GoGreenNation news

New ideas shed light on addressing climate issues

Environmental scientist Hannah Ritchie discusses how technological advances could lead to a more sustainable future in the face of climate challenges.Ezra Klein reports for The New York Times.In short:Clean energy technology is making strides, providing a hopeful outlook for sustainable development.The environmental impact of livestock farming highlights the importance of finding solutions for food production that align with sustainability goals.The politics of implementing large-scale climate initiatives remain complex and challenging, but progress in technology is opening doors to potential solutions.Key quote:"These are tractable problems. They’re not easy problems. They’re really, really difficult to tackle, but they’re tractable."— Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data.Why this matters: Innovations in clean energy and agriculture will play a significant role in shaping a sustainable future, but the road ahead will require cooperation, determination, and effective policy. Read more: The global food system is failing small-scale farmers — here’s how to fix it.

Environmental scientist Hannah Ritchie discusses how technological advances could lead to a more sustainable future in the face of climate challenges.Ezra Klein reports for The New York Times.In short:Clean energy technology is making strides, providing a hopeful outlook for sustainable development.The environmental impact of livestock farming highlights the importance of finding solutions for food production that align with sustainability goals.The politics of implementing large-scale climate initiatives remain complex and challenging, but progress in technology is opening doors to potential solutions.Key quote:"These are tractable problems. They’re not easy problems. They’re really, really difficult to tackle, but they’re tractable."— Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data.Why this matters: Innovations in clean energy and agriculture will play a significant role in shaping a sustainable future, but the road ahead will require cooperation, determination, and effective policy. Read more: The global food system is failing small-scale farmers — here’s how to fix it.

New studies reveal genetic adaptations in California birds

Two studies reveal how genetic changes in bird populations in California respond to environmental threats, highlighting the potential for adaptation and the risks of genetic dilution.Rebecca Heisman reports for The Revelator.In short:The southwestern willow flycatcher has developed genetic traits for heat tolerance in response to changing climate conditions, although its population is still declining.Savannah sparrows face the dilution of their salt-tolerant adaptations due to gene flow from inland birds, threatening their ability to survive in saltmarsh environments.Both studies underline the importance of natural history collections in understanding and addressing these environmental challenges.Key quote:“These genetic changes are imperceptible to the human eye ... [but] we were able to identify several genes that are likely involved in heat tolerance and the birds’ ability to effectively dissipate heat in humid environments.”— Sheela Turbek, postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State UniversityWhy this matters:Understanding genetic adaptations to environmental changes helps inform conservation efforts, enabling scientists to safeguard species facing increasingly rapid shifts due to climate change. Read more: Climate change creates camouflage confusion in winter-adapted wildlife.

Two studies reveal how genetic changes in bird populations in California respond to environmental threats, highlighting the potential for adaptation and the risks of genetic dilution.Rebecca Heisman reports for The Revelator.In short:The southwestern willow flycatcher has developed genetic traits for heat tolerance in response to changing climate conditions, although its population is still declining.Savannah sparrows face the dilution of their salt-tolerant adaptations due to gene flow from inland birds, threatening their ability to survive in saltmarsh environments.Both studies underline the importance of natural history collections in understanding and addressing these environmental challenges.Key quote:“These genetic changes are imperceptible to the human eye ... [but] we were able to identify several genes that are likely involved in heat tolerance and the birds’ ability to effectively dissipate heat in humid environments.”— Sheela Turbek, postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State UniversityWhy this matters:Understanding genetic adaptations to environmental changes helps inform conservation efforts, enabling scientists to safeguard species facing increasingly rapid shifts due to climate change. Read more: Climate change creates camouflage confusion in winter-adapted wildlife.

Cholera is making a comeback — and the world doesn’t have enough vaccines

A nurse administers a dosage of the cholera vaccine during the launch of the campaign to immunize people in affected areas, at the Kuwadzana Polyclinic in Harare on January 29, 2024. | Jekesai Njikizana/AFP via Getty Images “A billion people at risk”: How worldwide cholera outbreaks are threatening lives. Amid a global resurgence of cholera, the world is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. The global stockpile of the oral cholera vaccine — a supply whose needs are difficult to predict and fill anyway — has dwindled to nearly nothing after the Indian drug manufacturer that produced about 15 percent of the world’s supply stopped making the vaccine last year. While other companies are setting up new production capacity, the stockpile is now effectively nonexistent. Demand is so great that as soon as doses are produced, they must immediately ship to one of the world’s current cholera hot spots. This crisis is symptomatic of a larger problem: the persistent lack of political will and financial investment to dramatically reduce cholera deaths. Cholera flourishes in areas where there is contaminated water, poor sanitation, and people living in crowded conditions — like the city of Rafah, currently home to more than 1 million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war in Gaza. Cholera has not yet been detected there, since no one from outside Gaza can bring it in, but an outbreak would be catastrophic given the decimation of Gaza’s health care system and the lack of access to humanitarian goods like clean water and medication. The disease is typically spread when an infected person or people contaminate a water source by defecating in or near it. People get sick after drinking the contaminated water, suffering from acute diarrhea and vomiting — which can, without treatment, kill an infected person within a day. It’s a disease that rich countries with clean water and good sanitation infrastructure do not have to worry about anymore. But cholera cases are rising worldwide now after a period of decline from 2017 through 2021, according to the World Health Organization’s cholera team leader Philippe Barboza. There are currently active cholera outbreaks in Zambia, Mozambique, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Haiti. “Once it is there in these situations, because of the very poor water and sanitation and hygiene situation, it can spread like wildfire,” Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, told Vox. As many as 143,000 people die from this preventable disease each year — which could even be an underestimate, since some countries do not have the capacity to detect or compile data on cholera cases. According to some metrics, it is becoming more fatal because many infected people do not have adequate access to health care. Concurrent outbreaks throughout the world are straining the global health sector’s resources to respond. “It’s a really horrible way to die,” Mohammad Fadlalla, an Ohio-based physician who volunteers with Medecins Sans Frontieres and has responded to multiple cholera outbreaks, told Vox. With the increase in outbreaks and limited countermeasures, particularly vaccines, “We are talking about a billion people at risk” in the immediate term, Barboza said. “And this is an underestimate. This is a very conservative estimate.” Why aren’t there enough cholera vaccine doses? There are a few intersecting crises that have led to cholera’s comeback and the world’s limited capacity to combat it. One pivotal moment came in 2020, when Shantha (now Sanofi India), a fully owned subsidiary of French pharmaceutical company Sanofi based in India, announced that it would stop manufacturing its oral cholera vaccine at the end of 2022. “We took this decision in a context where we were already producing very small volumes versus the total demand for cholera vaccines and in the knowledge that other cholera vaccine manufacturers (current and new entrants) had already announced an increased supply capacity in the years to come,” Sanofi told the Guardian in 2022. The company said at the time that it had shared information about how its vaccine was manufactured with public health partners like the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), which has transferred the vaccine technology to new manufacturers. But those contingencies weren’t enough to offset a total shutdown by the company that was manufacturing about 15 percent of the global vaccine supply depending on the year, as Jerome Kim, director general of the IVI, told Vox. That left just one other manufacturer, South Korea’s EuBiologics, in the market as global cholera cases surged. “WHO has contacted [Sanofi] several times to ask first to increase [vaccine production], second to maintain, and third, to postpone their decision,” Barboza said. “So we have tried all the possible things and the rationale of [Sanofi is], ‘Oh, no, there will be other manufacturers that are coming.’” In an email to Vox, Sanofi said that the decision to exit the cholera vaccine market was not about profitability, but rather based on an understanding that EuBiologics would increase its output and other manufacturers would enter the market. EuBiologics will produce as many as 50 million doses of an oral cholera vaccine this year. The WHO announced in April that it approved a simplified, but still effective, version of the present formula for use, which will help mitigate the vaccine shortage. The world has already been forced to start rationing vaccine doses. In 2022, the WHO recommended halving the vaccine dose from two to one, which downgrades the vaccine’s efficacy but does offer protection for a year or more, and obviously increases the number of people who can receive some protection with limited supplies. Last year, all of the 36 million regimens were distributed to 72 million people to take one dose each. Today, with only EuBiologics now producing a cholera vaccine, doses are allocated as soon as they are made to one of the areas with an active outbreak, said Derrick Sim, managing director of vaccine markets and health security at Gavi, the international vaccine alliance. Because of the global shortfall, there are no vaccine doses available for preventive campaigns that would keep cholera out of communities in the first place. And absent an international commitment to improve the water supply and sanitation in poor countries at risk for cholera outbreaks — an approximately $114 billion yearly commitment — vaccination would be a powerful tool for preventing sickness and death from cholera in areas where outbreaks could occur. There are some important developments in vaccine technology in the pipeline, such as a temperature-stable pill form that would be much easier to transport and administer than the current liquid form, which must be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. At least three companies are currently working to develop new cholera vaccines, but they won’t be on the market until at least the end of 2025, and potentially years later. Gavi, which supports vaccine programs in developing countries and has contributed to the vaccination of nearly 1 billion children since its founding in 2000, is also working with smaller manufacturers in developing countries in Africa to bolster the global supply and produce the vaccine closer to where it will ultimately be used, Sim said. But developing cholera vaccines — from research to improve them to transferring the vaccine technology to new manufacturers, from clinical trials to purchasing and distributing them — also requires money. The WHO budgeted about $12 million for its cholera vaccination efforts last year, but that number will need to increase as cases do. That could potentially help address some of these supply issues — but it also highlights why they exist in the first place. “The big manufacturers are not interested in investing in a vaccine that only the poor countr[ies] can buy,” Barboza said, “and that will cost only $1.50 or $1 per dose.” Why are cholera cases rising in the first place, in the 21st century no less? At the time Sanofi decided to exit the cholera vaccine market in 2020, cholera was trending downward after a 20-year high in 2017. The Global Task Force for Cholera Control — a collaboration between the WHO, GAVI, and other stakeholders — had released a road map to reducing cholera deaths by 90 percent by 2030, and poor and developing countries where cholera is endemic or an active concern were implementing national cholera vaccination plans. In retrospect, experts believe the world missed an opportunity to work aggressively toward prevention, an effort that would have been aided by Sanofi’s continued production of its cholera vaccines. But Covid-19, which diverted resources and attention away from most other global diseases including cholera; an increase in displacement due to violence and conflict; and extreme weather events caused by climate change that both displace people and make environments more conducive to cholera have combined to allow the disease to spread more rapidly. Four of the five worst years for cholera in recent history have come since 2017. This is all the more concerning because cholera is fairly simple to prevent, with the supplies to provide clean drinking water and sanitation. It’s easy to treat, too: All it takes to cure cholera in most cases is clean water and oral rehydration salts, antibiotics in the worst-case scenarios. With proper medical intervention, no one should die from it. In situations of extreme instability like in Sudan, or where the medical sector has been decimated as in Gaza, those interventions become more challenging. And while some countries have long had routine cholera outbreaks, it’s not always easy to predict when or where they’ll hit, or how big they will grow, because contaminated water sources and infected people can cross borders, as likely occurred in Lebanon in 2022. Cholera is common in neighboring Syria, where the Assad regime has decimated local infrastructure and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Though Lebanon had not experienced an outbreak since 1993, conditions were ripe for it. Years of government corruption and incompetence have led to a breakdown in public infrastructure including health care and sanitation — all of which helped trigger the outbreak in 2022. That outbreak saw at least 6,000 confirmed and suspectd cases. In August 2023, Fadlalla was responding to an outbreak in Al Qadarif, Sudan, which has been in a devastating civil conflict for a year now. “A lot of the governmental institutions were [at the time] eight months without their people getting paid their salaries, and the bureaucracy was not really functioning or operating,” he said. “And this is including the Ministries of Health. The whole medical sector was not getting paid, supplies were not getting restocked.” Climate change and the conflict and displacement related to it also significantly contribute to the uptick in cholera outbreaks, according to experts Vox spoke with. Higher temperatures and changing weather patterns make the environmental conditions ripe for outbreaks in new places unused to the disease. But climate change is not going to be reversed any time soon, nor is the global community going to commit to improving sanitation in developing countries or mitigating displacement. So in the meantime, vaccines remain one of the most important ways to prevent cholera deaths. “It’s not that nothing is happening,” Barboza said. “There are a lot of things that are happening, but are they acting fast enough, with enough money?”

How rioting farmers unraveled Europe’s ambitious climate plan

Farmer protests in Nîmes, France, in March. According to reports, large tires were set on fire during the blockade. | Luc Auffret/Anadolu via Getty Images Road-clogging, manure-dumping farmers reveal the paradox at the heart of EU agriculture. In February 2021, in the midst of the deadly second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon, France, temporarily took red meat off the menus of the city’s school cafeterias. While the change was environmentally friendly, the decision was driven by social distancing protocols: Preparing one hot meal that could be served to meat-eaters, vegetarians, and those with religious restrictions rather than serving multiple options was safer and more efficient. The response from the French agricultural establishment was hysterical. “We need to stop putting ideology on our children’s plates!,” then-Minister of Agriculture Julien Denormandie tweeted. Livestock farmers clogged Lyon’s downtown with tractors and paraded cows in front of city hall, brandishing banners declaring, “Stopping meat is a guarantee of weakness against future viruses.” An impromptu coalition of livestock producers, politicians, and parents unsuccessfully petitioned the city’s court to overturn the change. It may have seemed a tempest in a teacup — a quintessentially French squabble. But it was a microcosm of European agricultural politics, reflecting the great paradox of European Union (EU) farmers’ relationship to the state. On one hand, farmers are wards of the welfare state, dependent on national governments and the European Union for the generous subsidies and suite of protectionist trade policies that keep them in business. On the other, they are business people who balk at regulations, restrictions, and perceived government overreach. The tension between these positions regularly erupts into farmer revolts when governments attempt to regulate food or farming in the public interest as it might any other industry. EU politicians, meanwhile, often feel the need to kowtow to agribusiness because of its ability to mobilize protesters and voters alike. This year, it has become clear these protests have the power to transform Europe’s future. This past February, three years almost to the day after Doucet’s school lunch announcement, roads around Lyon were again blocked by farmers raging against the French government and the EU. It was one surge in the wave of protests that has swept through Europe in recent months, set off by a litany of demands, including continued subsidies and no new environmental regulations. In short, all the benefits of government with none of the governance. In Paris, farmers traded blows with police at the country’s Salon de l’Agriculture trade fair. In Germany, they tried storming a ferry carrying the country’s economy minister. In Brussels, they rammed through police barricades with tractors. In the Netherlands, they lit asbestos on fire alongside highways. In Poland, they massed along the Ukrainian border to prevent the import of cheap grain. In Czechia, they paved Prague’s streets with manure. The protests have come as the EU seeks to pass a slate of laws as part of its Green Deal, a sweeping climate plan that includes checking the worst harms of industrial agriculture, which takes up more than a third of the continent’s landmass and contributes disproportionately to its ecological footprint. That agenda is colliding with Europe’s longtime paradigm of few-strings-attached welfare for agribusiness. Agribusiness interests have been working to foil the Farm to Fork strategy, the crown jewel of the Green Deal meant to overhaul Europe’s food system, since its inception in 2020. This year, with the specter of right-wing populism looming over upcoming European Parliament elections (part of the EU’s legislative branch), farmers’ protests across the continent have succeeded at not only stalling new sustainability reforms, but also undermining existing environmental regulations. Now, plans to make Europe a global leader in sustainable agriculture appear to be dead on arrival. Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images Farmers dump manure on streets in the EU quarter of Brussels in March. How European agriculture got this way Despite its centrality to European politics and policy, agriculture is a very small industry within the bloc’s economy, making up about 1.4 percent of the EU’s GDP and no more than 5 percent of GDP in any of the Union’s 27 countries. The sector is also one of the biggest recipients of EU funds, with subsidies to farmers and investment in rural development consuming about a quarter of the EU’s budget, on top of often generous national subsidies. Meanwhile, European agriculture’s environmental footprint is vastly disproportionate to its economic contribution. It uses a third of all water on the increasingly arid continent. It’s responsible for 10 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, including much of its methane and nitrous oxide, both highly potent greenhouse gases primarily released by animal agriculture. It accounts for about a quarter of global pesticide use, which has been linked to soil and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and a slew of impacts on human health. Of course, we need to eat, and food needs to be produced. But Europe’s monocrop- and livestock-intensive agriculture system is anything but sustainable. Yet the EU continues to pour massive amounts of money into subsidizing an economically negligible sector that is responsible for many of the continent’s environmental problems and that, off the back of those subsidies, organizes to prevent environmental regulations or even conditions on those very subsidies. Many countries around the world generously subsidize food production — including, famously, the United States, where agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of GDP and punches far above its weight politically. But much of the US ag sector’s billions in annual federal payouts comes in indirect forms like subsidized crop insurance, including more than a third of the $24 billion it received in 2021 — and these subsidies make up a much smaller share of the industry’s contribution to GDP relative to agriculture subsidies in the EU. In Europe, decades of government policy have integrated food production into an extensive state welfare framework where, on paper, the good of farmers is equated with the public good. That system emerged from the ruins of World War II, when shoring up farming and food security became an existential policy imperative on the devastated and often starved continent. Post-war policies were designed to secure the food supply, provide farming families with a stable income, and stimulate rural economies in the interest of the public good. European agriculture policy became its own welfare system defined by subsidies and protection from foreign competition. It worked. By 1950, agricultural production in Western Europe had recovered to pre-war levels. When the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU, formed in 1957, agriculture was central to the discussions, as economic integration would require dealing with the problem of highly subsidized and protected farming in member states. The answer was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), launched in 1962, a centerpiece of EEC and later EU policy. An extension of national-level agricultural welfare policies, the goal of the CAP was “to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture.” In other words, rather than using policy to build agriculture into a viable competitive business, the goal was to protect agriculture from the market and commit to a long-term policy of keeping farmers in business. CAP was “from the outset a public policy reflecting highly subjective political ‘preferences,’ not rational commercial interests,” economic historian Ann-Christina Knudsen argues in her book Farmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. For decades, CAP has been the EU’s biggest budget line. As recently as the 1980s, it made up about two-thirds of the Union’s budget. While bouts of trade liberalization and the rise of other priorities have steadily reduced its relative size, about a third of the EU’s 2021-2027 budget was earmarked for CAP. Over 70 percent of this money is distributed as direct payments to farmers. Since payments are primarily based on farm size, the biggest farms get the lion’s share of that money. Over half of the EU’s 9 million farms produce less than 4,000 euros of products per year and make up a combined 2 percent of Europe’s farm production, while the top 1 percent of farms — those that bring in over 500,000 euros — control 19 percent of all farmland and are responsible for over 40 percent of output. The top 0.5 percent of farms receive over 16 percent of all CAP payments. Lavish subsidies have helped make Europe a net exporter of agricultural products, with early concerns about food security long since displaced by a global thirst for Irish whiskey and Dutch beer and hunger for Irish butter and French cheese. Coupled with decades of government policy incentivizing industrial production methods that favor big operations, such as factory farming and large-scale monocropping, CAP has served to push Europe’s farmers to get big or get out. Between 2005 and 2020, the EU lost over 5 million farms, virtually all of them small operations sold by retiring farmers or those simply unable to compete with their larger neighbors. Large farmers, in turn, have organized into powerful political interest groups that aim to dictate agricultural policy to their governments. Farmers and their political allies pack the EU’s agriculture committee. Lobby organizations like Copa-Cogeca, which represents large farmers’ unions across the EU, and CropLife Europe, a pesticide trade group, pressure governments to entrench the status quo, including maintaining CAP as an ever-open spigot gushing taxpayer money. And where governments are seen as truant in delivering on their promises, cities and nations can be brought to a standstill by blockades of tractors, helping galvanize public opinion and push politicians into acquiescence. Europe’s turn toward environmental protections is clashing with farming interests Today, the growing importance of environmental goals in EU politics has driven a wedge into the sometimes contentious but mostly cozy relationship between farming interests and governments. While EU subsidies do come with some environmental strings attached, such as requirements to protect wetlands or engage in soil-friendly crop rotation, these are often poorly enforced and noncompliance is common. In Europe, much like in the US, agriculture is governed with a lighter touch compared to other industries, a paradigm often known as agricultural exceptionalism. In the Netherlands, for instance, farms have for decades been granted a derogation on nitrogen emissions, allowed to emit more than any other industry. This meant that, over the years, dairy farms and heavily fertilized crop fields leached nitrogen into the soil and water, poisoning rivers and wetlands. In 2019, the Dutch government sought to close the loophole and buy out livestock farmers unable to comply with the restriction. Farmers launched a series of protests marked by the now-ubiquitous use of tractors to block roads and public spaces in a show of force against government bureaucrats. Many felt aggrieved that government, by pushing the resource-intensive industrial farming that had made the Netherlands into an agricultural powerhouse, had helped create the very environmental problems now being blamed on farmers. Peter Boer/Bloomberg via Getty Images A two-week old calf on a dairy farm in Hazerswoude, Netherlands. Livestock farmers have been protesting the Dutch government’s efforts to limit polluting nitrogen emissions from farms. Cities across the country ground to a halt, and the protesters formed a new political party, the far-right-aligned BoerBurgerBeweging (the Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB). Last year, it won the country’s provincial elections in a landslide on the back of rural votes as well as broader anti-government and anti-EU sentiment, controlling 20 percent of seats in the Dutch senate. It was a portent of things to come. 2019 was also the year the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, proposed the Green Deal, which aims to achieve net zero emissions across the EU by 2050 through emissions reduction across all industries, renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption, and reforestation programs. Farm to Fork, the food system component of the plan, calls for dramatically reducing pesticide use and food waste, and promoting more sustainable dietary choices through product labeling and school lunches; independent modeling suggested it could cut agricultural emissions by up to 20 percent and halve biodiversity destruction. Environmental policies are broadly popular with the European electorate, and that plan was arrived at through the EU’s highly bureaucratic — but nonetheless democratically deliberative — process. But because it originated with the European Commission, whose members are unelected, it was seen by some as being mandated by unaccountable functionaries. Farmers bristled at the idea of being told to devote some of their land to biodiversity and nature restoration. Growers of monocrop products like grains and grapes for wine balked at drastic pesticide reductions. The pesticide industry and its lobby saw its profits threatened. But most impacted would be livestock, the sector least able to meet stringent environmental or animal welfare standards. Animal agriculture makes up 40 percent of European agricultural production, releases more than 80 percent of the continent’s emissions from agriculture, and receives more than 80 percent of CAP subsidies, according to a recent study using data from 2013. Immediately, the agricultural lobby began petitioning politicians to delay or do away with the proposed rules, starting with the proposed pesticide reduction measures. At first, EU politicians held in their support for reforms, voting in 2021 to implement Farm to Fork. But as Covid-19, with its disruption of food supply chains, dragged on and Russia invaded Ukraine, raising the specter of a food shortage, ag lobby groups gained new ammunition to fire at what they framed as the Green Deal’s attack on food security and the livelihood of farmers. Attacks on pro-Green Deal politicians escalated, including threats of violence against its staunchest supporters. Bit by bit, political support for Farm to Fork began to erode. By the end of 2023, before most of Farm to Fork had even been implemented, many of its core initiatives were already watered down or abandoned, including pesticide reduction mandates and farm animal welfare improvements. Also declawed was the nature restoration law, which would require EU member states to restore 20 percent of degraded habitats to preserve biodiversity, by calling on farmers to plant tree and flower strips along the edges of fields, for example. Industrial beef and dairy operations were also granted an exemption from industrial emissions targets despite being among the food system’s biggest emitters, responsible for most agricultural methane emissions. Throughout, political allies of agricultural lobbies like the right-wing European People’s Party have celebrated these wins over the specter of “NGO environmental dictatorship.” Farming interests are blocking the development of sustainable alternatives The same groups pushing against environmental regulation in the name of keeping the government out of business have few compunctions about turning to governments to thwart their competition. Meat producers in particular are threatened not only by environmental regulations that would affect them most, as the food system’s biggest emitters, but also by meat alternatives that have the potential to cut into their market share. Cell-cultivated meat, a novel technology that can harvest animal tissue from stem cells rather than slaughtered animals, has not yet received regulatory approval for sale in the EU and remains largely theoretical. That did not stop politicians in Italy, under pressure from agricultural lobby groups, from passing legislation last November banning not just the sale of cellular agriculture products, but also scientific research into the technology. Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a member of the country’s far-right ruling party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), declared cultivated meat a threat to Italian culture and civilization. Soon thereafter, members of the Italian delegation to the EU, joined by representatives from 11 other countries, called on the Council of Europe to “ensure that artificially lab-grown products must never be promoted as or confused for authentic foods,” ostensibly in the public interest. Farming lends itself to populism, which often acts as a cover for cold business calculations. The cultivated meat ban reveals that agricultural lobby group demands are generally about realpolitik rather than a principled position about state intervention — no different from any business that aims to protect its bottom line. Political scientist Leah Stokes, in her book Short Circuiting Policy, has described such policy fights as “organized combat” between interest groups, which tends to favor powerful incumbents over new constituencies aiming to build political support for social or economic change. In Italy, an entrenched and politically well-connected agricultural lobby had the power to write its preferences into policy while proponents of cellular agriculture did not, allowing them to nip potential competition in the bud. Something similar is at work in the unraveling of the EU’s green agenda. Proponents of environmental legislation, while technically having science and public support on their side, were either unprepared or lacked the heart for a fight with the battle-tested farming lobby. All that took place before Europe became engulfed by protests. Then came the tractors. Last December, a proposed cut to diesel subsidies (used to power tractors and other farm machinery) in Germany, which had more to do with the country’s budgetary crisis than with environmental regulations, sent aggrieved farmers into the streets. Dozens of other protests erupted around Europe stemming from particular national issues. But as they grew, they coalesced into a generalized grievance about the failure of government and the EU to sufficiently support farmers, with new environmental policies offering a particularly easy target for ire. Alan Matthews, an Irish economist and preeminent expert on the CAP, recently argued that part of the problem is the changing social capital of farmers: “Instead of being seen as heroic producers of a vital commodity, they are increasingly described as environmental villains and climate destroyers. ... Instead of taking responsibility for these problems, farmers often adopt a defensive position of denial.” The protests have brought farmers of all stripes to the streets, big and small, organic and conventional. Despite their differences and the historic exclusion of small farmers from EU policymaking, most of Europe’s farmers share a common interest in maintaining subsidies and reducing regulation. They also raise some valid points about the contradictions in EU policy, such as in their calls for more protection from foreign competitors that produce with lower standards than in Europe, including livestock produced in jurisdictions with no animal welfare protections or raised using growth stimulants banned in Europe. But this argument is undermined by farmers’ calls to weaken those very standards. By late February, when a massive protest by farmers from across the continent ran amok through the EU quarter of Brussels, politicians across the continent were buckling to farmers’ demand. At the EU, even the watered-down version of the nature restoration law that had passed a vote in EU Parliament despite protests was stalled — perhaps indefinitely — as states including Belgium and Italy withdrew their support. But perhaps most worrying has been the willingness of EU politicians to weaken already existing environmental standards, including loosening environmental conditions and reporting requirements for all farms smaller than 10 hectares. These decisions may have also been motivated by upcoming EU elections. Many Europeans support the farmers’ cause, and as the Dutch case showed, the protests have the potential to galvanize voters to support parties seen as “pro-farmer.” With widespread concern about large gains for right and far-right parties in the EU Parliamentary elections next month, even ostensibly pro-Green Deal politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been forced to act appropriately deferential to the protesters. Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at the European Parliament on February 6, the same day that she recommended shelving a plan to cut pesticide use as a concession to protesting farmers. Sooner or later, climate change will force a reckoning with farming practices The latest progress report on the EU’s quest for carbon neutrality, released by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change amid the protests in January, showed little improvement, especially in agriculture. It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans. In short: the opposite of the situation on the ground. Arriving at a viable agricultural policy that marries support for farmers, green goals, and liberal trade policies is a difficult balancing act with few clear-cut solutions. It is unlikely that these could be achieved without continued state and EU involvement in shaping how food is produced in Europe through some mix of protectionism, policy nudges, and regulation. CAP, in one form or another, isn’t going anywhere. But to the extent that it remains primarily a subsidy program, there is no reason why conditions on meeting strict climate and environmental targets should not be massively strengthened, rather than weakened, and enforcement ramped up. And there is no reason not to use policy to steer production away from highly polluting industries like meat and dairy toward less harmful ones. To be in favor of more sustainable farming is not to be against farmers; it is to be against unsustainable farming practices. To allow these two to be conflated is to lose the fight, as the EU is currently doing. After all, to the extent farmers see themselves as businessmen, a sign of business acumen is making a profit within regulatory and market constraints. One thing is certain: Bowing to the demands of special interests whose only interest is maintaining agricultural exceptionalism only precipitates a sooner reckoning with environmental crises, which will force farming to change whether farmers want to or not. The EU, however, seems to be taking marching orders from a parasite of its own creation, abandoning the very notions of public good that led to the creation of its agricultural policies in the first place.

How Some Common Medications Can Make People More Vulnerable to Heat

As climate change brings more intense heat waves, scientists are trying to understand how certain medications interact with the body’s thermoregulation system

Summers are undoubtedly getting hotter. Extreme heat events are predicted to become longer, more intense and more frequent in the coming years—and rising temperatures are already taking a toll on the human body. A published last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that heat-related emergency room visits were substantially higher from May to September 2023 than in any year before. And now growing evidence suggests that people who rely on certain medications, notably including antipsychotics, may become especially vulnerable to heat-related illness and adverse side effects as temperatures climb.Studies have established that people with chronic illnesses such as schizophrenia, diabetes and cardiovascular or respiratory disease are generally more vulnerable to overheating—and the medications they need may actually worsen these risks. A 2020 PLOS ONE study found that various commonly prescribed drugs interfere with the body’s ability to perceive and protect itself from heat, increasing the risk of hospitalization. These include diuretics, antipsychotics, beta-blockers, stimulants, antihypertensives and anticholinergic medications (which include Parkinson’s and bladder-control medications). Illicit use of amphetamines and some other drugs, including unlicensed weight-loss drugs such as dinitrophenol, can alter body temperature.“There are a lot of drugs out there that diminish our ability to radiate off heat and cool down,” says Adam Blumenberg, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. Emergency room visits for medication-related heat stress or illness, also known as drug-induced hyperthermia, are still relatively rare—but Blumenberg says this will likely change as heat waves and record-breaking temperatures continue to increase.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The human body’s built-in “thermostat” system works to maintain an internal temperature between 97 and 99 degrees Fahrenheit (36 and 37 degrees Celsius), Blumenberg says, adding that a body temperature of more than 104 degrees F (40 degrees C) can be life-threatening. The brain structure called the hypothalamus helps orchestrate processes to keep that core temperature stable when the weather gets too hot. It acts on the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for keeping the body in homeostasis via many important processes, including heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. The hypothalamus also regulates sweating and dilates blood vessels in the skin, arms, feet and face to dissipate body heat—and it can cause a sensation of discomfort that prompts the body to seek out shade, water or rest.Experts say many medications associated with drug-induced hyperthermia have one factor in common: they’re anticholinergic. These drugs block cells’ receptors from binding to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, which plays an important role in the autonomic nervous system and its heat-adjustment responses, such as perspiration. Blocking its action can cause dry mouth and urinary retention—feeling a need to urinate but being unable to do so. “Some of these medications might cause more heat sensitivity because you’re not sweating,” says Vicki Ellingrod, dean of the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy. “Your body is not making the secretions that it should be making.” Anticholinergics can also causeflushed skin, dilated pupils, blurred vision, fever and an altered mental state. Clinicians have historically used a mnemonic about these symptoms to diagnose anticholinergic poisoning.“A lot of drugs have mild anticholinergic properties, even if that’s not their main intent as a drug,” Blumenberg says. For example, some allergy medications primarily block a cell’s histamine receptors—but they might also bind to other receptors as well and thus still produce anticholinergic effects.Some antipsychotics and neuroleptics (first-generation antipsychotics) can also lead to this and can create a dopamine-blocking effect as well. Dopamine—often called the “feel-good” hormone—influences motivation, memory and even body movement; blocking it can make people feel stiff and cause problems with gait, balance and muscles. One way to decrease those side effects is by pairing an antipsychotic with an anticholinergic—further interfering with acetylcholine and potentially disrupting heat regulation. People who take the antipsychotic drug haloperidol for schizophrenia, for example, are often prescribed an anticholinergic drug called benztropine that decreases some adverse side effects but can, on rare occasions, elevate internal temperature. This shouldn’t happen if people take the appropriate prescribed dose, Blumenberg says, “but it’s possible.”Antipsychotic medications, as well as medications commonly prescribed for bipolar disorder, depression and insomnia, typically act on the brain, which means they could potentially influence the neural pathways that control temperature. Some older antipsychotics are known to occasionally cause a severe reaction called neuroleptic malignant syndrome, which impacts the body’s ability to thermoregulate, Ellingrod notes. “Now, with our newer medications, it’s not as common. But maybe with the impact of the climate, it’s going to be more common,” she says.New research into psychiatric disorders has rapidly improved existing treatments and led to new strategies to reduce some of the adverse side effects; such steps include pairing antipsychotics with other medications. But responses to medications can still vary from person to person. Additionally, “the degree in which [these drugs] actually block the acetylcholine receptors varies between medications, which is why you can see one drug in a class really having this [anticholinergic] effect and another drug in the same class not having the same effect,” Ellingrod says. For example, she adds, the antihistamines that cause more drowsiness tend to be more anticholinergic because they can cross the blood-brain barrier. Newer antihistamines have side effects that are less sedating and very rarely disrupt thermoregulation.A 2023 study in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology found that most heat-related adverse effects were reported for medications that act on the nervous system (such as drugs that have strong anticholinergic effects), followed by medications that modulate the immune system. People on heart medications might face thermoregulation complications under high environmental temperatures, too. A 2022 study in Nature Cardiovascular Researchfound that people taking beta-blockers and antiplatelet medications for cardiovascular conditions have a higher risk of experiencing a heart attack in hot weather.“Beta-receptor blockers could decrease the heart rate [and] reduce the blood flow to the skin. That makes people more vulnerable to heat exposure,” says Kai Chen, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health and a co-author of the 2022 study. “The same goes for the [antiplatelet drugs], like aspirin. People taking that could increase core body temperature during passive heat stress, which will make them more vulnerable.”Chen notes that his study is based only on a small group of German participants. But he and his team are conducting studies to analyze these effects in bigger cohorts in the U.S., and they expect results in a couple of years. “We’re trying to see if this enhanced heat effect on these certain medications is due to the medication itself or due to the preexisting conditions,” he says. “If we can confirm through multiple studies at multiple locations with different populations that this is not a mere correlation or association and can maybe indicate a causation, then I think that will change how physicians advise the patients taking the medication during heat waves.”Soko Setoguchi, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a co-author of the 2020 PLOS ONE study, says there is a growing effort to understand how drugs are affected by extreme heat—because any medication can have unintended effects, and there is still “limited evidence” on how heat influences various drug interactions.“The precise temperature threshold for these side effects to occur is not explicitly defined in the provided studies, as heat sensitivity can vary based on individual health status, medication dosage and specific environmental conditions,” Setoguchi says, adding that comprehensive data from larger trials are needed.The Food and Drug Administration monitors drugs’ safety even after they are approved, but it has not been tracking heat-related issues associated with medications. “If newly identified safety signals are identified,” the agency wrote in an e-mail to Scientific American, “the FDA will determine what, if any, actions are appropriate after a thorough review of available data.”Scientific American requested comment from 10 major pharmaceutical companies that make antipsychotic medications, but only one, Lundbeck, had responded by the time of publication. A spokesperson said in an e-mail that the company hasn’t “observed any side effects linked to weather conditions such as hot weather in relation to the use of antipsychotics. However, certain labels may mention side effects like flushing, tremor, and hyperthermia, which are linked to [medications that act on serotonin] and can resemble symptoms associated with hot weather.” (Serotonin is a hormone involved in temperature regulation.)Ultimately, some medications that can induce heat-related side effects are still necessary for treating certain conditions. Experts recommend consulting with physicians about potentially adjusting doses or scheduling and alerting a health care provider if any irregular reactions occur as the weather warms. Additionally, people taking medications known to produce an anticholinergic effect should be aware of strategies to keep cool. These can include staying hydrated, carrying fans or ice packs and seeking shade or air-conditioning. Until more research results emerge, clinicians and their patients should discuss best options for prescriptions—and ways to prepare for hotter days.