Climate change

Inside Climate News -   Though the concept of a bike bus is simple—gather a group, hop on the bicycles and go—it didn’t creep into public awareness until 2021 when one in Barcelona went viral. In 2022, physical education teacher Sam Balto, who had started a bike bus in Boston in 2016 and another in Portland, Oregon, after moving there in 2018, organized the Bike Bus for Earth Day event in Portland that gained massive social media attention. By 2024, there were at least 470 bike bus routes around the globe, according to City Lab Barcelona. 

Inside Climate News -  Several global trends are colliding with disastrous consequences for health and the environment, new research warns.

Plastic production has skyrocketed since the 1950s, from a few million tons a year to nearly half a billion tons today, and is on track to triple by 2060. And since just a small fraction of plastics is recycled, millions of tons of plastic—derived from fossil fuels and loaded with toxic chemical additives—enter the environment as waste every year. That staggering figure is also likely to triple by midcentury.

For decades, the United States and other high-income countries have exported their plastic waste to low-income countries in the Global South, many ill-equipped to manage the burgeoning waste stream. At the same time, billions of people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America lack access to clean cooking fuels, adequate sanitation or waste-management services. As urbanization accelerates at an unprecedented rate across those regions, city dwellers living in extreme poverty often resort to burning debris from the massive mounds of plastic waste that inundate their communities. 

NY Times - For the tribal nations of the Pacific Northwest, water has been a through line, bringing spirituality and sustenance that have sustained communities for generations.

Now, as climate change drives rising sea levels and increasingly brings devastating floodwaters to native lands, that same water is forcing coastal villages located in Washington State to adapt to protect their heritage.

The scope of the change needed was made clear by the flooding across the state this past December, which forced 100,000 people to evacuate from low-lying areas, required 600 rescues and took at least one life. Many of those who fled the rising waters were members of the Indigenous fishing tribes positioned on the front lines of the storms, east of the Puget Sound.