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Massive conservation program pledges to put communities first. Mongabay Constance Malleret 5 Jan 2026
- The Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) is a massive conservation program that has helped reduce deforestation across 120 conservation areas in the Brazilian Amazon and avoided 104 million metric tons of CO2 emissions between 2008 and 2020.
- A new phase of the program, called ARPA Comunidades, will now focus on supporting the communities who live in and protect the forest, by helping them increase their revenue through the bioeconomy or sale of sustainable forest products.
- Backed by a $120 million donor fund, ARPA Comunidades aims to increase protections across 60 sustainable-use reserves in the Brazilian Amazon spanning an area nearly the size of the U.K., directly impacting 130,000 people and helping raise 100,000 out of poverty.
Humanity achieved a fateful milestone last year. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has 2024 as the hottest year on record, and the first year in history with an average global temperature rising 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial period — significantly increasing dangerous climate risks. In fact, 2023 and 2024 may well be the hottest years in 100,000 years, with all indicators pointing to it getting hotter, bringing ever-worsening global impacts. “The temperature-related extreme events witnessed last [Northern Hemisphere] summer will only become more intense,” warned Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service
Delhi, a sprawling city in northern India, is nestled in the country’s Indo-Gangetic Plain where summer daytime temperatures average 32°C (90°F). But a series of persistent anticyclonic wind circulation events over the northern Indian Ocean, coupled with the fading El Niño, caused clockwise wind gusts to sink over the city, creating a persistent high-pressure heat dome that pushed 2024 temperatures to relentless highs. For weeks, brutal daytime temperatures stayed above 40°C (104°F), with little respite by night. The city’s solar heat-absorbing built environment made conditions even more miserable and dangerous. For Kumar, who spends 12 to 15 hours a day on the road making deliveries, the heat was life-threatening — as it was for the rest of the city’s 33.8 million people, many of whom work outside or lack air-conditioning. In Kumar’s cramped South Delhi neighbourhood, heat radiated off the walls and street day and night in a textbook example of the urban heat island effect. He was dehydrated and irritable most days. “Everywhere you look there’s a traffic jam in this city. Stuck in jams, under the hot sun with hot air blowing on your body; it was unbearable,” Kumar remembers. Normally, air pollution is perceived as a winter problem in Delhi, when a thick blanket of low-altitude smog gets trapped by cool air hanging above the metropolis. That smog is mostly composed of toxic PM2.5 particulates — very tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and can cause cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Every winter, PM2.5 levels peak due to seasonal crop burning and the exploding of fireworks during the Diwali festival, turning Delhi into one of the world’s most polluted places.
But now, as global warming and urban development bring higher temperatures over the city in summer, the co-occurring impacts of intense heat and air pollution compound in less obvious but seriously unhealthful ways. Epidemiologist Poornima Prabhakaran, director of the Centre for Health Analytics Research and Trends at Ashoka University, calls the increasing ground-level ozone trend worrying. India has the highest death burden of any nation from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, attributable to ground-level ozone levels, according to the “State of Global Air” report published annually by U.S.-based Health Effects Institute in partnership with UNICEF; ozone killed 238,000 people in India in 2019. People also continue breathing other toxic contaminants released from tailpipes and smokestacks. But “The impacts of [these] secondary pollutants have not been given as much attention compared to the impacts of smog and PM2.5, probably because of lack of awareness,” Prabhakaran said. Prabhakaran is working with scientists internationally, developing databases to track the impacts of air pollution (including PM2.5 and ozone) on a variety of outcomes, such as respiratory and cognitive health functions. “We’re trying to analyse, with data, every health outcome that we can get our hands on,” Prabhakaran said, adding, “Intermediate risk factors like hypertension, high blood pressure, fasting glucose, high lipid levels — all of those cardiovascular outcomes — are known to worsen with even chronic, low-dose [air pollution] exposure.”.........read onhttps://india.mongabay.
3 Dead in Catastrophic Christmas Flooding in California; East Coast & Midweest Brace for Heavy Snow.
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3 dead in catastrophic Christmas flooding in California; East Coast and Midwest Brace for Heavy Snow. NBC News Rebecca Cohen, Kathryn Prociv, Kate Reilly and Phil Helsel 26 Dec 2025 An atmospheric river that dumped rain on California most of the week was easing Friday as New York City and other parts of the Northeast could get nearly a foot of snow. Three people were dead in California by Friday after major storms swept through the state, causing days of rain and flooding over the Christmas holiday — while in New York City, a storm was forecast to dump around a half-foot of snow. While the atmospheric river that sent flooding rain over California was winding down Friday the snow was forecast to begin Friday afternoon and evening in the Northeast, forecasters said.
The three weather-related deaths in California occurred Sunday through Wednesday, officials said. Sacramento County sheriff's deputy James Caravallo died in a single-vehicle crash on his way to work at a correctional center on Christmas Eve, the sheriff's office said. NBC affiliate KCRA of Sacramento reported roads were wet and officials believe the crash was weather-related. In San Diego, Roberto Ruiz, died Wednesday after a large tree branch fell on him, causing him to go into cardiac arrest, NBC San Diego reported, citing San Diego Fire-Rescue. The storms in California were brought on by an "atmospheric river," which was winding down Friday, the National Weather Service said. Flood watches remained for the Los Angeles region through Saturday because of runoff fears, it said. Wrightwood, California, a community in the mountains northeast of Los Angeles, got nearly a foot of rain. One resident who lives in the area said he was shocked to wake up to a “river running through our property.” The floods reached homes and buried cars in mud. Air and boat crews spent the holiday rescuing California residents trapped in high floodwaters, pulling some off of roofs.
Winter weather hits the Northeast..... A section of the Northeast including most of Pennsylvania and New York, as well as Connecticut and Massachusetts were under winter weather advisories or winter storm warnings Friday evening. The winter weather in the Northeast and the West Coast on Friday contributed to more than 6,000 delayed flights and 1,600 cancellations into or out of the U.S., according to flight tracking website FlightAware. New York City area airports led in cancellations......read on https://www.nbcnews.com/
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul has declared a state of emergency for areas and counties pointed to be impacted by the storm system and New York City Emergency Management NYCEM has issued a travel advisory through Saturday. For the first time in over three years, New York City saw a Winter Storm Warning, though snow totals were around 4" as of Saturday morning. In eastern Pennsylvania, areas near Scranton and the suburbs of greater Philadelphia received over 0.5" of dangerous ice.Hundreds of PennDOT crews were at the ready to deal with the multi-threat storm delivering active winter weather, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) Deputy Communications Director Brad Rudolph said. In Connecticut, the Connecticut Department of Transportation’s (CTDOT) fleet of 650 snow plows and specialized snow removal equipment will remain active until the roads are clear of snow and ice, Gov. Lamont said. https://www.yahoo.com/news/
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Small cities in the US Rust Belt are leading an urban transformation charge. After empty streets and ruined economies, cities try to write a new chapter with new apartments, breweries and thriving arts scenes. Guardian Stephan Starr in Evansville Indiana Thu 4 Jul 2024 Life in Evansville, Indiana, during the 20th century mirrored much of the rest of the US’s industrial midwest: booming growth powered by manufacturing in the early decades – then a steep decline that left its streets empty and economy in practical ruins. Since its heyday as an industrial powerhouse in the 1960s, Evansville’s population has fallen by 18%. But today, following decades of urban decay, downtown life in this city of 115,000 people is changing. It boasts hundreds of new apartments, a host of breweries, a thriving arts scene and even a Taylor Swift-themed escape room. “It’s a more vibrant space. You’ve got more residents downtown, which means more businesses, more hotels [and] a new medical campus,” the mayor of Evansville, Stephanie Terry, said recently of the current downtown compared to a decade ago. “People are really energized.”These and other changes prompted Logan Jenkins, a southern California native, to move to Evansville last year as part of a relocation program that offers a number of perks to move there and to other cities. “I would have been one of 10 such businesses in Indianapolis, or one of 20 in Cincinnati,” he said. Jenkins works with tech startups and the local university, and he said that living downtown means he is within walking distance of about 20 restaurants and cafes.
“The big thing for me is that there’s times where I don’t have to drive for a week,” he said. Evansville isn’t alone. At a time when some major US cities are grappling with business closures and high rents, a number of small, post-industrial cities in the midwest are experiencing a boom centered on their downtown cores. In Lansing, Michigan, another former industrial hub that’s lost tens of thousands of residents since its mid-20th century heyday, local and state authorities plan to invest more than a quarter-billion dollars on housing, a music and arts center and other community projects. Similar experiences are playing out in Dayton, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; and other smaller, once-struggling manufacturing towns. The turnaround is being fueled by a combination of affordable housing, flexible work environments and other opportunities. The Joe Biden White House is spending billions of dollars across the midwest in an attempt to turn the Rust Belt into America’s “Silicon Heartland” – meaning that thousands of new jobs are en route to the region. A 40-minute drive north of downtown Evansville, Toyota is investing $1.4bn to manufacture a new electric vehicle that is expected to bring hundreds of new jobs into the area.
The rise of work from home means that cities are looking towards concepts such as the 18-hour streetscape, which places recreation and housing alongside, rather than secondary to, access to work. In many towns in the midwest, that means breweries inside residential apartment buildings, free outdoor concerts and whitewater parks opening up.In 2019, Evansville wasranked the city with the most homeowners in their 20s per capita in the country. Affordable housing projects on the city’s Lincoln Avenue, Market Street and Bond Street have all broken ground or opened in recent years, with the number of downtown housing units rising from 176 a decade ago to 568 today – with another 228 under construction. But while there’s been significant progress for smaller mid-western cities, challenges remain.......read on https://www.theguardian.
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As many Adults don't seem to be moved to take Positive Climate Action, maybe they should read this book as well, as their kids are are the ones who will suffer from the future stark threats of Climate Change- Editor.......Design studio Formafantasma has created a picture book for children, exploring humans' relationship to the natural world through a fable-like adventure. Titled The Down Under: The Curious Fall of a Boy Who Knew Nothing and Becomes Everything, the book tells the story of a child who, while wandering over a field covering a former mining site, begins to hear the thoughts of a nearby flower. Urged to consider reality from the perspective of this plant – and soon a spider, a canary and tiny soil-dwelling collembolas – he begins to see that nature has been just as busy creating, building and living as the human world. https://www.dezeen.
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Climeworks, Direct Air Capture, and the Brutal Reality of Pulling Carbon from the Sky. The poor performance of the Climeworks direct air capture plant in Iceland should be a turning point. Not just for one company, but for an entire class of false solutions. Clean Technica Michael Barnard May 2025 The poor performance of the Climeworks direct air capture plant in Iceland should be a turning point. Not just for one company, but for an entire class of false solutions.In 2024, Climeworks’ direct air capture (DAC) Mammoth plant in Iceland captured just 105 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s not per day, not per week, that’s total, across the year. For context, that’s less than the annual tailpipe emissions from a dozen long-haul trucks, or roughly one-thousandth of what the company said the plant was built to remove. In mid 2025, the company began laying off a minimum of 10% of its ~500 staff. For a firm that raised over $800 million in equity and subsidies, hailed as a pioneer of direct air capture, the numbers are sobering. But they are not surprising. They are merely the inevitable result of colliding hopeful techno-optimism with the brutal constraints of physics, economics, and scale.
DAC has always promised a seductive narrative: the ability to suck carbon out of the sky, store it underground, and buy ourselves a climate mulligan. It promised to clean up after fossil fuels without requiring too many lifestyle changes. It was a technology that said yes — to oil companies, to airlines, to governments slow-walking their emissions policies. And for a time, it looked like it might work. Big names like Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify lined up to buy carbon removal credits at $600 a ton or more. Government agencies began pouring in cash. The US 45Q tax credit was sweetened to $180 per ton. Europe and Japan set aside funds. And dozens of startups bloomed. But beneath the marketing sheen, the physics was never on DAC’s side.
Removing CO₂ from ambient air is a thermodynamic slog. The concentration is a measly 0.04% — less than one molecule in 2,500. Capturing it means moving vast volumes of air across chemically active surfaces, then applying heat, vacuum, or electric fields to regenerate the sorbents. The most mature systems, like Climeworks’ solid sorbent modules or Carbon Engineering’s hydroxide-calcination loop, require on the order of 2,000 to 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per ton of CO₂. Even newer concepts that promise electrochemical capture still hover around 700 to 1,000 kWh per ton. And that’s just to capture it. Compressing, transporting, and injecting it underground adds another layer of complexity and cost. Back in 2019, I analyzed Carbon Engineering’s system in detail and concluded that it wasn’t ready for prime time. The energy requirements were steep, the system architecture was complex, and the economic case relied heavily on theoretical scale and generous subsidies. Fast forward to today, and those conclusions still hold. Carbon Engineering’s Squamish pilot captured a few hundred tons over several years. Its first commercial plant, Stratos in Texas, is still under construction. Occidental Petroleum acquired the company in 2023 not because it had a viable climate solution, but because it had a narrative that could buy time for oil and gas. Stratos, too, will run on natural gas. The captured CO₂ will be injected underground and earn 45Q credits, while Occidental continues to sell hydrocarbons. This isn’t carbon removal. It’s corporate theater wrapped in a green ribbon.
Both Climeworks and Carbon Engineering rely on energy-intensive processes that significantly affect their net CO₂ removal performance. Climeworks uses solid amine sorbents that require low-grade heat, typically around 80–100 °C, to regenerate. While its Icelandic operations claim to run on geothermal heat and renewables, life-cycle analyses show that even with clean power, the system still re-emits about 10% of the CO₂ it captures — due to embedded emissions in materials, equipment fabrication, and operational energy overhead. When fossil-derived heat or grid power is used, the carbon intensity increases sharply.
Carbon Engineering’s system is even more demanding, using around 8.8 GJ of thermal energy and over 360 kWh of electricity per ton of CO₂ removed. In its commercial configuration, it burns natural gas to provide high-temperature heat for calcination, capturing the resulting CO₂ from combustion alongside that from the air. While this design recovers some of the emissions, the system still emits roughly 0.1–0.2 tons of CO₂ for every ton it captures — less if powered by renewables, more if grid electricity or inefficient fuel use is involved. In both cases, without access to extremely low-carbon energy, the DAC process risks becoming a net emitter or offering only marginal removal at best. That low-carbon energy is much better used to power electric cars or heat pumps to avoid more CO2 being emitted in the first place, rather than used to extract homeopathic amounts of CO2 from the air.
Direct air capture, like the broader class of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, has been used less as a mitigation tool and more as a justification tool. Capture projects at the smokestack were supposed to save coal. They didn’t. DAC was supposed to save aviation. It isn’t. Now it’s being positioned as the backstop for net-zero oil and gas production, a way to square the carbon ledger while the meter keeps running. The problem is that the math never adds up. To remove even one gigaton of CO₂ annually — the lower end of what IPCC pathways suggest we might need by mid-century — we would need thousands of DAC plants the size of the one Climeworks can’t get to work. That would require hundreds of terawatt-hours of energy annually, roughly equivalent to doubling the electricity use of a mid-sized industrial nation.....read on https://cleantechnica.com/
g Carbon from the Sky.
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