Climate

This week, the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights (IACHR) started to hear testimony at the University of the West Indies, near Bridgetown, Barbados, addressing one of the most pressing global issues of our time: climate change and its implications on human rights. Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Research Scientist Carly Philips (pictured on the left above) testified on April 24. With dozens testifying over three packed days, the court heard powerful statements focused on impacts to small nation-states, connections between climate and health, calls for intergenerational justice, and—the focus of UCS’s input—state obligations to reduce corporate emissions. All testimony was recorded and can be watched here.

Greater capacity brings greater responsibility

The landmark hearing opened with statements by representatives from Chile and Colombia, which, in 2023, had sought the court’s advisory opinion on the interplay between climate change and human rights. Their requests underline a need for clarity about states’ responsibilities, emphasizing protections for children and women, environmental defenders, and the frameworks of loss and damage.  Importantly, loss and damage frameworks suggest that while all nations have a role in combating climate change, those with more capacity and resources should shoulder a greater burden.

Barbados, a small island state profoundly affected by climate change, brought to light the tangible harms it faces—increased difficulty in agriculture, threats to its fishing and tourism industries, and significant losses from recent tropical storms. Its position is a poignant reminder of the immediate and severe impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities.

During the sessions, Robert Volterra, a representative for Barbados and an expert in international law, argued persuasively that states contributing to climate change owe compensation to those that suffer its adverse effects disproportionately. He highlighted the potential danger of the court’s advisory opinion becoming a “rich person’s climate change advisory opinion,” which would fail to hold wealthy nations accountable and leave developing countries to face the consequences alone.

Bridging science and law

UCS expert Dr. Phillips provided a compelling scientific perspective that reinforced the urgency of addressing climate change as a threat multiplier and clarified the disproportionate impact of climate change on the Americas. You can watch the full testimony here.

UCS was invited to testify before the court as co-author of a joint amicus brief that focused on corporate accountability for the climate crisis, written with Greenpeace International, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), and the New York University School of Law’s Climate Law Accelerator (CLX). The organization’s testimony served as a scientific backbone to the legal discussions, stressing the need for immediate and coordinated action to address the intertwined crises of climate change and human rights.

Dr. Phillips’s testimony pointed out that attribution science—identifying the direct links between specific actions and climate change—confirms the causal connections between the conduct of major polluters, primarily large companies from the Global North, and the adverse effects now being suffered globally. Citing this evidence, she made the case for the need to regulate business activities.

Dr. Phillips also painted a stark picture of the narrowing window for action. Ignoring the escalating threat posed by climate change, and by the unaccountable corporations driving the crisis, risks pushing global temperatures beyond the critical goal of 1.5ºC, she said. Such a failure would be not only an ecological catastrophe, but also a profound failure of our legal systems, potentially undermining the legitimacy of human rights law and its institutions.

Our legal partners at Greenpeace International then argued that states have a primary responsibility to enact and enforce laws and regulations, which means requiring businesses to respect human rights—including by swiftly and sharply reducing global warming emissions.

Potential precedents

The court’s task is formidable. It must navigate a complex landscape of varied vulnerabilities and capacities among the nations under its jurisdiction. Yet, its role is crucial. As the court’s president Nancy Hernández López noted, the outcome of these hearings could profoundly influence regional and global approaches to climate justice, ensuring that no voice is silent and no opinion lacks legitimacy.

The IACHR’s hearings are not merely procedural; they are a beacon of hope for those most at risk. As the world watches, the decisions made here could set a precedent for how we address the legal and moral obligations of climate change mitigation and compensation globally.

This is the first of three sessions for hearings before the IACHR. As we continue to monitor these hearings, one thing is clear: climate justice is not just about legal battles, it’s about securing a sustainable and equitable future for all. I’m grateful that the court has made the space to hear from experts and communities impacted by its rulings. We will keep you posted as this decision, and other climate advisory requests, move through the courts.

New EPA directive will cut pollution equivalent to the emissions of 328m cars, but industry group decries it as a ‘reckless plan’

Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued on Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

New limits on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-fired electric plants are the Biden administration’s most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the power sector, the nation’s second-largest contributor to the climate crisis. The rules are a key part of Joe Biden’s pledge to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide by 2050.

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Read part 1 of this blog post series on the White House’s initiative.

In a previous blog post about the federal Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) recent report about how the White House can better implement its Justice40 initiative, I noted that the GAO should have said the program needs much more transparency at multiple levels. That is the first of three fixes that I and my former colleague and senior official at the EPA Matthew Tejada agree should have been recommended.

As former EPA officials in the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, we had a front row seat to how Justice40, a landmark initiative born via President Biden’s executive order 14008, was rolled out.

There are two more fixes we think the GAO should have recommended to the White House to strengthen implementation of Justice40.

What the GAO should have said Fix #2: Appoint OMB as the lead White House entity for Justice40 oversight.

GAO’s recommendations treated each component of the EOP as equal. Both Matthew Tejada and I wish they had gone further to point out that no initiative as potentially ambitious and transformative as Justice40 can be successful without clear decision-making authority from the White House and an effective structure to engage executive branch agencies that have likewise committed the necessary staff and budget.

In the case of Justice40, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Climate Policy Office (CPO) each have co-equal roles, given their various policy mandates. This has resulted in significant delays across key decisionmakers, as pointed out by GAO.

“The Equitable and Just National Climate Forum (EJNCF) [of which UCS is a part] got it right on the money in recommending that the lead entity for oversight of the implementation of Justice40 should be OMB, especially now that they received $25 million through the Inflation Reduction Act,” Matthew said to me.

OMB can ensure durability of these goals across administrations if they commit to addressing the GAO critique of enhancing and improving coordination with EJ leaders appointed to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (WHEJAC), led by CEQ.

Clarifying leadership could also greatly help to cure another common critique in GAO’s report—lack of coordination with and activation of the newly-constituted Interagency Council on EJ (EJ IAC). Clear leadership, authority, and focus from one office in the White House would empower the political and career leads from each agency to quickly and effectively bring ideas from their agencies to shape the initiative through the EJ IAC.

GAO also noted the lack of process for systematically accepting agency feedback (p. 40). For example, because Justice40 implementation guidance was so long in coming and had to move through so many decision-making centers in the White House, the initiative has been slow to adapt to changing circumstances, such as the expansion of Justice40-covered programs after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Similar delays and confusion have been met with providing guidance to define disadvantaged communities when the IRA gave that authority individually to the leads of different agencies. The result is that agency officials had to wait for new guidance documents that they didn’t always have a hand in shaping.

Moving forward, the hope would be for the EJ IAC to not just be part of a more responsive and clear chain of communication but also relied upon for crafting the policies that they will then in turn be charged with implementing across the different programs at their agencies.

OMB has the horsepower to look across the executive branch and dive into programs, methodologies, and reporting. CEQ has the clear authority to lead the WHEJAC and EJ IAC. Establishing clear authority across these critical areas and aligning the efforts of the different offices, rather than mixing their actions and authorities together, would be a dramatic improvement.

Fix #3: Only use the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool for its designed intent.

The final fix for Justice40 I recommend is to make clear what the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) should be used for and, just as importantly, not used for.

CEJST represents a huge step forward in the use of equity-centric tools across the United States. Despite the word “screening” in its name, CEJST was not built to be just another “screening” tool. Executive Order 14008 laid out a specific policy question for CEJST—if at least 40% of the benefits were to go to certain places based on the intersection of climate, economic, and environmental injustices, where are those places? CEJST was custom built to provide that answer.

What has happened since CEJST was released? There was the predictable confusion amongst many people; citizens, government officials, industry representatives—all asking which tool to use. CEJST started showing up in inappropriate policy arenas, such as identifying potentially disproportionately-impacted communities during permitting processes under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. CEJST was not built for a host of analytical screening purposes and should not be used as such. There are other tools—EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool (EJScreen) and NEPAssist, and Department of Health and Human Service’s EJ Index—that were.

CEJST was built to specifically identify which parts of the country should receive at least 40% of the benefits of those 400-plus government programs. As Matthew says, “CEJST was tuned to include somewhere less than 40% of the country, or else what’s the point? It wasn’t built to capture all of the communities that deserve government benefits. It wasn’t designed to show which communities might need and deserve certain attention or specific resources more than other communities based upon compounding, or cumulative, challenges. It wasn’t designed to be used in permitting, rulemaking, compliance, emergency response and recovery, clean-ups…the list goes on. And it certainly wasn’t designed to provide an answer for which disadvantaged communities should receive 100% of a program’s benefits, which is exactly what numerous Inflation Reduction Act programs have been statutorily mandated to achieve.”

Then there’s the issue of spatial resolution

For you data geeks out there, like me, pay attention to this: the Census Bureau has a tool for using populations and land masses, starting from the smallest geographies, actual blocks, then block groups, then tracts, and so forth. Most analysts prefer using the smallest geographical unit possible because they can get much more granular in their understanding of community-scale needs and disparities. Because of CEJST’s reliance on census tract geographies rather than census block groups, many disadvantaged communities that happen to be near other more affluent areas are averaged out and don’t make the cut for Justice40’s threshold. This happens when disadvantaged census block groups in heavily populated areas are surrounded by more affluent neighbors, or rural disadvantaged communities get averaged in with affluent resort areas that are not particularly close but included in the vast bounds of rural census tracts.

Sometimes even at the block group level, getting to community needs is difficult but less perilous than operating at the tract scale.  

CEJST estimates that approximately 33% of the country’s population lives in areas labeled as disadvantaged; that means 40% of benefits is a meaningful number as compared to the target populations and geographies. It is not the be-all and end-all to identifying every disadvantaged community in the United States.

In that way, CEJST is a simple but effective tool which will go a long way toward advancing progress if used appropriately, even with the clearly articulated and well-put criticism of its exclusion of race and ethnicity. There are important opportunities to improve it in future iterations.

Matthew says, “if CEJST is used as a simple but powerful lever, it can move our government—not just the Justice40 programs and not only 40% of the benefits of those programs—because it forces civil servants at all levels of government to contend with issues of equity, history, disinvestment, and their own singular decision-making in incredibly powerful and tangible ways. Once you start that process, it ripples out across the rest of government action and thinking.”

Coupled with fixing the reporting, transparency, and accountability issues we’ve noted are still problematic within Justice40, using CEJST will enable those ripples to swell into waves. With an all-of-government approach, we can learn how to think about equity issues, use data tools, and then make different policy decisions about how government works to achieve a better and more equitable result.

CEJST and Justice40 don’t have to dictate all of those results and specify every community destination. Trying to do so only limits the scope of what it can achieve, and it will also guarantee that many deserving communities will be left out of the change we collectively seek.

There is no doubt that Justice40 and CEJST are driving significant change across federal government. As long-serving EPA leaders, we saw the difference. It was clear, necessary, and almost instantaneous. The EJ truism holds here as in so many other places—we’ve come a long way but have a long, long way yet to go. There’s so much left to be done to solidify the wins of Justice40 in the face of skepticism and growing political hostility towards both equity and climate issues.

In this post and the previous I have provided a few ideas to help institutionalize practices that would allow agencies to showcase and scale the changes. What would be not just unfortunate but also tragic is if we fail to learn from the early struggles of Justice40’s historic policy and fail to support the efforts emerging from the Inflation Reduction Act’s absolutely unprecedented funding amounts. If done right, Justice40 can continue to achieve the lasting, meaningful, systemic, and structural changes that so many have spent their lives fighting to achieve.

What else should the GAO have said in its report about Justice40? Read my previous blog post to learn more.

Since the inception of the environmental justice (EJ) movement, EJ leaders have called for accountability by the federal government for meeting the needs of communities that for generations have been systematically excluded, environmentally overburdened, and starved of much needed and deserved resources.

The federal government has responded in many ways over the ensuing decades, from the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) original 1983 study on the siting of hazardous waste facilities, to President Clinton’s 1994 executive order 12898 on environmental justice, to then-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson’s ambitious Plan EJ 2014 strategic plan.

While valiantly cultivating the bureaucratic soil, none of these efforts offered the promise of holding government accountable when making one of the most fundamental decisions of governance—the distribution of benefits.

President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, born in 2021 via executive order 14008, is the first meaningful attempt in decades to get at that basic function of government and prioritize the needs of communities that have been left behind for far too long.

The Justice40 Initiative’s goal is for 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments to flow to disadvantaged communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened. Taken together with other important equity and justice mandates, such as those included in additional executive orders dedicated to environmental justice and racial equity, we now are seeing the most comprehensive set of presidential equity and justice actions since the 1960s.

Yet more needs to be done to ensure the bold commitments of the past three years take root and grow into the systemic and structural changes our country and its most oppressed communities deserve. Because of the clarity of its goal and sharp focus on where and to whom benefits should flow during a time of historic government investment, the success of Justice40 will in many ways be the measuring stick of the Biden administration’s equity and justice efforts.  

A recent Government Accountability Office report made a series of recommendations to strengthen Justice40 implementation, including five recommendations to each of the different White House units (aka Executive Office of the President, or EOP) that are leading Justice40 implementation. Those units are the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Climate Policy Office (CPO). The reason GAO’s recommendations matter is that agencies and the White House need to respond formally to their recommendations, while those of us in the public and nonprofit sector are easier to ignore.

I am a former EPA official who worked in the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and have over 20 years of experience in equity-centered public service. I have some insights and I also encourage readers to delve into the expert insights and recommendations from the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC), which are rich and valuable.

Here’s what I think about the GAO’s report about Justice40:

What the GAO report on Justice40 got right Having a clear whole-of-government focus on Justice40 has been a crucial catalyst for action.

GAO pointed this out in findings from its interviews with federal and nonfederal officials, saying “some respondents (7 of 18) wrote that the interim guidance was useful for developing implementation plans because it established clear deadlines for taking action. For example, one respondent stated that the ‘aggressive’ deadlines set in the interim guidance made implementing the Justice40 Initiative the program’s main priority.” (p. 33)    

Indeed, in a few short years, the focus on Justice40 has resulted in the creation of numerous new programs across many agencies to improve community engagement and advance environmental justice. This has been accompanied by a significant increase in related levels of staff commitment and expertise, such as new EJ offices at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The US Department of Energy (DOE) opened its doors to the Office of Energy Justice and Equity and set up numerous programs funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to expand community engagement.

Each institutional change gave agencies like EPA, where the first Office of Environmental Justice was opened in 1992, more and stronger collaborators across the federal family to work alongside. Thanks to the historic support for EJ and personal commitment of EPA Administrator Michael Regan, EPA significantly increased the heft of its EJ program by aligning with its external civil rights program and reorganizing to create a national program (a big step up from the previous solo office) with a senate-confirmed Assistant Administrator position to head the new Office of EJ and External Civil Rights.  

GAO also shared important recommendations around improving transparency and accountability, including through better use of its scorecard, in order to allow Congress and the public to hold the executive branch accountable for upholding Justice40. See, p. 52 and p. 43 of the report.

Very importantly, the Equitable and Just National Climate Forum (EJNCF) has noted concerns about including racial demographic data to improve the scorecard’s efficacy, saying “As it currently stands, the information provided in the Phase One Scorecard does not include any racial demographic data that would allow verification of the extent to which agencies have ensured racial equity in their work.” EJNCF has also provided recommendations in response to the one-year anniversary of the EJ executive order 14096 on April 21, 2024.

What I wish the GAO had also said

I wish the GAO had also said this in its recommendations:

Fix #1: Accountability will only happen with public transparency at multiple levels.

Unfortunately, the way Justice40 is set up right now, it will not provide transparency on a program-by-program basis across federal agencies. With nearly 470 programs in the mix, the White House communicated through its original guidance that public reporting will be neither program-by-program nor agency-by-agency, but rather will roll up the results of multiple “buckets” of programs into overall government-wide totals.

This is problematic.

Matthew Tejada, the senior official in charge of EPA’s EJ program from 2013-2023, shared with me that “failing to include some mechanism for transparency at multiple levels undermines the goal of Justice40 in several respects. First, it eliminates the opportunity for individuals and organizations inside and outside of government to look at single programs of interest and monitor their success in providing at least 40% of benefits to disadvantaged communities.”

He’s right. By rolling programs together, it is possible and perhaps even likely that big-ticket, large-scale programs eclipse the success of smaller, more targeted programs. For example, Solar for All is a $7 billion program targeted exclusively for low-income solar projects. This large infusion to disadvantaged communities coming from EPA could mask the hard-fought efforts of many other smaller renewable energy programs from multiple federal agencies that are working to move the needle above 40%.

Further, there’s another more pernicious issue of whether to include certain programs in analyses of benefits at all. DOE’s hydrogen hubs (H2Hubs) program selected seven projects for award negotiations in the fall of 2023. The projects include disadvantaged parts of Appalachia and Houston where EJ communities (and the WHEJAC) are contesting any approaches, including hydrogen facilities, that prolong reliance on fossil fuel-based infrastructure. Including this program in the denominator of any overall calculation is critical, since the H2Hub program was included in the list of J40-covered programs. However, also including it in the numerator would mean each H2Hub could dwarf tens of smaller Justice40 investments in the same bucket of programs. The way around this is to encourage J40 data to be shared in a disaggregated way so that program administrators and the public can independently evaluate the effect of these programs.

Matthew also said, “This approach sets the White House up for what is a potentially impossible task —coming up with some defensible means for mathematically aggregating benefits from a multitude of programs with varied benefits, measured at different scales and units, without showing the individual program-by-program numbers.”

He’s right again. We need a way to understand the bigger picture, but it cannot come at the cost of transparency and accountability for individual programs and agencies. Allowing analysts within and outside of government to see data and benefits methodologies at various scales is critical for this outcome.

Even if the White House redirects the executive branch to change its reporting structure to include a program or agency basis, there would still be data hurdles to surmount. Many federal programs do not currently track exactly where their appropriated funds touch down on the ground (i.e., at the local neighborhood, individual level, or depending on the funding stream). For some programs, this is the result of historic systemic inequities baked into programs (e.g., transportation formula funding) that have never been concerned about justifying where taxpayer dollars flow beyond the political wins of road-widening projects. In some cases, the fix is easy: programs should be required to track and report on the final destination of funds, and not just to the state agency or regional planning body that initially receives them. Matthew and I recognize there are reporting questions that would need to be sorted through with the support of OMB, who shepherds the Paperwork Reduction Act. And of course, wrestling with state and local agencies’ capacity and willingness to share information with the federal government would also need to be addressed.

In the case of some programs whose funding goes through multiple transactions, this might not be possible. Matthew thinks that’s ok. He says, “We should figure out which programs those are and push them to find an alternative means for tracking where the money will be spent in a way that is not so burdensome as to overwhelm the usefulness of the resources provided.”

Before the end of 2024, basic information that tags to geography across the board needs to be made, so that agencies can start reporting in a way that allows communities and civil society—not to mention the civil servants in charge of these programs—to monitor progress and support implementation. And, like EJNCF has advocated, we should request them to provide more technical assistance to navigate the complex programs so the data can be used meaningfully.

If this could be done quickly, more agencies would have the institutional capacity built up to implement programs with an equity lens as a matter of course.

What else should the GAO have said in its report about Justice40? Read my next post to learn more.

As the climate crisis has deepened, protesters have become more confrontational – and their ambitions have grown

The head of ExxonMobil told to “eat shit” as he was about to receive an award. A US senator and coal boss called a “sick fuck”, almost sparking a brawl. Theatre shows interrupted. As the climate crisis has deepened, protests aimed at those deemed responsible are becoming starkly personal, and often confrontational.

At the vanguard of this new style of in-your-face activism is Climate Defiance, a group of just a handful of core staffers now marking its first birthday following a year of disrupting, often crudely, the usually mundane procession of talks, speeches and panels that feature Joe Biden administration officials, oil company bosses and financiers.

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Brazil, Germany, Spain and South Africa sign motion for fairer tax system to deliver £250bn a year extra to fight poverty and climate crisis

• ‘Why we need a global tax on billionaires’

The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2% tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise £250bn a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.

In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa and Spain say a 2% tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

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Green Finance Institute report said further pollution could cut 12% off GDP by 2030s

The destruction of nature over the rest of the decade could trigger a bigger economic slump in Britain than those caused by the 2008 global financial crisis and the Covid pandemic, experts have warned.

Sounding the alarm over the rising financial cost from pollution, damage to water systems, soil erosion, and threats from disease, the report by the Green Finance Institute warned that further breakdown in the UK’s natural environment could lead to a 12% loss of gross domestic product (GDP) by the 2030s.

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Finance chiefs say higher taxes for the super-rich are key to battling global inequality and climate crisis

• Billionaires should pay minimum 2% wealth tax, say G20 ministers

When the governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund convened for the spring meetings last week, it was all about the really big questions. What can the international community do to accelerate decarbonisation and fight climate change? How can highly indebted countries retain fiscal space to invest in poverty eradication, social services and global public goods? What does the international community need to do to get back on track towards reaching the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? How can multilateral development banks be strengthened to support these ambitions?

There is one issue that makes addressing these global challenges much harder: inequality. While the disparity between the richest and poorest countries has slightly narrowed, the gap remains alarmingly high. Moreover, in the past two decades, we have witnessed a significant increase in inequalities within most countries, with the income gap between the top 10% and the bottom 50% nearly doubling. Looking ahead, current global economic trends pose serious threats to progress towards higher equality.

Svenja Schulze is Germany’s minister for economic cooperation and development; Fernando Haddad is the minister of finance in Brazil; Enoch Godongwana is the minister of finance in South Africa; Carlos Cuerpo is the minister of economy, trade and business and María Jesús Montero the minister of finance in Spain

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Researchers in the Netherlands find climate change is increasing vulnerability of some species

Climate change is causing apparently healthy trees to die after periods of heat and drought. Many may not die immediately but repeated periods of hot weather seem to increase the vulnerability of some species more than others.

Researchers studied 20 species of conifers planted 100 years ago in the same place in the Netherlands, taking tree ring samples to see how they did in droughts between 1970 and 2013. From the distance between the rings it is possible to tell how much each species’ growth was affected.

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Few economic and social benefits will come to Africans if processing is all done overseas, says Wanjira Mathai

Africa must take greater control in the industries it supplies with raw materials to lift its people from poverty and seize its own destiny in a low-carbon world, one of the continent’s leading environmentalists has urged.

Wanjira Mathai, the managing director for Africa and global partnerships at the World Resources Institute thinktank, said much more of what the continent produced must be processed and made use of close to where it is produced, if the world is to shift to a low-carbon footing.

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Illnesses such as dengue and malaria to reach unaffected parts of northern Europe, America, Asia and Australia, conference to hear

Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.

The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.

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The rapper, producer, actor and vegan talks about the connections between meat and masculinity, animal welfare and the environment.

Coordinated withdrawal agreed after several member states and UK have quit energy charter treaty

European lawmakers have voted to escape a treaty that lets investors sue governments in private courts for pursuing policies that stop the planet from heating.

Fossil fuel companies have used the energy charter treaty (ECT), an international trade agreement from the 1990s, to demand billions of euros of taxpayers’ money in opaque tribunals set up to protect investors.

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The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today

Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies.

“The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward the Columbia president, Minouche Shafik.

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British Medical Association says decision to take Dr Sarah Benn off medical register for five months ‘sends worrying message’

Doctors groups are calling for urgent consideration of the rules for medical professionals who take peaceful direct action on the climate crisis, which they say is the “greatest threat to global health”, after a GP was suspended from the register for non-violent protest.

Dr Sarah Benn, a GP from Birmingham, was taken off the medical register for five months on Tuesday by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC), over her climate protests. The tribunal said Benn’s fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

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High winds, rains, winter storms and tropical cyclones accounted for 80% of power interruptions over the last 20 years

Power outages in the US are rising, as climate-related extreme weather strain an already burdened energy grid.

Over the last decade, severe storm outages increased by 74% compared with the previous 10 years.

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Investors lodge 58% protest vote against emissions report but defiant chair Richard Goyder maintains company is part of solution to climate change

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Woodside Energy has suffered an embarrassing rebuke of its climate credentials after its emissions plan was overwhelmingly rejected by shareholders at its annual general meeting on Wednesday.

Investors lodged a 58% vote against Woodside’s climate report, representing the strongest protest recorded against any of the dozens of listed companies around the world that regularly put climate-related resolutions to shareholders.

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A dawn chorus of flutes, whistles and chirps once flowed through my Cambridge window, but there has been a shocking collapse in birdlife. What can be done?

Every year from February through to June, the early morning chorus of birdsong is one of the most evocative manifestations of spring. During late winter I open the bedroom window before going to sleep, to hear that incredible mix of flutes, whistles and chirps that begin before first light, when I wake. I listen for the layers of song that simultaneously come from close by and far away.

This year though, the dawn chorus that once was the soundtrack for spring in central Cambridge has collapsed. It was noticeably quieter in 2023, and this year strikingly so. Blackbirds are depleted and song thrushes no longer heard at all. The dunnocks – once one of the most common garden songsters – have disappeared, as have the chaffinches, whose early February song was among the first audible confirmations of lengthening days. The cheery chatter of house sparrows is absent and the once familiar sound of coal tits has fallen silent. Long-tailed tits are now rare, and so far this year I’ve heard no blackcaps. Great and blue tits, robins and goldfinches, are still present, but down in number.

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The region is turning towards Russia and other global players when it comes to security. Tackling the climate crisis would contribute to a solution

Two apparently separate developments in the Sahel are linked by more than geography. Last week, the US confirmed that it will withdraw more than 1,000 troops from Niger after the military junta revoked a security pact – just six years after a new $110m military base opened. Meanwhile, a record heatwave is the latest deadly extreme weather event.

The US had hoped to maintain the military agreement despite last summer’s coup, part of a wave of military power grabs across the central Sahel and the wider region. French troops had already been expelled, with France earlier withdrawing from Mali and Burkina Faso. Mali’s regime also ordered an end to the UN stabilisation mission. Western departures come alongside the growing presence of Russian mercenaries, including the Wagner group.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Sarah Benn is first of three GPs facing disciplinary tribunals this year over climate activism

A doctor who went to jail after a series of climate protests has been taken off the medical register for five months – and still faces being permanently struck off.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) – the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC) – suspended Dr Sarah Benn on Tuesday, having found last week that her fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

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