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Uprooted review – the female fightback against the exploitation of Latin America

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Sunday, October 5, 2025

The previous show devised by the international theatre company Ephemeral Ensemble was subtle, horrifying and exhilarating: Rewind, about Latin America’s “disappeared”, landed a punch straight to the gut and was, for me, one of last year’s most memorable plays. Director Ramon Ayres employs a similarly striking blend of sound, visual effects and physicality in Uprooted, but the story does not quite cohere, despite some individually superlative scenes.The drama is once again set in Latin America, and this time depicts the advent of western imperialism and its ruinous effects on ecology, indigenous life and the climate. Deviser-performers Eyglo Belafonte, Josephine Tremelling, Louise Wilcox and Vanessa Guevara Flores give spirited performances, and there is an overarching eco-feminist message that connects gendered violence to the rape and exploitation of the land.Musical compositions by Alex Paton, who sits on a raised platform on one side of the stage, certainly carry great levels of drama. Marco Curcio’s magnificent sound design adds ambience, embroidering bird-sounds with the babble of streams, the sound of chainsaws and earth-rattling rumbles. Tremelling’s lighting design is wondrous too, using miniature models of houses lit up from the inside to depict displacement, and shadow-play from within a recycling bin, as well as imaginatively using of wind-machine and muslin to depict rippling water and, at one point, a thunderous landslide.Martian-like occupiers … Louise Wilcox and Ephemeral Ensemble. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianBut despite this stagecraft and immersive atmosphere, there is little specificity to the story and minimal character building. Characters fight against the colonial destruction of their land and are angry, but they are almost as faceless as the occupiers, who wear martian-like metal facemasks.Uprooted touches on more issues that it can possibly do justice to within its hour-long duration, from female activism against colonialism and climate disaster to child labour, economic disruption to local communities, violence against women and more.It is frustrating that the script seems so generic in its messages and didactic in its delivery. Indigenous people fought and resisted western occupiers, we hear, and one defender of the land is still killed every other day. A quiz delivers more facts and figures. Strident statements are made about the centrality of the earth, progress versus plunder, and hopelessness being a luxury we cannot afford in the fight against environmental catastrophe. But they sound generalising and familiar. Where Rewind led with specificity to evoke intense emotion, this is a disjointed screed that leaves you impressed yet oddly unmoved.

New Diorama theatre, LondonEphemeral Ensemble’s atmospheric but unfocused follow-up to Rewind depicts the west’s ecologically ruinous colonisation of Latin America from a feminist perspectiveThe previous show devised by the international theatre company Ephemeral Ensemble was subtle, horrifying and exhilarating: Rewind, about Latin America’s “disappeared”, landed a punch straight to the gut and was, for me, one of last year’s most memorable plays. Director Ramon Ayres employs a similarly striking blend of sound, visual effects and physicality in Uprooted, but the story does not quite cohere, despite some individually superlative scenes.The drama is once again set in Latin America, and this time depicts the advent of western imperialism and its ruinous effects on ecology, indigenous life and the climate. Deviser-performers Eyglo Belafonte, Josephine Tremelling, Louise Wilcox and Vanessa Guevara Flores give spirited performances, and there is an overarching eco-feminist message that connects gendered violence to the rape and exploitation of the land. Continue reading...

The drama is once again set in Latin America, and this time depicts the advent of western imperialism and its ruinous effects on ecology, indigenous life and the climate. Deviser-performers Eyglo Belafonte, Josephine Tremelling, Louise Wilcox and Vanessa Guevara Flores give spirited performances, and there is an overarching eco-feminist message that connects gendered violence to the rape and exploitation of the land.

Musical compositions by Alex Paton, who sits on a raised platform on one side of the stage, certainly carry great levels of drama. Marco Curcio’s magnificent sound design adds ambience, embroidering bird-sounds with the babble of streams, the sound of chainsaws and earth-rattling rumbles. Tremelling’s lighting design is wondrous too, using miniature models of houses lit up from the inside to depict displacement, and shadow-play from within a recycling bin, as well as imaginatively using of wind-machine and muslin to depict rippling water and, at one point, a thunderous landslide.

Martian-like occupiers … Louise Wilcox and Ephemeral Ensemble. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

But despite this stagecraft and immersive atmosphere, there is little specificity to the story and minimal character building. Characters fight against the colonial destruction of their land and are angry, but they are almost as faceless as the occupiers, who wear martian-like metal facemasks.

Uprooted touches on more issues that it can possibly do justice to within its hour-long duration, from female activism against colonialism and climate disaster to child labour, economic disruption to local communities, violence against women and more.

It is frustrating that the script seems so generic in its messages and didactic in its delivery. Indigenous people fought and resisted western occupiers, we hear, and one defender of the land is still killed every other day. A quiz delivers more facts and figures. Strident statements are made about the centrality of the earth, progress versus plunder, and hopelessness being a luxury we cannot afford in the fight against environmental catastrophe. But they sound generalising and familiar. Where Rewind led with specificity to evoke intense emotion, this is a disjointed screed that leaves you impressed yet oddly unmoved.

Read the full story here.

Photos courtesy of

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The EPA is ending greenhouse gas data collection. Who will step up to fill the gap?

With the agency no longer collecting emissions data from polluting companies, attention is turning to whether climate NGOs have the tools—and legal right—to fulfill this EPA function.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this month that it would stop making polluting companies report their greenhouse gas emissions to it, eliminating a crucial tool the US uses to track emissions and form climate policy. Climate NGOs say their work could help plug some of the data gap, but they and other experts fear the EPA’s work can’t be fully matched. “I don’t think this system can be fully replaced,” says Joseph Goffman, the former assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “I think it could be approximated—but it’s going to take time.” The Clean Air Act requires states to collect data on local pollution levels, which states then turn over to the federal government. For the past 15 years, the EPA has also collected data on carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from sources around the country that emit over a certain threshold of emissions. This program is known as the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) and “is really the backbone of the air quality reporting system in the United States,” says Kevin Gurney, a professor of atmospheric science at Northern Arizona University. Like a myriad of other data-collection processes that have been stalled or halted since the start of this year, the Trump administration has put this program in the crosshairs. In March, the EPA announced it would be reconsidering the GHGRP program entirely. In September, the agency trotted out a proposed rule to eliminate reporting obligations from sources ranging from power plants to oil and gas refineries to chemical facilities—all major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. (The agency claims that rolling back the GHGRP will save $2.4 billion in regulatory costs, and that the program is “nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality.”) Joseph says shutting down this program hamstrings “the government’s basic practical capacity to formulate climate policy.” Understanding how new emissions-reduction technologies are working, or surveying which industries are decarbonizing and which are not, “is extremely hard to do if you don’t have this data.” Read Next Trump administration gives coal plants and chemical facilities a pass Elena Bruess, Capital & Main Data collected by the GHGRP, which is publicly available, underpins much of federal climate policy: understanding which sectors are contributing which kinds of emissions is the first step in forming strategies to draw those emissions down. This data is also the backbone of much of international US climate policy: collection of greenhouse gas emissions data is mandated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which undergirds the Paris Agreement. (While the US exited the Paris Agreement for the second time on the first day of Trump’s second term, it remains—tenuously—a part of the UNFCCC.) Data collected by the GHGRP is also crucial to state and local climate policies, helping policymakers outside the federal government take stock of local pollution, form emissions-reductions goals, and track progress on bringing down emissions. There’s some hope that nongovernmental actors could help. In recent years, various groups have stepped up to the table to help calculate greenhouse gas emissions from sources both in the US and nationwide. These groups use a mix of federal, state, industry, and private data—from oil and gas industry databases to public and private satellites to federal data like what the EPA provides—to create tools that help policymakers and the public understand where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from, and how they impact people in various ways. Technology has also grown leaps and bounds, too, as artificial intelligence models are getting more advanced at both tracking and modeling emissions from different sources. In the days since the EPA’s announcement, groups collecting and modeling emissions data say that they are fielding calls from various stakeholders trying to figure out solutions if the EPA revokes the program. Goffman, who left the EPA at the start of this year, says that there are staff within the agency looking to “connect or become part of university efforts” to continue data collection. One of the most high-profile efforts in nongovernmental emissions modeling is a coalition called Climate TRACE, which was founded in 2019, following a donation from Google, to observe global emissions using satellites. The group, which has since grown to more than 100 collaborating organizations, has developed a host of AI models that they pair with data from various sources to track and model emissions from around the world. Read Next Trump’s EPA is attacking its own power to fight climate change Kate Yoder There’s a dark timing, says cofounder Gavin McCormick, in having the EPA move to end the GHGRP after Climate TRACE has built its models relying so heavily on EPA data. “We started this project on the thesis that America has the world’s best emissions monitoring, and other countries could reduce emissions faster if they got up to the same quality as America,” McCormick says. “We just spent five years building this AI system to try to make it possible for other countries to have an approximation of the same system America has.” It’s not just the climate-conscious who are worried about the future of this data: there’s significant industry interest in continuing to collect national data on greenhouse gas emissions. Just because the US government is no longer invested in tracking climate change doesn’t mean the rest of the world is on board. Oil and gas companies with facilities in the US, for instance, still have a financial interest to keep track of their emissions if they’re selling to other markets—like Europe, which is beginning to impose strict methane requirements on gas imported into the bloc. “Our phones have been blowing up over the last ten days or so, from people saying, ‘Should we start reporting to you now? You’re not an official source, but you’re the closest thing there is,’” says McCormick. “It’s not obvious to me that we are the right vehicle for that. But there are very clear business interests in why companies would want to continue reporting even though they don’t have to.” Private industry data could also be used to help track greenhouse gas emissions—and even covers some emissions that aren’t captured in the EPA data. The Rocky Mountain Institute, for instance, a nonprofit that works on market-based climate solutions, runs an index based on private industry data that tracks emissions from across the oil and gas production cycle. (RMI is part of the Climate TRACE coalition.) This private data enables this index to have insights into emissions from the industry that the GHGRP may have missed or undercalculated—including calculating emissions from sources that don’t meet the cutoff for reporting. Still, all experts WIRED spoke to stressed that ending GHGRP data collection would severely hobble US efforts to measure and combat greenhouse gas emissions, no matter how good the non-federal options are. There’s a myriad of difficulties that face any organization that tries to take on this monumental task. Read Next Trump’s 2-year reprieve gives coal plants ‘a free pass to pollute’ Terry L. Jones, Floodlight “If the EPA stopped requiring this, it’s entirely possible that states will continue to do it,” says Gurney. But, he says, “there is no [other] central warehouse to do the collating. Fifty entities turning in data files, which are massively complex, is just a huge endeavor. The EPA plays such an important role as this kind of data arbiter, ensuring that it’s all complying with standardization. That’s key for the rest of us, frankly, to not have to do that ourselves, which would be pretty much a prohibitive barrier for us to be able to make sense of that amount of data.” There are many different ways to calculate emissions; the techniques used to collect and model data can also differ between different organizations and experts. Gurney, for instance, has been a vocal critic of the way Climate TRACE designs its models. The EPA’s pollution reporting requirements, meanwhile, are also backed by law: “A nongovernmental entity really can’t require that,” Goffman says. There’s also an open question of whether nongovernmental estimates could hold up legally, especially if a policy formed using these estimates is challenged in court. In Louisiana, a law passed last year seriously restricts the ability of communities to use low-cost emissions-monitoring devices to track air quality and bring complaints or lawsuits about emissions violations; air monitoring must now be solely done by EPA-approved tools. (Groups who advocate for communities living near oil and gas facilities filed a lawsuit in May, saying that the tools are prohibitively expensive for local advocates and claiming the law is a “blatant violation of the free speech rights of community members to use their own independent air pollution monitoring to raise alarms about deadly chemicals being released into their own homes and schools.”) That law “really drove home to me that this is only partly a scientific and do-you-have-the-data question, and partly an are-you-legally-allowed-to-use-that-dataset question,” says McCormick. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA is ending greenhouse gas data collection. Who will step up to fill the gap? on Oct 5, 2025.

Climate

Business

CO2

Climate Scientists Raise a Middle Finger to Trump’s Censorship Efforts

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Researchers across the United States and the world who raced to protect climate data, public reports and other information from the Trump administration’s budget cuts, firings, and scrubbing of federal websites are launching their own climate information portals. A group of scientists and other experts who formerly worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently launched Climate.us, where they eventually hope to replicate much of the public-oriented climate content from Climate.gov. In a parallel effort, two major scientific institutions, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, have started soliciting studies for a special “Climate Collection” to maintain momentum on the work that was already under way on a Congressionally mandated 6th National Climate Assessment, due in 2028, before all the scientists working on the report were fired and cabinet-level team that led the effort disbanded. “It’s unbelievable…We were literally forced to word search our own website and take down articles because they didn’t want to read the word ‘equity’ “ The new efforts demonstrate how difficult it is to erase or obscure climate science from the public in an era when thousands of scientists and computers around the world are continuously calculating and measuring climate and greenhouse gas emissions. Other science rescue efforts have focused on preserving those data sets, but the public-facing portals are also important, experts said. Current efforts by the US government to make it harder for people to get scientific information are a clear-cut case of censorship, said Haley Crim, currently a climate solutions researcher at MIT and one of the leaders of an effort to restore important climate information that officials in the Trump administration purged from federal websites. Along with significant funding and personnel cuts to various federal climate programs and other scientific efforts, some scientists report facing increased harassment and threats online. Others worry that misleading, inaccurate and potentially dangerous misinformation is being posted on official government websites. Gaining traction for new climate websites can be a challenge in a world filled with misleading and false scientific information, but the latest efforts have endorsements from leading scientists and scientific institutions. And the researchers working on the science preservation and restoration efforts say that, in the long run, the projects may result in new ways to store and share scientific information, and perhaps even better ways to make that information more relevant to the growing number of people experiencing deadly and disruptive climate impacts in the US and around the world. During her last few months working on the Climate.gov website, Crim said she was ordered to remove articles mentioning diversity and other terms identified by political appointees. The altered version of the website remains online, but its future beyond the end of this year is uncertain. A NOAA spokesperson said that changes to Climate.gov were made in compliance with an executive order, and that all research products from climate.gov will be relocated to Noaa.gov to “centralize and consolidate resources.” “It’s unbelievable, and it is censorship, and I think people were afraid to say that for a long time,” Crim said. “We were literally forced to word search our own website and take down articles because they didn’t want to read the word ‘equity’, or other related terms.” The administration could still use Climate.gov to publish misleading information, like a recent debunked climate report from Trump’s DOE. On top of the censorship, Crim said she and others working on the new website fear that the Trump administration could lash out at them or their institutions, but she said she won’t be intimidated. “There’s no other option for me,” she said. “I can’t sit back and watch this stuff be taken down because someone didn’t like it. It is state-of-the-art climate information and I’m not just going to let that go away.” Any mentions of climate justice were also purged, said former Climate.gov editor Rebecca Lindsey, who is now working on the effort to restore the deleted information on the new website, Climate.us. So far, a handful of people are coordinating the effort publicly, with dozens of others volunteering behind the scenes. The long-term goal is to ensure there is as complete a backup as possible, including censored material, if Climate.gov goes offline. “They removed anything about trying to increase diversity in the sciences, and the fact that the impacts of human-caused climate change are going to be disproportionately felt by people who are already marginalized,” Lindsey said, adding that the team wants to revive that potentially life-saving information. Through mid-September, crowdfunding efforts have enabled the volunteers to launch their new website and, in a big step, to post the Fifth National Climate Assessment. The NCA5, published in 2023, is the most comprehensive federal report on human-caused warming and its impacts and serves as a critical resource for communities facing wildfires, rising sea levels and other climate-related challenges. It was relegated to an archival website in June when the administration shut down the interagency US Global Change Research Program, which had a congressional mandate to produce the report. In a worst-case scenario, Lindsey added, the administration could use the popular Climate.gov portal to publish deliberately misleading information, like a recent debunked climate report from the US Department of Energy. To establish the new website’s credibility, the team plans to partner with authoritative institutions, such as the World Meteorological Organization and the American Meteorological Society, and recruit an independent science advisory panel for expert review and oversight, she said. Parallel to the efforts to re-create the Climate.gov information portal, the AGU and the AMS are working to ensure that climate information relevant to the United States’ interests is being properly cataloged in a format that could be used in a future national climate assessment. Their project compensates for the potential discontinuation of work on a new congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment scheduled for 2028. The Trump administration defunded the interagency team and dismissed the scientists working on the assessment in April. A federal task force coordinated the National Climate Assessment, but the new US climate collection will be more of a grassroots project, as the peer-reviewed contributions help define its shape. Working “outside the federal fence” could open avenues for climate communications that weren’t previously an option.” “One of the things that we in the broader science community can do in this moment is do what we do best, and that’s peer-reviewed, rigorous science,” said Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and trustee professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who is helping to coordinate the collection. “Information about how climate affects communities and resources is essential for both public understanding and for public and private decision making,” he said. The collection can be a beacon for the scientific community to submit “high-quality, rigorous scientific research around climate that can be peer-reviewed and widely shared for free,” he said, “in a way that helps, our broader understanding of these issues, especially as climate impacts accelerate.” He said some of the research likely will focus on questions like where extreme rains will lead to flooding in coming decades, and where sea level rise may take unexpectedly big bites out of coastal communities, as well as studies looking at overall ecosystem impacts and community impacts, with an eye toward how climate impacts “disproportionately affects marginalized communities, both here and around the world,” he said. Co-organizer Bob Kopp, a climate researcher at Rutgers University who has also participated in several other major national and international climate assessments, said there has been significant research on systemic climate impacts that could be part of the collection, including effects on insurance and real estate markets, and how climate impacts strain municipal health infrastructure. Additionally, he said assessments of carbon dioxide removal and other negative-emissions technologies would be useful. There are, for example, a lot of ways to think about climate impacts and climate solutions that “relate to the education sector, the IT sector, or the legal system. I personally would love to see things that haven’t been assessed as much,” he said. “New synthesis papers could really lay the groundwork for future assessments.” Lindsey, the former NOAA contractor now working on the new public climate information portal, climate.us, said that working “outside the federal fence” could open avenues for climate communications that weren’t previously an option for the federal agency, including posting information about global warming and carbon dioxide mitigation, which was not part of the mission of the climate.gov website, she said. “We see this as an opportunity to diversify our support, to get out from under potential political interference,” she said.

Climate

CO2

Energy

The rich must eat less meat

Here’s a sobering fact: Even if the entire world transitions away from fossil fuels, the way we farm and eat will cause global temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the critical threshold set in the Paris Climate Agreement. The further we go above that limit, the more intense the effects of climate change will get. The good news is that we know the most effective way to avert catastrophe: People in wealthier countries have to eat more plant-based foods and less red meat, poultry, and dairy. Such a shift in diets — combined with reducing global food waste and improving agricultural productivity — could cut annual climate-warming emissions from food systems by more than half. That’s one of the main findings from a new report by the EAT-Lancet Commission, a prestigious research body composed of dozens of experts in nutrition, climate, economics, agriculture, and other fields. The report lays out how agriculture has played a major role in breaking several “planetary boundaries”; there’s greenhouse gas emissions — of which food and farming account for 30 percent — but also deforestation and air and water pollution. The new report builds on the commission’s first report, published in 2019 — an enormous undertaking that examined how to meet the nutritional needs of a growing global population while staying within planetary boundaries. It was highly influential and widely cited in both policy and academic literature, but it was also ruthlessly attacked in an intensive smear campaign by meat industry-aligned groups, academics, and influencers — a form of “mis- and disinformation and denialism on climate science,” Johan Rockström, a co-author of the report, said in a recent press conference. Our food’s massive environmental footprint stems from several sources: land-clearing to graze cattle and grow crops (much of them grown to feed farmed animals); the trillions of pounds of manure those farmed animals release; cattle’s methane-rich burps; food waste; fertilizer production and pollution; and fossil fuels used to power farms and supply chains. But this destruction is disproportionately committed to supply rich countries’ meat- and dairy-heavy diets, representing a kind of global dietary inequality. “The diets of the richest 30% of the global population contribute to more than 70% of the environmental pressures from food systems,” the new report reads. To set humanity on a healthier, more sustainable path, the commission recommends what they call the Planetary Health Diet, which consists of more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts than what most people in high- and upper-middle-income countries consume, along with less meat, dairy, and sugar. But in poor regions, like Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the commission recommends an increase in most animal products, as well as a greater variety of plant-based foods. If globally adopted, this plant-rich diet would prevent up to 15 million premature deaths each year. (The commission notes that the diet is a starting point and should be adjusted to accommodate individual needs and preferences, local diets, food availability, and other factors.) It would also reshape the global food industry, resulting in billions of fewer land animals raised for meat each year and a significant increase in legume, nut, fish, and whole grain production (while many regions currently eat more fish per capita than the report recommends, total global fish production would increase over time under the report’s parameters to meet demand from growing populations). Rather than expecting billions of people to actively change how they eat, the commission recommends a number of policies, including reforming school meals, federal dietary guidelines, and farming subsidies; restricting marketing of unhealthy foods; and stronger environmental regulations for farms. If EAT-Lancet’s main recommendations were to be implemented, shifting to plant-rich diets would account for three-quarters of the major reduction in agricultural emissions. Other recommendations, like improving crop and livestock productivity and reducing food waste, are important, but their impact would be much smaller than diet change, contributing a quarter of expected agricultural emissions reductions. The report is thorough and nuanced, but its conclusions aren’t exactly novel; for the past two decades, scientists have published a trove of studies on the environmental impact of agriculture and have landed on the same takeaways — especially that rich countries must shift their diets to be more plant-based. But that message has, with few exceptions, failed to incite action by governments and food companies, or even the environmental movement itself. That failure can be explained, in part, by the meat industry’s aggressive, denialist response to the scientific consensus on meat, pollution, and climate change. The meat industry’s anti-science crusade, briefly explained In the 2010s, it seemed possible that the US and other wealthy countries might adopt more plant-based diets: Some researchers and journalists predicted that better plant-based meat products, from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, could disrupt the conventional meat industry; governments in several countries recommended more plant-based diets; and campaigns like Meatless Monday and Veganuary had gained momentum. This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com! These trends posed an existential threat to the livestock sector, and it was in this environment that the first EAT-Lancet report was published. It made international headlines, but the backlash was swift: The meat industry coordinated an intense and successful online backlash operation. Shortly after, the World Health Organization pulled its support for an EAT-Lancet report launch event. One report author said she was “overwhelmed” with “really nasty” comments, and another said he faced career repercussions. In the years that followed, the industry ramped up its efforts to steer policy and narratives in its favor and out of line with scientific consensus: From 2020 to 2023, European meat companies and industry groups successfully weakened EU climate policy. The number of delegates representing the meat industry at the UN’s annual climate change conference tripled from 2022 to 2023. A 2023 United Nations report on reducing climate emissions in the food system omitted meat reduction as an approach, which some environmental scientists found “bewildering” (this could be due to intense meat industry pressure imposed on UN officials). The industry spent a great deal of money attacking plant-based meat companies, downplaying meat’s environmental impact, cozying up to environmental nonprofits, and spreading the narrative that voluntary, incremental tweaks to animal farming methods are sufficient — not regulations and diet shifts. Now, as global ambitions to reduce meat consumption and livestock production have shriveled in the face of intense pressure from industry, the new EAT-Lancet report feels more important, and also more vulnerable, than ever. But I worry most of the climate movement is only too eager to go along with the industry’s preferred approaches and narratives because many environmental advocates, like virtually everyone else across society, don’t want to accept that meat reduction in richer countries is non-negotiable. That much was evident when I attended last month’s Climate Week NYC, the world’s second-largest climate change gathering. The meat conversation missing from Climate Week The annual event brings together some 100,000 attendees for more than 1,000 events across the city. This year, only five events centered on plant-based food as a solution to climate change. In other words, what environmental scientists consider to be the most effective solution to addressing around 16 percent of greenhouse gas emissions received around 0.5 percent of the week’s programming. At the same time, the meat and dairy sectors managed to establish a large presence at Climate Week’s food and agriculture programs. The Protein Pact, a coalition of meat and dairy companies and trade groups, sponsored a panel put on by the climate events company Nest Climate Campus, which listed one of Protein Pact’s representatives — who spoke on its main stage — as a “climate action expert.” The Protein Pact is also a leading sponsor of Regen House, an agriculture events company that hosted several days of Climate Week programming. Meanwhile, the Meat Institute — the founder of the Protein Pact — sponsored events put on by Food Tank, a nonprofit think tank. It would be one thing if the Protein Pact were open to compromise on environmental regulation and spoke more honestly about their industries’ climate impact. But many of its members lobby against environmental action and downplay the industry’s environmental footprint. Some even participated in the campaign against EAT-Lancet’s first report. Given this track record, it’s hard to see the industry’s presence at Climate Week as anything but a reputation laundering effort. The Meat Institute, Food Tank, Nest Climate Campus, and Regen House didn’t respond to requests for comment. This dynamic — in which meat industry narratives are welcomed and legitimized in much of the environmental movement — has contributed to public ignorance of the industry’s pollution and its underreporting in the news media. According to a new, exclusive analysis from the environmental nonprofit Madre Brava, only 0.4 percent of climate coverage in US, UK, and European English-language news outlets mention meat and livestock. Madre Brava also polled US and Great Britain residents and found they underestimated animal agriculture’s environmental impact. Finding hope in Climate Week’s Food Day A lot of climate news coverage — including this story — is depressing and fatalistic, so I’ll try to end on a hopeful note. I felt a bit of this strange emotion at Food Day, a Climate Week event organized by Tilt Collective, a philanthropic climate foundation advocating for plant-rich diets. I’ve attended a lot of conferences on shifting humanity toward more plant-based diets, and I usually end up seeing a lot of the same people. That wasn’t the case at Food Day. There were a lot of unrecognizable faces — people from climate foundations, environmental nonprofits, government agencies, and universities — all eager to take on this big, challenging, fascinating problem, however intimidating it may be. The following day, I attended a climate journalism event hosted by Sentient, a nonprofit news outlet that covers meat and the environment. Similarly, the room was packed with journalists and communications professionals, most of whom don’t cover these issues but were there to learn about them. These events — and the few others that centered on plant-based foods — were overshadowed by the meat industry’s Climate Week presence. But the events did suggest that there’s growing acceptance that we must change the way we eat, and that time is running out to do something about it. That’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing. Given the state of our politics and environmental policy, that’s maybe the best one can hope for.

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Agriculture

Culture

In First Address on Climate Change, Pope Leo Signals Continuity With Francis—and Opposition to Trump

Pope Leo on Wednesday spoke before a slowly melting chunk of glacial ice in Vatican City in his first address on climate change. On a stage adorned with ferns and lush plants, Leo addressed a crowd of roughly 1,000 attendees representing Indigenous groups and environmental organizations across the world. The remarks were the strongest signal […]

The pontiff called on people all over the world to demand action on climate from their governments. Right-wing pundits in the U.S. immediately denounced his message as “woke.”By Carl David Goette-LuciakPope Leo on Wednesday spoke before a slowly melting chunk of glacial ice in Vatican City in his first address on climate change. On a stage adorned with ferns and lush plants, Leo addressed a crowd of roughly 1,000 attendees representing Indigenous groups and environmental organizations across the world. The remarks were the strongest signal yet that the new pope intends to continue his predecessor’s legacy on climate issues, placing the Catholic Church squarely in the fight against global warming.

Climate

Indigenous

A Recipe for Avoiding 15 Million Deaths a Year and Climate Disaster Is Fixing Food, Scientists Say

Scientists are presenting new evidence that the worst effects of climate change can’t be avoided without a major transformation of food systems

Their conclusion: Without substantial changes to the food system, the worst effects of climate change will be unavoidable, even if humans successfully switch to cleaner energy.“If we do not transition away from the unsustainable food path we’re on today, we will fail on the climate agenda. We will fail on the biodiversity agenda. We will fail on food security. We’ll fail on so many pathways,” said study co-author Johan Rockström, who leads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.The commission's first report in 2019 was regarded as a “really monumental landmark study” for its willingness to take food system reform seriously while factoring in human and environmental health, said Adam Shriver, director of wellness and nutrition at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement. Key points from the latest report: A ‘planetary health diet’ could avert 15 million deaths every year The first EAT-Lancet report proposed a “planetary health diet” centered on grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes. The update maintains that to improve their health while also reducing global warming, it's a good idea for people to eat one serving each of animal protein and dairy per day while limiting red meat to about once a week. This particularly applies to people in developed nations who disproportionately contribute to climate change and have more choices about the foods they eat.The dietary recommendations were based on data about risks of preventable diseases like Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, not environmental criteria. Human and planetary health happen to be in alignment, the researchers said.Rockström said it may seem “boring” for an analysis to reach the same conclusion six years later, but he finds this reassuring because food science is a rapidly moving field with many big studies and improving analytics.Food is one of the most deeply personal choices a person can make, and “the health component touches everyone’s heart,” Rockström said. While tackling global challenges is complicated, what individuals can do is relatively straightforward, like reducing meat consumption without eliminating it altogether.“People associate what they eat with identity” and strict diets can scare people off, but even small changes help, said Emily Cassidy, a research associate with climate science nonprofit Project Drawdown. She wasn’t involved with the research. Our food choices could push the planet past a tipping point The researchers looked beyond climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to factors including biodiversity, land use, water quality and agricultural pollution — and concluded that food systems are the biggest culprit in pushing Earth to the brink of thresholds for a livable planet.The report is “super comprehensive” in its scope, said Kathleen Merrigan, a professor of food systems at Arizona State University who also wasn’t involved with the research. It goes deep enough to show how farming and labor practices, consumption habits and other aspects of food production are interconnected — and could be changed, she said. “It’s like we’ve had this slow awakening to the role of food” in discussions about planetary existence, Merrigan said. Changing worldwide diets alone could lead to a 15% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, because the production of meat, particularly red meat, requires releasing a lot of planet-warming gases, researchers concluded. Increased crop productivity, reductions in food waste and other improvements could bump that to 20%, the report said.Cassidy said that if the populations of high- and middle-income countries were to limit beef and lamb consumption to about one serving a week, as recommended in this latest EAT-Lancet report, they could reduce emissions equal to Russia's annual emissions total. Incorporating justice in an unequal world Meanwhile, the report concludes that nearly half the world's population is being denied adequate food, a healthy environment or decent work in the food system. Ethnic minorities, Indigenous peoples, women and children and people in conflict zones all face specific risks to their human rights and access to food.With United Nations climate talks around the corner in November, Rockström and other researchers hope leaders in countries around the world will incorporate scientific perspectives about the food system into their national policies. To do otherwise “takes us in a direction that makes us more and more fragile,” he said.“I mean both in terms of supply of food, but also in terms of health and in terms of stability of our environments,” Rockström said. “And this is a recipe to make societies weaker and weaker.”The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See – Sept. 2025

Climate

Food

Animals

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Crossing the Divide

An Iowa farmer reacts swiftly when he hears that radical climate marchers plan to disrupt peace in his tiny town. What he does after that offers a lesson for would-be peacemakers everywhere.

Inspirational

Activism

Climate

THE WATER WILL TAKE US

This film tells the story of the victims of the flood of 2019 in Iran, which happened in the three provinces of North, Central and South of the country and left a lot of damages. The main narrators are three women who reveal the causes of this incident and mismanagements and tell the story of the people who were left to fend for themselves during the flood and after.

Water

Social Justice

Climate

Eating the Future

Bafta-winner Mia McKenna-Bruce voices an eco-investigator who is traumatised by her work accessing factory farms and documenting animal abuses undercover. Terrified of a future of climate apocalypse, she embarks on a journey into the food systems that shape our planet, to look for hope.

Activism

Climate

Food

Capturing The Fire

When Louise Coghill saw the first plume of smoke begin to rise behind her parents property, she could never have predicted that in less than four hours, it would become a wall of flames, swallowing everything in its path. A photographer by trade, Louise has travelled the world documenting everything from the nomadic wanderers of Mongolia, to base life at Mount Everest. Capturing the extraordinary comes naturally to Louise, so when her family home in the semi-rural Western Australian town of Gidgegannup became engulfed in flames, her first instinct wasn’t to take shelter, it was to pick up her camera.

Conservation

Climate

Nature

Uncovering the Permian Climate Bomb

The fossil fuel industry is building a global threat in the oil fields of West Texas. Miguel Escoto, who has lived close to this region his whole life, witnesses the industry’s villainy for the first time by viewing oil and gas site emissions through optical gas imaging cameras, becoming a stand-in for a world that has yet to grasp the gravity of the Permian Climate Bomb.

Pollution

Activism

Climate

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