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Under a Coalition government, the fate of Australia’s central climate policy hangs in the balance

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Monday, March 31, 2025

RobynCharnley/ShutterstockThe future of Australia’s key climate policy is uncertain after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said a Coalition government would review the measure, known as the “safeguard mechanism”, which is designed to limit emissions from Australia’s largest industrial polluters. According to the Australian Financial Review, if the Coalition wins office it will consider relaxing the policy, as part of its plan to increase domestic gas supplies. Evidence suggests weakening the mechanism would be a mistake. In fact, it could be argued the policy does not go far enough to force polluting companies to curb their emissions. Both major parties now accept Australia must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. This bipartisan agreement should make one thing clear: winding back the safeguard mechanism would be reckless policy. What’s the safeguard mechanism again? The safeguard mechanism began under the Coalition government in 2016. It now applies to 219 large polluting facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. These facilities are in sectors such as electricity, mining, gas, manufacturing, waste and transport. Together, they produce just under one-third of Australia’s emissions. Under the policy’s original design, companies were purportedly required to keep their emissions below a certain cap, and buy carbon credits to offset any emissions over the cap. However, loopholes meant the cap was weakly enforced. This meant greenhouse gas pollution from the facilities actually increased – rising from 131.3 million tonnes to 138.7 million tonnes in the first six years of the policy. Labor strengthened the safeguard mechanism after it won office, by setting a hard cap for industrial emissions. The Coalition voted against the reforms. Dutton has since labelled the safeguard mechanism a “carbon tax” – a claim that has been debunked. Some members of the Coalition reportedly believe the policy makes manufacturers globally uncompetitive. Now, according to media reports, a Coalition government would review the safeguard mechanism with a view to weakening it, in a bid to bolster business and increase gas supply. Why the safeguard mechanism should be left alone Weakening the safeguard mechanism would lead to several problems. First, it would mean large facilities, including new coal and gas projects, would be permitted to operate without meaningful limits on their pollution. This threatens Australia’s international climate obligations. Second, if polluters were no longer required to buy carbon offsets, this would disrupt Australia’s carbon market. As the Clean Energy Regulator notes, the safeguard mechanism is the “dominant source” of demand for Australian carbon credits. In the first quarter of 2024, about 1.2 million carbon-credit units were purchased by parties wanting to offset their emissions. The vast majority were purchased by companies meeting compliance obligations under the safeguard mechanism or similar state rules. If companies are no longer required to buy offsets, or they buy fewer offsets, this would hurt those who sell carbon credits. Carbon credits are earned by organisations and individuals who abate carbon – through measures such as tree planting or retaining vegetation. The activities are often carried out by farmers and other landholders, including Indigenous organisations. Indigenous-led carbon projects have delivered jobs, cultural renewal and environmental benefits. The safeguard mechanism, together with the government pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, also provides certainty for the operators of polluting facilities. Many in the business sector have called for the policy to remain unchanged. And finally, winding back the safeguard mechanism would send a troubling signal to the world: that Australia is stepping back from climate action. Now is not the time to abdicate our responsibilities on climate change. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen dramatically since 1960. This increase is driving global warming and climate change, leading to extreme weather events which will only worsen. A hard-won policy The safeguard mechanism has not had time to deliver meaningful outcomes. And it is far from perfect – but it is hard-won, and Australia needs it. The 2023 reforms to the mechanism were designed to support trade-exposed industries, while encouraging companies to invest in emissions reduction. Undoing this mechanism would risk our climate goals. It would leave the government limited means to curb pollution from Australia’s largest emitters, and muddy the roadmap to net-zero. It would also create uncertainty for all carbon market participants, including the polluting facilities themselves. Felicity Deane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Both major parties agree Australia must reach net-zero emissions. That’s why winding back the safeguard mechanism would be reckless policy.

RobynCharnley/Shutterstock

The future of Australia’s key climate policy is uncertain after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said a Coalition government would review the measure, known as the “safeguard mechanism”, which is designed to limit emissions from Australia’s largest industrial polluters.

According to the Australian Financial Review, if the Coalition wins office it will consider relaxing the policy, as part of its plan to increase domestic gas supplies.

Evidence suggests weakening the mechanism would be a mistake. In fact, it could be argued the policy does not go far enough to force polluting companies to curb their emissions.

Both major parties now accept Australia must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. This bipartisan agreement should make one thing clear: winding back the safeguard mechanism would be reckless policy.

What’s the safeguard mechanism again?

The safeguard mechanism began under the Coalition government in 2016. It now applies to 219 large polluting facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. These facilities are in sectors such as electricity, mining, gas, manufacturing, waste and transport. Together, they produce just under one-third of Australia’s emissions.

Under the policy’s original design, companies were purportedly required to keep their emissions below a certain cap, and buy carbon credits to offset any emissions over the cap. However, loopholes meant the cap was weakly enforced.

This meant greenhouse gas pollution from the facilities actually increased – rising from 131.3 million tonnes to 138.7 million tonnes in the first six years of the policy.

Labor strengthened the safeguard mechanism after it won office, by setting a hard cap for industrial emissions. The Coalition voted against the reforms.

Dutton has since labelled the safeguard mechanism a “carbon tax” – a claim that has been debunked. Some members of the Coalition reportedly believe the policy makes manufacturers globally uncompetitive.

Now, according to media reports, a Coalition government would review the safeguard mechanism with a view to weakening it, in a bid to bolster business and increase gas supply.

Why the safeguard mechanism should be left alone

Weakening the safeguard mechanism would lead to several problems.

First, it would mean large facilities, including new coal and gas projects, would be permitted to operate without meaningful limits on their pollution. This threatens Australia’s international climate obligations.

Second, if polluters were no longer required to buy carbon offsets, this would disrupt Australia’s carbon market.

As the Clean Energy Regulator notes, the safeguard mechanism is the “dominant source” of demand for Australian carbon credits.

In the first quarter of 2024, about 1.2 million carbon-credit units were purchased by parties wanting to offset their emissions. The vast majority were purchased by companies meeting compliance obligations under the safeguard mechanism or similar state rules.

If companies are no longer required to buy offsets, or they buy fewer offsets, this would hurt those who sell carbon credits.

Carbon credits are earned by organisations and individuals who abate carbon – through measures such as tree planting or retaining vegetation. The activities are often carried out by farmers and other landholders, including Indigenous organisations. Indigenous-led carbon projects have delivered jobs, cultural renewal and environmental benefits.

The safeguard mechanism, together with the government pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, also provides certainty for the operators of polluting facilities. Many in the business sector have called for the policy to remain unchanged.

And finally, winding back the safeguard mechanism would send a troubling signal to the world: that Australia is stepping back from climate action.

Now is not the time to abdicate our responsibilities on climate change. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen dramatically since 1960. This increase is driving global warming and climate change, leading to extreme weather events which will only worsen.

A hard-won policy

The safeguard mechanism has not had time to deliver meaningful outcomes. And it is far from perfect – but it is hard-won, and Australia needs it.

The 2023 reforms to the mechanism were designed to support trade-exposed industries, while encouraging companies to invest in emissions reduction.

Undoing this mechanism would risk our climate goals. It would leave the government limited means to curb pollution from Australia’s largest emitters, and muddy the roadmap to net-zero. It would also create uncertainty for all carbon market participants, including the polluting facilities themselves.

The Conversation

Felicity Deane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Why 50-Degree-F Days Feel Warmer in Spring Than in Fall

There are real, physiological reasons why the same temperature feels different in April and October

In the first few weeks of spring, a 50-degree-Fahrenheit (10-degree-Celsius) day might call for a light jacket or no jacket—or even short sleeves, depending on the person. But in the fall, the same weather might have you reaching for a parka.It’s not just in your head. The relative warmth of spring is physiological as well as psychological; after a long, biting winter, your body has changed in ways that can make 50 degrees F seem downright balmy.“I fully experience this on a regular basis with my work,” says Cara Ocobock, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, who studies how the human body adapts to cold. Her work often takes her to Finland, where she studies populations of reindeer herders who spend lots of time in extreme cold.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.“The human body is very good at acclimatizing to different environmental situations that are not permanent—and the changes that your body experiences during this time also aren’t permanent,” she says. Some of these changes involve a heat-generating organ that was only recently discovered in adults.Scientific American spoke with Ocobock to learn more about the changes our bodies undergo during winter—including to that strange, newfound organ—and how these changes affect us when the winter chill finally gives way to the warmth of spring.Have you personally experienced this “50 degrees feels warm” phenomenon?Yes, I have a story from my last trip to Finland. I was 300 kilometers [185 miles] north of the Arctic Circle during what should have been the coldest time of the year. There were maybe four or five days where it didn’t get above –20 degrees Fahrenheit [–29 degrees Celsius]. But then five days later, it was in the positive 40s Fahrenheit [or five to 10 degrees C], which should not exist that far north that time of year. After those days of extreme cold, I started sweating [when it went] above freezing. I wouldn’t even wear a coat. My body just kind of reversed course—like, “We need to cool you down; this is not what we have been used to.”How quickly do these physiological changes happen when someone is exposed to more extreme temperatures?There’s always going to be individual and populational variation, but we see the changes start happening pretty quickly. It can start within 24 hours, but they don’t fully set in for about seven to 10 days. You will maintain those changes until you go and switch environments again, and then you’ll lose your acclimatization. This can be to heat, cold, humidity, dryness or high altitude as well. For example, when I [returned to sea level from] field work in the Rocky Mountains, I was able to do two full lengths of an Olympic swimming pool without breathing. Within two weeks, that was gone.So how do our bodies change when we are exposed to cold weather?There’s a constant balancing of several different systems going on here. One of the quick changes is an increase in your resting metabolic rate—the baseline number of calories your body burns in order to survive. Your body is kind of increasing its own thermostat to produce more heat because you are losing more heat to the environment.We also see changes in the way your blood vessels [tighten or expand] to respond to the cold. In the cold, [vessels constrict to] reduce how much blood is flowing through and the heat that can potentially be lost to the environment. And when you’re cold, blood will be shunted more to the deep blood vessels that are further away from the surface, whereas in a hot climate, the opposite happens.We also see and increase in brown adipose tissue activity—this is an active area of research. “Brown fat,” as we call it colloquially, is a type of fat that burns only to keep you warm during acute cold exposure. In adult humans, it’s located [just above your clavicles], as well as along your major deep blood vessels. This organ, and we do consider it kind of its own organ, uses energy to produce heat—not energy to [activate your muscles] to go run a mile or anything like that. We used to think that human adults never have brown fat. We knew that babies have it [for the first few months of life], but we thought that once they burned through it, that was it. But we are now seeing brown adipose tissue everywhere we look in adult human populations.How is brown fat different from regular fat?Brown adipose tissue is very, very rich in mitochondria. Instead of being the powerhouse of the cell, those mitochondria are the furnace. It basically short-circuits the typical process so that this tissue produces heat rather than energy.In adults, to date, we have seen brown fat in populations in Russia and Finland—cold climates, which makes sense. We’ve seen it in Albany, N.Y.—temperate climate but cold winters. And we’ve also seen it in Samoa—a tropical island climate. So we’re beginning to think that brown adipose tissue might be a very deeply ancient tissue and that it could have been around in our evolutionary history for a very long time.How does brown fat activity change during cold seasons?One study on seasonal changes in brown adipose tissue [was] conducted by my former graduate student, Alexandra Niclou. She looked at seasonal variation in a brown adipose tissue among folks in Albany. She found that people were able to maintain higher body temperatures from brown fat in the winter but at a reduced caloric cost. And so it seemed the brown fat actually got more efficient the more it was being used to maintain body temperature in the winter. So there does seem to be a physiological difference in how brown fat is responding between the seasons. I’m going back to Finland this spring [to measure this further] among reindeer herders and indoor workers.Given all of those factors, what do you think is happening to our bodies on that first “warm” spring day?In the winter, you’re going to have an increase in resting metabolism. You might see an increase in your brown adipose tissue activity in order to keep you warm. Then all of a sudden it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but your resting metabolic rate is still going to be higher, [and your brown fat might be more active], which means your body is producing more heat than it typically would have been. That’s probably why you feel like it’s way warmer out and start sweating. That acclimatization process is going to take a week or more to get you used to this new, warmer temperature setting.There’s also a developmental aspect of this—where you grew up likely has a massive, massive impact on how your body responds to different extremes and changes in seasonal temperatures. I’m a college professor [in Indiana], and walking around campus this time of year, you can tell the kids from the East Coast and the Midwest versus those from the South and the West Coast [by who is wearing] short T-shirts and sandals when it’s, like, 50 degrees and [who is] still in puff jackets. It always cracks me up. And we might actually see happening with brown adipose tissue as well—that the more you are exposed to cold during critical developmental periods as a child, the more active and responsive your brown adipose tissue may be as an adult.Do these seasonal changes still impact you if you spend most of the winter indoors?They are definitely still impacting you. It might not be as much, obviously, and this is part of what we’re doing with our work in Finland with reindeer herders, who spend more time outside in the extreme cold, and indoor office workers in the same region. But because you still go outside, you still experience acute cold, [even if it’s not] for hours and hours on end.Why is it important to understand how our bodies acclimatize to extreme temperatures?Understanding how bodies rapidly respond [to changes in temperature] is going to be even more important in the face of climate change, when we have highly and dramatically variable environments —where you get ice storms in Texas, for example. [Helping people acclimatize via what we know about] biology, behavior and technology is going to be critical, I think, because no matter what, our bodies are going to be physiologically limited in coping with both extreme cold and extreme heat. Our bodies are not limitless, so we have [to adjust our] behavior and turn to technology to make up for what our bodies can’t do.

Climate
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The Psychological Effects of Climate Change: The Scientific Explanations — and Solutions That Can Empower Your Mind

Our minds can flip the script on climate change. Here are ways to reframe our perceptions and make us more resilient and empowered. The post The Psychological Effects of Climate Change: The Scientific Explanations — and Solutions That Can Empower Your Mind appeared first on The Revelator.

Are environmental and climate change problems overwhelming you? As psychologists my colleagues and I increasingly see the psychological and physiological effects of climate stress on our clients. These effects — including “fear of the unknown,” instability, catastrophizing, financial insecurity, and biophysiological alterations due to unseasonal weather events — create an ominous feeling of chaos, adversely affecting people’s emotional and mental equilibrium and making it hard to focus on clear actions, solutions, and effective pathways to fighting back climate confusion. This can leave us feeling deeply uneasy about the future. How can we cope with these feelings of overwhelming apprehension or hopelessness? As individuals we can’t take on the world — that’s an impossible task. So do we just turn away and give up? Of course not. Instead let’s look at more productive approaches to applying the brakes when anxiety, nihilism, and emotional shutdown leave us stuck in place. There’s a new and growing field in psychology focused on addressing the increasing burdens on our psyches due to climate chaos. Climate psychology addresses the emotional, mental, and sociological processes that contribute to the climate crisis, and human responses and adaptations to that can make positive, proactive, and productive solutions to climate-change events. As I’ve seen with my clients, friends, family, and community, the effects of climate change on mental and emotional wellbeing require a fresh approach to this lived experience challenge. For many people the first step to addressing this psychological crisis starts in our own minds. Psychologically this is known as “taking back the power”: Choose to do something — something that will empower you, energize you, and heal the trauma of climate insecurity, ignorance, and willful destruction by the rich and powerful. Before we do that, though, it helps to understand the psychological and physiological damage we’re trying to heal. “Where Did the World I Used to Know Go?” The word “solastalgia” describes the emotion of longing for a natural world that no longer exists. You’ve probably experienced this: The ongoing disruption of seasonal weather’s traditional timing makes us feel deeply disoriented, moody, depressed, confused, irritable, and uneasy on a subconscious level as our bodies’ biological, mind-affecting chemicals become unbalanced — much like what’s happening to our planet. There are biochemical reasons for these emotions caused by climate disruption. Climate trauma causes remarkable physiological — and therefore psychological — alterations to human biochemistry that significantly alter brain chemistry, leading to dysregulation of neurotransmitters and hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, and dopamine. This adversely affects normal stress response, memory, and emotional regulation. Physiologically, increased heat and climate instability can even accelerate the aging process, new research suggests. Examples of events that disorient and alter our minds include: Plants bloom too early for the wildlife that depend on them, pushing them out of synch with the natural system. Salt and freshwater wildlife migrate with warmer temperatures, disrupting our food systems. Wildlife and plants become infected with disease or poisoned due to algae blooms or poisonous flood runoff. Drought causes water insecurity, increases costs, and threatens livelihoods. The loss of slow “transitional seasons” like spring and autumn causes deep temperature swings — and mood swings. Warmer climates mean invasive species, whether planted by humans or caused by “species creep” out of inhospitable climates. Diseases kill wildlife who historically have kept disease-carrying pest populations down. These disruptions alter our behavior and affect some of our most significant life choices. Climate Change Affects Life’s Biggest Decisions People are now questioning important life decisions under an uncertain climate context. Should we have children? Should we buy a home? Where should we live? Can we afford children and a home mortgage? Will there be food and clean water? How secure is my job? This is the psychological trauma and uncertainty of displacement, which leaves us feeling trapped, without agency or control. We can’t look into a crystal ball and see the future, but climate anxiety and resource insecurity create a very difficult, confusing decision-making process when planning family, home, job, and community. The increasingly likely threats of displacement — loss of life and health, region, or country — are highly stressful and traumatic because they’re unpredictable. Globally we see the increasing geographical relocation of individuals, cultures, and communities. Leaving behind generations of the family sense of “home” is highly traumatic as entire cultures must relocate due to resource insecurities caused by drought, floods, invasive species, or the extinction of native species. These insecurities cause extreme and enduring stress. A few examples include the rising cost or unavailability of insurance for disasters, community dissolution, loss of a “home” or place, and friends and family scattering to new geographic locations because of better opportunities there. Globally these events affect local, federal, and international government and political decision-making. Huge migrations of wildlife and humans to other geographical locations upset existing populations, which causes perceived cultural threats, so emigrants are demonized, segregated, and violence erupts, destabilizing societies and governments. All of this creates a universal sense of helplessness: “There’s nothing I can do, so why bother?” Take Back Your Power: Try This Psychology 101 Exercise Exercise 1. Spend an hour enviro-dooming online. It’s easy. Go for it with gusto: Furiously repost the bad things, “like,” and share — send the doom to all your groups and friends. The algorithms and AI will direct you to every negative environmental disaster online, because the scientists hired by Big Tech know what excites your brain chemicals and tickles your brain’s pleasure centers. It’s based on addiction science: Create exciting content, keep supplying more stimulation and agitation. Big Tech is a drug dealer for negative, aggressive, pleasurable chemicals. You’ll always get a fix, because Big Tech algorithms and AI now know your mind — and offers your brain maladaptive chemical and behavioral solutions. Now stop and check yourself. Scan your mind and body. How do you feel? Exercise 2: Turn off all your electronics. Get up and go for a walk, stroll into town and see what’s happening. Art shows? Community events? Farmers markets? What’s new at the library and community center? Is there a park to kick back and enjoy nature? Smile and be nice to strangers and shop clerks, open a door for someone, help someone with directions, or help an elderly or disabled person reach that can of corn on the top shelf. Research shows that when we smile and act nice to strangers, we get a burst of serotonin and other happiness chemicals in our brains. And the people we help do too. It’s contagious. Now how do you feel? We can all take advantage of that reset. Whether we’re talking about climate change, civil rights, politics, or anything else, you control the mediums you expose yourself to. Use your critical thinking, set limits and boundaries, resist the manipulation of media. It takes some practice to resist bad habits. But we can do it. Let’s reframe your relationship with the world in its current health. Start with your mindset, then, using what you discovered above, branch out into your community. Get involved with others around you and you’ll soon find yourself making small local changes, then bigger ones as your positive engagement ripples outward to others. See how those positive brain chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins — which play crucial roles in regulating mood, promoting well-being, and fostering feelings of pleasure and satisfaction — are radiating out to others, and the world. Be kind to yourself. It all starts with you. Scroll down to find our “Republish” button Previously in The Revelator: Why Climate Grief Is an Essential for Climate Action The post The Psychological Effects of Climate Change: The Scientific Explanations — and Solutions That Can Empower Your Mind appeared first on The Revelator.

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Chemicals
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Scientists Shielding Farming From Climate Change Need More Public Funding. but They're Getting Less

Public funding for agricultural research in the U.S. has been declining for the last two decades, a process Trump has rapidly accelerated by freezing or pausing support for a variety of research programs financed by the USDA, EPA and other organizations

Erin McGuire spent years cultivating fruits and vegetables like onions, peppers and tomatoes as a scientist and later director of a lab at the University of California-Davis. She collaborated with hundreds of people to breed drought-resistant varieties, develop new ways to cool fresh produce and find ways to make more money for small farmers at home and overseas.Then the funding stopped. Her lab, and by extension many of its overseas partners, were backed financially by the United States Agency for International Development, which Trump's administration has been dismantling for the past several weeks. Just before it was time to collect data that had been two years in the making, her team received a stop work order. She had to lay off her whole team. Soon she was laid off, too.“It’s really just been devastating,” she said. “I don’t know how you come back from this.”The U.S. needs more publicly funded research and development on agriculture to offset the effects of climate change, according to a paper out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month. But instead the U.S. has been investing less. United States Department of Agriculture data shows that as of 2019, the U.S. spent about a third less on agricultural research than its peak in 2002, a difference of about $2 billion. The recent pauses and freezes to funding for research on climate change and international development are only adding to the drop. It’s a serious issue for farmers who depend on new innovations to keep their businesses afloat, the next generation of scientists and eventually for consumers who buy food.“This is terrible news for the U.S. agricultural sector,” said Cornell associate professor Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, the lead author of the paper. Trump administration hastens funding cuts As the Trump administration pauses and shutters research programs funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, USDA and other agencies, Ortiz-Bobea and other experts have seen field trials stopped, postdoctoral positions eliminated and a looming gap forming between the reality of climate change and the tools farmers have to deal with it.The EPA declined to comment, and the USDA and USAID did not respond to Associated Press queries.Ortiz-Bobea and his team quantified overall U.S. agricultural productivity, estimated how much it would be slowed by climate change in coming years and calculated how much money would need to be invested in research and development to counteract that slowdown.Think of it like riding a bike into a headwind, Ortiz-Bobea said. To maintain the same speed, you have to pedal harder; in this case, R&D can be that extra push.Some countries are heading that direction. China spends almost twice as much as the U.S. on agricultural research, and has increased its research investments by five times since 2000, wrote Omanjana Goswami, a scientist with the Food and Environment team at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an email.Spending cutbacks have also shuttered agricultural research across almost all of the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, of which McGuire's was one. Those 17 labs across 13 universities focused on food security, technical agriculture research, policy and various aspects of climate change. The stop-work orders at those labs not only disappointed researchers, but made useless much of their work.“There are many, many millions of dollars of expenditure that will generate nothing now because the work couldn’t be finished,” said David Tschirley, a professor who had been directing another one of those programs, the Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Capacity and Influence at Michigan State University, since 2019. Finding new funding for agricultural research Some researchers hope that other sources of funding can fill the gaps: “That’s where private sector could really step up,” said Swati Hegde, a scientist in the Food, Land, and Water Program at the World Resources Institute.From an agricultural point of view, climate change is “really scary,” with larger and larger regions exposed to temperatures above healthy growing conditions for many crops, said Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, a multinational biotechnology and pharmaceutical company that invested nearly $3 billion in agricultural research and development last year. But private companies have their own constraints on R&D investment, and he said Bayer can't invest as much as it would like in that area. “I don’t think that private industry can replicate" how federal funding typically supports early stage, speculative science, he said, “because the economics don't really work.” He added that industry tends to be better suited to back ideas that have already been validated. Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, also expressed concerns that private research funding isn't as trackable and transparent as public funding. And others said even sizeable investments from companies don't give anywhere near enough money to match government funding. Researchers, farmers and consumers feel the fallout The full impact may not be apparent for many years, and the damage won't easily be repaired. Experts think it will be a blow in other countries where climate change is already decimating yields, driving hunger and conflict. “I really worry that if we don’t really look at the global food situation, we will have a disaster,” said David Zilberman, a professor at UC Berkeley who won a Wolf Prize in 2019 for his work on agriculture.But even domestically, experts say one thing is almost certain: this will mean even higher prices at the grocery store now and in the future.“More people on the Earth, you need more productivity to prevent food prices going crazy,” said Tom Hertel, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. Even if nothing changes right away, he thinks “10 years from now, 20 years from now, our yield growth will surely be stunted” by cuts to research on agricultural productivity.Many scientists said the wound isn’t just professional but personal. “People are very demoralized,” especially younger researchers who don’t have tenure and want to work on international food research, said Zilberman.Now those dreams are on hold for many. In carefully tended research plots, weeds begin to grow.The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

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Faith Leaders Push Back After EPA Head Disparages Climate Action as ‘Religion’

When Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin made a defiant reference to “climate change religion” in order to justify a plan to roll back environmental protections, American faith leaders and scholars reacted with confusion, sadness and anger. On March 12, the agency announced 31 actions to reconsider restrictions on air and water pollution and end […]

Jewish and Christian faith leaders responded to Lee Zeldin’s comments with “righteous anger” and called for policies that support a more just, livable world.By James BruggersWhen Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin made a defiant reference to “climate change religion” in order to justify a plan to roll back environmental protections, American faith leaders and scholars reacted with confusion, sadness and anger.

Climate
Pollution
Water

For plants, urban heat islands don’t mimic global warming

Scientists have found that trees in cities respond to higher temperatures differently than those in forests, potentially masking climate impacts.

It’s tricky to predict precisely what the impacts of climate change will be, given the many variables involved. To predict the impacts of a warmer world on plant life, some researchers look at urban “heat islands,” where, because of the effects of urban structures, temperatures consistently run a few degrees higher than those of the surrounding rural areas. This enables side-by-side comparisons of plant responses.But a new study by researchers at MIT and Harvard University has found that, at least for forests, urban heat islands are a poor proxy for global warming, and this may have led researchers to underestimate the impacts of warming in some cases. The discrepancy, they found, has a lot to do with the limited genetic diversity of urban tree species.The findings appear in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT postdoc Meghan Blumstein, professor of civil and environmental engineering David Des Marais, and four others.“The appeal of these urban temperature gradients is, well, it’s already there,” says Des Marais. “We can’t look into the future, so why don’t we look across space, comparing rural and urban areas?” Because such data is easily obtainable, methods comparing the growth of plants in cities with similar plants outside them have been widely used, he says, and have been quite useful. Researchers did recognize some shortcomings to this approach, including significant differences in availability of some nutrients such as nitrogen. Still, “a lot of ecologists recognized that they weren’t perfect, but it was what we had,” he says.Most of the research by Des Marais’ group is lab-based, under conditions tightly controlled for temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration. While there are a handful of experimental sites where conditions are modified out in the field, for example using heaters around one or a few trees, “those are super small-scale,” he says. “When you’re looking at these longer-term trends that are occurring over space that’s quite a bit larger than you could reasonably manipulate, an important question is, how do you control the variables?”Temperature gradients have offered one approach to this problem, but Des Marais and his students have also been focusing on the genetics of the tree species involved, comparing those sampled in cities to the same species sampled in a natural forest nearby. And it turned out there were differences, even between trees that appeared similar.“So, lo and behold, you think you’re only letting one variable change in your model, which is the temperature difference from an urban to a rural setting,” he says, “but in fact, it looks like there was also a genotypic diversity that was not being accounted for.”The genetic differences meant that the plants being studied were not representative of those in the natural environment, and the researchers found that the difference was actually masking the impact of warming. The urban trees, they found, were less affected than their natural counterparts in terms of when the plants’ leaves grew and unfurled, or “leafed out,” in the spring.The project began during the pandemic lockdown, when Blumstein was a graduate student. She had a grant to study red oak genotypes across New England, but was unable to travel because of lockdowns. So, she concentrated on trees that were within reach in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then collaborated with people doing research at the Harvard Forest, a research forest in rural central Massachusetts. They collected three years of data from both locations, including the temperature profiles, the leafing-out timing, and the genetic profiles of the trees. Though the study was looking at red oaks specifically, the researchers say the findings are likely to apply to trees broadly.At the time, researchers had just sequenced the oak tree genome, and that allowed Blumstein and her colleagues to look for subtle differences among the red oaks in the two locations. The differences they found showed that the urban trees were more resistant to the effects of warmer temperatures than were those in the natural environment.“Initially, we saw these results and we were sort of like, oh, this is a bad thing,” Des Marais says. “Ecologists are getting this heat island effect wrong, which is true.” Fortunately, this can be easily corrected by factoring in genomic data. “It’s not that much more work, because sequencing genomes is so cheap and so straightforward. Now, if someone wants to look at an urban-rural gradient and make these kinds of predictions, well, that’s fine. You just have to add some information about the genomes.”It's not surprising that this genetic variation exists, he says, since growers have learned by trial and error over the decades which varieties of trees tend to thrive in the difficult urban environment, with typically poor soil, poor drainage, and pollution. “As a result, there’s just not much genetic diversity in our trees within cities.”The implications could be significant, Des Marais says. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its regular reports on the status of the climate, “one of the tools the IPCC has to predict future responses to climate change with respect to temperature are these urban-to-rural gradients.” He hopes that these new findings will be incorporated into their next report, which is just being drafted. “If these results are generally true beyond red oaks, this suggests that the urban heat island approach to studying plant response to temperature is underpredicting how strong that response is.”The research team included Sophie Webster, Robin Hopkins, and David Basler from Harvard University and Jie Yun from MIT. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Bullard Fellowship at the Harvard Forest, and MIT.

Climate
Forests
Government

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