Published

2 years ago

August 14, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

Key developments

Wildfires resurfaced

PANTANAL FIRES: Climate change made the wildfires that scorched the Pantanal wetlands earlier this summer 40% more intense, according to a new rapid attribution study covered by Carbon Brief. Around 2,500 fires occurred in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands in June 2024. The World Weather Attribution service found that “the month was the hottest, driest and windiest year in the 45-year record”, creating conditions that were highly conducive to wildfires. Separately, Reuters reported on a new study that found that fires, logging and “other forms of human-caused degradation, along with natural disturbances to the Amazon ecosystem, are releasing more climate-warming CO2 than clear-cut deforestation”.

EXTENDED IMPACT: In North America, 90 large fires burned nearly 4.5m acres across the US during the first days of August, the New York Times reported. The “devastating wildfires” spread ash and smoke “over large swathes of the continent…destroyed homes and charred through thousands of acres of farms and forests”, the outlet added. Particularly dry, hot weather affected the western US and caused four wildfires across Colorado, leaving one person dead and forcing hundreds of people to evacuate, according to the Washington Post.

BEYOND AMERICAN CONTINENT: On the other side of the ocean, wildfires swept Athens, where thousands of residents were evacuated as fires crossed into suburbs and flames rose up to 25 metres, BBC News reported. According to the outlet, June and July were “the hottest on record” for the European country, while Greece’s civil protection minister has “warned that extremely dangerous weather would continue”. Meanwhile, Algeria’s north-eastern Kabylie region has experienced blazes since last Friday, Agence France-Presse reported. The newswire added that homes, olive groves, hen coops and beehives were engulfed by flames. Most of the wildfires are now under control, a civil defence official said.

Offsets up in smoke

UP IN SMOKE: The Park fire – one of the “largest wildfires in California’s history” and is still blazing – destroyed around 45,000 acres of trees enrolled in the state’s carbon-offsetting programme, the Financial Times reported. According to analysis by the not-for-profit research firm Carbon Plan, cited in the story, buyers of credits included oil refining, power and lumber companies. The story also pointed to an unsold “buffer pool” of credits meant to replace losses to “credited trees” from wildfires, drought or pests. California authorities told the FT that the buffer was “quite sound”. But Carbon Plan scientist Dr Grayson Badgley said that the pool needed updating to “reflect the realities of fire risk” and that the state “should stop approving carbon credit projects in risky wildfire regions”.

STOLEN CREDIT: Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, warned international buyers of carbon credits to be “vigilant” after police uncovered “allegedly fraudulent emissions-offset schemes on stolen land in the Amazon”, the Financial Times wrote. Silva said the issue was a “serious problem” and “could damage the credibility [and] integrity of this mechanism”, the story added. Separately, Bloomberg reported that a key oversight body is set to review carbon offsets generated from forestry projects “in the coming months”, after it found methods to assess renewable energy credits to be “insufficiently rigorous”.

FOREST THINNING: Meanwhile, scientists writing in the Conversation cautioned against the Australian forest industry’s plans “to remove trees from native forests, potentially including national parks, and claim carbon credits in the process”. They pointed to Forestry Australia’s “problematic proposal” that “purports to reduce environmental impacts, but still produce wood products”. It does so through a method known as “adaptive harvesting”, which involves forest thinning, or practices such as delaying logging until trees are older. The group’s acting president, William Jackson, responded to the piece, saying that forest thinning would be “conducted for ecological reasons, cultural values or fire management or other reasons” and that he “disagrees with the view that thinning makes forests more fire prone”.

Spotlight

Joshua trees are flowering more frequently due to climate change

This week, Carbon Brief explores a new study, published in Ecology Letters, looking at the impacts of climate change on the Joshua tree, a type of yucca plant that is native to California and other parts of the south-western US.

Climate change is causing Joshua trees – the iconic plant that dots the landscape of the south-western US – to flower more frequently, a new study has found.

Despite the plant’s importance as a keystone species in the Mojave Desert and other parts of the south-west, many studies of climate impacts on Joshua trees lack nuance – in part due to the resources needed to collect field data.

Using a machine-learning model trained on crowdsourced images from the biodiversity platform iNaturalist, researchers were able to examine the impacts of climate change on the trees since 1900.

The lead author of the study told Carbon Brief that “there’s a lot of potential” to use the team’s newly developed methods to study the impacts of climate change on other flora.

Beyond binary

Much of the existing work looking at climate change impacts on Joshua trees is based on so-called “distribution models”, Prof Jeremy Yoder, an evolutionary biologist at California State University, Northridge, told Carbon Brief.

These models are based on identifying the climatic factors that are closely associated with the presence or absence of a particular species. Then, he explained, researchers can “take a future climate projection and ask where conditions will look like places where we know Joshua trees are today”.

In the new study, instead of simply looking at the distribution of the species, the researchers modelled the flowering of the trees – using specific weather data to draw connections between a flowering year and the climatic conditions leading up to it.

Using this model, they were then able to “hindcast” previous instances of Joshua tree flowering. They matched up their predicted flowering with historical botanical collections, field notes and even newspaper reports and found that they “line up pretty well”.

By taking the hindcast as a whole, the team could then explore how climate change has affected Joshua tree flowering over the past century and a quarter. Yoder told Carbon Brief:

“That’s concretely new information that we did not have about Joshua trees before.”

Flowering frequency

Overall, the researchers found a “slightly rising frequency” in the flowering of Joshua trees over the past 123 years. The flowering was most closely related to year-to-year variability in rainfall.

But increased flowering on its own might not necessarily be beneficial to the trees. “Flowering is just the first step in regenerating Joshua tree woodland,” Yoder said – meaning that more frequent blooms will not necessarily result in a growing population. While a flowering Joshua tree may produce thousands of seeds in a year, those seeds will result in just a few seedlings.

Then, it’s “an even smaller subset of seedlings that start to get to something closer to an established tree over a couple of years”, he said. And some of the conditions that seem to be influencing the flowering frequency – such as contrasts in year-to-year rainfall – are “probably not good for seedling survival”.

Beyond the scientific result, Yoder is excited by the potential for further applications of the hindcast modelling. He told Carbon Brief:

“Hopefully this is something that folks can use to start to get that richer view of what climate change is doing to natural populations.”

News and views

SKYROCKETING: Researchers have warned that the current H5N1 bird flu outbreak “could reach Australia this spring”, according to the Guardian. Australia has thus far remained bird-flu-free since the strain emerged in 2020. Although some researchers think the island’s virus risk “is low” due to the country being outside the “flyways of migratory ducks and geese, [which are] the main hosts of bird flu viruses over long distances”, others say “there is still a risk, and we need to be ready for it”. Mongabay also covered the bird flu transmission, highlighting that it is the “fastest-spreading, largest-ever outbreak” and has infected “hundreds of species pole-to-pole”. The outlet reported that the virus has spread to at least 485 bird species and 48 mammals and that “the risk to humans [is] rising”.

WHEAT STOCKS: Iraq’s wheat harvest surged more than 20% this year due to a combination of “extraordinary” rainfall and improved irrigation, Bloomberg reported. The outlet added that the harvest “marked a second year of self-sufficiency in the grain” for Iraq. Meanwhile, France is facing “one of the worst harvests in the last 40 years”, according to the French agriculture ministry, as reported by Politico. The country – which is the EU’s largest producer of soft wheat – “experienced a very wet planting season last year and not enough sun in the spring and early summer”. Farmers’ unions in France are seeking governmental assistance, the outlet said.

SEABED SHAKE-UP: Leticia Carvalho was elected the new head of the International Seabed Authority, Australia’s ABC News reported, where she “will be the first woman, first oceanographer and the first representative from Latin America to serve in this position”. Carvalho unseated the incumbent secretary-general, Michael Lodge, who has presided over the ISA since 2016. The New York Times noted that Lodge “has been a polarising figure at the seabed authority” and has faced accusations that he “was too closely aligned with the mining industry”. Prior to the election, Foreign Policy Magazine profiled Carvalho and her proposed approach to the ISA.

COCA PROBLEM: Colombia’s programme for substituting coca crops in favour of legal alternatives “is failing to achieve its goals due to design, implementation and security issues”, Mongabay reported. The outlet pointed out that coca leaf growers and pickers “haven’t received the agreed technical or financial support from the government”, resulting in lower incomes and forcing them to engage in other activities, such as illegal mining, to survive. The programme was created one year after the 2016 peace deal between Colombia’s government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the outlet said. It added that a recent UN assessment of the programme found that coca production has actually increased 13% between December 2021 and December 2022.

NEW SEEDS ON THE BLOCK: On 9 August, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi launched 109 “high-yielding, climate-resilient” seed varieties at three experimental plots in New Delhi, Livemint reported. Among these was a rice variety “ideal for coastal saline areas” and a wheat variety “tolerant to terminal heat”, it added. Another Livemint long-read looked at the impact of climate change on tur dal – India’s second most consumed legume – finding that dal prices soared “by a staggering 60% between July 2022 and July 2024”. Meanwhile, an Economic Times analysis found that food inflation in India “has remained above 6% since July 2023, driven mostly by vegetables”. Overall inflation climbed to 5.1% in June this year with “most of the pressure…coming from rising food prices”, Bloomberg reported.

Watch, read, listen

‘DEFORESTATION MAFIA’: Inside Climate News delved into the legal battle to save Argentina’s Gran Chaco forest from corruption and deforestation.

‘THINKING LIKE BEARS’: NPR’s Short Wave podcast addressed what scientists are doing to conserve grizzly bears in the US – including “thinking like bears”.

VULNERABLE SCIENTISTS: A Nature career feature explored the mental health issues that rainforest scientists experience while watching “the ongoing destruction of the forest[s]”.
REASONS TO WINE: In his Bloomberg column, David Fickling wrote about how a warming climate “could play havoc” with grape vines and imperil future wine production.

New science

Summer monsoon drying accelerates India’s groundwater depletion under climate change

Earth’s Future

New research found that changes in India’s summer monsoon, alongside warmer winters and increased demand, are driving “rapid depletion” of groundwater. Using satellite data, on-the-ground observations and a hydrological model, scientists observed that India’s groundwater declined substantially over 2002-21. They attributed the reduction in groundwater to “reduced groundwater recharge and enhanced pumping to meet irrigation demands” amid lower rainfall. They concluded: “Groundwater sustainability measures including reducing groundwater abstraction and enhancing the groundwater recharge during the summer monsoon seasons are needed to ensure future agricultural production.”

Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger

Nature

Heat extremes in the sea containing the Great Barrier Reef over January-March in 2024, 2017 and 2020 were the “warmest in 400 years”, according to a new study. Using a multi-century reconstruction of sea surface temperature data on the Coral Sea on the Australian coast along with climate model analysis, the researchers highlighted the “existential threat” that human-caused climate change poses to the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem. Without “urgent intervention”, the researchers wrote that the reef risks “experiencing temperatures conducive to near-annual coral bleaching” in future. They noted: “In the absence of rapid, coordinated and ambitious global action to combat climate change, we will likely be witness to the demise of one of Earth’s great natural wonders.”

Marine heatwave-driven mass mortality and microbial community reorganisation in an ecologically important temperate sponge

Global Change Biology

The 2022 marine heatwave in Fiordland, New Zealand – the “strongest and longest” to occur there – killed more than half of the marine sponges living there, a new study revealed. The researchers analysed the impacts of the marine heatwave – which had a maximum temperature of 4.4C above average and lasted for 259 days – on a particular photosynthetic sponge. They suggested that what killed marine sponges was not bleaching – which affected more than 90% of the sponges – but the high temperatures killing their tissues directly. The research concluded that the remaining sponges “had mostly recovered from earlier bleaching”, probably due to a microbial community shift as an “adaptive response”.

In the diary

12-16 August: Meeting of the working group on benefit-sharing from digital sequence information | Montreal
26-30 August: Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting | Tonga
28-29 August: EU Dialogue on national biodiversity strategies and action plans | Brussels

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org.

The post Cropped 14 August 2024: Worldwide wildfires; Offsets up in smoke; Joshua tree spotting appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Cropped 14 August 2024: Worldwide wildfires; Offsets up in smoke; Joshua tree spotting

Climate Change

Planning For Life After Coal Cost a Montana County Commissioner His Seat

Published

5 hours ago

June 20, 2026

Alice Rush

The fiscal future of Musselshell County is uncertain after the coal mine that anchors its economy helped defeat the official working to diversify the area’s revenue streams.

By Jake Bolster

Robert Pancratz couldn’t believe it.

Planning For Life After Coal Cost a Montana County Commissioner His Seat

Climate Change

El Niño Is Here and Will Have ‘Big Consequences’ for Global Weather

Published

5 hours ago

June 20, 2026

Alice Rush

A deep pool of warm water that forms in the Western Pacific could bring strong storms to Southern California and throughout the South while increasing the risks of Western wildfires.

Interview by Jenni Doering, Living on Earth

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with author Kevin Trenberth.

El Niño Is Here and Will Have ‘Big Consequences’ for Global Weather

Climate Change

Water Is a Relative, Not a Resource

Published

6 hours ago

June 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Rethinking clean water in First Nations through the sovereignty and rights of water itself.

This month, Canada tabled a new version of its First Nations clean-water legislation, and the shift in its language is quietly telling.

The previous bill, C-61, the First Nations Clean Water Act, contained something notable for a Canadian statute: it “recognized and affirmed” that it is a human right of every individual on First Nations land to have access to clean and safe drinking water, albeit only “in accordance with” that Act. That bill lapsed when Parliament was prorogued in early 2025. Its replacement, Bill C-37, introduced this June, frames the same idea more cautiously. Rather than recognizing a right outright, it commits to “further the progressive realization, for individuals on First Nation lands, of the human right to safe drinking water, as protected by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.” It is a subtle change in wording, but those close to the file noticed it at once.

It is worth sitting with that for a moment—not as a matter of politics, but of permanence. A right to water that one law can affirm and the next can soften is, by its nature, a provisional thing. The water itself, meanwhile, does not wait on language. Communities like Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario have lived under a drinking-water advisory since 1995—long enough that children born into the advisory are now raising children of their own under it. Dozens of advisories remain in place across the country, including long-term ones that governments pledged to end years ago. The wording on the page changes; the water on and under the ground does not.

So we are left with a quieter, harder question. If the right to water can be written and unwritten, strengthened and softened, then was it ever truly secure—and on what foundation did it rest? Perhaps the difficulty lies in the frame itself: the idea that water is something granted to people, rather than something with a life, a continuity, and a standing of its own.

Let’s flip the script entirely. Not water as a human right, but the rights of water—and the sovereignty of water itself.

The trap inside a good word

“Water is a human right” is a sentence written in defence of people, and people do need defending. But notice what it assumes. It makes water an object of human entitlement—a thing we are owed, a benefit we are due, a resource to be delivered to the human end of a pipe. The framing puts humanity at the centre and water at the service end.

That framing is not neutral. It is the same logic that lets a corporation bottle billions of litres from an aquifer and call it commerce, and the same logic that lets a data centre evaporate a river to keep its servers cool. Once water is framed primarily as a resource to which humans hold rights, every argument becomes an argument about which humans, and how much, and at what price. The water itself never gets a seat at the decision-making table. It is only ever the prize.

Indigenous law begins somewhere else. Water is not a resource. Water is a relative.

Water governs

Consider what water actually does before any human claims it.

At the smallest scale, water is the medium of life itself—the solvent inside every living cell, the substance through which a body becomes a body. We are mostly water, carrying memory and breath. At the largest scale, water is the author of the landscape: it carves valleys, lays down floodplains, and decides where forests stand, where deserts begin, where fish spawn, and where birds rest on their migrations. Rivers do not flow through the land as guests. They govern it. The shape of a watershed is water’s own decision, written over millennia.

And water does not act alone. It moves in relationship with the sky and the land, in a rhythm older than any law a government could pass. The land holds the water; the water nourishes the land; the sky lifts the water and returns it as rain and snow. Earth needs all three—water, sky, and land—to keep its rhythm, and nowhere in that rhythm are humans required. The cycle ran for billions of years without us, and it would still run on without us. This is the part we are slowest to accept: water’s agency and autonomy do not depend on human recognition. We do not animate the water. We arrived in a world that the water had already made.

To say, “I have a right to water,” then, is to get the order of things backwards. Water does not owe its existence to our rights. We owe our existence to it.

Stewards, not owners

If water holds its own sovereignty, where does that leave Indigenous Peoples—who have asserted, rightly and urgently, a relationship to water since time immemorial?

The answer is not ownership. It is stewardship. And the difference is everything.

For generations, Indigenous nations did not merely survive within their waters; they thrived within them, because thriving required something colonial water management has never had: an awareness of water governance as a living obligation. To be a steward is to hold something in trust—to carry responsibility for it—not to hold title over it. Around the sharing circle, the supreme decision-maker is not the Chief, the council, or the loudest voice. It is the water itself, the life force on which every being in the circle depends. The people speak with the water. They do not speak over it or for it.

This is the distinction that even good-hearted advocacy can blur. When a First Nation insists on its right to clean drinking water, the demand is just and overdue. But it should never be misread to mean that the people have become the final owners of the water—its de facto decision-makers, its masters. They are something more dignified than owners. They are part of water’s reality, participants in its self-determination—relatives who carry the duty to keep a sacred balance, not proprietors who treat it as something to be extracted for their own gain.

Claiming water as a possession, even with the best intentions, quietly diminishes the natural law and order that set the conditions for life in the first place. Stewardship enlarges human beings. Ownership shrinks both humanity and the water.

A deplorable inheritance

None of this excuses Canada. If anything, it indicts it more deeply.

The boil-water advisories that have shadowed First Nations for decades are not a plumbing failure. They are a colonial inheritance. The Crown displaced Indigenous Peoples from the waters they had stewarded for millennia and confined them within a reserve system designed to control and assimilate. That system broke the relationships between people, land, and water that made a nation a nation. When you sever people from their waters and then deny them safe water in the cramped territory you have confined them to, you are not just failing to deliver a service. You are continuing a project of dehumanization—one that delegitimizes even the most basic human rights affirmed by the United Nations.

Those rights are now recognized internationally. The UN General Assembly has affirmed the human right to water and sanitation, along with the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) sets out the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the requirement of free, prior, and informed consent for decisions that affect their lands, territories, and resources. Canada has endorsed these instruments. And Canada keeps failing—failing the people who are sorely in need of clean water, and, more profoundly, failing to protect the most precious source of all life: the water itself.

Here is the part that should unsettle every Canadian, not only First Nations. If First Nations communities are treated as the acceptable outliers of poor water quality—the places where unsafe water is tolerated because the people are out of sight—then what becomes of everyone else when the water runs short? It is not hypothetical. We already buy water by the litre. We already accept that water is something sold to us in plastic. The First Nations water crisis is no exception to Canada’s treatment of water. It is a preview of it.

The thirst of empire

Look at how thoroughly water has already been turned into a commodity. National and international conglomerates draw countless billions of litres from springs and aquifers, truck them into grocery stores and urban centres, and sell them back to us for billions in profit—not because the water needs bottling, but because thirst is reliable revenue. And now a new and enormous mouth has opened: Artificial intelligence runs hot, and the data centres that power it drink to stay cool.

Recent research and policy analysis estimate that global data centre operations consume hundreds of billions of litres of water each year, with use projected to roughly double by 2030 as AI workloads expand. A single large facility can require millions of litres of water per day for cooling in some regions. Some studies estimate that running a sequence of AI prompts can consume enough cooling water to fill a small bottle—a figure magnified across billions of queries daily, often in already water-stressed basins. The industry now promises closed-loop cooling and “water-positive” pledges, and some of that innovation is real. But the demand curve is climbing far faster than the solutions curve.

This is precisely the danger hidden inside “water as a human right.” If water is a right held by humanity, for humanity’s benefit, then there is nothing in that framing, by itself, to stop humanity from drinking the planet dry to feed its conveniences and its machines. The right to water, untethered from any duty to water, becomes a licence for its destruction. If these conglomerates can find ways to extract water at a planetary scale, they can find ways to use it responsibly—protecting the sources, the watersheds, the living bodies of water, and the governance of those bodies. The question is whether we will compel them to do so, and on whose terms.

Water self-determination

So how do we shift the ideology from water as a human right to water as a living relation to which we are responsible?

Across Canada, we can start by naming what we are actually defending: water self-determination—the water’s own right to flow, to be whole, to keep its rhythm with the land and the sky. And together, we can recognize Indigenous Peoples not as the new owners of that sovereignty but as its treaty partners and shared stewards—the rights holders charged with maintaining a sacred sovereignty that was never theirs, or anyone’s, to control.

This is not abstract. It already exists in Canadian law and governance experiments. In 2021, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Regional County Municipality of Minganie declared the Magpie River (Muteshekau shipu) a legal entity, the first river in Canada to hold rights of its own. The river was granted rights to flow, to maintain its biodiversity, to be safe from pollution, and to have legal standing in court. Guardians appointed by the Innu and the municipality can speak (with, not for) on the river’s behalf. It is a guardianship model: the water holds the rights, and the people hold the responsibility to defend them. This is the rights of water and water self-determination actualized—Indigenous law and the global rights-of-nature movement meeting in a single river.

That is one pathway. Real solutions to the First Nations water crisis cannot stop at finally laying the pipe and lifting the advisory—though that must happen, urgently, and is owed. They must go further than anything the Crown currently holds in place:

Protect water at its source, not just at the tap—through Indigenous-led source-water protection, Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, and guardianship that treats a watershed as a living body with standing.
Recognize the sovereignty and rights of water bodies, following Muteshekau shipu, so that a river can be defended in court before it is harmed, not mourned after.
Honour free, prior, and informed consent as a floor, not a courtesy, so that no decision over source water, drinking water, or wastewater is made without the consent of the Nations whose relatives those waters are.
Hold the commodifiers accountable—bottlers, extractive industries, and the AI infrastructure now drinking deeply—to the protection of the sources they profit from.
Centre Indigenous governance not as consultation after the fact but as authority, because the knowledge of how to keep the water’s balance was never lost; it was only ignored.

A balance kept for seven generations

The point of all this is not to take away the right to clean water from the people who are dying for lack of it. It is to anchor that water in something stronger than a clause that a future Parliament can delete. A human right to water can be granted and weakened. The rights of water, held in trust by the people who have always known themselves to be its relatives, are grounded in a law older than Canada—natural law, the law of the sharing circle, where the water decides because every life in the circle depends on it.

We are not the source of water’s sovereignty. We are part of its reality, and we have the chance to be its stewards instead of its undoing. That is the work: to remedy the atrocity Canada engineered in First Nations communities, and at the same time to build pathways of protection that honour the water itself—so that the rhythm of water, land, and sky is kept whole, not for our convenience, but for seven generations and the seven beyond them.

Water gave us life. The least we owe it is a right to its own.

By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock

Photo by Yunus Tuğ on Unsplash

The post Water Is a Relative, Not a Resource appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.