Global Pulse

分类： environment

  • Vultures are disappearing in Nigeria – but the ‘Vulture King’ is fighting to reverse the trend

    Vultures are disappearing in Nigeria – but the ‘Vulture King’ is fighting to reverse the trend

    Long stigmatized as symbols of death and decay, vultures across much of Africa have faded from urban skies with little public mourning. But conservationists are now sounding the alarm: driven by illegal hunting, poisonings, habitat destruction, and demand for their body parts in traditional spiritual practices, multiple vulture species across the continent are teetering on the edge of total extinction. And their disappearance could trigger devastating public health and ecological consequences that many people have yet to recognize. One small community in southeastern Nigeria, however, is bucking this devastating trend, proving that community-led conservation can reverse decades of population decline.

    In Awka-Etiti, a sacred forest surrounding the Nguma deity shrine has served as a safe haven for vultures for hundreds of years. Though most residents identify as Christian, many continue to uphold long-held traditional beliefs that position vultures as sacred, good omens. Local tradition holds that if vultures appear to feed on ritual sacrifices left at the shrine, it means the deity Nguma has accepted the offering and heard the community’s prayers. Because of this spiritual status, vultures have never been hunted by local residents, and the birds have long lived side-by-side with people in the town, scavenging openly in markets and public spaces.

    Chukwuemeka Igwe, a local resident in his 50s who has volunteered with the Nigeria Conservation Foundation (NCF) for six years, has become the public face of the community’s protection efforts, earning him the local nickname Ezeudene, or the Vulture King. “The indigenous don’t hunt vultures,” he explains. Long after he noticed the number of vultures in the area began to drop as outside poachers slipped into the region to hunt the protected birds, Igwe began a grassroots campaign to rally local protection. He travels to markets, bus stations, and public gathering spots to educate residents and visitors about vultures’ critical ecological role, and has worked with community leaders, local organizations, and security teams to block poachers. Local bylaws have now been passed to formalize the birds’ protected status in the area.

    While many people still see vultures as unpleasant or sinister creatures, scientists and conservationists emphasize they are one of nature’s most critical natural sanitation systems. By consuming animal carcasses within hours of death, vultures stop rotting remains from becoming breeding grounds for deadly pathogens. Their uniquely powerful stomach acids neutralize dangerous bacteria, allowing them to safely consume infected carcasses and stop the spread of fatal zoonotic diseases such as anthrax and rabies. “In places where the total collapse of vultures has happened, there has been impact of rising zoonotic diseases,” explains NCF conservation biologist Stella Egbe. Without vultures, ecosystems lose a free, highly effective natural defense against disease outbreaks that can spread to humans.

    Across the continent, vulture populations have plummeted at an alarming rate. BirdLife International, the leading authority on avian conservation for the IUCN Red List, reports that African vulture populations have dropped between 80% and 97% over the past 50 years. Seven African vulture species are now classified as either Endangered or Critically Endangered. Poisoning is responsible for an estimated 60% of all vulture deaths across Africa, according to BirdLife data, while rapid urban expansion has destroyed much of the tall old-growth trees that vultures rely on for nesting.

    The fastest growing driver of decline, particularly in West and Southern Africa, is illegal hunting driven by demand for vultures and their body parts for use in traditional medicine and spiritual practices. Dead adult vultures that once sold for just $18 to $22 in Nigeria now fetch as much as $145 on the black market, Egbe says. Poachers are also increasingly targeting vulture eggs and nests, a catastrophic threat for a slow-reproducing species: vultures do not reach sexual maturity until they are 5 to 7 years old, produce only one chick every 1 to 2 years, and many juvenile vultures do not survive their first year of life. Removing even a single nest or clutch of eggs eliminates an entire year’s reproductive output for a breeding pair, accelerating population collapse. In 2020, more than 2,000 dead hooded vultures were found in Guinea-Bissau, most with their heads removed for use in belief-based practices, highlighting the scale of the crisis.

    Nigeria has become a key hub for illegal vulture trafficking, in part due to its rich biodiversity and porous national borders. Nigerian Customs Service spokesman Abdullahi Maiwada says the agency has made cracking down on wildlife smuggling a priority, seizing protected species and supporting prosecutions of traffickers to meet the country’s commitments under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which bans cross-border trade in endangered vulture species. But Maiwada acknowledges that enforcement alone cannot solve the crisis. “We may not be able to do it without the cooperation or understanding of members of the community,” he says. “If people understand why these species should be preserved, then our enforcement will only be complementary to those who decide to be recalcitrant.”

    That community-centered approach is exactly what has driven success in Awka-Etiti. After years of coordinated protection and local outreach, the results are already encouraging: in 2017, just 20 vultures were recorded in the town’s monitoring surveys; today, that number has climbed to more than 160. “The missing vultures are almost back. If you go to the marketplace now, you see vultures. At one time they disappeared, but now they are coming back,” Igwe confirms.

    Egbe says the Awka-Etiti model offers a blueprint for vulture conservation across the continent. “What we’ve done in Awka-Etiti is one very good example of a success story where people have taken charge of what’s going on in their environment. That makes us happy,” she says. Later this year, conservation researchers from across West Africa will gather in Abuja to review and update the 2022 West African Vulture Conservation Action Plan, where threats from poaching and the role of community-led conservation will top the agenda.

    For Igwe, every returning vulture to Awka-Etiti is a small victory, but he knows the fight to save African vultures extends far beyond his town’s borders. “I’m fighting to make nature exist the way it’s supposed to be,” he says.

  • ‘The right to stay’: Albania’s Italian diaspora sails back to support the Flamingo Revolution

    ‘The right to stay’: Albania’s Italian diaspora sails back to support the Flamingo Revolution

    Thirty-two years after a mass wave of Albanian migration crossed the Adriatic Sea to reach southern Italy’s shores, a new journey is preparing to traverse that same body of water in the opposite direction. On August 20, a three-vessel flotilla of activists from the Albanian diaspora in Italy and the Italian branch of Global Sumud Flotilla will depart from the Italian port of Brindisi, bound for Albania, to stand in solidarity with the Flamingo Revolution — a growing grassroots movement opposing foreign-backed luxury tourism projects that threaten ecologically sensitive protected lands.

    The upcoming voyage is a joint effort by three organizing groups: Mesdhe, an Italian-Albanian activist collective, Palestina e Lire (Free Palestine), an Albania-based pro-Palestine advocacy group, and Global Sumud Flotilla Italy, the national wing of an international civil society network that works to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip and deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave. For organizers, the voyage is far more than a show of support for on-the-ground Albanian activists; it is an effort to connect overlapping global struggles over land dispossession, ecological destruction, and foreign control of natural resources across the Mediterranean region.

    The choice of departure date and location carries deep historical and symbolic weight. Brindisi sits in Italy’s southern Puglia region, the first landing point for hundreds of thousands of Albanians who fled the country following the 1991 collapse of its communist regime. The most infamous of those mass crossings came on August 8, 1991 — exactly 32 years before the voyage’s social media launch — when the cargo ship *Vlora* docked in Bari, Puglia’s capital, carrying roughly 20,000 Albanian refugees crammed into its hold. The arrival triggered one of the fastest, largest repatriation operations in Italian history: more than 17,400 of those refugees were deported within days, after being confined to Bari’s Stadio della Vittoria without adequate food, water, or medical care. Hundreds were hospitalized for dehydration, and violent clashes with police ended with officers opening fire on refugees attempting to escape the overcrowded facility. Tens of thousands more Albanians crossed the Adriatic to southern Italy in the months that followed, reshaping the cultural and social fabric of Puglia forever.

    Today, the same systemic corruption that pushed that generation of Albanians to flee their home country is now selling off Albania’s most precious natural assets to foreign investors, organizers argue. As Albanian activists enter their 68th day of continuous protest against the proposed developments, the diaspora is sailing back to stand with the movement demanding the right for Albanians to remain on and control their own land.

    The Flamingo Revolution takes its name from the ecologically rich Narta Lagoon, one of the sites targeted for private luxury development. At the center of the controversy is Sazan Island, a former military outpost where Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former U.S. President Donald Trump and head of investment firm Affinity Partners, is backing a $1.4 billion luxury resort project. A second Kushner-linked development is planned near Zvernec, located within the protected Narta-Vjosa coastal landscape — a living ecosystem that hosts more than 200 species of migratory birds, including the iconic pink flamingos that give the movement its name, and has been home to Indigenous coastal communities for generations.

    For diaspora activists, the voyage is a convergence of personal memory and contemporary political struggle. “I am part of the Albanian diaspora in Italy. And our memory is also made of the sea,” explained Clara Osma, an Italian-Albanian organizer with Mesdhe and Palestina e Lire, in an interview with Middle East Eye. “It is the memory of the ships of the 1990s, of the stadiums where Albanians were locked up when they arrived, of deportations and the first systems of administrative detention. The diaspora preserves that history. And this is where, for me, memory meets what is happening today with the Flamingo Revolution and why we decided to sail. Because 30 years later, we see another generation of Albanians asking, essentially, for the right to stay, and we want to come back.”

    Enton Nazeraj, an Italian-Albanian artist participating in the mobilization, noted that the protest movement has also helped him reconnect to a fragmented identity shaped by decades of migration. “As the son of immigrants, I feel at home within the revolution. That is why I am taking part in this action. In the revolution I found my identity,” he said.

    Tony La Piccirella, an Italian organizer with Global Sumud Flotilla Italy, grew up alongside Albania’s diaspora community in Puglia, and frames the struggle as shared across the Adriatic. “I was born just before the arrival of the Vlora, so I have never known a Puglia without an Albanian presence. They are precisely the friends I grew up with,” he explained. Organizers point to similar fights against destructive luxury development in Puglia itself, where local and environmental groups are challenging a proposed $115 million Four Seasons resort near Ostuni, a project developed by Israeli real estate firm Omnam. The proposal has faced repeated legal challenges from environmental organizations, with the Puglia regional government even joining the opposition — a situation that mirrors long-running fights against destructive coastal development in other parts of Italy, including Sardinia’s Tavolara region.

    For activists, these local fights are part of a global pattern of resource dispossession that connects the Albanian coast to the Gaza Strip. Organizers emphasize that the same financial and political actors pushing for the destruction of Albanian ecosystems for luxury profit are also behind controversial plans to reshape Gaza after years of war. Kushner has led a $25 billion initiative to redevelop Gaza into a global commercial and tech hub, a plan widely criticized by activists and scholars for facilitating the forced displacement of Palestinian people and erasing Indigenous Palestinian cultural and political identity.

    “The same people who finance the oppression of the Palestinian people, planning to build a tourist hub on the rubble of Gaza, are the ones who aim to bury the ecosystems of Sazan Island under a luxury resort,” Mesdhe wrote in the movement’s official launch statement.

    The three vessels being used for the voyage carry their own history of international solidarity. The boats were originally deployed by the Global Sumud Flotilla for aid missions to Gaza, but were damaged and abandoned after Israeli forces attacked the flotilla and captured participating activists earlier this spring. Restored and repurposed for the journey to Albania, the boats now serve as floating symbols of connected resistance, linking the struggle for Palestinian self-determination to the fight to protect Albania’s coasts.

    “The fact that a piece of the Albanian diaspora is returning in support of the Flamingo Revolution, using boats born from solidarity with Palestine, is very powerful,” La Piccirella said.

    For the Mesdhe collective, the core meaning of the voyage is simple: it reverses the historic flow of displacement that has shaped the Adriatic for three decades. “We are returning not as tourists or investors, but as a diaspora organised around the right of people to remain on their land,” the group said.

  • Brazil Supreme Court upholds laws that led to downfall of Amazon soy moratorium

    Brazil Supreme Court upholds laws that led to downfall of Amazon soy moratorium

    RIO DE JANEIRO – In a divided decision that threatens one of the Amazon rainforest’s most successful deforestation-reduction measures, Brazil’s Supreme Court announced Wednesday it has upheld state laws that strip tax incentives from farmers and companies that participated in the decades-long voluntary soy moratorium. While the court ruled the landmark anti-deforestation pact itself is constitutionally permissible, the ruling creates a major barrier to its survival, just months after most major industry traders pulled out of the agreement.

    The soy moratorium, first launched in 2006 in response to advocacy from global environmental groups and international soybean buyers, was never a binding legal mandate. Instead, it represented a voluntary commitment among major grain traders: they pledged not to purchase soy grown on Amazon land cleared after July 2008, a policy the Brazilian government later formally endorsed. For nearly 20 years, the agreement delivered extraordinary results: a July 2024 study published in the journal *Science* found the moratorium cut deforestation in high-risk Brazilian soy-producing regions by 35% in its first decade, without reducing overall agricultural productivity. Brazil is the world’s top soybean producer, accounting for roughly 40% of global supply; most of the country’s soy cultivation takes place in central and northern states that overlap with the Amazon biome, including Mato Grosso, Para, and Rondonia. The South American nation is projected to produce 171.5 million metric tons of soy in the 2024-25 growing season, per U.S. Department of Agriculture data, with China as the largest export destination.

    The Amazon, Earth’s largest tropical rainforest, plays an irreplaceable role in regulating the global climate. Researchers have repeatedly warned that accelerating forest loss could speed up global warming and disrupt agricultural systems thousands of miles away, from the U.S. Midwest to large swathes of Europe. After declining steadily from the record deforestation rates of the 1990s and early 2000s, forest clearing surged again during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 administration, which drew widespread international condemnation for rolling back environmental protections. Under current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, deforestation has once more fallen to its lowest level in 15 years.

    Critics of the moratorium, led by large-scale soy producers in top-growing states, have long argued the agreement placed unnecessary burdens on business. Brazil’s national environmental code requires Amazon landowners to preserve 80% of their property as native forest, allowing legal clearing of the remaining 20%. The moratorium, by contrast, prohibits any purchase of soy from recently deforested land, even when that clearing complies with national law. In response to producer lobbying, Mato Grosso and other major soy-producing states passed laws earlier this year that revoke tax benefits for any company or farmer that abides by the moratorium’s stricter rules. Within months, all major grain traders withdrew from the pact.

    Wednesday’s court decision has drawn mixed reactions from stakeholders across the political and environmental spectrum. Angela Barbarulo, legal coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil, called the court’s affirmation of the moratorium’s constitutionality “enormously important,” but noted the ruling is fatally undermined by its endorsement of state laws that penalize actors for adopting stricter environmental standards than required by law. “There is an apparent contradiction between recognizing the environmental importance of the soy moratorium while simultaneously validating state laws that can weaken its effectiveness,” Barbarulo said. “When it comes to protecting the Amazon, we should not allow state legislation to create loopholes or incentives that undermine environmental commitments built collectively.”

    The Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE), which represents major soy traders, said the ruling resolves years of legal uncertainty and validates the right of private companies to adopt voluntary sustainability commitments. However, the organization referenced the moratorium in the past tense, indicating Wednesday’s decision is unlikely to bring traders back to the pact. ABIOVE added that it hopes the decision paves the way for “a new phase of dialogue among different parts of the supply chain, with a focus on legal certainty, competitiveness and sustainability.”

    Producers who have long opposed the agreement celebrated the ruling. The Mato Grosso Soy Producers Association said the decision reinforces state governments’ authority to push back against private environmental rules that go beyond national legal requirements, and pledged to continue fighting any future efforts to reimpose the moratorium’s restrictions.

    Climate researchers warn that if the moratorium collapses completely, up to 1.4 million hectares (3.5 million acres) of Amazon rainforest – an area roughly the size of Portugal – could be cleared for soy production over the next decade, erasing years of progress on reducing forest loss.

  • Trump’s ‘energy emergency’ could fast-track massive expansion of Plaquemines LNG export terminal

    Trump’s ‘energy emergency’ could fast-track massive expansion of Plaquemines LNG export terminal

    Just 24 months after launching operations, a major liquefied natural gas export terminal outside New Orleans is pushing forward with a multibillion-dollar expansion, leveraging a controversial Trump administration emergency permitting framework that cuts short environmental oversight and threatens fragile coastal ecosystems in one of America’s most vulnerable land-loss regions.

    Located along the Mississippi River between the Louisiana communities of Myrtle Grove and Port Sulphur, Plaquemines LNG has qualified for expedited approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under the national energy emergency declared by former President Trump in 2024. Under the accelerated process, the public comment window has been slashed from the standard 30 days to just 10 days, closing on July 2, and Corps officials are on track to greenlight the project rapidly.

    If approved, the expansion would more than double the terminal’s footprint, growing it from just under 590 acres to roughly 1,220 acres. According to the facility’s owner, Virginia-based developer Venture Global, the expansion would cement Plaquemines LNG’s status as the largest LNG export terminal in North America. The total price tag for the buildout is estimated at $18 billion.

    But environmental advocates are sounding the alarm, warning that the truncated review process eliminates critical scrutiny of the dredging, in-water construction, and marshland filling required for the expansion. Corps projections confirm the project could damage or destroy up to 470 acres of sensitive wetlands and water bottoms in central Plaquemines Parish, a region already grappling with catastrophic coastal land loss just 25 miles south of New Orleans.

    “Louisiana is already in the middle of an unprecedented coastal crisis,” explained Matt Rota, senior policy director for New Orleans-based environmental nonprofit Healthy Gulf. “Destroying another 400 acres of wetland in Plaquemines Parish is indefensible. Remaining land in the parish is already incredibly scarce, and this project would erase a huge chunk of what’s left.”

    Data bears out Rota’s warning: Over the past 60 years, Plaquemines Parish alone has lost more than 250 square miles of coastal land to a combination of geological subsidence, human-caused sea level rise, and chronic erosion. The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority projects that an additional 300 square miles — roughly half of the parish’s remaining land mass — could disappear within the next 50 years. The crisis extends across the entire Louisiana coast: Since the early 1900s, the state has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of coastal land, an area roughly equivalent to the entire state of Delaware.

    Neither the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers nor Venture Global responded to repeated requests for comment on the project and associated environmental risks.

    The Plaquemines expansion is far from an isolated case. The 2024 national energy emergency declaration opened the door for hundreds of other energy projects across the country to skip rigorous standard environmental reviews required under the Clean Water Act. Last year, the Army Corps identified more than 600 energy projects eligible for the expedited permitting process. Trump justified the emergency order as a necessary step to protect energy security for the U.S. military and domestic economy, framing the action as critical to maintaining a “reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy.”

    The streamlined regulatory process is expected to supercharge the already rapidly growing U.S. LNG export industry. Currently, more than 30 new or expanded LNG export terminals are in the proposal or construction phase across the country. Plaquemines LNG is the newest of four operating LNG terminals in Louisiana, which is now a national hub for LNG exports; Venture Global also owns the Calcasieu Pass LNG terminal in the state, alongside existing facilities at Sabine Pass and Cameron LNG.

    LNG is natural gas cooled into liquid form to enable low-cost shipment to overseas markets, where global demand has surged since 2022 as European nations sought alternatives to Russian piped gas and economies shifted away from higher-emission coal. But critics point out that exporting massive volumes of LNG directly contradicts the Trump administration’s stated rationale for the emergency declaration, which was framed as a way to shore up domestic U.S. energy supplies and improve national energy independence.

    “It’s impossible to argue that expanding an LNG export terminal boosts domestic energy reliability or independence,” noted Griffin Bird, research analyst with the Environmental Integrity Project. Rota went further, arguing: “This has nothing to do with energy security. It’s just sacrificing the Louisiana coast to line the pockets of corporate billionaires.”

    U.S. Energy Information Administration data backs up the export-focused nature of Plaquemines’ operations: Of the 833 billion cubic feet of LNG exported from the terminal in 2024, the vast majority was shipped to Europe, with Germany taking the largest single share at 19 percent.

    Today, Plaquemines LNG ranks among Louisiana’s largest industrial facilities, with 1.3 miles of Mississippi River frontage, three deep-water ship berths, two on-site gas-fired power plants, and nearly 30 miles of connecting natural gas pipelines. It is also one of the state’s largest sources of industrial greenhouse gas pollution. Company permitting records show the facility is legally allowed to emit roughly 8.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and other climate-warming gases each year — an amount equal to the annual emissions from 1.7 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles.

    Only one industrial facility in Louisiana posts higher annual emissions: CF Industries, an ammonia production plant in Donaldsonville that reported 10.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, the most recent year included in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency public emissions data.

    Advocates emphasize that these emissions, combined with the additional carbon released when imported LNG is burned for energy overseas, accelerate the climate change that is already driving sea level rise and more intense storm systems that worsen Plaquemines Parish’s land loss crisis. “Burning more natural gas from this expansion means we lose Plaquemines Parish even faster,” Rota said.

    If the expansion moves forward, the terminal’s total annual export capacity will jump from roughly 1.4 trillion cubic feet to 2.3 trillion cubic feet. While the exact impact on overall emissions is still undisclosed, federal regulatory filings indicate the expanded facility could emit at least 9 million tons of greenhouse gases annually. Venture Global has stated it plans to deploy carbon capture and sequestration technology to inject a portion of the terminal’s emissions into underground geologic formations, though details on the scope and efficacy of the system have not been released publicly.

    The project has earned support from many Louisiana political leaders, who frame the expansion as a major economic boost that will create high-wage jobs for local workers. U.S. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Republican from Jefferson Parish, publicly praised the rapid development of the Plaquemines LNG site during an April 2025 tour of the facility.

    “Four or five years ago, this was nothing but cow pasture,” Scalise told reporters during the visit. “Today it’s the most modern, most efficient LNG export facility in the world, and they’re building another identical facility right next door.”

    This report was originally produced by Verite News and distributed via a partnership with The Associated Press.

  • India’s small steelmakers could save money and cut emissions with switch to renewable power

    India’s small steelmakers could save money and cut emissions with switch to renewable power

    India’s secondary, small-scale steel producers, which collectively churn out nearly 40 percent of the country’s total crude steel output, could slash their electricity expenses by up to a third and deliver dramatic cuts to their carbon footprint by transitioning to renewable energy sources, according to a new collaborative study published Wednesday.

    The analysis, titled *Powering India’s Secondary Steel Transition*, calculates that switching to renewables would cut annual power expenditures between 22 million and 24 million Indian rupees ($250,000 to $275,000) per production unit, a reduction of as much as 34 percent. The report was developed through a partnership between leading industry associations and environmental organizations, including the Confederation of Indian Industry, WWF-India, non-profit climate action group Climate Catalyst, and independent energy think tank JMK Research.

    For most small steel manufacturing operations, electricity makes up as much as 40 percent of total operating costs, ranking it among the sector’s biggest ongoing expenses. In recent years, thin profit margins at many of these smaller firms have been squeezed even further by spiking global fuel costs driven by geopolitical instability including the Iran conflict.

    As the world’s most populous country and one of the globe’s top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change, India has staked its international climate reputation on a pledge to reach full net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. The domestic steel industry alone accounts for roughly 12 percent of India’s total annual carbon output, making decarbonization of this sector non-negotiable to hitting the country’s 2070 target. Beyond climate and cost benefits, transitioning to clean power would also help insulate Indian steel exporters from the European Union’s new carbon border adjustment tax, which came into force at the start of 2026.

    “With rising pressure on all industries across the globe to cut carbon emissions, high-emitting sectors like steel have to seek out cost-effective decarbonization pathways,” explained Prabhakar, a lead author of the report from JMK Research who uses a single name. “India has seen explosive growth in renewable energy capacity in recent years, so switching to renewable electricity is an accessible, low-cost win for cutting carbon pollution.”

    The study identifies the most feasible pathway for small producers as collective, joint investment in shared renewable energy projects, where participating firms draw power proportional to their capital contribution and energy needs. This clustered model dramatically reduces the upfront financial burden that would fall on individual smaller companies, while also creating projects large enough to attract commercial financing and deliver economies of scale.

    “A cluster-based approach fundamentally transforms how small steelmakers can access affordable renewable energy,” Prabhakar noted. “Aggregating demand through existing industry associations makes projects far more attractive to lenders, allows for optimal plant sizing, and spreads investment risk across multiple participants rather than concentrating it on any single operation.”

    Despite India’s total renewable energy capacity tripling over the past 10 years, adoption of clean power among small and medium-sized steel producers has lagged far behind the national average. The report estimates that only around 11 percent of smaller steelmakers currently source any power from renewables, compared to 22 percent of India’s total national electricity mix that comes from clean sources.

    Vinoth Balakumar, of the Confederation of Indian Industry, emphasized that expanding clean energy access for small steel producers is a core requirement for India to meet its ambitious climate commitments. “These companies are ready to transition, and they have recognized that shifting to renewable electricity is a critical step to protect their long-term profitability,” he said.

    Still, the report outlines multiple persistent barriers slowing the transition. Many small steel firm leaders report that both domestic and international buyers increasingly prioritize low-carbon steel, and they are eager to switch, but obstacles including limited awareness of cost benefits, burdensome bureaucratic red tape, high upfront capital costs, and inadequate grid infrastructure are holding back progress.

    “When capital costs are already extremely elevated, it makes the transition unviable for most smaller operations,” said Sanjay Tripathi, a steel company owner based in central India’s Chhattisgarh state. In Gujarat, India’s second-largest producer of renewable energy, small steelmakers say underdeveloped transmission and grid infrastructure leaves them unable to use all the solar power they have already invested in.

    Dhirubai Patel, a steel manufacturer in Rajkot, Gujarat, which hosts one of India’s largest small-scale steelmaking clusters, noted that his firm and other local producers launched a shared solar power plant in 2021, but state authorities regularly order operators to cut solar output by as much as 80 percent due to grid constraints.

    Patel called on the Indian government to upgrade core energy infrastructure and streamline regulatory processes to speed the transition. “We already have many strong national policies in place, but there is a lack of coordination and support across many government departments,” he said. “Regulatory officials are still working with outdated mindsets that need to change to support clean energy growth.”

  • Indonesia haze spreads across region as firefighters battle wildfires

    Indonesia haze spreads across region as firefighters battle wildfires

    A crippling climate-driven disaster is unfolding across Indonesia, where intense wildfires fanned by an unusually severe El Nino event have scorched more than 107,000 hectares of land, forcing widespread school closures and triggering cross-border air quality alarms in neighboring Malaysia.

    This year, much of Southeast Asia is confronting an extended, hotter than average dry season supercharged by one of the strongest El Nino events in recent memory, dubbed the “Godzilla El Nino” by climate observers. The climatic phenomenon, which drives warmer ocean temperatures and altered weather patterns across the tropical Pacific, has created tinder-dry conditions across Indonesia’s vast archipelago, particularly in peatland-rich regions that are inherently fire-prone during dry months.

    Indonesian disaster response authorities have prioritized six hard-hit provinces for their containment efforts: Jambi, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, South Kalimantan, and Riau. Local residents in these regions have described weeks of worsening conditions that have upended daily life. Darwin Romy, an indigenous Dayak resident based in Palangka Raya, Central Kalimantan’s largest city, told reporters that blazes have burned for more than a month, with flames now encroaching on residential neighborhoods. “The smoke has become quite thick. When we step outside, our eyes start to sting. The smell of the smoke is also quite strong,” Romy said, adding that drought has left firefighting teams critically short on water to douse blazes.

    Schools across affected regions have been forced to adapt, with many suspending in-person instruction to protect students from toxic haze. In Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan, Mayor Edi Rusdi Kamtono announced that classes would shift to fully online learning for the duration of the fire crisis, AFP reported. “We have started to feel it, especially at night and in the morning, as haze has already blanketed the city of Pontianak,” Kamtono said earlier this week. The shutdown of in-person schooling has already stretched into three consecutive days in multiple affected provinces.

    To combat the spreading blazes, Indonesian authorities have deployed cloud-seeding aircraft in an effort to trigger much-needed rainfall across fire zones, a last-ditch tactic to supplement ground firefighting efforts when water supplies are depleted. Even popular tourist sites have not escaped the crisis: a separate blaze burned for nearly a week at Mount Bromo National Park, a famous active volcano and top tourist draw in East Java, before it was fully contained on Monday. The fire destroyed roughly 550 hectares of park land, and authorities have ordered the site closed to all visitors since August 8 amid warnings of new active hotspots near the volcano’s caldera. Local disaster chief Gatot Soebroto told reporters that early investigations point to preventable human carelessness as the likely cause: “A person lit a fire, then put it out, but the fire was not fully extinguished,” he explained.

    The impact of Indonesia’s wildfires has already crossed national borders, as thick haze has drifted to parts of neighboring Malaysia. On Wednesday, the small Sarawak state town of Serian recorded an Air Pollutant Index (API) reading of 195, a level categorized as unhealthy by global air quality standards. By Wednesday afternoon, at least nine separate areas across Sarawak had logged unhealthy API readings, Malaysian local media reported. Under the standard API ranking system, readings between 101 and 200 are classified as unhealthy, 201 to 300 as very unhealthy, and any reading above 300 is considered hazardous to all population groups.

  • How a 97-year-old escaped deadly Indian floods on a banana raft

    How a 97-year-old escaped deadly Indian floods on a banana raft

    Deep in the night of July 19, rushing floodwaters swallowed Charing village, a small community in India’s northeastern Assam state’s hard-hit Sivasagar district. For 40-year-old Bornali Baruah and her husband, the hours that followed would become a fight for life: their 97-year-old family member, Lokada Duarah, was nearly bedridden and unable to walk through the rising water. With no rescue craft, no emergency team on site, and neighbors all scrambling to save their own homes and families, the couple improvised. They lashed banana trunks into a rough makeshift raft, lifted Duarah onto it, and set off through the churning current, clinging to each other’s hands and propping themselves steady with wooden sticks.

    An hour of slow, treacherous travel brought the three to safety at a relief camp set up on a nearby national highway. By that time, Baruah’s childhood home had already vanished beneath the surging flood, with water eventually climbing to five feet deep inside the eight-room single-story house.

    This harrowing escape is one of hundreds that unfolded across Assam this summer, when a record-breaking flood event devastated swathes of the region. Official data puts the total death toll at 100, with 456 villages across 10 districts submerged, and more than 1.2 million people impacted across 25 Assam districts. Authorities have established 252 relief camps that currently house more than 75,000 displaced residents, with 52 additional camps activated in the earliest days of the disaster. More than 19,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed, and the floods have reached areas that have never experienced inundation in living memory — including Charing village.

    For Baruah, who has lived in Charing her entire life, with generations of her family rooted in the land, the disaster is a profound shock. “This is the first flood we have experienced in this area in our lifetime,” she explained. While the region is crisscrossed by several rivers connected to the Brahmaputra — the Jhanji 10 kilometers away, the Mitong just 5 kilometers from her property — her home has never sat close enough to a river to face flood risk, and no major inundation has hit the area since a 1950 event decades before she was born.

    The flood destroyed far more than just her family home: it wiped out the livelihood Baruah spent years building after leaving a career in journalism to pursue animal husbandry in 2016. Just three years after switching careers, she was named Assam’s “Best Livestock Farmer,” growing her operation to 300 goats, 500 ducks, 1,000 chickens and a productive fish farm. The disaster erased most of that progress: she lost the majority of her goats, 300 ducks, 300 chickens, much of her fish stock, and the machine used to process animal feed. All of the family’s furniture, personal electronics, vehicles and book collection were also ruined, and no livestock insurance exists to cover the losses. “There is no insurance system here for livestock, especially goats,” Baruah noted.

    The first warning signs emerged on July 17, when the Jhanji River began to swell rapidly. Two days later, heavy rainfall pushed the Brahmaputra and its tributaries past their banks, with the Dikhow and Mitong rivers overflowing and breaching embankments. By the time Baruah and her family evacuated their home nearly a day after water levels started rising, four feet of water already filled the property. They spent 10 days in the relief camp, where five days brought no electricity or mobile connectivity, leaving Baruah unable to even charge her phone. While the government provided basic relief kits with rice, lentils and cooking oil, the most meaningful support came from strangers in the camp: one young woman helped care for the 60 goats that survived the flood, while another tended to sick animals, bringing food and medical care.

    Climate and river experts explain that this unprecedented flood event is part of a shifting pattern for the Brahmaputra Valley. Dhrubajyoti Sahariah, a geography professor and director of the Centre for Brahmaputra Studies at Gauhati University, notes that while flooding has always been a natural annual occurrence in the low-lying Brahmaputra Valley, today’s floods differ drastically from historical norms. “What has changed is the frequency, intensity and severity of floods well beyond historical norms,” he said.

    The Brahmaputra is one of the world’s largest river systems, ranking among the top five globally for both water discharge and sediment load, with most sediment carried from its origin in Tibet. As the river enters Assam’s vast, populous floodplains hemmed in by surrounding hills, it slows down, deposits sediment, and naturally drives erosion and seasonal flooding. Severe flood events are not new: the 2004 Assam floods killed 251 people and displaced 12 million. But recent years have brought far more extreme events that reach once-unaffected areas.

    Sahariah attributes this shift to a combination of human activity and extreme rainfall. The recent 2025 floods were triggered by days of continuous heavy downpour across Upper Assam and neighboring Nagaland’s Mon district, which caused widespread flooding and silt deposition across Sivasagar, Charaideo and Jorhat districts. Today, floods are reaching once-spared areas due to increased settlement on active floodplains, widespread deforestation, mining and hill-cutting that add excess sediment to river systems, and infrastructure development that does not account for the region’s unique hydrology.

    Addressing the growing flood risk will require coordinated action that extends beyond Assam’s borders, Sahariah argues: many of the Brahmaputra’s tributaries originate in neighboring hill states, but current flood control planning is done only at the state level within Assam. “What is needed is basin-scale planning,” he said, calling for cross-state coordination and improved understanding of the river system’s changing geography to build more effective long-term flood management.

    For Baruah, the disaster is a deeply personal upheaval that has forced her to adapt to a new reality. After the floodwaters receded, she and her family returned to the area, staying temporarily with a nearby neighbor while they plan to repair their damaged home and move back within a week. She has no plans to leave Charing: the economic and social resources required to relocate are simply out of reach for her family. Instead, she is learning to live with the new flood risk that has entered her life.

    Baruah is already planning future adaptations: if heavy rain returns, she will need to raise her home’s foundation to keep water out, though she is still uncertain how to fund or execute the work. She also plans to build a raised emergency platform for her family to retreat to during floods, and stockpile emergency food and drinking water ahead of monsoon season. When asked if she considers herself a climate refugee, she rejects the label.

    “No. If we regain our economic and mental strength, life will return to the way it was before,” she said. “We will have to learn to coexist with the floods.”

  • Watch: Tide of rubbish blankets Philippines river

    Watch: Tide of rubbish blankets Philippines river

    A thick, suffocating tide of discarded waste has engulfed a major river in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, following several consecutive days of intense downpours that washed accumulated trash from surrounding urban areas into the waterway.

    Footage of the disaster shows municipal cleanup workers wading through waist-deep, murky water littered with plastic containers, food packaging, rotting organic matter and other discarded materials, working tirelessly to gather and remove the massive volume of refuse that now covers the river’s entire surface.

    The extreme rainfall that triggered this event is part of a broader pattern of intense weather events impacting the Southeast Asian archipelago, where poor urban waste management infrastructure has long left waterways vulnerable to massive trash accumulation during storm surges and heavy precipitation events. Environmental activists have repeatedly warned that uncollected municipal waste in densely populated urban neighborhoods of Manila regularly gets washed into connected river systems during monsoon season, creating severe risks to both aquatic ecosystems and public health for communities that live along the river’s banks.

    The ongoing cleanup operation is expected to take multiple days to complete, as workers race to clear the waste before it flows out into Manila Bay, where it would exacerbate already critical marine pollution issues in the region.

  • Drone captures devastating aftermath of Spokane wildfires

    Drone captures devastating aftermath of Spokane wildfires

    Newly released aerial footage captured by an unmanned drone has laid bare the full scale of destruction left behind by recent wildfires that swept through parts of Spokane. The sweeping, bird’s-eye view of the affected area offers a haunting perspective on the disaster, showing entire residential neighborhoods reduced to charred rubble. Where family homes once stood, only concrete foundations remain, blackened and empty. In a particularly striking detail that underscores how suddenly the blaze forced residents to flee, many burned-out, twisted shells of cars still sit in the driveways of the leveled properties, abandoned when owners evacuated ahead of the advancing fire line. The dramatic imagery has drawn renewed attention to the growing threat of destructive wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, a region that has seen a steady increase in large-scale fire events in recent years linked to rising temperatures and prolonged dry conditions. Local emergency management officials have confirmed that the damage captured in the footage matches preliminary on-ground assessments, as teams continue working to clear debris, support displaced residents, and investigate the cause of the blaze.

  • Key Amazon cases reach Brazil’s Supreme Court following Lula’s defeats in Congress

    Key Amazon cases reach Brazil’s Supreme Court following Lula’s defeats in Congress

    SAO PAULO – In the coming days, Brazil’s highest judicial body will deliver a series of landmark rulings that stand to fundamentally alter the trajectory of Amazon rainforest protection and the rights of the Indigenous communities who have stewarded these lands for millennia. The batch of pending cases touches on three critical, interconnected flashpoints: long-disputed Indigenous land title claims, recent congressional rollbacks of long-standing environmental safeguards, and streamlined approval rules for large-scale infrastructure projects. All these disputes have landed on the Supreme Court’s docket after a series of clashes between Brazil’s left-leaning executive branch and a conservative-dominated legislature, with environmental advocates increasingly framing the court as the last remaining bulwark against the erosion of protections for the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

    For more than three years, Brazil’s Congress, led by a powerful bloc of lawmakers aligned with the country’s massive agribusiness sector, has advanced a slate of measures that environmental and Indigenous rights groups argue violate the environmental and indigenous rights protections enshrined in Brazil’s 1988 Constitution. Current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who campaigned on a pledge to reverse the devastating deforestation surges of his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, has used executive power to veto a number of these anti-environmental measures outright, and struck out harmful provisions in others. But lawmakers in Congress, where agribusiness interests hold a clear majority, have repeatedly voted to override Lula’s vetoes, forcing the disputes into the judicial system.

    These court battles lay bare the stark political constraints facing the Lula administration, even as it has won praise for cutting Amazon deforestation by nearly 50% during its first term and redirecting federal resources toward ecological conservation and sustainable development. With conservative agribusiness-aligned lawmakers outnumbering the administration’s allies, Lula’s government has consistently struggled to advance its environmental agenda through the legislative branch. Lawmakers in recent years have also shifted more control of the federal budget—an indispensable tool for political bargaining and coalition-building—away from the executive branch, further weakening the administration’s leverage.

    “The government is extremely weak on the legislative playing field,” explained Suely Araújo, policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory, a coalition of more than 50 Brazilian environmental nonprofits. “It regularly opposes bills that roll back environmental protections, but it simply lacks the political capital to persuade enough members of Congress to align with its position.”

    Brazil’s agribusiness sector is one of the largest and most economically influential parts of the country’s economy, accounting for nearly a quarter of national GDP. The country is the world’s top exporter of beef and soybeans: official trade data shows that between January and July 2026, 50% of Brazil’s beef exports and 70% of its soybean exports went to China, Brazil’s largest single trading partner. Agricultural expansion for cattle ranching and soy cultivation is the leading driver of Amazon deforestation, which releases massive stores of carbon stored in rainforest vegetation and soils and accelerates global climate change. The Amazon plays an irreplaceable role in regulating global and regional rainfall patterns and limiting global temperature rise, making its protection a core priority for global climate action. Agribusiness groups have pushed back against criticism, arguing they oppose illegal deforestation and pointing to gains in productivity that allow output to expand without additional forest clearing. The Parliamentary Agricultural Front, the leading caucus for agribusiness interests in Congress, did not respond to requests for comment for this report.

    The most closely watched of the pending cases centers on a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that rejected the so-called “time limit thesis,” a legal position long championed by the agribusiness caucus. That thesis would restrict Indigenous land claims exclusively to territories that Indigenous groups physically occupied, or had active legal claims over, when Brazil’s current Constitution took effect on October 5, 1988. Proponents of the cutoff argue it delivers much-needed legal certainty for rural landowners. But Indigenous organizations counter that the rule ignores decades of forced displacement and violent expulsion of Indigenous communities from their traditional lands during the aggressive agricultural expansion of the 20th century.

    The Supreme Court began reviewing final motions from all parties last Friday, with final voting scheduled to conclude by August 18. Justices are set to address critical follow-up questions, including new compensation rules for non-Indigenous occupants of disputed lands and potential new deadlines for completing the official demarcation of Indigenous territories. Ricardo Terena, a lawyer for the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, the country’s largest Indigenous advocacy network, warned that some of the proposals on the table would effectively bring future Indigenous land demarcation to a halt. The new rules would add layers of costly administrative hurdles and expand compensation rights for non-Indigenous occupants, allowing those groups to remain on disputed territory until payment is finalized, a process that can take decades.

    One of the many Indigenous communities whose futures hang in the balance is the Kawahiva, an isolated, uncontacted group that remains nomadic in the Amazon rainforest of Mato Grosso state. Brazilian authorities first confirmed the Kawahiva’s presence in the region in 1999, but only completed the physical demarcation and official mapping of their territory earlier this month. According to UK-based Indigenous rights nonprofit Survival International, the remaining Kawahiva are hunter-gatherers who survived decades of violent attacks and introduced diseases that wiped out much of their population, and they continue to avoid contact with outside settlers.

    Beyond the Indigenous land rights case, the Supreme Court will take up two other high-stakes cases on Wednesday that will shape how the Amazon is governed. First, justices will review an injunction issued by Justice Flávio Dino that temporarily blocked state laws passed by top soy-producing states that effectively ended the Brazilian Amazon Soy Moratorium, a landmark voluntary pact that has operated for nearly 20 years. The moratorium barred major grain traders from purchasing soy grown on recently deforested land in the Amazon, and independent analysts credit it with drastically cutting deforestation linked to soy production. The pact collapsed earlier this year after the state legislatures passed laws revoking tax benefits for any trading company that participated in the agreement, leading major global traders to withdraw from the pact.

    The second case Wednesday challenges a new national environmental licensing law that took effect in February, which streamlines and fast-tracks permit approvals for large infrastructure projects including mines, highways, and industrial plants. Environmental advocates argue key provisions of the law are unconstitutional, including a rule that allows project operators to issue their own environmental permits for projects with moderate environmental impact, eliminating independent government review.

    Araújo said she expects the court to strike down at least the most clearly unconstitutional provisions of the new licensing law, noting that the law is already causing harm to the Amazon even before the court issues its ruling. She pointed to the ongoing paving of a controversial cross-Amazon highway and plans to dredge a major Amazon river that moved forward without the full environmental impact assessments required under previous rules. The Ministry of Environment, which has backed challenges to both the state laws ending the soy moratorium and the most harmful provisions of the licensing law, noted that the moratorium had proven it could cut deforestation while allowing agricultural output to grow. The ministry added that Brazil does need a more efficient, technically sound licensing system to support needed infrastructure investment, but that the current law undermines core standards needed to protect the Amazon and address climate change.

    The office of the president’s chief of staff, which coordinates the administration’s relations with Congress, declined to comment on pending cases before the Supreme Court. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental reporting is supported by grants from multiple private foundations, with AP retaining full editorial control over all content.