Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Into the Clear Blue Sky Offers Hope for Our Climate Future

News Feed
Friday, August 9, 2024

The goal is simple: save the world. Rob Jackson, climate scientist and author of Into the Clear Blue Sky, is trying to save the world by removing things: removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, removing fossil fuels from our cars, removing everyday pollutants from our homes. Last summer in the Northern Hemisphere felt cataclysmic: the sky in the U.S. Northeast turned burnt orange from wildfires in Canada, temperatures rose higher and higher, and hurricanes caused more and more damage. How do you save the world, when the present and future feel so bleak? Jackson hasn’t lost hope for a green, sustainable future. He has trekked across the world, meeting CEOs, researchers and field scientists who are working to save our world and our future by removing pollutants, building with greener and better materials and inspiring the rest of us to never lose hope.Scientific American spoke with Jackson about his new book and outlook on our environmental future.[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]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.You start this book with small but surprising ways the atmosphere affects our lives on Earth. A funny example that I wanted to ask you about was salt forming on Italian frescoes. Can you tell me about that? It seems like an odd place to begin a climate book, but I was interested in how we think about preserving things for centuries, and the Vatican has a whole office of people thinking about maintaining and restoring items over decades to centuries. For centuries, people lit the chapel with candles, and the burned wax and soot got released into the air and gradually built up on the frescoes. On top of that, they started to see what looked almost like powdery mildew on the frescoes, and that was literally carbon dioxide from people's breath, almost in the same way that the stalagmites form in a cave. There was too much carbon dioxide in the air. The most amazing thing about seeing the chapel were these little blocks, the Italian word for them translates to “testimony”; they leave these rectangles of dirt on the fresco to remind people of what things were like. I found that to be a very beautiful and moving example of how far they had come in restoring the frescoes.In addition to carbon dioxide, you talk about the greenhouse gas methane. Can you tell me what concerns you about methane in particular?I spent so much of my time working on methane because it's 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming Earth. It’s responsible for an additional third as much warming as CO2 in recent decades. But methane is also mysterious. We’re still trying to understand why it’s rising: [it] could be the tropical wetlands that I study in the Amazon are starting to release more methane as they warm; it could be that there's more methane coming from cows or oil and gas wells or other things that we do. The biggest reason for emphasizing methane as much as I do is [that] it’s short-lived in the atmosphere—it lasts only a decade or so. That means that if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, we could restore methane concentration to preindustrial levels in only a decade!Speaking of the Amazon, you talk about your research in the region and this concept of “climate colonialism.” What do you mean by the term, and what can be done to avoid perpetuating it? I don't use the word colonialism lightly. I think of climate colonialism as industrialized nations living at the ecological expense of other countries. I think it’s appropriate because poorer nations, and to some extent poor people in richer nations, bear the brunt and pay the price for this extra pollution. In Pakistan, where emissions are about a tenth or less of what they are in the U.S. per person, there were record floods where a third of [the country] was submerged. Climate change was statistically responsible for at least part of that extreme weather. [The] same [goes] for island nations in the Pacific: they didn't cause climate change, but [these] countries are literally going underwater because of things that we do.Is there anything that you try to do or not to do in your own research to avoid perpetuating this form of climate colonialism?There’s an undercurrent in the book of environmental justice. I have started doing research on inequities in research, resource use, consumption and energy use. One way I tackle it is that I believe climate solutions start with using less in rich countries. If climate solutions are a three-legged stool, the first leg is to consume less. The second leg is to decarbonize whatever products remain that have to be made. And the third leg, to a lesser extent, is to hack the atmosphere to remove some greenhouse gases. So we can’t talk about climate solutions without acknowledging that resource consumption is deeply unfair in the U.S. and around the world.I was intrigued by the breadth of industries you talked about in the book and the way you spoke with people on the ground at research sites, manufacturers and scientists. Whose work are you still thinking about?I loved seeing the steel plants in Sweden [that have been] making the world's first fossil-free steel, that was very powerful and moving for me. I have to say, they do it because there’s a carbon price; to avoid the fee for carbon dioxide pollution, they developed this whole new way of making steel that gets rid of all the coal and uses clean hydrogen. I found that visit inspiring, and I just love the way the CEO there talked about his daughters saying they used to think that this was just another shitty company, but now they understand they’re trying to do something good for the world. I really enjoyed the people I met there.The chapter about minor gas leaks in the home, especially those caused by gas stoves, really was eye-opening for me. What changes have you enacted in your own life to avoid this indoor pollution?I have swapped out all our gas appliances. My lab and I were studying methane leaks in homes, and we essentially developed all these methods in my own home. We started measuring nitrogen oxides and benzene pollution, and I was ... shocked to see the NOx [nitrogen oxide] levels [that] formed in my kitchen.One of the other interesting things about the gas stove work for me was this intersection of climate solutions and health—that has become a recurring theme of my research. Pollution from coal and cars still kills 100,000 Americans a year even though our air and water are cleaner today than when I was a boy. Worldwide it’s 10 million people: one in five deaths worldwide is caused by breathing in pollution. One of the biggest sources of carcinogenic benzene and asthma-triggering NOx gases in many people’s lives is the pollution that we create by burning gas indoors. You would never stand over the tailpipe of your car and breathe in the exhaust. Yet we stand willingly over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants hour after hour, meal after meal, year after year.It’s even worse to think about the gas leaks occurring nearby schools, highways or private homes that aren’t considered big enough to warrant fixing right away by the companies that own them. I wanted to ask you about your experience driving around and tracking these gas leaks, it seemed like a very meaningful experience for you in the book.I was fortunate to work with a friend and colleague, Nathan Phillips, who I interviewed in the book. Especially in cities like Boston and [Washington], D.C., or Manhattan—where the pipelines are older than a century, some of them dating back to the Civil War—you don't even drive a mile before you’ve got a couple of gas leaks that nobody’s fixing. It’s really, really eye-opening to see how many of these leaks there are and equally eye-opening to see how many of them are still there when you go back not one year later but 10 years later, in some cases.The Supreme Court recently overturned the so-called Chevron deference, making it more likely that courts rather than expert agencies get to interpret statutes. What do you think this ruling will mean for your work and the work of others whom you interviewed in this book?It’s one thing to have a conversation around ways we can make the permitting process more efficient so that companies can spend less time and less money getting through the system. It’s another thing entirely to throw out the whole idea of monitoring and permitting. We need to have some safeguards. I’m deeply disturbed and concerned by the recent Supreme Court rulings in the environment space—there have been rulings over the past few years [that roll] back the ability of the [Environmental Protection Agency] to regulate pollution from coal plants—and the idea that we shouldn’t, or that we don’t, have a legal footing to worry about cross-state pollution. I don’t understand because everyone in the country wants cleaner air and cleaner water for their kids.As a climate expert, if it was entirely up to you to enact any national or international climate policy at your will, what would you do?I would price pollution. I would want the polluter to pay so there’s a direct incentive for companies to cut pollution and use cleaner technologies. We don’t have that nationally in the U.S. We’re very different from Europe, which has had a carbon market for a long time. The problem with pollution being free is that any climate solution is always more expensive than free.Are the polluter-pay policies the ones that give you the most hope for a cleaner future? Yeah, there are different paths to get to a winning future, but the price is one. Regulation is another; it’s a sort of an unpopular word in many circles. When I talk with students, I will ask them to practice optimism, to go back and look at things that have gotten better. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to find things that are better today than they were 50 years ago or a century ago, environmental things, and that list is long. It’s water and air quality; it’s life expectancy and childhood mortality. And then you look at the outcomes of specific environmental regulations in the past, and we’re amazingly better off. Lead levels in the blood of our children have dropped by 95 percent in this country since the phasing out of leaded gasoline—that was a regulatory mandate. The Montreal Protocol has saved billions of skin cancers and millions of cataracts. My favorite, the U.S. Clean Air Act, continues to save us hundreds of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. at a 30-fold return on investment. Sometimes regulation is warranted, and it ends up saving us money.My final question for you is simply: What do we do? How do we clean the environment? How do we keep it clean?We start at home. We never buy a gasoline-powered car or a gas-powered appliance again. We use less. We use cleaner electricity-based vehicles and appliances. Then we vote for politicians who believe in clean energy and climate solutions to help us decarbonize industries that require furnaces at thousands of degrees, like steel and cement and aluminum manufacturing. We vote for politicians who are willing to price pollution and save lives and save money while we do it. I think a necessary mix of individual action and collective societal action.A little optimism can't hurt.Yeah, I learned so much and met so many inspiring people, and I hope to inspire people myself. I’ve spent decades tracking greenhouse gas emissions. And then, after watching years of climate inaction roll by like floats in the parade, I went looking for hope and solutions. I found that hope in the people I met, the technologies that I learned about. There are a lot of good things happening out there. And I want people to have hope that we can beat climate change.

An interview with Rob Jackson about ending climate colonialism, inspiring polluter-pay policies and taking a path to a cleaner climate

The goal is simple: save the world. Rob Jackson, climate scientist and author of Into the Clear Blue Sky, is trying to save the world by removing things: removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, removing fossil fuels from our cars, removing everyday pollutants from our homes. Last summer in the Northern Hemisphere felt cataclysmic: the sky in the U.S. Northeast turned burnt orange from wildfires in Canada, temperatures rose higher and higher, and hurricanes caused more and more damage. How do you save the world, when the present and future feel so bleak? Jackson hasn’t lost hope for a green, sustainable future. He has trekked across the world, meeting CEOs, researchers and field scientists who are working to save our world and our future by removing pollutants, building with greener and better materials and inspiring the rest of us to never lose hope.

Scientific American spoke with Jackson about his new book and outlook on our environmental future.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]


On supporting science journalism

If 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.


Into the Clear Blue Sky book cover

You start this book with small but surprising ways the atmosphere affects our lives on Earth. A funny example that I wanted to ask you about was salt forming on Italian frescoes. Can you tell me about that?

It seems like an odd place to begin a climate book, but I was interested in how we think about preserving things for centuries, and the Vatican has a whole office of people thinking about maintaining and restoring items over decades to centuries. For centuries, people lit the chapel with candles, and the burned wax and soot got released into the air and gradually built up on the frescoes. On top of that, they started to see what looked almost like powdery mildew on the frescoes, and that was literally carbon dioxide from people's breath, almost in the same way that the stalagmites form in a cave. There was too much carbon dioxide in the air. The most amazing thing about seeing the chapel were these little blocks, the Italian word for them translates to “testimony”; they leave these rectangles of dirt on the fresco to remind people of what things were like. I found that to be a very beautiful and moving example of how far they had come in restoring the frescoes.

In addition to carbon dioxide, you talk about the greenhouse gas methane. Can you tell me what concerns you about methane in particular?

I spent so much of my time working on methane because it's 90 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming Earth. It’s responsible for an additional third as much warming as CO2 in recent decades. But methane is also mysterious. We’re still trying to understand why it’s rising: [it] could be the tropical wetlands that I study in the Amazon are starting to release more methane as they warm; it could be that there's more methane coming from cows or oil and gas wells or other things that we do. The biggest reason for emphasizing methane as much as I do is [that] it’s short-lived in the atmosphere—it lasts only a decade or so. That means that if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, we could restore methane concentration to preindustrial levels in only a decade!

Speaking of the Amazon, you talk about your research in the region and this concept of “climate colonialism.” What do you mean by the term, and what can be done to avoid perpetuating it?

I don't use the word colonialism lightly. I think of climate colonialism as industrialized nations living at the ecological expense of other countries. I think it’s appropriate because poorer nations, and to some extent poor people in richer nations, bear the brunt and pay the price for this extra pollution. In Pakistan, where emissions are about a tenth or less of what they are in the U.S. per person, there were record floods where a third of [the country] was submerged. Climate change was statistically responsible for at least part of that extreme weather. [The] same [goes] for island nations in the Pacific: they didn't cause climate change, but [these] countries are literally going underwater because of things that we do.

Is there anything that you try to do or not to do in your own research to avoid perpetuating this form of climate colonialism?

There’s an undercurrent in the book of environmental justice. I have started doing research on inequities in research, resource use, consumption and energy use. One way I tackle it is that I believe climate solutions start with using less in rich countries. If climate solutions are a three-legged stool, the first leg is to consume less. The second leg is to decarbonize whatever products remain that have to be made. And the third leg, to a lesser extent, is to hack the atmosphere to remove some greenhouse gases. So we can’t talk about climate solutions without acknowledging that resource consumption is deeply unfair in the U.S. and around the world.

I was intrigued by the breadth of industries you talked about in the book and the way you spoke with people on the ground at research sites, manufacturers and scientists. Whose work are you still thinking about?

I loved seeing the steel plants in Sweden [that have been] making the world's first fossil-free steel, that was very powerful and moving for me. I have to say, they do it because there’s a carbon price; to avoid the fee for carbon dioxide pollution, they developed this whole new way of making steel that gets rid of all the coal and uses clean hydrogen. I found that visit inspiring, and I just love the way the CEO there talked about his daughters saying they used to think that this was just another shitty company, but now they understand they’re trying to do something good for the world. I really enjoyed the people I met there.

The chapter about minor gas leaks in the home, especially those caused by gas stoves, really was eye-opening for me. What changes have you enacted in your own life to avoid this indoor pollution?

I have swapped out all our gas appliances. My lab and I were studying methane leaks in homes, and we essentially developed all these methods in my own home. We started measuring nitrogen oxides and benzene pollution, and I was ... shocked to see the NOx [nitrogen oxide] levels [that] formed in my kitchen.

One of the other interesting things about the gas stove work for me was this intersection of climate solutions and health—that has become a recurring theme of my research. Pollution from coal and cars still kills 100,000 Americans a year even though our air and water are cleaner today than when I was a boy. Worldwide it’s 10 million people: one in five deaths worldwide is caused by breathing in pollution. One of the biggest sources of carcinogenic benzene and asthma-triggering NOx gases in many people’s lives is the pollution that we create by burning gas indoors. You would never stand over the tailpipe of your car and breathe in the exhaust. Yet we stand willingly over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants hour after hour, meal after meal, year after year.

It’s even worse to think about the gas leaks occurring nearby schools, highways or private homes that aren’t considered big enough to warrant fixing right away by the companies that own them. I wanted to ask you about your experience driving around and tracking these gas leaks, it seemed like a very meaningful experience for you in the book.

I was fortunate to work with a friend and colleague, Nathan Phillips, who I interviewed in the book. Especially in cities like Boston and [Washington], D.C., or Manhattan—where the pipelines are older than a century, some of them dating back to the Civil War—you don't even drive a mile before you’ve got a couple of gas leaks that nobody’s fixing. It’s really, really eye-opening to see how many of these leaks there are and equally eye-opening to see how many of them are still there when you go back not one year later but 10 years later, in some cases.

The Supreme Court recently overturned the so-called Chevron deference, making it more likely that courts rather than expert agencies get to interpret statutes. What do you think this ruling will mean for your work and the work of others whom you interviewed in this book?

It’s one thing to have a conversation around ways we can make the permitting process more efficient so that companies can spend less time and less money getting through the system. It’s another thing entirely to throw out the whole idea of monitoring and permitting. We need to have some safeguards. I’m deeply disturbed and concerned by the recent Supreme Court rulings in the environment space—there have been rulings over the past few years [that roll] back the ability of the [Environmental Protection Agency] to regulate pollution from coal plants—and the idea that we shouldn’t, or that we don’t, have a legal footing to worry about cross-state pollution. I don’t understand because everyone in the country wants cleaner air and cleaner water for their kids.

As a climate expert, if it was entirely up to you to enact any national or international climate policy at your will, what would you do?

I would price pollution. I would want the polluter to pay so there’s a direct incentive for companies to cut pollution and use cleaner technologies. We don’t have that nationally in the U.S. We’re very different from Europe, which has had a carbon market for a long time. The problem with pollution being free is that any climate solution is always more expensive than free.

Are the polluter-pay policies the ones that give you the most hope for a cleaner future?

Yeah, there are different paths to get to a winning future, but the price is one. Regulation is another; it’s a sort of an unpopular word in many circles. When I talk with students, I will ask them to practice optimism, to go back and look at things that have gotten better. My first homework assignment in every class is for students to find things that are better today than they were 50 years ago or a century ago, environmental things, and that list is long. It’s water and air quality; it’s life expectancy and childhood mortality. And then you look at the outcomes of specific environmental regulations in the past, and we’re amazingly better off. Lead levels in the blood of our children have dropped by 95 percent in this country since the phasing out of leaded gasoline—that was a regulatory mandate. The Montreal Protocol has saved billions of skin cancers and millions of cataracts. My favorite, the U.S. Clean Air Act, continues to save us hundreds of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. at a 30-fold return on investment. Sometimes regulation is warranted, and it ends up saving us money.

My final question for you is simply: What do we do? How do we clean the environment? How do we keep it clean?

We start at home. We never buy a gasoline-powered car or a gas-powered appliance again. We use less. We use cleaner electricity-based vehicles and appliances. Then we vote for politicians who believe in clean energy and climate solutions to help us decarbonize industries that require furnaces at thousands of degrees, like steel and cement and aluminum manufacturing. We vote for politicians who are willing to price pollution and save lives and save money while we do it. I think a necessary mix of individual action and collective societal action.

A little optimism can't hurt.

Yeah, I learned so much and met so many inspiring people, and I hope to inspire people myself. I’ve spent decades tracking greenhouse gas emissions. And then, after watching years of climate inaction roll by like floats in the parade, I went looking for hope and solutions. I found that hope in the people I met, the technologies that I learned about. There are a lot of good things happening out there. And I want people to have hope that we can beat climate change.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Costa Rica’s Tortuga Island Coral Garden Revives Reefs

The coral reefs off Tortuga Island in the Gulf of Nicoya are experiencing a remarkable revival, thanks to an innovative coral garden project spearheaded by local institutions and communities. Launched in August 2024, this initiative has made significant strides in restoring ecosystems devastated by both natural and human-induced degradation, offering hope amidst a global coral […] The post Costa Rica’s Tortuga Island Coral Garden Revives Reefs appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

The coral reefs off Tortuga Island in the Gulf of Nicoya are experiencing a remarkable revival, thanks to an innovative coral garden project spearheaded by local institutions and communities. Launched in August 2024, this initiative has made significant strides in restoring ecosystems devastated by both natural and human-induced degradation, offering hope amidst a global coral bleaching crisis. The project, a collaborative effort led by the State Distance University (UNED) Puntarenas branch, the Nautical Fishing Nucleus of the National Learning Institute (INA), the PROLAB laboratory, and Bay Island Cruises, has transplanted 1,050 coral fragments from June to September 2024, with an additional 300 corals added in early 2025. This builds on earlier efforts, bringing the total volume of cultivated coral to approximately 9,745.51 cm³, a promising indicator of recovery for the region’s coral and fish populations. The initiative employs advanced coral gardening techniques, including “coral trees” — multi-level frames where coral fragments are suspended — and “clotheslines,” which allow corals to grow in optimal conditions with ample light, oxygenation, and protection from predators. These structures are anchored to the seabed, floating about 5 meters below the surface. Rodolfo Vargas Ugalde, a coral reef gardening specialist at INA’s Nautical Fishing Nucleus, explained that these methods, introduced by INA in 2013, accelerate coral growth, enabling maturity in just one year compared to the natural rate of 2.5 cm annually. “In the Pacific, three coral species adapt well to these structures, thriving under the favorable conditions they provide,” Vargas noted. The project was born out of necessity following a diagnosis that revealed Tortuga Island’s reefs were completely degraded due to sedimentation, pollution, and overexploitation. “Corals are the tropical forests of the ocean,” Vargas emphasized, highlighting their role as ecosystems that support at least 25% of marine life and 33% of fish diversity, while also driving tourism, a key economic pillar for the region. Sindy Scafidi, a representative from UNED, underscored the project’s broader impact: “Research in this area allows us to rescue, produce, and multiply corals, contributing to the sustainable development of the region so that these species, a major tourist attraction, are preserved.” The initiative actively involves local communities, fostering a sense of stewardship and ensuring long-term conservation. This local success story contrasts with a grim global outlook. A recent report by the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) revealed that 84% of the world’s coral reefs have been affected by the most intense bleaching event on record, driven by warming oceans. Since January 2023, 82 countries have reported damage, with the crisis ongoing. In Costa Rica, 77% of coral reef ecosystems face serious threats, primarily from human activities like sedimentation, pollution, and resource overexploitation. Despite these challenges, the Tortuga Island project demonstrates resilience. By focusing on species suited to the Gulf of Nicoya’s conditions and leveraging innovative cultivation techniques, the initiative is rebuilding reefs that can withstand environmental stressors. The collaboration with Bay Island Cruises has also facilitated logistical support, enabling divers and researchers to access the site efficiently. The project aligns with broader coral restoration efforts across Costa Rica, such as the Samara Project, which planted 2,000 corals by January and aims for 3,000 by year-end. Together, these initiatives highlight Costa Rica’s commitment to marine conservation, offering a model for other regions grappling with reef degradation. As global temperatures continue to rise, with oceans absorbing much of the excess heat, experts stress the urgency of combining restoration with climate action. The Tortuga Island coral garden project stands as a ray of hope, proving that targeted, community-driven efforts can revive vital ecosystems even in the face of unprecedented challenges. The post Costa Rica’s Tortuga Island Coral Garden Revives Reefs appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

More women view climate change as their number one political issue

A new report shows a growing gender gap among people who vote with environmental issues in mind.

A new report from the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), shared first with The 19th, finds that far more women than men are listing climate and environmental issues as their top priority in voting. The nonpartisan nonprofit, which focuses on tailoring get out the vote efforts to low-propensity voters who they’ve identified as likely to list climate and environmental issues as a top priority, found that women far outpace men on the issue. Overall 62 percent of these so-called climate voters are women, compared to 37 percent of men. The gender gap is largest among young people, Black and Indigenous voters.  The nonprofit identifies these voters through a predictive model built based on surveys it conducts among registered voters. It defines a climate voter as someone with at least an 85 percent likelihood of listing climate change or the environment as their number one priority.  “At a time when other political gender gaps, such as [presidential] vote choice gender gaps, are staying relatively stable, there’s something unique going on with gender and public opinion about climate change,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the organization.  While the models can predict the likelihood of a voter viewing climate as their number one issue, it can’t actually determine whether these same people then cast a vote aligned with that viewpoint. The report looks at data from 21 states that are a mix of red and blue. Read Next Where did all the climate voters go? Sachi Kitajima Mulkey Based on polling from the AP-NORC exit poll, 7 percent of people self-reported that climate change was their number one priority in the 2024 general election, Stinnett said. Of those who listed climate as their top priority, they voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris by a 10 to 1 margin.  The EVP findings are important, Stinnett says, because they also point the way to who might best lead the country in the fight against the climate crisis. “If almost two thirds of climate voters are women, then all of us need to get better at embracing women’s wisdom and leadership skills,” Stinnett said. “That doesn’t just apply to messaging. It applies to how we build and lead a movement of activists and voters.”  Though the data reveals a trend, it’s unclear why the gender gap grew in recent years. In the six years that EVP has collected data, the gap has gone from 20 percent in 2019, and then shrunk to 15 percent in 2022 before beginning to rise in 2024. In 2025, the gap grew to 25 percentage points. “I don’t know if men are caring less about climate change. I do know that they are much, much less likely now than they were before, to list it as their number one priority,” he said. “Maybe men don’t care less about climate change than they did before, right? Maybe it’s just that other things have jumped priorities over that.” A survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, a nonprofit that gauges the public’s attitude toward climate change has seen a similar trend in its work. Marija Verner, a researcher with the organization, said in 2014 there was a 7 percent gap between the number of men and women in the U.S. who said they were concerned by global warming. A decade later in 2024, that gap had nearly doubled to 12 percent.  Read Next What do climate protests actually achieve? More than you think. Kate Yoder There is evidence that climate change and pollution impact women more than men both in the United States and globally. This is because women make up a larger share of those living in poverty, with less resources to protect themselves, and the people they care for, from the impacts of climate change. Women of color in particular live disproportionately in low-income communities with greater climate risk.  This could help explain why there is a bigger gender gap between women of color and their male counterparts. In the EVP findings there is a 35 percent gap between Black women and men climate voters, and a 29 percent gap between Indigenous women and men.  Jasmine Gil, associate senior director at Hip Hop Caucus, a nonprofit that mobilizes communities of color, said she’s not really surprised to see that Black women are prioritizing the issue. Gil works on environmental and climate justice issues, and she hears voters talk about climate change as it relates to everyday issues like public safety, housing, reproductive health and, more recently, natural disasters.  “Black women often carry the weight of protecting their families and communities,” she said. “They’re the ones navigating things like school closures and skyrocketing bills; they are the ones seeing the direct impacts of these things. It is a kitchen table issue.” The EVP survey also found a larger gender gap among registered voters in the youngest demographic, ages 18 to 24.  Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of youth voting organization NextGen America, said that in addition to young women obtaining higher levels of education and becoming more progressive than men, a trend that played out in the election, she also thinks the prospect of motherhood could help explain the gap.  She’s seen how young mothers, particularly in her Latino community, worry about the health of their kids who suffer disproportionately from health issues like asthma. Her own son has asthma, she said: “That really made me think even more about air quality and the climate crisis and the world we’re leaving to our little ones.” It’s a point that EVP theorizes is worth doing more research on. While the data cannot determine whether someone is a parent or grandparent, it does show that women between ages of 25 to 45 and those 65 and over make up nearly half of all climate voters. Still, Ramirez wants to bring more young men into the conversation. Her organization is working on gender-based strategies to reach this demographic too. Last cycle, they launched a campaign focused on men’s voter power and one of the core issues they are developing messaging around is the climate crisis. She said she thinks one way progressive groups could bring more men into the conversation is by focusing more on the positives of masculinity to get their messaging across.  “There are great things about healthy masculinity … about wanting to protect those you love and those that are more vulnerable,” she said. There are opportunities to tap into that idea of “men wanting to protect their families or those they love or their communities from the consequences of the climate crisis.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline More women view climate change as their number one political issue on Apr 26, 2025.

Climate change could deliver considerable blows to US corn growers, insurers: Study

Federal corn crop insurers could see a 22 percent spike in claims filed by 2030 and a nearly 29 percent jump by mid-century, thanks to the impacts of climate change, a new study has found. Both U.S. corn growers and their insurers are poised to face a future with mounting economic uncertainty, according to the...

Federal corn crop insurers could see a 22 percent spike in claims filed by 2030 and a nearly 29 percent jump by mid-century, thanks to the impacts of climate change, a new study has found. Both U.S. corn growers and their insurers are poised to face a future with mounting economic uncertainty, according to the research, published on Friday in the Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualisation. “Crop insurance has increased 500 percent since the early 2000s, and our simulations show that insurance costs will likely double again by 2050,” lead author Sam Pottinger, a senior researcher at the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Data Science & Environment, said in a statement. “This significant increase will result from a future in which extreme weather events will become more common, which puts both growers and insurance companies at substantial risk,” he warned. Pottinger and his colleagues at both UC Berkeley and the University of Arkansas developed an open-source, AI-powered tool through which they were able to simulate growing conditions through 2050 under varying scenarios. They found that if growing conditions remained unchanged, federal crop insurance companies would see a continuation of current claim rates in the next three decades. However, under different climate change scenarios, claims could rise by anywhere from 13 to 22 percent by 2030, before reaching about 29 percent by 2050, according to the data. Federal crop insurance, distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides economic stability to U.S. farmers and other agricultural entities, the researchers explained. Most U.S. farmers receive their primary insurance through this program, with coverage determined by a grower’s annual crop yield, per the terms of the national Farm Bill. “Not only do we see the claims’ rate rise significantly in a future under climate change, but the severity of these claims increases too,” co-author Lawson Conner, an assistant professor in agricultural economics at the University of Arkansas, said in a statement. “For example, we found that insurance companies could see the average covered portion of a claim increase up to 19 percent by 2050,” Conner noted. The researchers stressed the utility of their tool for people who want to understand how crop insurance prices are established and foresee potential neighborhood-level impacts. To achieve greater security for growers and reduce financial liability for companies in the future, the authors suggested two possible avenues. The first, they contended, could involve a small change to the Farm Bill text that could incentivize farmers to adopt practices such as cover cropping and crop rotation. Although these approaches can lead to lower annual yields, they bolster crop resilience over time, the authors noted. Their second recommendation would  involve including similar such incentives in an existing USDA Risk Management Agency mechanism called 508(h), through which private companies recommend alternative and supplemental insurance products for the agency’s consideration. “We are already seeing more intense droughts, longer heat waves, and more catastrophic floods,” co-author Timothy Bowles, associate professor in environmental science at UC Berkeley, said in a statement.  “In a future that will bring even more of these, our recommendations could help protect growers and insurance providers against extreme weather impacts,” Bowles added.

From Greenland to Ghana, Indigenous youth work for climate justice

“No matter what happens we will stand and we will fight, and we will keep pushing for solutions.”

For the last week,  Indigenous leaders from around the world have converged in New York for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFI. It’s the largest global gathering of Indigenous peoples and the Forum provides space for participants to bring their issues to international authorities, often when their own governments have refused to take action. This year’s Forum focuses on how U.N. member states’ have, or have not, protected the rights of Indigenous peoples, and conversations range from the environmental effects of extractive industries, to climate change, and violence against women. The Forum is an intergenerational space. Young people in attendance often work alongside elders and leaders to come up with solutions and address ongoing challenges. Grist interviewed seven Indigenous youth attending UNPFII this year hailing from Africa, the Pacific, North and South America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Arctic. Joshua Amponsem, 33, is Asante from Ghana and the founder of Green Africa Youth Organization, a youth-led group in Africa that promotes energy sustainability. He also is the co-director of the Youth Climate Justice Fund which provides funding opportunities to bolster youth participation in climate change solutions.  Since the Trump administration pulled all the funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, Amponsem has seen the people and groups he works with suffer from the loss of financial help. Courtesy of Joshua Amponsem It’s already hard to be a young person fighting climate change. Less than one percent of climate grants go to youth-led programs, according to the Youth Climate Justice Fund.   “I think everyone is very much worried,” he said. “That is leading to a lot of anxiety.”  Amponsem specifically mentioned the importance of groups like Africa Youth Pastoralist Initiatives — a coalition of youth who raise animals like sheep or cattle. Pastoralists need support to address climate change because the work of herding sheep and cattle gets more difficult as drought and resource scarcity persist, according to one report.  “No matter what happens we will stand and we will fight, and we will keep pushing for solutions,” he said. Janell Dymus-Kurei, 32, is Māori from the East Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand. She is a fellow with the Commonwealth Fund, a group that promotes better access to healthcare for vulnerable populations. At this year’s UNPFII, Dymus-Kurei hopes to bring attention to legislation aimed at diminishing Māori treaty rights. While one piece of legislation died this month, she doesn’t think it’s going to stop there. She hopes to remind people about the attempted legislation that would have given exclusive Maori rights to everyone in New Zealand. Courtesy of Janell Dymus-Kurei The issue gained international attention last Fall when politician Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke performed a Haka during parliament, a traditional dance that was often done before battle. The demonstration set off other large-scale Māori protests in the country.  “They are bound by the Treaty of Waitangi,” she said. Countries can address the forum, but New Zealand didn’t make it to the UNPFII.  “You would show up if you thought it was important to show up and defend your actions in one way, shape, or form,” she said. This year, she’s brought her two young children — TeAio Nitana, which means “peace and divinity” and Te Haumarangai, or “forceful wind”. Dymus-Kurei said it’s important for children to be a part of the forum, especially with so much focus on Indigenous women. “Parenting is political in every sense of the word,” she said. Avery Doxtator, 22, is Oneida, Anishinaabe and Dakota and the president of the National Association of Friendship Centres, or NAFC, which promotes cultural awareness and resources for urban Indigenous youth throughout Canada’s territories. She attended this year’s Forum to raise awareness about the rights of Indigenous peoples living in urban spaces. The NAFC brought 23 delegates from Canada this year representing all of the country’s regions. It’s the biggest group they’ve ever had, but Doxtator said everyone attending was concerned when crossing the border into the United States due to the Trump Administration’s border and immigration restrictions. Taylar Dawn Stagner “It’s a safety threat that we face as Indigenous peoples coming into a country that does not necessarily want us here,” she said. “That was our number one concern. Making sure youth are safe being in the city, but also crossing the border because of the color of our skin.” The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, protects Indigenous peoples fundamental rights of self-determination, and these rights extend to those living in cities, perhaps away from their territories. She said that she just finished her 5th year on the University of Toronto’s Water Polo Team, and will be playing on a professional team in Barcelona next year.  Around half of Indigenous peoples in Canada live in cities. In the United States around 70 percent live in cities. As a result, many can feel disconnected from their cultures, and that’s what she hopes to shed light on at the forum — that resources for Indigenous youth exist even in urban areas. Liudmyla Korotkykh, 26, is Crimean Tatar from Kyiv, one of the Indigenous peoples of Ukraine. She spoke at UNPFII about the effects of the Ukraine war on her Indigenous community. She is a manager and attorney at the Crimean Tatar Resource Center. The history of the Crimean Tatars are similar to other Indigenous populations. They have survived colonial oppression from both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union — and as a result their language and way of life is constantly under threat. Crimea is a country that was annexed by Russia around a decade ago.  Taylar Dawn Stagner In 2021, President Zelensky passed legislation to establish better rights for Indigenous peoples, but months later Russia continued its campaign against Ukraine.  Korotkykh said Crimean Tatars have been conscripted to fight for Russia against the Tatars that are now in Ukraine.  “Now we are in the situation where our peoples are divided by a frontline and our peoples are fighting against each other because some of us joined the Russian army and some joined the Ukrainian army,” she said.  Korotkykh said even though many, including the Trump Administration, consider Crimea a part of Russia, hopes that Crimean Tatars won’t be left out of future discussions of their homes.  “This is a homeland of Indigenous peoples. We don’t accept the Russian occupation,” she said. “So, when the [Trump] administration starts to discuss how we can recognize Crimea as a part of Russia, it is not acceptable to us.” Toni Chiran, 30, is Garo from Bangladesh, and a member of the Bangladesh Indigenous Youth Forum, an organization focused on protecting young Indigenous people. The country has 54 distinct Indigenous peoples, and their constitution does not recognize Indigenous rights.  In January, Chiran was part of a protest in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where he and other Indigenous people were protesting how the state was erasing the word “Indigenous” — or Adivasi in Hindi — from text books. Chiran says the move is a part of an ongoing assault by the state to erase Indigenous peoples from Bangladesh. Courtesy of Toni Chiran He said that he sustained injuries to his head and chest during the protest as counter protesters assaulted their group, and 13 protesters sustained injuries. He hopes bringing that incident, and more, to the attention of Forum members will help in the fight for Indigenous rights in Bangladesh. “There is an extreme level of human rights violations in my country due to the land related conflicts because our government still does not recognize Indigenous peoples,” he said.  The student group Students for Sovereignty were accused of attacking Chiran and his fellow protesters. During a following protest a few days later in support of Chiran and the others injured Bangladesh police used tear gas and batons to disperse the crowd.  “We are still demanding justice on these issues,” he said. Aviaaija Baadsgaard, 27, is Inuit and a member of the Inuit Circumpolar Council Youth Engagement Program, a group that aims to empower the next generation of leaders in the Arctic. Baadsgaard is originally from Nuunukuu, the capital of Greenland, and this is her first year attending the UNPFII. Just last week she graduated from the University of Copenhagen with her law degree. She originally began studying law to help protect the rights of the Inuit of Greenland.. Recently, Greenland has been a global focal point due to the Trump Administration’s interest in acquiring the land and its resources – including minerals needed for the green transition like lithium and neodymium: both crucial for electric vehicles. “For me, it’s really important to speak on behalf of the Inuit of Greenland,” Baadsgaard said. Taylar Dawn Stagner Greenland is around 80 percent Indigenous, and a vast majority of the population there do not want the Greenland is around 80 percent Indigenous, and a vast majority of the population there do not want the U.S. to wrest control of the country from the Kingdom of Denmark. Many more want to be completely independent.  “I don’t want any administration to mess with our sovereignty,” she said.  Baadsgaard said her first time at the forum has connected her to a broader discussion about global Indigenous rights — a conversation she is excited to join. She wants to learn more about the complex system at the United Nations, so this trip is about getting ready for the future. Cindy Sisa Andy Aguinda, 30, is Kitchwa from Ecuador in the Amazon. She is in New York to talk about climate change, women’s health and the climate crisis. She spoke on a panel with a group of other Indigenous women about how the patriarchy and colonial violence affect women at a time of growing global unrest. Especially in the Amazon where deforestation is devastating the forests important to the Kitchwa tribe.  She said international funding is how many protect the Amazon Rainforest. As an example, last year the United States agreed to send around 40 million dollars to the country through USAID — but then the Trump administration terminated most of the department in March. Courtesy of Cindy Sisa Andy Aguinda “To continue working and caring for our lands, the rainforest, and our people, we need help,” she said through a translator. Even when international funding goes into other countries for the purposes to protect Indigenous land, only around 17 percent ends up in the hands of Indigenous-led initiatives. “In my country, it’s difficult for the authorities to take us into account,” she said.  She said despite that she had hope for the future and hopes to make it to COP30 in Brazil, the international gathering that addresses climate change, though she will probably have to foot the bill herself. She said that Indigenous tribes of the Amazon are the ones fighting everyday to protect their territories, and she said those with this relationship with the forest need to share ancestral knowledge with the world at places like the UNPFII and COP30.  “We can’t stop if we want to live well, if we want our cultural identity to remain alive,” she said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline From Greenland to Ghana, Indigenous youth work for climate justice on Apr 25, 2025.

Harris County commissioners approve climate justice plan

Nearly three years in the works, the Harris County Climate Justice Plan is a 59-page document that creates long-term strategies addressing natural resource conservation, infrastructure resiliency and flood control.

Sarah GrunauFlood waters fill southwest Houston streets during Hurricane Beryl on July 8, 2024.Harris County commissioners this month approved what’s considered the county’s most comprehensive climate justice plan to date. Nearly three years in the works, the Harris County Climate Justice Plan is a 59-page document that creates long-term strategies addressing natural resource conservation, infrastructure resiliency and flood control in the Houston area. The climate justice plan was created by the Office of County Administration’s Office of Sustainability and an environmental nonprofit, Coalition for Environment, Equity and Resilience. The plan sets goals in five buckets, said Stefania Tomaskovic, the coalition director for the nonprofit. Those include ecology, infrastructure, economy, community and culture. County officials got feedback from more than 340 residents and organizations to ensure the plans reflect the needs of the community. “We held a number of community meetings to really outline the vision and values for this process and then along the way we’ve integrated more and more community members into the process of helping to identify the major buckets of work,” Tomaskovic told Hello Houston. Feedback from those involved in the planning process of the climate justice plan had a simple message — people want clean air, strong infrastructure in their communities, transparency and the opportunity to live with dignity, according to the plan. It outlines plans to protect from certain risks through preventative floodplain and watershed management, land use regulations and proactive disaster preparation. Infrastructure steps in the plan include investing in generators and solar power battery backup, and expanding coordination of programs that provide rapid direct assistance after disasters. Economic steps in the plan including expanding resources with organizations to support programs that provide food, direct cash assistance and housing. Tomaskovic said the move could be cost effective because some studies show that for every dollar spent on mitigation, you’re actually saving $6. “It can be cost effective but also if you think about, like, the whole line of costs, if we are implementing programs that help keep people out of the emergency room, we could be saving in the long run, too,” she said. Funds that will go into implementing the projects have yet to be seen. The more than $700,000 climate plan was funded by nonprofit organizations, including the Jacob & Terese Hershey Foundation. “Some of them actually are just process improvements,” Lisa Lin, director of sustainability with Harris County, told Hello Houston. “Some of them are actually low-cost, no-cost actions. Some of them are kind of leaning on things that are happening in the community or happening in the county. Some of them might be new and then we’ll be looking at different funding sources.” The county will now be charged with bringing the plan into reality, which includes conducting a benefits and impacts analysis. County staffers will also develop an implementation roadmap to identify specific leaders and partners and a plan to track its success, according to the county. “This initiative is the first time a U.S. county has prepared a resiliency plan that covers its entire population, as opposed to its bureaucracy alone," Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement. "At the heart of this plan are realistic steps to advance issues like clean air, resilient infrastructure, and housing affordability and availability. Many portions of the plan are already in progress, and I look forward to continued advancement over the years."

Suggested Viewing

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.