of the tech, though, only a handful of models sport V2G capabilities, but the number is growing. The hardware and software aren’t wildly complicated. A special charger juices up the vehicle’s battery, then draws from the car to power a house, in the case of vehicle-to-home systems, or sends it back to the utility, in the case of vehicle-to-grid.
Utilities will have to communicate with anyone participating in such a program, for instance with an app that allows a customer to, say, ask that their vehicle never be discharged below a certain percentage. Each utility will also need to figure out how much to compensate people for their power in order to incentivize them to join in. That might mean paying for the amount of energy provided, the same principle behind net metering, in which residential solar customers are reimbursed for the energy they give to the grid. “We’re still in a bit of an early stage here,” said Divesh Gupta, director of clean energy solutions at Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. “There are a lot of things that need to be worked out, particularly on the customer-experience side.”
That battery power need not go all the way back to the grid, though, to help utilities. For years now, owners have been using their Ford Lightning trucks to power their homes. These batteries are mammoth — the extended-range version can go 300-plus miles — and powering a home with one uses just 5 or 6 miles of that range per hour.
So say an owner returns home at 6 p.m., when demand on the grid is skyrocketing as everyone else is knocking off work and switching on air conditioners and other energy-hungry appliances. Because consumption is rising, so too is the price of electricity. But a Lightning owner doesn’t have to pay that if they’re using their battery to power their home for five hours until they go to bed, using 25 to 30 miles of range on their battery. “It basically makes the house disappear, effectively, from the grid,” said Ryan O’Gorman, Ford’s business lead for vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home.
Then the owner can charge again when demand, and electricity prices, are lower. If they work from home, for example, they can charge during the day, when lots of solar power is coursing through the grid.
More homes tapping EV batteries also eases demand on the grid, which is especially welcome during a heat wave when everyone’s running their AC units. Those heat waves will only get worse from here — a growing challenge for utilities to provide the power that keeps people cool and safe. At the same time, ever more data centers are devouring ever more power and stressing the grid to its limits. That infrastructure also must accommodate other forms of decarbonization, like heat pumps and induction stoves, that are essential for weaning us off fossil fuels.
Instead of sitting idly in a garage depreciating, V2G turns an EV into an asset for bolstering the grid and powering the home cheaply. “Cars are parked more than 22 hours a day,” O’Gorman said. “When we look at the advantages of an EV, now that vehicle can provide savings and potentially revenue flows for the customer.” (Interestingly, even electric trains can now send juice back to the grid and generate revenue, thanks to what they gain from regenerative braking: In the Bay Area, the Caltrain system is now being compensated for that energy, slashing its estimated annual power cost from $19.5 million to $16.5 million.)
The residential V2G program in Baltimore follows other experiments across the nation with larger vehicles. In Oakland, California, for instance, the utility Pacific Gas & Electric worked with the electric bus provider Zum to deploy vehicles that take kids home in the afternoon, return to the lot, and plug back into the grid. Because their batteries are so large, they have ample power left over, sending that extra energy to the grid just as demand is spiking. They charge overnight, take kids to school, and plug in again to charge.
This kind of predictability could make commercial fleets even more powerful for V2G than residential vehicles, experts say. A school bus is on a schedule a utility can rely on — it’s parked and available at certain times of day and making the rounds at others. Plus, in the summer, they would be available almost constantly. Other fleets, like delivery and government vehicles, follow regular timetables as well.
Fleet managers can also procure large numbers of the appropriate chargers, buying into the system en masse, compared to a homeowner shelling out for just one. “In the short term, we see commercial-level V2G applications as more viable due to infrastructure costs, but we expect affordable domestic units to emerge as the market matures and demand grows,” said a spokesperson for Nissan, which has long included bidirectional charging in its electric Leaf.
Utilities are still figuring out how to coordinate this ballet between vehicle, charger, and grid on a citywide scale. But the payoff could be big, because all those EVs are existing infrastructure that could help reduce the need to build dedicated battery plants to store renewable energy. The less a utility has to build, the fewer costs it has to pass on to ratepayers. And with more V2G, a utility that has to import lots of electricity from a neighboring state can now store power locally.
Thus this technology could reduce energy bills. And for participants, their vehicles now provide transportation and energy storage. “It would seem pretty easy to imagine that that’s going to be cheaper than building just stationary battery storage facilities that do nothing but support the grid in times of need,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of VGI pilot implementation at Pacific Gas & Electric. “Because you’re not getting that secondary use with those batteries. They’re kind of sitting around a lot of the time.”
People are more complicated than battery banks, though. Folks with busy lives want the convenience of charging their cars whenever they like and might not even realize how much prices fluctuate throughout the day, said David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the behavior of EV drivers. Many like the peace of mind of having a fully charged vehicle ready at all times. “I take from that that V2G is going to be really, really hard for fleets outside of professionally managed fleets,” Victor said, “that we know reliably are going to be available at the time that the V2G asset is going to be needed.”
Still, given the number of EVs out there, only a fraction of owners need to participate to make a sizable impact. And residential and commercial V2G can complement each other — and in turn, complement a utility’s larger battery facilities — a widescale diversification of energy storage that could accelerate the adoption of renewables. “I fundamentally believe that bidirectional electric vehicles are going to be something that no one’s ever heard of, until suddenly everyone has it,” Rauscher said. “Once we have enough customers enrolled and deployed out there, some percent of customers not plugging in and performing doesn’t really matter.”

A new report by scientists in Israel details the emerging environmental crisis in Palestine.
Over two years of nearly incessant bombardment, Israeli forces have killed over 60,000 Palestinians, at least a third of whom are children. The human toll has been called genocide by human rights organizations around the world, and a United Nations commission, but a new report from an Israeli research center points to environmental devastation: Gaza’s soil is polluted after the destruction of wastewater treatment plants, sewage contamination is widespread, and particulate matter left by exploded bombs is increasing rates of respiratory illness.
According to a new report by the Arava Institute, an environmental research institute based in Israel, Gaza is covered with an estimated 61 million tons of rubble, much of which contains asbestos, unexploded munitions, and unburied human remains. “The environmental situation in Gaza, before October 7th, was a disaster,” said Dr. Tareq Abuhamed, who leads the Arava Institute and is Palestinian. Rebuilding even to that prior state of disaster is likely to take decades.
A report from the United Nations, published in late September, estimated that nearly $70 billion in damage had been done to Gaza’s roads, buildings, and infrastructure over the past two years while over 80 percent of cropland had been destroyed. Less than 10 percent of all hazardous waste is being safely disposed of, and most, by necessity, is being burned or piled in open-air landfills. Untreated wastewater, meanwhile, is dumped directly on the land or into the sea.
“The garbage becomes mountains, and the mountains are a breeding site for mosquitos and rodents, which spread malaria,” said Dr. Yasser El-Nahhal, an environmental chemist and eco-toxicologist with the Islamic University of Gaza.
Long before Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, Israeli blockades prevented easy access to water, electricity, and food. Rolling blackouts have been common in Palestine for the last 20 years and many residents relied on small-scale desalination units, plants that make seawater drinkable, and private water tankers to purchase potable water. Now, the aid organization Doctors Without Borders says that only one out of every 10 of their requests for water to be imported are approved by Israeli authorities.
“The environment has been destroyed before the war,” said El-Nahhal. “But since the war, it has been destroyed several times above imagination.”
Palestinian researcher Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University’s Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, calls what is happening now ecocide: a term broadly defined as the severe, long-term, and widespread destruction of the environment. A growing coalition of countries hopes to legally define ecocide as a crime the International Criminal Court might prosecute.
“Gaza, of course, was a functioning society, even though it was subjected to significant sanctions in the past 16 years that limited supplies,” Qumsiyeh said. “They had a functioning society. They had schools, universities, sewage treatment facilities, and a desalination plant. All of this was destroyed in this genocidal, ecocidal war.”
Earlier this month, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the world’s largest conservation congress, signed a resolution asserting that ecocide should be treated as a criminal offense. Jojo Mehta, founder of the legal advocacy group Stop Ecocide International, said that while the resolution defines ecocide quite broadly, it could certainly be applied to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “What’s been happening in terms of the environment in Gaza is horrific,” Mehta said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt in anybody’s mind that it’s ecocidal.”
Israeli officials did not return multiple requests for comment on this story.
The Arava report calls for unimpeded aid to Gaza, as well as potable water systems and personal hygiene kits to mitigate disease. The United Nations, in their September report, wrote that to make Gaza’s environment livable again “will require a cessation of hostilities. The first phase of recovery will focus on saving lives, through restoration of essential services and removal of debris.”
Nonetheless, Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University said, Palestinians will continue to rebuild – even if, as he believes is likely, this current ceasefire falls apart. “I don’t claim we have a huge success rate,” he said, “But imagine your community being destroyed dozens of times, and you continue to rebuild. That shows an incredible amount of hopefulness.”

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