Published

1 year ago

December 24, 2024

Alice Rush

Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall at the beginning of July this year broke records as the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane ever which was attributed to warmer early-season ocean temperatures. This storm was another reminder of climate change and served to warn hurricane-prone communities that these storm seasons are becoming longer and more dangerous. These extreme weather events pose significant threats to society’s health, homes, and livelihoods in unforeseen ways.

While we can clearly see the catastrophic destruction caused by hurricanes like Katrina which devastated 800,000 US homes and left over a million people homeless for at least a month, hurricanes leave other damages that are not always addressed but are sometimes just as dangerous as the initial disaster. Immediate disaster response usually focuses on restoring power an access to food, housing, and water, as relief organizations come together to aid afflicted communities.

But what about the other damages that are left for hurricane survivors to face after the initial storm response?

For those individuals who can return home, the next step is to survey damages. A Sense of relief may come when a home appears to have survived the storm with little visible water damage. But, it is important not to write off water damage or to save it for a later home improvement project. Water damage and moisture left unchecked leave the opportunity for mold spores to grow and wreak havoc on your health.

Mold, which starts out as Mildew, will begin to grow only 24 to 48 hours after water exposure. Because it grows so quickly, and because it is often not immediately acted on by hurricane and flooding victims, it is safe to ‘assume that mold is already present in homes’ that have endured hurricanes and flooding events, according to the CDC. While this initial period is critical for homeowners, it is often very difficult to actually prevent. And, because mold is sneaky and often undetectable to our senses, it may grow unnoticed in our homes, in our cars, at our work, or amongst our belongings, for years, which can cause various health issues.

So what health issues may occur from mold?

Mold exposure is detrimental to our health and may cause and exacerbate health conditions. Acute exposure may lead people to have wheezing, coughing, itchy eyes, and other common cold symptoms. Prolonged exposure, however, may cause severe allergic responses, skin infections, asthma, and chronic respiratory illnesses. This makes it important to be aware of small changes to our health, particularly in the period coming out of hurricanes and flood events. Still, some types of mold and infections have long incubation periods, making it difficult for individuals and clinicians to connect its symptoms to an actual mold exposure event which slowly manifests after water damage has occurred.

Increases in severe hurricanes and flooding events and subsequent mold exposures have recently brought a lesser-known health condition, Invasive mold Infections (IMI)s, into the spotlight as well. Infection rates of IMI’s have markedly increased particularly in areas hit by extreme weather. After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in 2023, IMI rates increased by 17.5% during the period after the hurricane. Infectious disease epidemiologists from the CDC who surveyed this disease emergence, attributed this rise in cases to mold exposure in homes impacted by the hurricane. While most of those who contracted an IMI were immunocompromised and at a greater risk of illness, researchers have warned that these pathogens are becoming more ‘virulent and potent’ as warming climates offer them favorable conditions for adaptation. IMI’s may soon pose a risk to healthier populations of people as well, and, as climate change continues to spread to areas that historically may face fewer threats of extreme weather events, the risk of mold exposure and contracting these IMI’s may also rise.

Experiences from contemporary pandemics like COVID-19 and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), have shown us that overlooking potential threats to emerging diseases leaves societies unprepared to effectively manage or respond to their future consequences. Climate change is a threat that will continue to impact societies in unprecedented ways, and it is unrealistic to assume immunity from its effects simply for living far away from those areas experiencing more extreme weather.

So, what is currently being done to prevent mold exposure after hurricanes?

The simple answer is: not enough. Without a ‘systematic surveillance’ system for mold exposure in the US, it is difficult to track down sources of mold exposure and those individuals who may be unknowingly exposed. Because rates of mold exposure have been shown to be connected to extreme weather events it could make sense for Disaster relief organizations to develop mold assessment and surveillance systems. For those, disaster-struck communities this would be particularly beneficial, especially since emergency assistance would extend past immediate and urgent needs as well as recognize the delayed, or secondary damages, like mold, which homes and victims often face.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that aid or surveillance by these organizations will improve, or be offered even amidst the growing threat of climate change and subsequent mold exposure. FEMA, the main emergency response agency in the US, recently announced that there is not enough funds to cover this season’s projected relief needs because of record-breaking natural disasters. While this had only been speculatory, those communities hit by Hurricane Beryl in July saw this concern become a reality; FEMA began ‘denying requests for aid’ because of their limited budget and projected finances for this season. Although these disaster relief organizations have an ever-increasing need in our societies, the increasing cost of climate disasters is making it harder for them to provide aid and manage effective response.

It is essential for individuals to know how to prevent mold growth and to manage mold exposure when it happens in your home. To prepare for a hurricane or for a flooding event, protect areas of the home that may be vulnerable to water damage, especially where there are unsealed barriers. If your house is prone to flooding, protect or cover those belongings that might be in contact with water or mold growth.

After the hurricane, it’s important to remember that mold can grow within 24-48 hours in places where there was water exposure. For those individuals returning to their homes after the storm has passed, it is vitally important to check for signs of water damage and to take photos of any potentially affected areas of damage! This is often necessary for individuals hoping to file insurance claims.

When inspecting your home, look for warps in the walls, check your roof for leaks or damage, inspect those areas in your home with little light exposure, and take notice of discolorations or damages to your carpets, floors, and walls.

If you end up finding mold and plan to remove it yourself, make sure to use personal protective equipment to prevent skin contact, inhalation, or ingestion of mold. Additionally, use dehumidifiers and air conditioning units to dry up moisture in the air immediately after a hurricane, and open windows when cleaning out mold.

If you are unsure whether there is mold in your home, or if you notice small changes in your home or to your health in the time after a flooding event, it is best to contact professional mold remediation services to get it checked out and cleaned properly.

As extreme weather events are becoming more frequent across the US, we can learn how to protect ourselves and our homes from mold. By educating friends and family about the risks and prevention measures for mold exposure communities can be more resilient against the long-term impacts of these weather events, which can be just as devastating as the initial storm itself.

Mold exposure and IMI’s are yet another facet of climate change. As the climate crisis grows increasingly complex, it is even more necessary that we shift our focus beyond immediate disasters and prioritize long-term strategies that safeguard the health of communities today and in the future.

Alyssa is a graduate Public Health Student at Lund University in Sweden. Originally from New England, USA, she grew up in the mountains and is passionate about making sustainable systems in public health.

The post Amidst a record-breaking hurricane season, mold may be in your homes. What does that mean for you? appeared first on Climate Generation.

Amidst a record-breaking hurricane season, mold may be in your homes. What does that mean for you?

Climate Change

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Published

16 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Alice Rush

Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.

By David Sun

When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Climate Change

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Published

21 hours ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.

“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.

“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.

“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.

“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”

-ENDS-

Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library

Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Climate Change

DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case

Published

1 day ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Iran war fallout continues

WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.

SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.

COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”

Around the world

WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.

1%

The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Nearly_750_studies_have_found_that_climate_change_has_made_extreme_events_more_severe_or_likely

Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)

Spotlight

New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.

Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.

The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.

Reductions vs removals

The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.

One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.

When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.

The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.

Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:

“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”

‘Global dialogue’

While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.

Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.

Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:

“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”

Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.

Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:

“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”

While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.

She added:

“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”

Watch, read, listen

COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.

SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.

Coming up

23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Pick of the jobs

International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

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