On Wednesday evening, conservative businesspeople, digital influencers, and US government officials flocked to the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, for the Latino Wall Street-organized inaugural Hispanic Heritage Gala. The event’s guest of honor was Javier Milei, the far-right president of Argentina, who has been described as “Trump’s doppelgänger” and a “proxy” for the US leader in Latin America. But that evening, all eyes were on another politician: Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and brother of  presidential contender Flávio Bolsonaro. Attendees in sparkly gowns and tuxedos swarmed to Eduardo for selfies and handshakes. Many asked after his 71-year-old father, whose health issues have allowed him to serve a 27-year sentence for attempted coup at home. Others gushed over his brother Flávio Bolsonaro’s lead in the first round of a close presidential race against incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He talked to MAGA media (including the boxer-turned-LindellTV White House correspondent Cara Castronuova) and posed alongside Javier Negre, a controversial Spanish communicator dubbed the “King Midas of virality” for right-wing propaganda. At one point, a woman approached to pray with him for Brazil.  Eduardo is more than a cheerleader for his would-be presidential sibling; he is poised to become the next foreign minister of Brazil in a potential Flávio Bolsonaro government. Since moving to the United States in early 2025, the younger Bolsonaro has lost his congressional seat for missing more than 80 percent of sessions and a job as a federal police investigator for “abandoning his post.” Last week, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes issued a warrant for his arrest after he was sentenced to more than four years in prison for trying to interfere with his father’s criminal case by lobbying the Trump administration. But in the MAGA world, Eduardo is a star—and his brother’s ascent to power is a fait accompli.  Eduardo Bolsonaro attended the Hispanic Heritage Gala in Washington, DC on October 14, 2026.Isabela Dias “We’re going to kick out the communist dictator in Brazil, and we’ll paint the continent blue,” Milei roared after warmly hugging Eduardo, who threw kicks in the air. Conservatives, he said, “cannot give an inch in our reconquest of the hemisphere.” Eduardo cautioned that the election results weren’t final yet, but the tone was openly celebratory. “When we confirm the victory of my brother Senator Flávio Bolsonaro as president of Brazil,” he said in a speech that followed Milei’s, “we’re going to achieve a new, what I call, the Golden Era of Latin America.” The optimism in the room wasn’t unjustified. Flávio came out ahead of Lula following the first round of voting, albeit by a small margin, and the election of conservative candidates to Congress all but guarantees that the legislature will move further to the right. The presidential race will be decided in a runoff on October 25. A Bolsonaro win would bring Brazil—Latin America’s largest economy and a coveted prize for its wealth of rare earths—back into the fold of populist right-wing leaders ideologically aligned with Trump, sealing the “orange wave” that has swept a region the American president sees as his sphere of influence. “We have everything to be just like the US,” Eduardo said.  The former lawmaker has used his ties to Trump’s circle to court the White House to impose tariffs on Brazil and sanctions on judicial authorities like Moraes while making the case for his father’s freedom. Trump heeded the call, linking a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods announced last year to a “witch hunt” trial against Jair Bolsonaro and accusing Brazil’s government officials of “persecuting” the former president. In May, a couple of days after Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro met with Trump, the US government designated two criminal groups active in Brazil as terrorist organizations. If Flávio Bolsonaro’s victory materializes, Brazil is expected to join the Shield of the Americas coalition. Despite his alleged connections to militia groups in Rio de Janeiro, Flávio has positioned himself as a tough-on-crime candidate, invoking the brutal regime of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador as an example to be followed. Flávio and Eduardo have visited CECOT, the mega prison where migrants sent by the Trump administration reported being tortured. At the gala, Eduardo name-checked Bukele and praised Colombia’s President Abelardo de la Espriella, who calls himself “El Tigre,” for posing in front of body bags.  “Everybody who gives a hard time to the criminals, we love,” he remarked, adding that “for the first time we’re going to see all the countries [in Latin America] fighting narcoterrorism.” The audience approved. One real estate entrepreneur who does business in Honduras told me he found the speech “inspirational” and that Brazil should implement the “Bukele model.” As speakers on stage talked about getting rid of crime and defeating socialism, guests who paid between $3,000 and $10,000 to be there enjoyed wagyu meatballs, smoked duck with blackberries, grilled stuffed avocado, and smoked beef tenderloin. “The best is yet to come,” Eduardo declared, vowing to free Brazil, starting with his father.  The Brazilian elections have raised the specter of outside influence, with the country’s intelligence agency warning of risk of US interference in light of the Trump administration’s priority of reaffirming its hegemony in Latin America. Earlier this year, the Brazilian government denied visas to two senior State Department officials whose visit was intended to cast doubt on Brazil’s voting system ahead of the election. Several Democrats have accused the Trump administration of “acting as an agent of interference and destabilization,” citing a “troubling pattern of interference” in electoral processes in Argentina, Honduras, and Colombia. Trump, experts have observed, is playing “kingmaker” in the region. (The event’s organizers lamented that Trump couldn’t be there because he was in Alaska campaigning ahead of the midterms. But after several minutes of audio issues, they showed a recorded message from the president urging US voters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot and get out to vote.) Speaking to reporters before the gala, Eduardo dismissed concerns that the United States is meddling in Brazil’s elections, repeating unfounded claims that, during the Biden administration, USAID funded NGOs and the media to prevent the re-election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 under the guise of fighting disinformation. “Brazil has already suffered international interference,” he said. “What I see now is the opposite.” First order of business would be to “purge this cancer called Alexandre de Moraes from the Supreme Court,” Eduardo said, calling the justice a “tyrant.” Otherwise, he added, his brother wouldn’t be able to govern. When asked if he had plans to return to Brazil, he said he wouldn’t want to go to jail, “being innocent.”  Eduardo Bolsonaro signed a painting by “America First artist” Lena Ruseva.Isabela Dias Eduardo moved around the ballroom shadowed by far-right blogger Allan dos Santos, a close Bolsonaro ally and self-described “most persecuted journalist in the world.” Dos Santos, who lives in the United States, is considered a fugitive from Brazilian justice in the context of probes into the dissemination of fake news and creation of digital militias. A fixture of US conservative events, Eduardo rubbed elbows with an Italian influencer who supports Germany’s far-right AfD party and schmoozed with CPAC chair Matt Schlapp and his wife Mercedes. She gave the Bolsonaros a shoutout in her speech, predicting Flávio would be elected president of Brazil. “We got Latin America back on track,” she said.  Toward the end of the evening, as guests danced to La Bamba, Conga, and the Macarena, I chatted with Lena Ruseva, who wore a long red dress with Trump’s face on it and the words “drill, baby, drill.” Calling herself an “America First Artist,” Ruseva said Milei had liked the portrait she did of him for the occasion so much that he wanted it for himself. She took similar pride in the painting she said she gave President Trump for one of his birthdays. Some of her work was displayed around the ballroom for auction, with bids starting at $10,000. Among them was a depiction of the American flag with the outline of Latin America on it. Eduardo Bolsonaro signed the piece in golden letters. “I told him I was going to keep it until he became the next president of Brazil,” she said. This article was published in partnership with Agência Pública.

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Polar bears became the poster child for the peril of climate change for obvious reasons: They hunt seals from the ice, and as fossil fuels warm the planet, the ice where these bears live is melting. For more than three decades, scientists have been warning that climate change could drive polar bear populations extinct. That message infiltrated the public psyche, perhaps more than any other about the scourge of global warming. But as scientists are continuing to learn, the reality for these iconic bears is more complicated. In 2022, scientists published a study showing that polar bears in southeastern Greenland were able to use glacial ice instead of sea ice to hunt, sheltering them from some of the impacts of warming. And a study published late last year revealed some changes in polar bear DNA that may help them adapt to hotter weather. > “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the > variability story.” Now, research in the journal Scientific Reports adds yet another wrinkle of hope for the species. The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. “I was surprised,” Aars told Vox from Svalbard. “I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.” The new study makes clear that, in other regions, the loss of sea ice from warming is indeed linked to ailing polar bear populations. In Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, for example, researchers have tied melting ice to lower bear survival and a shortage of food, finding that the population has roughly halved since the 1980s. Climate change remains the largest threat to these animals. Yet, there are 20 distinct polar bear populations around the world, and they all behave slightly differently. Warming is not uniformly killing them. Perhaps, then, polar bears aren’t the best mascot for the climate crisis—a point some advocates have been making for a while—especially when there are countless other species imperiled by rising temperatures. Polar bears need fat to survive the harsh Arctic cold; that’s why they eat blubbery seals. Seals, meanwhile, need ice to rest and birth pups. Without that ice, polar bears have a hard time finding and catching them. Since the late 1970s, the Arctic—the northernmost region of the planet, including parts of Alaska, Canada, Europe, and Russia—has lost more than 27,000 square miles of summer ice. That’s an area larger than the state of West Virginia. Some estimates suggest that the region could be ice-free by the middle of the century, even under optimistic emissions scenarios. That melting ice is what’s harming polar bear populations in Canada’s Hudson Bay; the Beaufort Sea, located north of Alaska and the Yukon; and Baffin Bay in Greenland. And it’s why they’re listed as threatened under the US Endangered Species Act and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, a global authority on endangered species. But the story in Svalbard—an icy archipelago in the Barents Sea, north of Scandinavia—is different. Magnus Andersen and Jon Aars, researchers at the Norwegian Polar Institute and co-authors on the new study, measure a polar bear in Svalbard.Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute Between 1992 and 2019, scientists in Svalbard darted hundreds of polar bears from helicopters and measured their bodies. Then they compared those measurements to sea ice conditions, such as the number of ice-free days, and other climate variables. Remarkably, the number of days with no ice in the region increased by roughly 100 during that period. And yet, as the authors found, the body condition of both male and female polar bears—i.e., how fat and healthy they are—increased from 2000 onward. Female bears were actually in worse condition when the sea ice lasted longer. Often, the message about polar bears is “100 percent doom,” said Kristin Laidre, a polar bear researcher at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “But that’s not true,” Laidre told me. “There’s variability in how bears are responding. This [research] adds to the variability story.” If polar bears in Svalbard are healthy, that means they’re finding food. So what are they eating? One possibility, said Aars, the lead author, is that there may be higher densities of ringed seals, their primary food source, in years with less ice, so they’re easier to catch. Even if polar bears have less time to catch the seals—because there are fewer days with ice—they can put on loads of weight quickly and rely on that for months. The bears may also be eating other animals on land that don’t require ice. Reindeer on the archipelago are increasing, for example, and Aars says he’s seen bears eat them. Walrus populations are increasing, too. Although polar bears can’t easily kill a walrus, they can scavenge their tusked, fat-filled carcass when walruses die from other causes. “Bears in Svalbard are potentially changing their diet, and that might account for the increase in body condition,” said John Iacozza, a senior instructor and polar bear expert at the University of Manitoba. That’s a luxury that polar bears elsewhere might not have. “You wouldn’t see the same effect happening in Western Hudson Bay, just because the availability of other species is less,” said Iacozza, who was not involved in the new research. While the Svalbard bears might be fine for now, researchers still worry about the long-term impacts of warming in the region. “We do think there’s a threshold,” Aars told me. “The difficult part is that we don’t know what it is.” No other animal has been so closely tied to climate change as the polar bear. It was on the cover of TIME’s 2006 global warming issue. It was featured in Al Gore’s seminal documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which premiered the same year. It was used in funding campaigns for environmental groups. (One year, I even dressed up as a drowning polar bear for Halloween with a friend who went as a melting ice cap.) The bear’s symbolism is rooted in good science. Those early studies were in places like Canada’s Western Hudson Bay, where these Arctic apex predators were clearly dying from melting sea ice. Media outlets amplified the most sensational conclusions—and they stuck. That’s partly because the message is simple, Laidre said: Polar bears need ice, and warming is making it disappear. “The relationship between [climate and] an animal that needs a platform to eat is easy to wrap your brain around,” she said.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. With an icy white sheet still blanketing much of the Eastern United States after an intense storm this week, it’s hard to imagine a future with less snow at this time of year.  But over time, climate change has decreased snowpack by as much as 20 percent per decade in parts of the Northern Hemisphere. This trend is already causing trouble for the Winter Olympics and Paralympics, global events reliant on snow to succeed. In a landmark 2024 study, researchers found that potential host locations are dwindling as temperatures warm.  Just weeks before this year’s Olympics-Paralympics events kick off in Italy, scientists published a follow-up study analyzing how the games can adapt. The most effective option: shifting when they are held.  Disappearing snow isn’t just affecting Olympians. Around the world, the warming climate is shortening recreational ski and snowboarding seasons, which could have cascading impacts for the towns that have long relied on this winter economy.  For more than a century, the Winter Olympics have been held almost every four years in snowy cities across the globe, from the first games in Chamonix, France, to the most recent in Beijing. The Paralympic Games take place in the same location shortly afterward.  Olympic competitions such as alpine skiing and snowboarding are dependent on consistent snowpack. Rapid levels of warming across the Northern Hemisphere disrupt that. In 2010, Vancouver saw a record-warm January, partially due to the weather phenomenon known as El Niño, and had to drive and fly in enough snow to fill 20 Big Bens for snowboarding and freestyle skiing events, the Christian Science Monitor reports.  Warm weather also threatens the quality of the snow already on the ground, as shown at Russia’s Sochi Olympics and Paralympics in 2014, which saw an uptick in injury rates compared with the previous games as athletes struggled in the slush.  With this in mind, the International Olympic Committee, which governs the games, recently commissioned a study to determine future climate impacts. Researchers analyzed 93 regions around the world that have previously hosted the Olympic Winter and Paralympic Games to determine whether they’d be “climate-reliable” by the 2050s. Under the most likely emissions scenario, only 52 locations met the criteria for the Olympics and just 22 for the Paralympics, given that it is slightly later in the season, according to their 2024 study. But there are ways to adapt, according to co-author Daniel Scott, a climate expert at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In a follow-up study published last week, Scott and his colleagues found that shifting both the Olympic and Paralympic Games to earlier dates could increase the number of climate-suitable host countries, particularly for the Paralympics.  As I reported last year, experts have called for a similar timing change for the Summer Olympics to reduce the risk of extreme heat, which has harmed both competitors’ and fans’ health in recent years.  It’s a seemingly simple shift but comes with its own set of complexities. Moving the Winter Olympics up a few weeks would mean the games are happening right after the holiday season. Cities may struggle to secure pre-games housing, ensure there’s sufficient infrastructure, or find volunteers shortly after Christmas.  Another added nuisance, according to Scott: Television rights. Broadcasters and advertisers pay billions and plan years ahead for the rights to air the Olympics, which provides the financial foundation for the games. Changing the time of the games could disrupt this model, at least in the short term.  Other experts have pointed out that organizers must reckon with the Olympic Games’ own rampant emissions to secure a future less threatened by climate change. Cities often raze ecosystems to build new facilities, companies use copious amounts of energy to broadcast the competitions, and people travel from around the world in carbon-emitting planes to spectate.  For the Winter Games specifically, environmentalists are concerned about the growing amount of artificial snow cities must pump out to supplement dwindling natural supplies. In 2022, Beijing made Olympics history as the first host to use artificial snow almost exclusively to support the games.  It was a mammoth task. China pulled water from key reservoirs to help create a wintry snowscape in a historically dry city. But critics said the effort strained water supplies for local communities, disrupted soil and plant growth, and used large amounts of energy.  The 2026 Olympics is in a snowier region, the Italian Alps. But still, the International Olympic Committee told the Associated Press it has produced more than 2 million cubic yards of artificial snow for the upcoming games.  Since the last time Italy’s Cortina d’Ampezzo hosted in 1956, February temperatures have warmed in the area by 6.4 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central.  Environmentalists have pointed to the climate feedback loop this can create: As places pump out more artificial snow, the emissions from this process—if fossil fuels are used—feed the climate change that will reduce future natural snowpack.  Artificial snow is becoming similarly important for recreational winter sports as temperatures rise. Some resorts have taken to stockpiling snow under giant insulating blankets to keep it from melting during warmer seasons, WIRED reports. But these efforts are costly, and it may soon become untenable for certain regions in the Northern Hemisphere, including some parts of the Northeastern US such as New York and Pennsylvania, to save or make enough snow for a lucrative ski operation.  Scott told me there will be “winners and losers” as winter resort towns face global warming. “As some of those businesses go out of business, the others are there to pick up market share, if demand stays the same,” he said.  Though Scott recognizes the energy and water required to produce machine-made snow, he believes the sustainability of snowmaking gets a bit of a bad rep. He noted that up to 90 percent of the water is returned to the same watershed once the snow melts, and the process likely has a lower emissions footprint than traveling farther to ski elsewhere or flying to watch the Olympics.  Nonetheless, winter sport enthusiasts—professional and amateur—will have to adapt to changing conditions. A survey of Olympic winter athletes and coaches from 20 countries found 90 percent had concerns about how climate change will affect the future of their sport. “When it comes to the Olympics, you hope you deliver [athletes] the best conditions possible,” Scott said. “These people have trained their whole damn lives for these things.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. “I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.” It was shortly after 10 pm on a cloudy December night, and Harrison, a coral researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University, was about 25 miles off the coast of northern Queensland. He was with a group of scientists, tourism operators, and Indigenous Australians who had spent the last few nights above the Great Barrier Reef—the largest living structure on the planet—looking for coral spawn. And apparently, it has a smell. Over a few nights in the Australian summer, shortly after the full moon, millions of corals across the Great Barrier Reef start bubbling out pearly bundles of sperm and eggs, known as spawn. It’s as if the reef is snowing upside down. Those bundles float to the surface and break apart. If all goes to plan, the eggs of one coral will encounter the sperm of another and grow into free-swimming coral larvae. Those larvae make their way to the reef, where they find a spot to “settle,” like a seed taking root, and then morph into what we know of as coral. Spawning on the Great Barrier Reef has been called the largest reproductive event on Earth, and, in more colorful terms, “the world’s largest orgasm.” Coral spawn can be so abundant in some areas above the reef that it forms large, veiny slicks—as if there had been a chemical spill. A team of researchers and tourism operators try to collect coral spawn above the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns one night in December.Harriet Spark/Vox This was what the team was looking for out on the reef, and sniffing is one of the only ways to find it, said Harrison, who was among a small group of scientists who first documented the phenomenon of mass coral spawning in the 1980s. Some people say coral spawn smells like watermelon or fresh cow’s milk. To me it was just vaguely fishy. “Here we go,” said Mark Gibbs, another scientist onboard and an engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), a government agency. All of a sudden the water around us was full of little orbs, as if hundreds of Beanie Babies had been ripped open. “Nets in the water!” Gibbs said to the crew. A few people onboard began skimming the water’s surface with modified pool nets for spawn and then dumping the contents into a large plastic bin. That night, the team collected hundreds of thousands of coral eggs as part of a Herculean effort to try to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. Rising global temperatures, together with a raft of other challenges, threaten to destroy this iconic ecosystem—the gem of Australia, a World Heritage site, and one of the main engines of the country’s massive tourism industry. In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is the largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted to protect a reef. The project involves robots, one of the world’s largest research aquariums, and droves of world-renowned scientists. The scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. But even then, will it be enough? The first thing to know about the Great Barrier Reef is that it’s utterly enormous. It covers about 133,000 square miles, making it significantly larger than the entire country of Italy. And despite the name, it’s not really one reef but a collection of 3,000 or so individual ones that form a reef archipelago. Another important detail is that the reef is still spectacular. Over three days in December, I scuba dived offshore from Port Douglas and Cairns, coastal cities in Queensland that largely run on reef tourism, a whopping $5.3 billion annual industry. Descending onto the reef was like sinking into an alien city. Coral colonies twice my height rose from the seafloor, forming shapes mostly foreign to the terrestrial world. Life burst from every surface. What really struck me was the color. Two decades of scuba diving had led me to believe that you can only find vivid blues, reds, oranges, and pinks in an artist’s imaginings of coral reefs, like in the scenes of Finding Nemo. But coral colonies on the reefs I saw here were just as vibrant. Some of the colonies of the antler-like staghorn coral were so blue it was as if they had been dipped in paint. A pink skunk clownfish encounters the author outside its anemone home.Harriet Spark/Vox It’s easy to see how the reef—built from the bodies of some 450 species of hard coral—provides a foundation for life in the ocean. While cruising around large colonies of branching coral, I would see groups of young fish hiding out among their nubby calciferous fingers. The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 1,600 fish species, many of which are a source of food for Indigenous Australians and part of a $200 million commercial fishing industry. “The reef is part of our life,” said Cindel Keyes, an Indigenous Australian of the Gunggandji peoples, near Cairns, who was part of the crew collecting coral spawn with Harrison. RRAP partners with First Nations peoples, many of whom have relied on the reef for thousands of years and are eager to help sustain it. “It’s there to provide for us, too,” Keyes, who comes from a family of fishers, told me. The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, as many visitors assume from headlines. But in a matter of decades—by the time the children of today grow old—it very well could be. The world’s coral reefs face all kinds of problems, from big storms to runoff from commercial farmland, but only one is proving truly existential: marine heat. Each piece of coral is not one animal but a colony of animals, known as polyps, and polyps are sensitive to heat. They get most of their food from a specific type of algae that lives within their tiny bodies. But when ocean temperatures climb too high, polyps eject or otherwise lose those algae, turn bleach-white, and begin to starve. If a coral colony is “bleached” for too long, it will die. Cindel Keyes, on a boat near Cairns, before spawn collection begins.Harriet Spark/Vox The global prognosis is bleak. The world has already lost about half of its coverage of coral reefs since the 1950s, not including steep losses over the last two decades. And should wealthy countries continue burning fossil fuels—pushing global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline—it will likely lose the rest of it. Projections for the Great Barrier Reef are just as grim. A recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications projected that coral cover across the reef would decline, on average, by more than 50 percent over the next 15 years, under all emissions scenarios—including the most optimistic. The reef would only later recover to anything close to what it looks like today, the authors wrote, if there are immediate, near-impossibly steep emissions cuts. (The study was funded by RRAP.) The reef has already had a taste of this future: In the last decade alone, there have been six mass bleaching events. One of the worst years was 2016, when coral cover across the entire reef declined by an estimated 30 percent. Yet recent years have also been alarming. Surveys by AIMS found that bleaching last year affected a greater portion of the reef than any other year on record, contributing to record annual declines of hard coral in the northern and southern stretches of the reef. “I’ve been suffering,” said Harrison, who’s been diving on the Great Barrier Reef for more than 40 years. “I’ve got chronic ecological grief. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, like when you see another mass bleaching. It can be quite crushing.” The problem isn’t just bleaching but that these events are becoming so frequent that coral doesn’t have time to recover, said Mia Hoogenboom, a coral reef ecologist at Australia’s James Cook University, who’s also involved in RRAP. “The hopeful part is if we can take action now to help the system adapt to the changing environment, then we’ve got a good chance of keeping the resilience in the system,” Hoogenboom said. “But the longer we wait, the less chance we have to maintain the Great Barrier Reef as a functioning ecosystem.” That night in December, after filling two large plastic bins onboard with coral spawn, the crew motored to a nearby spot on the reef where several inflatable pools were floating on the ocean’s surface. The boat slowly approached one of the pools—which looked a bit like a life raft—and two guys onboard dumped spawn into it. The government established RRAP in 2018 with an ambitious goal: to identify tools that might help the reef cope with warming, refine them through research and testing, and then scale them up so they can help the reef at large. It is a massive undertaking. RRAP involves more than 300 scientists, engineers, and other experts across 20-plus institutions, including AIMS, which operates one of the world’s largest research aquariums called the National Sea Simulator. And it has a lot of money. The government committed roughly $135 million to the project, and it has another $154 million from private sources, including companies and foundations. It’s operating on the scale of decades, not years, said Cedric Robillot, RRAP’s executive director. Scientists at RRAP have now honed in on several approaches that they think will work, and a key one is assisted reproduction—essentially, helping corals on the reef have babies. That’s what scientists were doing on the water after dark in December. Normally, when corals spawn, only a fraction of their eggs get fertilized and grow into baby corals. They might get eaten by fish, for example, or swept out to sea, away from the reef, where the larvae can’t settle. That’s simply nature at work in normal conditions. But as the reef loses more and more of its coral, the eggs of one individual have a harder time meeting the sperm of another, leading to a fertility crisis. RRAP is trying to improve those odds through what some have called coral IVF. At sea, scientists skim spawn from the surface and then load them into those protected pools, which are anchored to the reef. Suspended inside the pools are thousands of palm-sized ceramic structures for the larval coral to settle on, like empty pots in a plant nursery. After a week or so, scientists will use those structures—which at that point should be growing baby corals—to reseed damaged parts of the reef. Crew members Paco Mueller-Sheppard and Devante Cavalcante dump a bucket of spawn into one of the floating pools above a reef near Cairns. Harriet Spark/Vox With this approach, scientists can collect spawn from regions that appear more tolerant to warming and reseed areas where the corals have been killed off by heat. Heat tolerance is, to an extent, rooted in a coral’s DNA and passed down from parent to offspring. So those babies may be less likely to bleach and die. While baby corals are growing in those pools, scientists can also introduce specific kinds of algae—the ones that live symbiotically within polyps—that are more adapted to heat. That may make the coral itself more resistant to warming. But what’s even more impressive is that scientists are also breeding corals on land, at the National Sea Simulator, to repopulate the reef. SeaSim, located a few hours south of Cairns on the outskirts of Townsville, is essentially a baby factory for coral. I drove to SeaSim one evening in December with Robillot, a technophile with silver hair and a French accent. He first walked me through a warehouse-like room filled with several deep, rectangular tanks lit by blue light. The light caused bits of coral growing inside them to fluoresce. Other than the sound of running water, it was quiet. The main event—one of the year’s biggest, for coral nerds anyway—was just outside. SeaSim has several open-air tanks designed to breed corals with little human intervention. Those tanks, known as autospawners, mimic the conditions on the wild reef, including water temperature and light. So when scientists put adult corals inside them, the colonies will spawn naturally, as they would in the wild. The tanks collect their spawn automatically and mix it together in another container that creates the optimal density of coral sperm for fertilization. Research technician Elena Pfeffer points out pink bumps on the surface of branching coral in one of the autospawners, a sign it’s about to spawn.Harriet Spark/Vox Observing spawning isn’t easy. It typically happens just once a year for each species, and the timing can be unpredictable. But I got lucky: Colonies of a kind of branching coral known as Acropora kenti were set to spawn later that evening. Through glass panels on the side of the autospawners, I saw their orangish branches, bunched together like the base of a broom. They were covered in pink, acne-like bumps—the bundles of spawn they were getting ready to release—which was a clear sign it would happen soon. As it grew dark, the dozen or so people around the tanks flipped on red headlamps to take a closer look. (White light can disrupt spawning.) Around 7:30 pm, the show started. One colony after another popped out cream-colored balls. They hung for a moment just above the coral branches before floating to the surface and getting sucked into a pipe. It was a reminder that corals, which usually look as inert as rocks, really are alive. “It’s such a beautiful little phenomenon,” Robillot said, as we watched together. “It’s a sign that we still have vitality in the system.” After spawning at SeaSim, scientists move the embryos into larger, indoor tanks, where they develop into larvae. Those larvae then get transferred to yet other tanks, settling on small tabs of concrete. Scientists then insert those tabs into slots on small ceramic structures—those same structures as the ones suspended in the floating pools at sea—which they’ll use to reseed the reef. One clear advantage of spawning corals in a lab is that scientists can breed individual corals that appear, through testing, to be more resistant to heat. Ideally, their babies will then be a bit more resistant, too. Andrea Severati, a researcher at AIMS who designed many of the tanks at SeaSim, releases coral embyros into a large tank, where they’ll develop into larvae. Harriet Spark/Vox During spawning late last year, SeaSim produced roughly 19 million coral embryos across three species. “People often don’t understand the scale that we’re talking about,” said Carly Randall, a biologist at AIMS who works with RRAP. “We have massive numbers of autospawning systems lined up. We have automated image analysis to track survival and growth. It is like an industrial production facility.” Including the spawn collection at sea, RRAP produced more than 35 million coral embryos last year that are now growing across tens of thousands of ceramic structures that will be dropped onto the reef. The goal RRAP is working toward, Robillot says, is to be able to stock the reef with 100 million corals every year that survive until they’re at least 1 year old. (Under the right conditions, each ceramic structure can produce one coral that lives until 1 year old in the ocean, Robillot told me. That means RRAP would need to release at least a million of those structures on the reef every year.) On that scale, the project could help maintain at least some coral cover across the reef, even in the face of more than 2 degrees C of warming, Robillot said, citing unpublished research. One study, published in 2021 and partially funded by RRAP, suggests that a combination of interventions, including adding heat-tolerant corals, can delay the reef’s decline by several years. “We are not replacing reefs,” Robillot said. “It’s just too big. We’re talking about starting to change the makeup of the population by adapting them to warmer temperatures and helping their recovery. If you systematically introduce corals that are more heat-tolerant over a period of 10 to 20 to 30 years, then over a hundred years, you significantly change the outlook for your population.” The obvious deficiency of RRAP, and many other reef conservation projects, is that it doesn’t tackle the root problem: rising greenhouse gas emissions. While restoration might help maintain some version of coral reefs in the near term, those gains will only be temporary if the world doesn’t immediately rein in carbon emissions. “It all relies on the premise that the world will get its act together on emissions reductions,” Robillot said. “If we don’t do that, then there’s no point, because it’s a runaway train.” Many groups involved in reef conservation have failed to reckon with this reality, even though they’re often on the front lines of climate change. During my trip, I would be on dive boats listening to biologists talk about restoration, while we burned diesel fuel and were served red meat—one of the most emissions-intensive foods. A lot of tour operators, some of whom work with RRAP, don’t talk about climate change much at all. Two of the guides who took me out on the reef even downplayed the threat of climate change to me. Yolanda Waters, founder and CEO of Divers for Climate, a nonprofit network of scuba divers who care about climate change, said this isn’t surprising. “At the industry level, climate change is still very hush-hush,” said Waters, who previously worked in the reef tourism industry. “In most of those boats, climate messaging is just nonexistent.” This makes some sense. Tourism companies don’t want people to think the reef is dying. “When international headlines describe the Reef as ‘dying’ or ‘lost,’ it can create the impression that the visitor experience is no longer worthwhile, even though large parts of the Reef remain vibrant, actively managed, and accessible,” Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a trade group, told me by email. (I asked around, but no one could point me to data that clearly linked negative media stories to a drop in visitors to the Great Barrier Reef.) A dive boat from the company Quicksilver Group above a reef near Port Douglas. Harriet Spark/Vox Yet by failing to talk about the urgent threat of climate change, the tourism industry—a powerful force in Australia, that influences people from all over the world—is squandering an opportunity to educate the public about what is ultimately the only way to save the reef, said Tanya Murphy, a campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit advocacy group. Tourists are ending their vacation with the memory of, say, a shark or manta ray, not a new urge to fight against climate change, Waters said. So the status quo persists: People don’t connect reducing emissions with saving the reef, even though that’s “the only reef conservation action that can really be taken from anywhere,” she added. (Not everyone in the tourism industry is so quiet. Eric Fisher, who works for a large Australian tourism company called Experience Co Limited, says he tells tourists that climate change is the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s what we tell people every day,” Fisher told me. “So as they fall in love with it, they’re more likely to leave with an understanding of that connection.”) Keeping mum on climate change, while speaking loudly about restoration and other conservation efforts, including RRAP, can also take pressure off big polluters to address their carbon footprints, Waters and Murphy said. Polluters who fund reef conservation, including the government and energy companies, are given social license to operate without stricter emissions cuts, because the public thinks they’re doing enough, they said. In reality, the Australian government continues to permit fossil fuel projects. Last year, for example, the Albanese administration, which is politically left of center, approved an extension of a gas project in Western Australia that Murphy and other advocates call “a big carbon bomb.” The extension of the project, known as the North West Shelf, will produce carbon emissions equivalent to about 20 percent of Australia’s current yearly carbon footprint, according to The Guardian. A spokesperson for the Albanese government acknowledged in a statement to Vox that climate change is the biggest threat to coral reefs globally. “It underlines the need for Australia and the world to take urgent action, including reaching net zero emissions,” the statement, sent by Sarah Anderson, said. “The Albanese Government remains committed to action on climate change and our net zero targets.” Anderson highlighted a government policy called the Safeguard Mechanism, which sets emissions limits for the country’s largest polluters, including the North West Shelf Facility. Yet the policy only applies to Scope 1 emissions. That means it doesn’t limit emissions tied to gas that the North West Shelf project exports — the bulk of the project’s carbon footprint. Although Australia has far fewer emissions compared to large economies like the US and China, the country is among the dirtiest on a per-capita basis. If any country can reduce its emissions, it should be Australia, Waters said. “We’re such a wealthy, privileged country,” Waters said. “We’ve got the biggest reef in the world. If we can do better, why wouldn’t we?” On a stormy morning, near the end of my trip, we returned to the reef—this time, visiting another set of floating pools, offshore from Port Douglas. They had been filled with spawn several days earlier. Small corals were now growing on the ceramic structures, and they were ready to be deployed on the reef. After a nauseating two-hour ride out to sea, a group of scientists and tourism operators jumped into small tenders and collected the structures from inside the pools. Then they motored around an area of the reef that had previously been damaged by a cyclone and started dropping coral babies off the side of the boat, one by one. As it started to pour, and I noticed water flooding into the front of the tender, I couldn’t help but think about how absurd all of this was. Custom-made pools and ceramics. Hours and hours on the reef, floating in small boats in a vast ocean. Sniffing out spawn. “You sort of think about the level of effort, that we’re going to try and rescue something that’s been on our planet for so many millions of years,” Harrison told me on the boat a few nights earlier. “It seems a bit ironic that humans now have to intervene to try and rescue corals.” RRAP is making this process far more efficient, Robillot says—machines, not people, will eventually be dropping the ceramic structures off the boats, for example. But still, why not invest the money instead in climate advocacy or clean energy? Isn’t that an easier, perhaps better, way to help? It can’t be either or, Robillot said. And it’s not, he contends. Many donors who fund the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a core RRAP partner and Robillot’s employer, are putting more of their money into climate action relative to reef conservation, he said. The government of Australia, meanwhile, says it’s spending billions on clean energy and green-lit a record number of renewable energy projects in 2025. Plus, while the scale of resources behind RRAP is certainly huge for coral reefs, it’s tiny compared to the cost of fixing the climate crisis. “We need trillions,” Robillot said. Investing that roughly $300 million into fighting climate change could have a small impact on reefs decades from now. Putting it into projects like RRAP helps reefs today. It’s only a waste of money—worse than a waste of money—if that investment undermines climate action. And Robillot doesn’t think it does. A hawksbill turtle on a reef offshore from Cairns. Harriet Spark/Vox The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has been criticized for its ties to mining and energy companies, including Peabody Energy and BHP. The Reef Foundation currently receives money from mining giant Rio Tinto and BHP Foundation (which is funded by BHP) for projects unrelated to RRAP, the organization told Vox. “It is a bit concerning,” Murphy told me. “It’s really important that we get polluters to pay for the damage they’re causing. But that should be done as an obligatory tax and they should not be getting any marketing benefits from that.” Robillot argues that these companies have not influenced RRAP’s work, or restricted what its staff can say about climate change. “If we can still scream that climate change is the main driver of loss of coral reefs, I don’t have an issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to only take money from people who do not have any impact on climate change. I don’t know anyone.” Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP—for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change—it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.” Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP—for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change—it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.”

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has taken a major step to stabilize water use in the state’s rural desert, where a Saudi-owned company established a massive farming operation more than a decade ago. During her State of the State Address earlier this month, Hobbs announced she was placing the Saudi alfalfa farm within an “active management area,” a technical designation that allows Arizona to slow and possibly even reverse the growth of groundwater use in a remote desert area of western Arizona. The megafarm near Vicksburg—owned by the Riyadh-based dairy company Almarai—began pumping massive amounts of groundwater in 2014 to grow hay for export to feed the Kingdom’s dairy cows. The Center for Investigative Reporting first broke news about the desert farm in 2015, drawing attention to a growing trend: Companies connected to foreign governments—Almarai was founded and is currently chaired by a member of the Saudi Royal family—were effectively exporting massive amounts of American groundwater in the form of hay, a water-intensive crop, to help their own countries cope with severe shortages. But one country’s solution would become another’s problem, as the wells of Arizonans living in La Paz County near the farm began running dry. The situation attracted international news coverage as awareness grew about the increasing global competition for groundwater, and other Arizona megafarms exporting desert water in the guise of agricultural products. The water grab would become a key issue in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election. The Grab, an Emmy-winning documentary based on our reporting, followed rural La Paz County supervisor Holly Irwin as she fought to protect residents’ precious water. Watch the trailer: After the film’s release, Hobbs canceled some of the Saudi farm’s contracts to grow hay on land owned by the state. Attorney General Kris Mayes then sued Fondomonte, a wholly owned subsidiary of Almarai, seeking compensation for the locals whose wells were kaput. Hobbs’ designation of the Ranegras Plain Groundwater Basin, located in western Arizona, as an “active management area,” allows regulators to curtail additional water use, effectively limiting the withdrawals to the people and entities pumping it today. In the short term, the designation by itself cannot reduce the amount of water being used by foreign megafarms, but it can at least stop new ones from coming in—and current ones from expanding their operations—in addition to encouraging farms to reduce their withdrawals. “This is huge,” said Irwin, the county supervisor. “It prevents any future companies from being able to purchase land and come here to extract water.” The global scramble for freshwater supplies is only increasing, according to a UN report released this week, which noted the world has entered an “era of water bankruptcy.”

President Donald Trump just gave a preview of how he plans to acquire Greenland: economic warfare.  That was the unmistakable warning embedded in Trump’s rambling, complaint-heavy speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, where he blasted European leaders and appeared to threaten retaliation if the US does not acquire Greenland. “We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump told the audience, before warning, “They have a choice. You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.” While Trump said that he wouldn’t “use force” to seize Greenland, he justified his ongoing demands to acquire the territory because the US keeps “the whole world afloat.” “Without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps,” he said. “After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now?” The president then shared a startling anecdote, which many viewed as an implicit warning of how the US could retaliate if it did not acquire Greenland. Trump told the audience that after initially planning to slap a 30 percent tariff on Switzerland’s exports to the US, he ultimately went up to 39 percent because Switzerland’s president at the time, Karin Keller-Sutter, had rubbed him “the wrong way.” “She just rubbed me the wrong way, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump told the audience. “And I made it 39 percent.” The US later reduced the tariff on Switzerland to 15 percent, which Trump described on Wednesday as evidence of his compassion: “I don’t want to hurt people.” The remarks appeared to underscore the exact warnings Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shared at the World Economic Forum just the day before.  “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” Carney said on Tuesday, stressing that “great powers” like the US have used “tariffs as leverage” and “financial infrastructure as coercion.”  Now, some leaders in Europe seem to be taking Carney’s approach. In response to the Trump administration’s continued threats to take Greenland, the chair of the European Parliament’s international trade committee announced on Wednesday that it would pause a EU-US trade deal that would have, in part, suspended tariffs on all industrial goods.

President Donald Trump famously doesn’t like to read. And if his increasingly frequent public naps are any indication, his attention span is only getting shorter. But he did claim to watch what one historian praised as a “riveting, extraordinary and brutally honest” speech by Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada yesterday in Davos, Switzerland. And Trump’s reaction was typically petulant. Imploring an audience chock-full of European officials at the annual World Economic Forum to recognize that “nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney rallied middle powers—countries with economies similar to Canada—to bind together in the face of unilateral military and economic coercion by bigger powers. (Unspoken but clear among them: Trump’s America.) In doing so, Carney painted a stark view of a new world in which old rules have been torn up, and countries should stop pretending otherwise. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said. “Not a transition.” His call to the world: Resist subordination to the “great powers” who “have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms.” “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said. Trump was clearly irked. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us,” he said on Wednesday. “They should be grateful but they’re not.” “Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.” Carney’s speech, which received a standing ovation, is rooted in Carney’s personal experience after winning an election fought on protecting Canada’s sovereignty against economic attack from the United States in the form of tariffs and bellicose threats that Canada should be the 51st state of America. At Davos, Carney framed Trump’s attempts to “buy” Greenland as part of the same intimidation campaign: “Great powers began using economic integration as weapons,” he said. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” “We know the old order is not coming back,” he added. “But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just.” Read the full transcript here. And watch the speech below.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Russian authorities have detained an Indigenous climate advocate, accusing her of participating in a terrorist organization in what international observers are calling “retribution” for her United Nations advocacy on behalf of Indigenous peoples.  Daria Egereva, an Indigenous Selkup woman from the city of Tomsk in western Siberia, has been involved in international advocacy at the United Nations for several years and has been a co-chair of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change since 2023—an official forum that facilitates the participation of Indigenous peoples in UN meetings and gatherings, including the annual Conference of the Parties climate change conventions. During COP30 in Brazil, Egereva advocated for the inclusion of Indigenous women in climate negotiations. “If we don’t protect women, we don’t have a future,” she said in a video published on social media on November 21.  In addition to her work at COP, Egereva advocated for better inclusion of Indigenous peoples at the United Nations and researched the effects of the green transition on Indigenous communities. “The transition to a green economy without an appropriate framework or with disregard for the rights of Indigenous peoples will continue to result in historical injustices, marginalization, discrimination, and dispossession of their lands and resources,” she wrote in a 2024 report that criticized the lack of inclusion of Indigenous peoples in the green transition. According to the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change, on December 17, Russian authorities searched Egereva’s home, confiscated her digital devices, and arrested her, in what the organization called “a direct retaliation for her Indigenous rights advocacy,” which included her work at COP30.  “These reprisals are part of a broader pattern of repression affecting Indigenous peoples across the globe, and are an unacceptable attack on the right of Indigenous peoples to engage in the global human rights and climate change processes,” said Sineia Do Vale, who is Wapichana from Brazil and co-chairs the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change along with Egereva. > “I believe I am being persecuted for my activism.” A 2023 UN report concluded that advocates from multiple countries have been discouraged from participating in UN processes because of fear of reprisals. In 2024, the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported an increase in the number of cases of reprisals, but did not publish specific numbers. More than 2,000 environmental and land defenders were killed or disappeared for their work between 2012 and 2024, nearly a third of them Indigenous, according to Global Witness.  In October, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution criticizing the Russian Federation’s designation of 55 Indigenous organizations and other groups as “extremist organizations,” and calling on the country to abide by international human rights law.  Luda Kinok, a Yupik woman from Russia who spoke to Grist as a friend of Egereva’s, said that Egereva is expected to be detained until her next court hearing on February 17, after which she could be sentenced to as long as 20 years in prison.  Kinok said Egereva was targeted in part because of her affiliation with the Aborigen Forum network, a group of Indigenous advocates that was designated as an “extremist” organization by the Russian Federation in July 2024. The forum advocated for the protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights as countries sought to develop the Arctic. Egereva was also a member of the Centre for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North, which Russian authorities shut down in 2019. Valentina Vyacheslavovna Sovkina, a Saami advocate based in Russia and one of 16 members of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said through an interpreter that she was also subjected to a search by Russian authorities the same week that Egereva was arrested.  “During the search, they seized technical equipment and searched the premises, folders, books, and boxes for four hours. They compiled a report without leaving a copy and without allowing me to call a lawyer,” she said. “I believe I am being persecuted for my activism and my steadfast commitment to protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples.”  Egereva’s arrest has been decried by several Indigenous international organizations, including Cultural Survival, the SIRGE Coalition, and the International Indian Treaty Council. The IITC called the situation “a grave case of intimidation and reprisal against an Indigenous leader in direct connection with her participation in the UNFCCC process,” referring to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Basmanny District Court of Russia and the United Nations did not respond to messages seeking comment on Egereva’s case.

This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Maurice Manishimwe runs a small garage beside a fuel station in Musango village, just outside the Rwandan capital of Kigali, in a nation known as the land of a thousand hills. Sandwiched between one of those hills and the Nyabugogo River, his workshop hums with activity as people arrive with cars and equipment to be tested and repaired. But this busy location comes at a cost: When rainstorms hit, water running off the hillsides and rising river levels flood the streets and spill into Manishimwe’s workplace. “Our shops were submerged and our goods were destroyed,” says the 30-year-old, speaking about a December 2023 storm that surrounded his garage with knee-high water. He says the flood cost him thousands of dollars in lost inventory and tools. Manishimwe built a higher step into his workshop to protect his brake pads and taillights, laid new tiles, and replaced his wooden shelves. Still, he worries that heavy rains could once again wreck his shop. > “The project represents a rare, citywide effort to rebuild nature-based > infrastructure. Kigali, a city of 1.7 million, has historically seen an average of nearly 40 inches of rain a year. But rainy seasons in Rwanda are becoming both “shorter and more intense,” according to the Rwanda Environment Management Authority (REMA). Since 2017, East Africa’s spring rains have shown record-breaking extremes as warmer air and ocean surfaces load storms with more moisture. Forty years ago, Kigali was protected from stormwaters by extensive wetlands at the base of its many hills. The wetlands soaked up rain, slowed floods, and filtered runoff. But decades of degradation, including informal agriculture, sand mining, and industrial dumping in these areas have reduced the wetlands’ ability to perform these essential ecological functions. Rapid urban growth has placed additional pressure on the wetlands. The city’s population has risen by 4 percent each year since 2020, and open space continues to be replaced with impermeable concrete, which sends ever more runoff downhill. The flooding erodes soil, destroys buildings and infrastructure, and causes tens of millions of dollars’ worth of damage a year, according to Teddy Kaberuka, a Rwandan economist.  Eager to protect its citizens and property, create green space for communities and wildlife, and curb financial losses, Kigali began working nearly a decade ago to restore its natural defenses. In just a three-year period, the city converted a degraded swamp into a functioning wetland—featuring a series of ponds, a riverine forest, and a savanna—that stores carbon, controls floods, filters pollutants, and enhances biodiversity. Building on that success, the city is now reforesting hillsides and restoring an integrated wetland system that will eventually span more than 18,000 acres. The ambitious project will ultimately reshape one of Africa’s fastest growing capitals.  As wetland loss accelerates worldwide, few cities have the space, resources, or political will to restore nature at this scale. Kigali’s project cannot stop floods on its own or reverse climate change, but it represents a rare, citywide effort to rebuild nature-based infrastructure—offering one of the continent’s clearest models for urban areas seeking to boost their resilience.  Kigali sits within what was once an exceptionally soggy and verdant landscape, with 37 interconnected wetlands covering almost 23,000 acres, or 12.5 percent of the city’s land mass. These weren’t small urban ponds with patches of swampland but broad, saturated expanses teeming with vegetation that supported birds, reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals.  The city’s wetlands functioned as a vast natural sponge, soaking up excess water, reducing flooding, trapping sediment, and filtering pollutants before they reached streams and rivers. Wetlands also cool surrounding neighborhoods through moisture release and shading and, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, support a diverse array of wildlife in their reedbeds and grasslands, and store carbon in their soils and vegetation. But in Kigali, explained Gloriose Umuziranenge, a senior lecturer in the Department of Urban and Environmental Management at Protestant University Rwanda, urban expansion—including the construction of new roads, housing estates, commercial developments, and hillside settlements—as well as the pasturing of livestock and dumping of waste gradually degraded the city’s wetlands. At least 50 percent of Kigali’s wetlands have lost their ecological character, according to the World Bank, meaning these wetlands have lost their “capacity to absorb and store excess rainwater,” Umuziranenge said. This local trend reflects a global pattern: about 22 percent of the world’s wetlands, around 1 billion acres, have been lost since 1970, and 25 percent of the remainder are degraded.  Eastern Kigali’s Nyandungu wetland is a case in point. The formerly lush area had been despoiled by decades of sand mining, stony quarrying, and cattle grazing. It frequently flooded the nearby roadway, jamming up traffic and endangering lives. In response, REMA—with support from the World Bank, Global Environment Facility, and Rwanda Green Fund—began in 2016 to transform this wasteland, at a cost of $5 million, into a biologically productive landscape.  Today, the 400-acre Nyandungu Eco-Park is alive with marshes, ponds, and more than 200 species of birds. “From the time [the wetland] was restored,” said park manager Ildephonse Kambogo, “there was no more flooding.”  The success of the Nyandungu pilot project reshaped national thinking about other wetlands, said Richard Mind’je, an environmental studies lecturer at the University of Lay Adventists of Kigali. “After having this benefit, Rwanda said, ‘Why can’t we now restore other wetlands from Kigali so that we can keep benefiting from these services?’” Today, cranes and diggers are working amid the bustle of Kigali’s streets— crowded with buses, moto taxis, shops, and homes—to restore and reshape five more degraded wetlands, covering 1,200 acres. Hundreds of workers are reshaping the land, creating islands, lakes, and ponds, clearing water channels, planting indigenous species, removing invasives, and establishing reed beds. > “If you’re deforesting the catchment, no amount of wetland is going to make > much difference.” By mid-2026, according to the city’s restoration blueprint, the restored sites—Gikondo, Rwamperu, Kibumba, Nyabugogo, and Rugenge-Rwintare—will link up, forming a continuous ribbon of wildlife corridors, parks that contain 36 miles of walkways and bike lanes, and wetlands that guide stormwater safely downstream. With wetlands under threat across the continent, the project has the potential to serve as a model for other African cities, said Julie Mulonga, East Africa director for Wetlands International. Its design, financing, and community engagement are all elements “that can be replicated,” she said. Yet challenges remain as Kigali expands. The city must balance new green spaces for flood protection and climate resilience with residents’ need for agricultural land. Many of the areas now set aside for restoration have been used informally for generations—to grow food, graze cattle, and fish. According to a 2019 report by the Albertine Rift Conservation Society, 53 percent of Rwanda’s wetlands had, by 2015, been converted to agriculture. The land is government-owned, and its use has, so far, been tolerated, as these wetlands are clearly spaces that people have come to depend on.  The Kigali Master Plan 2050 aims to restore and protect 18,000 acres of wetlands that thread between the city’s hills, said Emma Claudine Ntirenganya, a spokesperson for the City of Kigali, but more than 14,000 farming households could lose access to these areas if the city’s restoration ambitions proceed as planned. Nyandungu, for example, no longer allows agricultural activity, its grounds are fenced, and entry now requires a fee.  Park manager Kambogo acknowledged that informal use has continued in Nyandungu, including illegal fishing and collecting grass for cattle. He said some breaches, such as fence cutting, incurred fines and that it was important to engage with and educate the local community until they “understand the importance of having the wetlands.”  Emphasizing conservation and tourism over agriculture, said Alan Dixon, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Worcester, in the UK, risks creating “spaces of exclusion.” Ultimately, he said, “people have just got to feed themselves. Everywhere else is drying up, the weather is becoming less predictable, so wetlands are the last place in the catchment that people can [use].” The dilemma for governments, planners, and conservationists, he added, is “how do you allow people to use these areas while also retaining the environmental integrity?” Christian Benimana, a Rwandan architect and the founding director of the African Design Centre, emphasized the importance of monitoring social impacts as Kigali restores its wetlands. So far, among the six wetlands restored to date, he said, displacement hasn’t yet occurred, “but it’s something that might happen.” Gentrification is also a concern. “Before, you were living close to makeshift car shops, and all of a sudden it’s a beautiful park,” he said. “Is it bad that it makes these people’s property more valuable? I don’t think so. Is it bad if it leads to some form of negative gentrification? I think so.” For some residents, relocating from the wetlands has been a relief rather than a loss. Athanase Segatsinzi, 60, head of Runyonza Village in Nyandungu, spent decades farming and grazing cattle in the flood-prone area.  “When heavy rains came, the wetland overflowed and destroyed our crops,” he recalled. “Even after the water receded, everything was ruined.” In 2019, he says, farmers and herders using the wetland were resettled in Rwanda’s Eastern Province, where the government gave his family 15 acres to farm. “Milk production increased because my cows now graze on a much larger area without the risk of losing pasture to floods,” he said.  But wetlands alone cannot protect the capital from flooding as temperatures rise, rainfall intensifies, and deforestation of the city’s slopes compounds the city’s challenges. “If you’re deforesting the catchment,” Dixon said, “no amount of wetland is going to make much difference.” In response, the City of Kigali last year launched a community campaign that aims to plant 3 million trees over five years, creating a continuous network of forest that links the restored wetlands.  Gatsata Hill, the steep slope that channels torrents of water into Maurice Manishimwe’s workplace, is currently being reforested, and the wetland in front of his garage is being restored. Together, these interventions will create a buffer that fills him with optimism. “Once the reforestation is complete and the trees take root, the water that used to rush downhill will slow,” he said. “And when the Nyabugogo wetland restoration is finished, the flooding problem will be solved for good.”

Donald Trump promised on Saturday to issue a series of increasing tariffs on European NATO allies until he is permitted to buy Greenland, the latest escalation in his already feverish threats to take over the Arctic country, which is part of Denmark. Trump announced on Truth Social that starting next month, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland would all be charged a 10 percent tariff on all goods sent to the US. The tariff would rise to 25 percent on June 1.  “These Countries, who are playing this very dangerous game, have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable,” Trump wrote. The president continued to assert that acquiring the island was “imperative” for America’s national security and the “survival of our planet” in the face of alleged threats from Russia and China, adding that the US’ “Golden Dome” air and missile defense system made the takeover necessary. But Trump’s claims are unfounded and don’t require obliterating the US’ relationship with NATO. As I noted earlier this week, the US already has a massive collection of at least 128 military bases in at least 51 countries—all without taking over land—and the US has had a strategic military presence in Greenland since World War II. There is also no evidence of a Russian or Chinese military presence on Greenland’s coast.  Trump’s threats have led European nations to send military personnel to the island at the request of Denmark. Protesters in Denmark and Greenland demonstrated on Saturday, demanding sovereignty. > A massive "Hands off Greenland" protest is happening right now in Copenhagen > to demonstrate against Trump's threats."The aim is to send a clear and unified > message of respect for Greenland's democracy," organisers said.“Respect for > Greenland, respect for Greenlanders, respect for Denmark.” > > — Adam Schwarz (@adamjschwarz.bsky.social) 2026-01-17T15:52:08.356Z > Massive crowds have taken to the streets of Nuuk to protest the Trump > administration with one message: Greenland is not for sale. It is not > negotiable. > > — Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) 2026-01-17T18:19:34.148Z According to CNN, an estimated 5,000 protesters showed up in Greenland’s capital city of Nuuk—remarkable for an island with a population of approximately 56,000. Even many Republican lawmakers have voiced strong opposition to buying Greenland. > Trump’s rhetoric risks “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies.” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), chair of the Senate defense appropriation subcommittee, labeled Trump’s rhetoric as risking “incinerating the hard-won trust of loyal allies in exchange for no meaningful change in U.S. access to the Arctic.” “If there was any sort of action that looked like the goal was actually landing in Greenland and doing an illegal taking… there’d be sufficient numbers here to pass a war powers resolution and withstand a veto,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said on Thursday. A bipartisan delegation of congressional lawmakers visited Copenhagen on Friday to reassure Denmark and Greenland officials that they would not support Trump’s plan to annex or buy Greenland—and especially not any military action against a fellow NATO member.  “Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset, and I think that’s what you’re hearing with this delegation,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said on Friday after meeting with Danish and Greenlandic leaders there. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said on Wednesday that the president’s threats were “utter buffoonery.” “If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency,” he continued. “He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.” But on Friday, Trump refused to commit to not engaging in attacking a NATO partner.  “I don’t talk about that,” the president replied when questioned by reporters. > REPORTER: Do you commit to not militarily engaging NATO partners?TRUMP: I > don't talk about thatREPORTER: You're not willing to commit to not attacking a > NATO partner? > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-16T22:01:15.026Z