update
President Joe Biden’s environmental policies will likely be remembered for the progress they made, even as they face setbacks in the years to come.
In one of his last acts as president, Biden conserved over 670 million acres of United States lands and waters, surpassing previous administrations in environmental preservation. This included the permanent withdrawal of 625 million acres of ocean waters from offshore oil and gas drilling, enabling greater protections for ecosystems and non-hydrocarbon coastal economies.
As president, Joe Biden advanced major climate policies, though the US remained the world’s largest oil and gas producer. Photo by National Renewable Energy Lab
Biden also advanced important climate policies, rejoining the Paris Agreement, committing to halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and targeting net-zero emissions by 2050. He pushed for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which injected $370 billion into clean energy — the largest such investment in US history. He undertook a number of conservation measures, including the largest expansion of US public lands and waters of any president in history.
After he dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024, Biden continued to advance an environmental agenda, introducing $4.3 billion in Environmental Protection Agency grants aimed at combating climate change, reducing pollution, and promoting environmental justice. In the last days of his presidency, he signed proclamations creating two national monuments in California, which will help protect important Indigenous cultural and ecological sites across nearly 850,000 acres of newly protected land.
Critics argue that Biden’s approval of drilling projects, like Alaska’s Willow project, undermined his climate goals. The US, after all, remains the world’s largest oil and gas producer.
“Two things are true,” Stevie O’Hanlon of the Sunrise Movement, told Inside Climate News. “One is that President Biden did more than any other president to tackle the climate crisis and really kick-start development of a renewable energy economy.… And at the same time, oil and gas production is at record highs, and the policies that Donald Trump is foreshadowing spell out the worst reality for our generation’s future.”
For his part, President Trump has already begun to undo regulations that he argues harm US “energy independence” and economic growth. Key Biden policies at risk include greenhouse gas standards for vehicles and power plants, restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and protections for sensitive ecosystems. It remains to be seen which of Trump’s executive rollbacks will survive legal challenge.
UPDATE
A pandemic may not be inevitable, but the ongoing avian influenza outbreak has passed enough key milestones in past months to heighten researchers’ worry that it is entirely possible.
This strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) — first detected in 2020 — has swept through wild bird and mammal populations. In North America, it has jumped over to poultry, cattle, cats, and humans, as well. Globally, the US currently has had the most cases of bird flu in humans. According to January figures from the Centers for Disease Control (before Trump ordered it to pause external communications), there have been 67 human cases of bird flu in the US since 2024, including the first reported fatal case in Louisiana. The virus has been found in dairy herds in 16 states and poultry farms in all 50 states.
The impact of the virus has been far worse for wildlife. Wildlife biologists say it has set off an “unprecedented panzootic” that has already killed tens of thousands of birds and mammals in every continent except Australia. It has affected around 320 species of birds and mammals and killed an estimated 24,000 Cape cormorants in South Africa, more than 57,000 pelicans in Peru, tens of thousands of elephant seals and sea lions in Argentina and Chile, bears and foxes in Alaska, endangered condors and mountain lions in California, and more. The virus threatens to disrupt ecosystems already at risk from climate disruption and habitat loss and to push some endangered animals closer to extinction.
In humans, most of the infections have been mild, but scientists say that the H5N1 variants spreading in North America, which appear to be adapting to new hosts, may cause severe illness and death, especially when passed directly to humans from birds.
“I’m still not pack-my-bags-and-head-to-the-hills worried, but there’s been more signals over the past four to six weeks that this virus has the capacity” to set off a pandemic, Richard Webby, an influenza expert at the Tennessee-based St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told The New York Times in late January.
Efforts to contain the outbreak are unfortunately going to be hampered by the Trump administration’s decree that US public health officials stop working with the World Health Organization and other international agencies monitoring the outbreak.
What you can do: If you see dead or sick birds don’t touch them. Don’t let your pets near them either. Inform your local health and wildlife officials instead.
LEGALESE
Much of the news on the climate front is bleak these days, but a recent legal decision in the youth lawsuit Held v. Montana gives us something to celebrate. As the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports, in December the Montana Supreme Court upheld a 2023 district court ruling in the case, affirming that the state’s young people have a constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, including a stable climate.
“Plaintiffs showed at trial — without dispute — that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” the decision states.
The finding is historic. The suit, which was brought by 16 youth from across the state, was the first constitutional climate case in the US, and also the first youth-led climate case to go to trial in the country. Montana must now consider the environmental and health impacts of all proposed fossil fuel projects, including how those projects harm children. “This ruling is a victory not just for us, but for every young person whose future is threatened by climate change,” lead plaintiff Rikki Held, now 22, said in a statement.
In more good news, in January the US Supreme Court nixed fossil fuel companies’ attempt to block a lawsuit brought against them by the state of Hawaiʻi. The suit seeks to hold 17 oil and gas companies — including Sunoco, Shell, and Chevron — accountable for deceiving the public about the climate impacts of fossil fuel dependence. The case will now proceed in Hawaiʻi state court, and is being celebrated not only by Hawaiʻi, but by the 11 other state attorneys general who have filed similar accountability lawsuits against Big Oil.
Future Tense
Artificial intelligence sucks up a lot of power, but according to new research, it’s also bad for the environment in a more insidious way: It has a bias against the kind of information that could lead humanity out of the climate crisis.
In a study published in December in Environmental Research Letters and led by Hamish van der Ven, a sustainability researcher at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that AI chatbots are shaping public understanding of environmental crises in ways that obscure corporate accountability, overlook marginalized communities, and promote incremental solutions misaligned with urgent climate action.
Researchers questioned four AI chatbots about major environmental issues and found systematic biases in their responses. The bots favored moderate policy and technological solutions while avoiding radical measures such as dismantling colonialism or questioning economic growth. Chatbots were reluctant to discuss broader social and economic issues, the study notes, pointing out that terms like “environmental justice” were largely absent.
Worse still, as investors look toward potential sponsors for AI development, van der Ven wrote for The Conversation recently, “it is not difficult to see a world in which a description of climate change and its attendant solutions will be brought to you by the good folks at ExxonMobil or Shell.”
TEMPERATURE GAUGE
New research at both ends of the Earth shows a greening up — and not in a good way.
Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate, with projections estimating a loss of up to 1,735 gigatons of ice per year by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed. One gigaton is the weight of 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, so that’s a lot of ice going into the sea. “This would put millions of lives at risk in coastal areas around the world, [with these areas] exposed to increased risks of flooding and submersion,” says Xavier Fettweis, head of the University of Liège’s Climatology Laboratory, who led the Greenland modeling research published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Icy landscapes in both Antarctica and Greenland (pictured) are becoming greener in a worrisome climate signal. Photo by Twila Moon/NSIDC/.
Greenland isn’t the only place undergoing massive change. An international team of scientists have calculated that the Arctic’s first ice-free day could come as soon as 2027, an event that would eventually lead to disrupted ecosystems, altered weather patterns around the world, and, in a feedback loop, more climate change. That can still be prevented. “If we could keep warming below the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 °C of global warming, ice-free days could potentially still be avoided,” the researchers write in a report in Nature Communications.
Meanwhile, Antarctica’s icy landscapes are also becoming greener, particularly along the Antarctic Peninsula, where vegetated land has increased more than tenfold since 1986, new research shows. Published by environmental scientist Thomas Roland of the University of Exeter and remote sensing expert Oliver Bartlett of the University of Hertfordshire in Nature Geoscience, the findings signal a potential ecological shift in the region, raising concerns about the broader implications of climate change on Antarctica’s fragile environment. “When we first ran the numbers, we were in disbelief,” Bartlett says. “The rate itself is quite striking, especially in the last few years.”
MARKETWATCH
The world is heating up faster than predicted, and we are experiencing the impacts in real time, from unprecedented wildfires and hurricanes, to species plunging towards extinction. Yet drilling for fossil fuels continues to ramp up. All that’s changed is the kind of fuel being dug up.
In the works right now: a slew of new gas projects across the world that, a new report says, could lead to a “climate bomb,” unleashing more than 10 gigatons of climate-wrecking greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite climate warnings, multinationals continue drill-and-build operations. Photo by Consumers Energy.
The report, by the climate group Reclaim Finance, found projects intended to boost the global trade of gas have spiked in recent years, driven by Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has been impacting gas imports into Europe, and a shift from coal to gas in developing countries.
Eight liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects and 99 import terminal projects have been completed in the past three years, and LNG developers are planning to complete another 156 new LNG terminal projects by 2030. The report warns that, due to methane leaks, these terminals could produce almost as much as the annual greenhouse gas emissions of all the world’s operating coal plants.
“Oil and gas companies are betting their future on LNG projects, but every single one of their planned projects puts the future of the Paris agreement in danger,” Justine Duclos-Gonda, a campaigner at Reclaim Finance, told The Guardian. And that, of course, means putting humanity’s future at greater risk as well.
Findings
We tend to think of young people as strong, healthy, and largely immune to many of the health conditions that plague older adults, including those linked to climate change. But according to new research, they may not be quite as resilient as we think, at least when it comes to extreme heat.
A recent study published in Science Advances found that those under 35 are most likely to die as a result of extreme heat compared to other age groups. Because of their susceptibility to heat, the researchers estimate that under a high-emissions scenario there would be a 32 percent increase in heat-related deaths of 35-and-unders by 2100.
“It’s a surprise,” Jeffrey Shrader, an environmental and labor economist with Columbia University’s Center for Environmental Economics and Policy and one of the study co-authors, said in a statement. “These are physiologically the most robust people in the population. I would love to know why this is so.”
The research team relied on data from Mexico, which has long-term records of mortality and heat. They found that 75 percent of heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2019 were of people under 35. (Meanwhile, more than 95 percent of cold-related deaths were of those above 50.)
While more research is needed to fully understand the findings, the researchers suspect a combination of physiological and social factors. For example, children under five can’t regulate their body temperature as effectively as adults, and younger adults are more likely than older ones to be employed in taxing outdoor jobs, like farmwork or construction.
Though the study focused on Mexico, the findings could have global relevance. As the authors wrote, “Hotter and lower-income countries — which are expected to be the most adversely affected by climate change — have among the youngest populations in the world.”
CALL OF THE WILD
Driven in part by dwindling fisheries, commercial fishing operations now play a significant role in smuggling tiger parts and other wildlife from Malaysia to Vietnam, new conservation research shows.
Researchers interviewed 53 individuals involved in the trade and found that fishing vessels — often illegally registered to Malaysian companies — provide a cost-effective and low-risk method for moving tiger parts, which are highly valuable in illegal Asian markets: bones for traditional medicine or boiled down into a gelatinous glue-like substance also believed to have medical benefits, skins for rugs or clothing, teeth and claws for amulets.
The research, released in January, was conducted in a collaboration between conservation organizations Panthera and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development at Malaysia’s Sunway University.
“Criminal groups are entrepreneurial and adaptive and can capitalize on emerging opportunities,” Rob Pickles, an expert on wildlife crimes at Panthera, said in a statement. “Understanding how and where these networks converge provides law enforcement agencies with a wider range of options for disrupting wildlife trafficking and recovering the tiger.”
Tiger skins and other wildlife parts remain in high demand, especially in Asia.
Now, fishing vessels are increasingly involved in smuggling. Photos by Panthera/Sunway University.
Malayan tigers are critically endangered, with fewer than 150 individuals left in the wild, down from an estimated 3,000 tigers in the middle of the twentieth century. The researchers also found that the trade was not necessarily lucrative for everyone along the supply chain. Many were forced into the work due to extreme poverty. They linked the poaching to human exploitation, including forced, indentured, and child labor on fishing vessels conducting both illegal fishing and human trafficking.
While Malaysia has increased penalties for wildlife crime and enhanced maritime enforcement, more intervention is needed, the groups said. “Successful prosecutions are difficult to achieve,” said Gopalasamy Reuben Clements, coauthor of the study and a sustainable finance specialist for ZSL. “So we need to explore other approaches, such as highly targeted behavioral-change interventions, that can run in parallel to arrests and prosecutions.”
The study recommends strengthening labor protections, closing illegal fishing loopholes, and raising awareness in poaching hotspots to reduce both wildlife and human exploitation.
UPWELL
In 1751, an Italian naturalist named Luigi Ferdinando Marsili described an Adriatic Sea “filled with oysters, almost placed one on top of the other like stones, forming a wall.” Until recently, in most of the seas surrounding Europe — across nearly 6,000 square miles of sea floor — oysters were so plentiful that they were a street staple on the continent. That has all changed.
Some 30 restoration projects aim to recover Europe’s oysters, including through the use of elevated settlement cones (pictured) that protect mollusks from bottom-dwelling predators. Photo by Matthias Huber/Ifremer.
New research warns that wild oyster ecosystems in Europe have essentially collapsed. “We’ve forgotten that oysters used to be so important,” says Ruth Thurstan, a historical ecologist at the University of Exeter, England, who worked with colleagues and the Native Oyster Restoration Alliance to survey old maritime records and map past oyster beds. Comparing the survey to current populations, researchers found that except for a few locations such as Norway and Sweden, Europe’s native oyster (Ostrea edulis) is largely found in densities of less than one individual per square meter or in tiny clumps of less than a quarter acre. They assert that oyster ecosystems have collapsed, according to international standards, thanks to overexploitation, poor water quality, and dredging. Their finding was published in a recent issue of Conservation Letters.
But there’s hope that the native mollusks may yet recover, thanks to the efforts of some 30 different restoration projects in Europe. “It’s at a very hopeful stage,” says Philine Zu Ermgassen, an ocean scientist at the University of Edinburgh who took part in the survey and other studies.
By examining past records, researchers hope to understand where oysters once thrived so that they can set a baseline for what a thriving oyster reef ecosystem should look like. This would enable oysters to resume their essential ecosystem functions: filtering water, stabilizing shorelines, and helping support populations of fish, crabs, starfish, birds — and humans.
CALL OF THE WILD
Photo by Adrien Lesaffre.
An Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) slurps nectar from an Ethiopian red hot poker flower (Kniphofia foliosa) in the Bale Mountains National Park in the country’s highlands. These endangered wolves dine mostly on rodents, but it appears they have a bit of a sweet tooth as well. They are the first large carnivorous predators known to feed on flowers. Since licking the flowers ends up depositing relatively large amounts of pollen on their muzzles, researchers reported, in a recent issue of the journal Ecology, that the wolves might be playing an additional, and rather unusual, role in this ecosystem — that of pollinators.
AROUND THE WORLD
As the climate crisis deepens, so too does its reach. Nothing, it seems, is truly insulated from the impacts of rising temperatures. That includes disease.
Climate change is exacerbating the spread of infectious disease in multiple ways. It is expanding the range of disease-carrying animals like mosquitoes and birds, allowing them to move into new landscapes as temperatures increase; it’s contributing to landscape changes that bring disease-carrying wildlife into closer contact with humans; it’s aggravating extreme weather events like flooding, leading to direct contact with contaminated water; it’s improving pathogen growth and survival rates; and in at least one case, it has led to the release of a frozen pathogen from permafrost. Indeed, as a 2022 study in Nature Climate Change found, 58 percent of pathogenic diseases known to impact humanity have already been aggravated at one point by climatic events.
Here are just a handful of the places where the climate crisis is increasing the spread of infectious disease in humans.
Sources: Grist, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, VOA News, Carbon Brief, Yale360, Mongabay, Vox, World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, British Red Cross, One Health
1 Bangladesh
Climate change is spurring changes in Bangladesh’s monsoon season. Specifically, the monsoons have gotten longer and are more likely to involve sporadic rainstorms that leave behind standing water. The water attracts breeding mosquitos, including those carrying dengue, a viral infection that can be fatal in humans.
Researchers have tied these weather patterns to an increase in the number of dengue cases and deaths in Bangladesh, with 1,705 reported deaths in 2023, and 415 in 2024, well above the number in other recent years (for example, 26 in 2018 and 164 in 2019). Due to climate change, the disease, which used to be associated with the summer season, is becoming a year-round risk.
Other countries, too, are experiencing a surge in dengue. Globally, the number of cases reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) increased tenfold between 2000 and 2019, from half a million to 5.2 million. (Some of this increase stems from better reporting and other non-climate related factors.)
2 Brazil
Oropouche isn’t very well known, but the virus is causing mounting concern in South America, particularly in Brazil, where the number of cases increased from 832 in 2023 to more than 9,000 in 2024. Traditionally confined to the Amazon Basin, Oropouche has now spread far from the rainforest, and last spring was reported as far away as Cuba.
The disease typically causes mild symptoms like fever, headache, and body pains, but can also lead to brain inflammation and neurological problems. Spread to humans by midges and mosquitos, the recent surge in Oropouche may be due to a combination of climate change and deforestation. Deforestation makes the insects more prone to biting humans when other animals are displaced by habitat loss, while higher temperatures and increased flooding facilitate midge maturation and reproduction respectively.
3 Italy
The first documented case of West Nile in Italy dates back to 1998, when it appeared in horses. The first human case came in 2008, and Italy has been a European hotspot for the disease since.
West Nile virus, which generally brings mild symptoms like fever and headache but can also cause serious conditions like encephalitis or meningitis, is carried from Africa to Europe by migratory birds. These birds pass the virus on to mosquitos, who pass it to humans. As temperatures warm in Italy, and across Europe, the mosquito breeding season is lengthening, which can boost mosquito populations, and as a result, infection rates. Researchers point to 2018 as an example: An unseasonably hot spring that year corresponded with record West Nile virus cases. Italy had 610 cases that year compared to 54 during the cooler 2019, and Europe as a whole saw 2,083 cases in 2018 compared to 463 the following year.
Warming temperatures are also facilitating the spread of the disease, which has become endemic to southern Europe, across the continent. The first locally transmitted case in the Netherlands, for example, was documented in 2020. By one estimate, Europe could see a five-fold increase in West Nile cases by 2040-2060 due to climate change.
4 Pakistan
In 2022, Pakistan suffered devastating floods, part of a pattern of extreme weather events there that are becoming more frequent with climate change. A third of the country was underwater at some point during the flooding, and at least 1,739 people died. Several hundred thousand cases of cholera — a bacterial disease spread through water or food, which can be fatal if left untreated — were later reported, the largest outbreak in the country in decades.
Unfortunately, Pakistan is part of a larger trend. Cholera is on the rise globally, and fatality rates are also increasing. While many factors are at play when it comes to the uptick — including conflict, displacement, and poverty — the WHO has pointed to climate disruption as a big one.
5 Uganda
Since the turn of the century, Central Africa has experienced 28 large Ebola outbreaks. Seven of these have been in Uganda. Ebola is just one of several zoonotic diseases — those that originate in other animals before infecting humans — on the rise in the region. Altogether, Central Africa saw a 63 percent increase in zoonotic disease outbreaks between 2012 and 2022.
Health officials are increasingly pointing to climate change as a factor. In particular, they say, increasingly frequent droughts are pushing disease-bearing animals like bats out of their traditional habitat and into closer contact with humans, increasing the chance that they pass on their pathogens. Research suggests the rate of Ebola epidemics will continue to increase in Africa as the climate warms and that a larger swath of the continent will become at risk.
6 United States
Lyme disease has, in the United States at least, become the poster child of climate change-aggravated disease. As winters have become milder in certain regions, Lyme-carrying black-legged ticks have taken full advantage.
In the Northeast, the blood-sucking arachnids have long spread the disease. But in recent years, they have begun emerging earlier in the spring and sticking around later into the fall and expanding their range into the Midwest and even Alaska, where they were previously unable to establish themselves. The number of cases of Lyme — which can cause a rash and flu-like symptoms, and a slew of sometimes-debilitating, later-stage symptoms if left untreated — doubled in the US between 1990 and 2020.
Other tick species, like Gulf Coast and lone star ticks, are also expanding their range northward. They are contributing to an increase in other tick-borne diseases like alpha-gal syndrome, which can cause a deadly allergic reaction to red meat, and Rickettsia parkeri infection, which causes spotted fever.
Photo by Sandy Chuck Harris
CALL OF THE WILD
The US Fish and Wildlife Service plans to add monarch butterflies to the threatened species list by the end of 2025, following years of declining numbers amid climate change, habitat loss, and agricultural expansion. The announcement follows years of legal battles and a petition from conservation groups in 2014.
Photo by Sandy Chuck Harris.
“The iconic monarch butterfly is cherished across North America, captivating children and adults throughout its fascinating life cycle,” US Fish and Wildlife Director Martha Williams said in a statement in December. “Despite its fragility, it is remarkably resilient, like many things in nature when we just give them a chance.”
An Endangered Species Act listing would protect monarchs from intentional harm and habitat destruction, though it would not prohibit farmers and others from removing milkweed, a vital food source for monarch caterpillars, from their properties. Transport of butterflies for educational purposes would be allowed, and incidental killing of the butterflies, such as vehicle strikes, would not be punished.
The proposed listing designates 4,395 acres in seven California counties as critical habitat for western monarchs, aiming to preserve overwintering sites vital for their survival. A designation would “prohibit federal agencies from destroying or modifying that habitat,” the Associated Press reported. “The designation doesn’t prohibit all development, but landowners who need a federal license or permit for a project would have to work with the wildlife service to mitigate damage.”
While some conservationists welcomed the announcement, agricultural groups expressed uncertainty about its implications. It’s too early to know what a threatened listing means for agriculture, Matt Mulica, the lead facilitator of Farmers for Monarchs, an industry group, told the AP. “We strongly encourage farmers to develop new habitat projects or continue the voluntary monarch conservation initiatives already deployed on their land,” Mulica said in a separate statement.
A 90-day public comment period will close March 12 with a final listing decision expected by the end of the year.
CALL OF THE WILD
Pet owners, you might be worried that your beloved dog or cat will get attacked by fleas as the spring approaches. But, for the sake of birdsong, hold off on those preventative topical flea treatments. New research shows that flea poison residues in pet fur are killing off songbird chicks.
Photo by Tania VdB.
Researchers from the University of Sussex surveyed 103 fur-lined nests of blue tits and great tits — songbirds who often line their nests with scavenged dog and cat fur — and found that every single one of them contained pesticides like fipronil and imidacloprid, which are banned for agricultural use in Europe but are commonly used in pet flea treatments.
The team tested for 20 total chemicals, of which they found 17 present across different nests. They found a higher number of unhatched eggs or dead chicks in nests where there was a higher incidence of insecticide, indicating that exposure to insecticides in the nest linings may lead to lower hatching and higher mortality rates.
“No nest was free from insecticides in our study, and this significant presence of harmful chemicals could be having devastating consequences on the UK’s bird populations,” Cannelle Tassin de Montaigu, the lead author of the research paper, which was published in Science of the Total Environment, said in a statement. The researchers say the UK government needs to urgently consider restricting the use of pesticides used in flea treatments, and in the meantime, recommend that domestic animals should not be treated for fleas unless they actually have them.
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