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drought
Desertification Doesn’t Just Look Like a Desert: It Looks Like a Flood
In many of the world's most arid and semi-arid regions, rain is no longer arriving as a blessing but as disaster; to understand why, we need to look at the ground rather than the sky.
Jun 17, 2026
The arrival of rain as a blessing is among the oldest human stories there is.
In Botswana, water and wealth are two names for the same blessing. Pula is the name of Botswana’s national currency, indicating the drought stricken land’s emotional relationship to water.
We see the emotional representation of rain in African American blues traditions, rainmaking rituals in West Africa, monsoon folk songs across South Asia, and Indigenous rain-dance ceremonies. Across cultures for millennia, rain has equaled relief.
But today, human-driven land degradation is rewriting that story.
What if instead of waiting for landscapes to collapse to pay the costs, we invested in the resilience of those very landscapes?
In many of the world's most arid and semi-arid regions, rain is no longer arriving as a blessing but as disaster.
To understand why, we need to look at the ground rather than the sky.
When the Sponge Hardens
If we look at the Earth's surface now, versus 100 years ago, we'll see that most of the land has been transformed from natural ecosystems to concrete, agricultural, and productive land. This is the process of desertification.
You may think of desertification through familiar cultural images such as advancing sand dunes swallowing settlements, cracked earth stretching to the horizon, and vegetation fading into absence. But the defining characteristic of desertification is not simply a lack of water. It is the loss of a landscape's ability to hold water.
Healthy soil functions like a sponge. Built from organic matter, fungal networks, plant roots, insects, and billions of microorganisms, it can absorb and store enormous quantities of water. When rain falls, much of it infiltrates the ground, replenishing soil moisture and underground aquifers. The water moves slowly through the landscape and across layers of soil, sustaining rivers and vegetation long after the storm has passed.
However, degraded soil behaves differently.
Decades of intensive cultivation, overgrazing, vegetation loss, repeated tillage, and use of synthetic inputs reduce soil organic matter and weaken the soil food web. As soil structure deteriorates, the ground becomes compacted and hardens. Pores that once allowed water to penetrate collapse. Rain can no longer soak in. So, when a heavy rainfall arrives, the water cannot penetrate the ground and flushes all that lays on the surface.
Instead of absorbing the water, the soil lets it run downhill. Small rivulets become torrents. Topsoil is stripped away. Gullies form. Streams rise rapidly, and rivers burst their banks. The same rainfall that would once have been absorbed by the landscape becomes a destructive flood.
Farmers and Communities on the Frontlines
At Commonland, we work with communities to restore landscapes that have been identified as degraded—places where decades of ecological decline have reduced the land's ability to support communities, livelihoods, and biodiversity. We aim to provide those communities and local organizations with the means to reverse the cycle of degradation and contribute to regenerating the landscapes they live in and depend on. However, reversing the effects of decades of landscape degradation is not an easy ride.
Over the past 18 months, two of those landscapes, on opposite sides of the world in Spain and South Africa, have delivered the same warning: Without healthy ecosystems, our social, economic, and financial systems collapse.
In the Spanish town of Grazalema, where around 1,500 people are nestled in the mountains of Cádiz, the 2026 January rains shattered records. The landscape, as a result of decades of intensive land use, had lost much of its ability to absorb and regulate water. Aquifers filled rapidly. Water began emerging through the ground itself, threatening the ancient karstic system on which the village sits. Gullies opened across farmland, roads disappeared, and the entire town was evacuated for 10 days.
We have funded the degradation of the systems that protect us, while calling it productivity. The rains are now sending the invoice.
For local farmers, the damage was not only immediate but cumulative. Fields were washed out or left waterlogged, making planting impossible. Topsoil was stripped away, taking with it both fertility and future yield potential. Livestock grazing areas were damaged or cut off, feed stores were lost or became inaccessible, and seasonal cycles were disrupted beyond repair for the year.
“The economic damages for all our activities have been very high,” says Carmen Bueno, owner of the regenerative farm Tambor del Llano. Bueno is also a member of Asociación Serranías Vivas, a local association that brings together farmers, land managers, and rural stakeholders working to restore and protect the Sierra de Cádiz landscape through more sustainable land use and coordinated landscape restoration efforts.
More than 8,000 kilometers away, another landscape faced a sadly similar story.
In May 2026, catastrophic flooding tore through the Langkloof and Baviaanskloof valleys on South Africa’s Eastern Cape. After months of droughts drying up the land, the floods washed everything away: from fields, to tarmac roads, as well as wetlands. For many households, this meant more than infrastructure loss—it meant isolation. Local communities could not move out of their house, let alone the valleys; food and water supplies could not be accessed; farm produce could not reach markets; and tourism bookings collapsed overnight. Repair work, where possible, became slow and costly, held back by washed-out routes and limited resources in already stretched communities.
“These are communities that were already living on the margins,” said Justine Rudman-Koekemoer, co-director and financial manager of Living Lands, an organization working to restore landscapes and support the rural communities who depend on them. "There are no easy routes in or out, no quick fixes. Recovery will be slow and expensive, and it will not happen without outside help." Today, fundraising efforts are underway to rebuild essential damaged infrastructure from the floods.
The hit associated with these events is felt across everyone living in the landscape, from the local communities whose houses were flooded, including the farmers who lost their harvests, to the public infrastructure that needs to be repaired and rebuilt.
However, those losses also have a ripple effect across the broader financial and private sectors, which often fail to account for the climate and nature risk they are exposed to. As a result of these events, loans from banks are likely to be delayed or defaulted, insurance payouts are likely to be requested, and investments into businesses lost.
These devastating events raise an essential question: What if instead of waiting for landscapes to collapse to pay the costs, we invested in the resilience of those very landscapes?
Landscape Restoration as Risk Mitigation
In the financial world, risk and return are two sides of the same coin; the rate of return is determined based on the risk of losing that money.
Over the past decades, investments toward nature were often framed as opportunities for investors to make a commercial return. However this rarely holds true, and most investments continue to flow toward extractive industries, outpacing investment in nature-based solutions by more than 30 to 1: In 2022, roughly $7.4 trillion was spent on extractive activities, and only $220 billion was spent on regenerative activities.
But what if we turned the logic for investing in nature on its head and started to present landscape restoration as a risk mitigation strategy for investors. Given that all the loans, insurance, and investments are tied to enterprises and people based in landscapes, they are directly exposed to the risk related to the health of these very landscapes.
The risk landscape desertification creates isn't abstract. Over 80% of Europe's natural habitats are now in poor or bad condition, leaving the continent more vulnerable to floods, droughts, and ecological instability. Restored wetlands, regenerated soils, and resilient forests aren't symbolic gestures—they're working infrastructure that slows water, stores carbon, and absorbs shocks before those shocks become disasters for people on the ground, and financial losses for capital providers.
Those who work degraded land understand this without needing the statistics. In Grazalema, southern Spain and in the Baviaanskloof, South Africa, farmers and land stewards have watched extreme rainfall turn bare, depleted soil into disaster—fields washed away, roads severed, local economies set back years by a single storm. They know, from direct experience, that land isn't just a commodity but a living system everything else depends on.
It’s now the private and financial sectors’ turn to recognize and value those risks by investing in mitigation solutions. In practice, they can begin by estimating the costs that climate change and environmental degradation could create in the landscapes where they invest or source products. This estimate can then help determine how much investment should be directed toward preventing desertification and restoring those landscapes. Landscape restoration could then become a risk mitigation strategy with an allocated budget for implementing the restoration of those landscapes.
The Invoice the Rains Are Sending
We have funded the degradation of the systems that protect us, while calling it productivity.
The rains are now sending the invoice.
What we are facing is not a choice between conservation and growth, but between repeatedly paying for destruction after the fact or investing in the systems that prevent it in the first place.
Restoration is not a cost to be minimized. It is the most reliable form of resilience we have and the only one that strengthens the system it protects.
Nature restoration is not a discretionary environmental cost; it is resilience infrastructure in its most fundamental form.
To recognize it as such, we need to move beyond fragmented, short-term funding and unlock access to large scale funding from the public, private, and financial sectors to the organizations and individuals on the ground that are on the frontline of landscape restoration.
Restoration is not a cost to be minimized. It is the most reliable form of resilience we have and the only one that strengthens the system it protects.
The task ahead is to ensure that we do not let degradation become the author of the story we tell about rain.
When the rains come, let us still look to the sky in relief.
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Experts Alarmed by ‘Way-Off-the-Scale Warmth’ as Snow Drought Hits Western US
"This is going to be an ugly summer," warned one California water policy specialist.
Apr 02, 2026
One of the worst Western US snow droughts of the century—exacerbated by a historically warm winter and a record-shattering March heatwave—has experts increasingly worried about wildfire and water supply risks heading into the spring and summer months.
On Wednesday, the California Department of Water Resources reported "no measurable snow" recorded at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada range. Because there was some visible snow already on the ground, DWR is calling this the second-lowest April measurement on record.
The agency said this is "a stark indicator of how record‑hot March temperatures and high‑elevation rain have erased the Sierra Nevada snowpack months ahead of schedule."
"The combination of warm storms and unusually hot temperatures rapidly melted what remained of this year’s already sparse snowpack," DWR added. "Statewide, the snowpack is now just 18% of average for this date, according to the automated snow sensor network."
DWR Director Karla Nemeth said that “it feels like we skipped spring this year and dropped straight into a summer heatwave."
“What should be gradual snowmelt happened suddenly weeks ago," Nemeth added. "We’re seeing fewer, warmer storms and shorter wet seasons. Future water supplies will depend upon our ability to capture water when it’s available and manage it more efficiently.”
(Image by US Department of Agriculture)
Jeff Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, told the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday: "It didn’t snow where we needed it to snow, and where it did snow, it didn’t stick. This is going to be an ugly summer."
Oregon's iconic Crater Lake is experiencing its lowest snow water equivalent levels on record for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service.
In Colorado, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data show the statewide snowpack is at just 26% of median levels as of Thursday.
“This year is on a whole other level,” Colorado State University climatologist Russ Schumacher told The Guardian. "Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning."
Last week, the Denver Board of Water Commissioners declared Stage 1 drought restrictions, a move that seeks to reduce water use by 20%.
“The snowpack within Denver Water’s collection system has deteriorated significantly and continues to decline,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. “Snowpack levels in both basins are now the lowest observed in the past 40 years, with accelerated melting underway. The conditions we are experiencing are unprecedented, and we need customers to save water to protect the supply we have right now.”
April measurements of alpine snowpacks—which are sometimes described as water savings accounts—typically indicate peak levels of water that, with spring warming, melt into reservoirs, rivers, and other bodies that help hydrate the West during the parched summer and fall months.
“March is often a big month for snowstorms,” Schumacher said. “Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth.”
“This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past,” he added.
As University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain explained last week:
Meteorologically speaking, March 2026 will go down in the record books as the warmest March on record for at least a third, and possibly half or more, of the continental United States. But even more remarkable is the ~10 day window of peak heat during this truly exceptional March heatwave—when many, if not most, locations across the western two thirds of the United States in a broad swath stretching from the Pacific Coast in California eastward past the Mississippi River broke their all-time March monthly heat records. The margin by which March heat records were shattered was so wide that more than a handful of locations also broke their all-time April heat records, and in a few locations even tied or broke their May heat records!
“Beyond the conspicuous ‘weirdness’ of it all, the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west," Swain warned. "The toll wrought on our 'water tower in the sky' is nothing short of shocking."
I agree. This event has been meteorologically astonishing, and its impacts will be felt long after it ends in terms of record low snowpack, sharply increased wildfire risk, and extreme low watershed runoff/streamflow into summer and beyond.
[image or embed]
— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) March 25, 2026 at 2:25 PM
The National Interagency Fire Center is among those projecting above-normal fire risk throughout the American West in the coming months.
“Unless there’s a major change in the weather patterns and we somehow pull out some sort of miracle springtime precipitation, we’re looking at an extended fire season,” Joel Lisonbee, senior associate scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, told The Guardian.
In addition to the risk of drought and wildfire, low water levels threaten wildlife, including California's flagging salmon runs—which are also imperiled by Trump administration actions including habitat disruption caused by water flow manipulation.
“No sooner do we start to gain a little ground back in rebuilding our salmon runs, the federal Bureau of Reclamation is destroying them again,” Vance Staplin, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, told The Sacramento Bee last week. "These fish are in big trouble if the bureau doesn’t relent very soon.”
Scientists have long warned that planetary heating driven by human burning of fossil fuels will result in longer and more frequent snow droughts. One 2020 study showed how the Western United States is fast becoming a "global snow drought hot spot," with the length of such dry spells increasing by 28% between 1980 and 2018.
“Climate change is going to result in a lot of these extreme events worsening,” Clark University climatologist Abby Frazier told The Guardian on Thursday. "It is heartbreaking to see it all playing out as we have predicted for so long. The changes we have teed up for ourselves are going to be catastrophic.”
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It's About to Get Even Hotter—Can We Learn From It?
The next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures.
Mar 14, 2026
I am (mostly) going to take a break from writing about the war for a day, because big though it is, it’s not quite the biggest thing happening on our planet. Or rather, its widespread destruction is taking place inside a larger context.
President Donald Trump’s endless folly (first tariffs, now a desperately stupid war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz) has caused what everyone is beginning to understand is widespread economic damage. As The New York Times reported today, “This is the big one,” and “the fallout is rattling households and businesses in neighborhoods all over the globe.”
On a stable planet, though, the damage might be contained and repaired; someone as incompetent as Trump (who is now describing his war as a “short excursion” and insisting that the Strait is in “very good shape”) will eventually (please God) burn himself out. Our bigger problem, as we’re about to be reminded, is that the planet is the furthest thing from stable. The backdrop is about to become the foreground, and with that the drama will shift once more.
It’s already hot, all over the world and here in the United States. That’s been a little hidden these past months, because the country’s population and power center—the northeast corridor from Boston to DC—has had a cold winter; until the last few days of rapid-onset mud season it’s felt like an old-school winter in New England (with sublime skiing, which has kept me sane). And Minnesota, the source of much of the year’s news so far, was cold too, at least in bursts. But we’ve been the exception: in fact, it was the second-warmest winter on record in the continental US, and that’s because the West broke every possible record, usually by a mile:
Several cities can now claim winter 2025-26 as their warmest on record, including locations with over a century of data, like Salt Lake City (152 years of data), Tucson (130 years of data), and Rapid City, South Dakota (114 years of data).
Phoenix, Arizona, obliterated its previous record (a record that was only a year old, mind you) by almost 3°F, a pummeling of a record in the realm of three-month temperature data.
Albuquerque, New Mexico clobbered its previous record warmest winter by 3°F, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Helena, Montana, Las Vegas, and Lubbock, Texas were among the other cities record warm this winter.
I don’t want to brush by those numbers. Phoenix and Albuquerque have temperature records going back more than a century. If they were going to beat the old record for a three-month stretch, something that shouldn’t happen very often, it should be by a tenth of a degree. That’s how statistics work on a set that large—or it’s how they did work on a stable planet. Three degrees is insane. And if that’s insane, then what’s going to happen in the next week is truly bonkers. A giant heat dome is set to settle in over the Southwest, bringing new temperature records. As The Washington Post reported Thursday, Palm Springs California is projected to reach 104°F on Monday; the old record for the date is 95°F. Again, that’s statistically bizarre in a way that makes my head hurt:
This record-breaking heat dome will contribute to worsening drought conditions across the Intermountain West.
In Utah, snowpack remains at record low levels according to Meyer. He said that it would take a foot of snow in Salt Lake City for the season to catch up with even the second-lowest seasonal snowfall total—and that a storm of that magnitude isn’t expected to come.
“The knockout punch comes in the form of Utah’s reservoirs, which are only at 40% of capacity right now,” Meyer said. “All this means we are likely going to see some very tangible water supply cuts and conservation efforts by the state this year.”
The weather forecast and climate outlook community in Utah was “filled with trepidation” because drought relief looked unlikely, added Meyer, stressing that much more meaningful impacts were possible for agricultural communities as water conservation efforts grow.
“Right now, every drop is going to count this year,” he said.
Across the region, New Mexico was also reporting its lowest snowpack on record and Colorado was in a similar situation.
Here’s how Daniel Swain and the good folks at Weather West described the heat dome that is forming as of Friday morning:
In fact: the strongest mid-tropospheric ridge ever observed in the southwestern US in March is expected to develop by Friday, and then will probably go on to break that new record (set this week) when it re-organizes into an even broader and stronger ridge next week.
In case you’re wondering, this heat is in no way confined to land. The oceans, which have soaked up most of the planet’s excess warmth, are crazily warm right now too:
Sea surface temperatures off the coast of Southern California have risen as much as 5°F above average for the time of year, causing a strong, Category 2 marine heat wave to develop.
These unusually warm waters will provide a boost to air temperatures near the coast, especially at night, preventing them from dropping off as much as they otherwise would.
“A strong to severe marine heatwave is ongoing off the coast of California,” wrote Colin McCarthy, a storm chaser affiliated with the University of California at Davis.
In early March, ocean temperatures reached the mid- to upper 60s at Scripps Pier in La Jolla, California.
“That’s the average ocean temperature for mid-June,” McCarthy said.
And here’s the kicker. All this is happening during a La Niña “cool phase” of the Pacific, something that will soon change. I alerted you exactly a month ago to the likelihood we were going to see an El Niño kick off sometime this summer; in the last few weeks the chances of that have grown stronger, and more to the point it looks like it could be an exceptionally strong “super” version of the warming current. The normally cautious-almost-to-a-fault climate scientist Zeke Hausfather came out with his new forecast Thursday afternoon, and it was a doozy:
I’ve collected 11 different models that have been updated since the beginning of March. Each of these in turn features a number of ensemble members, so that we end up with 433 total ENSO forecasts…
These clearly show that a strong El Niño is indeed likely to develop later in the year. While I’d probably discount some of the higher values (much above 3°C) as outliers here, the median and mean across all the models still gives an estimate around 2.5°C, which would put it notably stronger than the 2023-2024 El Niño and close to if not matching what we saw back in 2015-2016.
So what does this mean for global temperatures this year and in 2027? All things being equal, the lag between peak El Niño conditions and the global surface temperature response would result in the largest impacts on 2027 temperatures (as El Niño events generally peak between November and January). It would still boost 2026, but probably not enough to set a new record this year.
However, I have to be a bit cautious here. Long time readers may remember my post in May 2023 where I deemed it unlikely that 2023 would set a new record (given this historical lag in global temperature response to El Niño) and argued that 2024 would instead. I was partially wrong–2023 was weird, and the heat came much earlier than expected. We think the extended triple-dip La Niña event between 2020 and 2023 may have primed the system for more rapid heating, something absent this time around. But we don’t know for sure. Fool me once, and all that.
Either way, this means that 2027 looks increasingly likely to set a new record, perhaps by a sizable margin if we end up on the high end of the range of El Niño forecasts.
That Hausfather and the brasher Jim Hansen are in basic agreement here should terrify us. We’re going to see temperatures unlike any that humans have seen before, which means we’re going to see chaotic weather unlike humans have seen before. If you think this is some kind of lefty enviro fantasy, check out this source:
“Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again,” Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb said.
Therefore, a super El Niño in 2026-27 would disperse more heat than other very strong events in 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16.
And were not going to know what hit us, in several ways. The substack Future Earth Catalog published an interview Wednesday with veteran Florida weatherman John Morales which was the best account I’ve seen yet of what the Trump cuts to our scientific system mean in real time:
The cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have been devastating. If you look at the statistics of forecast accuracy for tropical cyclone tracks and intensities from the National Hurricane Center, they were off in 2025. And anecdotally, I’m not the only meteorologist who will tell you that day-to-day forecasting has become more challenging. The weather models are flip-flopping from one solution to the next.
Think about how many times TV meteorologists in the fall of 2025 had to show you two or three models with different solutions and say, “Well, this is what this model says, but yesterday it was saying something different.” That leads to more confusion among the public—and it makes our job of saving life and property more difficult.
We’ve been missing 15 to 20% of our weather balloon data. And those missing balloons are upstream—out West, in the Plains, in the Intermountain West, and especially in Alaska. That’s where our weather comes from. We’re no longer able to really know what’s going on out there. And nothing provides the detail weather balloons can: every 15 feet, all the way up to 100,000 feet.
So we may not know what’s coming, but we can guess it’s going to be bad. For instance, I noted before that the Western snowpack is at record low levels. Even in California, which, due to a couple of record-level atmospheric rivers off the warm Pacific saw lots of midwinter snow, the early heat in the Sierras has already led to widespread melt. I do not think it’s fear-mongering to warn that fire may be a serious danger this season in the West.
And what’s happening in the US will be paralleled in places around the planet as El Niño takes us up the escalator. A new study just found that rising temperatures are already taking many humans past the point where they can live with any kind of comfort. As Todd Woody reports:
The number of days where extreme heat makes it too dangerously hot to walk the dog, sweep the porch, and engage in other ordinary pursuits has doubled around the world over the past 75 years, according to new research.
Scientists determined that on average, those 65 and older experience a month a year when heat prevents them from routine activities. Parts of Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America are becoming unlivable for senior citizens, the researchers said. Younger adults also are losing time as climate-driven heat restricts their lives for 50 hours a year.
Overall, more than a third of the global population resides in regions where heat severely affects daily life, according to the peer-reviewed paper published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research: Health.
But it may be getting too hot for some key physical systems too. It seems likely that this is the year the Colorado River system may finally have to deal with the fact that it simply can’t provide the water people have been counting on. A new study last week found clear signs that the Gulf Stream is beginning to drift northward, a “clear sign” that worries about the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) are no mere phantasm:
The findings indicate that the movement of the Gulf Stream could be a “canary in the coal mine” for the AMOC’s collapse. According to their analysis of satellite data, the Gulf Stream has already been nudged northwards from the coast near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, since the early 1990s. This is likely to be the result of the AMOC dwindling and losing its grip.
We don’t know for sure how the Iran war will play out, nor the El Niño; at the moment, though, things look ominous. All I’m saying is, the next six months could be the ultimate in teachable moments, with rapidly rising prices for oil, and rapidly rising temperatures. And what do you know, we have a midterm exam coming up on November 3.
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How Do We Manage a World in Water Bankruptcy?
According to the UN, the world has moved beyond water crisis into systemic, chronic scarcity threatening public health, economies, and ecosystems while making global cooperation increasingly existential.
Jan 22, 2026
According to a major new report from the United Nations University, global water systems are no longer in crisis, but have entered a state of chronic failure, with shortages that extend far beyond temporary shocks or short-term recovery.
Released on January 20 by the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era concludes that the planet has entered the era of global water bankruptcy. This indicates that long-term water use now exceeds renewable inflows, leaving much of Earth’s natural systems damaged beyond realistic repair. In other words, societies have already exhausted or polluted the natural buffers—rivers, aquifers, wetlands, and glaciers—that once sustained them. Droughts, shortages, and pollution events are increasingly becoming persistent features of daily life. In this post-crisis condition, the authors argue, it is best not to describe the situation as a crisis at all, but as water bankruptcy.
At the press conference set to release the report, Kaveh Madani, lead author and director of the UNU-INWEH, emphasized that this is not a semantic shift, but a clear warning that the dominant way governments, markets, and international institutions think about water is no longer fit for reality.
“For decades, scientists, the media, and policymakers have warned about a global water crisis… what we document in this report is a different reality emerging in many places: a persistent failure state in which water systems can no longer realistically return to their historical baselines,” Madani said.
Applied to water, bankruptcy management requires confronting overuse, acknowledging irreversible losses, and aligning development goals with hydrological limits.
The report does not claim that the entire planet is bankrupt. Water bankruptcy is assessed basin by basin and aquifer by aquifer. However, as regions across the globe simultaneously overdraw water and erode the natural systems that sustain it, the world faces a fundamentally altered risk landscape, with cascading threats to food security, agricultural markets, rural livelihoods, and climate feedbacks.
What distinguishes water bankruptcy from familiar narratives of scarcity is the scale of irreversibility. According to the report, societies have not only overdrawn annual renewable water flows, but have also liquidated long-term savings stored in groundwater, wetlands, glaciers, soils, and river ecosystems.
Over the past five decades, the world has lost approximately 410 million hectares of natural wetlands—almost the land area of the European Union—resulting in the disappearance of vital ecosystem services such as flood control, water purification, and habitat provision, valued at more than US$5 trillion. Groundwater depletion is even more consequential. According to the analysis, around 70% of the world’s major aquifers show long-term declining trends. Excessive pumping has already caused land subsidence across nearly 5% of the global land area, including dense urban zones that are home to close to 2 billion people. In some regions, land is sinking by up to 25 centimeters per year, permanently reducing storage capacity and increasing flood risk. These damages are not easily undone. Compacted aquifers, subsided deltas, dried-up lakes, and extinct species represent long-term, irretrievable losses.
As Kaveh Madani emphasizes, “This is not another warning about a future we might still avoid everywhere… It is a diagnosis of a world where, in many basins, the old normal is already gone.”
The current human cost and future risks of water bankruptcy are also staggering. According to the report, nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives in countries classified as water insecure or critically water insecure. About 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water, 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation, and roughly 4 billion experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. The risks are compounded given more than half of global food output is located in regions where total water storage (including surface water, soil moisture, snow, ice, and groundwater) is already declining or unstable.
The report’s crux is that the global water agenda remains stuck in a crisis-response mindset that is no longer fit for purpose. Such alarming figures are partly the result of governments, utilities, and basin authorities continuing to treat chronic overshoot as a temporary emergency. Short-term emergency measures, supply expansion, and incremental efficiency gains dominate policy discussions, even as underlying water balances continue to deteriorate. Ultimately, this only deepens ecological damage and entrenches unsustainable water-use practices.
Madani was clear at the press conference: “Expecting a wicked problem of this scale to have a simple solution is as naïve as the reductionist solutions that helped get us into the current state,” he said.
Instead, the United Nations University calls for a shift to what it terms bankruptcy management, a concept borrowed deliberately from finance. Applied to water, bankruptcy management requires confronting overuse, acknowledging irreversible losses, and aligning development goals with hydrological limits. It also demands protecting remaining aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, lakes, and glaciers, rather than treating these life-sustaining systems as expendable capital to prop up unsustainable growth.
The report itself also highlights the social and political dimensions of water bankruptcy, stressing that it is not solely an environmental issue. The costs of hydrological overshoot fall hardest on those least responsible and least able to adapt: smallholder farmers, Indigenous communities, and the urban poor. The authors caution that demand reduction is not politically feasible if treated as a purely technical exercise, noting that abruptly cutting water access for farmers could trigger unemployment, social unrest, and broader instability. Effective management, they argue, must be paired with political and economic transitions that protect livelihoods, provide compensation and risk support, enable shifts in crops and practices, and help economies decouple jobs and growth from ever-rising water use.
Despite their sober diagnosis, the authors do not end in resignation, arguing that water could—and existentially must—still serve as a unifying axis in an increasingly fragmented world. Given water intersects climate, biodiversity, food systems, public health, land use, and political stability, it remains one of the few domains where coordination is both necessary and unavoidable.
“Investing in water is an investment in delivering on all of those [aforementioned] agendas,” said Madani, at the report’s launch. “And in rebuilding cooperation in a fragmented world.”
Similarly, authors stress the importance of upcoming political milestones: the UN Water Conferences in 2026 and 2028, the conclusion of the Water Action Decade, and the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals deadline. They argue these moments offer a rare window to reset the global water agenda to move beyond incremental efficiency gains and emergency responses toward explicit recognition that many river basins and aquifers have already crossed thresholds where historical conditions cannot be restored.
Yet translating this clarity into action faces stark political and institutional realities. The UN system, tasked with leading such a reset, remains mired in member states cutting funding, worsening geopolitical polarization and international conflict, and key bodies—including the Security Council—grossly failing to uphold the UN Charter’s basic human rights mandates. In practice, declarations and frameworks proliferate, deadlines are extended, but meaningful, coordinated action remains slow, uneven, or hollow. Water may be uniquely cross cutting, yet it is not immune to these structural constraints or the apparent erosion of accountability. Crucially, it also requires that primarily Western, early-industrial economies reckon with histories of inequitable use and extraction that have both driven water shortages and contributed to the persistent inequities of scarcity today.
As with other pressing global crises, the consequences of water bankruptcy may unfold faster than governments and institutions can respond, but the authors argue that naming the problem clearly could galvanize civil society and decision-makers into meaningful action before it’s too late.
“Our message is not despair,” Madani concluded. “It’s clarity. The earlier we face the real balance sheet, the more options we still have.”
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Facing the Climate Crisis, Can We Make Politics Move Faster Than Physics?
As Tehran runs low on water, New York City considers divesting from planet-wrecker Blackrock. We need more of the latter to prevent more of the former.
Nov 29, 2025
We are not getting out of the climate crisis without immense amounts of damage—the only question at this point is whether we can extricate ourselves with something like our civilizations intact. And the news from one cradle of civilization isn’t heartening: In Iran, where urban settlements date back to 4400 BC, the deepest drought in the country’s recorded history has now reached the havoc stage.
Tehran, shrouded in truly toxic smoke because the country’s power plants have run short of natural gas and begun burning “mazut, a dark residue of petroleum high in sulphur and other impurities,” is now facing a possible evacuation because it has run out of water. As Yeaganeh Torbati points out in an excellent essay, Iran’s water woes are deeply rooted in agricultural policy that prioritized irrigation above all (see also California); its international isolation has not helped it cope (including with the tragic fires that broke out last week in the Hyrcanian Forest, one of the oldest woodlands on Earth and a biodiversity hotspot). But the savage drought has been the final domino here, in a country where, as the head of one water utility points out, “Higher than normal heat has intensified the evaporation of water resources.” As the Australia Broadcasting Corporation summarized it:
Faced with a perfect storm of weather woes and decades of mismanagement, President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a warning to his country earlier this month that the situation could deteriorate even further.
“We’ve run short of water. If it doesn’t rain, we in Tehran… must start rationing,” he said.
“Even if we do ration and it still does not rain, then we will have no water at all."
“They [citizens] must evacuate Tehran.”
While it may seem like an exaggeration, it is the shocking reality facing the Iranian population—particularly in its capital, which has in excess of 15 million people across the broader metropolitan area.
This particular kind of disaster is becoming more common on a rapidly warming world. We’ve already had severe Day Zero scares in big cities in Brazil and South Africa; a new study earlier this month warns that:
Moments when water levels in reservoirs fall so low that water may no longer reach homes—could become common as early as this decade and the 2030s.
To find out where and when DZDs are most likely to occur, scientists at the Center for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea ran a series of large-scale climate simulations. They considered the imbalance between decreasing natural supply (such as years of below-average rainfall and depleted river flows).
By some estimates, 2 billion humans are at risk.
The residents of New York are not at present among them. The city’s water supply system is one of the miracles of the modern world, and after six decades the “third tunnel” that will make that water system more secure is almost complete. (As a cub reporter in the early 1980s I spent several happy days underground, watching "sandhogs" from Local 147 blowing up rock walls to extend the shaft).
But that doesn’t mean New York is immune from climate danger, as anyone who lived there during Hurricane Sandy will recall. (As the financial journal Business Week printed in block letters on its cover the week after that catastrophe, “IT’S GLOBAL WARMING STUPID”).
And it certainly doesn’t mean that New York isn’t part of the cause of the global climate collapse. Not from its emissions—subway-riding New Yorkers are fairly green—but from the churn of capital through its financial markets that underwrites the ongoing expansion of the fossil fuel enterprise, in ways that scientists have said for years now simply has to stop.
A huge step in the right direction came Wednesday morning, when the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, announced that he was recommending the city stop investing its money with Blackrock, the largest single representative of irresponsible capitalism on planet Earth.
Lander is urging three of the city’s pension funds to drop BlackRock Inc. because of “inadequate” climate plans, the latest move to penalize investment firms for failing to tackle global warming.
The guidance to reject BlackRock, the city’s largest money manager overseeing $42.3 billion of index funds for the pensions, follows a review of the firm’s efforts to press companies to decarbonize. Lander said Wednesday he’s also asking plan trustees to terminate much smaller mandates with Fidelity Investments and PanAgora Asset Management.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this decision. To call Blackrock a “giant” is to pitifully underestimate its size—it has $13.46 trillion under management as of this fall. It owns 10% of the world’s stock market. If it wanted to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, it could, more easily than any other single entity on planet Earth.
Instead it has dithered endlessly, making occasional noises of climate concern and then backtracking when red state treasurers (with far smaller portfolios than Lander’s to wave around) squawked at them. In August, Democratic officials from a dozen states sent warning letters to asset managers, calling on them to “reject pressure from the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers, and instead commit to thorough evaluations of risks tied to global warming, supply chains, and corporate governance.” Lander’s recommendation is the first concrete outcome.
Or, fairly concrete. Lander’s term ends on December 31. The advocates who have pressed for this policy—especially New York Communities for Change—are pushing him to get one of the city’s three pension plans—the New York City Employees Retirement System or NYCERS—to actually commit to the plan at its December 17 meeting. They think that with some prodding by Lander the votes are there to make the change.
If anyone has the political credibility to get it done before Christmas, that would be Brad Lander. Though he finished third in the primary, he emerged from this year’s mayoral contest with more love than any player in the city, maybe even including Zohran Mamdani. Partly that was because stood up for immigrants early, getting arrested by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement thug. Mostly it was because he figured out he was going to lose to Mamdani, took it with exceptionally good grace, and ended up playing the important role of his being his verifier—assuring people with both his insider and his Jewish credentials that the young socialist was up to the job. He comes out of 2025 both a macher and a mensch, and now he’s rumored to be planning a run for Congress; assuming he ties up some of the loose ends here, he will take on any future race with the fervent support of the environmental community, for whom he has delivered big-time. (And with the fervent opposition of Wall Street, which is proving to be a useful credential in itself).
In a larger sense, I’ve been reading accounts for months now of how climate is dead as a political issue. I think this move makes clear that isn’t true; in fact, I’d wager that as energy affordability takes center stage in next year’s midterms, the transition off fossil fuels will be a key issue for progressives to seize.
They will need to do so quickly. As events in Tehran make clear, time is now moving fast. The physics of global warming are implacable: Run out of water and you have to move your city. We’ll have to make politicians move fast to have any hope of getting ahead of the curve.
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Trump Planning to Destroy Planet
When it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world.
Jul 15, 2025
Yes, he’s done quite a job so far and, in a way, it couldn’t be simpler to describe. Somehow he’s managed to take the greatest looming threat to humanity and put it (excuse the all-too-appropriate image) on the back burner. I’m thinking, of course, about climate change.
My guess is that you haven’t read much about it recently, despite the fact that a significant part of this country, including the city I live in, set new heat records for June. And Europe followed suit soon after with a heat hell all its own in which, at one point, the temperature in part of Spain hit an all-time record 114.8°F. And oh yes, part of Portugal hit 115.9°F as both countries recorded their hottest June ever. Facing that reality, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said (again all too appropriately), “Extreme heat is no longer a rare event—it has become the new normal.” The new normal, indeed! He couldn’t have been more on target!
And why am I not surprised by all this? Well, because whether you’re in the United States or Europe (or so many other places on this planet) these days, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve noticed that June is indeed the new July, and that, thanks to the ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that continue to flow into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves have grown more frequent and more intense. After all, we’re now on a planet where, without a doubt, heat is at an all-time-record high. After all, 2024, was the hottest year in history and the last 10 years, the hottest decade ever known. Worse yet, in the age of Donald Trump, this is clearly just the beginning, not the end (though somewhere down the line, of course, it could indeed prove to be exactly that).
An Ongoing Act of Global Terrorism
While this old man is online constantly reading publications ranging from The Washington Post to the British Guardian, he still reads the paper New York Times. And if that isn’t old-fashioned of me, what is? Can you even believe it? And its first section of news, normally 20-odd pages long, does regularly tell me something about how climate change is (and isn’t) covered in the age of Donald Trump. Let me give you one example: On June 21, that paper’s superb environmental reporter Somini Sengupta had a piece covering the droughts that, amid the rising heat, are now circling this planet in a major fashion from Brazil to China, the U.S. to Russia. And yes, she indicated clearly in her piece that such droughts, bad as they may always have been from time to time, are becoming significantly worse thanks to the overheating of this planet from fossil fuel use. (As she put it: “Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather.”)
The next day that piece appeared in the paper newspaper I read—a day when, as always, the front page was filled with Donald Trump—and where was it placed? Yep, on page 24.
And on the very day I happened to be writing this sentence, Trump was the headline figure in, or key, to 3 of the 6 front-page Times stories, including ones headlined “The Supreme Court’s Term Yields Triumphs for Trump” and “Trump’s Deal with El Salvador Guts MS-13 Fight.” On the other hand, you had to turn to page eight to read “Heat Overcoming Europe Turns Dangerous, and There’s More to Come” in which the eighth and 24th paragraphs quote experts mentioning climate change. I don’t mean to indicate that the Times never puts a climate piece on the front page. It does, but not daily like Donald Trump. Not faintly. He is invariably the page-one story of our present American world, day after day after day. Whatever he may do (or not do), he remains the story of the moment (any moment). And for the man who eternally wants to be the center of attention, consider that, after a fashion, his greatest achievement. Yet, at 79 years old, he, like this almost 81-year-old, will, in due course, leave this country and this planet behind forever. But the climate mess he’s now helping intensify in such a significant way won’t leave with him. Not for a second. Not in any foreseeable future.
Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change.
In short, despite everything else he’s doing in and to this world of ours, there’s nothing more devastating (not even his bombing of Iran) than his urge to ignore anything associated with climate change, while putting fossil fuels back at the very center of our all-American world. Yes, he can no longer simply stop solar and wind power from growing rapidly on this planet of ours, but he can certainly try. And simply refusing to do anything to help is—or at least should be—considered an ongoing act of global terrorism.
And don’t think it’s just that either. For example, Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service have already ensured that, when truly bad weather hits (and hits and hits), as it’s been doing this year, whether you’re talking about stunning flash flooding or tornadoes, there will be, as the Guardian‘s Eric Holthaus reports, ever fewer staff members committed to informing and warning Americans about what’s coming or helping them once it’s hit. Meanwhile, cuts to the government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network will ensure that we’ll know less about the effects of climate change in this country.
To put it bluntly, when it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world (though, if he has his way, it may not be “our” world for long). We’re talking about the president who is already doing everything he can to cut back on clean energy and ensure that this country produces more “clean, beautiful” coal, not to speak of oil and natural gas, and so send ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House and Senate, bowing to Trump, have only recently passed a “big, beautiful bill” that would “quickly remove $7,500 consumer tax credits for buying electric cars,” among so many other things, while negating much of what the Biden administration did do in relation to climate change (even as it, too, let the American production of oil rise to record levels).
A Drill, Baby, Drill Presidency
Of course, given a president who once labeled climate change a “Chinese hoax” and “one of the greatest scams of all time,” who could be faintly surprised that his administration seems remarkably intent on sending ever more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere? And sadly, if that reality, which was all too clear from his first term in office, had been the focus of the news last year, perhaps he wouldn’t have been voted back into the White House by 1.6% more Americans than opted for former Vice President Kamala Harris who, to give her full (dis)credit, didn’t run a campaign taking out after him in any significant fashion on the issue of climate change and planetary suicide.
So here we are distinctly in Donald Trump’s world and what a world it’s already proving to be. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who quite literally ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the phrase “drill, baby, drill.” In a sense, he couldn’t have been blunter or, in his own fashion, more honest than that. Still, it pains me even to imagine that, for the next three and a half years, he will indeed be in control of U.S. environmental policy. After all, we’re talking about the guy whose (now wildly ill-named) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “plans to repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions and other airborne pollutants from the nation’s fossil fuel-fired power plants.” Brilliant, right? And the fellow now running the EPA, Lee Zeldin, couldn’t have been more blunt about it: “Rest assured President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal. EPA is helping pave the way for American energy dominance because energy development underpins economic development, which in turn strengthens national security.”
Clean, beautiful coal. Doesn’t that take the air out of the room? Or perhaps I mean, shouldn’t it? Because, sadly enough, in this Trumpian world of ours, all too few people are paying all that much attention. And yet it’s the slow-motion way that we humans have discovered to destroy this planet and ourselves. Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change. After all, to take but one example, only recently it opened up millions of acres of previously protected Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.
While President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too.
It’s not that there are no strong articles in the mainstream world about what’s happening. Check out, for instance, this article by Simmone Shah of Time Magazine on the increasing number of heat domes on this planet of ours. Or if you look away from the mainstream and, for instance, check out the work of Mark Hertzgaard at The Nation magazine considering the climate-change costs of war or environmentalist Bill McKibben at his substack writing on how Trump and crew want to create an all too literal hell on Earth, you would certainly have a stronger sense of what’s truly happening on this planet right now.
For a moment, just imagine the reaction in this country and in the media if Donald Trump suddenly started openly talking about actually using atomic weaponry. And yet, in a slow-motion fashion, that’s exactly what his officials and the president himself are doing in relation to climate change and it all continues to be eerily normalized and largely ignored amid the continuing chaos of this Trumpian moment.
Who, for instance, could imagine this headline anywhere in the media: Trump Planning to Destroy Planet. Or perhaps: American President Attempting to Create a Literal Hell on Earth. Or even how about a milder: End of World as We’ve Known It Now Underway. Or… well, you’re undoubtedly just as capable as I am of imagining more such headlines.
Instead, we increasingly live in a world where, while President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too. We lead our lives largely not imagining that our world is slowly going down the drain—or do I mean up in flames?
And in some grim sense, that reality (or perhaps irreality would be the better term) may prove to be—I was about to write “in retrospect,” but perhaps there will be no “retrospect”—Donald Trump’s greatest “triumph.” He is indeed in the process of doing in, if not us, then our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about it. (If anything, it leaves him feeling distinctly on top of the world.)
Of all the wars we shouldn’t be fighting on this planet of ours from Ukraine to Gaza, Iran to Sudan, there is indeed one that we all should be fighting, including the president of the United States, and that’s the war against our destruction of this planet (as humanity has known it all these endless thousands of years) in a planetary heat hell.
If only.
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Our Human-Made Problem Can and Must Be Unmade
We know what we must do to address the climate crisis, so why aren’t we doing it?
Jul 12, 2025
In the summer of 2023, researchers “binge-watched 250 of the most-rated movies” of the past 10 years for climate research purposes. A mere 13% of films made mention of climate-related disasters, some more seriously and others “offhandedly” in dialogue. In contrast, since the rise of Hollywood as the center of entertainment over a century ago, more than “2,500 war-themed movies and TV programs have been made with Pentagon assistance.” Why does the Pentagon partner with Hollywood? And why does Hollywood glamorize war at the expense of the planet?
The Pentagon provides multimillion dollar equipment (tanks, planes such as F-35 fighter jets which cost over $80 million dollars, aircraft carriers) and personnel to operate them, giving movies an air of realism at no cost to the filmmaker or director. Partnering with the military obliges Hollywood directors to accept significant script changes by the Department of Defense, telling directors “what to say—and what not to say.” In the end, movies portray the U.S. military as a force for good in the world and nuclear weapons (in our hands) as critically needed for national security. They use racist stereotypes of Asians and Africans while portraying U.S. soldiers as noble in purpose and making it appear that U.S. wars “are fought to spread freedom, democracy, and human rights.” They hide the profit motives of Hollywood and the self-serving motives of the Pentagon, which are public approval for their existence and mission, gaining public acceptance of war thus attracting new recruits. And the result is: Hollywood glamorizes war for greed at the extreme expense of the planet.
War is a driving force in the climate crisis, with the Pentagon being the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world powering fighter jets, warships, and 800 military bases. Perversely the U.S. used sustained influential effort to keep the military’s impact on climate out of the 1997 Kyoto protocol counting process. And consequently, there is silence on U.S. military emissions and the climate crisis.
Even before U.S. President Donald Trump’s nihilist administration cut staff and the budget from our key climate agencies NOAA and NASA while furiously promoting oil and coal, we were in trouble with our injured Earth.
Furthermore, the damage to the world’s economy from fossil fuels has been massively underestimated, according to Timothy Neal and colleagues’ recent research. To date it has been thought to be mild to moderate, they stated, the flawed assumption being that damage to a country’s economy is caused within a country by extreme weather and it doesn’t account for how flooding in one country, for example, affects food supply in another. The team found that “if Earth warms by more than 3°C by the end of the century, the estimated harm to the global economy jumped from an average of 11% (under previous assumptions of isolated damage) to 40%,” devastating the livelihoods of a huge part of the world.
Other studies on drought find that increasing evaporation from rising temperatures due to global warming has disrupted the global water cycle in vast regions of North and South America, Africa, East and Central Asia, and Europe. Some regions would need 10 years of significantly above average rain to recover from long periods of drought. The southwest U.S., for example, has been drying out for 30-40 years—a megadrought, hemorrhaging groundwater, threatening its food security and economy. “About 40% of the contiguous U.S.” are in some stage of drought. Expected hotter temperatures and prolonged die-off of trees are the recipe for future wildfires. After a drought for a year or two, scientists would see recovery. No longer: “Drought is a creeping disaster.”
James Hansen, an early and outspoken expert on the climate crisis, and colleagues have published the most critical warning to date. We are experiencing sudden global warming of 1.6°C, and temperatures will oscillate “near or above that level for the next few years.” Their warning is unvarnished: more powerful tropical storms, tornadoes, more extreme floods; intensity of heatwaves, increase in drought in places of dry weather. The polar ice melt and freshwater injection into the North Atlantic Ocean will increase and could slow down AMOC in the next 20-30 years—locking our coasts into sea-level rise of several meters. AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, circulates water from north to south and back in a long cycle within the Atlantic Ocean. This circulation also brings warmth to various parts of the globe and also carries nutrients necessary to sustain ocean life.
Another frightening factor in faster warming is the fact that the planet’s plants and soils peaked in their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide in 2008. “Natural sequestration of carbon dioxide is in decline: Climate change will accelerate,” concluded the authors of the study.
We are heading toward catastrophe, though it can be mitigated: Though solar is doubling every few years, energy demand is increasing faster and being met by fossil fuels. “Science is clear...: stop using fossil fuels, respect and protect Nature, use resources sustainably.” Why aren’t we doing it?
Even before U.S. President Donald Trump’s nihilist administration cut staff and the budget from our key climate agencies NOAA and NASA while furiously promoting oil and coal, we were in trouble with our injured Earth. Trump has accelerated our ecocide. But human societies have been created by us, our human-made problems can and must be unmade. We owe it to the billions of young people who inherit this Earth.
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Climate Change Fueling 'Most Widespread and Damaging' Droughts in History: UN Report
"This is not a dry spell," said the co-author of a new U.N. report. "This is a slow-moving global catastrophe."
Jul 03, 2025
Climate change is driving "some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history," according to a report published Wednesday on global drought hotspots.
Over the past two years, droughts have fueled increased food insecurity, dehydration, and disease that have heightened poverty and political instability in several regions of the world, according to research by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
"This is not a dry spell," says Dr. Mark Svoboda, report co-author and NDMC Director. "This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I've ever seen. This report underscores the need for systematic monitoring of how drought affects lives, livelihoods, and the health of the ecosystems that we all depend on."
The report examined conditions in some of the globe's most drought-prone regions. They found that the economic disruption caused by droughts today is twice as high as in 2000.
In Eastern and Southern Africa, which have been blighted with dangerously low levels of rainfall, more than 90 million people face acute hunger.
Somalia has been hit particularly hard, with 4.4 million, more than a quarter of the population, facing "crisis level" food insecurity in early 2025. Zambia, meanwhile, faced one of the world's worst energy crises last year when the Zambezi River dried up, causing its hydroelectric dams to run critically low.
Other drought-plagued regions have seen wide ranges of ecological and economic disruptions.
In Spain, low levels of rainfall in 2023 devastated olive crops, causing olive oil prices to double. In the Amazon Basin, low water levels caused a mass death of fish and endangered dolphins. The Panama Canal became so depleted that trade vessels were forced to re-route, causing multi-week shipping delays. And in Morocco, Eid celebrations had to be cancelled due to a shortage of sheep.
Recent studies of drought have found that they are increasingly caused not by lack of rainfall, but by aggressive heat, which speeds up evaporation. The areas hit the hardest over the past two years were ones already suffering from the most severe temperature increases. It was also exacerbated by a particularly severe El Niño weather cycle in 2023-24.
"This was a perfect storm," says report co-author Dr. Kelly Helm Smith, NDMC Assistant Director and drought impacts researcher. "El Niño added fuel to the fire of climate change, compounding the effects for many vulnerable societies and ecosystems past their limits."
Though the effects of droughts are often felt most acutely in areas already suffering from poverty and instability, the researchers predict that as they get worse, the effects will be felt worldwide.
In 2024, then the hottest year on record, 48 of the 50 U.S. states faced drought conditions, the highest proportion ever seen. Drought in the U.S. has coincided with a dramatic increase in wildfire frequency and severity over the past 50 years.
"Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks," Smith said. "No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse."
The researchers advocated for investments in global drought prevention, but also for broader measures to address the existing inequalities that make droughts more severe.
"Drought has a disproportionate effect on those with few resources," Smith said. "We can act now to reduce the effects of future droughts by working to ensure that everyone has access to food, water, education, health care and economic opportunity."
The researchers also emphasized the urgency of coordinated action to confront the climate crisis.
"The struggles...to secure water, food, and energy under persistent drought offer a preview of water futures under unchecked global warming," said Svoboda. "No country, regardless of wealth or capacity, can afford to be complacent."
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The Dystopia of the Border Security Expo Is Trump’s Response to the Climate Emergency
U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: Reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus.
Jun 02, 2025
Believe it or not, I had a transcendent experience at this year’s Border Security Expo, the annual event that brings Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement together with private industry. I hesitate to describe it that way, though, because I was on the exhibition hall floor and instantly found myself in the very heart of the U.S. border-industrial complex. It was early April, and I was surrounded by the latest surveillance equipment—camera systems, drones, robodogs—from about 225 companies (a record number for such an event) displaying their wares at that Phoenix Convention Center. Many of the people there seemed all too excited that Donald Trump was once again president.
You might wonder how it’s even possible to have a mystical experience while visiting this country’s largest annual border surveillance fair, and I would agree, especially since my moment came just after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave the keynote speech to a packed convention center ballroom. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Noem, who had infamously worn a $50,000 Rolex watch to a Salvadoran “terrorism” prison photo shoot just weeks before, received rousing ovation after ovation, as she claimed that the Trump administration had almost achieved “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexican border. (Only a little more to go, she insisted!) The same point had been made by “border czar” Thomas Homan earlier that day. Both asked the audience to give standing ovations to all border law enforcement officials in the room for, as Noem put it, enduring the “train wreck and poor leadership of Joe Biden leading this country.” And like those who preceded her, she used words like “invasion” abundantly, suggesting that an all-too-fragile United States was battling a siege of unknown proportions.
The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano had a name for just such an experience: an “upside-down world,” he called it. In such a world, we’re presented not with the facts but their very opposite. For the border-industrial complex, however, it’s just such an inverted world that sells their product.
For the United States—increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump—the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
Then it happened. I was walking down a corridor lined with drone companies, including one from India called ideaForge, whose medium-sized drone was “built like a bird” and “tested like a tank.” There were also sophisticated artificial intelligence camera systems mounted on masts atop armored ground drones, which might be considered the perfect combination of today’s modern border technology. There was also the company Fat Truck, whose vehicles had tires taller than my car. X-ray and biometric systems surrounded me, along with green-uniformed Border Patrol agents, sheriffs from border counties, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents checking the equipment. As always, you could practically smell the cash in the air. Of my 13 years covering the Border Security Expo, this was clearly the largest and most enthusiastic one ever.
I was walking through it all on one of those worn blue carpets found in convention centers and then, suddenly, I wasn’t walking there at all. Instead, I was in the Sierra Tarahumara in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, with a Rarámuri man named Mario Quiroz. I had been there with him the previous week, so it was indeed a memory, but so vivid it essentially overcame me. I could smell the forest near the Copper Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I could see Quiroz showing me the drying yellowish trees cracking everywhere amid a mega-drought of staggering proportions. I could even catch a glimpse of the fractured Río Conchos, the Mexican river that, at the border, would become the Rio Grande. It was drying up and the trees along it were dying, while many local people were finding that they had little choice but to migrate elsewhere to make ends meet.
I had to sit down. When I did, I suddenly found myself back at the expo in that stale air-conditioned environment that only promises yet more surveillance towers and drones on that very border. Then came the realization that gave me pause: Although that devastated Sierra Tarahumara terrain and the Border Security Expo couldn’t be more different, they are, in fact, also intimately connected. After all, Sierra Tarahumara represents the all too palpable and devastating reality of climate change and the way it’s already beginning to displace people, while the Expo represented my country’s most prominent response to that displacement (and the Global North’s more generally). For the United States—increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump—the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
“Unwanted Starving Immigrants”
Consider the 2003 Pentagon-commissioned report entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. It stated, “The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency.” It also predicted that “borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.” Twenty-two years later, that prophecy—if the Border Security Expo is any indication—is coming true.
In 2007, Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, wrote that “border problems” will overwhelm American capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic measures and perhaps not even then.” His thoughts were a response to a request from the House of Representatives for scientists and military practitioners to offer serious projections connecting climate change and national security. The result would be the book Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. Since, according to its editor Kurt Campbell, it would take 30 years for a major military platform to go from the “drawing board to the battlefield,” that volume was, indeed, a book of preparation for a bordered future that only now is beginning to truly envelop us.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal.
In March, I stood on a hill in the town of Sisoguichi in Chihuahua, Mexico with the local priest, Héctor Fernando Martínez, who told me people there wouldn’t be planting corn, beans, and squash at all this year because of the drought. They feared it would never again rain. And it was true that the drought in Chihuahua was the worst I had ever seen, affecting not only the mountains but also the valleys where drying lakes and reservoirs had left farmers without water for the 2025 agricultural cycle.
“What do people do instead?” I asked the priest. “Migrate,” he told me. Many people already migrate for half the year to supplement their incomes, picking apples near Cuauhtémoc or chiles near Camargo. Others end up in the city of Ciudad Juárez, working in maquiladoras (factories) to produce goods for Walmart, Target, and warplane manufacturers, among other places. Some, of course, also try to cross into the United States, only to encounter the same technology and weaponry that was before my eyes that day at the Border Security Expo.
Those displacements, anticipated in assessments from the early 2000s, are already happening in an ever more unnerving fashion. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reports that each year now about 22.4 million people are forcibly displaced by “weather-related hazards.” And projections for future migration are startling. The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, 216 million people could be on the move globally, while another report speculates that the number could even hit 1.2 billion. Multiple factors influence people’s decisions to migrate, of course, but climate change is rapidly becoming a (if not the) most prominent one.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to banish climate change from all government documents and discourse and quite literally wipe it out as a subject of any interest at all, the DHS’s 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment describes what’s going on in Chihuahua and elsewhere all too well: “Natural disasters or extreme weather events abroad that disrupt local economies or result in food insecurity have the potential to exacerbate migration flows to the United States.” The 2021 DHS Climate Action Plan stated that the department would “conduct integrated, scalable, agile, and synchronized steady-state operations… to secure the Southern Border and Approaches.” It turns out that the “operational control” Kristi Noem mentioned at the Border Security Expo includes preparations for potential climate-induced mass migration. That hellish dystopic world (envisioned in movies like Mad Max) is coming to you directly from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Border-Industrial Complex in Action
As I continued through that expo hall, I recalled walking in drought-stricken Chihuahua and thought about what’s now happening on our border to face the human nightmare of climate change in an all-too-military fashion. Ominously enough, the company Akima, which operates the ICE detention center in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was a prime sponsor of the Expo and I saw its name prominently displayed. Its website indicates that it is “now hiring to support ICE efforts,” effectively framing the mass deportations promised by Trump as a good opportunity for volunteers.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal. When I gave him a look of disbelief, he mentioned that he’d heard of a couple of cases of bombs found at the border. At another company, UI Path, an enthusiastic vendor claimed their software was focused on administrative “efficiency” and, he assured me, was well “aligned with DOGE” (Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency), allowing Border Patrol agents to not have to handle the “tedious tasks,” so that they could “go out in the field.” I then asked about their success with the Border Patrol and he replied, “They already have our program. They are already using it.”
When I approached the Matthews Environmental Solutions booth, the vendors weren’t there. But behind a lone green chair, a large placard stated that the company was one of the “global leaders in waste incineration,” with over 5,000 installations worldwide. A photo of a large metal waste incinerator caught my eye, somewhat morbidly, because the website also said that the company offered “cremation systems.” Though they weren’t selling that service at the Border Security Expo, there was certainly a macabre symbolism to such an expo where human ashes could be converted into profit and suffering into revenue.
When it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
Forecasters at the global management consulting firm IMARC Group cheerily project an even more robust global homeland security market to come. “The growing number and severity of natural disasters and public health emergencies,” they write, “is offering a favorable homeland security market outlook.” By IMARC’s calculations, the industry will grow from $635.90 billion this year to $997.82 billion by 2033, a nearly 5% growth rate. The company Market and Markets, however, predicts a far quicker ascent, estimating that the market will reach $905 billion by next year. The consensus, in short, is that, in the age of climate change, homeland security will soon be on the verge of becoming a trillion-dollar industry—and just imagine what future Border Security Expos will be like then!
Certainly, the Trump administration, eager to toss out anything related to climate change funding while also working hard to increase the production of fossil fuels, has ambitious plans to contribute to that very reality. Since January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE have already put out about $2.5 billion in contracts. It’s still early, but that number is actually lower than Joe Biden’s pace a year ago; his spending reached $9 billion at the end of fiscal year 2024. Despite constant accusations from Trump and others that Joe Biden maintained “open borders,” he finished his term as the top contractor of any president when it came to border and immigration enforcement and so set a high bar for Trump.
In 2025, Trump is operating with a CBP and ICE budget of $29.4 billion, slightly lower than Biden’s 2024 one, but historically high (approximately $10 billion more than when he started his first term as president in 2017). The change, however, will come next year, as the administration is asking for $175 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, an increase of $43.8 billion “to fully implement the president’s mass removal campaign, finish construction of the border wall on the Southwest border, procure advanced border security technology, modernize the fleet and facilities of the Coast Guard, and enhance Secret Service protective operations.”
On top of that on May 22, the House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that, among other things, would infuse $160 billion more in funding into the CBP and ICE budgets over the next four and a half years. As Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America stated, “We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill” that will now go to a vote in the Senate. This may explain the industry’s optimism; they sense a potential bonanza to come.
Despite Trump’s deep urge to erase global warming from consideration, climate displacement and border protection—two dynamics trending distinctly upward—are on a collision course. The United States, the world’s largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal. U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: Reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus. In fact, the dystopia of the Border Security Expo I saw that day is the U.S. response to the drought in Chihuahua and so much else involving the overheating of this planet. And yet, when it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
As I listened to Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan discuss what they considered to be a besieged country, I thought of Galeano’s provocative analysis of that inverted world where the oppressor becomes the oppressed and the oppressed the oppressor. That world now includes fires, floods, increasingly devastating storms, and encroaching seas, all to be met with high-tech cameras, biometrics, robotic dogs, and formidable walls.
I still can’t shake my vision of those yellowish hues on the dying trees in the Sierra Tarahumara. I walked with Quiroz down that canyon to the Río Conchos River and out onto its bed of dried stones that crunched like bones underfoot. Quiroz told me he came to that then-flowing river every day as a kid to tend to his family’s goats. I asked how he felt about it now that it looked like a bunch of disconnected puddles stretching before us to the horizon. “Tristeza,” he told me.
Walking the halls of the expo, I felt the weight of that word: sadness. Sadness, indeed, in this thoroughly upside-down borderworld of ours.
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'This Is Unprecedented': Several Horrific Wildfires Ravage Los Angeles
"There is no 'firefighting' in these kinds of conditions," said one meteorologist. "There is only saving as many lives as possible and getting the heck out of the fire's way."
Jan 08, 2025
Several major wildfires burned out of control in California's Los Angeles County on Wednesday as roaring winds fueled the rapid spread of the blazes, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate as state, local, and federal officials mobilized resources to confront the emergency.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wrote on social media late Tuesday that the city is "working aggressively" to stem the wildfires, which scientists and government officials characterized as uniquely devastating.
"Emergency officials, firefighters, and first responders are all hands on deck through the night to do everything possible to protect lives," California Gov. Gavin Newsom said early Wednesday. The governor noted that more than 1,400 firefighting personnel have been deployed to "combat these unprecedented fires."
The Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst fires broke out on Tuesday. It quickly exploded amid what the National Weather Service described as "extremely critical fire weather," with wind gusts up to 99 mph propelling the devastating blazes. The extreme winds forced emergency crews to ground aircraft that were working to contain the fires.
"For some context, fire crews are up against near hurricane-force winds occurring mid-winter in rugged terrain during a drought at night," wrote meteorologist Eric Holthaus. "There is no 'firefighting' in these kinds of conditions. There is only saving as many lives as possible and getting the heck out of the fire's way."
"The emergence of extreme wintertime wildfires in California presents one of those classic 'this is climate change' moments."
The Eaton fire, which broke out Tuesday evening in the Pasadena area, "spread so rapidly that staff at a senior living center had to push dozens of residents in wheelchairs and hospital beds down the street to a parking lot," The Los Angeles Times reported.
"The residents waited there in their bedclothes as embers fell around them until ambulances, buses, and even construction vans arrived to take them to safety," the newspaper added.
The three fires have together burned thousands of acres so far and destroyed or endangered tens of thousands of homes and buildings, according to Newsom's office. So far, at least 19 school districts have announced complete or partial closures due to the fires.
Video footage posted to social media showed residents watching in horror as flames surrounded their homes:
This is by far the craziest video from the fire in Los Angeles. This guy is filming huge walls of fire surrounding a house they're in, and there's another person and a dog. I have no idea why they didn't evacuate or what happened to them. Let's hope they're okay. #PalisadesFire pic.twitter.com/QYtsBSKvdl
— Sia Kordestani (@SiaKordestani) January 8, 2025
Another video shows residents attempting to salvage as many belongings as possible before fleeing:
Video of the moment my friend and I abandoned his house after we tried to save what we could. Please be praying for him and his family @orlylistens
Location: North of Rustic Canyon#cawx #PalisadesFire #fire #California pic.twitter.com/fie6Ywkmz3
— Tanner Charles 🌪 (@TannerCharlesMN) January 8, 2025
"There has been a recent massive increase in wildfires in California but really, a fire this big in January? This is unprecedented," scientist Hayley Fowler wrote on social media. "One of many extreme events fueled by the climate crisis."
Holthaus wrote Tuesday that Southern California is "facing a rare and dangerous juxtaposition of extreme winds and midwinter drought," the meteorologist described as "a worrying example of the state's expanding wildfire threat as climate change worsens."
"The National Weather Service defines 'extremely critical' fire weather as sustained winds over 30 mph and relative humidity of less than 10% in drought conditions and temperatures warmer than 70 degrees," Holthaus observed. "This is the first time in history these criteria have been met anywhere in the United States during January."
"The emergence of extreme wintertime wildfires in California," he added, "presents one of those classic 'this is climate change' moments: A specific set of weather conditions are now occurring in such a way to produce the potential for rare disasters to become much more common."
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