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Many native New Zealand species face threat of extinction, report finds

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Monday, April 7, 2025

A major new report on New Zealand’s environment has revealed a worrying outlook for its unique species and highlighted declining water health, while also noting some improvements in air quality.The ministry of the environment’s three-yearly update, Our Environment 2025, collates statistics, data and research across five domains – air, atmosphere and climate, freshwater, land, and marine – to paint a picture of the state of New Zealand’s environment.James Palmer, the ministry’s secretary for the environment, said the findings in the report were a “mixed bag”.“It does highlight the real risks to people, communities and places, which left unaddressed threaten our livelihoods and our quality of life for generations to come,” Palmer said. “But the report also shows that there are reasons for optimism.”The report painted a sobering picture for New Zealand’s indigenous animals, with 76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened.“New Zealand’s unique biodiversity has a high proportion of threatened or at-risk species – one of the highest amid the global biodiversity crisis”, the report said, noting that land use, pollution, invasive species and climate change can all have an impact on biodiversity.The report also found the most widespread water quality issue affecting groundwaters was the presence of E coli – a bacteria found in the guts of animals and humans that can cause serious illness and has been linked to farming and cities in New Zealand.Of more than 1,000 groundwater monitoring sites, nearly half failed to meet the drinking water standard for E coli on at least one occasion between 2019 and 2024, while nearly half of the monitored rivers shows worsening E coli trends.Meanwhile, a significant proportion of groundwaters have accumulated excess nitrate due to activities such as intensive farming, logging and urbanisation, which also affects water quality and degrades surface water ecosystems.Dr Mike Joy, a senior research fellow in freshwater ecology and environmental science at Victoria University of Wellington, said the report revealed the ongoing and – in most cases – worsening decline of the environment. “The report reveals starkly the fallacy of the label ‘clean green New Zealand’ and the urgent need for this to be taken seriously by government,” he said.New Zealand also faced a significant problem with pest plants. “The most spectacular of those, arguably, is the wilding conifer,” Palmer said.Around 2m hectares are thought to be invaded by wilding conifers, an introduced pest plant that spreads from plantation forests. Their area is expanding by around 90,000 hectares a year and, without proper management, could invade about a quarter of New Zealand’s land within 30 years, the majority of which would be conservation land.The report traverses how New Zealanders will be affected by the climate crisis and the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. Around 750,000 people and 500,000 buildings, are near rivers and in coastal areas already exposed to extreme flooding, while low-lying communities are vulnerable to sea-level rise, and rural communities are at risk of wildfires.“We’ll face some tough choices about our priorities as a country, including about where we put our efforts and our scarce dollars,” Palmer said.The report identified some environmental improvements, particularly in air quality. While road transport remains the main source of nitrogen oxide pollution, air pollution from motor vehicles was reducing due to stronger emission standards, more people choosing to use lower-emission vehicles, and improvements to engines and fuel.“We’ve started to turn the corner in meaningful ways on some of our measures – choices about the cars we drive, the heating we use for our homes, for example, are showing up in better air quality, which is likely to flow through into better health,” Palmer said.“That underscores that we can make a difference, and we can build on the momentum that is already underway by doing more.”

A three-yearly environmental update issues stark warning over biodiversity – and reports air pollution has improved in some areasA major new report on New Zealand’s environment has revealed a worrying outlook for its unique species and highlighted declining water health, while also noting some improvements in air quality.The ministry of the environment’s three-yearly update, Our Environment 2025, collates statistics, data and research across five domains – air, atmosphere and climate, freshwater, land, and marine – to paint a picture of the state of New Zealand’s environment. Continue reading...

A major new report on New Zealand’s environment has revealed a worrying outlook for its unique species and highlighted declining water health, while also noting some improvements in air quality.

The ministry of the environment’s three-yearly update, Our Environment 2025, collates statistics, data and research across five domains – air, atmosphere and climate, freshwater, land, and marine – to paint a picture of the state of New Zealand’s environment.

James Palmer, the ministry’s secretary for the environment, said the findings in the report were a “mixed bag”.

“It does highlight the real risks to people, communities and places, which left unaddressed threaten our livelihoods and our quality of life for generations to come,” Palmer said. “But the report also shows that there are reasons for optimism.”

The report painted a sobering picture for New Zealand’s indigenous animals, with 76% of freshwater fish, 68% of freshwater birds, 78% of terrestrial birds, 93% of frogs, and 94% of reptiles threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened.

“New Zealand’s unique biodiversity has a high proportion of threatened or at-risk species – one of the highest amid the global biodiversity crisis”, the report said, noting that land use, pollution, invasive species and climate change can all have an impact on biodiversity.

The report also found the most widespread water quality issue affecting groundwaters was the presence of E coli – a bacteria found in the guts of animals and humans that can cause serious illness and has been linked to farming and cities in New Zealand.

Of more than 1,000 groundwater monitoring sites, nearly half failed to meet the drinking water standard for E coli on at least one occasion between 2019 and 2024, while nearly half of the monitored rivers shows worsening E coli trends.

Meanwhile, a significant proportion of groundwaters have accumulated excess nitrate due to activities such as intensive farming, logging and urbanisation, which also affects water quality and degrades surface water ecosystems.

Dr Mike Joy, a senior research fellow in freshwater ecology and environmental science at Victoria University of Wellington, said the report revealed the ongoing and – in most cases – worsening decline of the environment. “The report reveals starkly the fallacy of the label ‘clean green New Zealand’ and the urgent need for this to be taken seriously by government,” he said.

New Zealand also faced a significant problem with pest plants. “The most spectacular of those, arguably, is the wilding conifer,” Palmer said.

Around 2m hectares are thought to be invaded by wilding conifers, an introduced pest plant that spreads from plantation forests. Their area is expanding by around 90,000 hectares a year and, without proper management, could invade about a quarter of New Zealand’s land within 30 years, the majority of which would be conservation land.

The report traverses how New Zealanders will be affected by the climate crisis and the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events such as Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. Around 750,000 people and 500,000 buildings, are near rivers and in coastal areas already exposed to extreme flooding, while low-lying communities are vulnerable to sea-level rise, and rural communities are at risk of wildfires.

“We’ll face some tough choices about our priorities as a country, including about where we put our efforts and our scarce dollars,” Palmer said.

The report identified some environmental improvements, particularly in air quality. While road transport remains the main source of nitrogen oxide pollution, air pollution from motor vehicles was reducing due to stronger emission standards, more people choosing to use lower-emission vehicles, and improvements to engines and fuel.

“We’ve started to turn the corner in meaningful ways on some of our measures – choices about the cars we drive, the heating we use for our homes, for example, are showing up in better air quality, which is likely to flow through into better health,” Palmer said.

“That underscores that we can make a difference, and we can build on the momentum that is already underway by doing more.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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This Netflix holiday rom-com is secretly an environmentalist fantasy

Don't watch "A Merry Little Ex-Mas" for the cheesy romance. Watch it for the sustainability messages, which shine as bright as LED Christmas lights.

At first glance, A Merry Little Ex-Mas looks like yet another holiday rom-com — a comforting, predictable love story done up in a tidy bow. Only in this case, that festive wrapper is made of green ribbon. Any environmentally-minded viewers will quickly clock Ex-Mas as not just a corny yuletide romp, but a PSA for sustainable living.  That’s why, on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, a few Grist staffers cozied up on their couches to watch a Netflix film our editor-in-chief assured us was actually a climate movie “disguised in holiday romance sappiness.” Alicia Silverstone (of Clueless fame, and a sustainability advocate in real life) plays an environmentalist named Kate, an architect turned handy-mom. Her passion for the planet — which manifests in familiar hippie tropes like composting, shopping secondhand, and making ornaments out of “recycled and found objects” — borders on obsession, in the eyes of family and friends tortured by such sins as handmade gifts and a carbon-sequestering live Christmas tree.  She’s been separated for months from her husband, a small-town doctor named Everett, who once upon a time whisked her away to his idyllic hometown of Winterlight, forcing her to leave her professional dreams behind in Boston. But enough about him. He barely matters. (Plus, he has about as much personality as recycled cardboard — perhaps why Kate likes him so much.) This movie isn’t about their reconciliation so much as it’s a hot cup of cocoa for the souls of neglected, crunchy, 40-something women who yearn to curl up with a movie that whispers, You are right. You are valued. You were smart to install all those solar panels.  As we started a running commentary on the movie in Slack, it didn’t take long for each of us to see something of ourselves in the protagonist. She shares her first name with senior staff writer Kate Yoder, along with a fondness for long words (like “thermodynamic”), and similar life experiences with associate editor Claire Elise Thompson, who also followed her doctor husband across the country. Teresa Chin, Grist’s executive editor, couldn’t help but identify with the antimaterialist mom who champions homemade and secondhand goods. Anyone who has given climate change more than a passing thought will probably find something in Kate to relate to.  All of the movie’s other characters are little more than props or foils for Kate, but there were two who caught our attention. One was Chet, Kate’s brief fling, a delightful himbo who appears to appreciate her interests more than anyone else in her life. Chet is to Winterlight what Kirk is to Stars Hollow, seemingly holding every job possible — including, we learn at the end, driving a snow plow as an emergency response volunteer. (Their love story would have made for a better movie, if we’re being honest.) The other was Kate’s house, nicknamed “the Mothership,” a picturesque Victorian that had us all cooing in the group chat because of its resemblance to the storied house from the movie Practical Magic. Spoiler alert: It’s the Mothership that truly saves the day in the end. Netflix Though the movie never mentions climate change explicitly, it’s sprinkled with environmental mentions. There are more references to sustainability than there are cheesy romance scenes. They go beyond the low-hanging fruit of eco-friendly lifestyle stuff like worm bins. Kate recommends a neighbor install a heat pump when her furnace breaks down. One of her fathers-in-law (yes, the family has two gay grandpas) asks her about geothermal energy. Her husband even calls her by the nickname “Al,” a reference to Al Gore — evidently the only environmentalist he’s heard of, apart from Kate.  Kate’s friends and family make fun of her environmentally-minded quirks. And she may deserve it a little — for much of the movie, she leans into the fun-killing environmentalist trope (at one point, in response to seeing Everett’s new house bedecked with energy-guzzling Christmas lights and inflatable lawn decorations, Kate exclaims, “I can hear the polar ice caps melting!”) But over the course of the movie, it becomes clear how much her loved ones admire her and share her values, if not in exactly the same way. Her kids, for instance, admit that her passion inspires them to pursue their own dreams.  And Kate’s preparedness comes to fruition when a windstorm knocks out the town’s power, leaving her solar-panel-and-battery-laden home the only one in Winterlight with lights (and, for that matter, heat). The neighbors flock to the Mothership like it’s a climate resilience hub. Inspired by the warmth of her community, Kate decides not to return to Boston to take up her old green architect job, but to stay in Winterlight with Everett and start her own sustainability company, which she describes as “making a difference in my community and changing the world, one person at a time.” It’s a model of “think global, act local.” As Teresa put it in our group chat about the film: “I mean, let’s call this movie what it was — a fantasy where everyone in your life eventually realizes that they were wrong, you are right, and you also get to live in the Practical Magic house during Christmastime.”  A Merry Little Ex-Mas may not be the rom-com of the century — maybe we’ll get the Kate-and-Chet chemistry that we deserve in a sequel — but as cozy wish fulfillment for people who care about the planet, it’s a 10 out of 10. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Netflix holiday rom-com is secretly an environmentalist fantasy on Dec 23, 2025.

Climate
Energy
Sustainable

The Push to Make U.S. College Students Climate Literate

Students and professors at universities across the country are pushing for general education requirements to equip students to combat climate change.

The majority of people in the United States want the government to do more to address climate change, according to a 2020 study by the Pew Research Center, yet few of them can be counted as “climate literate”—which the North American Association for Environmental Education defines through metrics such as being able to understand essential climate principles, assess the credibility of climate information, and make “informed and responsible decisions” where their actions may impact the climate. The purpose of being climate literate is not just to gain scientific knowledge, but to uncover climate perspectives and solutions that can inspire action. In 2023, Allianz surveyed Americans to see how climate literate they were, asking scientific questions like “What is the impact of the rise in temperature?” as well as political ones like “What is COP?”, referring to the annual Conference of the Parties meetings that broadly discuss climate action among U.N. member nations. Researchers found only five percent of Americans had a high level of climate literacy.  To close this gap in climate literacy, a burgeoning movement of students and professors is pushing for climate literacy to be integrated in general education. Some efforts have already succeeded, such as at the University of California, San Diego, which in 2024 became one of the first universities to require that all undergraduates complete a general education course related to climate change. The push to implement this requirement was the result of a student-faculty alliance that has been organizing toward “climate education for all” since 2021. Arizona State University also revamped its general education requirements in 2024, making a three-credit sustainability course mandatory for incoming students. The University of Massachusetts Amherst has a robust climate literacy program, though the university has not yet included this in its required coursework.  UC San Diego’s victory recently inspired a group of thirteen professors at the University of California, Davis, to propose a Climate Crisis General Education requirement for undergraduate students. Former UC Davis undergraduate students Chely Saens, Meghan Van Note, and Trisha Trilokekar wrote that since “climate issues affect all fields of study, the new study requirement would ensure that every student, regardless of their major, gains a broad understanding of climate science, justice, and solutions.” The proposal has collected at least 530 endorsements from various student and staff groups across campus. Should they succeed in implementing it, a graduating class in the near future would be required to learn about sanitation, clean energy, sustainable communities, and responsible consumption and production. Most of the proposed courses for the climate change requirement would overlap with existing general education requirements. Mark Huising, who teaches neurobiology and physiology at UC Davis’s College of Biological Sciences, was part of the group pushing for this general education requirement. “It’s part of our core mission as faculty—especially of higher learning—to make sure that the teachings that we do are broadly applicable and useful to the students that we teach,” he tells The Progressive.  Huising says he saw the stakes of integrating climate education into undergraduate studies in 2018, when a student in the front row of one of his courses raised their hand and to be excused, having just found out their home had burned down in the Camp Fire. It pushed Huising to think more deeply about how to teach at a time when many students (and faculty members) are impacted by climate disasters. He continuously sees students dealing with environmental issues that interfere with their education. “Air quality concerns are front of mind,” Huising says. “More regularly we have people in our community who are facing extreme heat in combination with housing instability.” He says the group who worked on the general education proposal wanted to make sure the required course didn’t just focus on the scientific elements of climate change, but also “the human connection,” including perspectives on climate justice and solutions that intertwine with coursework in urban planning, public policy, renewable energy, public health, law, ecology, politics, sociology, and journalism. This, he says, instills a “sense of urgency” and agency in creating a graduated workforce “ who knows how to navigate this information landscape around climate change.”  But the proposal is currently a standstill. ​​ Earlier this fall, the Academic Senate at UC Davis, the faculty governance system, declined to implement the proposal, citing logistical issues such as concerns about the school’s capacity to implement a new general education curriculum on a campus with more than 30,000 undergraduates. “ We can’t create a requirement for students and then set them up to not be able to take classes that they need, or increase their time to [earn their] degree,” Huising says. Still, he says, the proposal’s proponents believe they can address these concerns with a carefully planned curriculum rollout, and are currently working to address the concerns and bring the amended proposal back to the Academic Senate.  Huising and his colleagues have brainstormed ways to broaden the range of courses that could fulfill the requirement by enriching courses in the current curriculum with climate-focused lessons. For him, this means teaching his physiology students about the impacts of extreme heat on the human body. Similarly, one of his colleagues in the Department of Entomology and Nematology is incorporating lessons on how Indigenous land use and water management practices can control insect populations in wetlands in the Central Valley. The English department, meanwhile, is adding literature courses focused on climate issues to its course catalog. At Harvey Mudd College, a private liberal arts school in Southern California focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), chemistry and climate professor Leila Hawkins hopes to create a permanent climate-focused general education course. A current class called “STEM & Social Impact” is temporarily focused on climate change until next spring. “The question is, do we keep it on climate or do we do something else like [artificial intelligence] or other big sticky problems?” Hawkins says. The course is currently taught by an interdisciplinary group of seven professors, including Hawkins, who teaches basic earth science principles for the class. Three of the course teachers are humanities, social sciences, or arts faculty, while other four are STEM faculty. Hawkins says it’s important for the climate change requirement to have a permanent place in curriculum, given the implications of global climate change for her students’ futures, “and the fact that we have to vote for people who are going to weigh in on policy choices related to climate and energy and resilience and planning and adaptation.” If students are not adequately informed about what climate change is and what can be done about it, she says, “they’re going to be much less able to be productive participants in a functioning society that’s going to tackle this.” An established requirement should have some basic earth science content, Hawkins says, but also an equal measure of historical context around climate policies. “You cannot avoid the partisan climate conversation,” she says. “I think having a really open, productive conversation about how it has become such a divided issue is really important.”  Similar to UC Davis’s proposal, Hawkins says a focus on climate solutions is essential in these courses, because without it, “it’s depressing to some students to the point of being immobilizing or debilitating.” Solutions-focused learning gives a vast array of students an opportunity to understand how they could play a role in the solution space given their own strengths and abilities. “They might want to be an artist or an engineer or a computer scientist or a historian or a tradesman—or whatever they want to be,” Hawkins says, “but there’s going to be a way that they can work on a solution for climate if they want to with those skills and interests.” At the end of the day, Huising says there is “not a large ideological opposition to doing this, but people are very comfortable not making a change in how we do stuff . . . . And very importantly, when we survey our students and when we talk to our student leadership on campus, there’s widespread support for this,” Huising notes. Jill Webb is a Brooklyn-based award-winning journalist and audio producer who mainly covers mental health, the environment, and labor issues. Her work can be found at www.jillmwebb.com. Read more by Jill Webb December 22, 2025 5:04 PM

Climate
Education
Energy

"Year of octopus" declared after warmer seas leads to record numbers

The Wildlife Trusts say its is "flabbergasted" by the sighting of the highest number of octopuses since 1950

"Year of octopus" declared after warmer seas leads to record numbersJonah FisherEnvironment correspondentWatch: Octopuses filmed by divers off the coast of Cornwall this yearA wildlife charity has declared 2025 "the Year of the Blooming Octopus" after record numbers were spotted off the south-west coast of England.In its annual marine review the Wildlife Trusts says octopus numbers were this summer at their highest level since 1950.Warmer winters, which are linked to climate change, are thought to be responsible for the population spike, which is known as a "bloom".The charity's findings are backed up by official figures which show that more than 1,200 tonnes of octopus was caught by fishermen in UK waters in the summer of 2025. The Wildlife Trusts/Kirsty AndrewsThe Wildlife Trusts says the highest number of octopuses has been seen off the south coast of Devon and Cornwall since 1950. It's a dramatic increase on previous years. Only once since 2021 has more than 200 tonnes of octopus been landed.Experts say most of those spotted are Octopus vulgaris a species commonly seen in the warmer Mediterranean Sea. Wildlife Trusts volunteers in Cornwall and Devon reported an increase in sightings of more than 1,500 percent on 2023 figures along one stretch of the south coast. "It really has been exceptional," says Matt Slater from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. "We've seen octopuses jet-propelling themselves along. We've seen octopuses camouflaging themselves, they look just like seaweeds. "We've seen them cleaning themselves. And we've even seen them walking, using two legs just to nonchalantly cruise away from the diver underwater."It's unclear at this point whether the rise in numbers is permanent or cyclical, which would mean octopus numbers returning to more typical levels after this year's bloom. The eight-armed cephalopods eat shellfish such as lobster, crabs and scallops so the Wildlife Trusts warn that if population numbers remain high, both fishing and eating habits may have to change."They are having an impact on those (shellfish) species around our shores. And as a consequence, they will be having an impact on our fishing industry who target those species as well," Ruth Williams the head of marine for The Wildlife Trusts told the BBC's Today programmme. "But there are opportunities and our fishing industry are doing some research into that at the moment to try and evolve with the changing fisheries that we're seeing as a result of climate change."Government data shows crab landings down on previous years but catches of lobster, crawfish and scallops stable.Wildlife Trusts of South and West Wales/Lynne NewtonA record number of puffins were recorded on Skomer Island in Pembrokeshire this year. Alongside good news for octopus lovers, the Wildlife Trusts' marine review contains more sobering news.The Trusts say this year was bookended by environmental disasters, with a collision between an oil tanker and a container ship in the North Sea in March spilling huge quantities of plastic resin pellets, and nearly 4.5 tonnes of bio-beads released from a water treatment plant in Sussex in November.There was some better news for wildlife elsewhere, with a record 46,000 puffins recorded on Skomer, Pembrokeshire, while the charismatic black and white bird has made a comeback on the Isle of Muck following conservation efforts by Ulster Wildlife Trust to remove invasive brown rats.

Climate
Conservation
Government

Disaster after disaster: do we have enough raw materials to ‘build back better’?

Disasters like earthquakes and flood destroy homes and generate vast amounts of waste. Is there a better, greener way to rebuild affected communities?

This Christmas Day marks 21 years since the terrifying Indian Ocean tsunami. As we remember the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in this tragic event, it is also a moment to reflect on what followed. How do communities rebuild after major events such as the tsunami, and other disasters like it? What were the financial and hidden costs of reconstruction? Beyond the immediate human toll, disasters destroy hundreds of thousands of buildings each year. In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan damaged a record 1.2 million structures in Philippines. Last year, earthquakes and cyclones damaged more than half a million buildings worldwide. For communities to rebuild their lives, these structures must be rebuilt. While governments, non-government agencies and individuals struggle to finance post-disaster reconstruction, rebuilding also demands staggering volumes of building materials. In turn, these require vast amounts of natural resource extraction. For instance, an estimated one billion burnt clay bricks were needed to reconstruct the half-million homes destroyed in the Nepal earthquake. This is enough bricks to circle the Earth six times if laid end to end. How can we responsibly source such vast quantities of materials to meet demand? Demand causes problems Sudden spikes in demand have led to severe shortages of common building materials after nearly every major disaster over the past two decades, including the 2015 Nepal earthquake and the 2019 California wildfires. These shortages often trigger price hikes of 30–40%, which delays reconstruction and prolongs the suffering of affected communities. Disasters not only increase demand for building materials but also generate enormous volumes of debris. For example, the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake produced more than 100 million cubic meters of debris – 40 times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Disaster debris can pose serious environmental and health risks, including toxic dust and waterway pollution. But some debris can be safely transformed into useful assets such as recycled building materials. Rubble can be crushed and repurposed as base for low-traffic roads or turned into cement blocks . The consequences of poor post-disaster building materials management have reached alarming global proportions. After the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, for example, the surge in sand demand led to excessive and illegal sand mining in rivers along Sri Lanka’s west coast. This caused irreversible ecological damage to two major watersheds, devastating the livelihoods of thousands of farmers and fisherpeople. Similar impacts from the overextraction of materials such as sand, gravel, clay and timber have been reported following other major disasters, including the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019. If left unaddressed, the social, environmental and economic impacts of resource extraction will escalate to catastrophic levels, especially as climate change intensifies disaster frequency. Urgent need for action This crisis has yet to receive adequate international attention. Earlier this year, several global organisations came together to publish a Global Call to Action on sustainable building materials management after disasters. Based on an analysis of 15 major disasters between 2005 and 2020, it identified three key challenges: building material shortages and price escalation, unsustainable extraction and use of building materials, and poor management of disaster debris. Although well-established solutions exist to address these challenges, rebuilding efforts suffer from policy and governance gaps. The Call to Action urges international bodies such as the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction to take immediate policy and practical action. Building back better and safer After a disaster hits, it leaves an opportunity to build back better. Rebuilding can boost resilience to future hazards, encourage economic development and reduce environmental impact. The United Nations’ framework for disaster management emphasises the importance of rebuilding better and safer rather than simply restoring communities to pre-disaster conditions. Disaster affected communities should be rebuilt with capacity to cope with future external shocks and environmental risks. Lessons can be learned from both negative and positive experiences of past disasters. For example, poor planning of some reconstruction projects after the Indian ocean Tsunami (2004) in Sri Lanka made the communities vulnerable again to coastal hazards within a few years. On the other hand, the community-led reconstruction approach followed after the Bhuj earthquake, India (2001), has resulted in safer and more socio-economically robust settlements, standing the test of 24 years. As an integral part of the “build back better” approach, authorities must include strategies for environmentally and socially responsible management of building materials. These should encourage engineers, architects and project managers to select safe sustainable materials for reconstruction projects. At the national level, regulatory barriers to repurposing disaster debris should be removed, whilst still ensuring safe management of hazardous materials such as asbestos. For example, concrete from fallen buildings was successfully used as road-base and as recycled aggregate for infrastructure projects following the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and 2011 Tohoku Earthquake in Japan. This critical issue demands urgent public and political attention. Resilient buildings made with safe sustainable material will save lives in future disasters. Missaka Nandalochana Hettiarachchi receives funding from WWF, an environmental NGO, through his role in disaster management

Climate
Crisis
Government

This Climate Concern Is Way Out There

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a mid-November evening, at precisely 7:12 p.m., a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Florida coast. It appeared to be a perfect launch. At an altitude of about 40 […]

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On a mid-November evening, at precisely 7:12 p.m., a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the Florida coast. It appeared to be a perfect launch. At an altitude of about 40 miles, the rocket’s first stage separated and fell back to Earth, eventually alighting in a gentle, controlled landing on a SpaceX ship idling in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission’s focus then returned to the rocket’s payload: 29 Starlink communication satellites that were to be deployed in low-Earth orbit, about 340 miles above the planet’s surface. With this new fleet of machines, Starlink was expanding its existing mega-constellation so that it numbered over 9,000 satellites, all circling Earth at about 17,000 miles per hour.  Launches like this have become commonplace. As of late November, SpaceX had sent up 152 Falcon 9 missions in 2025—an annual record for the company. And while SpaceX is the undisputed leader in rocket launches, the space economy now ranges beyond American endeavors to involve orbital missions—military, scientific, and corporate—originating from Europe, China, Russia, India, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. This year the global total of orbital launches will near 300 for the first time, and there seems little doubt it will continue to climb.     “We are now in this regime where we are doing something new to the atmosphere that hasn’t been done before.” Starlink has sought permission from the Federal Communications Commission to expand its swarm, which at this point comprises the vast majority of Earth’s active satellites, so that it might within a few years have as many as 42,000 units in orbit. Blue Origin, the rocket company led by Jeff Bezos, is in the early stages of helping to deploy a satellite network for Amazon, a constellation of about 3,000 units known as Amazon Leo. European companies, such as France’s Eutelsat, plan to expand space-based networks, too. “We’re now at 12,000 active satellites, and it was 1,200 a decade ago, so it’s just incredible,” Jonathan MacDowell, a scientist at Harvard and the Smithsonian who has been tracking space launches for several decades, told me recently. MacDowell notes that based on applications to communications agencies, as well as on corporate projections, the satellite business will continue to grow at an extraordinary rate. By 2040, it’s conceivable that more than 100,000 active satellites would be circling Earth. But counting the number of launches and satellites has so far proven easier than measuring their impacts. For the past decade, astronomers have been calling attention to whether so much activity high above might compromise their opportunities to study distant objects in the night sky. At the same time, other scientists have concentrated on the physical dangers. Several studies project a growing likelihood of collisions and space debris—debris that could rain down on Earth or, in rare cases, on cruising airplanes. More recently, however, scientists have become alarmed by two other potential problems: the emissions from rocket fuels, and the emissions from satellites and rocket stages that mostly ablate (that is, burn up) on reentry. “Both of these processes are producing pollutants that are being injected into just about every layer of the atmosphere,” explains Eloise Marais, an atmospheric scientist at University College London, who compiles emissions data on launches and reentries.  As Marais told me, it’s crucial to understand that Starlink’s satellites, as well as those of other commercial ventures, don’t stay up indefinitely. With a lifetime usefulness of about five years, they are regularly deorbited and replaced by others. The new satellite business thus has a cyclical quality: launch, deploy, deorbit, destroy. And then repeat.  The cycle suggests we are using Earth’s mesosphere and stratosphere—the layers above the surface-hugging troposphere—as an incinerator dump for space machinery. Or as Jonathan MacDowell puts it: “We are now in this regime where we are doing something new to the atmosphere that hasn’t been done before.” MacDowell and some of his colleagues seem to agree that we don’t yet understand how—or how much—the reentries and launches will alter the air. As a result, we’re unsure what the impacts may be to Earth’s weather, climate, and (ultimately) its inhabitants.  To consider low-Earth orbit within an emerging environmental framework, it helps to see it as an interrelated system of cause and effect. As with any system, trying to address one problematic issue might lead to another. A long-held idea, for instance, has been to “design for demise,” in the argot of aerospace engineers, which means constructing a satellite with the intention it should not survive the heat of reentry. “But there’s an unforeseen consequence of your solution unless you have a grasp of how things are connected,” according to Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. In reducing “the population of debris” with incineration, Lewis told me—and thus, with rare exceptions, saving us from encounters with falling chunks of satellites or rocket stages—we seem to have chosen “probably the most harmful solution you could get from a perspective of the atmosphere.”  We don’t understand the material composition of everything that’s burning up. Yet scientists have traced a variety of elements that are vaporizing in the mesosphere during the deorbits of satellites and derelict rocket stages; and they’ve concluded these vaporized materials—as a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences put it—“condense into aerosol particles that descend into the stratosphere.” The PNAS study, done by high altitude air sampling and not by modeling, showed that these tiny particles contained aluminum, silicon, copper, lead, lithium, and more exotic elements like niobium. “Emission plumes from the first few minutes of a mission, which disperse into the stratosphere, may…have a significant effect on the ozone layer.” The large presence of aluminum, signaling the formulation of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, may be especially worrisome, since it can harm Earth’s protective ozone layers and may undo our progress in halting damage done by chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. A recent academic study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that the ablation of a single 550-pound satellite (a new Starlink unit is larger, at about 1,800 pounds) can generate around 70 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles. This floating metallic pollution may stay aloft for decades.  The PNAS study and others, moreover, suggest the human footprint on the upper atmosphere will expand, especially as the total mass of machinery being incinerated ratchets up. Several scientists I spoke with noted that they have revised their previous belief that the effects of ablating satellites would not exceed those of meteorites that naturally burn up in the atmosphere and leave metallic traces in the stratosphere. “You might have more mass from the meteoroids,” Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, said, but “these satellites can still have a huge effect because they’re so vastly different [in composition].”  Last year, a group of researchers affiliated with NASA formulated a course of research that could be followed to fill large “knowledge gaps” relating to these atmospheric effects. The team proposed a program of modeling that would be complemented by data gleaned from in situ measurements. While some of this information could be gathered through high-altitude airplane flights, sampling the highest-ranging air might require “sounding” rockets doing tests with suborbital flights. Such work is viewed as challenging and not inexpensive—but also necessary. “Unless you have the data from the field, you cannot trust your simulations too much,” Columbia University’s Kostas Tsigaridis, one of the scientists on the NASA team, told me.  Tsigaridis explains that lingering uncertainty about NASA’s future expenditures on science has slowed US momentum for such research. One bright spot, however, has been overseas, where ESA, the European Space Agency, held an international workshop in September to address some of the knowledge gaps, particularly those relating to satellite ablations. The ESA meeting resulted in a commitment to begin field measurement campaigns over the next 24 months, Adam Mitchell, an engineer with the agency, said. The effort suggests a sense of urgency, in Europe, at least, that the space industry’s growth is outpacing our ability to grasp its implications. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket takes off. SpaceX now has more than 9,000 Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth.SpaceX The atmospheric pollution problem is not only about what’s raining down from above, however; it also relates to what happens as rockets go up. According to the calculations of Marais’ UCL team, the quantity of heat-trapping gases like CO2 produced during liftoffs are still tiny in comparison to, say, those of commercial airliners. On the other hand, it seems increasingly clear that rocket emission plumes from the first few minutes of a mission, which disperse into the stratosphere, may, like reentries, have a significant effect on the ozone layer.  The most common rocket fuel right now is a highly refined kerosene known as RP-1, which is used by vehicles such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9. When RP-1 is burned in conjunction with liquid oxygen, the process releases black carbon particulates into the stratosphere. A recent study led by Christopher Maloney of the University of Colorado used computer models to assess how the black carbon absorbs solar radiation and whether it can warm the upper atmosphere significantly. Based on space industry growth projections a few decades into the future, these researchers concluded that the warming effect of black carbon would raise temperatures in the stratosphere by as much as 1.5 degrees C, leading to significant ozone reductions in the Northern Hemisphere. When satellite companies talk about sustainability, “what they mean is, we want to sustain this rate of growth.”  It may be the case that a different propellant could alleviate potential problems. But a fix isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Solid fuels, for instance, which are often used in rocket boosters to provide additional thrust, emit chlorine—another ozone-destroying element. Meanwhile, the propellant of the future looks to be formulations of liquefied natural gas (LNG), often referred to as liquid methane. Liquid methane will be used to power SpaceX’s massive Starship, a new vehicle that’s intended to be used for satellite deployments, moon missions, and, possibly someday, treks to Mars.  The amount of black carbon emissions from burning LNG may be 75 percent less than from RP-1. “But the issue is that the Starship rocket is so much bigger,” UCL’s Marais says. “There’s so much more mass that’s being launched.” Thus, while liquid methane might burn cleaner, using immense quantities of it—and using it for more frequent launches—could undermine its advantages. Recently, executives at SpaceX’s Texas factory have said they would like to build a new Starship every day, readying the company for a near-constant cycle of launches. One worry amongst scientists is that if new research suggests that space pollution is leading to serious impacts, it may eventually resemble an airborne variation of plastics in the ocean. A more optimistic view is that these are the early days of the space business, and there is still time for solutions. Some of the recent work at ESA, for instance, focuses on changing the “design for demise” paradigm for satellites to what some scientists are calling “design to survive.” Already, several firms are testing satellites that can get through an reentry without burning up; a company called Atmos, for instance, is working on an inflatable “atmospheric decelerator” that serves as a heat shield and parachute to bring cargo to Earth. Satellites might be built from safer materials, such as one tested in 2024 by Japan’s space agency, JAXA, made mostly from wood.  More ambitious plans are being discussed: Former NASA engineer Moriba Jah has outlined a design for an orbital “circular economy” that calls for “the development and operation of reusable and recyclable satellites, spacecraft, and space infrastructure.” In Jah’s vision, machines used in the space economy should be built in a modular way, so that parts can be disassembled, conserved, and reused. Anything of negligible worth would be disposed of responsibly. Most scientists I spoke with believe that a deeper recognition of environmental responsibilities could rattle the developing structure of the space business. “Regulations often translate into additional costs,” says UCL’s Marais, “and that’s an issue, especially when you’re privatizing space.” A shift to building satellites that can survive reentry, for instance, could change the economics of an industry that, as astronomer Aaron Boley notes, has been created to resemble the disposable nature of the consumer electronics business. Boley also warns that technical solutions are likely only one aspect of avoiding dangers and will not address all the complexities of overseeing low-Earth orbit as a shared and delicate system. It seems possible to Boley that in addition to new fuels, satellite designs, and reentry schemes, we may need to look toward quotas that require international management agreements. He acknowledges that this may seem “pie in the sky”; while there are treaties for outer space, as well as United Nations guidelines, they don’t address such governance issues. Moreover, the emphasis in most countries is on accelerating the space economy, not limiting it. And yet, Boley argues that without collective-action policy responses we may end up with orbital shells so crowded that they exceed a safe carrying capacity.  That wouldn’t be good for the environment or society—but it wouldn’t be good for the space business, either. Such concerns may be why those in the industry increasingly discuss a set of principles, supported by NASA, that are often grouped around the idea of “space sustainability.” University of Edinburgh astronomer Andrew Lawrence told me that the phrase can be used in a way that makes it unclear what we’re sustaining: “If you look at the mission statements that companies make, what they mean is, we want to sustain this rate of growth.”  But he doesn’t think we can. As one of the more eloquent academics arguing for space environmentalism, Lawrence perceives an element of unreality in the belief that in accelerating space activity we can “magically not screw everything up.” He thinks a goal in space for zero emissions, or zero impact, would be more sensible. And with recent private-sector startups suggesting that we should use space to build big data centers or increase sunlight on surface areas of Earth, he worries we are not entering an era of sustainability but a period of crisis. Lawrence considers debates around orbital satellites a high-altitude variation on climate change and threats to biodiversity—an instance, again, of trying to seek a balance between capitalism and conservation, between growth and restraint. “Of course, it affects me and other professional astronomers and amateur astronomers particularly badly,” he concedes. “But it’s really that it just wakes you up and you think, ‘Oh, God, it’s another thing. I thought, you know—I thought we were safe.’” After a pause, he adds, “But no, we’re not.”

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