Monitor Says Climate Coverage Fell 14% in 2025, Even as the Planet Heated Up In 2025, news sources showed less interest in covering climate change than in previous years, a media monitoring group said. ©fizkes/iStock Climate change may be accelerating, but news coverage of it is moving in the opposite direction, according to the University of Colorado Boulder-based Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO). MeCCO monitors 131 newspaper, radio, and television sources in 59 countries across seven regions of the world. Its 2025 year-end review found that worldwide climate coverage fell 14% from 2024 and was 38% below its 2021 peak. Of the 22 years MeCCO has tracked climate coverage, 2025 ranked only 10th for the amount of attention devoted to climate change and global warming. The decline stands in stark contrast to reported conditions on the planet. MeCCO notes that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now approximately 50% higher than at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, while the 10 most recent years have been the 10 hottest years since recordkeeping began. Key MeCCO Data In 2025, global news coverage of climate change and global warming was 14% lower than in 2024. Compared with 2021—the highest-coverage year in MeCCO's dataset—2025’s coverage was down 38%. The volume of climate coverage in 2025 ranked just 10th among the 22 years MeCCO has monitored the issue, starting in 2004. The issue has not slowed down: The 10 most recent years have been the 10 hottest years in the nearly 150-year instrumental temperature record, underscoring the contrast between increasing planetary warming and decreasing media attention. Worldwide climate coverage in June 2025 was 28% below June 2024. International wire-service coverage was also 26% lower than a year earlier. In August 2025, US newspaper coverage was 21% below August 2024, while US television climate coverage dropped an even steeper 50% year over year. Worldwide coverage that month was down 25% from August 2024. The UN’s major environmental event in 2025— the 30th session of the Climate Change Conference— provided only a temporary boost: Global climate coverage increased 23% from October to November 2025, when the UN COP30 was held in Belém, Brazil. Latin American coverage jumped nearly 48% during the month. Yet worldwide, November climate coverage remained 24% below that of November 2024. Even during COP30, the five major US newspapers examined in one MeCCO dataset published a combined 362 climate-related articles in November 2025. This was comparatively low and approached the COVID-19 pandemic-era low of 297 articles in June 2020. In the weeks following COP30, global climate coverage plummeted 40% from November to December 2025 and finished the year 27% below December 2024. Asian outlets alone registered a 37% month-to-month decline. Source: Media and Climate Change Observatory, A Review of Media Coverage of Climate Change and Global Warming in 2025; Media and Climate Change Observatory.

CCTV footage shows a wall of water, ice, and rocks crashing into the Gyirong crossing point on the Nepal–Tibet border in August 2026. Wikimedia Across the globe, the rapid thawing of permafrost is destabilizing mountain slopes and turning once-settled alpine regions into hazardous zones. As subzero temperatures rise in high-altitude environments, the subterranean ice that binds fractured rock faces together is melting, making living in mountainous regions dangerously unpredictable. According to Stephan Gruber of the University of Zurich, “Permafrost and its climate-induced degradation influence the stability of steep bedrock permafrost.” This accelerating global threat was brought into stark focus by the appalling flooding that struck communities along the Nepal–Tibet border on August 26, 2026. It began not with a rainstorm or an earthquake but with the sudden failure of a high mountain slope, involving underlying permafrost, glacier ice, and rock. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), a rapid slope failure involving a glacier in Nepal’s Langtang National Park generated a massive debris flow that traveled nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) down the Lhende Khola and Trishuli river systems. The USGS says it remains uncertain whether the initial failure should be classified primarily as a landslide incorporating glacier ice or as a glacial collapse. A Human Catastrophe The event—which killed at least 1,451 people, injured 9,287 as of September 21, and left 6,264 missing—produced one of the disaster’s strangest features. Seismic instruments initially detected what appeared to be an earthquake. Subsequent analysis determined that the signal was generated by the enormous collapse itself. The USGS earthquake catalog classifies the event as a magnitude-5.2 “landslide,” noting that no earthquake actually occurred. As the material from the mountainside collapse plunged downward, it entrained additional sediment, boulders, and water from streams and river channels. The result was not simply a conventional flood but a rapidly moving debris avalanche and flood—a dense, destructive mixture capable of carrying enormous rocks and demolishing structures in its path. Satellite observations showed that the initial material entered the Lhende Khola near the Nepal–China border. It then moved into the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river systems. According to Al Jazeera’s satellite analysis, the Trishuli River rose as much as 9 meters (30 feet) in only 30 minutes. Thawing permafrost can weaken the frozen ground and fractured rock that help bind mountain slopes together. The rapid influx of debris temporarily dammed sections of the Lhende Khola River. As water built up behind these unstable, natural debris dams, they rapidly breached under immense pressure, releasing secondary surge waves downstream that worsened the flash flooding. Seasonal monsoon rains preceding the collapse meant that rivers and watersheds were already filled to capacity, maximizing the flood volume as the debris mixed with river water. Rising High-Elevation Temperatures Climate change may have contributed to the conditions that made such a collapse possible, although scientists caution against attributing this particular failure to warming alone. Rising temperatures are shrinking glaciers and destabilizing high-elevation terrain, while thawing permafrost can weaken the frozen ground and fractured rock that help bind mountain slopes together. Researchers increasingly warn that warming could make such compound mountain hazards more important in the future. The disaster also demonstrates why Himalayan flood risk cannot be understood simply by watching the weather. A community can be threatened by a devastating flood even when no extraordinary rainfall is occurring locally. A failure kilometers away—and thousands of meters of elevation higher—can suddenly convert a mountain valley into a high-speed conduit for water, ice, rock, and sediment. A video depicting how the landslide and flood developed. As Reuters reported, the initial disaster caught communities along the border by surprise. The lesson may extend far beyond Nepal and Tibet: In a warming world, some of the most dangerous floods may begin not in the clouds but on the mountainsides not so far above.

Why Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Champions Creative Collaboration By Mark Smith* A packed house at a Georgetown University auditorium in Washington, DC, watches a screening of Her Shark Story, directed by Ignacio Walker, during the 34th annual DC Environmental Film Festival, part of the Earth Commons’ Earth Month activities. Photo courtesy of Peter Marra While environmental policy and climate science typically rely on hard datasets and complex graphs, a growing body of research suggests that data alone is insufficient to drive public engagement or political consensus. In response to this gap, at least one academic institution is turning to the creative arts as a vital bridge between scientific understanding and human action. At Georgetown University’s Earth Commons institute, Dr. Peter Marra is championing this interdisciplinary shift by embedding artistic expression directly alongside environmental science. By integrating theater, photography, and storytelling into sustainability education, the institute aims to transcend traditional political and ideological boundaries, move climate communication beyond abstract metrics, and motivate concern for the environment. Far beyond their aesthetic appeal, the ability of the arts to elicit powerful emotional responses is what makes them such a cultural cornerstone. They speak not just to the mind but to the spirit and body. In fact, viewing art has been shown to have an immediate and measurable impact on physiology, reducing stress and increasing excitement. Moreover, three-quarters of Americans said they consider arts and culture personally important to them, with many stating how the arts contributed to their personal well-being and sense of creativity. The Arts Aiding the Environment So, what if the power of art could be harnessed to help raise awareness of environmental issues? That is exactly the mission of Georgetown’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability, otherwise known as the Earth Commons. It utilizes the arts as a way of fostering creative collaboration and encouraging storytelling to help deepen public understanding of issues like sustainability, environmental justice, and climate change. Prof. Peter Marra, director of Georgetown University's Institute for Environment and Sustainability (the Earth Commons). Photo courtesy of Peter Marra Marra, who is director of the institute, is best known in the academic world for his pioneering research on migratory birds, biodiversity loss, climate change, and conservation biology. In an exclusive interview with The Earth & I, Marra said weaving things like performance, film, photography, storytelling, and painting into what he does touches on something at the heart of sustainability: human beings. “Environmental challenges,” he said, “are often presented as problems of science, technology, and policy, and of course they are. But ultimately, environmental sustainability is about people: what we value, what we care about, and what we are willing to act to protect.” “If we want people to make the environment part of their core purpose, we have to reach them not only in their heads but in their hearts. That is what the arts can do.” Marra explained that while science can help us understand what is happening to the planet and what we might do about it, understanding something intellectually is not always enough to inspire action—and not just action but “hope” that our actions can and do make a difference. “That requires that we have to feel it,” he said. “The arts have an extraordinary capacity to reach that part of us—to create empathy, wonder, grief, hope, and a sense of connection to the natural world and to one another. I often put it this way: If we want people to make the environment part of their core purpose, we have to reach them not only in their heads but in their hearts. That is what the arts can do.” The biologist’s work has included a whole selection of artistic endeavors. Earlier this year, Georgetown hosted performances by actor Jesse Eisenberg (known for playing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network), Distinguished University Prof. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York (leader of the Democratic Party in the US Senate), and others for a special showing of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The university had previously joined forces with Dramaten (the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden), the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, DC, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics for the launch of We Hear You—A Climate Archive, a global storytelling and performance project exploring youth perspectives on climate issues. Eco-oriented Music and Photography To anchor these initiatives long term, the Earth Commons launched its Artist-in-Residence Program, which embeds professional artists directly within the scientific institute to cocreate public works. This collaborative framework also powers regular eco-performances, where students and local musicians perform multimedia pieces, driven by regional environmental datasets, alongside the annual Earth Commons Photography Contest, which challenges students to visually document changes in local ecosystems. The Earth Commons hosted a reading performance of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex that included luminaries such as actor Jesse Eisenberg (center, with curly hair) and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci (right). Photo courtesy of Peter Marra Marra said students have been highly responsive to these endeavors. “They have jumped at opportunities to participate in climate and arts events, photography contests, performances, conversations with artists and writers, and other creative activities we have introduced,” the professor said. “What that tells me is that students genuinely want these outlets. They don’t necessarily see the same boundaries between science, policy, art, and culture that institutions sometimes create. Students are curious, and they want opportunities to express that curiosity in different ways.” But while the need for action on the environment can inspire messaging that relies on the need for swift responses, there are schools of thought that anything perceived as overly “gloomy” can actually backfire. A study by researchers at Anglia Ruskin University found that feelings of dread actively caused people to disengage from the message. “Fear alone cannot solve our environmental problems or correct the path we are on,” Marra warned. “That said, unfortunately, I think fear is, for better or worse, part of the equation.” “If people are continually told that everything is getting worse and there is little they can do about it, fear can quickly turn into despair or disengagement.” Because the threats we face as a species are real, he opined, the science should not be “softened” simply to make people “feel better.” “The problem is when fear becomes the only message,” Marra said. “If people are continually told that everything is getting worse and there is little they can do about it, fear can quickly turn into despair or disengagement. We need to pair urgency with a sense of possibility and agency.” A performance of Ferry Tales, a series of community-interview-based theater pieces. Photo courtesy of Peter Marra Awakening Hope Marra said there is another piece of the puzzle where art can be influential—the power to inspire hope in the face of feelings of powerlessness. “Art can communicate loss and even fear, but it can also evoke wonder, beauty, empathy, and hope. It can remind us not only of what we stand to lose, but why something is worth saving in the first place. I think people need both an honest understanding of what is at stake and a reason to believe that their actions can still make a difference.” Earth Commons brings together performers, visual artists, scientists, policymakers, and students for collaborations rarely seen in any other forum. Earth Commons brings together performers, visual artists, scientists, policymakers, and students for collaborations rarely seen in any other forum. And Marra said such collaborations have taught him that people are not always as different as they might imagine. “In fact, bringing artists, scientists, policymakers, and students together often feels like a very natural fit,” he said. “Some of the best scientists and policymakers I know are also among the most creative people I know. Great science requires imagination—the ability to ask a question no one has asked before, see patterns, and imagine explanations or solutions that don’t yet exist. At the same time, some of the most artistic people I know approach their work not only emotionally from their gut but with enormous analytical rigor and discipline.” The idea of harnessing the arts as a component of wider efforts to inform and educate is gaining more widespread acceptance. One study even found that the use of art in place of—or in support of—things like data graphs on issues like the environment can help cut through political polarization. So, what tips would Marra give universities hoping to integrate the creative arts into environmental education? “My advice would be to build creativity into the fabric of environmental education rather than treating it as a series of one-off events,” he said. “For example, environmental culture is one of four foundational pillars for our undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Environment and Sustainability curriculum. Bringing in an artist for a performance or exhibition can be wonderful, but true integration requires something deeper and more sustained.” Over the next decade, as humanity grapples with issues around technology such as artificial intelligence, he said he hopes people will look to nature for “grounding”—for what he called something “real, tangible, and alive.” “In much the same way,” he concluded, “I hope we will look to the arts as a way of finding and expressing our own humanity, and of understanding how that humanity intersects with the natural world.” *Mark Smith is a journalist and author from the UK. He has written on subjects ranging from business and technology to world affairs, history, and popular culture for the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, and magazines in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

How Bioacoustics Is Helping Scientists Listen to—and Protect—African Forest Elephants By Dinshaw Dadachanji* African forest elephants emerge from the jungle to drink at a waterhole. Matt Muir, CC-SA 4.0/Wikimedia In a dense tropical forest in Central Africa, a mama elephant takes a walk with her two cute calves. The calves stay close to their mother, as she is a hefty giant who shows them how to walk through and feed on the ample vegetation surrounding them. At the same time, these family members are engaged in quiet conversations using low-frequency rumbles that are mostly inaudible to humans. They are African forest elephants, and they play a key role as architects of the forests in which they roam. However, in recent decades, their populations have declined sharply. It is therefore vital to monitor them for both scientific study and conservation—and what they “say” to each other is becoming increasingly important information. Population Decline A major analysis of survey data, published in the journal PLOS One, found that the population of African forest elephants dropped by as much as 62% between 2002 and 2011, and their geographic range shrank by around 30%. The population decline can be attributed to various factors, particularly habitat loss and fragmentation through the expansion of human infrastructure and land use, and poaching for ivory and meat. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a membership group composed of government agencies and civil society organizations from around the world, publishes a Red List of Threatened Species, based on assessments carried out by ecology experts. In an assessment published in 2026, the forest elephant, Loxodonta cyclotis, is listed as “critically endangered.” Despite their giant size, African forest elephants are among the most difficult animals to track and study. As their native habitats are the dense rainforests of Central Africa, the thick vegetation makes it almost impossible to monitor them visually. Moreover, their whispering conversations are hard to hear. Thankfully, scientists in the field of bioacoustics have developed special technology that can detect, record, and transmit the elephants’ low-frequency sounds, making it possible to monitor the animals for scientific studies and conservation. Before going into that, let us get to know the species. Meet the African Forest Elephants All elephants have features that make them easily distinguishable from other animals—particularly, their enormous size, long flexible trunk, and large flappy ears. They are mammals with high intelligence and like to socialize with one another. Biologists have given them a family name, Elephantidae. For many years, it was thought that living elephants consist of only two species: African and Asian. They were named Loxodonta africana and Elephas maximus, respectively. When it was recognized that African forest elephants differ from African savanna elephants (also called African bush elephants), they were initially regarded as different subspecies. Eventually, as significant differences were observed, including genetic differences, the IUCN recognized them in 2021 as two distinct species: Loxodonta africana (savanna) and Loxodonta cyclotis (forest). Several features distinguish the African forest elephant from its savanna relative. The savanna elephant roams across the plains of sub-Saharan Africa and boasts of being the largest living terrestrial animal. The forest elephant, by comparison, is smaller in size, but it is uniquely adapted to inhabit the tropical rainforests of Central and West Africa. It is about 8–10 feet tall and weighs around 2–5 tons, whereas the savanna elephant is 10–13 feet tall and weighs up to 7.5 tons. The forest elephant’s ears are rounder and smaller, and its tusks are relatively straight, pointing downward, and sport a pinkish tinge. A group of forest elephants digging at a mineral lick. US Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters/Wikipedia African forest elephants are herbivores, feeding mainly on fruit, grasses, leaves, and bark. They particularly enjoy tree fruits and disperse the seeds over long distances through their feces. Studies have shown that the loss of forest elephants from a part of a forest leads to the loss of trees that bear large-seeded fruit. In addition to living in rainforests, African forest elephants also congregate and socialize at mineral-rich clearings called bai, where they can get water and the mineral supplements they need. Elephant Talk Elephants can produce and detect a surprising variety of sounds for communication. The sounds range from loud, broadband calls—such as trumpets, snorts, and roars—to deep, low-frequency rumbles. The rumbles include “infrasonic” vibrations, which means their frequencies extend below the approximately 20-hertz lower threshold of human hearing. Forest elephants use their sounds to socialize, express care for one another, coordinate their movements, and find partners for reproduction. Forest elephants use their sounds to socialize, express care for one another, coordinate their movements, and find partners for reproduction. The loud calls are often signals of threats and other emotionally charged situations. The low-frequency vibrations travel through the ground across long distances and are detected by sensitive pads in the elephants’ feet. An African forest elephant touches another in a seemingly friendly manner. Nis Vagabond/Pexels Katy Payne, a bioacoustics researcher, says that in 1984, she was near an elephant enclosure in a zoo, when she felt some vibrations coming from the animal. Although she could not hear it vocalizing any sounds, she decided to investigate the vibrations. Based on that experience, she cofounded the Elephant Listening Project at Cornell University. The project has involved monitoring African forest elephants through a grid of battery-powered audio recorders mounted on trees in their habitats. The instruments can collect data over long periods without human intervention. This approach is both cost-effective and noninvasive, allowing scientists to “listen” to the elephants as they “talk” to one another. The method is called passive acoustic monitoring (PAM). However, this approach has its challenges. In particular, the project’s archive contains hundreds of thousands of hours of rainforest sounds. The recordings include not only elephant calls but also the sounds of rainfall, birds, insects, primates, chainsaws, vehicles, gunshots, and numerous other components of the rainforest. To analyze such enormous amounts of complex data, scientists are relying on artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques. They first train algorithms using recordings in which elephant calls have been previously identified. They then use machine-learning systems to search new recordings to detect and classify likely elephant calls. In one significant study, researchers assembled thousands of hours of recordings and employed machine-learning methods for elephant call detection and classification. They also developed techniques to compress the data, because conventional methods are unsuitable for the low-frequency rumbles of elephants. In this manner, scientists can now shift from sampling individual observations to analyzing entire soundscapes. Forest elephants do not simply produce singular calls. Recent research has shown that these animals often combine their low-frequency rumbles with loud, broadband calls in their “speech.” The researchers compared it with the human use of syntax in forming sentences, noting that call combinations would lower the ambiguity of a message. The calls of African elephants have been recorded in the context of many types of behavior. These records can be found in a large online library, The Elephant Ethogram. A forest elephant and her calf in the Mbeli Bai swamp in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Republic of the Congo. Despite a near-universal ban on trade in ivory, poaching is endangering the species. Thomas Breuer/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 2.5 Population Surveys and Conservation The PAM approach provides a way to measure the frequency and distribution of elephant calls. It can thereby help estimate the size of forest elephant populations. Traditional surveys, such as dung counts, are difficult in dense forests and require extensive fieldwork. With PAM, the population size can be estimated without repeatedly sending large teams into remote forests. For the conservation of forest elephants, perhaps the most immediate application of acoustic monitoring is to detect potential threats, such as poaching. For the conservation of forest elephants, perhaps the most immediate application of acoustic monitoring is to detect potential threats, such as poaching. The microphones that detect elephant sounds can also detect human activity, including gunshots, vehicles, chainsaws, and other machinery. Such information can help park managers identify the place and time of illegal hunting and evaluate how patrols could be used effectively. Protecting forest elephants extends well beyond protecting the species itself. They are ecosystem engineers, creating trails, dispersing seeds, and modifying the vegetation. They also help increase the aboveground biomass by promoting the growth of larger trees that lead to a higher density of carbon-capturing wood per acre. Thus, these animals contribute simultaneously to forest structure, biodiversity, and carbon storage. For effective conservation, scientists with Cornell’s Elephant Listening Project have been collaborating with organizations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and the World Wildlife Fund, while also training researchers and conservationists who live in Central Africa. Through such partnerships and the support of government agencies, the listening technology is more sustainable. Where to Observe African Forest Elephants As of 2026, the main countries these elephants inhabit are Gabon (about 66% of the total) and the Republic of the Congo (about 19%). They are also present in smaller numbers in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Equatorial Guinea, along with some in more-western Africa. To observe African forest elephants in the wild, recommended sites to visit include the Loango National Park (Gabon), the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve (Central African Republic), and the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park (Republic of the Congo). *Dinshaw Dadachanji holds a PhD in Biochemistry and is a freelance writer who lives in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC. He serves as research director of the HJ International Foundation for Environmental Peace, the institution that publishes The Earth & I.

How a Dutch Innovator Is Growing the Food of the Future—on Land By Mark Smith* Seaweedland founder Sven Rusticus displays some of the fresh sea lettuce grown in seawater in his pilot seaweed farming facility. Photo courtesy of Seaweedland With a global hunger crisis impacting hundreds of millions of people, the search is on for innovative ways to address its many causes. The United Nations estimates that 266 million people are at risk of acute hunger this year. And while many converging crises have conspired to create such a troubling statistic—from geopolitics, war, and extreme weather to inflation—the sheer unavailability of food is perhaps the simplest to understand. Extreme weather, such as multiple heat waves this year, has hit global food production hard. Europe alone saw significant drops in crop yields as a direct result. In the face of such pressures, innovative—some might say radical—measures to try and shore up food security are being explored. And one of those answers could originate in the world of water. Packed with Nutrition Seaweed provides a healthy source of essential minerals, vitamins, protein, and fiber, and has been shown to improve gut health and protect heart function. What’s more, it is a robust and sustainable crop. It doesn’t need acres of farmland, requires no fresh water, and grows quickly. And while we might imagine its cultivation takes place only in the sea—either naturally or in specialized farms—one innovator has found a way to bring the whole process ashore. Dutch engineer and entrepreneur Sven Rusticus is challenging the status quo by bringing seaweed cultivation onto terra firma, thus making seaweed harvesting possible all year round. Sea lettuce … is a wonderful green seaweed with an excellent umami flavor and significant potential as a food ingredient. He founded Seaweedland in 2022, and working with his friend and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Anko Kuil, a strategy was developed to build the most sustainable and innovative seaweed production facility possible. Sea lettuce (genus Ulva) packaged in a 150-gram (5.3-ounce) container, ready to be sold and eaten. Photo courtesy of Seaweedland In an interview with The Earth & I, he said that one of the mistakes people make when thinking about seaweed is that it’s just one foodstuff, when in fact more than 12,000 types exist—all with different qualities. It is for this reason, he said, that he is not looking to replace ocean cultivation but to complement it. “Not every species is equally well suited to cultivation in the ocean,” he said. “Take Ulva, or sea lettuce, for example. It is a wonderful green seaweed with an excellent umami flavor and significant potential as a food ingredient. But cultivating Ulva in the open ocean is challenging. Now compare that with a kelp such as Saccharina latissima. It is a fast-growing brown seaweed that naturally forms large underwater forests and is very well suited to ocean-based cultivation. “So, the question should not be whether seaweed should be cultivated in the ocean or on land. The question is: Which species should be cultivated where?” He said he believes the future of the seaweed industry will involve both approaches: ocean cultivation for species that are well suited to it, and controlled land-based cultivation for types where it offers advantages in productivity, quality, consistency, and value. But broadly speaking, according to Rusticus, growing on land where possible has clear advantages. “In the ocean, you have little control over the growing environment. Water quality, temperature, storms, pests, and contamination with shellfish, heavy metals, and plastics make a seaweed that is not consistent in quality and needs significant cleaning and purification. And at sea, harvesting is seasonal, while on land it is all year round.” Dutch Farming’s Tradition of Innovation When creating Seaweedland, he said he asked the question: What if one could treat seaweed like a crop and grow it under controlled conditions? His approach was inspired by the long-standing Dutch culture of innovation in all aspects of farming. “In the Netherlands, we have developed an extremely sophisticated horticultural industry because we learned how to control the growing environment. We can produce tomatoes, peppers, and flowers with very high consistency, traceability, and productivity. We believe many of those principles can be applied to seaweed.” Sourcing the right seaweed species in nature, where land-based seaweed cultivation starts. Photo courtesy of Seaweedland But by its very nature, the ocean provides everything seaweed needs to live and grow while land-based cultivation requires mechanical, man-made interventions. With the need for pumps, building space, and monitoring equipment, it begs the question of how it can compete from an economic standpoint. This is exactly the challenge, said Rusticus. “It is why we don’t claim that land-based cultivation will be cheaper for every application. The economics come from productivity, control, and value, not simply from producing the cheapest kilogram of biomass.” “Our approach,” he said, “is to use relatively simple systems rather than traditional energy-intensive aquaculture technology. And we don’t need to continuously replace all the water. We recirculate it, manage the nutrients, and provide the conditions the seaweed needs.” Rusticus said they can also locate seaweed farms where land has relatively little alternative agricultural value—for example, on non-arable coastal land—and use saltwater that is already locally available from the sea or salty groundwater. The enthusiasm for the idea of land-based seaweed cultivation is for it to one day be introduced to non-arable coastal land around the globe. The company is still at the pilot stage. Rusticus said the current production is around 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of fresh seaweed per year, and depending on species and cultivation conditions, they are working with yields in the order of 30–60 kilograms of fresh biomass per square meter (6–12 pounds per square foot) per year. This leads to 10–20 times more efficient protein production per square meter than soybeans. Worldwide Potential The enthusiasm for the idea of land-based seaweed cultivation is for it to one day be introduced to non-arable coastal land in multiple countries around the globe, something the team is currently working on via its license and joint venture model. In theory, it could allow the cultivation of local healthy seaweed crops and local seaweed-based proteins and fibers in areas where land-based agricultural farming is difficult or simply impossible. “We are particularly interested in land that is not suitable for conventional agriculture. You need access to clean seawater or another suitable saline water source, reliable energy, and preferably renewable energy. You also need infrastructure, roads, processing, cold storage, security, and logistics.” He added that while climate is important, it is not necessarily a limitation. In this regard, another potential advantage of seaweed is that where one species may not thrive in a particular environment, another will. “Different seaweed species perform well under different conditions, and our controlled cultivation approach gives us much more flexibility than simply depending on local ocean conditions. Ultimately, we are looking for places where land, water, energy, infrastructure, and market demand come together.” Once up and running, he said there would be additional advantages to local people beyond simply the seaweed itself, including jobs. Seaweed can add to haute cuisine creations. Photos courtesy of Seaweedland “A seaweed farm creates opportunities not only in cultivation but also in hatchery operations, maintenance, harvesting, processing, quality control, logistics, sales, and management,” he said. “There are also opportunities for local entrepreneurs to develop food products, cosmetics, and other applications around the seaweed. So, our model is not just building farms and creating jobs, it’s about creating local seaweed value chains.” It would also provide work all year round due to land-based cultivation being a continuous process rather than seasonal, as with ocean cultivation. But the path between the dream and reality is made complex by challenges that need to be overcome, which he cites as a combination of biology, technology, and economics. “We know how to grow seaweed. The challenge is growing it at sufficiently high productivity, with predictable quality, while keeping labor, energy, infrastructure, and processing costs low.” “We know how to grow seaweed. The challenge is growing it at sufficiently high productivity, with predictable quality, while keeping labor, energy, infrastructure, and processing costs low enough to create a profitable business,” he said. “That sounds straightforward, but when you move from a pilot to hundreds of tons, everything becomes more complicated.” Peering into the Future Over the next decade, Rusticus and his team have big plans. One ambition is that by 2035, Seaweedland will have helped establish a global network of land-based seaweed farms. “And we don’t want to build every farm ourselves,” he said. “We want to develop the technology, biology, operating systems, and knowledge that allow farms to be replicated in different parts of the world.” Rusticus added that if they can establish between 10 and 25 commercial farms across multiple countries, each adapted to local conditions, that would be a major achievement. “In terms of production, I would like to see Seaweedland and its partners producing thousands of tons of seaweed per year, with a significant proportion going into food and high-value applications.” As with all things in this challenging world, there is no quick or easy fix to the multitude of issues exacerbating global hunger, but innovations such as those being piloted by Seaweedland could open up a valuable new supply of nutritious food that can be cultivated all year round. *Mark Smith is a journalist and author from the UK. He has written on subjects ranging from business and technology to world affairs, history, and popular culture for the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph, and magazines in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Members of the Miami-Dade Urban Search and Rescue team walk the disaster zone in La Guaira, Venezuela, searching for survivors of the nation’s most recent earthquake. US Marines 24MEU by Lance Cpl. Allison White/Wikimedia While early coverage of northern Venezuela’s devastating June 2026 disaster centered on victim numbers and rescue efforts, geophysicists are highlighting the tragic geologic story behind the human toll and infrastructure ruin. Scientific analysis reveals that the widespread destruction in the capital Caracas and Caribbean port city La Guaira was driven by a rare “seismic doublet”—where two earthquakes struck in rapid succession, compounded by their shallow depth of origin, the region’s soft soil, and massive horizontal ground movement. The death toll as of August 3 was 6,125 and rising. Some 61,000 people sustained injuries. How the Doublet Unfolded The disaster began when a magnitude 7.2 earthquake ruptured along the boundary of the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates. Just 39 seconds later, a second, even larger magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck nearby. Earthquake sequences with two major shocks occurring close together in time and space are known as a seismic doublet. Instead of experiencing the usual scenario of a single main quake followed by smaller, diminishing aftershocks, the region was hit by a double punch of massive seismic waves. Because the rupture was so close to the surface, the seismic waves lost very little energy before slamming into city foundations. Engineers explain that this 39-second gap was fatal for many high-rise residential and commercial buildings. The initial magnitude 7.2 foreshock, a powerful quake in itself, cracked critical support walls, fractured structural joints, and pushed building frames out of alignment. Before these already weakened structures could stabilize or stop swaying, the magnitude 7.5 mainshock hit. This second blast of energy pushed compromised structural elements past their breaking point, causing entire floors to collapse onto one another in a devastating chain reaction. Horizontal Shear vs. Vertical Ground Motion As the mainshock’s rupture sped eastward along the fault line toward Caracas, seismic energy was directly focused into densely populated areas. The devastation was intensified because the mainshock occurred at a shallow focal depth—the point beneath the surface where the quake begins—of only 10 kilometers (about 6 miles). Because the rupture was so close to the surface, the seismic waves lost very little energy before slamming into city foundations, as detailed by the US Geological Survey. Data captured from space added another crucial piece to the puzzle. According to radar measurements from a NASA satellite, there was some 60 centimeters (24 inches) of horizontal ground movement near Caracas and La Guaira. Buildings in the Hugo Chávez housing development affected by the earthquake. RatUnderground/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0 Instead of moving up and down, the ground shifted sideways in an east–west direction—a movement known as "strike–slip displacement." Most standard building codes are designed to handle vertical forces, like the downward pull of gravity and heavy structural loads. However, the severe side-to-side shearing motion from this strike–slip movement sliced through nonreinforced concrete support columns and severed deep underground foundation piers. Evaluating the sheer magnitude of this lateral movement, geophysicists emphasized how extraordinary the ground displacement was along the fault line. Reports compiled by Smithsonian Magazine confirm that the pairing of back-to-back shocks, shallow energy release, and extreme sideways shearing created a combination of forces that standard regional building designs were simply not built to withstand. Further structural field evaluations highlight that updating building design standards to account for horizontal shear and rapid multishock quakes will be essential for protecting vulnerable coastal cities in the future.

Evidence Hints at Plant Communication, Memory, and Decision-making Sentience By Deborah Talbot* Does that plant know what she's thinking? Aaron Amat/iStock For centuries, science viewed plants as silent, passive background scenery. But a wave of groundbreaking research into how flora communicate, adapt, and make decisions is smashing that paradigm—revealing that plants possess complex forms of memory, kin recognition, and decentralized problem-solving. As researchers debate whether these capabilities amount to a form of plant sentience, this scientific revolution is converging with a growing global movement to grant legal rights to nature. Together, these developments challenge our human-centered worldview, pushing us to rethink not only what it means to “think” but whether the green world deserves fundamental rights and ethical protections. 1960s Plant Experiments The debate over floral “thinking” began in earnest in 1966 with controversial claims stemming from Cleve Backster’s experiments suggesting that plants could perceive human thoughts. Backster was a CIA lie detector specialist who hooked up his machine to plants and got sharp electrical readings when he even thought, for example, of touching a lit match to a plant. Although Backster's work was never reliably replicated and is rejected by most scientists, modern research has nevertheless revealed a surprisingly dynamic inner life of plants that is stranger—and more fascinating—than many imagined. “There is solid evidence of anticipatory behavior, decision-making, numerosity, kin recognition, and other complex behavioral capacities in plants.” Today, findings on trees and a “wood wide web” are capturing the popular imagination. Researchers are beginning to understand that trees can communicate, exchange nutrients, and support neighboring trees via the “mycelium” network, which is the collective fungi that live within soil. A mycelium is the main body of a fungus. It lives and persists year after year below ground, sending up temporary fruiting bodies we see as mushrooms, shelf fungi, and the like. The mycelium is like the trunk and branches of a tree, while the mushrooms, etc. are akin to the fruits that grow on trees and then are harvested or fall to the ground and decay. Each mycelium is composed of millions of microscopic threads called “hyphae” that interpenetrate the soil. The fruiting bodies of a fungus (above) are showy and temporary. The fungus’ main body is the mycelium, which lives below ground. Markus McKay/Unsplash Miguel Segundo Ortín is a research fellow at the Universidad de Murcia, Spain, and a member of the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab). Together with colleagues, he has been exploring the science behind plant behavior and cognitive capacity. Science has gone a long way toward overturning the idea that plants are solitary, inert natural forms, Ortín told The Earth & I in an email exchange. “There is solid evidence of anticipatory behavior, decision-making, numerosity, kin recognition, and other complex behavioral capacities in plants,” he said. But does this amount to thinking? Plant Communication Michael Marder, research professor of philosophy at the Universidad del País Vasco, in Spain, and author of Plant Thinking, argues that plants pay attention to their above- and below-ground environments, have several types of short- and long-term memory, and can communicate and make decisions. Together with colleagues from the UK and Brazil, he has conducted theoretical–empirical studies of plant attention and has just written an as-yet-unpublished scientific paper on possible mechanisms of decision-making in plants. “In their broadest scope,” he said in an email interview with The Earth & I, “our studies have proposed a model of extended (and extending) plant cognition, involving not only plant tissues and organs but also the intermediate zones between root tips, the surface of leaves, or the meristems [growing tips] spread out throughout a plant and the world.” One topic of research is communication. Plants, scientists now understand, do “communicate” via mycelium networks and complicated root systems. Plant root systems don’t just aid plant growth: They use chemical signals, vibrations, and electrical impulses to transmit information about environmental conditions and events in the plant’s surroundings, either to different parts of the same plant or to other plants nearby. Root systems further interact with fungi, producing so-called mycorrhizal (meaning “fungus/root”) networks. These can connect plants for sharing water and nutrients and sending danger alerts. Mycorrhizal systems exist around plant roots, and the mycelia’s thread-like hyphae create symbiotic networks that allow plants to get nutrients from the soil in exchange for what the nonphotosynthetic fungi need: sugars produced via green-plant photosynthesis. And these networks are the means by which plants can send signals to nearby flora. Plants can also release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) over longer distances, which can attract species such as parasitic wasps that help protect the plant against predators. The VOCs signal other plants that they should prepare their own defense mechanisms against pests and threats. Plants have epigenetic memory; in other words, they can “learn” from environmental conditions and pass these memories along to their offspring. Plant Memory Another target of research is something we largely view as unique to mammals—memory. Recent research has shown that plants have epigenetic memory; in other words, they can “learn” from environmental conditions and pass these memories along to their offspring. A research team at the University of York in the UK discovered that plants hold a “winter memory” via two proteins: VIN3 and VRN5. In cold conditions, these proteins gather and double in size. According to Prof. Mark Leake, “these long-lasting clusters act like miniature ‘memory hubs,’ helping the plant remember it has been through winter and it's now time to start new growth.” Plants can also engage in “stress priming.” That is, they react to a mild environmental stressor, such as a pest attack, through epigenetic changes occurring within their cells. This then primes them to resist much stronger stressors more effectively. When powdery mildew infests oak leaves (above), the stress can alter the tree’s epigenetics, leading to mildew resistance in succeeding generations of oak trees. Kadir Celep/Unsplash Research led by Dr. Estrella Luna-Diez and colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, for example, showed that trees subject to environmental stressors can pass resilience on to their offspring, including drought tolerance and resistance to powdery mildew. These two examples (and there are more) show patterns that parallel capabilities often regarded as mammalian. But does this amount to thinking or sentience? As far as the science is concerned, says Ortín, we don’t have any definitive answers. He argues, however, that “many claims that plants aren’t (or can’t be) sentient rely on unproven a priori assumptions. … The proposal [of his research] is to take the hypothesis of plant sentience seriously as a falsifiable scientific hypothesis, rather than dismissing it a priori as an impossibility.” Redefining ‘Consciousness’? It would be very difficult to convince people that plants are sentient based on this research, but perhaps this reflects our human-centric view of sentience. For example, Prof. Stefano Mancuso, a world-leading plant neurobiologist (a controversial, or cutting-edge, term depending on one’s point of view) based at the University of Florence, argues that we should perhaps move away from concepts like consciousness and sentience and use the term “awareness” to describe plant capabilities. He suggests thinking about intelligence differently, not as originating from a brain but “diffused.” In this paradigm, plants’ decision-making occurs throughout their root systems, stems, and leaves, rather than centered in one area. Mancuso argues that we have a tendency to center humans as the pinnacle of life on Earth—its highest and most advanced species. And we see the consequences of that thinking, he says, written across our damaged landscapes, extermination of other species, and warming climate. Ortín draws a parallel with animal ethics. “Most theories of animal ethics (though certainly not all) hold that sentience is morally relevant: Because nonhuman animals have a subjective point of view and are capable of feeling, they qualify as ‘moral patients,’” a philosophical term meaning entities that have a right to be free of undue harm or suffering. That thinking could apply to plants were it established that they have a form of sentience. But, he argues, “it is far too early to draw any firm conclusions about what those ethical implications might be.” According to Rights of Nature thinking, this forest-and-river ecosystem in Oregon deserves legal protection for it to exist, persist, and flourish. Welcomia/iStock A Broader Morality But many people in the wider world today have already concluded, based on their own felt experience of consciousness in nature, that animals, plants, and even entire natural systems deserve treatment as “moral patients.” In August 2026, for example, some citizens in Oregon aimed to pass a Rights of Nature initiative—Measure 20-373—to protect all watersheds in a county from existential threats. The Rights of Nature agenda … invites us to rethink our relationship to nature, just as many world leaders become more aggressively extractivist. While it failed, the Rights of Nature agenda, which posits that nature has a right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve for its own sake, fundamentally challenges perspectives on the place of nature—animals, plants, soil, and water—in the world. It invites us to rethink our relationship to nature, just as many world leaders become more aggressively extractivist. This new rights framework is a logical accompaniment to the evolving thinking about plant intelligence and capabilities. Marder, however, told The Earth & I that we should perhaps think of the ethical implications of plant intelligence and a rights framework as very different from human/animal intelligence and human/animal rights. Human rights, and to some degree those of animals, are predicated on individual subjects, he thinks. Plant intelligence, however, is located within an ecosystem, with a symbiotic relationship between plant life and place. Plants, he argues, “solve some of the ethical and political dilemmas generated by the individualistic figures of personhood. To put it in a slogan-like form … plant rights are the rights of the environment.” What this could mean, therefore, is that humans could learn much from plant “sentience”—a more communal, Earth-connected, symbiotic, and respectful relationship with the environment. And it underlines the importance of the Rights of Nature framework. Far from being a fringe preoccupation of extremist environmental activists, assigning rights to nature or to trees may be where the science and our understanding of the place of all living beings are heading. *Deborah Talbot is a journalist with three decades of research experience in sustainability as a concept, focusing on cities, the environment, eco-tech, and education.

Heat Waves Have Killed Tens of Thousands Annually in Recent Years By Deborah Harvey* To escape the searing summer heat of recent years, many Europeans, such as these bathers in Bulgaria, sought out the region’s beaches. Ramon Karolan/Pexels Imagine stepping outside on a summer afternoon in a European city and feeling the heat rise from the pavement. The shade of a tree suddenly becomes precious. A glass of cold water feels like a small luxury. Picture an elderly woman on the third floor of a poorly ventilated building, closing her shutters against the sun and hoping it will be enough to get her through the night. For millions of Europeans, extreme heat is no longer just an uncomfortable part of summer. It’s a growing threat to life. One study, published in Nature Medicine, estimated that nearly 63,000 people died from heat-related causes across Europe in the summer of 2024. The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) European office says more than 200,000 people in the region have died from heat over the past four years. “Heat waves are no longer one-off freak events. They are recurring crises,” Dr. Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said in June, warning that they’re becoming more frequent, stronger, and longer-lasting. Europe is warming at more than twice the global average rate due to several reasons: Changing weather patterns produce more frequent high-pressure systems and heat domes. Parts of Europe extend into or are close to the Arctic, which is the fastest-warming region on Earth. Ironically, Europe’s stricter air pollution standards have reduced the concentration of airborne particulates that used to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. Progressively less snow cover in recent years has allowed sunlight to be absorbed by the ground instead of being reflected back into space. While all these may be true, the WHO stresses that many of the region’s heat-related deaths can be prevented. So how does a continent keep its people safe without putting an air conditioner in every home, school, office, and shop, threatening to bend the electric grid to the breaking point? Keeping Heat Out, Letting Nature In One answer starts before any cooling machine is switched on: Stop buildings from heating up so quickly in the first place. Shutters, awnings, thick insulation, well-placed windows, and designs that let fresh air move through a space can all help keep heat out, and they matter most after dark, since a building that soaks up heat all day can stay uncomfortably warm long after the sun goes down. This is especially true for Europe’s older buildings, many of which were built to hold on to heat through cold winters, not to shed it in hot summers. None of this means air conditioning has no place. It just means a building shouldn’t have to lean on it for every degree of summer heat. Parks, urban forests, and roofs covered in plants, known as green roofs, measurably lower temperatures and support people’s physical and mental health. Many people, such as this man in Milan, Italy, spent far more time outdoors to find relief from the 2026 heat waves in Europe, which were particularly dangerous, and even deadly, for the elderly and those living alone. Helena Jankovicova Kovacova/Pexels Nature can do some of the same work and often more gently. Trees cast shade, and plants release moisture that cools the air around them. Parks, urban forests, and roofs covered in plants, known as green roofs, measurably lower temperatures and support people’s physical and mental health. A 2026 European Commission project shows how far this can go. Three schools in Spain and Portugal took part in a trial, adding green roofs, plant-covered walls, and shaded walkways across an area of nearly two soccer fields. At the Spanish school, indoor temperatures fell by 4°C to 6°C (about 7°F to 11°F), and electricity used for cooling dropped by more than 11%. “Nature is a powerful ally in energy conservation,” Miguel Vega, who led the project, told the European Commission. The lesson isn’t that every building needs a green roof. It’s that cooling can be woven into the places in which people already live, learn, and work. Preparing before the Heat Arrives Preparing communities for hot summer months is important. The WHO’s guidance calls for early alerts about rising temperatures, checking in on older adults and people who live alone, moving outdoor work to cooler hours, and opening public cooling spaces on the worst days. These simple human acts add up to real protection. “Prevention works! We know this because we can measure it,” Kluge said, pointing to estimates that without the precautions already in place, heat-related deaths in 2023 would have been around 80% higher and roughly twice as high among people 80 and older. “The days of low AC penetration in Europe are coming to an end,” wrote Helge Brinkmann. It’s also worth remembering that not every family can afford to run an air conditioner around the clock. The European Environment Agency has flagged growing concern over who can afford to stay cool as summer electricity bills climb, a gap that any real solution will need to close. And Then There’s Air Conditioning As Europe keeps getting hotter, air conditioning will likely become a bigger part of daily life, whether people are entirely comfortable with that or not. It’s still far less common in that region than in the United States, Japan, or South Korea, but that’s changing quickly. In 1990, fewer than 7 million room air conditioners were in use across the European Union (EU). By 2020, that number had grown to more than 57 million, and the European Commission expects it to roughly double again by 2030. The energy used for cooling is climbing just as fast: In 2024, households across the EU used twice as much energy for cooling as they did in 2018. “The days of low AC penetration in Europe are coming to an end,” wrote Helge Brinkmann, a Boston Consulting Group partner who tracks Europe’s energy markets, in 2025, pointing to a string of brutal heat waves as the reason why. In plain terms, air conditioning is becoming much more common across Europe. Europe’s best bet is probably to do two things at once: Build homes that need less cooling in the first place, and make whatever cooling is used as efficient as it can be. That growth brings its own challenge. When a heat wave hits, millions of people switch on cooling at more or less the same moment, straining the electrical system that powers homes and businesses right when the grid is needed most. However, better, more efficient equipment can ease that strain. Europe’s best bet is probably to do two things at once: build homes that need less cooling in the first place, and make whatever cooling is used as efficient as it can be. For the 2026 World Cup games, Europeans streamed to the US and experienced comfortably air-conditioned stadiums. The visitors’ experience could promote greater adoption of air conditioning in Europe. Gorodenkoff/iStock Impact of the 2026 World Cup There’s also a more human, less predictable question in the mix. The 2026 FIFA World Cup drew a record 6,810,966 spectators into stadiums across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, more than the 2018 and 2022 tournaments combined. Prior to the tournament, an estimated 1.24 million international visitors were projected to attend, so it’s likely hundreds of thousands of Europeans came to the US at that time. Before the tournament, researchers warned that about a quarter of the World Cup games would take place in cities known for hot summer temperatures. Climate scientist Friederike Otto, cofounder of the research group World Weather Attribution, warned that fans in the stands could face real health risks, since, unlike the players on the field, they wouldn’t be “taken care of by a lot of medical doctors.” However, visitors soon found themselves in fully air-conditioned stadiums, restaurants, and hotel rooms—a striking first taste of the centrality of cooling to everyday comfort in America. Whether these experiences will change what Europeans want in their own homes, no one can say yet, and it would be too simple to credit one summer of travel with reshaping a continent’s habits. But Europe’s appetite for cool interiors was already growing before the opening whistle: Demand for cooling was 25% higher in 2024 than in 2020. If that trend keeps climbing, a summer spent chasing relief from America’s heat may turn out to be one small, memorable moment inside a much bigger change. Europe doesn’t have to choose between nature and technology. Air conditioning can save lives when temperatures turn dangerous. But trees, shade, smarter building design, cooler roofs, and early warnings can shrink how often that cooling is needed, and help make sure the people who need relief most can actually get it. The goal was never just to make rooms colder. It’s to build a Europe where people and the planet can both stay a little cooler, together. *Deborah Harvey is a writer and researcher focused on science, technology, sustainability, and global innovation. Her work explores how emerging ideas shape the future of energy, infrastructure, and the environment.

Bulk foods sold at a market from cloth bags. Agung Pandit Wiguna/Pexels Plastic has become an unavoidable part of modern life, from food packaging and kitchenware to personal care products. Along with it come plastic-associated chemicals (PACs), including phthalates and bisphenols such as bisphenol A (BPA), which have been linked in previous research to hormone disruption and other health concerns. Now, a randomized controlled trial from researchers at the University of Western Australia suggests that reducing contact with plastics—even for just seven days—can substantially lower the body's exposure to several of these chemicals. The findings point to food packaging and processing as some of the most important sources of everyday exposure. Key Data A cohort of 211 Australian adults participated in the observational portion of the Plastic Exposure Reduction Transforms Health (PERTH) Trial, while 60 participants took part in the randomized controlled intervention. The intervention lasted just seven days, demonstrating that measurable reductions in several plastic-associated chemicals can occur within one week of lowering plastic exposure. Researchers sourced food from more than 100 producers that minimized plastic contact in production, packaging, and delivery. Participants receiving low-plastic food plus plastic-free kitchenware reduced urinary mono-n-butyl phthalate (MnBP) by 37.5% compared with the control group. The same intervention reduced monobenzyl phthalate (MBzP) by 53.5%. BPA levels fell by 59.7% after only one week in the low-plastic food and kitchenware group. Participants who received all three interventions—low-plastic food, kitchenware, and personal care products—experienced the largest reduction in MnBP, with levels falling 44.1%. Combining all groups that received low-plastic food resulted in average reductions of: 37.9% in MnBP 44.5% in MBzP 51.6% in BPA 47.3% in total urinary bisphenols Even without dietary changes, replacing conventional personal care products with low-plastic alternatives reduced MnBP by 35.3%. Sources: Nature Medicine. Low-plastic diet and urinary levels of plastic-associated phthalates and bisphenols: the randomized controlled PERTH Trial. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04324-7 University of Western Australia Research Repository. Low-plastic diet and urinary levels of plastic-associated phthalates and bisphenols: the randomized controlled PERTH Trial. https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/low-plastic-diet-and-urinary-levels-of-plastic-associated-phthala/

How the Inga Model Is Helping Farmers Grow Food without Destroying Rainforest By Becky Hoag* Honduran farmers prune their rows of Inga trees, creating ample mulch between the rows and a harvest of firewood as well. Photo courtesy of Mike Hands For centuries, traditional slash-and-burn agriculture has locked tropical smallholders into a destructive cycle of forest clearing and rapid soil exhaustion. But when tropical ecologist Mike Hands set out to uncover why rainforest soils fail so quickly after burning, his 1980s research at Cambridge University laid the foundation for unlocking a permanent, regenerative alternative. Teaming up with farmers in Honduras, Hands founded the award-winning Inga Foundation to champion Inga alley cropping—a transformative agroforestry model that uses nitrogen-fixing, phosphorus-unlocking Inga trees to restore vital nutrients, choke out weeds, and deliver consistent annual crop yields on the exact same plot of land, breaking the relentless march of deforestation. The results have been so rewarding that the method is being adopted in larger numbers in Central America and explored in African countries. The Futility of ‘Slash and Burn’ Slash-and-burn is an agricultural practice that involves felling parts of a forest before the dry season to take advantage of the rich woodland soil for staple crops like rice, maize, cassava, and beans. The original vegetation is dried and burned before the next planting season, the ashes refertilizing the soil. But the crops and the tropical weather quickly exhaust vital nutrients, and by the second or third year of cultivation, yields plummet. Farmers are then forced to clear fresh sections of forest in a never-ending cycle of ecological destruction. “The process is not sustainable and is actually keeping people in poverty and food insecurity,” Hands said in an interview with The Earth & I. Through his Cambridge investigation in 1985, Hands found that while his colleagues agreed slash-and-burn was a dead-end agricultural process, the reasons for its failure were a mystery. “I found to my dismay—and disgust, in a sense—that science could not explain why the fertility of soil in rainforests fails so quickly after a slash-and-burn operation,” Hands recalled. Another slash-and-burn drawback is that when the cut biomass is burned, subsistence farm families’ health and the local environment are damaged. Weakening local ecosystems through deforestation can even change the regional climate, which makes the farming process yet more difficult. This is especially true when industrial agricultural practices enter the picture—cattle ranching, palm oil production, avocado farms, and the like. Tropical deforestation in general accounts for 13%–21% of greenhouse gas emissions because of the CO2 released by rotting and burning trees. Tropical rainforests cover less than 2% of the world’s surface yet are home to more than 50% of terrestrial biodiversity. But due to human activities, tropical deforestation in general accounts for 13%–21% of greenhouse gas emissions because of the CO2 released by rotting and burning trees. Back to the 1980s During his 1980s work as a topological surveyor and senior research assistant at Cambridge, Hands traveled to Costa Rica and worked with smallholder farmers there to investigate the cause of slash-and-burn’s sustainability failure. Analyzing soil samples from various before-and-after stages of the agricultural cycle, he found that the slashed-and-burned plots were severely deficient in phosphorus. “Until we could explain and understand the problem, we could not think of developing a solution,” he told The Earth & I. “The loss of phosphorus that I discovered on the sites over the seven years since the burning operation was so huge that, on its own, it would probably explain what is driving slash-and-burn agriculture and why people have to keep moving on into fresh forest, cut some more, and then move on again,” Hands said. “[It explained] why it is such a destructive, consumptive process.” Planting rows of Inga trees on a degraded Honduran hillside that was once jungle. Photo courtesy of Mike Hands Putting Phosphorus Back in the Soil Industrial agricultural practices would suggest that the solution is simply to buy synthetic fertilizers to make up for the loss of the essential macronutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium). Hands, however, wanted to find a more sustainable and long-term solution that would replenish the soil and even improve the yield. He understood that while fertilizers boost yields in the short term, they don’t truly revitalize the soil. Additionally, crops that rely on synthetic fertilizers tend to be less nutritious and sturdy compared to ones grown in naturally enriched soil. Not only that, the cost of fertilizers could be out of reach for most subsistence farmers. “It’s never that simple to whack on the fertilizers and get lots and lots more [production],” Hands said. “It’s never that stupidly simple—and how could it be when you’re dealing with nature?” Armed with his phosphorus discovery, his research led him to explore “alley cropping” (also known as intercropping) to improve soil fertility and crop yield. Alley cropping involves planting single parallel rows of trees or shrubs to form alleyways. Between the tree rows, cash crops are grown. This allows farmers to grow multiple plant types on the same plot, and if strategically done, the two or more species can benefit by providing each other with different necessary nutrients, improve the microclimate (like adding a bit of shade for the cash crop), and help protect one another from pests and weeds. Young maize grows in recently pruned Inga alleys—100% weed-control without herbicides. Photo courtesy of Mike Hands In fact, Hands and his colleagues would later determine that Inga trees can recapture land from invasive grass species in about 24 months. Trees in the genus Inga were a popular choice to help shade the cash crop and deliver nutrients back to the soil at the same time. Hands observed coffee bean alley crops in the highlands of Costa Rica and noticed that trees in the genus Inga were a popular choice to help shade the cash crop and deliver nutrients back to the soil at the same time. They are fast-growing, low-maintenance trees, and there are hundreds of tropical species within the Inga genus, all native to Central and South America. Inga tree roots also have a strong ability to form mycorrhizal (“fungus/root”) networks with the vast web of filamentous fungi that grow underground. These symbiotic networks recycle and help prevent phosphorus leaching in rainforest environments, and they produce an acid environment that aids in releasing phosphorus from rock in the soil. “I was very impressed with what it did to the soil … how it performed,” Hands recalled. He was so enthralled by the promise of the alley-cropping model using Inga trees that he wrote a thesis on the topic and spent the next few years looking for funding to help farmers adopt this practice. Thus, the idea that would later become the Inga Foundation was born. Starting a Movement Once the organization was ready to start approaching farmers, a main funder at the time encouraged them to start operations in Honduras. So, the team began work with one of Honduras’ top universities, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, to set up Inga alley-cropping plots to continue to conduct research and demonstrate the method to local nonprofit organizations and farm families. The people there were impressed by the high yield of maize and firewood per hectare and the minimal amount of weeding required. “By 2002, the verdict was we’ve got a winner. It worked. People liked it. It ticks all the boxes,” Hands said. The local community saw the vision and grew interested. After 20 years of research, Hands and his team had enough financial and community backing to formally launch the Inga Foundation. Flash forward and now the organization reports working with more than 700 Honduran farm families. Hands says practically every farmer they’ve worked with has maintained use of the method. The foundation provides all the materials and technical assistance needed to help farmers get started and only asks for them to use at least a 10th of a hectare (a quarter of an acre). “Big enough to be significant, small enough not to be too much of a nuisance if it [fails] for them,” Hands explains. Hands said the organization doesn’t pay people to adopt their method but rather relies on its merits and a farmer-to-farmer adoption process. The Inga Foundation hires workers in Honduras to help build community connections. In fact, the chief of field operations, Abraham Martínez, and the chief agronomist, Luís Miranda, are both Honduras farmers who fell in love with the foundation’s mission. Several farm families have increased the amount of crop they can grow on their land to the extent that they’ve been able to expand to new foods to either enjoy themselves or sell. “They’ve got food,” Hands said. “They’re not worried by El Niño because … if it was planted before the drought, they’ve got a crop. The neighbor’s crop will fail, but their crop will succeed.” The Method’s Success The foundation recommends planting tight hedgerows of Inga trees, which are pruned to about 1.5 meters (5 feet) in height, and spreading the clippings over the ground as mulch to nourish the soil for the cash crops and mitigate weeds. Essentially, the method duplicates the rich organic supply that the forest provides. “If you’re going to develop a sustainable system for human consumption, you’ve got to do what the forest does,” Hands explained. “You’ve got to imitate the forest. That’s the only model of sustainability I have that could be adapted for human use.” A landscape west of Bonito Oriental, Honduras, after a century or more of repeated slash-and-burn, showing no trace of the original rainforest. Photo courtesy of Mike Hands He said the Inga alley-cropping method actually works faster than the natural forest because when the trees get heavily pruned once a year, the cuttings are still green and blanket the ground with about 6 inches of organic matter, which slowly decomposes and protects the soil from extreme weather conditions. That’s a bigger influx of nutrients at once compared with the continuous stream of mostly dead pieces that trees would drop in the forest. Beyond that, the only supplement the Inga Foundation recommends for farmers to buy is rock phosphate—and not much is required to make a big impact. The Inga Foundation boasts of being one of the few organizations to positively impact 11 of [the Sustainable Development Goals], including no poverty, zero hunger, decent work, and climate action. The Inga alley-cropping method continues to yield success. A 2024 account of Inga tree agroforestry in Honduras, published by Tropenbos International, reported a 98% tree survival rate when it observed a plot with about 5,000 Inga trees per hectare (2.5 acres) planted 50 centimeters (20 inches) apart in contour rows about 4 meters (13 feet) apart. And that was without using synthetic chemicals and minimal rock phosphate. Additionally, the Inga Foundation states that Inga alleys can provide basic food security and firewood to farmers on only 1–2 hectares (2.5–5 acres) of land where it would take about 8 rotating hectares (20 acres) of slash-and-burn to get the same results. The nonprofit has gained the support of United Nations organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization for providing innovative support for several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In fact, the Inga Foundation boasts of being one of the few organizations to positively impact 11 of those goals, including no poverty, zero hunger, decent work, and climate action. An Urge to Grow The Inga Foundation plans to continue concentrating its efforts in Honduras because Hands believes it’s better to concentrate effort on doing things well in fewer places than spreading resources too thin. That being said, the nonprofit also has smaller projects in the Congo and Madagascar, where the team is working with local experts to investigate native plants that would function like Inga trees. “The strategy of the Inga Foundation is we probe the system scientifically. We proved it socioeconomically with the trials [and] we proved it institutionally, so that there are NGOs and social institutions—the kind of people who will roll it out—who are convinced as well,” Hands summarized. “Finally, we wanted proof of concept at landscape scale, and that is what we’ve now achieved.” *Becky Hoag is a freelance environmental reporter. You can find her work on her site beckyhoag.com and through her YouTube channel https://youtube.com/beckisphere.

A farmworker spraying pesticide in Andhra Pradesh state, India. B. Udaykiran/Unsplash For millions of farmers, the chemicals used to protect crops may be sickening the people who grow the world’s food. A new global study estimates that 402 million to 433 million farmers and farmworkers experience unintentional acute pesticide poisoning every year—roughly 46% of the world’s estimated 934 million farmers. The researchers describe the findings as evidence of a major global public health problem that has largely escaped attention. The study, published in Frontiers in Public Health, defines unintentional acute pesticide poisoning as an illness or other health effect resulting from pesticide exposure within a short period after exposure. The study focuses on acute poisoning; it does not capture the potentially much larger burden of chronic disease associated with repeated exposure. India Is Hardest Hit The researchers analyzed publicly available data collected between 2006 and 2023. They estimate that pesticide poisoning causes about 11,000 deaths annually, with nearly 60% occurring in India. The largest estimated numbers of nonfatal poisonings occurred in South Asia, followed by Southeast Asia and East Africa. Burkina Faso had the highest estimated national incidence, with nearly 84% of farmers and farmworkers experiencing poisoning. The numbers may actually be conservative. The researchers found major gaps in national reporting systems and noted that many agricultural workers who become ill never receive medical attention. In many countries, poisoning cases are not consistently diagnosed, recorded, or reported. Pesticide use itself has been moving in the opposite direction from efforts to reduce exposure. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, agriculture used 3.73 million metric tons of pesticide active ingredients in 2023—about twice the amount used in 1990. The FAO notes that pesticides can protect crops and yields but can also contaminate soil and water and harm nontarget plants, animals, and other organisms. Spraying a pesticide in West Java, Indonesia. Ilham Wicaksono/Unsplash Pesticides remain an important agricultural tool. They protect crops from insects, weeds, fungi, and other pests and can prevent substantial crop losses. But the World Health Organization says agricultural workers are among those facing the greatest risks from exposure. Pesticides can enter the body through inhalation, ingestion, or contact with the skin and eyes. Exposure does not necessarily end when spraying stops. Farmers and farmworkers can encounter residues on treated crops, contaminated equipment, clothing, soil, and water. WHO recommends reducing pesticide use when possible and using nonchemical pest-management approaches where practical. The concern extends beyond an episode of nausea, dizziness, or other acute symptoms. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 124 studies found a positive association between pesticide exposure and Parkinson’s disease, with occupational exposure associated with Parkinson’s across nearly all pesticide classes examined. The authors cautioned that substantial differences among studies mean more research is needed. Research into occupational exposure also illustrates how widespread contact with pesticides can be. An analysis conducted through the International Agency for Research on Cancer examined 316,270 agricultural workers in three large prospective cohorts. Depending on the chemical group, pesticide exposure was identified in substantial proportions of the workers studied, although the researchers cautioned that different methods of measuring exposure can produce different estimates. The new study did not examine the estimated 84 million children working in agriculture, nor did it assess chronic health effects. A Call for Pesticide-Use Rules The researchers are calling for standardized international surveillance of pesticide poisoning and implementation of recommendations to phase out highly hazardous pesticides. WHO has described exposure to highly hazardous pesticides as a major public-health concern, particularly because occupational exposure can cause acute and chronic health effects and because environmental contamination can expose people through food and drinking water. The pesticide problem, then, is larger than the number of deaths recorded in hospitals and government statistics. Every year, hundreds of millions of agricultural workers may be experiencing the immediate consequences of chemical exposure—while the long-term consequences remain harder to see. The question facing agriculture is no longer simply how to control pests. It is whether the world can produce food without making the people who produce it—and the ecosystems around them—pay the price.

Why Planned ‘Burns’ Can Avert Disastrous Wildfires in the Western US By Gordon Cairns* Mixed conifer forest six months after a planned fire on the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains, Oregon, USA. Image courtesy of James Johnston For generations, Americans have been taught to think of wildfire as an enemy: Flames “destroy” acres, firefighters “battle” blazes, and successful fire management means extinguishing fire as quickly as possible. But a growing body of fire science suggests that this familiar story is incomplete—and, in some landscapes, dangerously backward. Fire is an essential ecological process in many North American ecosystems. Some forests evolved with frequent, low-intensity burns that cleared accumulated vegetation, recycled nutrients, and helped maintain resilient landscapes. Yet more than a century of man-made “fire exclusion”—a policy to not start controlled burns and quickly suppress any known fires—combined with logging, grazing, development in fire-prone areas, drought, and a warming climate, has profoundly altered many fire regimes. The Case for Prescribed Burning Wildfire experts across the country are now building a case for using prescribed fire to help address the wildfire threat. In an online discussion on the issue with the author and a group of experts, Michelle Greiner, a senior research associate with the Public Lands Policy Group at Colorado State University, explained that countering fire with fire has been an essential part of a forest’s cycle since time immemorial. “We have fire-adapted forests that are accustomed to fire in the West—it’s about correcting this misconception that fire is a negative,” Greiner said. “In prehuman times, [fires] would burn naturally at a really low level. It was when we started excluding fire from these landscapes that we [became] at larger risk of crown fires,” she said, referring to the deadly wildfires that speed through the tops—or crowns—of trees in a forest. “These forests are supposed to have wildfires in their regime,” she said. “Since we have removed that from the system, we have created the opportunity for bigger, more catastrophic wildfires that aren’t part of their natural regime.” Addressing Fire Deficit A 2025 Nature Communications study found that a widespread “fire deficit” persists across diverse North American forests, despite recent increases in acreage burned. Using more than 1,800 tree-ring, fire-scar sites, researchers found that the 2020 fire year burned about 6% of the study sites—approximately the historical average and far below the 29% that burned in 1748. A 2025 Nature Communications study found that a widespread “fire deficit” persists across diverse North American forests, despite recent increases in acreage burned. Firefighters watch the devastating wildfire, the Mangum Fire, in Arizona on June 23, 2020. Mike McMillan/USFS via Wikimedia Public Domain To redress the fire deficit balance, James Johnston, a fire ecology expert at the University of Oregon, explained that prescribed burns are needed to remove the fuel a fire needs. “It may seem counterintuitive that we would use fire to fight fire, but it is actually the most effective way to prevent forest fire, particularly in the western United States,” said Johnston, who is an assistant research professor in the university’s Institute for Resilient Organizations, Communities, and Environments. “What’s driving large and severe wildfire is the accumulation of dead fuel on the forest floor,” he said. Johnston cleared up another common misconception about wildfire: “It’s sort of a ‘fun fact’ about forest fires that what most people don’t appreciate is that it is not necessarily live trees that are burning; in fact, a very small percentage of the live tree is combusted in a fire event.” He added that burning is more effective than raking, collecting, or vacuuming to remove the highly flammable forest floor litter that has accumulated over decades. “So prescribed fire is actually the key to mitigating the effects of fast-moving wildfire in the western United States.” A prescribed fire underway in a mixed conifer forest in Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevadas, California, US. Image courtesy of James Johnston Challenges to At-Scale Application Despite prescribed fires being acknowledged as the best way to prevent an out-of-control wildfire, they are not being set at the proper size. “One of the significant challenges is the capacity to set prescribed fire on the scales that are necessary. There are millions of hectares of land out in the western United States that are extremely vulnerable to fast-moving, high-severity wildfires as a result of fuel accumulation, and we really need prescribed fires across millions of hectares,” Johnston said. “Unfortunately, due to a variety of regulatory restrictions and, more importantly, a lack of agency capacity, we are typically only treating tens of thousands of hectares a year; we are very much behind in terms of applying prescribed fire on the necessary spatial scales,” he added. “We are very much behind in terms of applying prescribed fire on the necessary spatial scales.” Greiner added that a lack of resources, equipment, and staff is a specific barrier to burns in California—something she believes is true across the West. “To prepare for a burn, you have to have proper equipment and staffing in place, but across the board this is really strained. If there happens to be an active wildfire, a lot of staff that were originally assigned to prescribed fires are typically pulled off onto the wildfire—this is a key barrier we hear,” she said. Another barrier is the atmospheric condition. “Aside from funding and capacity challenges, I think there are limitations of burn windows—the time of year that is appropriate to burn doesn’t always align with when air quality windows are good. In California, there might be a day when conditions look good for air quality for health reasons, but it is not necessarily a good window to burn,” said Greiner. Jess Downey, manager of the Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice at the University of Oregon, added that Oregon faces other difficulties: “The season between the spring burning and the wildfire season is shortening … [and] the wildfire season is going longer—so there are some challenges there, too.” Risks Involved Johnston added that there are two basic risks to a prescribed fire. First, that it escapes control, but this is a really low risk, he said. “The second risk is smoke production. Prescribed fire does involve smoke, which can impact vulnerable populations, but the impact of this smoke is significantly less than smoke from wildfires, and furthermore it tends to reduce the impact of smoke from large wildfires. Those are the basic trade-offs we need to evaluate.” He added: “The major benefit of a prescribed fire is we get to choose the time and the place, and we can often pick weather windows when smoke is being transported away from communities or when atmospheric conditions mean that wind disperses smoke instead of trapping it over human communities.” “The major benefit of a prescribed fire is we get to choose the time and the place, and we can often pick weather windows when smoke is being transported away from communities.” A Ponderosa pine forest three months after a prescribed fire in the Deschutes National Forest in the eastern Cascades, Oregon, USA. Image courtesy of James Johnston Alerting Communities Downey, whose research looks at the intersections between smoke and public health, explained that when notifying a community about a prescribed fire, public health concerns about smoke need to be addressed. “What we hear from some communities is that they view smoke preparedness for prescribed burn season as preparation for wildfire season—making sure you know what to do and have what you need to reduce your smoke exposure,” she said. Pre-fire health messaging might include telling the public how to set up a box fan filter for smoke, where to purchase an air purifier, or when to change the filter. “It’s important to have more communication, outreach, and connection with public health,” she said. “Public health is well connected with community-based organizations. They know the events to go to and people to reach out to in the community.” Getting Community Buy-in Downey’s colleague, Heidi Huber Sterns, director of the Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice at the University of Oregon, added: “Even when people understand the role and benefits of prescribed fire, their fatigue from repeated air-quality events can shape how they respond to it. Clear, actionable guidance about what to do can help people feel more prepared when smoke is present." And when people understand the purpose of a prescribed fire, they are usually in favor of it, Downey said. “When [researchers] ask about public perception of prescribed fire, what we found in the peer-reviewed literature is generally support, particularly when prescribed fire is framed as a tool for forest health and wildfire risk reduction,” Downey said. In California, citizens seem to understand the paradox of using fire to fight fire, Greiner said. “Largely in our work in California, the public has generally been more supportive [of prescribed burning], especially over the last couple of years when we have had a few really bad fire seasons,” Greiner said. “This has helped people to come around to the idea of prescribed fire. However, investing in education and public outreach is still really important, and we are continuing to pursue that.” Johnston outlined challenges they still face: Climate change is a challenge, as well as “past land-use history, which has left us a ton of accumulated fuel on the ground,” he said. “But the overarching challenge here is of politics. We are navigating a really polarized political system in order to craft wise natural-resource policies.” *Gordon Cairns is a freelance journalist and teacher of English at the Forest Schools, based in Scotland.