Venture capitalist Finn Murphy believes world leaders could soon resort to deflecting sunlight into space if the Earth gets unbearably hot. That’s why he’s invested more than $1 million in Stardust Solutions, a leading solar geoengineering firm that’s developing a system to reduce warming by enveloping the globe in reflective particles. Murphy isn’t rooting for climate catastrophe. But with global temperatures soaring and the political will to limit climate change waning, Stardust “can be worth tens of billions of dollars,” he said. “It would be definitely better if we lost all our money and this wasn’t necessary,” said Murphy, the 33-year-old founder of Nebular, a New York investment fund named for a vast cloud of space dust and gas. Murphy is among a new wave of investors who are putting millions of dollars into emerging companies that aim to limit the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth — while also potentially destabilizing weather patterns, food supplies and global politics. He has a degree in mathematics and mechanical engineering and views global warming not just as a human and political tragedy, but as a technical challenge with profitable solutions. Solar geoengineering investors are generally young, pragmatic and imaginative — and willing to lean into the adventurous side of venture capitalism. They often shrug off the concerns of scientists who argue it’s inherently risky to fund the development of potentially dangerous technologies through wealthy investors who could only profit if the planet-cooling systems are deployed. “If the technology works and the outcomes are positive without really catastrophic downstream impacts, these are trillion-dollar market opportunities,” said Evan Caron, a co-founder of the energy-focused venture firm Montauk Capital. “So it’s a no-brainer for an investor to take a shot at some of these.” More than 50 financial firms, wealthy individuals and government agencies have collectively provided more than $115.8 million to nine startups whose technology could be used to limit sunlight, according to interviews with VCs, tech company founders and analysts, as well as private investment data analyzed by POLITICO’s E&E News. That pool of funders includes Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s largest venture capital firms, and four other investment groups that have more than $1 billion of assets under management. Of the total amount invested in the geoengineering sector, $75 million went to Stardust, or nearly 65 percent. The U.S.-Israeli startup is developing reflective particles and the means to spray and monitor them in the stratosphere, some 11 miles above the planet’s surface. At least three other climate-intervention companies have also raked in at least $5 million. The cash infusion is a bet on planet-cooling technologies that many political leaders, investors and environmentalists still consider taboo. In addition to having unknown side effects, solar geoengineering could expose the planet to what scientists call “termination shock,” a scenario in which global temperatures soar if the cooling technologies fail or are suddenly abandoned. Still, the funding surge for geoengineering companies pales in comparison to the billions of dollars being put toward artificial intelligence. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has raised $62.5 billion in 2025 alone, according to investment data compiled by PitchBook. The investment pool for solar geoengineering startups is relatively shallow in part because governments haven’t determined how they would regulate the technology — something Stardust is lobbying to change. As a result, the emerging sector is seen as too speculative for most venture capital firms, according to Kim Zou, the CEO of Sightline Climate, a market intelligence firm. VCs mostly work on behalf of wealthy individuals, as well as pension funds, university endowments and other institutional investors. “It’s still quite a niche set of investors that are even thinking about or looking at the geoengineering space,” Zou said. “The climate tech and energy tech investors we speak to still don’t really see there being an investable opportunity there, primarily because there’s no commercial market for it today.” AEROSOLS IN THE STRATOSPHERE Stardust and its investors are banking on signing contracts with one or more governments that could deploy its solar geoengineering system as soon as the end of the decade. Those investors include Lowercarbon Capital, a climate-focused firm co-founded by billionaire VC Chris Sacca, and Exor, the holding company of an Italian industrial dynasty and perhaps the most mainstream investment group to back a sunlight reflection startup. Even Stardust’s supporters acknowledge that the company is far from a sure bet. “It’s unique in that there is not currently demand for this solution,” said Murphy, whose firm is also supporting out-there startups seeking to build robots and data centers in space. “You have to go and create the product in order to potentially facilitate the demand.” Lowercarbon partner Ryan Orbuch said the firm would see a return on its Stardust investment only “in the context of an actual customer who can actually back many years of stable, safe deployment.” Exor, another Stardust investor, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Other startups are trying to develop commercial markets for solar geoengineering. Make Sunsets, a company funded by billionaire VC Tim Draper, releases sulfate-filled weather balloons that pop when they reach the stratosphere. It sells cooling credits to individuals and corporations based on the theory that the sulfates can reliably reduce warming. There are questions, however, about the science and economics underpinning the credit system of Make Sunsets, according to the investment bank Jeffries. “A cooling credit market is unlikely to be viable,” the bank said in a May 2024 note to clients. That’s because the temperature reductions produced by sulfate aerosols vary by altitude, location and season, the note explained. And the warming impacts of carbon dioxide emissions last decades — much longer than any cooling that would be created from a balloon’s worth of sulfate. Make Sunsets didn’t respond to a request for comment. The company has previously attracted the attention of regulators in the U.S. and Mexico, who have claimed it began operating without the necessary government approvals. Draper Associates says on its website that it’s “shaping a future where the impossible becomes everyday reality.” The firm has previously backed successful consumer tech firms like Tesla, Skype and Hotmail. “It is getting hotter in the Summer everywhere,” Tim Draper said in an email. “We should be encouraging every solution. I love this team, and the science works.” THE NEXT FRONTIER One startup is pursuing space-based solar geoengineering. EarthGuard is attempting to build a series of large sunlight deflectors that would be positioned between the sun and the planet, some 932,000 miles from the Earth. The company did not respond to emailed questions. Other space companies are considering geoengineering as a side project. That includes Gama, a French startup that’s designing massive solar sails that could be used for deep space travel or as a planetary sunshade, and Ethos Space, a Los Angeles company with plans to industrialize the moon. Both companies are part of an informal research network established by the Planetary Sunshade Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the development of a trillion-dollar parasol for the globe. The network mainly brings together collaborators on the sidelines of space industry conferences, according to Gama CEO Andrew Nutter. “We’re willing to contribute something if we realize it’s genuinely necessary and it’s a better solution than other solutions” to the climate challenge, Nutter said of the space shade concept. “But our business model does not depend on it. If you have dollar signs hanging next to something, that can bias your decisions on what’s best for the planet.” Nutter said Gama has raised about $5 million since he co-founded the company in 2020. Its investors include Possible Ventures, a German VC firm that’s also financing a nuclear fusion startup and says on its website that the firm is “relentlessly optimistic — choosing to focus on the possibilities rather than obsess over the risks.” Possible Ventures did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia-backed Reflect Orbital is another space startup that’s exploring solar geoengineering as a potential moneymaker. The company based near Los Angeles is developing a network of satellite mirrors that would direct sunlight down to the Earth at night for lighting industrial sites or, eventually, producing solar energy. Its space mirrors, if oriented differently, could also be used for limiting the amount of sun rays that reach the planet. “It’s not so much a technological limitation as much as what has the highest, best impact. It’s more of a business decision,” said Ally Stone, Reflect Orbital’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a matter of looking at each satellite as an opportunity and whether, when it’s over a specific geography, that makes more sense to reflect sunlight towards or away from the Earth.” Reflect Orbital has raised nearly $28.7 million from investors including Lux Capital, a firm that touts its efforts to “turn sci-fi into sci-fact” and has invested in the autonomous defense systems companies Anduril and Saildrone.” Sequoia and Lux didn’t respond to requests for comment. The startup hopes to send its first satellite into space next summer, according to Stone. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose aerospace company already has an estimated fleet of more than 8,800 internet satellites in orbit, has also suggested using the circling network to limit sunlight. “A large solar-powered AI satellite constellation would be able to prevent global warming by making tiny adjustments in how much solar energy reached Earth,” Musk wrote on X last month. Neither he nor SpaceX responded to an emailed request for comment. DON’T CALL IT GEOENGINEERING Other sunlight-reflecting startups are entering the market — even if they’d rather not be seen as solar geoengineering companies. Arctic Reflections is a two-year-old company that wants to reduce global warming by increasing Arctic sea ice, which doesn’t absorb as much heat as open water. The Dutch startup hasn’t yet pursued outside investors. “We see this not necessarily as geo-engineering, but rather as climate adaptation,” CEO Fonger Ypma said in an email. “Just like in reforestation projects, people help nature in growing trees, our idea is that we would help nature in growing ice.” The main funder of Arctic Reflections is the British government’s independent Advanced Research and Invention Agency. In May, ARIA awarded $4.41 million to the company — more than four times what it had raised to that point. Another startup backed by ARIA is Voltitude, which is developing micro balloons to monitor geoengineering from the stratosphere. The U.K.-based company didn’t respond to a request for comment. Altogether, the British agency is supporting 22 geoengineering projects, only a handful of which involve startups. “ARIA is only funding fundamental research through this programme, and has not taken an equity stake in any geoengineering companies,” said Mark Symes, a program director at the agency. It also requires that all research it supports “must be published, including those that rule out approaches by showing they are unsafe or unworkable.” Sunscreen is a new startup that is trying to limit sunlight in localized areas. It was founded earlier this year by Stanford University graduate student Solomon Kim. “We are pioneering the use of targeted, precision interventions to mitigate the destructive impacts of heatwave on critical United States infrastructure,” Kim said in an email. But he was emphatic that “we are not geoengineering” since the cooling impacts it’s pursuing are not large scale. Kim declined to say how much had been raised by Sunscreen and from what sources. As climate change and its impacts continue to worsen, Zou of Sightline Climate expects more investors to consider solar geoengineering startups, including deep-pocketed firms and corporations interested in the technology. Without their help, the startups might not be able to develop their planet-cooling systems. “People are feeling like, well wait a second, our backs are kind of starting to get against the wall. Time is ticking, we’re not really making a ton of progress” on decarbonization, she said. “So I do think there’s a lot more questions getting asked right now in the climate tech and venture community around understanding it,” Zou said of solar geoengineering. “Some of these companies and startups and venture deals are also starting to bring more light into the space.” Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — Current plans to tackle global warming will only save 3 percent of Europe’s Alpine glaciers from disappearing this century, with most melting away within the next two decades, a new study has found.  The ice fields of Central Europe are vanishing faster than anywhere else on Earth,according to research led by Switzerland’s ETH Zurich. Overall, the scientists found that 79 percent of the world’s glaciers will not survive this century unless countries step up efforts to curb climate change.  “The Alps as we know them nowadays will completely change by the end of the century,” Lander Van Tricht, the study’s lead author, told POLITICO. “The landscape will be completely different. Many ski resorts will not have access to glaciers anymore … the ones we keep are so high and so steep that they are not accessible anymore. So the economy will be confronted with these changes,” he said. “And even the small glaciers provide water downstream” for vegetation and villages, he added. “This will also change.” Their study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the first to calculate the number of glaciers remaining by the year 2100 under different warming scenarios. Previous studies have focused on size or ice mass, the factors determining future sea-level rise and water scarcity, as glaciers hold 70 percent of the world’s freshwater.  The researchers hope their findings, including a database showing the projected survival rate of each of the world’s 211,000 glaciers, will help assess climate impacts on local economies and ecosystems.  “Even the smallest glacier in a remote valley in the Alps, even if it’s not important for sea-level rise or water resources, can have a huge importance for tourism, for example,” said Van Tricht. “Every individual glacier can matter.”  The researchers found that 97 percent of Central European glaciers will go extinct this century if global warming hits 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the temperature rise expected under governments’ current climate policies.  That means only 110 of the region’s roughly 3,200 glaciers would survive to see the next century. Those are located in the Alps, as the region’s other mountain range, the Iberian Peninsula’s Pyrenees, is set to lose its remaining 15 glaciers by the mid-2030s.  If the world manages to limit global warming to 1.5C or 2C, in line with the Paris Agreement, the Alps would lose 87 percent or 92 percent of glaciers, respectively. At warming of 4C, a level the world was heading toward before the 2015 climate accord was signed, 99 percent of Alpine glaciers would disappear this century, with just 20 surviving the year 2100.  In all scenarios, however, the majority of Central European glaciers melt away in the coming two decades. The scientists write that for this region, “peak extinction” — the year when most glaciers are expected to disappear — is “projected to occur soon after 2025.”  Glaciers located in high latitudes — such as in Iceland and Russian Arctic — or holding vast amounts of ice have the best survival chances, Van Tricht said.  Alpine glaciers “are in general very small” and “very sensitive” to climatic changes like warmer springs, he said. The biggest ice fields, such as the Rhône glacier, will survive 2.7C of warming but not 4C, he added.  The second-worst affected region is Western Canada and the United States, home to the Rocky Mountains, where 96 percent of the nearly 18,000 glaciers are expected to disappear this century under 2.7C of warming.  Overall, the study projects a dramatic disappearance of glaciers around the globe: At 2.7C of warming, 79 percent of glaciers worldwide would go extinct by the end of the century, rising to 91 percent at 4C. The melt-off is expected to continue after 2100, the researchers add. Drastic cuts in planet-warming emissions could save tens of thousands of individual glaciers, however, with the extinction rate slowing to 55 percent at 1.5C and 63 percent at 2C.  The rate of disappearance shocked even the scientists, Van Tricht said. Around mid-century, when glacier loss reaches its peak, “we lose at a global scale 2,000 to 4,000 glaciers a year,” depending on the level of warming. “Which means that if you look at the Alps today, all the glaciers we have there, you lose that number in just one single year at the global scale.” 

BRUSSELS — Climate change is already costing Europe dearly. This summer’s droughts, heat waves and floods will cost the European Union an estimated €43 billion this year, knocking nearly half a percentage point off the region’s economic output, according to a study published Monday.  The same study estimated that the cumulative damage to the European economy will reach about €126 billion by 2029. “These estimates are likely conservative,” said the authors of the study, Sehrish Usman of the University of Mannheim, and Miles Parker and Mathilde Vallat, economists at the European Central Bank. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as greenhouse gases warm the world. In 2024, natural disasters, including catastrophic flooding in Spain, destroyed assets worth $31 billion in Europe, according to the insurance company MunichRe. “Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and all of this is contributing to the rising economic cost for the European regions,” Usman said at an event in Brussels on Monday. The study included physical damage to buildings and infrastructure as well as impact on worker productivity and efficiency, and spillover effects on other parts of the economy. It did not include damage from wildfires that burned more than 1 million hectares in Europe this year. “These events are not just temporary shocks,” said Usman. “They manifest their impacts over time.” Floods can disrupt supply chains. Droughts can cripple agricultural yields. “Initially, this is just a heat wave,” she said. “But it affects your efficiency, it reduces your labor productivity.” Droughts were the most damaging, causing an estimated €29.4 billion of loss to the EU this summer. Heat waves and floods caused damages of €6.8 billion and €6.5 billion, respectively. Southern Europe, a region particularly vulnerable to climate change, was hit hardest. Cyprus, Greece, Malta and Bulgaria suffered losses of more than 1 percent of their economic output. “Denmark, Sweden, Germany show relatively lower damages but the frequency and magnitude of these events, especially floods, are also increasing across these regions,” the researchers wrote. The findings come just after climate scientists reported that global warming made a heat wave in July in Norway, Sweden and Finland 2 degrees Celsius hotter than it would have otherwise been. Scientists have also calculated that wildfires in Spain and Portugal were made 40 times more likely by climate change.

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s climate chief has warned that the Gulf Stream could collapse in a few decades after Dutch scientists found key ocean currents are weakening faster than thought. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the system that forms part of the Gulf Stream — an Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Europe from becoming frigid — could start shutting down in the 2060s as a result of climate change, according to a study by Utrecht University researchers published this week.  European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra described the findings in a social media post as a “wake-up call.”  The Gulf Stream, he noted, “carries warm tropical waters north, keeping Northern Europe’s winters far milder than regions on the same latitude, like Canada. This new study says that the Gulf Stream could collapse in our lifetime.”  Shutdown of the AMOC would see temperatures in Europe plummet even as global warming marches on. This would also reduce rainfall and likely bring even drier summers, with devastating consequences for agriculture. Earlier this month, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera — in charge of the EU’s overarching green policy — suggested that the AMOC should be “added to the list of national security acronyms in Europe” given the severe impact of a shutdown.  The Dutch study, which analyses 25 different climate models, found that under a moderate emissions scenario — meaning a rise in global temperatures of around 2.7 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels this century — the AMOC could start collapsing from 2063. The planet has already warmed to 1.3 C, and is on track to warm to 2.7 C under governments’ current climate plans. Under a high-emissions scenario of warming above 4 C, which is considered unlikely, the shutdown could occur as early as 2055, they found.  Previous studies said a collapse was unlikely to happen this century.  WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? Sybren Drijfhout, chair of ocean and earth science at the University of Southampton and a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said the Utrecht study was “solid.”  Drijfhout, who was not involved in the Utrecht paper, published a separate study Thursday that reached a similar conclusion about the AMOC reaching a tipping point this century, entering a decline before shutting down after the year 2100.  According to this study, the unlikely high-emissions scenario has a 70 percent chance of leading to such an AMOC collapse, while the moderate scenario — the 2.7 C increase the planet is on track for at the moment — sets out a 37 percent chance.  Yet even a low-emissions scenario in line with the 2015 Paris climate accord targets that limit warming to below 2 C, the researchers write, give a 25 percent chance of a shutdown.  “As far as current models suggest, we conclude that the risk of a northern AMOC shutdown is greater than previously thought,” Drijfhout and his colleagues wrote. In his post, Hoekstra expressed frustration about climate becoming less of a priority in European politics in recent years despite the threat posed by global warming.  “There’s a sense out there that climate change has taken a backseat because we’re so busy dealing with [other] pressing concerns,” he wrote. “Progress takes time … it’s not linear,” he continued, and insisted that “there’ll be moments when attention wanes. So a big thanks to these scientists for giving us another serious climate wake-up call.”

In February 2022, as Russia marched on Kyiv, Oleksandr Dmitriev realized he knew how to stop Moscow’s men: Blow a hole in the dam that strangled the Irpin River northeast of the capital and restore the long-lost boggy floodplain. A defense consultant who organized offroad races in the area before the war, Dmitriev was familiar with the terrain. He knew exactly what reflooding the river basin — a vast expanse of bogs and marshes that was drained in Soviet times — would do to Russia’s war machinery.  “It turns into an impassable turd, as the jeep guys say,” he said. He told the commander in charge of Kyiv’s defense as much, and was given the go-ahead to blow up the dam.  Dmitriev’s idea worked. “In principle, it stopped the Russian attack from the north,” he said. The images of Moscow’s tanks mired in mud went around the world.  Three years later, this act of desperation is inspiring countries along NATO’s eastern flank to look into restoring their own bogs — fusing two European priorities that increasingly compete for attention and funding: defense and climate.  That’s because the idea isn’t only to prepare for a potential Russian attack. The European Union’s efforts to fight global warming rely in part on nature’s help, and peat-rich bogs capture planet-warming carbon dioxide just as well as they sink enemy tanks.  Yet half of the EU’s bogs are being sapped of their water to create land suitable for planting crops. The desiccated peatlands in turn release greenhouse gases and allow heavy vehicles to cross with ease.  Some European governments are now wondering if reviving ailing bogs can solve several problems at once. Finland and Poland told POLITICO they were actively exploring bog restoration as a multi-purpose measure to defend their borders and fight climate change.  Poland’s massive 10 billion złoty (€2.3 billion) Eastern Shield border fortification project, launched last year, “provides for environmental protection, including by … peatland formation and forestation of border areas,” the country’s defense ministry said in a statement.  “It’s a win-win situation that achieves many targets at the same time,” said Tarja Haaranen, director general for nature at Finland’s environment ministry.  BOGS! WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?  In their pristine state, bogs are carpeted with delicate mosses that can’t fully decompose in their waterlogged habitats and slowly turn into soft, carbon-rich soil known as peat.  This is what makes them Earth’s most effective repositories of CO2. Although they cover only 3 percent of the planet, they lock away a third of the world’s carbon — twice the amount stored in forests.  Yet when drained, bogs start releasing the carbon they stored for hundreds or thousands of years, fueling global warming.  Some 12 percent of peatlands worldwide are degraded, producing 4 percent of planet-warming pollution. (To compare, global aviation is responsible for around 2.5 percent.) In Europe, where bogs were long regarded as unproductive terrain to be converted into farmland, the picture is especially dramatic: Half of the EU’s peatlands are degraded, mostly due to drainage for agricultural purposes. As a result, EU countries reported 124 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution from drained peatlands in 2022, close to the annual emissions of the Netherlands. Some scientists say even this is an underestimate.  Various peatland restoration projects are now underway, with bog repair having gained momentum under the EU’s new Nature Restoration Law, which requires countries to revive 30 percent of degraded peatlands by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050.  The bloc’s 27 governments now have until September 2026 to draft plans on how they intend to meet these targets.  On NATO’s eastern flank, restoring bogs would be a relatively cheap and straightforward measure to achieve EU nature targets and defense goals all at once, scientists argue.  “It’s definitely doable,” said Aveliina Helm, professor of restoration ecology at the University of Tartu, who until recently advised Estonia’s government on its EU nature repair strategy. “We are right now in the development of our national restoration plan, as many EU countries are,” she added, “and as part of that I see great potential to join those two objectives.”  NATO’S BOG BELT  As it happens, most of the EU’s peatlands are concentrated on NATO’s border with Russia and Kremlin-allied Belarus — stretching from the Finnish Arctic through the Baltic states, past Lithuania’s hard-to-defend Suwałki Gap and into eastern Poland.  When waterlogged, this terrain represents a dangerous trap for military trucks and tanks. In a tragic example earlier this year, four U.S. soldiers stationed in Lithuania died when they drove their 63-ton M88 Hercules armored vehicle into a bog.  And when armies can’t cross soggy open land, they are forced into areas that are more easily defended, as Russia found out when Dmitriev and his soldiers blew up the dam north of Kyiv in February 2022.  A destroyed Russian tank sits in a field on April 28, 2022 in Moshchun, Ukraine. | Taras Podolian/Gazeta.ua/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images “The Russians there in armored personnel carriers got stuck at the entrance, then they were killed with a Javelin [anti-tank missile], then when the Russians tried to build pontoons … ours shot them with artillery,” Dmitriev recounted.  Bog-based defense isn’t a new idea. Waterlogged terrain has stopped troops throughout European history — from Germanic tribes inflicting defeat on Roman legions by trapping them beside a bog in 9 AD, to Finland’s borderlands ensnaring the Soviets in the 1940s. The treacherous marshes north of Kyiv posed a formidable challenge to armies in both world wars.  Strategically rewetting drained peatlands to prepare for an enemy attack, however, would be a novelty. But it’s an idea that’s starting to catch on — among environmentalists, defense strategists and politicians.  Pauli Aalto-Setälä, a lawmaker with Finland’s governing National Coalition Party, last year filed a parliamentary motion calling on the Finnish government to restore peatlands to secure its borders and fight climate change.  “In Finland, we have used our nature from a defense angle in history,” said Aalto-Setälä, who holds the rank of major and trained as a tank officer during his national service. “I realized that at the eastern border especially, there are a lot of excellent areas to restore — for the climate, but also to make it as difficult to go through as possible.”  The Finnish defense and environment ministries will now start talks in the fall on whether to launch a bog-repair pilot project, according to Haaranen, who will lead the working group. “I’m personally very excited about this.” POLAND’S PEATY POLITICS Discussions on defensive nature restoration are advancing fastest in Poland — even though Warsaw is usually reluctant to scale up climate action.  Climate activists and scientists started campaigning for nature-based defense a few years ago when they realized that Poland’s politicians were far more likely to spend financial and political capital on environmental efforts when they were linked to national security.  “Once you talk about security, everyone listens right now in Poland,” said Wiktoria Jędroszkowiak, a Polish activist who helped initiate the country’s Fridays for Future climate protests. “And our peatlands and ancient forests, they are the places that are going to be very important for our defense once the war gets to Poland as well.”  After years of campaigning, the issue has now reached government level in Warsaw, with discussions underway between scientists and Poland’s defense and environment ministries.  Wiktor Kotowski, an ecologist and member of the Polish government’s advisory council for nature conservation, said initial talks with the defense ministry have been promising.  “There were a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions but in general we found there are only synergies,” he said. Damaged Russian vehicle marked V by Russian troops and then re-marked UA by Ukrainians bogged down in the mud on April 8, 2022 in Moshchun, Ukraine. | Serhii Mykhalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images “What the ministry of defense wants is to get back as many wetlands as possible along the eastern border,” Kotowski added. “And that is what is required from the point of view of nature restoration and climate as well.”  Cezary Tomczyk, a state secretary at Poland’s defense ministry, agreed. “Our objectives align,” he said. “For us, nature is an ally, and we want to use it.”  JUST … DON’T DRAIN THE SWAMP  Governments in the Baltics have shown little interest so far. Only Lithuania’s environment ministry said that defense-linked wetland restoration “is currently under discussion,” declining to offer further details.  Estonia’s defense ministry and Latvia’s armed forces said that new Baltic Defence Line plans to fortify the three countries’ borders would make use of natural obstacles including bogs, but did not involve peatland restoration.  Yet scientists see plenty of potential, given that peatlands cover 10 percent of the Baltics. And in many cases, the work would be straightforward, said Helm, the Estonian ecologist.  “We have a lot of wetlands that are drained but still there. If we now restore the water regime — we close the ditches that constantly drain them and make them emit carbon — then they are relatively easy to return to a more natural state,” she said.  Healthy peatlands serve as havens for wildlife: Frogs, snails, dragonflies and specialized plant species thrive in the austere conditions of bogs, while rare birds stop by to nest. They also act as barriers to droughts and wildfires, boosting Europe’s resilience to climate change.  The return of this flora and fauna takes time. But ending drainage not only puts a fast stop to pollution — it also instantly renders the terrain impassable. As long as the land isn’t completely drained, “it’s one or two years and you have the wetland full of water,” said Kotowski, the Polish ecologist. “Restoration is a difficult process from an ecological point of view, but for water retention, for stopping emissions and for difficulty to cross — so for defensive purposes — it’s pretty straightforward and fast.”  And at a time when Europe’s focus has shifted to security, with defense budgets surging and in some cases diverting money from the green transition, environmentalists hope that military involvement could unlock unprecedented funding and speed up nature restoration.  “At the moment, it takes five years to obtain approval for peatland rewetting, and sometimes it can take 10 years,” said Franziska Tanneberger, director of Germany’s Greifswald Mire Centre, a leading European peatlands research institute. “When it comes to military activities, there is a certain prioritization. You can’t wait 10 years if we need it for defense.”  THE TRACTOR FACTOR  But that doesn’t mean there’s no resistance to the idea.  A Russian tank seized inside of the woodland is examined by Ukrainian soldiers in Irpin, Ukraine on April 01, 2022. | Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images In Estonia, the environment ministry halted one peatland restoration effort earlier this year amid fierce opposition from locals who worried that rewetting would lead to flooding and forest destruction. Scientists described such concerns as unfounded.  The biggest threat to peatlands is agriculture — an awkward reality for EU governments desperate to avoid drawing the ire of farmers.  In both Finland and Poland, any initial defensive restoration projects are likely to focus on state-owned land, sidestepping this conflict for now. But scientists argue that if countries are serious about large-scale bog repair, they have to talk to farmers. “This will not work without involving agricultural lands,” said Kotowski, the Polish ecologist. A whopping 85 percent of the country’s peatlands are degraded, in most cases because they have been drained to plant crops where water once pooled.  “What we badly need is a program for farmers, to compensate them for rewetting these drained peatlands — and not only compensate, to let them earn money from it,” he added.   There are plants that can be harvested from restored peatlands, such as reeds for use in construction or packaging. Yet for now, the market for such crops in Europe is too small to incentivize farmers to switch.  The bogs-for-defense argument also doesn’t work for all countries. In Germany, where more than 90 percent of peatlands are drained, the Bundeswehr sounded reluctant when asked about the idea.  “The rewetting of wetlands can be both advantageous and disadvantageous for [NATO’s] own operations,” depending on the individual country, a spokesperson for the Bundeswehr’s infrastructure and environment office said.  NATO troops would need to move through Germany in the event of a Russian attack in the east, and bogs restrict military movements. Still, “the idea of increasing the obstacle value of terrain by causing flooding and swamping … has been used in warfare for a very long time and is still a viable option today,” the spokesperson said.  BOGGING DOWN PUTIN Scientists are quick to acknowledge that a bogs-for-security approach can’t solve everything.  “Of course we still need traditional defense. This isn’t meant to replace that,” said Tanneberger, who also advises a company that recently drew up a detailed proposal for defense-linked peatland restoration.  Bogs can’t stop drones or shoot down missiles, and war isn’t good for nature — or conservation efforts.  Soldiers of the “Bratstvo” (Brotherhood) battalion under the command of the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine sit on the muzzle of a captured Russian tank stuck in a field on April 2, 2022 in Nova Basan Village, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine. | Andrii Kotliarchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images And in Ukraine, the flooding of the Irpin basin was economically and ecologically destructive.  Among outside observers, there was initial excitement about the prospect of a new natural paradise. But villagers in the region lost their lands and homes, and the influx of water had a negative effect on local species that had no time to adapt to the sudden change.  “Yes, it stopped the invasion of Kyiv, and this was badly needed, so no criticism here. But it did result in environmental damage,” said Helm, the Estonian ecologist.  Unlike Ukraine, EU governments have the chance to restore peatlands with care, taking into account the needs of nature, farmers and armies.  “Perhaps it’s better to think ahead instead of being forced to act in a hurry,” she said. “We have this opportunity. Ukraine didn’t.”  Zia Weise reported from Brussels, Wojciech Kość from Warsaw and Veronika Melkozerova from Kyiv. 

BRUSSELS — The European Union is suffering its worst wildfire season on record, surpassing 1 million hectares burned on Thursday. Fires have burned 1,016,000 hectares — an area larger than Cyprus or around a third of the size of Belgium — since January, data from the bloc’s European Forest Fire Information System analyzed by POLITICO shows. This is the first time the EU hits the 1 million hectare milestone since EFFIS started keeping records in 2006. The previous worst wildfire season, in 2017, clocked just below 988,000 hectares. Nearly two-thirds of losses occurred since Aug. 5, when EFFIS showed only 380,000 hectares burned. The vast majority of the fires have occurred in the Iberian Peninsula. Spain accounts for more than 400,000 hectares burned, while in much-smaller Portugal, flames have consumed more than 270,000 hectares — or 3 percent of the country’s entire territory. In Spain, where records stretch back to the 1960s, this year is the worst fire season since 1994, according to government data. Both countries have endured searing heat in recent weeks, desiccating forests and turning the peninsula into a tinderbox. Climate change is exacerbating wildfire risk, bringing more frequent and intense heat waves and droughts. But scientists say that the main driver of the catastrophic fires in Spain and Portugal is an overabundance of flammable vegetation on abandoned land and authorities’ failure to take preventive measures. Spain’s special prosecutor for environmental issues this week opened an investigation into the lack of fire prevention plans. Wildfires also release large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide, with the EU on track for a potential new record for fire-related pollution as well, EFFIS data shows.

BRUSSELS — Exhausted firefighters. Traumatized evacuees. Charred villages. Red horizons, all flames and smoke.  The dramatic images from wildfires tearing through Spain and Portugal year after year have become a mainstay of Europe’s increasingly blistering summers, a symbol of the devastation wreaked by climate change.  But while global warming fuels the flames, the Iberian Peninsula isn’t destined to turn into a fiery hellscape every year. Experts say that most of the damage is, in fact, preventable — if only authorities at regional, national and European levels would act.  “Climate change plays a role here, that’s for sure, but it’s not the main cause, and this cannot be used as an excuse for what governments must do in terms of prevention,” said Jordi Vendrell , director of the Pau Costa Foundation, a nonprofit focused on wildfire management.  This year’s fire season is already the worst on record. Across the European Union, blazes have consumed more than 1 million hectares so far this year — an area larger than Cyprus. Most of that land has burned over the past two weeks in the Iberian Peninsula, where at least six people have died. The scale of this year’s disaster has kicked off an unusual reckoning in both countries as to why Spanish and Portuguese citizens are exposed to such a deadly threat each year.  “My house, my neighbor’s house, my entire town of Castrocalbón has gone up in flames because our authorities are incompetent,” 74-year-old Josefina Vidal cried out at a protest in the central Spanish city of León on Monday. Across the border in Portugal on Tuesday, mourners at a firefighter’s funeral declared Prime Minister Luís Montenegro persona non grata.  Politicians on both sides of the border are keen to avoid being held responsible, and are taking pains to blame the fires on uncontrollable factors like climate change and arson, or past decisions taken by their political rivals. At best, the debate centers on firefighting resources.  Yet experts say that preventing destructive blazes is both simpler and cheaper than fighting them. And the conditions that create firestorms are largely due to how countries manage — or rather, don’t manage — their land. THE CLIMATE FACTOR That’s not to say climate change isn’t playing a role.  The global increase in temperatures, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, does not spark fires. But it creates conditions for flames to spread with ease: More intense and frequent heat waves — such as the searing heat Spain and Portugal endured in recent weeks — dry out soils and plants, rendering forests and land more flammable.  Scientists stress that while halting global warming is crucial to avoid even worse heat waves and droughts, governments must also urgently minimize the risk of climate-fueled disasters. The scale of this year’s disaster has kicked off an unusual reckoning in both countries as to why Spanish and Portuguese citizens are exposed to such a deadly threat each year. | Brais Lorenzo/EPA In the case of fires, that mostly means ensuring there’s less stuff for flames to feast on.  While climate change is ratcheting up fire risk, “the fires we’re seeing are the result of decades of rural exodus and the absence of forest management,” said Arantza Pérez Oleaga, vice dean of Spain’s Official College of Forestry Engineers.  LEAVING THE LAND As more and more farmers and shepherds migrated to cities in recent decades, uncontrolled vegetation took over the forests, meadows, orchards and cropland they once managed. An estimated 2.3 million hectares of Spanish land are now abandoned.  This provides abundant fuel for catastrophic wildfires. The amount of biomass in Spain has surged by 160 percent over the past 50 years, said Eduardo Rojas Briales, forest expert at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.  Halting land abandonment is the key to preventing fires, experts say. Yet currently, with the rural population aging and struggling to make a living, it’s a trend that’s expected to continue.  “We need a strong primary sector,” said Víctor Resco de Dios, forest engineering professor at the University of Lleida. Crops such as olive orchards “traditionally served as firebreaks,” he added. “Now we have the problem that with rural abandonment, crops are less common.”  The wild shrublands and young forests that sprang up in their place may look like land returning to its natural state. But Resco de Dios says that the romantic “Disney ecology” vision many Europeans have of untouched nature is not only a fantasy — it’s actively dangerous.  “We need to make people understand that cutting trees is not an ecological crime,” he said. “On the contrary … if we plant trees and then we forget about them, then we’re just planting the fires that we’ll have in 20 or 30 years from now.”  Forestry experts, scientists and even conservationists agree: Letting Europe’s nature grow wild, without active management, is fueling the devastating fires.  Prevention, they say, means creating diverse landscapes, felling trees to create fire breaks, and developing a rural policy that ensures farmers and shepherds can make a living.  Crucially, it also means letting some fires burn, as long as they don’t spin out of control — ending what experts call a counterproductive policy of extinguishing all flames. In the Mediterranean, “our landscapes, they burn in the past, they are burning in the present, and they must burn in the future,” Vendrell said .  PREVENTION PARADOX Yet political debates about fire management tend to focus on fighting the flames when the land is already burning. In Spain, for example, conservative-led regions and the left-wing central government spent the past week trading blame over firefighting resources.  Experts say that preventing destructive blazes is both simpler and cheaper than fighting them. | Pereira Da Silva/EPA But governments more readily invest in firefighting equipment than prevention. Spain’s firefighting budget is double that of its prevention spending, even though preventing fires is much cheaper than fighting them.  “If we want firefighters to be able to stop a fire, of course, they have to have the means,” said Resco de Dios. “But … they cannot do their job, even if they have all the resources in the world, because the landscapes that we have do not allow them to work.”  Still, the task governments are facing isn’t easy, or cheap. Halting land abandonment will take significant long-term investment in rural communities, said Pérez Oleaga.  Stimulating demand for material such as wood is essential, she added. “There is a reason why there are fewer fires in places like Soria or the Basque Country,” where “the forests are pruned and managed because you still have sawmills and other businesses that make a living from the forests.” The Spanish environment ministry, which also oversees policies related to demographic change, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Portugal’s environment ministry blamed the fires on extreme weather, but said that the country was planning to invest €246 million a year until 2050 in measures to boost forestry industries and land management.  There are signs that fire prevention is getting more attention amid growing frustration over how authorities handle the fires. On Thursday, Spain’s special prosecutor for environmental issues opened an investigation into the lack of forest management plans in connection with the fires.  But all experts interviewed acknowledged that politicians have few incentives to take preventive action, given that the results are often not visible for years or decades after the next election.  “For a politician, the calculation is simple,” said Pérez Oleaga. “You can take a picture next to the firefighting plane you bought with EU funds, but you don’t get to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony when you use public cash to clean up a forest.”

BRUSSELS — Climate change supercharged last week’s European heat wave and tripled the death toll, a group of scientists said Wednesday.  Extreme temperatures baked large swaths of the continent in late June and early July, exposing millions of Europeans to dangerous levels of heat.  Looking at 12 European cities, the researchers found that in 11 of them, heat waves of the type that peaked last week would have been significantly less intense — between 2 to 4 degrees Celsius cooler — in a world without man-made global warming.  This climate-induced change in temperatures, the scientists said, led to a surge in excess deaths in those cities. Of the 2,300 additional fatalities linked to high temperatures, around 1,500 of them can be attributed to global warming, they estimated.  “Climate change is an absolute game changer when it comes to extreme heat,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, which co-led the research.  A construction worker in Italy and a street cleaner in Spain were among those thought to have died of heat stroke last week. But most heat-related deaths, particularly among the elderly, go unreported. The scientists said the vast majority of deaths they analyzed occurred among Europeans aged 65 or older.  As a result, heat is often dubbed a “silent killer,” though it’s no less deadly than other climate-related disasters. The scientists noted that last week’s heat wave killed more people than devastating flood events in recent years, which resulted in several hundred deaths.  “Our study is only a snapshot of the true death toll linked to climate change-driven temperatures across Europe, which may have reached into the tens of thousands,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, also a climate specialist at Imperial College London. Global warming, driven by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, is increasing the severity and frequency of heat waves in Europe and worldwide. An aging population also makes Europe more vulnerable to the health effects of extreme temperatures.  The European Environment Agency has warned that heat-related deaths are expected to increase tenfold if the planet warms 1.5 C, and thirtyfold at 3 C. The planet is already 1.3 C hotter than in preindustrial times and on track to warm 2.7 C this century.  THE TOLL OF EXTREME HEAT The rapid analysis published Wednesday — which uses methods considered scientifically reliable but has not undergone peer review  — was led by researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.  The scientists looked at deaths in Milan (where they estimated 317 fatalities were due to changes in the climate), Barcelona (286), Paris (235), London (171), Rome (164), Madrid (108), Athens (96), Budapest (47), Zagreb (31), Frankfurt (21), Lisbon (also 21) and the Sardinian city of Sassari (six) between June 23 and July 2.  “These numbers represent real people that have lost their lives in the last days due to the extreme heat. Two-thirds of these would not have died were it not for climate change,” said Otto.  Last week’s heat also drove up wildfire risk across Europe, with fires still raging in many parts of the continent. The analysis does not include deaths linked to fire or smoke. In Spain, for example, two farmers were killed trying to flee encroaching flames last week.  The Spanish government separately monitors heat-related excess deaths and found that between June 21 and July 2, more than 450 people died due to extreme temperatures — 73 percent more than in the same period in 2022, which saw record numbers of deaths.  WESTERN EUROPE’S HOTTEST JUNE The EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service, meanwhile, said Wednesday morning that last month was the third-hottest June on record worldwide.  For Europe, it was the fifth-warmest June, though the western part of the continent saw its hottest June on record, the scientists said — just above the 2003 record, which was followed by a summer marked by deadly heat.  The temperatures in Europe are further amplified by what Copernicus terms an “exceptional” marine heat wave in the Mediterranean Sea. The water surface temperatures have hit their highest level on record, not just for June but for any month.  “June 2025 saw an exceptional heat wave impact large parts of western Europe, with much of the region experiencing very strong heat stress. This heatwave was made more intense by record sea surface temperatures in the western Mediterranean,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.  “In a warming world, heat waves are likely to become more frequent, more intense and impact more people across Europe,” she added.  Cory Bennett contributed to this report. 

PARIS — Air conditioning isn’t the key to address ever-more-intense heat waves, France’s minister for ecological transition said Tuesday in response to the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen’s proposal for a “major air conditioning equipment plan.” “Our issue with air conditioning concerns heating,” Agnès Pannier-Runacher explained, calling air conditioning an “inadequate adaptation” to rising temperatures. “When you cool a room, you need heat to obtain the cold — which means you’re necessarily heating another area,” the French official told reporters. “You’re heating up the streets, which increases hot spots.” A 2020 study on air conditioning use in Paris underlined that “if AC systems release heat into the street, as is most often the case, the outside air is warmed and the heat wave worsens,” with an impact of several degrees Celsius depending on how widespread the use is. “Although it is an efficient solution for households that can afford it, AC makes the situation worse for households who cannot or do not want to adopt it,” the study published in the Environmental Research Letters scientific journal added. The French have not traditionally been big fans of air conditioning, but the number of French households installing cooling systems is growing. In a post on X on Monday, Le Pen accused the government of forcing ordinary people to suffer the heat while the “so-called French elites” benefit from air conditioning. Frédéric Falcon, a lawmaker from Le Pen’s National Rally, said that his party’s goal is to install air conditioners “as widely as possible, in administrations, schools, retirement homes and private homes.” French authorities have supported supplying strategic buildings and public transport with cooling systems but prioritized other ways of keeping temperatures down that do not emit greenhouse gasses, like planting more trees and better insulating buildings. The night from Monday to Tuesday was the warmest on record, according to France’s weather service, and Tuesday is expected to be “one of the 10 warmest days ever recorded in France,” with maximum temperatures of up to 41 degrees Celsius in the capital city of Paris. Giorgio Leali and Aude Le Gentil contributed to this report.

Europe must act quickly to face extreme heat as temperatures surpass 40 degrees and thousands of excess deaths are predicted in the coming days. Southern Europe is in the midst of a soaring heatwave with temperatures reaching up to 46 degrees Celsius in Spain’s Huelva region — a new national record for June. Meanwhile, Italy, Greece, Portugal and the Western Balkans are also facing scorching highs, along with wildfires and civilian victims. A World Health Organization expert issued a stark warning on Monday, calling for more action to stop tens of thousands of “unnecessary and largely preventable deaths.” “It’s no longer a question of if we will have a heatwave, but how many are we going to experience this year and how long will they last,” said Marisol Yglesias Gonzalez, technical officer for climate change and health at the WHO in Bonn. As for how many people could be at risk, Pierre Masselot, a statistician at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told POLITICO this heatwave could cause more than 4,500 excess deaths between June 30 and July 3. The countries likely to experience the highest excess death rates are Italy, Croatia, Slovenia and Luxembourg, he said. “The worst days will likely be [Tuesday] and Wednesday.” Heat claims more than 175,000 lives across the WHO’s Europe region — spanning from Iceland to Russia — each year. A major study co-authored by Masselot and published in January, which covered 854 European cities, warned that deaths from heat would rise sharply if significant climate adaptation is not prioritized. The WHO on Monday echoed that climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, means heatwaves will become more frequent, dangerous and intense, leading to more serious illness and death. Almost two-thirds of Spanish towns have been slapped with health risk warnings, including 804 at the highest alert level, according to data from the Aemet national weather agency. A spokesperson stated that intense heat is expected across the country until July 3. Meanwhile, heat alerts are also in place in France, Italy, Portugal and Greece. Southern Europe is in the midst of a soaring heatwave with temperatures reaching up to 46 degrees Celsius in Spain’s Huelva region — a new national record for June. | Toni Albir/EPA The Greek government has also issued warnings about air pollution from wildfires that have ripped through coastal towns near Athens. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 people have been evacuated in Turkey, primarily due to a fire near Izmir. In Albania, 26 wildfires were reported between Sunday and Monday, while in Serbia, meteorologists reported that last Thursday was the hottest day since records began in the 19th century. The WHO has advised staying hydrated, avoiding the midday heat and keeping homes cool, particularly for vulnerable groups, including older adults, children, outdoor workers, pregnant women and individuals with chronic health conditions. Those on medications like antidepressants or blood pressure drugs should also take care, Yglesias Gonzalez said, as these can affect the ability to regulate body temperature. However, it’s not just about managing heatwaves when they strike, but also about being more prepared, the WHO said. In a 2022 survey, only 21 of the 57 countries in the WHO Europe region reported having a national heat-health action plan. Of those, 14 were in the EU. Of the WHO’s core recommendations, the most commonly implemented are timely alert systems and communication campaigns. But countries are lagging in preparing their health systems and preventing heat exposure through better urban planning, Yglesias Gonzalez said. The WHO will issue new updated guidance for governments next year, including advice on “people-centered cooling” strategies at the urban and regional level to protect people from heat, she added.