POLICYWATCH
Danger in the Air
The Trump administration started 2026 off with an especially grim policy change: When placing limits on certain deadly air pollutants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will no longer factor in the value of human health — only the expense of regulations for polluters.
People hike in Los Angeles, California, on a smoggy day. As of 2026, the US Environmental Protection Agency will no longer be factoring in the value of human lives when placing limits on two harmful air pollutants: ozone and fine particulate matter. Photo by Stephen Leonardi.
The new policy will apply to two particularly harmful pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone. Both have been linked to a range of health impacts, including asthma, dementia, heart disease, and premature death.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, told The New York Times. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, EPA is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
The change marks a significant break from precedent. For decades, the federal government has placed a monetary value on a human life — $11.7 million, to be exact — and used that metric to weigh the costs of regulation against the benefits to human health. It’s believed that this long-term practice has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution in the United States.
It’s no surprise that environmentalists responded to the decision with outrage. “Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is saying the quiet part out loud with this new announcement: They have no interest in actually protecting American lives and keeping our communities healthy and safe from toxic pollutants,” Patrick Drupp, policy director with the Sierra Club, said in a statement. “So much for making America healthy.”
FINDINGS
Liquidation
Water experts from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health recently inventoried Earth’s most precious resource and released a dire outlook — “global water bankruptcy.” Nearly three-quarters of humanity lives in countries classified as water-insecure, around 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water, and 3.5 billion people cannot access proper sanitation. “These figures indicate that water-related risks are now systemic rather than marginal,” the institute’s new report states.
Billions of people lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and the majority of the world’s population lives in water-insecure countries. Photo by Daniel Bachhuber.
The consequences are visible on every continent: rivers that no longer touch the sea; aquifers pumped down until land subsides (10 inches a year in some places); wetlands, glaciers, and lakes that have shrunk or disappeared (more than half of the world’s lakes have lost water since the 1990s). Then there are the knock-on effects for food, employment, migration, and national security.
Addressing such a wicked problem requires shifting from crisis management to bankruptcy management, the researchers argue. This “calls for a transformational fresh start in human-water relations.” It also requires developing governance and legal levers to not only protect water but also the underlying hydrological and natural systems that make it available in the first place.
While the report is a sobering wake-up call, it’s also an invitation to use water as a bridge to promote global cooperation, starting at the 2026 UN Water Conference to be held later this year. Indeed, water connects us all.
THE GREAT OUTDOORS
Sticky Business
Something has gone amiss with the latest America the Beautiful card, the $80 annual pass that allows entry into more than 2,000 federal recreation sites across the United States. For starters, the 2026 card isn’t, well, beautiful. Instead of showcasing a sweeping landscape or iconic animal as previous iterations have, the new card shows a stern Donald Trump nudging himself in front of an empty-eyed George Washington. It’s no wonder that many nature-loving park visitors have felt an urge to cover these faces.
Illustrations by Jenny Mccarty.
Soon after the new pass was released, people started pressing on stickers, in part to bring beauty back to the America the Beautiful card. While some opted to simply put a peach emoji over Trump’s face, Jenny McCarty, a graphic designer and national park volunteer, was one of several artists who created park-themed stickers designed to fit over the whole card. McCarty, who sold $16,000 worth of stickers in the first month, is sending all proceeds to conservation nonprofits.
But passholders, beware. In mid-January, the US government updated the National Park Service card policy to say that passes could be voided if they’ve been “defaced or altered.” Enforcement is up to park staffers. So, like wheatpasted posters on city streets, stickers on national park passes have become acts of protest — against partisan politics on public lands. “The Interior’s new guidance only shows they continue to disregard how strongly people feel about keeping politics out of national parks,” McCarty told NPR.
Meanwhile, the Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit against the administration for effectively turning the cards into a partisan platform. On the bright side, an altered pass has become a calling card for those who love public lands. Let’s see if their activism sticks.
CALL OF THE WILD
Junk Food and Junco Beaks
Since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, we’ve known that birds can adapt to changing conditions by changing the shapes of their beaks. But can humans directly influence such avian evolution? It turns out we can — and fast.
A wild dark-eyed junco munches on a bug using its slim beak that’s evolved for seeds and insects. Photo by Alex Fu.
According to a December study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, soon after the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), shut down due to the pandemic in 2020, the urban-adapted beaks of resident dark-eyed juncos morphed into the more slender style of their wildland cousins. Years later, once students returned to school, the junco beaks reverted back.
Like most cases of animal evolution, the reason is most likely due to food. In natural forest habitats, dark-eyed juncos survive on seeds and insects, which require longer, slimmer beaks. At UCLA, by contrast, juncos eat like students — pecking on cookies, sandwiches, and pizza — which favors beefier beaks. Take away student lunches, the study suggests, and slimmer beaks prevail.
While there have been other examples of bird beaks transforming due to human influence — namely Anna’s hummingbirds growing longer, larger beaks to reach reserves of sugar water left in neighborhood birdfeeders — the UCLA study highlights just how rapidly these physical transformations can occur.
“I think it’s just important for us to know what our effects are,” Pamela Yeh, one of the study’s authors, said to The New York Times, “and know how dramatic our effects can be.”
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Busting the Data Center Boom?
Public backlash against data centers in the United States heated up in December when a coalition of more than 230 environmental groups demanded a halt to the construction boom, driven by the growing generative artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency industries. The green groups — including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Food & Water Watch — in addition to dozens of state organizations, called on Congress to support a moratorium on new developments.
Their letter directed attention to the environmental harms of data centers, which consume huge amounts of energy and water and are spiking greenhouse gas emissions and US electricity bills. This is on top of the societal costs of AI, ranging from lost jobs to socioeconomic instability.
“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security,” the coalition’s letter states.
The letter followed actions by several cities — from Athens, Georgia, to Tucson, Arizona — to stop new data centers, which are expected to double US electricity consumption by 2030. But not all cities have been successful.
This is where Congress comes in, the green groups argue. Without proper regulations to protect communities and the planet, they say, new data centers should be put on ice.
UPWELL
Mining Moratorium
For years, Norway has eagerly — and controversially — advocated for deep-sea mining, standing out as one of the industry’s top supporters. That seems to be changing: This past December, the Nordic nation made a major shift when it announced a pause on all deep-sea mining exploration and exploitation until at least the end of 2029.
Greenpeace projects a protest message in Lysefjord in southern Norway. In December, the Nordic country gave in to pressure from environmental groups and paused all deep-sea mining exploration until the end of 2029. Photo by Daniel Müller / Greenpeace.
The decision was celebrated by ocean advocates, who have long pointed to the dangers of deep-sea mining, from habitat loss to carbon emissions. “This must be the nail in the coffin for the deep-sea mining industry in Norway,” Haldis Tjeldflaat Helle, a Greenpeace Nordic campaigner, said in a statement. “Any government that is committed to sustainable ocean management cannot support deep-sea mining.”
Back in 2024, Norway became the first country to open its waters — which extend into the vulnerable Arctic region — to deep-sea mining. The country’s ambitions soon stalled, however. In an effort to garner the required support for its state budget, the Labour-led government agreed not to open the first round of licensing in 2025, a concession to the Social Left Party. Facing similar budget negotiations for 2026, the government effectively extended the moratorium through 2029, when the current legislative session ends. It also cut funding for seabed mapping, which is seen as critical to mining efforts.
Norway has argued that deep-sea mining is essential for the green energy transition, that minerals like zinc and cobalt contained in seabed nodules will be invaluable. But green groups contest this assertion, noting that technological innovations combined with recycling could drastically cut demand for minerals in the coming decades.
Norway’s pause comes at a contentious time in deep-sea mining negotiations. The International Seabed Authority has struggled to enact regulations, and the Trump administration has assumed authority to permit mining in international waters. Advocates hope the moratorium may spur a broader shift — beyond the Nordic country.
FINDINGS
Early Birth
A rapidly warming Antarctic is significantly changing when some penguin species are having babies.
Researchers with Penguin Watch, the largest penguin monitoring project in the Southern Ocean, tracked 37 Adélie, chinstrap, and gentoo penguin colonies from 2012 to 2022 and discovered that these seabirds are starting breeding at least two weeks earlier than a decade ago, likely in response to climate change. The finding, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology in January, is being called the fastest-recorded shift in phenology (recurring events influenced by the seasons) in any bird species, and possibly any vertebrate.
A colony of gentoo penguins nests near a cracking glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula. Photo by Juárez Martínez.
All three penguin species live in the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the most rapidly warming habitats on Earth. Temperatures at the colony locations are increasing up to four times faster than the Antarctic average. Researchers say it is unclear whether the shift in breeding season is an adaptive response or not, since it threatens to disrupt penguins’ access to food availability, and increase interspecies competition.
“Our results indicate that there will likely be ‘winners and losers of climate change’ for these penguin species,” the study’s lead author, Ignacio Juárez Martínez of Oxford Brookes University, said in a statement. “The increasingly subpolar conditions of the Antarctic Peninsula likely favor generalists like gentoos at the expense of polar specialists like the krill-specialist chinstraps and the ice-specialist Adélies.”
It’s also unclear how much more elasticity these species will be capable of if temperatures keep rising. “Penguins play a key role in Antarctic food chains, and losing penguin diversity increases the risk of broad ecosystem collapse,” Martínez said.
POLICYWATCH
Deep Cuts
The Trump administration has been slashing its way through the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), claiming that states can take on more responsibility for environmental oversight. But guess what? More than half of US states are woefully unprepared. It turns out they, too, have been hacking away at their own environmental agencies for the past 15 years.
According to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), since 2010, 27 US states have downsized budgets and 31 have cut staff at their own public health and environmental agencies that usually work in collaboration with the EPA. Collectively, these states have cut about $1.4 billion from their environmental agencies, or about 33 percent of the nation’s spending on state-level environmental regulation, says the report.
“These deep reductions mean that … not only will the federal pollution cop no longer be on the beat, state authorities may not show up either,” the report notes. As a result, there will be fewer inspections of polluting industries and weaker enforcement. “It really means that more American communities are at risk of being exposed to industrial pollution,” Jen Duggan, EIP’s executive director, told usa today.
Seven states — including Texas, where industry is growing rapidly — have reduced pollution-control funding by at least one-third, increasing the risk of industrial accidents and exposure to pollution. Mississippi slashed its environmental agency’s budget by 71 percent from 2010 through 2024; South Dakota by 61 percent.
One bright spot from the report: A handful of states — including California, Colorado, and Massachusetts — have moved in the opposite direction, building up their state environmental agencies.
TABLE TALK
The Cost of Chemicals
Our modern food system is built on synthetic chemicals. We spray our crops with pesticides, package much of what we eat in plastics and other toxic materials, and cook our meals in pans treated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. This reliance on chemicals, from production through to consumption, comes with a steep cost to our health — and a hefty toll on our pocketbooks.
Chemicals are pervasive in every stage of the global food system, from the pesticides sprayed on crops to the plastic and other toxic materials used to package foods for the grocery store. Photo by Kwon Junho.
That’s the finding from a new report published by Systemiq, a company working to accelerate a shift to a sustainable economy. Researchers selected four classes of synthetic chemicals used widely throughout the food system — phthalates, bisphenols, pesticides, and PFAS — and then estimated the combined health costs associated with food-related exposures. They tallied metabolic disruptions, reproductive harms, respiratory illnesses, developmental impacts, and more, and priced the resulting global health costs at $1.4 to $2.2 trillion annually, or 2 to 3 percent of global GDP.
“All of us in today’s world … are exposed to hundreds of chemicals and there is an increasingly strong body of evidence that these chemicals are an important cause of disease in people of all ages, but especially in children,” report coauthor Philip Landrigan, the director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, told The New Lede.
But it’s not just human health that’s impacted. The authors also estimated the ecological harms associated with food-related uses of these chemicals, which are now pervasive in our air, water, and soil. They put the environmental price tag at $640 billion annually. However, they described that figure as “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to environmental damage, since many ecosystem impacts “remain unpriced.”
Correcting course won’t be easy. Industry influence on regulations and risk management is a potent barrier, the authors wrote. But the report charts a way forward: Eliminate unnecessary chemical uses in our food system. Then redesign the system to reduce overall chemical reliance. Finally, clean up the mess we’ve already made.
TOXICS
Roundup Retraction
A scientific journal that published a paper in 2000 claiming there was no evidence that Monsanto’s widely used glyphosate herbicide, Roundup, can cause cancer, has retracted it. In the announcement, the journal cited “serious ethical concerns” and questions about the validity of the research.
“This article has been widely regarded as a hallmark paper in the discourse surrounding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate and Roundup,” wrote toxicologist Martin van den Berg, the co-editor-in-chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, in the retraction notice released in late November 2025. “However, the lack of clarity regarding which parts of the article were authored by Monsanto employees creates uncertainty about the integrity of the conclusions,” he wrote, referring to internal emails from Monsanto staff, released via lawsuit in 2017, suggesting that company employees helped ghostwrite the paper.
The retraction came at the urging of Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, and Alexander Kaurov, her then-postdoctoral researcher. Together, the two conducted an analysis that found the paper in the top 0.1 percent of academic literature on glyphosate cited as evidence of Roundup’s safety.
The US Environmental Protection Agency still lists Roundup as safe. But as per the judgment in a lawsuit filed by environmental, public health, and farmworker advocacy groups, the federal government has until the end of this year to re-examine if glyphosate is actually safe to use.
AROUND THE WORLD
Planet Plastic
It takes only a brief inventory of our lives and living spaces to see plastic’s near total infiltration. It’s ubiquitous in our food packaging, clothes, and personal care items. It’s a core component in our computers, our water pipes, and our cars. It’s used in doctor’s offices, agricultural fields, and daycares. It is, in a word, everywhere.
We now know that’s a problem — and a big one. The fossil fuels used to make plastics harm the communities in which they’re produced and drive global heating. The chemical additives used to give plastics their flexibility, color, and water-resistance expose humans to a range of health risks, and they go on to contaminate our soil, water, and air. The massive quantities of waste generated by the industry pollute virtually every nook and cranny of the planet, harming wildlife wherever plastics lodge.
Though the dangers posed by plastic stretch across the globe, production does not. About two-thirds of all plastic is produced in just seven countries where petrochemical companies are aided by exemptions, tax credits, and other subsidies. Even as a chorus of community activists, environmental advocates, and scientific experts sound the alarm on plastic’s many dangers — and call for a global plastics treaty to tackle the issue — top-producing countries continue to stand in the way of action, and petrochemical companies continue ramping up production. Currently, the plastic barons are succeeding: Plastic production is on track to double or even triple by 2050.
Here are some of the nations most responsible for our plastic pollution crisis — countries that have historically opposed tackling the issue, but are nonetheless essential for reining the industry in.
Sources: Climate Home News, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, Deutsche Welle, Earth.org, Natural History Museum, Nature, Statista, Visual Capitalist, World Population Review, Zero Carbon Analytics
1 China
One nation stands above all others in the realm of plastic production, plastic industry subsidies, and plastic waste: China. In 2022, an estimated 34 percent of all plastic polymer was produced in the East Asian nation. China also provided more than $10 billion in subsidies for industries producing plastic feedstocks — aka oil and gas. That’s 41 percent of the global total. State-owned Sinopec is the top plastic-producing company in the world, and PetroChina is not far behind. Much of this production — and resulting environmental harm — is concentrated in eastern China along the coast, putting people and ecosystems there at heightened risk from industrial pollutants.
China also stands out with respect to plastic pollution. A 2024 study estimated that the country ranks fourth globally when it comes to total plastic waste entering the environment, with some 3.1 million tons dumped into Chinese lands and waters every year. Yet, while cumulative plastic pollution for China is high, per-capita rates are among the lowest in the world.
2 United States
The United States is the world’s second-largest plastic producer, responsible for creating 13 percent of the global total. Much of that plastic is produced in the so-called “Chemical Corridor,” a 150-mile stretch along the Mississippi River in Texas and Louisiana that serves as a major hub for the petrochemical industry — and that suffers from severe air pollution as a result. A subset of the corridor has become known as Cancer Alley due to the particularly high rates of cancer and other illnesses among the mostly Black residents there.
Even under the Biden adminis-tration, the United States showed little leadership when it came to global plastic negotiations, tending to favor action on waste and recycling over production. For its part, the Trump administration has been clear on its stance: The US will oppose any binding caps on plastic production or limits on chemical additives.
3 Saudi Arabia
Well known for its vast oil reserves, Saudi Arabia is perhaps less known for its prominent role in the global plastics industry. But the Middle Eastern nation ranks behind only China when it comes to subsidizing Big Plastic, providing nearly one-third of the world’s plastic-feedstock subsidies in 2022. It also produces 5 percent of the planet’s plastic polymer, putting it among the top four producers. Alongside other plastic majors, Saudi Arabia has vocally opposed binding production limits during plastic treaty negotiations.
4 South Korea
Tied with Saudi Arabia as the
world’s third-ranking plastic producer, South Korea has one of the largest petrochemical industries in the world. The nation also stands out among the world’s top plastic producers for its lack of domestic sources for fossil fuels.
In 2024, South Korea hosted what many hoped would be the final round of discussions on a global plastics treaty. Yet negotiators walked away empty-handed after a small but vocal group of countries opposed caps on plastic production.
5 India
India produces 4 percent of the world’s plastic, ranking it among the top-five nations globally. Like other countries that produce a disproportionate amount of the world’s virgin plastic, India has stymied efforts to enact a global treaty limiting plastic production.
India is also mired in plastic pollution. While per-capita rates are relatively low, India as a whole is the world’s top plastic polluter. Some 10 million tons of plastic waste enter the country’s environment each year — far more than in any other nation. (Nigeria, which holds the number-two spot, contributes about two-thirds less to the global waste stream.).
FLIP SIDE
When Greening Means Heating
Urban greening is a growing response to the so-called heat-island effect, wherein infrastructure-heavy cities with limited vegetation absorb and retain more heat than surrounding rural areas. But not all green spaces are created equal. In fact, according to a new study published in Science Advances, incorporating vegetation into city landscapes can actually increase heating under certain conditions.
Not all green spaces are created equal. In arid cities, grasses and crops can cause net warming compared with built environments. Photo by Barmalini / istock.com.
Drawing on satellite and climate data, as well as machine learning, the study assessed the impact of urban trees, grasslands, and croplands on temperature regulation across 761 megacities in 105 countries and uncovered a surprising result: The cooling effect of green spaces weakens in arid environments and during extreme heat.
In nearly one-quarter of cities that receive less than 1,000 millimeters of annual precipitation, vegetation — especially grasslands and croplands — caused net warming. And these same two ecosystems were found to exacerbate extreme heat compared with built environments in most cities.
There are two main reasons for this: Grassy and agricultural areas release less moisture than trees, and these open spaces also have a lower albedo effect, meaning darker grass blades and leaves make them less reflective, so they absorb more sunlight (and thus heat) compared with urban materials like concrete. While trees are even darker than grasses and crops, and thereby absorb more radiation, they release much more moisture because of their deep roots and larger leaves. Urban trees cooled 98 percent of the cities in the study.
“Our results demonstrate that vegetation’s cooling benefits are highly dependent on vegetation type and local context,” the study states. “The
diminished cooling effect [of grasslands and croplands] in these cities underscores the need for alternative heat-mitigation approaches, such as light-colored roofs or cool valleys.”
Vegetation remains essential, however, for other benefits, from biodiversity to stormwater management to well-being, the authors note. Urban resilience requires holistic thinking.
HIGH VOLTAGE
Solar Surge
The European energy forecast is looking bright: In 2025, for the first time ever in the European Union, wind and solar generated more power than fossil fuels, according to a new report by the global energy think tank Ember. The report calls the milestone a “tipping point.”
The scales have tipped largely due to surging solar — the fastest-growing source of electricity across the region — and declining coal use. When hydropower is added into the mix, renewables provided nearly half of the EU’s energy last year.
In Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands, solar supplied over 20 percent of power. By contrast, coal provided only 5 percent of electricity in 19 countries. Ireland and Finland both shuttered their last coal plants in 2025, thanks in part to growing wind power.
However, it’s not all sunshine and breezes. Drought is straining hydropower across Europe, and natural gas is cranking up to fill the gap. (In fact, the EU’s gas consumption increased by 8 percent in 2025, but it’s still well below its 2019 peak). Given the growing tensions between Europe and the United States — the EU’s largest natural gas supplier — climate impacts such as drought are a growing threat.
“The next priority for the EU should be to put a serious dent in reliance on expensive, imported gas,” Ember analyst Beatrice Petrovich told Yale Environment 360. “Gas not only makes the EU more vulnerable to energy blackmail, it’s also driving up prices.”