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Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain

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Wednesday, April 3, 2024

At the end of January, multiple publications including Modern Farmer and Bloomberg ran eye-catching stories on the results of a research study published in Nature. Forbes declared that, “Urban Farming Has a Shockingly High Climate Cost,” a headline that was outright wrong in terms of the study’s findings. Earth.com led with a single, out-of-context data point: “Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint is 6x greater than normal farms.” On Instagram, urban farmers and gardeners began to express anger and frustration. Some commented on media company posts; others posted their own critiques. In February, students at the University of Michigan, where the study was conducted, organized a letter to the researchers pointing out issues with the study. The issue most cited across critiques was simple: When urban farms were separated from community gardens in the study, the higher rate of greenhouse gas emissions reported essentially disappeared. Now, two months later, national advocates for the multi-faceted benefits of growing food and green spaces in cities are working to counter what they see as harmful narratives created by a study they say had design flaws to begin with and was then poorly communicated to the public. Of special concern is funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) fledgling Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, which Congress has been shorting since it was established. A coalition of groups have been pushing to change that in the upcoming farm bill. “We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years and possibly undermine the continued and necessary investment in urban agricultural communities,” reads a letter sent to the study authors by Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, PASA Sustainable Agriculture, and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association. “We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years…” Their overall critiques of the study start with the sample set of “urban farms.” In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms, community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used, irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods. That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and that’s the conclusion the study led with. But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Gaswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make sense. “It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community garden is not set up to maximize production.” In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers, CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not. And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive. “They call out the fact that that tiny sample of seven urban farms that are actually production-focused, competitive with conventional agriculture, but that one line just got buried,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). This aspect was especially frustrating to urban farming advocates because, as the groups who sent the letter point out, one of their biggest challenges in working with policymakers in D.C. is to get them to “regard urban farming as farming.” Hawes said he found the critiques around lumping community gardens and urban farms together “reasonable” but that he stood by the method. He hadn’t considered including backyard gardens in rural areas in the sample, he said, even though city gardens were. “We were not necessarily attempting to compare urban and rural food production,” he said. “In fact, we chose to use the word conventional specifically because it pointed to the sort of ‘conventional food supply chain,’ which is often what urban agriculture producers are attempting to intervene in.” Not only did taking the community gardens out of the picture change the emissions results, the researchers also found that 63 percent of carbon emissions at all of the sites came not from daily inputs or lack of crop efficiency but from infrastructure, such as building raised beds and trucking in soil. But using recycled materials for infrastructure cut those emissions so much, that if all the sites had done so, that would have been enough for them to close the gap and be competitive with conventional agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions. “That problem can of course be solved by upfront funding,” said Gaswami. “Then, bingo, according to the authors, you have systems with very comparable climate metrics.” Overall, Hawes said he did regret some of the ways media coverage framed the study’s results but that he didn’t feel the framing of the study itself was problematic. “In my opinion, the most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions,” he said. “The most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions.” However, while climate scientists and sustainable agriculture advocates agree that addressing the food system’s 22 percent contribution to global greenhouse emissions is critical to meeting climate goals, whether carrots are grown in gardens in Detroit and Atlanta or only on huge commercial farms in the Salinas Valley (or both) won’t likely be a deciding factor. At an event to kick off a new focus on food and agriculture last week, Project Drawdown launched a new series that will focus on food system solutions to climate change. There, Executive Director Jonathan Foley pointed out that the vast majority of food system emissions come from a few big sources: meat and dairy production, deforestation and other land use change (a large portion of which is linked to animal agriculture), and food waste. As Gaswami at UCS noted, that broader context is essential. “The authors . . . don’t at all zoom out to compare this to agriculture’s broader footprint,” Gaswami said, so even if there weren’t clear climate benefits to urban farming—which many say the study didn’t clearly conclude—prioritizing other benefits of growing things in cities might still make more sense. Especially given the climate resilience built into decentralizing and diversifying the food system. Land use is particularly interesting, Quigley at NSAC said, because city farmers and gardeners often reclaim spaces that might otherwise be paved over and developed, adding carbon-holding trees and plants. “Folks who are maintaining community gardens and green spaces in cities to help with water run-off and urban heat island effect providing safe places for community gatherings . . . these are probably people that would be very concerned with their climate impact,” she said. “Can you imagine if they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh my god, should I not be gardening?’” While NSAC did not sign on to the initial letter sent by the coalition of groups, Quigley is working with those farm groups and the members have since talked to Hawes. Disagreements on the study framing still abound, but they’re now working together on policy briefs that will be available to lawmakers if the farm bill process ever picks up again and conversations around funding urban farms are once again on the (picnic) table. “Ultimately, one of the motivations behind this study was the fact that urban agriculture is largely discussed as a really useful sustainability intervention, and this study does not take away from that conclusion,” Hawes said. “I also think that to the degree that this starts conversations about the availability of resources for urban agriculture and the support that is available to urban farmers and gardeners for creating low-carbon solutions—I’m happy with that.” Read More: Congress Puts Federal Support for Urban Farming on the Chopping Block Urban Farms Are Stepping Up Their Roles in Communities Nationwide The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too Supply Chain Impacts of the Key Bridge Collapse. One of the most iconic elements of Baltimore’s harbor is the illuminated Domino Sugar sign, below which the sweet stuff can often be seen piled high on massive ships. Now, the sugar refinery is one of many food and agriculture companies that will likely be impacted by last week’s collapse of the Key Bridge, which shut down the shipping channel that leads to the city’s busy port. The port also handles imports and exports of commodity grains, coffee, and farm equipment. On Friday, representatives from the White House and USDA met with more than a dozen farm and food stakeholders including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Sugar Alliance, and Perdue Farms to discuss impacts on the industry. On Sunday, officials announced they are working on opening a temporary alternate shipping channel to get the port back open while the clean-up of the bridge and the stranded ship continues. Read More: Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze The Last Front to Save the ‘Most Important Fish’ in the Atlantic Climate-Friendly Rice. “My dad taught me to continuously flood a rice field. If you saw dry ground in a rice field, you were in trouble,” said fifth-generation Arkansas farmer Jim Whittaker at a USDA event last week. Now, Whittaker practices a technique that alternates his rice fields between wet and dry, a system he said has cut water use and methane emissions in those fields by 50 percent. Whittaker is one of 30 farmers whose rice is now available in a two-pound bag sold by Great River Milling. It’s the first product to officially hit the market as a result of funding from the USDA’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the end, holding up one of those bags. And the debut comes at a time when some lawmakers and environmental groups are lobbing criticism at the agency over its broadening definition of “climate-smart.” Read More: Could Changing the Way We Farm Rice Be a Climate Solution? The USDA Plan to Better Measure Agriculture’s Impact on the Climate Crisis Slaughterhouse Rulemaking. More than 800 comments were submitted before the comment period on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contentious proposal to increase the regulation of water pollution from meat processing facilities closed last week. On one side of the issue, 45 environmental, community, and animal welfare organizations joined together to make a case for the most restrictive set of regulations proposed, arguing that the weakest option, which EPA has said it prefers, is “inconsistent with federal law.” “We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal-rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” said Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a press release. Meanwhile, farm and meat industry groups including the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Meat Institute filed multiple sets of comments asking for an extension of the comment period and arguing for additional flexibilities to even the least restrictive regulatory framework proposed. Read More: Should a Plan to Curb Meat Industry Pollution Consider the Business Costs? EPA to Revise Outdated Water Pollution Standards for Slaughterhouses The post Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain appeared first on Civil Eats.

In this week’s Field Report, controversial research on growing food in cities, the food and agriculture impacts of the Key Bridge collapse, and more. The post Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain appeared first on Civil Eats.

At the end of January, multiple publications including Modern Farmer and Bloomberg ran eye-catching stories on the results of a research study published in Nature. Forbes declared that, “Urban Farming Has a Shockingly High Climate Cost,” a headline that was outright wrong in terms of the study’s findings. Earth.com led with a single, out-of-context data point: “Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint is 6x greater than normal farms.”

On Instagram, urban farmers and gardeners began to express anger and frustration. Some commented on media company posts; others posted their own critiques. In February, students at the University of Michigan, where the study was conducted, organized a letter to the researchers pointing out issues with the study.

The issue most cited across critiques was simple: When urban farms were separated from community gardens in the study, the higher rate of greenhouse gas emissions reported essentially disappeared.

Now, two months later, national advocates for the multi-faceted benefits of growing food and green spaces in cities are working to counter what they see as harmful narratives created by a study they say had design flaws to begin with and was then poorly communicated to the public. Of special concern is funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) fledgling Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, which Congress has been shorting since it was established. A coalition of groups have been pushing to change that in the upcoming farm bill.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years and possibly undermine the continued and necessary investment in urban agricultural communities,” reads a letter sent to the study authors by Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, PASA Sustainable Agriculture, and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over the past many years…”

Their overall critiques of the study start with the sample set of “urban farms.”

In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms, community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used, irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods.

That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and that’s the conclusion the study led with.

But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Gaswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make sense.

“It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community garden is not set up to maximize production.”

In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers, CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not.

And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive.

“They call out the fact that that tiny sample of seven urban farms that are actually production-focused, competitive with conventional agriculture, but that one line just got buried,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). This aspect was especially frustrating to urban farming advocates because, as the groups who sent the letter point out, one of their biggest challenges in working with policymakers in D.C. is to get them to “regard urban farming as farming.”

Hawes said he found the critiques around lumping community gardens and urban farms together “reasonable” but that he stood by the method. He hadn’t considered including backyard gardens in rural areas in the sample, he said, even though city gardens were. “We were not necessarily attempting to compare urban and rural food production,” he said. “In fact, we chose to use the word conventional specifically because it pointed to the sort of ‘conventional food supply chain,’ which is often what urban agriculture producers are attempting to intervene in.”

Not only did taking the community gardens out of the picture change the emissions results, the researchers also found that 63 percent of carbon emissions at all of the sites came not from daily inputs or lack of crop efficiency but from infrastructure, such as building raised beds and trucking in soil. But using recycled materials for infrastructure cut those emissions so much, that if all the sites had done so, that would have been enough for them to close the gap and be competitive with conventional agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions.

“That problem can of course be solved by upfront funding,” said Gaswami. “Then, bingo, according to the authors, you have systems with very comparable climate metrics.”

Overall, Hawes said he did regret some of the ways media coverage framed the study’s results but that he didn’t feel the framing of the study itself was problematic. “In my opinion, the most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions,” he said.

“The most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions.”

However, while climate scientists and sustainable agriculture advocates agree that addressing the food system’s 22 percent contribution to global greenhouse emissions is critical to meeting climate goals, whether carrots are grown in gardens in Detroit and Atlanta or only on huge commercial farms in the Salinas Valley (or both) won’t likely be a deciding factor.

At an event to kick off a new focus on food and agriculture last week, Project Drawdown launched a new series that will focus on food system solutions to climate change. There, Executive Director Jonathan Foley pointed out that the vast majority of food system emissions come from a few big sources: meat and dairy production, deforestation and other land use change (a large portion of which is linked to animal agriculture), and food waste.

As Gaswami at UCS noted, that broader context is essential. “The authors . . . don’t at all zoom out to compare this to agriculture’s broader footprint,” Gaswami said, so even if there weren’t clear climate benefits to urban farming—which many say the study didn’t clearly conclude—prioritizing other benefits of growing things in cities might still make more sense. Especially given the climate resilience built into decentralizing and diversifying the food system.

Land use is particularly interesting, Quigley at NSAC said, because city farmers and gardeners often reclaim spaces that might otherwise be paved over and developed, adding carbon-holding trees and plants. “Folks who are maintaining community gardens and green spaces in cities to help with water run-off and urban heat island effect providing safe places for community gatherings . . . these are probably people that would be very concerned with their climate impact,” she said. “Can you imagine if they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh my god, should I not be gardening?’”

While NSAC did not sign on to the initial letter sent by the coalition of groups, Quigley is working with those farm groups and the members have since talked to Hawes. Disagreements on the study framing still abound, but they’re now working together on policy briefs that will be available to lawmakers if the farm bill process ever picks up again and conversations around funding urban farms are once again on the (picnic) table.

“Ultimately, one of the motivations behind this study was the fact that urban agriculture is largely discussed as a really useful sustainability intervention, and this study does not take away from that conclusion,” Hawes said. “I also think that to the degree that this starts conversations about the availability of resources for urban agriculture and the support that is available to urban farmers and gardeners for creating low-carbon solutions—I’m happy with that.”

Supply Chain Impacts of the Key Bridge Collapse. One of the most iconic elements of Baltimore’s harbor is the illuminated Domino Sugar sign, below which the sweet stuff can often be seen piled high on massive ships. Now, the sugar refinery is one of many food and agriculture companies that will likely be impacted by last week’s collapse of the Key Bridge, which shut down the shipping channel that leads to the city’s busy port. The port also handles imports and exports of commodity grains, coffee, and farm equipment. On Friday, representatives from the White House and USDA met with more than a dozen farm and food stakeholders including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Sugar Alliance, and Perdue Farms to discuss impacts on the industry. On Sunday, officials announced they are working on opening a temporary alternate shipping channel to get the port back open while the clean-up of the bridge and the stranded ship continues.

Climate-Friendly Rice. “My dad taught me to continuously flood a rice field. If you saw dry ground in a rice field, you were in trouble,” said fifth-generation Arkansas farmer Jim Whittaker at a USDA event last week. Now, Whittaker practices a technique that alternates his rice fields between wet and dry, a system he said has cut water use and methane emissions in those fields by 50 percent. Whittaker is one of 30 farmers whose rice is now available in a two-pound bag sold by Great River Milling. It’s the first product to officially hit the market as a result of funding from the USDA’s $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at the end, holding up one of those bags. And the debut comes at a time when some lawmakers and environmental groups are lobbing criticism at the agency over its broadening definition of “climate-smart.”

Slaughterhouse Rulemaking. More than 800 comments were submitted before the comment period on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contentious proposal to increase the regulation of water pollution from meat processing facilities closed last week. On one side of the issue, 45 environmental, community, and animal welfare organizations joined together to make a case for the most restrictive set of regulations proposed, arguing that the weakest option, which EPA has said it prefers, is “inconsistent with federal law.” “We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal-rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” said Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a press release. Meanwhile, farm and meat industry groups including the Iowa Farm Bureau and the Meat Institute filed multiple sets of comments asking for an extension of the comment period and arguing for additional flexibilities to even the least restrictive regulatory framework proposed.

The post Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Has the UK's most loathed protest group really stopped throwing soup?

Just Stop Oil says it will disband but does this mark an end to the chaos caused by its climate protests?

Has the UK's most loathed protest group really stopped throwing soup?Justin RowlattBBC News Climate EditorJSO HandoutThe climate action group Just Stop Oil has announced it is to disband at the end of April. Its activists have been derided as attention-seeking zealots and vandals and it is loathed by many for its disruptive direct action tactics. It says it has won because its demand that there should be no new oil and gas licences is now government policy. So, did they really win and does this mark an end to the chaos caused by its climate protests?Hayley Walsh's heart was racing as she sat in the audience at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 27 January this year. The 42 year-old lecturer and mother of three tried to calm her breathing. Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver was onstage in her West End debut production of Shakespeare's The Tempest. But Hayley, a Just Stop Oil activist, had her own drama planned.As Weaver's Prospero declaimed "Come forth, I say," Hayley sprang from her seat and rushed the stage with Richard Weir, a 60-year-old mechanical engineer from Tyneside. They launched a confetti cannon and unfurled a banner that read "Over 1.5 Degrees is a Global Shipwreck" - a reference to the news that 2024 was the first year to pass the symbolic 1.5C threshold in global average temperature rise, and a nod to the shipwreck theme in the play. It was a classic Just Stop Oil (JSO) action. The target was high profile and would guarantee publicity. The message was simple and presented in the group's signature fluorescent orange.The reaction of those affected was also a classic response to JSO. Amid the boos and whistles you can hear a shout of "idiots". "Drag them off the stage", one audience member can be heard shouting, "I hope you [expletive] get arrested," another says.JSO is a UK-based environmental activist group that aims to end fossil fuel extraction and uses direct action to draw attention to its cause. It has been called a "criminal cult" and its activists branded "eco-loons" by the Sun. The Daily Mail has described it as "deranged" and says its members have "unleashed misery on thousands of ordinary people though their selfish antics".JSO HandoutIt is the group's road protests that have probably caused the most disruption – and public anger.The group has thrown soup at a Van Gogh in the National Gallery, exploded a chalk dust bomb during the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield, smashed a cabinet containing a copy of the Magna Carta at the British Library, sprayed temporary paint on the stones of Stonehenge and even defaced Charles Darwin's grave.But it is the group's road protests that have probably caused the most disruption – and public anger. In November 2022, 45 JSO members climbed gantries around the M25 severely disrupting traffic for over four days. People missed flights, medical appointments and exams as thousands of drivers were delayed for hours. The cost to the Metropolitan Police was put at £1.1 million.Just Stop Oil was born out of Extinction Rebellion (XR). XR – founded in 2018 - brought thousands of people onto the streets in what were dubbed "festivals of resistance". They came to a peak in April 2019, when protestors brought parts of the capital to a halt for more than a week and plonked a large pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus.The spectacle and disruption XR caused generated massive media attention, but the police were furious. Hundreds of officers were diverted from frontline duties and by the end of 2019 the bill for policing the protests had reached £37m.And behind the scenes XR was riven by furious debates about tactics. Many inside the movement said it should be less confrontational and disruptive but a hard core of activists argued it would be more effective to double down on direct action.It became clear that there was room for what Sarah Lunnon, one of the co-founders of Just Stop Oil, calls "a more radical flank". They decided a new, more focused operation was needed, modelled on earlier civil disobedience movements like the Suffragettes, Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns and the civil rights movement in the US.The group was formally launched on Valentine's Day, 2022. It was a very different animal to XR. Instead of thousands of people taking part in street carnivals, JSO's actions involved a few committed activists. A small strategy group oversaw the campaign and meticulously planned its activities. A mobilisation team worked to recruit new members, and another team focused on supporting activists after they were arrested.Getty ImagesJust Stop Oil protesters invading a Rugby matchThe dozens of actions the group has carried out generated lots of publicity, but also massive public opposition. There were confrontations between members of the public and protestors and an outcry from politicians across all the main political parties.The police said they needed more powers to deal with this new form of protest and they got them. New offences were created including interfering with national infrastructure, "locking on" – chaining or gluing yourself to something – and tunnelling underground. Causing a public nuisance also became a potential crime – providing the police with a powerful new tool to use against protestors who block roads.In the four years since it was formed dozens of the group's supporters have been jailed. Five activists were handed multi-year sentences for their role in the M25 actions in 2022. Those were reduced on appeal earlier this month but are still the longest jail terms for non-violent civil disobedience ever issued.Senior JSO members deny the crackdown had anything to do with the group's decision to "hang up the hi-vis" – as its statement this week announcing the end of campaign put it.JSO's public position is that it has won its battle. "Just Stop Oil's initial demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history," the group claimed.The government has said it does not plan to issue any new licences for oil and gas production but strongly denies its policies have a link to JSO. Furthermore, the Prime Minister's official spokesperson told journalists: "We have been very clear when it comes to oil and gas that it has a future for decades to come in our energy mix."And the group's wider goal – to end the production of oil and gas – has manifestly not been achieved. The members of the group I spoke to for this article all agree the climate crisis has deepened.AFPA protest at the Aston Martin showroom in central LondonIn the face of stiffer sentences, some climate campaigners have said they will turn to more clandestine activities. One new group says it plans a campaign of sabotage against key infrastructure. In a manifesto published online it says it plans to "kickstart a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors of the fossil fuel economy."That's not a direction the JSO members I spoke to said they wanted to go. Sarah Lunnon said a key principle of JSO and the civil disobedience movement generally was that activists would take responsibility for their actions. One of the first questions new joiners were asked is whether they would be willing to be locked up."As corporations and billionaires corrupt political systems across the world, we need a different approach. "We are creating a new strategy, to face this reality and to carry our responsibilities at this time," the group says, suggesting they may be planning to form a new movement.JSO's most high-profile figure, Roger Hallam, is one of the five activists convicted for their role in the M25 protests. In a message from his prison cell he acknowledged that JSO has only had a "marginal impact". That is "not due to lack of trying," he said. The failure lay with the UK's "elites and our leaders" who had walked away from their responsibility to tackle the climate crisis, Hallam claimed. A hint perhaps that the group's new focus might be on the political system itself.JSO has said its last protest – to be held at the end of April – will mark "the end of soup on Van Goghs, cornstarch on Stonehenge and slow marching in the streets". But don't believe it. When pressed, the JSO members I spoke to said they may well turn back to disruptive tactics but under a new name and with a new and as yet unspecified objective.

Climate

Activism

Crisis

Amid Trump Cuts, Climate Researchers Wait for the Ax to Fall

Climate experts whose research is funded by federal grants hide, whisper and wait for their jobs to disappear

Climate Researchers Wait for the Ax to FallClimate experts whose research is funded by federal grants hide, whisper and wait for their jobs to disappearBy Ariel Wittenberg, Chelsea Harvey & E&E News The Trump administration has slashed jobs and funding at the National Institutes of Health. Mark Wilson/Newsmakers/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | The National Institutes of Health has canceled grants for research on diversity, Covid-19 and vaccines. Climate scientists are hoping their work won’t be next — but fear it could be.“We are holding our breaths because we know we are on their list of targets,” said Marsha Wills-Karp, chair of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. “It feels like it’s been slash and burn. We are hopeful they won’t get to climate, but we know it’s not likely.”Researchers in her department have received NIH grants to study the effects of wildfire air pollution on preterm birth rates and how hotter weather is affecting the health of babies at birth, measured by their weight and potential complications. They’re also studying how climate change is affecting nutrition.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.At the University of Washington, Kristie Ebi is fearful that NIH could cut grants that fund studies about which populations are more vulnerable to extreme heat — a project that the team is planning to expand to include the dangers of wildfire smoke.“We’re working to provide information that departments of health, communities and individuals can use,” Ebi said. “The more you know, the more of those lives you can save.”None of those programs haven’t been cut yet. But there’s reason to think they could be, and soon.Earlier this week, ProPublica reported on an internal NIH memo that outlined how the agency will no longer fund research on the health effects of climate change. It followed a story in Mother Jones showing that NIH had ended three climate-related programs, including the Climate Change and Health Initiative. The program was created in 2022 and has had annual congressional appropriations of $40 million, according to a December NIH report that was taken offline by the agency earlier this year.“HHS is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities,” said Emily Hilliard, a department spokesperson.“As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans,” she added. “We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root cause of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”She did not respond to questions about whether HHS believes that research into the health effects of heat and other types of extreme weather are aligned with agency priorities or whether HHS believes that heat waves affect the health of Americans. NIH did not respond to a request for comment.Heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency within HHS. Heat caused or contributed to at least 2,300 deaths in 2023, CDC records show.In addition to turbocharging temperatures, climate change can affect people's health by increasing the prevalence of vector-borne diseases and the number of wildfires, whose smoke has been shown to increase asthma and cause cardiovascular problems.Those connections have long been studied with funding from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. Then in 2022, NIH broadened the scope of federal funding for climate health research, directing each of the agency’s 26 centers and institutes to study the dangers of climate change. At the time, the agency said “a mounting number of assessments and reports provide undeniable evidence that climate change is resulting in … direct and indirect consequences for human health and well-being.”Most of the climate researchers contacted by POLITICO's E&E News declined to talk publicly about their funding, citing concerns about their grants being rescinded if they spoke to the media.One researcher who was awarded federal funding said some experts in the climate and health field are pausing work related to their grants, like hiring.Others have turned down speaking requests because they're concerned about attracting attention from the Trump administration. Their work often focuses on how extreme weather has disproportional effects on the health of communities of color, according to several researchers who were granted anonymity for fear of retribution. One said that they declined a speaking invitation to avoid “accidentally us[ing] language we are not supposed to and then be told our language is not compliant with various executive orders” on diversity and equality.“We’ve been told we need to comply with those executive orders as federal grantees, but it’s hard to do if you are funded for something that the name is something you are not allowed to say,” the researcher said. “No one wants to do a social media post or a webinar or an event that might get them in trouble.”An annual conference hosted by NIH, Boston University and the Harvard School of Public Health was postponed earlier this month.Linda Birnbaum, who led the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences until 2017, said that during the first Trump administration, researchers were able to circumvent directives by wording grant applications as “climate and health” rather than “climate change.”“It worked then. I don’t think that will work anymore,” she said.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

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