By Kate Wheeling for Nexus Media News.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
After a series of winter storms pummeled California this winter, thousands of trees across the state lost their grip on the earth and crashed down into power lines, homes, and highways. Sacramento alone lost more than 1,000 trees in less than a week. Stressed by years of drought, pests and extreme weather, urban trees are in trouble.
The U.S. Forest Service estimates that cities are losing some 36 million trees every year, wiped out by development, disease and, increasingly, climate stressors, like drought. In a recent study published in Nature, researchers found that more than half of urban trees in 164 cities around the world were already experiencing temperature and precipitation conditions that were beyond their limits for survival.
"So many of the trees that we've relied upon heavily are falling out of favor now as the climate changes," said Nathan Slack, the urban forest superintendent for the city of Santa Barbara. Conifers, like pines and coastal redwoods, once extensively planted along the coast, are dying in droves, he said. "The intensity of heat [and] the longer periods [without] rainfall really force us, as urban forestry managers, to reimagine what are good street trees."
Trees help keep neighborhoods cool, absorb rain water and clean up air pollution. But in order for them to provide those critical functions they need to survive those same conditions. For many cities, that means reconsidering what species are planted.
Slack said he is looking to trees that typically grow further east, like the paloverde, that do better in warmer, drier conditions. "The trees that survive in the desert are going to be much more useful to us here," he said.
In Sacramento, species like the "Bubba" desert willow are replacing redwoods, said Jessica Sanders, the executive director of the Sacramento Tree Foundation. "It's sad because it's an iconic tree," Sanders said, "but it's not really suited to the Sacramento region's climate at this point."
It's not just California cities that are rethinking their canopies.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, officials are bringing in willow oak and sweetgum - trees that are more tolerant to heat than many local species - from the coast. In Seattle, they're planting more Pacific madrone and Garry oaks, which stand a better chance of surviving hotter, drier summers.
In Detroit, which was once known as the "City of Trees," for its extensive canopy, officials are planting hardy trees like the Eastern redbud, American witch hazel and White oak that can withstand extreme heat and flooding.
City officials are also expanding species diversity to fend off disease, aiming not to allow any single species to comprise more than 10% of the city's canopy. Detroit lost much of its canopy between the 1950s and 1990s to Dutch elm disease and an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer. Today almost 40% of the trees that remain are considered "poor quality," said Jenni Shockling, the senior manager of urban forestry in Detroit for American Forests, a nonprofit. "[They] consist of species that are prone to disease and storm damage, cause property and infrastructure damage, and drop heavy amounts of debris."
Preserving urban tree cover can mean the difference between life and death on a heating planet. Extreme heat kills roughly 12,000 people annually already in the United States; experts say that figure could reach 100,000 by century's end. A study published by the Lancet in January found that increasing a 30% increase to a city's tree cover could cut heat-related deaths by a third.
Poorer neighborhoods with large non-white populations tend to have less tree cover and can get up to 20 degrees warmer than wealthier (and greener) neighborhoods, according to several studies. "A map of trees in any city in America is a map of income and a map of race," said Jad Daley, the president and CEO of the nonprofit American Forests.
Cites may soon see some relief. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last year, includes $1.5 billion for the Forest Service's Urban and Community Forestry Program, amounting to a five-fold increase in the program's annual budget.
The funding has the potential to transform urban canopies, according to experts like Daley. But as Slack and other arborists across the country turn to new species to fill their streets, they're running into a new issue: supply.
"Right now there are bottlenecks in the traditional nursery supply line," said Shockling. "Growers tend to favor specific species because they grow well in the nursery or grow quickly, but that doesn't necessarily speak to the species diversity standards that we're trying to adhere to."
American Forests has partnered with the U.S. Forest Service to invest in and develop nurseries across the country to improve the supply chain. "The nurseries need some assurances that what they're growing is going to have market value, and we have the assurance that what we're going to purchase will have a supply," Shockling said.
Those large-scale investments will be crucial to updating the make-up of urban canopies, according to David Teuschler, the chief horticulturist at Devil Mountain, one of California's largest nurseries.
According to Teuschler, even California native trees, like the Coastal Live oak, are struggling in the state's droughts. He'd like to invest more in trees like Mesa oak or Silver oak to sell in Northern California and Swamp mallet or Salt Marsh gum to sell in Southern California, but it can take years to grow trees to a saleable size, and then he has only a limited time to sell those seedlings. Unsold trees are usually composted, burned, or otherwise destroyed.
He needs to know he'll have customers who have a clear eye toward the future.
"You have to remember that there are a lot of old-school people out there that want to plant redwoods," he said. "You want to be the nursery that has these drought-adapted species, but if you can't sell them, it's waste."
One of Devil Mountain's longtime customers is California arborist Dave Muffly, who stocks all his projects with drought-tolerant species.
Muffly first began looking for drought-resistant trees 15 years ago, while leading a project to plant 1,000 trees along a two-mile stretch of highway that runs through East Palo Alto. He wanted evergreens, to block freeway pollution from reaching the low-income community on the other side, and drought-tolerant varieties, but most of the state's nurseries held few options.
Muffly began scouring the Southwest for acorns from hardier species of oaks; with more than 500 species of oak around the world that can breed and create viable hybrids, the trees are particularly likely to evolve traits that can help them survive rapid climate change, Muffly said.
With Teuschler's help, his projects - including a 9,000-tree mega-project around Apple's campus - have served as a proof of concept for cities as they work toward climate-resilient tree canopies.
Through channeling federal funding toward nurseries like Devil Mountain, this kind of holistic system could be replicated around the country to meet each region's unique needs, Muffly said.
"The truth is we don't grow anywhere near enough trees in the United States to spend the money that the government just put out," Muffly said. "So now it's time to build an arsenal of ecology, and the production lines are the new nurseries that will have to be built to grow the trees."
Kate Wheeling wrote this article for Nexus Media News.
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A New York bill aims to regulate the fashion industry's effects on climate change.
The Fashion Act would hold clothing and footwear companies accountable for their effects on the environment.
Fashion accounts for up to around 9% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, more than the aviation industry. The bill also creates a remediation fund for environmental, community or labor-related projects.
Rich Schrader, northeast government affairs director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, described how enforcement of the bill would work.
"The bill will create an enforcement mechanism that the attorney general in New York State will be responsible for," Schrader explained. "It's given a monitoring investigative and enforcement set of authorities. That's to ensure the companies are in compliance."
He pointed out the attorney general could fine companies not in compliance with the guidelines.
Fast fashion companies like Shein have only made things worse, studies have shown. The companies make clothes designed to be worn less than a handful of times before they're tossed away, ending up in a landfill. Fast fashion is responsible for around 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions. The bill has been referred to the Assembly's Consumer Affairs and Protection Committee.
A United Nations report found more than one-quarter of signatories to the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action are working with lawmakers on climate-related issues and regulations.
Maxine Bédat, executive director of the New Standard Institute, said issues persist in greening the process of making clothes.
"The textile mills, which are the ones that would be responsible for decarbonizing, are not getting any price premiums from the brands that they work with to decarbonize," Bédat noted. "There is zero incentive for them to decarbonize even though the technologies are there."
She argued more collaboration is needed between brands and manufacturers to develop an incentive structure. Bédat sees the New York bill as the foundation to build on, which a federal bill could do. The FABRIC Act would establish safer working conditions for garment workers and improve industrywide sustainability.
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By Jack McGovan for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for New York News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
When Guherbar Gorgulu arrived to study at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she was surprised by the many plant-based options.
"In Turkey, you don't really have a lot of vegan options," she says, not to mention many people interested in talking about the impact of what they eat. "I really didn't have a community of people who also cared about animal rights and the environment."
That all changed when Gorgulu started attending weekly vegan cooking workshops hosted by the Erasmus Sustainability Hub - a student-led organization encouraging students to lead more sustainable lifestyles. Inspired to join the Hub as Food and Agriculture Manager, Gorgulu, along with her colleagues, have been active in fighting for climate action on campus. Initiatives include workshops, discussions and petitions to demand fully plant-based cafeterias.
The work seems to be paying off. In February, the university announced that they are aiming to make plant-based foods the norm on campus by 2030. The goal is part of the university's climate commitments; animal agriculture is responsible for around 20 percent of global emissions, and is also a leading cause of habitat loss.
Change is happening beyond Rotterdam. A dozen universities across the U.S. joined an incubator program this year to provide more plant-based foods on their campuses, and across the UK, student unions in Cambridge, Stirling, Birmingham and London voted in support of vegan menus this academic year. In 2021, universities across the entire city of Berlin went predominantly meat-free.
Rising Demand for Plant-Based Foods at Universities
It's no surprise to see rising plant-based initiatives on campus, says Emma Garnett, PhD, a researcher focusing on strategies for promoting more sustainable diets at the University of Oxford. "Students often form the backbone of many climate campaigns," she says. The Fridays for Future school strikes began in 2018, and many of those students are now at university.
In 2021, Nathan McGovern helped launch the Plant-Based Universities Campaign, which aims to push universities to serve 100 percent plant-based foods on campus.
McGovern is now a spokesperson for Animal Rising, previously Animal Rebellion UK, a group working on mobilizing student action on campuses.
"Our strategy is to pass motions through student unions," says McGovern, which become a mandate from the unions to the university itself. "This gives us a platform for negotiation." The four successful student union votes in the U.K. were part of this campaign - with the group eyeing 36 more universities for future efforts.
Garnett also highlights research which suggests that a big life change - such as moving to university - can an increased willingness to adopt green behaviors. Representatives from the student organization in Berlin, Studierendenwerk, attribute their decision to rising demand for vegan meals on campus. There, 16.5 percent of students identify as vegan, in comparison to an average of 1.6 percent across the rest of Germany.
Universities Hoping to Meet Climate Commitments
A growing number of universities are now committing to reduce their emissions by serving more plant-based foods on campus, says Edwina Hughes, Head of the Cool Food Pledge at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
Universities make up roughly a fifth of the 67 organizations who have taken the Cool Food Pledge run by WRI. The rest include hospitals, hotels and cities like New York, whose mayor has promised to reduce 30 percent of food-related emissions by the end of the decade.
Cities and schools that sign on must aim to reduce their food-related emissions by at least 25 percent by 2030 - a rate calculated by WRI to fall in line with Paris climate targets. The first 30 organizations who took the pledge have already successfully reduced their per-plate emissions by 21 percent, according to the organization's data.
The Cool Food Pledge team begins their work by looking at each organization's procurement data, and then calculating their carbon footprint. They measure this with the direct emissions of the food purchased, as well as the carbon opportunity cost - an amount based on how much carbon the land could store if it had been left alone as forest or other wild landscape.
What becomes clear, says Hughes, is that in order to drive down the climate impact of food, "it's really important to move away from climate impactful foods like ruminant meat and all animal based products towards plants."
Using Behavioral Science to Promote Plant-Based
Each organization also receives behavioral science recommendations to help them encourage diners to select plant-based options. Such small interventions - known as nudges - can be effective in university settings.
One meta-analysis spanning 21 years and 24 universities across different continents found that over two-thirds of nudges were successful in reducing meat consumption. The analysis also found that multiple complementary nudges were more effective than singular interventions. Nudges can take many forms - like adding more meal options, promotional messaging, pricing incentives, manipulating the layout of dining areas and changing the arrangement of food choices on menus.
Even in the classroom there are opportunities to promote plant-based eating. Economics students at a U.S. college reduced their meat consumption by roughly 10 percent over a three year period hearing a 50 minute informational campaign that talked about the environmental impacts of animal agriculture, combined with information on the health benefits of reducing meat consumption.
The intervention wasn't coercive, says Andrew Jalil, an associate professor in economics at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and lead author of the study. "It was just saying, here's what the scientific literature says, you do what you want to do."
Jalil highlights similar research in which students in a philosophy class were exposed to material arguing for vegetarianism. Based on student cafeteria purchases, this too translated to a reduction in meat consumption. With roughly half of all young people going to university, at least in the U.K., universities are an ideal institution for disseminating information to a range of people from different backgrounds.
Jalil points out there might be other factors influencing students to be more open to dietary shifts. They attend university to learn, they might be more concerned about the climate crisis due to their age and access to dining facilities removes any cooking barriers that might exist to trying out vegan foods.
Universities Still Face Challenges to Climate Action
Shifting what an entire university eats isn't easy. Many schools, Hughes says, are decentralized in the way they provide food, with different colleges offering their own menus. The logistics of reduction can be complicated.
What's more, Hughes adds, it would be naive not to think that "there are universities and faculties who are quite opposed to doing this kind of work because it comes into conflict with their ethos or with their research." Many universities, for example, have research centers focusing on livestock production.
Plus, as the Cool Food Pledge is voluntary, there's no guarantee that anyone will stick to it, and the same is true of any claims made in a press release separate from the pledge.
"It's their responsibility if they want to make progress," says Hughes, adding that she sees students, faculty and investors as the "informal police," who should act to put pressure on their universities if they fumble their targets. The WRI doesn't publish any data on individual organizations, which Hughes says universities could do in order to hold themselves accountable.
"Ultimately what you want is data - you want to be able to track progress," she says. "It's not very interesting to a lot of people but it is the material way to see whether anything is changing."
Even if these schools were accountable and making strides to reduce their food emissions, they might be hogging the limelight in a way that obscures trends elsewhere in society. In the case of the Cool Food Pledge, only a fraction of the organizations who've taken it are universities.
"We should bear in mind that universities often receive a lot of press interest, so we could be missing similar initiatives at other organizations due to less publicity," says Garnett.
In April, the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, made a commitment to reduce food emissions in the city by 33 percent by 2030, in part by serving less meat at schools and hospitals. Other councils, such as Cambridge City and Oxfordshire County, have made similar commitments to only serve plant-based foods at events and meetings, and push for more vegan options in schools. Last year, Ingka Group, responsible for a majority of IKEA stores, began selling plant-based foods at the same price or cheaper than meat options in their restaurants.
But for some activists, the publicity that universities attract is exactly why they should be targets for climate action.
"A lot of universities, by continuing to serve animal products on their menus, are giving legitimacy to an industry that has none," says McGovern. "These are the places we're referencing when we talk about the need to move to a plant-based food system, and they really need to be aligning their actions and their menus with that."
Jack McGovan wrote this article for Sentient Climate.
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As Coloradans begin to weigh their options in this year's presidential election, a new Carbon Brief analysis projects that a second Biden term would help reduce climate pollution - but the administration will still fall short of meeting its 2030 goals.
Report co-author Simon Evans - senior policy editor at Carbon Brief - said by contrast, a second Trump term that successfully rolls back Biden initiatives, including the Inflation Reduction Act as promised, would add four billion extra tons of fossil fuel pollution.
"That's equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the European Union and Japan," said Evans. "That amount of extra emissions, four billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, would cause global climate damage worth something like $900 billion."
Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a hoax, and advanced policies that increased crude oil drilling in order to maintain American energy dominance.
Researchers project a second Trump term would wipe out all emission-reduction gains made over the past five years by installing wind turbines, solar panels, and other clean energy technologies across the globe twice over.
In the 20th century, Evans said nations controlling large fossil fuel reserves did hold significant economic and other advantages.
But in the 21st century and beyond, he said he believes countries with large portfolios of clean energy will have the advantage.
"Actually, clean energy technologies are a great way of bringing energy security," said Evans. "Because you're not relying on import, you're just relying on the wind and the sun that you have in your own country. And the U.S. is certainly very well endowed with wind and solar resources."
Four billion tons is also equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the world's 140 countries with the smallest carbon footprints.
Evans noted that people who can't afford air conditioning to survive extreme heat, or move away from areas prone to flooding and wildfire, will continue to face the biggest threats.
"The people around the world that are least responsible for climate change," said Evans, "whether that's in the poorest countries in the world, or the poorest people in the richest countries - those tend to be the people that are most exposed to the negative impacts of climate change."
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