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biodiversity loss
Trump's Big New Law Is a Disaster for the Big Blue Sea
A policy expert explains why the budget reconciliation bill will harm the ocean and attempts to protect and understand it.
Jul 31, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is not a fan of sharks or the ocean. From gutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to seeking the expansion of offshore oil drilling and deep-sea mining while attacking wind energy, his view of our public seas is that they'll make a good gas station and garbage dump. And, this view is reflected in his major legacy bill recently passed into law by the MAGA majority in Congress.
But there's been little discussion about how this bill will impact our public seas. So, we (Vicki Nichols Goldman and myself) spoke with George Leonard, former chief scientist with the Ocean Conservancy and an ocean policy consultant about what's going on:
George Leonard (GL): I am a marine scientist by training. I got a master's in marine science and then a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and have for 25 years worked on the interface between science and policy. I think many of the moves made by the Trump administration are counter to good public policy and put the ocean at great risk.
David Helvarg (DH): George, during the first Trump administration, his focus seemed to be on opening it up for offshore drilling.
GL: Yeah, I think that's right. Now, on the one hand, it (the Trump administration's new ocean policy) feels disjointed, unorganized, and without a broader strategy. And yet if you then actually try to focus in on what's happening, it seems to be quite deliberate. The attacks on science and knowledge seem to be comprehensive and unrelenting. And that's really troubling, right? It's troubling for a whole generation of upcoming scientists, undergraduates, graduate students, you know, postdocs, people who are just getting started and having the legs cut out from underneath them. And then you combine that with a real disdain for anything related to renewable energy. Obviously, the ocean has a huge role to play in renewable energy.
Vicki Nichols Goldstein (VNG): I'm looking at the bill, and it's astounding that he is proposing a $2.2 billion reduction in NOAA's overall funding.
GL: By one account that I've seen there's 18 different line items, program areas that NOAA focuses on, and 11 of the 18 aren't just cut, they're terminated, like 100% reduction. The remaining (programs) experience a cut of between 20-60%. I mean, there's a lot of narrative around efficiency and (cutting) fraud and waste. But I have yet to see anything that supports these levels of cuts, certainly not in the NOAA space.
DH: And now they're doing major changes to the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which has gotten America close to sustainable commercial fishing in federal waters. Fishermen can't be happy with that. Also, abolishing the Coastal Zone Management Act? That's every coastal state working in coordination with the feds to do good planning. What are some of the other really egregious things you saw coming out of this quote "Big Beautiful Bill"?
GL: I kept calling it the reconciliation bill because I refuse to call it the "big beautiful bill." Some I've heard call it the "big ugly bill." But look, the first thing that I think is really troubling is (getting rid of) the Ocean Observatories Initiative, right? That's a bunch of basic research and scientists working on a whole range of ocean-related science. Climate obviously is a big part of that, but also understanding the role of habitats and the importance of biodiversity and fisheries. That's entirely slated to be cut. I don't know how you pursue any kind of science-based work if you're going to reduce that to zero.
DH: That includes 10 laboratories working on climate and weather.
GL: That's right: 10 individual facilities that are to be closed. But the other big science-related piece for NOAA that many folks probably don't know they have is a big ocean observing system where there are literally high-tech buoys and devices deployed both in coastal waters and in offshore waters. They take the temperature, the pulse if you will, of the ocean and by my latest look, this is also slated for termination.
DH: And one of those ocean observing impacts is that it warns people when there are harmful algal blooms, when red tides are coming into Florida for example, when the beaches are going to be shut down. That warning system is gone. The public's being told, "Go swim at your own risk."
VNG: Or eat shellfish without knowing…
GL: Yes, harmful algal blooms can make water unfit to swim in. But they also have big impacts on the shellfish that we eat. And I know shellfish poisoning is nothing to laugh at. It can be extremely dangerous.
DH: I once interviewed a fisheries enforcement agent who demonstrated the effects of paralytic shellfish poisoning. He grabbed his throat and swelled up his tongue in his mouth and started gagging and flopping around on his desk very realistically. That guy's probably been laid off under this plan.
GL: Probably. You know there are other specific aspects of NOAA that are likewise being hobbled here. One is their ocean acidification program. You know burning fossil fuels is doing two things to the ocean. It's making the ocean hotter, and it's making the ocean more acidic. About 90% of the heat generated by climate change from burning fossil fuels ends up in the ocean and along with warming, it's also making the ocean more acidic. And that's simply because CO2 dissolves in water, and NOAA has spearheaded that work and done a lot of work with coastal shellfish farmers and others to address this issue, and that work (with the aquaculture industry) is being cut as well.
VNG: You think about acidification, what's so important is that you need those calcium carbonate ions, and with acidification, they're being reduced. And so, when you think about oysters and muscles and crabs and clams needing that material as basic building blocks, we're looking at enormous hits to the ocean's productivity.
DH: And people's livelihoods. The shellfish industry has become the indicator species for ocean acidification.
GL: And some of the biggest champions to address the broader issue of climate change and how it relates to ocean acidification have been shellfish farmers, particularly shellfish farmers on the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest.
DH: Now Trump's pushing deep-sea mining, and yet they've terminated NOAA's Ocean Exploration and Research division, which is all about exploring the deep ocean and understanding the places where they want to go and exploit it.
GL: There's all kinds of things like that that don't make sense. There was an executive order (from Trump) a while back about promoting U.S. aquaculture, and yet there's a cut to the (NOAA) aquaculture program in the reconciliation bill. So, what is that? Do we want to support aquaculture or do we want to undermine it? There doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency there.
VNG: It just seems so challenging to follow the logic with this budget.
DH: It's almost vindictive, without logic, taking a chainsaw to places that may need scalpels or may in fact need to be expanded. Most people hearing about the bill are only hearing about it in terms of, "It'll add $3 or $4 trillion to the budget deficit" or "It will take Medicaid away from 12 million people and give tax benefits to the rich." But there's much more there. Like it will also impact our public seas in these many different ways that we're talking about. The Ocean used to be a bipartisan issue.
GL: Yeah, and there've been great examples of bipartisan work in the U.S. on oceans and fisheries and other issues. But when you look at the voting on this bill, it's pretty astounding. I mean, it's hard to ignore the fact that all the Democrats voted against it, and pretty much all the Republicans with a handful of exceptions, voted for it (passing it into law).
VNG: Well, I think we really need to engage with people who care about these issues. When people start linking up national, federal decisions with their own livelihoods, I think that's when people will start realizing, "Hmm, maybe there's an opportunity in the next election cycle to change what's happening."
GL: And of course, the great irony here is that NOAA had an Office of Education, which also is fully terminated. So whatever education and outreach and conversation is going to happen (around the ocean), it doesn't look like it's going to be led by NOAA, at least in the short term.
DH: No, and look at what we're seeing in other frontline agencies. I mean, the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump, they're pushing to shift the market away from a clean energy transition and back to fossil fuels. They are promoting keeping coal-fired power plants open, which is a major source of mercury in tuna. Mercury out of the smoke stacks that precipitates onto the ocean and into the food web. It's crazy. We're literally at a point where market forces favor a transition to cleaner, cheaper energy, including offshore wind, and they're trying to use their political power to shift that balance back to offshore oil and the burning of coal while denying climate science.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse?
I mean democracies don't guarantee environmental improvement, but that never happens under dictatorships. You need to have democracy in order to have good environmental policy. And so, there's this larger issue: Are we moving away from democracy and is that why we're seeing these irrational power- and vengeance-driven attacks on our public seas?
GL: That's the $64,000 question, David. I don't have a great answer for that one. I'm really just a lowly marine scientist by training, but I do think those are important questions for us to ask and it certainly seems like the evidence, at least now, is pointing in that direction. You know, you were talking about renewable energy versus fossil fuels. Maybe we should acknowledge one very small win in the legislative process here. There was part of the bill that was going to put additional taxes on offshore wind and other renewable technologies that was stripped out of the final version of the bill. And what remains is the tax incentives that are the remainder of the Inflation reduction Act from the Biden administration that will not expire until 2027.
It's a minor win, but one I think that was hard fought for and all of these minor improvements that made the big bad bill less bad is because of advocates and public leaders in Congress and folks like yourselves who are bringing these issues to everybody's attention.
VNG: I want to go back to our national marine sanctuaries program, something that's vital for protecting critical habitats and species and yet they're cutting this program by 60%. And that also includes our national monuments (in the ocean). And you are living adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, so how do you feel these impacts are going to affect recovery?
GL: It's super disheartening. It's the underwater equivalent of our national park system, right? America's greatest idea, but underwater. You know, I grew up in Massachusetts and I remember seeing little sea urchins and teeny little plants and a couple of small fish, and I just thought this was the coolest thing. Then I came to California and flopped into a kelp forest out here, and it just blew my mind away. And I was spellbound, right? And, I realized pretty quickly that that kelp forest was just an example of what was in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which was a testament to just the incredible biodiversity and the amazing habitats that we have here.
So, it's really tough to think about what might be the future of that with a sanctuary office that's going to lose its superintendent and employees and people that I went to graduate school with who have made this their life, protecting the coastal ocean here. I've heard, you know, that they're only going to maintain the buoys in the sanctuaries through this bill and cease all on-water operations, which I'm still not sure what that means. I assume that means any kind of research, and they've also made a statement that they're no longer going to consider any new sanctuaries.
Now the National Marine Sanctuaries Act (the law) has a whole process by which new sanctuaries can be nominated and debated. And they're going to shut the door on any future sanctuaries? I think that's a real disservice to the legislation and to the public's ability to identify places that they want to see protected.
DH: So, George, in terms of looking at what the administration is doing with this new bill, what are the two or three ocean impacts that you think the marine conservation community should be focusing on and educating the public around?
GL: If we kind of step way back for a second, why is this a problem for the ocean? It's important to recognize what are the three big threats right now to ocean health.
In very simplistic terms, what's happening is that we're putting too much stuff into the ocean and we're taking too much stuff out of the ocean. So, we're putting in too much carbon, we're putting in too much plastic, we're putting in too many other pollutants, and we're basically taking out too many fish because there is still a global overfishing crisis.
And so, the United Nations has framed this up as sort of a triple planetary crisis where we have climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss as three separate but connected problems. And they need to be individually addressed, but they also need to be addressed in an integrative way because the ocean is one big connected system.
If climate change and pollution and biodiversity loss are the big things that we as a society need to be worried about, both here in the U.S. and around the world, the question is, does this bill make any of those better or worse? And I think it's not hard to make the argument that for all three of those problems, this bill makes them worse.
DH: And I'd just add that if you love the ocean, you have to love democracy too. And you have to fight like hell to turn the tide here.
GL: Absolutely. This is not a time to give up. I just saw a headline this morning that some of the Republicans have already started to push back a bit on some of the NOAA impacts largely because of advocacy from members of the public. So, you know, while the bill passed and was signed on July 4, we are still, I think, in the early days of what this is actually going to mean on the water. And we need to keep focused on that.
VNG: Looking for more opportunities for the public to get our voices out there and to make sure that we go out and vote and keep the ocean as a priority.
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Let’s (Not) Choose Sides and Fight
It would be harder to stoke homicidal zeal if everyone understood that behind all our hostilities is the simple, though stark, reality that humanity faces climate change and resource depletion.
Jul 23, 2025
In the course of human events there are times when everyone seems determined to pick sides and brawl. A prime example was the
First World War: Over a dozen countries divided into two camps—the Allied Powers and the Central Powers—and fought for four years, with 40 million casualties. Afterward, few seemed to agree on what the conflict had been about (probably the best explanation was that it had been over tensions between a fading colonial superpower, Britain, and a potential rival, Germany). World War II, which left 60 million dead, was in many ways a continuation of the same conflict, with the terms of surrender for the first war setting a 20-year fuse for the second (the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty were partly a response to German demands at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, a reminder of how revenge echoes through history).
We appear to be sliding into a similar era, where a previously stable world order is failing and much of humanity seems to be preparing to divide and do battle. Many historians see the United States—which emerged as world hegemon after WWII—as a decaying imperial hub, now facing an increasingly organized battery of opponents.
This time, hovering above the potential fray are profound environmental shifts, including climate change, the disappearance of much of wild nature, and resource depletion. In 2024, global average temperature was 1.6°C above the preindustrial average, and the rate of warming is accelerating. We appear to be on course to reach 2°C of warming around 2035—an amount of heating that, according to a recent research paper, “The Future of the Human Niche,” by Tim Lenton and colleagues, might result in roughly a billion refugees.
As conflict approaches, mentally getting outside society’s collective miasma of hostile emotions might help our own mental well-being, while also improving the survival prospects for our species.
At the same time, global energy from fossil fuels is set to start its inevitable decline after 2030 due to a combination of climate policies and the accelerating depletion of oil, coal, and natural gas resources. Since energy from renewables won’t fully replace energy from fossil fuels, the result will be an overall decline in available energy, making economic contraction hard to stave off. Declining population in many countries will also present economic challenges. Energy transitions and economic disruptions both seem to correlate with international conflicts.
In this article, I’ll make a case for the increasing likelihood of conflict, internationally as well as domestically within the U.S,, and then consider some novel ideas about conflict. As we’ll see, either taking sides in an approaching battle, or refusing to do so, comes with a cost. We’ll also see why the tendency to choose sides and fight is not uniquely human, though humans have developed it into a specialty. Finally, we’ll explore how, as conflict approaches, mentally getting outside society’s collective miasma of hostile emotions might help our own mental well-being, while also improving the survival prospects for our species.
Nation Against Nation
Since 1945, the U.S. has been a military, financial, manufacturing, agricultural, scientific, and cultural global leader, acting in alliance with the United Kingdom, a selection of other European nations, and Japan. Much of the rest of the world supplied labor and resources at cut-rate prices and shouldered debt imposed by U.S.-led international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to 1990, the Soviet bloc posed a military and ideological counterweight, but it collapsed, leaving the U.S. seemingly triumphant.
Decline is the eventual default path for empires, and the U.S. is adhering to that historical trend: It has depleted its domestic resources; increased its people’s economic inequality; built up staggering amounts of public and private debt; and pissed off a list of nations that it raided, demonized, invaded, or humiliated over the decades. The stage has been set for internal and external conflict.
Arguably the first round of that conflict started with the spectacular attacks of September 11, 2001, to which the U.S. responded with senseless and ultimately self-destructive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Those invasions happened to coincide with the plateauing of global conventional oil production, which was in turn the backdrop for, and a contributor to, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The U.S.-led international order appeared to be on increasingly shaky ground. It was at about this time that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (soon joined by South Africa) began holding meetings to build ties of trade and strategic cooperation under the rubric BRICS.
Instead of big, expensive weapons, smaller and cheaper drone and cyberweapons systems are likely to predominate.
Over the following 20 years, conflict was largely contained and imperial decline minimized as fracking made the U.S. once again the world’s foremost oil and gas producer. Meanwhile, China grew its economy rapidly, while oil-rich Russia under President Vladimir Putin became more authoritarian and looked for ways to regain its former superpower status.
Then, in 2016, Donald Trump landed on the American political stage. Among voters, he stoked long-festering white, rural working-class resentments resulting from growing domestic economic inequality and high rates of immigration; he ridiculed his country’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; and he decried globalization as a “rip-off” of American wealth. If U.S.-based globalist institutions (including the World Bank, the IMF, and USAID) were under fire previously, in the second Trump administration all are comatose or defunct. Using tariffs as a cudgel, Trump has introduced a nakedly nationalist, personal approach to international economic policy. Understandably, many formerly allied nations are looking to exit what’s left of the U.S.-led global order.
As of this year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have joined the five original BRICS members. Together, the 10 member nations represent over 40% of the world’s population and 37% of the global economy. China now operates the world’s biggest development bank.
The rise of BRICS comes as the U.S. is at a crossroads in more than just politics. U.S. tight oil (which has been the main source of global petroleum production growth since 2010) is set to start its inevitable decline within the next year or so, according to the International Energy Agency. The peaking of U.S. shale gas will come close behind. Meanwhile, President Trump has done his best to undercut U.S. electrification and development of renewable energy (the fabled energy transition, undertaken mostly to blunt climate change). He is instead promoting the rapid development of energy-hungry AI and cryptocurrencies.
China, in contrast, is poised to profit from the energy transition: It leads in the export of all things electric and renewable, despite depending overwhelmingly on coal for its domestic energy. China far exceeds the U.S. in electricity generation (and therefore the potential for development of AI). As oil and gas run out, the transition will demand more minerals, many of which China controls.
Will there be war between the U.S. and its fraying alliance on one hand, and BRICS on the other? Currently there are visible flashpoints in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Iran conflicts. On July 7, Trump posted the following on social media: “Any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.” He had previously threatened that any move to replace the U.S. dollar with a BRICS-backed international reserve currency would trigger 100% tariffs.
Given the apocalyptic potential of nuclear weaponry, the major powers wish to avoid direct all-out military engagement. What appears far more likely is a stairstep increase in strategic resource wars over minerals, water, and arable land, along with proxy conflicts to test alliances and probe weaknesses. Instead of big, expensive weapons, smaller and cheaper drone and cyberweapons systems are likely to predominate. However, there is always the possibility that limited skirmishes could metastasize.
Neighbor Against Neighbor
People are increasingly choosing sides not just internationally, but also within nations. I have written recently about the increase of political polarization in the United States and many European countries, and about the global decline in democracy and rise of autocrats.
Trends toward polarization and authoritarian rule are being driven by shifting demographics, by increasing inequality and economic precarity, and by new communication technologies (social media and AI) that amplify extreme beliefs. Each of these drivers is set to explode in dimension and impact. Ideology (e.g., capitalism versus socialism, or democracy versus autocracy) and religion will likely continue to provide people with immediate justifications for conflict, as deeper environmental and economic trends make conflict more likely.
Measured levels of civil violence have declined in recent decades, as discussed by Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. However, Pinker’s analysis misses two of the main causes of the relative calm that much of humanity has enjoyed since World War II: the immense wealth produced by fossil fuels, along with soaring levels of food production (likewise tied to fossil fuels). Pinker also downplays the degree to which daily average numbers of violent incidents can greatly shift during times of all-out war between major military-industrial powers. The fact that global violence was held in check by an imperial power for eight decades (a period sometimes called “Pax Americana,” in a nod to “Pax Romana” two millennia ago and the more recent “Pax Britannica”) says little about how durable this peace may be as that empire declines, as the world warms, and as fossil fuels deplete.
In the U.S. and some other countries, civil violence may increase in tandem with international conflict—or, as has happened repeatedly in history, war may serve to unify domestic sentiment against a common enemy. In either case, it is likely that nations will continue to see highly variable levels of internal strife, as is already the case: Jamaica’s level of violent crime is 350 times that of Singapore, and Norway is far less politically polarized than Argentina.
Belligerent Humans
It’s tempting to think that choosing sides and fighting is just a human thing. But wars do happen elsewhere in nature. Some species are natural enemies: Crows often cooperate to drive away hawks, which raid crow nests. And, in a few species, notably chimpanzees, individuals band together to attack other members of the same species. Chimp wars can be brutal. Animal conflicts are usually fought over scarce resources, access to potential mates, and territory.
However, because humans have language and advanced tool-making ability, we have developed fighting into a vastly more destructive enterprise. We use language to plan and coordinate attacks, and to demonize enemies—but also to negotiate peace. As for tools, while we humans have created technologies for every conceivable purpose, no field of endeavor has prompted more inventiveness than warfare. We have turned conflict into an art, science, philosophy, and business.
The trouble is, once we’ve declared war on nature, we all surely lose.
We humans also have more things to fight over than do other animals, thanks to language. Religion, money, trade, and political ideologies all derive from our talent for symbolic communication, and all provide justifications for organized mayhem.
Warfare has become so intensive that the casualties aren’t just other humans. Just one example: the Russia-Ukraine war is ruining soils and water sources, and threatens both wildlife and domesticated animals. The Ukrainian government and environmental journalists have described the damage as ecocide, and the consequences are forecasted to persist for centuries.
Indeed, humans’ relationship with the natural world is often described in martial terms. Earlier in the Industrial Revolution, prior to the emergence of the modern environmental movement, it was common to hear politicians and academics speak of the “conquest” not just of diseases but of nature generally. The trouble is, once we’ve declared war on nature, we all surely lose.
What If They Held a War and Nobody Came?
I came of age during the Vietnam War, and my generation was steeped in anti-war sentiment. It seemed easy then to think of all war as stupid. Things look different today if you happen to live in a country, like Ukraine, that’s being invaded (or, if you’re on the other side of the conflict, if you live in a nation, like Russia, that’s been vilified for decades by the global superpower). Similarly, within the U.S., neutrality looks like cowardice if you’re concerned that the nation is being taken over by authoritarian thugs (or, if you’re on the other side of the conflict, if you believe the country is being invaded by lawless immigrants). It’s not so easy to say, “Don’t fight,” when something apparently needs to be done to protect people you care about from an imminent threat.
I tend to side with the (perceived) oppressed over the (perceived) oppressor, and democracy over autocracy. But I also realize that the sides we choose are largely determined by geography and genes.
We can minimize the bloodshed if we never lose sight of our common humanity and creaturehood.
Understanding tends to blunt bloodlust. Humans are more likely to fight if they believe, “Those are bad people, they mean us harm, and we must kill them.” Once one starts inquiring deeply into the motives of the opposition, bloodlust tends to fade. Returning to the example of World War I: If more people had seen the conflict as “competition between a fading colonial superpower and a rising rival” and less as “a war of good against evil,” the public would have been less likely to endorse sending their sons into battle. Britain’s depiction of German soldiers as murderous Huns helped recruit soldiers; perhaps because Germany already had a larger standing army, its propaganda tended to be more matter-of-fact, often featuring graphs of German resources in comparison with those of other nations. Demonization worked for Britain and its allies, and it has become central to modern propaganda ever since (the Nazis adopted it in the 1930s and helped make it a science).
Today, it would be harder to stoke homicidal zeal if everyone understood that behind all our hostilities is the simple, though stark, reality that humanity faces climate change and resource depletion, and that living space is likely to become more constricted. Widespread acceptance of that framing might inspire efforts to share what’s left peacefully while reducing the consumption of the richest nations and individuals.
I’m not suggesting that we can all simply summon a “kumbaya moment” and avert the looming hostilities. Our deck of cards is stacked (in terms of history, resources, trends, and personalities) toward conflict. But we can minimize the bloodshed if we never lose sight of our common humanity and creaturehood—that is, if we continually make the effort to see the world through the eyes of not just our allies, but our enemies as well, and through the “eyes” of the animals, plants, and ecosystems that we currently dominate.
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US Pension Fund TIAA Linked to Brutal Land Grabs and Evictions of Farmers in Brazil
The 10 largest transnational landowners in the world control an area larger than Japan, according to a new report. This accumulation fuels human rights abuse, inequalities, and environmental destruction, and underlines the need for redistributive policies.
Jun 03, 2025
Angelim is a small rural community in Piauí, northeastern Brazil, where small-scale farmers and artisans have lived for generations. Their way of life dramatically changed a few years ago when a company arrived, claiming it had purchased the land. Residents report being threatened by armed men. They have faced forest clearances and the destruction of native vegetation that is essential for their livelihoods and way of life. New monoculture plantations began to dry up the wetlands. The plantations also used pesticides, polluting the ecosystem and threatening residents’ health and livelihoods.
Angelim is located in the municipality of Santa Filomena and is just one of many communities affected by land acquisitions by Radar Propriedades Agrícolas, a company formed in 2008 as a joint venture between U.S. pension fund TIAA and Brazilian agribusiness giant Cosan. In recent years, Radar has acquired more than 3,000 hectares in Santa Filomena, adding to the land it already owns throughout the Matopiba region, which includes the Brazilian states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia—the latest frontier of industrial agriculture in Brazil.
Elite Group
This region sits in the Cerrado, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas, home to 12,000 plant species (35% endemic) and 25 million people, including Indigenous Peoples and small-scale food providers. But 40-55% of the Cerrado has already been converted to commercial tree plantations, large agro-industrial monocultures, and pastures for cattle production. Land grabs, speculation, and deforestation are displacing communities and damaging the environment. One of the major players in this expansion is TIAA and its asset management company, Nuveen.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future.
As revealed in our new report, TIAA is one of the world’s largest landowners and has almost quadrupled its landholdings since 2012. Managing 1.2 million hectares across 10 countries, it ranks 7th among the world’s top 10 transnational landowners, who together control 404,457 square kilometers—an area the size of Japan.
Others in this elite group include financial investors like Blue Carbon from the UAE, Australia-based Macquarie, and Canada’s Manulife; agribusiness giants Olam and Wilmar from Singapore; Chilean timber company Arauco; and U.K.-based Shell via Raízen, a Brazilian subsidiary.
Global Land Grabbing and Concentration Trends
This accumulation of land in the hands of a few transnational companies is part of a global trend of land grabbing that surged after the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2000, transnational investors have acquired an estimated 65 million hectares of land—twice the size of Germany. This has accelerated a dynamic of land concentration, which has resulted in 1% of farms controlling 70% of global farmland, a trend that jeopardizes the livelihoods of 2.5 billion smallholder farmers and 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest, most of whom depend on agriculture.
As the case of the Angelim community shows, land grabbing and land concentration have devastating consequences for communities and ecosystems. Like U.S.-based TIAA, virtually all the top global landowners have reportedly been implicated in forced displacements, environmental destruction, and violence against local people.
Land concentration exacerbates inequality, erodes social cohesion, and fuels conflict. But there are deeper consequences as well: The fact that vast tracts of land, located across different state jurisdictions, are brought under the control of distant corporate entities for the sake of global supply chains or global financial capital flows runs diametrically counter to the principles of state sovereignty and people’s self-determination. In particular, it undermines states’ ability to ensure that land tenure serves the public good and enables the transition to more sustainable economic models.
“Net Zero” Fueling Evictions
The question of who should own and manage land becomes even more pressing in light of climate change and biodiversity loss. Transnational landowners are associated with industrial monoculture plantations, deforestation, and other extractive practices. In contrast, up to 80% of intact forests are found on lands managed by Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities. Moreover, small-scale food providers practicing agroecology support higher biodiversity, better water management, and produce over half the world’s food using just 35% of global cropland.
Ironically, the environmental value of community-managed land has sparked a new wave of land grabs. So-called “green grabs” (land grabs for alleged environmental purposes) now account for about 20% of large-scale land deals. Since 2016, more than 5.2 million hectares in Africa have been acquired for carbon offset projects. The global carbon market is expected to quadruple in the next seven years, and over half of the top 10 global landowners now claim participation in carbon and biodiversity markets. “Net zero” has become a pretext for expelling communities from their lands.
From Deregulation to Redistribution
While global land policy debates in the past 10 years have focused on limiting the harm of land grabs on people and nature, the scale and severity of these trends demand a shift from regulation to redistribution. Neoliberal deregulation, as well as trade and other economic policies, have fueled the massive transfer of land and wealth to the corporate sector and the ultra-rich. Redistributive policies are needed to reverse this trend.
Tackling land inequality is crucial for a more just and sustainable future. However, only very few countries implement land policies and agrarian reform programs that actively attempt to redistribute and return land to dispossessed peoples and communities.
The international human rights framework requires states to structure their land tenure systems in ways that ensure broad and equitable distribution of natural resources and their sustainable use. The tools at the disposal of governments include redistribution, restitution, and the protection of collective and customary tenure systems, as well as measures such as ceilings on land ownership (including by corporate entities), protection and facilitation of use rights over publicly owned land, and participatory and inclusive land-use planning. These efforts must also be matched by redistributive fiscal policies, such as progressive land and property taxes, which remain regressive or ineffective in most countries today, thus perpetuating inequality and enabling wealth concentration.
International Cooperation
Because land grabbing is driven by global capital and the accumulation of land across jurisdictions by transnational corporations and financial entities, international cooperation is essential. The upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) in Colombia in February 2026 offers a critical moment for governments to agree on measures that end land grabbing, reverse land concentration, and ensure broad and sustainable distribution of natural resources.
To be effective, these discussions should connect with initiatives on a global tax convention and an international mechanism to address sovereign debt, empowering states to have the fiscal space to implement human rights-based, redistributive policies and just transitions. Also important are binding legal provisions that prevent transnational corporations from using the power of their money to bend national rules in their pursuit of profits.
In a world facing intersecting crises—climate breakdown, food insecurity, persisting poverty, and social inequality—and a reconfiguration of the global balance of power, there is an opportunity to move away from neoliberal policies that have benefited very few, and to create a more just and sustainable global future for all.
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