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LISTEN: Elijah Hutchinson on New York City’s push for climate justice

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Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Elijah Hutchinson joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss New York City’s first comprehensive study on environmental inequality and how communities can use it to advocate for themselves.Hutchinson, executive director at New York City’s Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, also talks about how the mayor’s office is incorporating the feedback and needs of diverse communities across the city into its policymaking.The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.Listen below to our discussion with Hutchinson and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or Spotify. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Elijah Hutchinson on New York City’s push for climate justiceTranscript Brian BienkowskiElijah, how are you doing today?Elijah Hutchinson Hi, I'm doing great. What a good Monday to start the week off.Brian Bienkowski Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to have you. So where are you today?Elijah Hutchinson I am in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, inside of the apartment building that I grew up in 40 years ago. I'm in a family-owned apartment building where my dad lives downstairs, and my mom lived with me for a little while, up until recently. So it's still kind of my, my, my, my home for a really long time, and kind of my, my community is all all around here. So calling in from Brooklyn.Brian Bienkowski wow, that is so cool. What a cool way to to grow up in the same community, but the same building. I am so far from home, not not too far. I grew up in the Detroit area, and now I'm in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so... but every time I go home, I always wanted to leave there, and now I feel a really strong pull. So very cool for you to share that with your family. So that brings me to my first question before we get into a lot of the cool work that you're doing with the city is, how did you get into environmental work in the first place?Elijah Hutchinson It's a big part of that is growing up in this community and growing up in Greenpoint, where we sit on top of not just one Superfund site, but multiple Superfund sites from the legacies of pollution that have occurred from industrial and energy uses that have been happening along our waterfront for generations, and really polluting Newtown Creek. I live next to the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant, which is a state-of-the-art facility that got invested into in the late 90s and early 2000s and was really a game changer for the neighborhood in terms of improving quality of life. But Greenpoint was also a place where a lot of our trees were cut down in the 90s because of a beetle infestation that came through our ports, and we had to, you know, replant a lot of trees. Our local pool was closed when I grew up here with McCarran Park, and it's amazing to see that now 50 pools are open across the city for for swimming, which is really important during these heat times. But living in Greenpoint and experiencing the rapid change of the neighborhood –gentrification, the environmental costs and benefits and burdens that legacies of decisions and policymaking make– really made me shift from being a geneticist, which was what I thought I was going to be when I was in training and in college, I was a biological anthropology major, I was working in mice and fly labs, and I really shifted to the city planning and community development and environmental justice work.Brian Bienkowski Excellent, and we are going to get into that. And I want to start with the city's first comprehensive study on environmental inequality that was released just this past April, which put you and your work on my radar. So what prompted this report, and what were some of the key findings?Elijah Hutchinson The prompt for the report was actually some city council legislation that had passed in 2017. Those local laws they were called local law 60 and 64 required us to assess environmental equity issues and develop a plan around incorporating environmental justice into the fabric of city decision making. It was a really interesting charge that meant that for the first time, New York City was going to produce a landmark and historic report about documenting environmental burdens and benefits across a landscape of issues in New York City, and do so in a really comprehensive way, where we brought over 100 different data layers together to try to put all of those compounding effects on one place and in one map, and tell multiple stories and narratives, interviewing people in those communities to get those first person perspectives on what was going on and happening in their community. And so those investigations and all of that data analysis and the Constitution of the Environmental Justice Advisory Board really guided the research and practice and resulted in us putting out the first report this past, this past spring, which is really, really exciting. But what it also comes with, is a mapping tool that is a digital online tool that can be used for research or analysis, but really captures all of the findings of the report, and it includes a next phase of work, which we're just starting right now, to come up with new policies and programs that are going to address the issues we identified in the first phase of the report.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned some of the historical context right where you are there in Greenpoint, but kind of more broadly, can you talk about the decisions and policies in the past in the city related to housing, zoning and transit that left a lot of low income and communities of color more subject to the environmental ills.Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, for sure, one of the biggest factors that we see affecting communities is not one that's a stranger to these communities, but really redlining and the practice of racially discriminatory real estate practices that were embedded within how mortgages and financing were given to most disproportionately impacting Black and Hispanic communities across New York City. And what we're finding is that 67% of the total population that lives in historically redlined areas of New York City also live in what we defined for the first time as environmental justice communities that were based off of the state's disadvantaged community criteria. And once we kind of crunched the numbers and look at these overlaps, you can see that in areas of central Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan, in most of the Bronx, these areas, you really start to see the intersections between the decisions to redline and what it ends up actually meaning for these communities which show up in areas of like deficiencies in housing maintenance, higher levels of pollution and other factors that are that are really persistent because of these decisions of the past.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned pollution. I know the city obviously has a lot of traffic. I think we all know that, even those of us who don't live there, leaving a lot of people exposed to air pollutants. But what did the report find about air pollution exposure and what is driving up exposure in the city's environmental justice communities?Elijah Hutchinson The report itself examines exposure to polluted air across five issues and indicators. So breaks that down into outdoor air pollution, stationary sources of pollution, mobile sources of pollution, solid waste facilities and indoor air quality. And air quality can be influenced by many things, including geography and regional weather patterns and human activity, but climate change is another variable and factor for air quality because of things like the Canadian wildfires, for instance, which have burned thousands of miles away, yet we know from last summer, and we suspect even this summer, we're going to experience air quality impacts on those hotter days that are associated with lower air quality, which really bring up the vulnerability. But then on the exposure side, there's a lot of mobile sources of pollution as well, that comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles. And communities of color are disproportionately exposed to emissions from heavy duty diesel vehicles compared to communities that are mostly white due to location near to arterial highways commercial waste routes, delivery routes, parking facilities for heavy duty vehicles, but really, last-mile facilities have proliferated in the city due to the rapid growth of the e Commerce Industry, and about 68% of these last mile facilities, these are your Amazon distribution centers, for instance, are located in environmental justice communities, and that has an impact on the traffic and the pollution that we're seeing in those areas. We're also seeing the stationary sources of pollution, meaning facilities that emit pollutants from a fixed position, like a power plant or a or a wastewater recovery facility or manufacturing facility, are also disproportionately located in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so 13 of the city's 19 peaker plants that get fired up on days in which we are desperate for energy, those are the days in which we experience higher levels of those stationary sources pollution from being generated in environmental justice neighborhoods.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned climate change, which is kind of the it touches on all of these issues, pollution and of course, heat vulnerability and flooding. So what did the report find out about heat vulnerability and flooding issues? And as we talk, I should say it has been an incredibly hot summer where I'm at and I think the same is true there in the city, and what neighborhoods are most at risk, and what's driving this risk?Elijah Hutchinson You know, heat vulnerability and flood vulnerability are two areas where we can look at the data and we could look at the numbers, but it doesn't necessarily tell you about impact. And so while it's really important that we understand exposure, and we know that our environmental justice communities are certainly exposed to more, the impacts of this exposure are also disproportionately high because of the adverse health outcomes related to air pollution and the intersectionality of so many of these issues in environmental justice communities, where you end up seeing high percentage of asthma, you know, 21% of public housing residents having asthma, compared to 11.5% of the rest of the New York City residents. And so it was really important for us to come up with these indicators that take into account the data, but then also other socio economic, demographic, health-related metrics that help us understand and contextualize the issue better. And so for the first time, with the Environmental Justice Report, we released the flood vulnerability index, which has six different maps and data layers to look at different types of flooding that communities will experience, not just from the coast, but also inland flooding and rainstorms and the compounded effect of that with the demographic factors, not just today in the year 2024, which is already a really challenging year, but looks at what these impacts will be in 2050, in 2080, in 2100, and so for the first time, we have the flood vulnerability maps added to the heat vulnerability maps, which is a metric that we've had with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for a few years now. Now we've added this flood vulnerability layer to people to help communicate those risks, so that people can kind of understand in a more simple way how climate is really affecting them from this really huge hazard, which is heat, which is only going to get worse over time, but also now this, this flooding, which you know, whether you're a property owner, you're a renter, you're realizing that you don't need to live in along the coast of New York City to be impacted by water.Brian Bienkowski What's something about the report that surprised you or that you think might surprise listeners?Elijah Hutchinson What's something that surprised me about the report was just how these issues all relate to one another, and sometimes there are stories or narratives we hear from or coming from within the communities that we work in, but it's really hard to characterize how All of these issues combined to create a feeling or an effect, and so it was really great to see that we didn't just stop at the data. We did tons of interviews and met with people and discussed our findings with people to try to understand how these issues show up in their community and what matters to them. Ad what matters to people are the same things that, you know, make it, make it hard for New Yorkers to live in in their communities, sometimes with just wanting to get to work on time, or wanting to find some shade or quiet place, or, you know, wanting to have some vegetation. And so it was good for us to be able to crunch the numbers and kind of validate what we've been already hearing and understanding from our communities. But it was also really good to give people that validation, and give them the tools itself, that that they need to to help advocate for their communities and ways that can be supported by by our office, which, which I thought was really exciting. On the data side, it's the flood vulnerability that people are experiencing, I think has been a real lesson learned for a lot of communities, because they may not necessarily understand their inland flood risk that happens when you have a rainstorm or you have water coming from below. It's a very different story than living in Coney Island or the Rockaways and kind of expecting water to be an issue. And so I think a lot of what's been surprising, too, is just being able to communicate and really tell that full story when we are speaking with people, to see how much people feel like they want this information, even though it's... even though it's not all good news. You know, it's not this is, this is very difficult to process in a lot of ways. The the data and the stats are hard to digest. But I think that it's, it's been really telling that people want the information, that they can can receive it, they can handle it. And they want to know, you know what's, what's the city doing, and what, what can we do to make it better? But it, I have also been struck by a couple of the other data points where we find that, you know, heat's a big issue, but almost 20 there are some neighborhoods where 25% or a quarter of their residents don't have access to air conditioning. And I don't know if people really grapple with that all the time or make assumptions about the cooling capacity of some of these of these neighborhoods, but there are lots of people that are going to be heat vulnerable if that kind of condition continues. And I grew up in New York without air conditioning, and it's just, you know, a lot harder to do that these days, and it's not necessarily safe. But then you also see that, you know, housing maintenance deficiencies and lead pain violations are another thing that come out of those historically redlined environmental justice areas, and nine out of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest incidence of three or more housing maintenance deficiencies are renter households in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so those are really powerful findings that can help motivate decision making and policy makers.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned the mapping tool for people to use and to see environmental hazards and risks near them in their neighborhood. So how do you see people using this tool, or, you know, to report and to advocate for themselves as you kind of develop some of the policy around these environmental justice issues?Elijah Hutchinson we've already seen people using the mapping tool and using the data that we've collected for their benefit in a few ways that have been really promising. One is the states and the federal government. Really, really, you know, the Biden administration is making historic investments in environmental justice communities, historic infrastructure investments. And so we need to be ready to take advantage of those investments, and really compete to take advantage of those investments with other jurisdictions. And so providing this data on an open-source platform for anyone to access means that if a community or an organization is applying for funding, they can beef up and make their application more competitive, using the mapping tool and stitch together narratives and stories using the data that's there to reinforce the grant application that they're applying for, hopefully driving resources into these communities. But we've also seen people use it as a legislative and policy advocacy tool. So whether they're meeting with their local elected, whether they're talking to their community board, whether they're pushing for a certain law to be passed. Using our EJ mapping tool to cull and pull up all of these different data layers to help support that story. And so that's really promising and really powerful, and I hope that people continue to really find new and creative ways to use the information that we're sharing.Brian Bienkowski So in light of this report, how is the Mayor's office embedding environmental justice into ongoing and future policies?Elijah Hutchinson Environmental Justice itself is for the first time in the title of the climate office of the mayor's office, and this is a new thing. Before we had separate sustainability offices, resilience offices, environmental remediation offices, and now we've all been brought under one umbrella and centered around environmental justice as a climate office, which is pretty powerful, because as a climate office, we already have our ambitious targets in place. We have that we're going for carbon neutrality by 2050 we have that we are striving for 100% renewables by by 2040 we're trying to half our transportation emissions by 2030. We have all these goals in place, but we you know, how we get there is really important, and we can't leave people behind if we're trying to achieve these really ambitious targets. And so it's really critical that we use environmental justice and work with our communities to make sure that we're doing the work in a way that makes sense for the everyday New Yorker who doesn't want to be left behind in this really critical and transformative transition that this entire city is about to and is experiencing, and so environmental justice itself, what we found from the first phase was that it needed to be... we needed improvements in several different areas, and it's not just having environmental justice be at the center of decision making, but it's also climate budgeting and changing our budgeting process so that as we're making agency spending decisions, we're considering it not just Our climate targets, but how it impacts our environmental justice communities, and that that evaluation is is happening. It's about permitting, and when permitting decisions are being made with the state to make sure that we're we're we're that environmental justice communities have a seat at the table as those decisions get made, and there are new permitting processes that are being developed and now for public comment right now on how to exactly do this. It's about prioritizing resources in environmental justice communities really coming out of Biden's Justice40 initiative and other funding prioritization targets that the state has, but it's about improved community engagement as well, which is something that we're really excited about doing in this next phase of our environmental justice plan. Is working with weact and other organizations who are the co chair for Environmental Justice Advisory Board to, you know, have a lot of conversations with people about what they would like to see in improvements and things we could do better.Brian Bienkowski So what are some of the challenges? I mean, I think of, I think of New York City, and I just think of the, you know, from where you are in Greenpoint, up to the Bronx to Harlem. I mean, it's just such a vast, large city, competing interest and just a big, dense population. What are some of the challenges in addressing climate change and other environmental health hazards given the size, and again, the competing interest and diversity within your city?Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, some of the challenges are that there's been so there's so many long-standing issues that these communities face, whether it's been public safety or affordable housing or transportation safety, you know, access to good schools, access to healthy food – New York City has a long advocacy platform that comes out of every one of these neighborhoods. And so now climate and environmental justice is, you know, in essence, a new thing. It's not a new thing, but it is a new priority, and it's a very, it can be a very expensive one to try to rebuild a waterfront, or to make our infrastructure more resilient, or to install solar panels in a lot of places. And so what we need to do is help people understand how climate and environmental justice are connected to the issues that they care deeply about, and help them see themselves as environmental justice advocates, because we really do need to broaden the tent and include more people in this movement as a whole, so that we can get more resources to tackle these issues, but but do so in a way that we're addressing the housing issues by addressing climate, and we're addressing the transportation issues by addressing climate, and we're addressing the waterfront or public safety issues by investing in our our built environment and our public spaces and beautifying our waterfront with trees and shade and new infrastructure. So my hope is that we can work with everyone to have a shared platform and a shared agenda, and what we would like to see and define some of these North Stars with with people, so that we can kind of collaborate and work together on the outcomes.Brian Bienkowski So a big theme among our fellows and in our program is kind of community engagement and doing so in an intentional and meaningful way, both in developing policy, you know, in the case of folks like you, but also, you know, doing research, gathering data, which it sounds like you guys took that same approach. So you mentioned WeAct. We've had folks on this podcast from WeAct. They are a fantastic organization. I'm always in awe of the work that they're doing. So I was wondering if you could speak to that and kind of more broadly, how the mayor's office is incorporating and engaging communities in decision and policy making again, given the city's diversity and size?Elijah Hutchinson yeah, there's, there's so many different inputs that we have to get people's perspectives included. One of the things we set up was the Environmental Justice Advisory Board, and so that is actually appointed by the city council and the mayor, but it's also, you know, not everybody can participate in the Environmental Justice Advisory Board. And so we have to have different kinds of meetings and forums to engage with people even further and go a level deeper. And so we have lots of different task forces and meetings with people to be transparent about the issues that we're grappling with and all of the trade offs and considerations so that we can kind of share in the concerns of of what we're seeing are the challenges that we face, and being really honest about the the the barriers and the challenges, while, while presenting the tools and opportunities to people so that we can say, here are, here's some things we can do that will put us in the right direction. And so I have found that the the as I've started here and taking a real focus on environmental justice, that people are really hungry for these conversations and have really celebrated that we're taking this kind of approach to climate and see this as a much more inclusive way to go about this transformation, and know that we don't have it all worked out. They know that nobody is exactly figured out. This is, this is the menu of and the ingredients, and this is exactly how you bake the cake, right? Like we know that there's a lot to figure out here. And so I think people are seeing that we're listening, but people are seeing also that we are making decisions and there is action. And so building that credibility, and building that momentum to make some decisions, to build credibility within that space, has been very, very effective to making sure that people want to work with us and see that there's real opportunity here to actually change the things that we've been upset about for a really long time. And now it's really about, how do we do this with limited funding, right? And how do we do this with, like, with long-term political cycles, and how do we do this with, with with our federal and state partners, where there's also changing politics? And how do we do this when it's we're just really complicated to deliver some of these engineering projects because of the just how technical they are and the amount of coordination that they need on the city side, but we get that these things are hard. We have a real good track record of delivering our our infrastructure priorities, and we're getting better and faster with delivering projects and making policy. So I'm feeling. Being optim somewhat optimistic about the future. I know that that can be feel really challenging at the moment, but I'm, I'm feeling like we are, we are making some steps in the right direction I hope that we we continue to do so.Brian Bienkowski So what would you say to somebody in the city who doesn't feel like they're being heard? You know, someone who feel is feeling the effects of climate change or pollution, and is feeling left out of this process, or just kind of not feeling hurt in general?Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, I hope that they come to you know, one of our one of our meetings or convenings, and talk to us. We have a couple of different processes, like climate strong communities is one program that we do where we set up meetings in with with community members, in partnership with other neighborhood-based organizations to start to get ideas for resilience projects, even before we have any funding or budget to support them. And then we work with those communities to take their project ideas, and apply to the public resources, state and federal resources, and really bring, you know, money and city capacity and decision making to some of their ideas. And that can be and I've seen this play out, and it could be really, really fulfilling, but I understand that it is also very frustrating. The state of the world is very frustrating at the moment. And you know, in some ways, I almost wish people were more frustrated with things, with where we are, and I want to be able to take that frustration and channel it into outcomes. And sometimes I look around the room, I'm like, How is everybody not more angry? But we are that we are where we are. So I actually, I welcome that people are frustrated and we I tour the neighborhoods with even Mayor Adams what he does his town halls and and we do get a lot of climate questions, and I'm so often surprised, though, that in every meeting we don't get climate questions. There's lots of questions about other things. But you know, whether it's like cannabis shops or or E-bikes, you know there's, there's lots of other pressing neighborhood issues, but I really want to see people speak about climate and every every public meeting that we go to, so that all of the policy makers are hearing it from us loud and clear.Brian Bienkowski And as you mentioned, there's been this kind of merging of advocacy in recent years that we've noticed too in the newsroom, which is the folks that are interested in labor rights, housing rights, are starting to see the intersection with climate and climate impacts. So I think hopefully you are going to see increasing frustration, increasing engagement, that will help the work that you all are doing. So you mentioned being optimistic. I was wondering if you could just expand on that. What are you, in general, What are you optimistic about?Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, I think the optimism that I feel is coming really from the new the new audience for climate and young people who are really making it a part of their future and how they want to contribute to the world. It's great to see just how different the state of play is from when I was starting my career in the city of New York. You know, you can 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago, prior to the pandemic, you know, you could be the only person in the room, sometimes lifting up the data and raising your voice about what's going on with with climate. And now I see that conversation, and that dialog has really shifted, and there's a groundswell of interest across many different topics, because there's a climate impact and a climate angle to literally everything that we do, and so it's fascinating to see how we're starting to understand these relationships, whether it's like AI or or our food systems, or, you know, decisions on where to where to locate renewable energy infrastructure, there's, there's all sorts of real estate and economic and legal and other perspectives that I that I see people getting really sophisticated about across sectors, and I think that that's what we're going to need, because we're going to this is an all hands on deck kind of transition that's going to affect every industry and every part of our lived experience in New York. Yeah.Brian Bienkowski Yeah, well, Elijah, thank you so much for filling us in on this report, the work you all are doing, it's really fascinating, and hopefully it's a blueprint for other cities who are looking to tackle climate change and pollution in an equitable way. And we will, of course, give readers and listeners links to all these resources so they can go poke around the mapping tool and have fun. And before we get you out of here, one question I like to ask everybody is, what is the last book that you read for fun?Elijah Hutchinson Well, I'll answer this honestly, but it's, it has a profanity in the title, and it was, it was the the subtle art of not giving a leap, and it's I, I have for I have to balance out all of my serious reading with just like fun let me, let me not, let me not worry too much kind of reading, because there's just, there's so much that you could worry about, but it can be really paralyzing. And so I love a good, you know, drugstore book read on happiness, or or or about just how to, how to, how to live your life with joy, because it's so critical to keep me, for me to maintain that side of things, so I could keep doing the work that I do. So I not, I don't necessarily recommend it, because I do want people to give a bleep, but something that I needed at the moment when I was on my last vacation and and was, was, was a good a book to read by the pool.Brian Bienkowski Excellent. You know, I've seen that book in bookstores, and I have been curious, and I you beat me to it. I was going to make the joke that you are spending your days trying to make people give a bleep, and spending your vacations reading about how to not but, you know, there is, there is lessons in there that we all need to decompress and know when to leave things be. But again, Elijah, thank you so much for your time. I'm really glad we got to connect on this. We will share the resources, and hopefully we can have you on again in the future.Elijah Hutchinson Sure, I certainly appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Elijah Hutchinson joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss New York City’s first comprehensive study on environmental inequality and how communities can use it to advocate for themselves.Hutchinson, executive director at New York City’s Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, also talks about how the mayor’s office is incorporating the feedback and needs of diverse communities across the city into its policymaking.The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.Listen below to our discussion with Hutchinson and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or Spotify. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Elijah Hutchinson on New York City’s push for climate justiceTranscript Brian BienkowskiElijah, how are you doing today?Elijah Hutchinson Hi, I'm doing great. What a good Monday to start the week off.Brian Bienkowski Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to have you. So where are you today?Elijah Hutchinson I am in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, inside of the apartment building that I grew up in 40 years ago. I'm in a family-owned apartment building where my dad lives downstairs, and my mom lived with me for a little while, up until recently. So it's still kind of my, my, my, my home for a really long time, and kind of my, my community is all all around here. So calling in from Brooklyn.Brian Bienkowski wow, that is so cool. What a cool way to to grow up in the same community, but the same building. I am so far from home, not not too far. I grew up in the Detroit area, and now I'm in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so... but every time I go home, I always wanted to leave there, and now I feel a really strong pull. So very cool for you to share that with your family. So that brings me to my first question before we get into a lot of the cool work that you're doing with the city is, how did you get into environmental work in the first place?Elijah Hutchinson It's a big part of that is growing up in this community and growing up in Greenpoint, where we sit on top of not just one Superfund site, but multiple Superfund sites from the legacies of pollution that have occurred from industrial and energy uses that have been happening along our waterfront for generations, and really polluting Newtown Creek. I live next to the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant, which is a state-of-the-art facility that got invested into in the late 90s and early 2000s and was really a game changer for the neighborhood in terms of improving quality of life. But Greenpoint was also a place where a lot of our trees were cut down in the 90s because of a beetle infestation that came through our ports, and we had to, you know, replant a lot of trees. Our local pool was closed when I grew up here with McCarran Park, and it's amazing to see that now 50 pools are open across the city for for swimming, which is really important during these heat times. But living in Greenpoint and experiencing the rapid change of the neighborhood –gentrification, the environmental costs and benefits and burdens that legacies of decisions and policymaking make– really made me shift from being a geneticist, which was what I thought I was going to be when I was in training and in college, I was a biological anthropology major, I was working in mice and fly labs, and I really shifted to the city planning and community development and environmental justice work.Brian Bienkowski Excellent, and we are going to get into that. And I want to start with the city's first comprehensive study on environmental inequality that was released just this past April, which put you and your work on my radar. So what prompted this report, and what were some of the key findings?Elijah Hutchinson The prompt for the report was actually some city council legislation that had passed in 2017. Those local laws they were called local law 60 and 64 required us to assess environmental equity issues and develop a plan around incorporating environmental justice into the fabric of city decision making. It was a really interesting charge that meant that for the first time, New York City was going to produce a landmark and historic report about documenting environmental burdens and benefits across a landscape of issues in New York City, and do so in a really comprehensive way, where we brought over 100 different data layers together to try to put all of those compounding effects on one place and in one map, and tell multiple stories and narratives, interviewing people in those communities to get those first person perspectives on what was going on and happening in their community. And so those investigations and all of that data analysis and the Constitution of the Environmental Justice Advisory Board really guided the research and practice and resulted in us putting out the first report this past, this past spring, which is really, really exciting. But what it also comes with, is a mapping tool that is a digital online tool that can be used for research or analysis, but really captures all of the findings of the report, and it includes a next phase of work, which we're just starting right now, to come up with new policies and programs that are going to address the issues we identified in the first phase of the report.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned some of the historical context right where you are there in Greenpoint, but kind of more broadly, can you talk about the decisions and policies in the past in the city related to housing, zoning and transit that left a lot of low income and communities of color more subject to the environmental ills.Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, for sure, one of the biggest factors that we see affecting communities is not one that's a stranger to these communities, but really redlining and the practice of racially discriminatory real estate practices that were embedded within how mortgages and financing were given to most disproportionately impacting Black and Hispanic communities across New York City. And what we're finding is that 67% of the total population that lives in historically redlined areas of New York City also live in what we defined for the first time as environmental justice communities that were based off of the state's disadvantaged community criteria. And once we kind of crunched the numbers and look at these overlaps, you can see that in areas of central Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan, in most of the Bronx, these areas, you really start to see the intersections between the decisions to redline and what it ends up actually meaning for these communities which show up in areas of like deficiencies in housing maintenance, higher levels of pollution and other factors that are that are really persistent because of these decisions of the past.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned pollution. I know the city obviously has a lot of traffic. I think we all know that, even those of us who don't live there, leaving a lot of people exposed to air pollutants. But what did the report find about air pollution exposure and what is driving up exposure in the city's environmental justice communities?Elijah Hutchinson The report itself examines exposure to polluted air across five issues and indicators. So breaks that down into outdoor air pollution, stationary sources of pollution, mobile sources of pollution, solid waste facilities and indoor air quality. And air quality can be influenced by many things, including geography and regional weather patterns and human activity, but climate change is another variable and factor for air quality because of things like the Canadian wildfires, for instance, which have burned thousands of miles away, yet we know from last summer, and we suspect even this summer, we're going to experience air quality impacts on those hotter days that are associated with lower air quality, which really bring up the vulnerability. But then on the exposure side, there's a lot of mobile sources of pollution as well, that comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles. And communities of color are disproportionately exposed to emissions from heavy duty diesel vehicles compared to communities that are mostly white due to location near to arterial highways commercial waste routes, delivery routes, parking facilities for heavy duty vehicles, but really, last-mile facilities have proliferated in the city due to the rapid growth of the e Commerce Industry, and about 68% of these last mile facilities, these are your Amazon distribution centers, for instance, are located in environmental justice communities, and that has an impact on the traffic and the pollution that we're seeing in those areas. We're also seeing the stationary sources of pollution, meaning facilities that emit pollutants from a fixed position, like a power plant or a or a wastewater recovery facility or manufacturing facility, are also disproportionately located in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so 13 of the city's 19 peaker plants that get fired up on days in which we are desperate for energy, those are the days in which we experience higher levels of those stationary sources pollution from being generated in environmental justice neighborhoods.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned climate change, which is kind of the it touches on all of these issues, pollution and of course, heat vulnerability and flooding. So what did the report find out about heat vulnerability and flooding issues? And as we talk, I should say it has been an incredibly hot summer where I'm at and I think the same is true there in the city, and what neighborhoods are most at risk, and what's driving this risk?Elijah Hutchinson You know, heat vulnerability and flood vulnerability are two areas where we can look at the data and we could look at the numbers, but it doesn't necessarily tell you about impact. And so while it's really important that we understand exposure, and we know that our environmental justice communities are certainly exposed to more, the impacts of this exposure are also disproportionately high because of the adverse health outcomes related to air pollution and the intersectionality of so many of these issues in environmental justice communities, where you end up seeing high percentage of asthma, you know, 21% of public housing residents having asthma, compared to 11.5% of the rest of the New York City residents. And so it was really important for us to come up with these indicators that take into account the data, but then also other socio economic, demographic, health-related metrics that help us understand and contextualize the issue better. And so for the first time, with the Environmental Justice Report, we released the flood vulnerability index, which has six different maps and data layers to look at different types of flooding that communities will experience, not just from the coast, but also inland flooding and rainstorms and the compounded effect of that with the demographic factors, not just today in the year 2024, which is already a really challenging year, but looks at what these impacts will be in 2050, in 2080, in 2100, and so for the first time, we have the flood vulnerability maps added to the heat vulnerability maps, which is a metric that we've had with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for a few years now. Now we've added this flood vulnerability layer to people to help communicate those risks, so that people can kind of understand in a more simple way how climate is really affecting them from this really huge hazard, which is heat, which is only going to get worse over time, but also now this, this flooding, which you know, whether you're a property owner, you're a renter, you're realizing that you don't need to live in along the coast of New York City to be impacted by water.Brian Bienkowski What's something about the report that surprised you or that you think might surprise listeners?Elijah Hutchinson What's something that surprised me about the report was just how these issues all relate to one another, and sometimes there are stories or narratives we hear from or coming from within the communities that we work in, but it's really hard to characterize how All of these issues combined to create a feeling or an effect, and so it was really great to see that we didn't just stop at the data. We did tons of interviews and met with people and discussed our findings with people to try to understand how these issues show up in their community and what matters to them. Ad what matters to people are the same things that, you know, make it, make it hard for New Yorkers to live in in their communities, sometimes with just wanting to get to work on time, or wanting to find some shade or quiet place, or, you know, wanting to have some vegetation. And so it was good for us to be able to crunch the numbers and kind of validate what we've been already hearing and understanding from our communities. But it was also really good to give people that validation, and give them the tools itself, that that they need to to help advocate for their communities and ways that can be supported by by our office, which, which I thought was really exciting. On the data side, it's the flood vulnerability that people are experiencing, I think has been a real lesson learned for a lot of communities, because they may not necessarily understand their inland flood risk that happens when you have a rainstorm or you have water coming from below. It's a very different story than living in Coney Island or the Rockaways and kind of expecting water to be an issue. And so I think a lot of what's been surprising, too, is just being able to communicate and really tell that full story when we are speaking with people, to see how much people feel like they want this information, even though it's... even though it's not all good news. You know, it's not this is, this is very difficult to process in a lot of ways. The the data and the stats are hard to digest. But I think that it's, it's been really telling that people want the information, that they can can receive it, they can handle it. And they want to know, you know what's, what's the city doing, and what, what can we do to make it better? But it, I have also been struck by a couple of the other data points where we find that, you know, heat's a big issue, but almost 20 there are some neighborhoods where 25% or a quarter of their residents don't have access to air conditioning. And I don't know if people really grapple with that all the time or make assumptions about the cooling capacity of some of these of these neighborhoods, but there are lots of people that are going to be heat vulnerable if that kind of condition continues. And I grew up in New York without air conditioning, and it's just, you know, a lot harder to do that these days, and it's not necessarily safe. But then you also see that, you know, housing maintenance deficiencies and lead pain violations are another thing that come out of those historically redlined environmental justice areas, and nine out of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest incidence of three or more housing maintenance deficiencies are renter households in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so those are really powerful findings that can help motivate decision making and policy makers.Brian Bienkowski So you mentioned the mapping tool for people to use and to see environmental hazards and risks near them in their neighborhood. So how do you see people using this tool, or, you know, to report and to advocate for themselves as you kind of develop some of the policy around these environmental justice issues?Elijah Hutchinson we've already seen people using the mapping tool and using the data that we've collected for their benefit in a few ways that have been really promising. One is the states and the federal government. Really, really, you know, the Biden administration is making historic investments in environmental justice communities, historic infrastructure investments. And so we need to be ready to take advantage of those investments, and really compete to take advantage of those investments with other jurisdictions. And so providing this data on an open-source platform for anyone to access means that if a community or an organization is applying for funding, they can beef up and make their application more competitive, using the mapping tool and stitch together narratives and stories using the data that's there to reinforce the grant application that they're applying for, hopefully driving resources into these communities. But we've also seen people use it as a legislative and policy advocacy tool. So whether they're meeting with their local elected, whether they're talking to their community board, whether they're pushing for a certain law to be passed. Using our EJ mapping tool to cull and pull up all of these different data layers to help support that story. And so that's really promising and really powerful, and I hope that people continue to really find new and creative ways to use the information that we're sharing.Brian Bienkowski So in light of this report, how is the Mayor's office embedding environmental justice into ongoing and future policies?Elijah Hutchinson Environmental Justice itself is for the first time in the title of the climate office of the mayor's office, and this is a new thing. Before we had separate sustainability offices, resilience offices, environmental remediation offices, and now we've all been brought under one umbrella and centered around environmental justice as a climate office, which is pretty powerful, because as a climate office, we already have our ambitious targets in place. We have that we're going for carbon neutrality by 2050 we have that we are striving for 100% renewables by by 2040 we're trying to half our transportation emissions by 2030. We have all these goals in place, but we you know, how we get there is really important, and we can't leave people behind if we're trying to achieve these really ambitious targets. And so it's really critical that we use environmental justice and work with our communities to make sure that we're doing the work in a way that makes sense for the everyday New Yorker who doesn't want to be left behind in this really critical and transformative transition that this entire city is about to and is experiencing, and so environmental justice itself, what we found from the first phase was that it needed to be... we needed improvements in several different areas, and it's not just having environmental justice be at the center of decision making, but it's also climate budgeting and changing our budgeting process so that as we're making agency spending decisions, we're considering it not just Our climate targets, but how it impacts our environmental justice communities, and that that evaluation is is happening. It's about permitting, and when permitting decisions are being made with the state to make sure that we're we're we're that environmental justice communities have a seat at the table as those decisions get made, and there are new permitting processes that are being developed and now for public comment right now on how to exactly do this. It's about prioritizing resources in environmental justice communities really coming out of Biden's Justice40 initiative and other funding prioritization targets that the state has, but it's about improved community engagement as well, which is something that we're really excited about doing in this next phase of our environmental justice plan. Is working with weact and other organizations who are the co chair for Environmental Justice Advisory Board to, you know, have a lot of conversations with people about what they would like to see in improvements and things we could do better.Brian Bienkowski So what are some of the challenges? I mean, I think of, I think of New York City, and I just think of the, you know, from where you are in Greenpoint, up to the Bronx to Harlem. I mean, it's just such a vast, large city, competing interest and just a big, dense population. What are some of the challenges in addressing climate change and other environmental health hazards given the size, and again, the competing interest and diversity within your city?Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, some of the challenges are that there's been so there's so many long-standing issues that these communities face, whether it's been public safety or affordable housing or transportation safety, you know, access to good schools, access to healthy food – New York City has a long advocacy platform that comes out of every one of these neighborhoods. And so now climate and environmental justice is, you know, in essence, a new thing. It's not a new thing, but it is a new priority, and it's a very, it can be a very expensive one to try to rebuild a waterfront, or to make our infrastructure more resilient, or to install solar panels in a lot of places. And so what we need to do is help people understand how climate and environmental justice are connected to the issues that they care deeply about, and help them see themselves as environmental justice advocates, because we really do need to broaden the tent and include more people in this movement as a whole, so that we can get more resources to tackle these issues, but but do so in a way that we're addressing the housing issues by addressing climate, and we're addressing the transportation issues by addressing climate, and we're addressing the waterfront or public safety issues by investing in our our built environment and our public spaces and beautifying our waterfront with trees and shade and new infrastructure. So my hope is that we can work with everyone to have a shared platform and a shared agenda, and what we would like to see and define some of these North Stars with with people, so that we can kind of collaborate and work together on the outcomes.Brian Bienkowski So a big theme among our fellows and in our program is kind of community engagement and doing so in an intentional and meaningful way, both in developing policy, you know, in the case of folks like you, but also, you know, doing research, gathering data, which it sounds like you guys took that same approach. So you mentioned WeAct. We've had folks on this podcast from WeAct. They are a fantastic organization. I'm always in awe of the work that they're doing. So I was wondering if you could speak to that and kind of more broadly, how the mayor's office is incorporating and engaging communities in decision and policy making again, given the city's diversity and size?Elijah Hutchinson yeah, there's, there's so many different inputs that we have to get people's perspectives included. One of the things we set up was the Environmental Justice Advisory Board, and so that is actually appointed by the city council and the mayor, but it's also, you know, not everybody can participate in the Environmental Justice Advisory Board. And so we have to have different kinds of meetings and forums to engage with people even further and go a level deeper. And so we have lots of different task forces and meetings with people to be transparent about the issues that we're grappling with and all of the trade offs and considerations so that we can kind of share in the concerns of of what we're seeing are the challenges that we face, and being really honest about the the the barriers and the challenges, while, while presenting the tools and opportunities to people so that we can say, here are, here's some things we can do that will put us in the right direction. And so I have found that the the as I've started here and taking a real focus on environmental justice, that people are really hungry for these conversations and have really celebrated that we're taking this kind of approach to climate and see this as a much more inclusive way to go about this transformation, and know that we don't have it all worked out. They know that nobody is exactly figured out. This is, this is the menu of and the ingredients, and this is exactly how you bake the cake, right? Like we know that there's a lot to figure out here. And so I think people are seeing that we're listening, but people are seeing also that we are making decisions and there is action. And so building that credibility, and building that momentum to make some decisions, to build credibility within that space, has been very, very effective to making sure that people want to work with us and see that there's real opportunity here to actually change the things that we've been upset about for a really long time. And now it's really about, how do we do this with limited funding, right? And how do we do this with, like, with long-term political cycles, and how do we do this with, with with our federal and state partners, where there's also changing politics? And how do we do this when it's we're just really complicated to deliver some of these engineering projects because of the just how technical they are and the amount of coordination that they need on the city side, but we get that these things are hard. We have a real good track record of delivering our our infrastructure priorities, and we're getting better and faster with delivering projects and making policy. So I'm feeling. Being optim somewhat optimistic about the future. I know that that can be feel really challenging at the moment, but I'm, I'm feeling like we are, we are making some steps in the right direction I hope that we we continue to do so.Brian Bienkowski So what would you say to somebody in the city who doesn't feel like they're being heard? You know, someone who feel is feeling the effects of climate change or pollution, and is feeling left out of this process, or just kind of not feeling hurt in general?Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, I hope that they come to you know, one of our one of our meetings or convenings, and talk to us. We have a couple of different processes, like climate strong communities is one program that we do where we set up meetings in with with community members, in partnership with other neighborhood-based organizations to start to get ideas for resilience projects, even before we have any funding or budget to support them. And then we work with those communities to take their project ideas, and apply to the public resources, state and federal resources, and really bring, you know, money and city capacity and decision making to some of their ideas. And that can be and I've seen this play out, and it could be really, really fulfilling, but I understand that it is also very frustrating. The state of the world is very frustrating at the moment. And you know, in some ways, I almost wish people were more frustrated with things, with where we are, and I want to be able to take that frustration and channel it into outcomes. And sometimes I look around the room, I'm like, How is everybody not more angry? But we are that we are where we are. So I actually, I welcome that people are frustrated and we I tour the neighborhoods with even Mayor Adams what he does his town halls and and we do get a lot of climate questions, and I'm so often surprised, though, that in every meeting we don't get climate questions. There's lots of questions about other things. But you know, whether it's like cannabis shops or or E-bikes, you know there's, there's lots of other pressing neighborhood issues, but I really want to see people speak about climate and every every public meeting that we go to, so that all of the policy makers are hearing it from us loud and clear.Brian Bienkowski And as you mentioned, there's been this kind of merging of advocacy in recent years that we've noticed too in the newsroom, which is the folks that are interested in labor rights, housing rights, are starting to see the intersection with climate and climate impacts. So I think hopefully you are going to see increasing frustration, increasing engagement, that will help the work that you all are doing. So you mentioned being optimistic. I was wondering if you could just expand on that. What are you, in general, What are you optimistic about?Elijah Hutchinson Yeah, I think the optimism that I feel is coming really from the new the new audience for climate and young people who are really making it a part of their future and how they want to contribute to the world. It's great to see just how different the state of play is from when I was starting my career in the city of New York. You know, you can 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago, prior to the pandemic, you know, you could be the only person in the room, sometimes lifting up the data and raising your voice about what's going on with with climate. And now I see that conversation, and that dialog has really shifted, and there's a groundswell of interest across many different topics, because there's a climate impact and a climate angle to literally everything that we do, and so it's fascinating to see how we're starting to understand these relationships, whether it's like AI or or our food systems, or, you know, decisions on where to where to locate renewable energy infrastructure, there's, there's all sorts of real estate and economic and legal and other perspectives that I that I see people getting really sophisticated about across sectors, and I think that that's what we're going to need, because we're going to this is an all hands on deck kind of transition that's going to affect every industry and every part of our lived experience in New York. Yeah.Brian Bienkowski Yeah, well, Elijah, thank you so much for filling us in on this report, the work you all are doing, it's really fascinating, and hopefully it's a blueprint for other cities who are looking to tackle climate change and pollution in an equitable way. And we will, of course, give readers and listeners links to all these resources so they can go poke around the mapping tool and have fun. And before we get you out of here, one question I like to ask everybody is, what is the last book that you read for fun?Elijah Hutchinson Well, I'll answer this honestly, but it's, it has a profanity in the title, and it was, it was the the subtle art of not giving a leap, and it's I, I have for I have to balance out all of my serious reading with just like fun let me, let me not, let me not worry too much kind of reading, because there's just, there's so much that you could worry about, but it can be really paralyzing. And so I love a good, you know, drugstore book read on happiness, or or or about just how to, how to, how to live your life with joy, because it's so critical to keep me, for me to maintain that side of things, so I could keep doing the work that I do. So I not, I don't necessarily recommend it, because I do want people to give a bleep, but something that I needed at the moment when I was on my last vacation and and was, was, was a good a book to read by the pool.Brian Bienkowski Excellent. You know, I've seen that book in bookstores, and I have been curious, and I you beat me to it. I was going to make the joke that you are spending your days trying to make people give a bleep, and spending your vacations reading about how to not but, you know, there is, there is lessons in there that we all need to decompress and know when to leave things be. But again, Elijah, thank you so much for your time. I'm really glad we got to connect on this. We will share the resources, and hopefully we can have you on again in the future.Elijah Hutchinson Sure, I certainly appreciate it. Thank you so much.



Elijah Hutchinson joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss New York City’s first comprehensive study on environmental inequality and how communities can use it to advocate for themselves.


Hutchinson, executive director at New York City’s Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, also talks about how the mayor’s office is incorporating the feedback and needs of diverse communities across the city into its policymaking.

The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.

Listen below to our discussion with Hutchinson and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or Spotify.


Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Elijah Hutchinson on New York City’s push for climate justice

Transcript 


Brian Bienkowski

Elijah, how are you doing today?

Elijah Hutchinson

Hi, I'm doing great. What a good Monday to start the week off.

Brian Bienkowski

Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We're really excited to have you. So where are you today?

Elijah Hutchinson

I am in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, inside of the apartment building that I grew up in 40 years ago. I'm in a family-owned apartment building where my dad lives downstairs, and my mom lived with me for a little while, up until recently. So it's still kind of my, my, my, my home for a really long time, and kind of my, my community is all all around here. So calling in from Brooklyn.

Brian Bienkowski

wow, that is so cool. What a cool way to to grow up in the same community, but the same building. I am so far from home, not not too far. I grew up in the Detroit area, and now I'm in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so... but every time I go home, I always wanted to leave there, and now I feel a really strong pull. So very cool for you to share that with your family. So that brings me to my first question before we get into a lot of the cool work that you're doing with the city is, how did you get into environmental work in the first place?

Elijah Hutchinson

It's a big part of that is growing up in this community and growing up in Greenpoint, where we sit on top of not just one Superfund site, but multiple Superfund sites from the legacies of pollution that have occurred from industrial and energy uses that have been happening along our waterfront for generations, and really polluting Newtown Creek. I live next to the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant, which is a state-of-the-art facility that got invested into in the late 90s and early 2000s and was really a game changer for the neighborhood in terms of improving quality of life. But Greenpoint was also a place where a lot of our trees were cut down in the 90s because of a beetle infestation that came through our ports, and we had to, you know, replant a lot of trees. Our local pool was closed when I grew up here with McCarran Park, and it's amazing to see that now 50 pools are open across the city for for swimming, which is really important during these heat times. But living in Greenpoint and experiencing the rapid change of the neighborhood –gentrification, the environmental costs and benefits and burdens that legacies of decisions and policymaking make– really made me shift from being a geneticist, which was what I thought I was going to be when I was in training and in college, I was a biological anthropology major, I was working in mice and fly labs, and I really shifted to the city planning and community development and environmental justice work.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent, and we are going to get into that. And I want to start with the city's first comprehensive study on environmental inequality that was released just this past April, which put you and your work on my radar. So what prompted this report, and what were some of the key findings?

Elijah Hutchinson

The prompt for the report was actually some city council legislation that had passed in 2017. Those local laws they were called local law 60 and 64 required us to assess environmental equity issues and develop a plan around incorporating environmental justice into the fabric of city decision making. It was a really interesting charge that meant that for the first time, New York City was going to produce a landmark and historic report about documenting environmental burdens and benefits across a landscape of issues in New York City, and do so in a really comprehensive way, where we brought over 100 different data layers together to try to put all of those compounding effects on one place and in one map, and tell multiple stories and narratives, interviewing people in those communities to get those first person perspectives on what was going on and happening in their community. And so those investigations and all of that data analysis and the Constitution of the Environmental Justice Advisory Board really guided the research and practice and resulted in us putting out the first report this past, this past spring, which is really, really exciting. But what it also comes with, is a mapping tool that is a digital online tool that can be used for research or analysis, but really captures all of the findings of the report, and it includes a next phase of work, which we're just starting right now, to come up with new policies and programs that are going to address the issues we identified in the first phase of the report.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned some of the historical context right where you are there in Greenpoint, but kind of more broadly, can you talk about the decisions and policies in the past in the city related to housing, zoning and transit that left a lot of low income and communities of color more subject to the environmental ills.

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, for sure, one of the biggest factors that we see affecting communities is not one that's a stranger to these communities, but really redlining and the practice of racially discriminatory real estate practices that were embedded within how mortgages and financing were given to most disproportionately impacting Black and Hispanic communities across New York City. And what we're finding is that 67% of the total population that lives in historically redlined areas of New York City also live in what we defined for the first time as environmental justice communities that were based off of the state's disadvantaged community criteria. And once we kind of crunched the numbers and look at these overlaps, you can see that in areas of central Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan, in most of the Bronx, these areas, you really start to see the intersections between the decisions to redline and what it ends up actually meaning for these communities which show up in areas of like deficiencies in housing maintenance, higher levels of pollution and other factors that are that are really persistent because of these decisions of the past.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned pollution. I know the city obviously has a lot of traffic. I think we all know that, even those of us who don't live there, leaving a lot of people exposed to air pollutants. But what did the report find about air pollution exposure and what is driving up exposure in the city's environmental justice communities?

Elijah Hutchinson

The report itself examines exposure to polluted air across five issues and indicators. So breaks that down into outdoor air pollution, stationary sources of pollution, mobile sources of pollution, solid waste facilities and indoor air quality. And air quality can be influenced by many things, including geography and regional weather patterns and human activity, but climate change is another variable and factor for air quality because of things like the Canadian wildfires, for instance, which have burned thousands of miles away, yet we know from last summer, and we suspect even this summer, we're going to experience air quality impacts on those hotter days that are associated with lower air quality, which really bring up the vulnerability. But then on the exposure side, there's a lot of mobile sources of pollution as well, that comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles. And communities of color are disproportionately exposed to emissions from heavy duty diesel vehicles compared to communities that are mostly white due to location near to arterial highways commercial waste routes, delivery routes, parking facilities for heavy duty vehicles, but really, last-mile facilities have proliferated in the city due to the rapid growth of the e Commerce Industry, and about 68% of these last mile facilities, these are your Amazon distribution centers, for instance, are located in environmental justice communities, and that has an impact on the traffic and the pollution that we're seeing in those areas. We're also seeing the stationary sources of pollution, meaning facilities that emit pollutants from a fixed position, like a power plant or a or a wastewater recovery facility or manufacturing facility, are also disproportionately located in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so 13 of the city's 19 peaker plants that get fired up on days in which we are desperate for energy, those are the days in which we experience higher levels of those stationary sources pollution from being generated in environmental justice neighborhoods.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned climate change, which is kind of the it touches on all of these issues, pollution and of course, heat vulnerability and flooding. So what did the report find out about heat vulnerability and flooding issues? And as we talk, I should say it has been an incredibly hot summer where I'm at and I think the same is true there in the city, and what neighborhoods are most at risk, and what's driving this risk?

Elijah Hutchinson

You know, heat vulnerability and flood vulnerability are two areas where we can look at the data and we could look at the numbers, but it doesn't necessarily tell you about impact. And so while it's really important that we understand exposure, and we know that our environmental justice communities are certainly exposed to more, the impacts of this exposure are also disproportionately high because of the adverse health outcomes related to air pollution and the intersectionality of so many of these issues in environmental justice communities, where you end up seeing high percentage of asthma, you know, 21% of public housing residents having asthma, compared to 11.5% of the rest of the New York City residents. And so it was really important for us to come up with these indicators that take into account the data, but then also other socio economic, demographic, health-related metrics that help us understand and contextualize the issue better. And so for the first time, with the Environmental Justice Report, we released the flood vulnerability index, which has six different maps and data layers to look at different types of flooding that communities will experience, not just from the coast, but also inland flooding and rainstorms and the compounded effect of that with the demographic factors, not just today in the year 2024, which is already a really challenging year, but looks at what these impacts will be in 2050, in 2080, in 2100, and so for the first time, we have the flood vulnerability maps added to the heat vulnerability maps, which is a metric that we've had with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for a few years now. Now we've added this flood vulnerability layer to people to help communicate those risks, so that people can kind of understand in a more simple way how climate is really affecting them from this really huge hazard, which is heat, which is only going to get worse over time, but also now this, this flooding, which you know, whether you're a property owner, you're a renter, you're realizing that you don't need to live in along the coast of New York City to be impacted by water.

Brian Bienkowski

What's something about the report that surprised you or that you think might surprise listeners?

Elijah Hutchinson

What's something that surprised me about the report was just how these issues all relate to one another, and sometimes there are stories or narratives we hear from or coming from within the communities that we work in, but it's really hard to characterize how All of these issues combined to create a feeling or an effect, and so it was really great to see that we didn't just stop at the data. We did tons of interviews and met with people and discussed our findings with people to try to understand how these issues show up in their community and what matters to them. Ad what matters to people are the same things that, you know, make it, make it hard for New Yorkers to live in in their communities, sometimes with just wanting to get to work on time, or wanting to find some shade or quiet place, or, you know, wanting to have some vegetation. And so it was good for us to be able to crunch the numbers and kind of validate what we've been already hearing and understanding from our communities. But it was also really good to give people that validation, and give them the tools itself, that that they need to to help advocate for their communities and ways that can be supported by by our office, which, which I thought was really exciting. On the data side, it's the flood vulnerability that people are experiencing, I think has been a real lesson learned for a lot of communities, because they may not necessarily understand their inland flood risk that happens when you have a rainstorm or you have water coming from below. It's a very different story than living in Coney Island or the Rockaways and kind of expecting water to be an issue. And so I think a lot of what's been surprising, too, is just being able to communicate and really tell that full story when we are speaking with people, to see how much people feel like they want this information, even though it's... even though it's not all good news. You know, it's not this is, this is very difficult to process in a lot of ways. The the data and the stats are hard to digest. But I think that it's, it's been really telling that people want the information, that they can can receive it, they can handle it. And they want to know, you know what's, what's the city doing, and what, what can we do to make it better? But it, I have also been struck by a couple of the other data points where we find that, you know, heat's a big issue, but almost 20 there are some neighborhoods where 25% or a quarter of their residents don't have access to air conditioning. And I don't know if people really grapple with that all the time or make assumptions about the cooling capacity of some of these of these neighborhoods, but there are lots of people that are going to be heat vulnerable if that kind of condition continues. And I grew up in New York without air conditioning, and it's just, you know, a lot harder to do that these days, and it's not necessarily safe. But then you also see that, you know, housing maintenance deficiencies and lead pain violations are another thing that come out of those historically redlined environmental justice areas, and nine out of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest incidence of three or more housing maintenance deficiencies are renter households in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so those are really powerful findings that can help motivate decision making and policy makers.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned the mapping tool for people to use and to see environmental hazards and risks near them in their neighborhood. So how do you see people using this tool, or, you know, to report and to advocate for themselves as you kind of develop some of the policy around these environmental justice issues?

Elijah Hutchinson

we've already seen people using the mapping tool and using the data that we've collected for their benefit in a few ways that have been really promising. One is the states and the federal government. Really, really, you know, the Biden administration is making historic investments in environmental justice communities, historic infrastructure investments. And so we need to be ready to take advantage of those investments, and really compete to take advantage of those investments with other jurisdictions. And so providing this data on an open-source platform for anyone to access means that if a community or an organization is applying for funding, they can beef up and make their application more competitive, using the mapping tool and stitch together narratives and stories using the data that's there to reinforce the grant application that they're applying for, hopefully driving resources into these communities. But we've also seen people use it as a legislative and policy advocacy tool. So whether they're meeting with their local elected, whether they're talking to their community board, whether they're pushing for a certain law to be passed. Using our EJ mapping tool to cull and pull up all of these different data layers to help support that story. And so that's really promising and really powerful, and I hope that people continue to really find new and creative ways to use the information that we're sharing.

Brian Bienkowski

So in light of this report, how is the Mayor's office embedding environmental justice into ongoing and future policies?

Elijah Hutchinson

Environmental Justice itself is for the first time in the title of the climate office of the mayor's office, and this is a new thing. Before we had separate sustainability offices, resilience offices, environmental remediation offices, and now we've all been brought under one umbrella and centered around environmental justice as a climate office, which is pretty powerful, because as a climate office, we already have our ambitious targets in place. We have that we're going for carbon neutrality by 2050 we have that we are striving for 100% renewables by by 2040 we're trying to half our transportation emissions by 2030. We have all these goals in place, but we you know, how we get there is really important, and we can't leave people behind if we're trying to achieve these really ambitious targets. And so it's really critical that we use environmental justice and work with our communities to make sure that we're doing the work in a way that makes sense for the everyday New Yorker who doesn't want to be left behind in this really critical and transformative transition that this entire city is about to and is experiencing, and so environmental justice itself, what we found from the first phase was that it needed to be... we needed improvements in several different areas, and it's not just having environmental justice be at the center of decision making, but it's also climate budgeting and changing our budgeting process so that as we're making agency spending decisions, we're considering it not just Our climate targets, but how it impacts our environmental justice communities, and that that evaluation is is happening. It's about permitting, and when permitting decisions are being made with the state to make sure that we're we're we're that environmental justice communities have a seat at the table as those decisions get made, and there are new permitting processes that are being developed and now for public comment right now on how to exactly do this. It's about prioritizing resources in environmental justice communities really coming out of Biden's Justice40 initiative and other funding prioritization targets that the state has, but it's about improved community engagement as well, which is something that we're really excited about doing in this next phase of our environmental justice plan. Is working with weact and other organizations who are the co chair for Environmental Justice Advisory Board to, you know, have a lot of conversations with people about what they would like to see in improvements and things we could do better.

Brian Bienkowski

So what are some of the challenges? I mean, I think of, I think of New York City, and I just think of the, you know, from where you are in Greenpoint, up to the Bronx to Harlem. I mean, it's just such a vast, large city, competing interest and just a big, dense population. What are some of the challenges in addressing climate change and other environmental health hazards given the size, and again, the competing interest and diversity within your city?

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, some of the challenges are that there's been so there's so many long-standing issues that these communities face, whether it's been public safety or affordable housing or transportation safety, you know, access to good schools, access to healthy food – New York City has a long advocacy platform that comes out of every one of these neighborhoods. And so now climate and environmental justice is, you know, in essence, a new thing. It's not a new thing, but it is a new priority, and it's a very, it can be a very expensive one to try to rebuild a waterfront, or to make our infrastructure more resilient, or to install solar panels in a lot of places. And so what we need to do is help people understand how climate and environmental justice are connected to the issues that they care deeply about, and help them see themselves as environmental justice advocates, because we really do need to broaden the tent and include more people in this movement as a whole, so that we can get more resources to tackle these issues, but but do so in a way that we're addressing the housing issues by addressing climate, and we're addressing the transportation issues by addressing climate, and we're addressing the waterfront or public safety issues by investing in our our built environment and our public spaces and beautifying our waterfront with trees and shade and new infrastructure. So my hope is that we can work with everyone to have a shared platform and a shared agenda, and what we would like to see and define some of these North Stars with with people, so that we can kind of collaborate and work together on the outcomes.

Brian Bienkowski

So a big theme among our fellows and in our program is kind of community engagement and doing so in an intentional and meaningful way, both in developing policy, you know, in the case of folks like you, but also, you know, doing research, gathering data, which it sounds like you guys took that same approach. So you mentioned WeAct. We've had folks on this podcast from WeAct. They are a fantastic organization. I'm always in awe of the work that they're doing. So I was wondering if you could speak to that and kind of more broadly, how the mayor's office is incorporating and engaging communities in decision and policy making again, given the city's diversity and size?

Elijah Hutchinson

yeah, there's, there's so many different inputs that we have to get people's perspectives included. One of the things we set up was the Environmental Justice Advisory Board, and so that is actually appointed by the city council and the mayor, but it's also, you know, not everybody can participate in the Environmental Justice Advisory Board. And so we have to have different kinds of meetings and forums to engage with people even further and go a level deeper. And so we have lots of different task forces and meetings with people to be transparent about the issues that we're grappling with and all of the trade offs and considerations so that we can kind of share in the concerns of of what we're seeing are the challenges that we face, and being really honest about the the the barriers and the challenges, while, while presenting the tools and opportunities to people so that we can say, here are, here's some things we can do that will put us in the right direction. And so I have found that the the as I've started here and taking a real focus on environmental justice, that people are really hungry for these conversations and have really celebrated that we're taking this kind of approach to climate and see this as a much more inclusive way to go about this transformation, and know that we don't have it all worked out. They know that nobody is exactly figured out. This is, this is the menu of and the ingredients, and this is exactly how you bake the cake, right? Like we know that there's a lot to figure out here. And so I think people are seeing that we're listening, but people are seeing also that we are making decisions and there is action. And so building that credibility, and building that momentum to make some decisions, to build credibility within that space, has been very, very effective to making sure that people want to work with us and see that there's real opportunity here to actually change the things that we've been upset about for a really long time. And now it's really about, how do we do this with limited funding, right? And how do we do this with, like, with long-term political cycles, and how do we do this with, with with our federal and state partners, where there's also changing politics? And how do we do this when it's we're just really complicated to deliver some of these engineering projects because of the just how technical they are and the amount of coordination that they need on the city side, but we get that these things are hard. We have a real good track record of delivering our our infrastructure priorities, and we're getting better and faster with delivering projects and making policy. So I'm feeling. Being optim somewhat optimistic about the future. I know that that can be feel really challenging at the moment, but I'm, I'm feeling like we are, we are making some steps in the right direction I hope that we we continue to do so.

Brian Bienkowski

So what would you say to somebody in the city who doesn't feel like they're being heard? You know, someone who feel is feeling the effects of climate change or pollution, and is feeling left out of this process, or just kind of not feeling hurt in general?

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, I hope that they come to you know, one of our one of our meetings or convenings, and talk to us. We have a couple of different processes, like climate strong communities is one program that we do where we set up meetings in with with community members, in partnership with other neighborhood-based organizations to start to get ideas for resilience projects, even before we have any funding or budget to support them. And then we work with those communities to take their project ideas, and apply to the public resources, state and federal resources, and really bring, you know, money and city capacity and decision making to some of their ideas. And that can be and I've seen this play out, and it could be really, really fulfilling, but I understand that it is also very frustrating. The state of the world is very frustrating at the moment. And you know, in some ways, I almost wish people were more frustrated with things, with where we are, and I want to be able to take that frustration and channel it into outcomes. And sometimes I look around the room, I'm like, How is everybody not more angry? But we are that we are where we are. So I actually, I welcome that people are frustrated and we I tour the neighborhoods with even Mayor Adams what he does his town halls and and we do get a lot of climate questions, and I'm so often surprised, though, that in every meeting we don't get climate questions. There's lots of questions about other things. But you know, whether it's like cannabis shops or or E-bikes, you know there's, there's lots of other pressing neighborhood issues, but I really want to see people speak about climate and every every public meeting that we go to, so that all of the policy makers are hearing it from us loud and clear.

Brian Bienkowski

And as you mentioned, there's been this kind of merging of advocacy in recent years that we've noticed too in the newsroom, which is the folks that are interested in labor rights, housing rights, are starting to see the intersection with climate and climate impacts. So I think hopefully you are going to see increasing frustration, increasing engagement, that will help the work that you all are doing. So you mentioned being optimistic. I was wondering if you could just expand on that. What are you, in general, What are you optimistic about?

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, I think the optimism that I feel is coming really from the new the new audience for climate and young people who are really making it a part of their future and how they want to contribute to the world. It's great to see just how different the state of play is from when I was starting my career in the city of New York. You know, you can 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago, prior to the pandemic, you know, you could be the only person in the room, sometimes lifting up the data and raising your voice about what's going on with with climate. And now I see that conversation, and that dialog has really shifted, and there's a groundswell of interest across many different topics, because there's a climate impact and a climate angle to literally everything that we do, and so it's fascinating to see how we're starting to understand these relationships, whether it's like AI or or our food systems, or, you know, decisions on where to where to locate renewable energy infrastructure, there's, there's all sorts of real estate and economic and legal and other perspectives that I that I see people getting really sophisticated about across sectors, and I think that that's what we're going to need, because we're going to this is an all hands on deck kind of transition that's going to affect every industry and every part of our lived experience in New York. Yeah.

Brian Bienkowski

Yeah, well, Elijah, thank you so much for filling us in on this report, the work you all are doing, it's really fascinating, and hopefully it's a blueprint for other cities who are looking to tackle climate change and pollution in an equitable way. And we will, of course, give readers and listeners links to all these resources so they can go poke around the mapping tool and have fun. And before we get you out of here, one question I like to ask everybody is, what is the last book that you read for fun?

Elijah Hutchinson

Well, I'll answer this honestly, but it's, it has a profanity in the title, and it was, it was the the subtle art of not giving a leap, and it's I, I have for I have to balance out all of my serious reading with just like fun let me, let me not, let me not worry too much kind of reading, because there's just, there's so much that you could worry about, but it can be really paralyzing. And so I love a good, you know, drugstore book read on happiness, or or or about just how to, how to, how to live your life with joy, because it's so critical to keep me, for me to maintain that side of things, so I could keep doing the work that I do. So I not, I don't necessarily recommend it, because I do want people to give a bleep, but something that I needed at the moment when I was on my last vacation and and was, was, was a good a book to read by the pool.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent. You know, I've seen that book in bookstores, and I have been curious, and I you beat me to it. I was going to make the joke that you are spending your days trying to make people give a bleep, and spending your vacations reading about how to not but, you know, there is, there is lessons in there that we all need to decompress and know when to leave things be. But again, Elijah, thank you so much for your time. I'm really glad we got to connect on this. We will share the resources, and hopefully we can have you on again in the future.

Elijah Hutchinson

Sure, I certainly appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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‘It can’t withstand the heat’: fears ‘stable’ Patagonia glacier in irreversible decline

Scientists say Perito Moreno, which for decades defied trend of glacial retreat, now rapidly losing massOne of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year. Continue reading...

One of the few stable glaciers in a warming world, Perito Moreno, in Santa Cruz province, Argentina, is now undergoing a possibly irreversible retreat, scientists say.Over the past seven years, it has lost 1.92 sq km (0.74 sq miles) of ice cover and its thickness is decreasing by up to 8 metres (26 ft) a year.For decades, Perito Moreno defied the global trend of glacial retreat, maintaining an exceptional balance between snow accumulation and melting. Its dramatic calving events, when massive blocks of ice crashed into Lago Argentino, became a symbol of natural wonder, drawing millions of visitors to southern Patagonia.Dr Lucas Ruiz, a glaciologist at the Argentine Institute of Nivology, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences, said: “The Perito Moreno is a very particular, exceptional glacier. Since records began, it stood out to the first explorers in the late 19th century because it showed no signs of retreat – on the contrary, it was advancing. And it continued to do so until 2018, when we began to see a different behaviour. Since then, its mass loss has become increasingly rapid.”Scientists and local guides warn that the balance is beginning to shift. “The first year the glacier didn’t return to its previous year’s position was 2022. The same happened in 2023, again in 2024, and now in 2025. The truth is, the retreat continues. The glacier keeps thinning, especially along its northern margin,” said Ruiz. This sector is the farthest from tourist walkways and lies above the deepest part of Lago Argentino, the largest freshwater lake in Argentina.Calving events at Perito Moreno, when ice collapses into the lake, are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. Photograph: Philipp Rohner/Getty Images/500pxThe summer of 2023-24 recorded a maximum temperature of 11.2C, according to meteorological data collected by Pedro Skvarca, a geophysical engineer and the scientific director of the Glaciarium centre in El Calafate, Patagonia. Over the past 30 years, the average summer temperature rose by 1.2C, a change significant enough to greatly accelerate ice melt.Ice thickness measurements are equally alarming. Between 2018 and 2022, the glacier was thinning at a rate of 4 metres a year. But in the past two years, that has doubled to 8 metres annually.“Perito Moreno’s size no longer matches the current climate; it’s simply too big. It can’t withstand the heat, and the current ice input isn’t enough to compensate,” Ruiz said.Ice that once rested on the lakebed owing to its weight, said Ruiz, had now thinned so much that it was beginning to float, as water pressure overtook the ice’s own.With that anchor lost, the glacier’s front accelerates – not because of increased mass input from the accumulation zone, where snow compacts into ice, but because the front slides and deforms. This movement triggers a feedback loop that further weakens the structure, making the process potentially irreversible.Xabier Blanch Gorriz, a professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, who studies ice calving at the Perito Moreno glacier front, said: “Describing the change as ‘irreversible’ is complex, because glaciers are dynamic systems. But the truth is that the current rate of retreat points to a clearly negative trend.” He added: “The glacier’s retreat and thinning are evident and have accelerated.”Ruiz confirmed another disturbing trend reported by local guides: calving events are becoming louder, more frequent, and much larger. In April, a guide at Los Glaciares national park described watching a tower of ice the height of a 20-storey building collapse into the lake. “It’s only in the last four to six years that we’ve started seeing icebergs this size,” he told Reuters.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIn January of this year, Blanch Gorriz and his team installed eight photogrammetric systems that capture images every 30 minutes, enabling the generation of 3D models of about 300 metres of the glacier front. Initial comparisons between December and June already reveal significant ice loss. Satellite images further highlight a striking retreat over just 100 days.Today, nothing seems capable of halting the glacier’s retreat. Only a series of cooler summers and wetter winters might slow the trend, but climate projections point in the opposite direction.“What we expect is that, at some point, Perito Moreno will lose contact with the Magallanes peninsula, which has historically acted as a stabilising buttress and slowed the glacier’s response to climate change. When that happens, we’ll likely see a catastrophic retreat to a new equilibrium position, farther back in the narrow valley,” said Ruiz.Such a shift would represent a “new configuration” of the glacier, raising scientific questions about how this natural wonder would behave in the future. “It will be something never seen before – even farther back than what the first researchers documented in the late 19th century,” Ruiz nadded.How long the glacier might hold that future position remains unknown. But what scientists do know is that the valley, unlike the Magallanes peninsula, would not be able to hold the glacier in place.Perito Moreno – Latin America’s most iconic glacier and part of a Unesco world heritage site since 1981 – now joins a regrettable local trend: its neighbours, the Upsala and Viedma glaciers, have retreated at an astonishing rate over the past two decades. It is also part of a global pattern in which, as Ruiz put it, humanity is “digging the grave” of the world’s glaciers.

Seeing fewer fireflies this year? Here’s why, and how you can help.

Fireflies are vulnerable to climate change and habitat loss. Some simple landscaping tricks and turning off porch lights can make a big difference.

It’s firefly season in the Blue Ridge.  As the sun goes down, they begin to blink and glow along the water, in the trees, and across open fields. Some species twinkle in unison, others off and on. One of nature’s loveliest light shows enchants onlookers of all ages, especially in the Smoky Mountains, which is home to about 20 percent of the 100 or so species found in the United States. But many of those who have long delighted in this essential feature of a humid East Coast summer say something feels different. Casual observers and scientists alike are seeing fewer fireflies, and studies show that habitat loss, rising temperatures, light pollution, and drought threaten these beloved bugs. Some populations are already dwindling, including about 18 species in the U.S. and Canada. “We’ve been hearing anecdotal reports of fireflies’ population declining for years,” said Sarah Lower, a biologist at Bucknell University. “Every time I would go out and give a scientific talk somewhere, somebody would raise their hand and say, ‘You know, I’ve been out in my yard and when I’m with a kid I remember there being fireflies everywhere, now I don’t see them.’” Lower and Darin J. McNeil, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Kentucky, examined  firefly population patterns last summer, using citizen science data collected nationwide to draw connections with environmental conditions.Though their observations don’t specifically confirm a decline, they suggest reasons we might be seeing fewer fireflies in some places. Climate change is already reshaping the Southeast with hotter, drier summers — conditions that could push fireflies past their limits. In some wetter regions, though, they may find new habitat. McNeil said these changing patterns are impacting firefly populations already. “They’re very, very sensitive to temperature and weather and things like that,” McNeil said. “In Southern areas where we expect it to get quite warm — and maybe get outside the comfort zone of fireflies — we might expect the fireflies are going to do poorly.” Read Next A year after Helene, river guides in Appalachia are navigating a new world Katie Myers Fireflies are carnivorous beetles. They don’t live long, and spend two years of their short lives in the soil as larvae, hunting slugs and other moisture-loving critters. “Disrupt that access to the soil, McNeil said, “and fireflies disappear very quickly.” The insects thrive in woodland areas (and, oddly, on farmland, despite herbicides), and habitat loss poses a threat. “We have this effect of fragmentation where people are chopping up the forest into little chunks and then the forest that’s left behind doesn’t get managed in any way,” McNeil said. McNeil would like to see researchers study how forest management, including prescribed burning, impacts fireflies. In the meantime, there’s a lot that ordinary folks can do to help them thrive. In western North Carolina, Brannen Basham and Jill Jacobs have built their lives around native landscapes. Their small business, Spriggly’s Beescaping, teaches people about pollinators — and increasingly, fireflies. The pair have a seemingly endless knowledge of fun facts about lightning bugs.  “One random interesting fact is that these animals never stop glowing,” Jacobs said. “They’re glowing as little eggs, even.” And one of the most common front yard genus, Photuris, use their glow to lure nearby males — then eat them. They take firefly conservation seriously, running regular workshops to teach people how to make their yards more welcoming to fireflies and pollinators, particularly as climate change disrupts growing seasons. “Fireflies might enter into their adult form and find themselves emerging into a world in which their favorite plants have either already bloomed or they haven’t bloomed yet,” Basham said. “By increasing the diversity of native plants in your space, you can help ensure that there’s something in bloom at all times of the growing season.” Basham and Jacobs have a few other tips for helping fireflies thrive. You don’t need to be a scientist to help protect fireflies. In fact, the biggest difference comes from how we care for our own backyards. Here are a few things Basham and Jacobs recommend: Turn off your porch lights. Fireflies are incredibly sensitive to artificial light and it can confuse them. Ditch the manicured lawn and embrace native plants. In addition to being easier to care for, they suit the local environment and conserve water. Leave some leaves behind when you rake in the fall. They’re a great place for fireflies to find food, stay cool, and lay eggs. Plant shrubs, tufting grasses, and other, large plants. These can shelter fireflies during rainstorms and other severe weather.  If you spot fireflies, jot down when and where you saw them and add your observations to citizen science databases like iNaturalist, Firefly Watch or Firefly Atlas to help scientists collect data. Even among those who study fireflies, the thrill of spotting them remains magical. Lower has made many excursions to the southern Appalachian mountains to find the famous, ethereal “blue ghosts.” Rather than flicker, the insects emit a continuous bluish-green glow. “You walk into the pitch black woods and at first you can’t really see anything right because your eyes are getting used to the darkness,” Lower said. “But eventually you start to see all these dim glows.” On other nights, Lower has seen so many fireflies it felt like she was walking among he stars. She’s been lucky enough to witness a phenomenon called spotlighting, in which lightning bugs hover in a circle of light. She’s even used pheromones as a tactic to lure them out of their hiding spots in the dead of winter, feeling elated as the creatures drifted toward her: “You can imagine me dancing and yelling and screaming in the forest.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Seeing fewer fireflies this year? Here’s why, and how you can help. on Jul 11, 2025.

Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect

From Mexico City to the Mekong Delta, increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to ecosystems and economies everywhere.

Taking shovels and buckets to a dried-up sandy belt of the Vhombozi River in Zimbabwe last August, groups of Mudzi district villagers gathered to dig with the hope of somehow finding water. The southern African region had entered into a state of severe drought, which had shriveled the Vhombozi, a primary water supply for more than 100,000 people. Before long, a maze of makeshift holes revealed shallow puddles along the otherwise arid riverbed. The frantic digging had worked — there was water. There was just one big problem: It wasn’t blue. It was a muddy brown color, and villagers worried that consuming it would make them ill. But as there were scarcely other options, many took their chances with drinking it and bathing with it.  Almost a year later, the persistent drought has led to a deluge of devastation on the region’s food system. Corn yields dropped 70 percent across the country, causing consumer prices to double. Thousands of cattle were lost to thirst and starvation. A local UNICEF emergency food distribution lost all of the food crops it harvested, which forced the NGO to reduce charitable food provisions from three meals a week to one. Child malnutrition levels in Mudzi doubled, driving up the demand for health care, and causing a quarter of health care clinics to run out of water reserves. Between January and March, about 6 million people in Zimbabwe faced food insecurity. According to a new report by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center, or NDMC, and the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, or UNCCD, the combined effects of global warming, drought, and El Niño have triggered similar crises all over the world, from Mexico City to the Mekong Delta. Using impact reports alongside government data, scientific and technical research, and media coverage of major drought events, the authors examined case-by-case how droughts compound poverty, hunger, energy insecurity, and ecosystem collapse in climate hot spots around the world. They measured impacts in 2023 and 2024, when the planet saw some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history. What they found is a lesson and a warning sign: Increasingly severe droughts caused by climate change are laying waste to ecosystems and economies everywhere.  “This report is a blistering reminder that climate change and punishing drought are already devastating lives, livelihoods, and food access,” said Million Belay of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and general coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We need to get serious about resilience and real adaptation.” A local farmer carries vegetables near a partially dry canal of a Chinampa, or floating garden, in San Gregorio Atlapulco, on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico, on May 23, 2024. Daniel Cardenas / Anadolu via Getty Images Mexico City A focal point in the analysis is Mexico, where prolonged drought conditions provoked a water crisis that has had repercussions for food affordability and access.  The situation began to intensify in 2023, when the country entered into a period of historically low rainfall. By June, the bulk of Mexico’s reservoirs dropped below 50 percent capacity. The rainy winter of 2023 brought some relief, but not enough.  By the next summer, 90 percent of the country was experiencing some level of drought, and Mexico City’s water supply system reached a record low of 39 percent capacity. Abnormally low rainfall and high temperatures, made worse by inefficient water infrastructure and overextraction of the city’s aquifer, would persist into early 2025. These struggles to obtain water have been further exacerbated by distribution needs as mandated by a water-sharing treaty Mexico has long shared with the United States.  A severe lack of water has been found to be closely linked with food insecurity, as water scarcity impacts food access through reductions in agricultural production that can fuel food shortages and higher grocery prices. Roughly 42 percent of Mexico’s population was food-insecure in 2021, according to national statistics, with consumer food inflation rates steadily climbing since then. Price hikes were eventually reflected in grocery stores, causing the costs of produce like cilantro to soar by 400 percent, alongside other climbing price tags for goods like onions, broccoli, and avocados.  “Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks,” said NDMC’s Cody Knutson, who co-authored the report. “No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse.”  Locals carry banana produce over the dry Solimoes riverbed in the Pesqueiro community in Northern Brazil, on September 30, 2024. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images Amazon Basin During those same years, the Amazon River Basin became another drought and hunger hot spot. According to the new report, climate change caused waterways to drop to historically low levels in September of 2023. Drinking water became contaminated by mass die-offs of marine life, and local communities weren’t able to eat the fish they rely on.  Supply chain transportation was also greatly affected, as the low water levels made it impossible for boats to travel in and out of certain regions. Brazil’s AirForce would be deployed to distribute food and water to several states where river supply routes were impassable.  Residents in some towns dug wells on their own properties to replace river water they would normally depend on for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, according to the U.N.-backed report. Others were stuck waiting on government aid. Disruptions to drinking water and food supplies due to low river levels continued through late 2024 as the drought persisted. By September, waterways that had previously been navigable were bone-dry.  A 2025 report released by the nonprofit ACAPS found that many communities in the Amazon region were already believed to be suffering malnutrition, making them more vulnerable to the emerging health and food insecurity effects of the drought.  Climate change plays “a critical role in food security,” said FAO economist Jung-eun Sohn, who is unaffiliated with the UNCCD report. He noted that warming not only can impact both availability of and access to food, but that natural hazards are “one of three main risks of food insecurity,” along with conflict and economic risks, in hunger hot spots.  A woman stands in a dried-out banana plantation in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, in 2016. At the time, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was experiencing its worst drought in 90 years. Christian Berg / Getty Images Mekong Delta  Though a central contributor to the interconnected water-and-food crisis, climate change isn’t the only factor in many hunger hot spots — failing infrastructure and inefficiencies in water delivery systems have also been flagged as critical contributors to widespread water shortages. The compounding effect of El Niño, or a naturally-occurring weather phenomena that drives above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the planet, is another culprit.  “It’s now abundantly clear that industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture, with its high water demands and uniform crops, is deeply vulnerable to drought and intensifying the crisis,” said Belay, the IPES expert.  One study found that saltwater intrusion, much like what persistently plagues the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam, also causes a significant reduction in food production. The watershed flows through six Asian countries, and over 20 million people depend on the rice grown in the region, which is Vietnam’s most productive agricultural area. It is also the region of Vietnam that is most vulnerable to hunger, with up to half of its rural households struggling to afford enough food.  A woman looks over her spoiled watermelon field in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam, in 2016. At the time, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta was experiencing its worst drought in 90 years. Christian Berg / Getty Images So when an early heat wave struck the Mekong Delta in 2024, and an abnormally long dry spell followed suit, causing canals to dry up, excessive salinity, heat, and water scarcity killed farmers’ catch in droves, reducing what communities were able to supply and sell, which led to shortages that prompted the local government to intervene and help producers quickly sell their wares. As the drought persisted, communities undertook other desperate measures to mitigate losses; renovating ditches, constructing temporary reservoirs, digging wells, and storing fresh water. Even so, according to the report, up to 110,000 hectares of agricultural resources, including fruit crops, rice fields, and aquaculture, have been impacted in the last year by the drought and excess salinity. The situation contributed to rice shortages, prompting a widespread inflationary effect on market prices. “These instances highlight how interconnected our global economies and food supplies are,” Paula Guastello, NDMC drought impacts researcher and lead author of the report, told Grist. “Drought has widespread implications, especially when it occurs on such a large, intense scale as during the past few years. In today’s global society, it is impossible to ignore the effects of drought occurring in far-off lands.”  All told, the authors argue that without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, rising temperatures will lead to more frequent and severe droughts by continuing to inflate heat, evaporation, and volatile precipitation patterns. All the while, urbanization, land use changes, and population growth are expected to continue to strain water resources and influence which assets and areas are most vulnerable to drought impacts. The world’s resilience to those impacts, the report denotes, ultimately depends on the fortification of ecosystems, the adoption of changes to water management, and the pursuit of equitable resource access.  “Proactive drought management is a matter of climate justice, equitable development, and good governance,” said UNCCD Deputy Executive Secretary Andrea Meza in a statement about the report. Stronger early warning systems and real-time drought impact monitoring, for example, those that assess conditions known to fuel food and water insecurity, are some of the ways countries can better fortify their systems in preparedness for the next big drought event. Others include watershed restoration, the broad revival of traditional cultivation practices, and the implementation of alternative water supply technologies to help make infrastructure more climate-resilient. Adaptation methods, however, must also account for the most vulnerable populations, the authors say, and require global cooperation, particularly along critical food trade routes.  “Drought is not just a weather event,” said report co-author and NDMC assistant director Kelly Helm Smith. “It can be a social, economic, and environmental emergency. The question is not whether this will happen again, but whether we will be better prepared next time.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Drought is draining water supplies and driving up food costs where you’d least expect on Jul 9, 2025.

Provocative new book says we must persuade people to have more babies

The population is set to plummet and we don't know how to stop it, warn Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in their new book, After the Spike

A large population may enable innovation and economies of scalePHILIPPE MONTIGNY/iStockphoto/Get​ty Images After the SpikeDean Spears and Michael Geruso (Bodley Head (UK); Simon & Schuster (US)) Four-Fifths of all the humans who will ever be born may already have been born. The number of children being born worldwide each year peaked at 146 million in 2012 and has been falling overall ever since. This means that the world’s population will peak and start to fall around the 2080s. This fall won’t be gradual. With birth rates already well below replacement levels in many countries including China and India, the world’s population will plummet as fast as it rose. In three centuries, there could be fewer than 2 billion people on Earth, claims a controversial new book. “No future is more likely than that people worldwide choose to have too few children to replace their own generation. Over the long run, this would cause exponential population decline,” write economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso in After the Spike: The risks of global depopulation and the case for people. This, you might think, could be a good thing. Won’t it help solve many environmental issues facing us today? No, say the authors. Take climate change: their argument isn’t that population size doesn’t matter, but that it changes so slowly that other factors such as how fast the world decarbonises matter far more. The window of opportunity for lowering carbon dioxide emissions by reducing population has largely passed, they write. Spears and Geruso also make the case that there are many benefits to having a large population. For instance, there is more innovation, and economies of scale make the manufacture of things like smartphones feasible. “We get to have nice phones only because we have a lot of neighbors on this planet,” they write. So, in their view, our aim should be to stabilise world population rather than letting it plummet. The problem is we don’t know how, even with the right political will. As we grow richer, we are more reluctant to abandon career and leisure opportuntiies to have children While some government policies have had short-term effects, no country has successfully changed long-term population trends, argue the authors. Take China’s one-child policy. It is widely assumed to have helped reduce population growth – but did it? Spears and Geruso show unlabelled graphs of the populations of China and its neighbours before, during and after the policy was in place, and ask the reader which is China. There is no obvious difference. Attempts to boost falling fertility rates have been no more successful, they say. Birth rates jumped after Romania banned abortion in 1966, but they soon started to fall again. Sweden has tried the carrot rather than the stick by heavily subsidising day care. But the fertility rate there has been falling even further below the replacement rate. All attempts to boost fertility by providing financial incentives are likely to fail, Spears and Geruso argue. While people might say they are having fewer children because they cannot afford larger families, the global pattern is, in fact, that as people become richer they have fewer children. Rather than affordability being the issue, it is more about people deciding that they have better things to do, the authors say. As we grow richer, we are more reluctant to abandon career and leisure opportunities to have children. Even technological advances are unlikely to reverse this, they say. On everything other than the difficulty of stabilising the population, this is a relentlessly optimistic book. For instance, say the authors, dire predictions of mass starvation as the world’s population grew have been shown to be completely wrong. The long-term trend of people living longer and healthier lives can continue, they suggest. “Fears of a depleted, overpopulated future are out of date,” they write. Really? Spears and Geruso also stress that the price of food is key to determining how many go hungry, but fail to point out that food prices are now climbing, with climate change an increasing factor. I’m not so sure things are going to keep getting better for most people. This book is also very much a polemic: with Spears and Geruso labouring their main points, it wasn’t an enjoyable read. That said, if you think that the world’s population isn’t going to fall, or that it will be easy to halt its fall, or that a falling population is a good thing, you really should read it. New Scientist book club Love reading? Come and join our friendly group of fellow book lovers. Every six weeks, we delve into an exciting new title, with members given free access to extracts from our books, articles from our authors and video interviews.

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield

Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve GuentherClimate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed. Continue reading...

Climate breakdown can be observed across many continuous, incremental changes such as soaring carbon dioxide levels, rising seas and heating oceans. The numbers creep up year after year, fuelled by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.But scientists have also identified at least 16 “tipping points” – thresholds where a tiny shift could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with potentially devastating effects. These shifts can interact with each other and create feedback loops that heat the planet further or disrupt weather patterns, with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. It is possible some tipping points may already have been passed.Dr Genevieve Guenther, an American climate communications specialist, is the founding director of End Climate Silence, which studies the representation of global heating in the media and public discourse. Last year, she published The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It, which was described by Bill McKibben as “a gift to the world”. In the run-up to the Global Tipping Points conference in July, Guenther talks to the Guardian about the need to discuss catastrophic risks when communicating about the climate crisis.The future of her son and all children motivates Dr Genevieve Guenther to protect the planet from further global heating. Photograph: Laila Annmarie Stevens/The GuardianThe climate crisis is pushing globally important ecosystems – ice sheets, coral reefs, ocean circulation and the Amazon rainforest – towards the point of no return. Why is it important to talk about tipping points? We need to correct a false narrative that the climate threat is under control. These enormous risks are potentially catastrophic. They would undo the connections between human and ecological systems that form the basis of all of our civilisation.How have attitudes changed towards these dangers? There was a constructive wave of global climate alarm in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 1.5C in 2018. That was the first time scientists made it clear that the difference between 1.5C and 2C would be catastrophic for millions of people and that in order to halt global heating at a relatively safe level, we would need to start zeroing out our emissions almost immediately. Until then, I don’t think policymakers realised the timeline was that short. This prompted a flurry of activism – Greta Thunberg and Indigenous and youth activists – and a surge of media attention. All of this converged to make almost everybody feel that climate change was a terrifying and pressing problem. This prompted new pledges, new corporate sustainability targets, and new policies being passed by government.This led to a backlash by those in the climate movement who prefer to cultivate optimism. Their preferred solution was to drive capitalist investment into renewable technologies so fossil fuels could be beaten out of the marketplace. This group believed climate fear might drive away investors, so they started to argue it was counterproductive to talk about worst-case scenarios. Some commentators even argued we had averted the direst predictions and were now on a more reassuring trajectory of global warming of a little under 3C by 2100.There is a misconception that wealthier places, such as the UK, Europe (including Italy, pictured) and the US will not be affected by the climate crisis but this is wrong, says Guenther. Photograph: Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty ImagesBut it is bananas to feel reassured by that because 3C would be a totally catastrophic outcome for humanity. Even at the current level of about 1.5C, the impacts of warming are emerging on the worst side of the range of possible outcomes and there is growing concern of tipping points for the main Atlantic Ocean circulation (Amoc), Antarctic sea ice, corals and rainforests.If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the Amoc collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off. And the idea that our little spaceship, our planet, is under the risk of essentially crashing and we’re still continuing business as usual is mindblowing. I think part of the problem is that people feel distant from the dangers and don’t realise the children we have in our homes today are threatened with a chaotic, disastrous, unliveable future. Talking about the risks of catastrophe is a very useful way to overcome this kind of false distance.In your book, you write that it’s appropriate to be scared and the more you know, the more likely you are to be worried, as is evident from the statements of scientists and the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres. Why? Some people at the centre of the media, policymaking and even research claim that climate change isn’t going to be that bad for those who live in the wealthy developed world – the UK, Europe and the United States. When you hear these messages, you are lulled into a kind of complacency and it seems reasonable to think that we can continue to live as we do now without putting ourselves, our families, our communities under threat within decades. What my book is designed to do is wake people up and raise the salience and support for phasing out fossil fuels.[It] is written for people who are already concerned about the climate crisis and are willing to entertain a level of anxiety. But the discourse of catastrophe would not be something I would recommend for people who are disengaged from the climate problem. I think that talking about catastrophe with those people can actually backfire because it’ll just either overwhelm them or make them entrench their positions. It can be too threatening.The Donnie Creek wildfire burns in British Columbia, Canada, in 2023. Photograph: Noah Berger/APA recent Yale study found that a degree of climate anxiety was not necessarily bad because it could stir people to collective action. Do you agree? It depends. I talk about three different kinds of doomerism. One is the despair that arises from misunderstanding the science and thinking we’re absolutely on the path to collapse within 20 or 30 years, no matter what we do. That is not true.Second, there’s a kind of nihilistic position taken by people who suggest they are the only ones who can look at the harsh truth. I have disdain for that position.Finally, there’s the doomerism that comes from political frustration, from believing that people who have power are just happy to burn the world down. And that to me is the most reasonable kind of doomerism. To address that kind of doomerism, you need to say: “Yes, this is scary as hell. But we must have courage and turn our fear into action by talking about climate change with others, by calling our elected officials on a regular basis, by demanding our workplaces put their money where their mouth is.”You need to acknowledge people’s feelings, meet them where they are and show how they can assuage their fear by cultivating their bravery and collective action.The most eye-opening part of your book was about the assumptions of the Nobel prize winner William Nordhaus that we’ll probably only face a very low percentage of GDP loss by the end of the century. This surely depends on ignoring tipping points? The only way Nordhaus can get the result that he does is if he fails to price the risk of catastrophe and leaves out a goodly chunk of the costs of global heating. In his models, he does not account for climate damages to labour productivity, buildings, infrastructure, transportation, non-coastal real estate, insurance, communication, government services and other sectors. But the most shocking thing he leaves out of his models is the risk that global heating could set off catastrophes, whether they are physical tipping points or wars from societal responses. That is why the percentage of global damages that he estimates is so ridiculously lowballed.The idea that climate change will just take off only a small margin of economic growth is not founded on anything empirical. It’s just a kind of quasi-religious faith in the power of capitalism to decouple itself from the planet on which it exists. That’s absurd and it’s unscientific.Some economists suggest wealth can provide almost unlimited protection from catastrophe because it is better to be in a steel and concrete building in a storm than it is to be in a wooden shack. How true is that? There’s no evidence that these protections are unlimited, though there are economists who suggest we can always substitute technologies or human-made products for ecosystems or even other planets like Mars for Earth itself. This goes back to an economic growth theorist named Robert Solow, who claims technological innovation can increase human productivity indefinitely. He stressed that it was just a theory, but the economists advising Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s took this as gospel and argued it was possible to ignore environmental externalities – the costs of our economic system, including our greenhouse gas pollution – because you could protect yourself as long as you kept increasing your wealth.Floods due to heavy rains at Porto Alegre airport left a plane stranded on the runway in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, last year. Photograph: Diego Vara/ReutersExcept when it comes to the climate crisis? Yes, the whole spectacle of our planet heating up this quickly should call all of those economic assumptions into question. But because climate change is affecting the poor first and worst, this is used as evidence that poverty is the problem. This is a misrepresentation of reality because the poor are not the only ones who are affected by the climate crisis. This is a slow-moving but accelerating crisis that will root and spread. And it could change for the worst quite dramatically as we hit tipping points.The difference between gradual warming and tipping points is similar to the difference between chronic, manageable ailments and acute, life-threatening diseases, isn’t it? Yes. When people downplay the effects of climate change, they often represent the problem as a case of planetary diabetes – as if it were a kind of illness that you can bumble along with, but still have a relatively good quality of life as long as you use your technologies, your insulin, whatever, to sustain your health. But this is not how climate scientists represent climate change. Dr Joelle Gergis, one of the lead authors on the latest IPCC report, prefers to represent climate change as a cancer – a disease that takes hold and grows and metastasises until the day when it is no longer curable and becomes terminal. You could also think of that as a tipping point.This is a fight for life. And like all fights, you need a tremendous amount of bravery to take it on. Before I started working on climate change, I didn’t think of myself as a fighter, but I became one because I felt I have a responsibility to preserve the world for my son and children everywhere. That kind of fierce protectiveness is part of the way that I love. We can draw on that to have more strength than our enemies because I don’t think they’re motivated by love. I believe love is an infinite resource and the power of it is greater than that of greed or hate. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.Tipping points: on the edge? – a series on our future Composite: Getty/Guardian DesignTipping points – in the Amazon, Antarctic, coral reefs and more – could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically, irreversibly and with devastating effects. In this series, we ask the experts about the latest science – and how it makes them feel. Tomorrow, David Obura talks about the collapse of coral reefsRead more

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