In April and May 2024, relentless rain turned Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul into a vast inland floodplain, pushing families onto rooftops and into crowded shelters as roads, bridges, and power lines failed around them. The floods killed 181 people, displaced 775,000, and affected 2.4 million residents.

Road salt has long been treated as an unavoidable cost of winter safety, but the tax it quietly imposes on ecosystems and infrastructure is far larger than its price per ton suggests.

Today, there are two kinds of existential cry resounding in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a central African nation synonymous with ecological and mineral riches.