Until she moved to Fresno, California in 2003, Janet DietzKamei had never experienced asthma. But after just a few years in a city notorious for its filthy air—the American Lung Association lists it in the five worst U.S. cities for air quality—DietzKamei found herself in the emergency room struggling to breathe.

She soon started staying inside on days when the air was thick with smog from nearby industry or traffic, and would check the local air-quality alerts every morning. But even that wasn’t enough—sometimes on days deemed safe by the air-quality index, she’d find herself gasping for breath.

If it’s bad, she said, “I just can’t breathe outside. Nothing is absorbed; I simply can’t breathe the air.”

Now 73, DietzKamei is coming off the first winter in years when she didn’t get sick at all. It’s all, she said, because of a $250 air sensor she put in her backyard, which sends her up-to-the-minute readings of pollution just outside her house, a more personalized and specific reading than she could get from the state’s stationary monitors miles away.

DietzKamei’s monitor, made by PurpleAir, is part of a network across California’s San Joaquin Valley, run in part by the Central California Environmental Justice Network. By putting monitors in backyards and around schools, the group is hoping to see what the area’s biomass plants and the dozens of trucks that rumble through are pumping into the lungs of disadvantaged residents.

Measuring air quality has been the purview of state environmental regulators, who rely on monitors approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that cost tens of thousands of dollars. That data is used to send out bad-air alerts (the green, orange, and red warning days) and for regulatory purposes.

But these readings show only a narrow slice of the air, based on a handful of monitors that may not be placed where the worst pollution is. Advances in technology have produced smaller sensors as cheap as $250, meaning that environmental activists, community groups, and curious citizens can map out air pollution around their schools, parks, or backyards.

This could eventually reshape air-pollution regulation, with previously unmeasured areas gathering data on air they say could violate federal health standards. In western Colorado, the environmental group Citizens for Clean Air has put up two dozen low-cost monitors around Grand Junction to supplement the two state-run monitors in the Grand Valley. In a region grappling with wildfire smoke, increased truck traffic, and natural-gas pollution, activists say a stronger web of monitors is necessary to prove to the state that more attention needs to be paid to them.

“The state does what they can with what they have to work with,” said Karen Sjoberg, the group’s leader. “They’ve got monitors in the best locations they can and they’ll do studies on that, but we need low-cost versions where we live.”

Even in large cities, which tend to get more attention because of their higher populations, low-cost sensors are being used to glean localized air-quality data. In addition to Fresno, take Salt Lake City, where pollution is a fact of life: The city sits in a basin, and wintertime inversions trap a thick coat of visible smog over the city for days at a time. Shea Wickelson, a high-school chemistry teacher at the Salt Lake Center for Science Education, said students begin thinking about pollution when recess is canceled on bad smog days.

“If you’re having that experience from elementary school, you’re very aware of air quality,” Wickelson said. “Students are coming up with questions like, ‘How is the air quality inside versus outside?,’ or ‘How does premium fuel compare to regular fuel?,’ or ‘How is the air around a school bus?’”

Answering those questions hasn’t been easy, but a partnership with the University of Utah has helped. The AirU program has students building their own particulate-matter sensors, starting with toy blocks, a cheap Arduino computer board, and a photo resistor that scatters light to detect particles of pollution. Students can use the tissue-box-sized monitors for science-fair projects, but they’ve also created a data-rich map of pollution around the city.

“Our lower-income areas have not always been very well represented, because people have other concerns than thinking of how to monitor air quality,” said Kerry Kelly, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Utah who oversees the program. “We’re getting real-time maps of the city’s microclimates. As this valley develops, this can help you manage where you’re putting things like schools.” Similarly, in Denver, Google has worked with Aclima to put the company’s low-cost sensors on street view cars to map pollution around the city.

The new generation of monitors is made possible by advances in laser technology. Monitors can capture air through a fan, then use a laser to count the number and size of particles in the air. Adrian Dybwad, the founder of PurpleAir, said he first started tinkering with air sensors to see what his family was breathing from a nearby gravel pit in Salt Lake City. An infrared sensor from the internet was too dependent on temperature, but he tested a modified laser sensor he got online against official regulatory monitors and found a 95 percent correlation.

After initially giving the monitors away, Dybwad’s company has now sold hundreds around the country, resulting in a real-time nationwide map on the company’s website.

“We call it high-resolution air sensing,” Dybwad said. “Having the ability to know what’s in your air, it gives people peace of mind.”

The technology works well for particulates, the pollution that can come from dust, smoke, and diesel exhaust and can lodge in the lungs and bloodstream. Ozone pollution, or ground-level smog, requires more complex readings on temperature, humidity, and gas makeup, which is a barrier to higher-quality and low-cost monitors for all pollutants.

“We’re getting real-time maps of the city’s microclimates. As this valley develops, this can help you manage where you’re putting things like schools.”

As would be expected, accuracy is a challenge—the monitors require calibration, can be affected by temperatures, and may be susceptible to, say, a backyard barbecue or a bug that flies into the sensor. They’re not precise enough for regulatory purposes, and some states have warned citizens against calling in with outrageously high readings that are most likely a glitch.

That said, some state agencies have embraced the low-cost brands. Colorado recently deployed some PurpleAir monitors to communities threatened by wildfires in the southwest of the state, a way to see where smoke was traveling so they could warn residents.

The EPA has been running trials for wearable sensors and an air monitor that could be installed in a park bench, to put it closer to roads and parks. As hardware continues to get smaller and battery life advances, some are even looking toward a future where monitors are stitched into clothing or clipped onto a jacket for a minute-by-minute reading.

Kelly, the University of Utah professor, said the possibilities for wearable sensors could be endless.

“Think of a crossing guard, or someone in a woodworking shop—we can understand their exposure and maybe find ways to minimize it,” she said. “If you’re an asthmatic, this can change your behavior. There’s so much information we can find.”

Learn more at CityLab

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Gunfire erupted as Iranian security forces confronted protesters early Sunday amid demonstrations over water scarcity in the country's south, violence that authorities said wounded at least 11 people, mostly police.

The protests around Khorramshahr, some 650 kilometers (400 miles) southwest of Tehran, come as residents of the predominantly Arab city near the border with Iraq complain of salty, muddy water coming out of their taps amid a yearslong drought.

The unrest there only compounds the wider unease felt across Iran as it faces an economic crisis sparked by President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw America from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers.

Protests began in Khorramshahr, Abadan and other areas of Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province on Friday. The demonstrations initially were peaceful, with protesters chanting in both Arabic and Farsi.

But late Saturday and into early Sunday morning, protesters began throwing stones and confronting security forces in Khorramshahr, according to widely shared online videos. State television aired images of rocks and broken glass covering sidewalks, as well as smashed ATMs. Women and children fled as gunfire echoed.

Heavy machine gun fire could be heard in one video showing demonstrators dragging away a man who couldn't walk. Another video appeared to show a man carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle on the back of a motorcycle near protesters.

State TV reported Sunday afternoon that "peace had returned" to Khorramshahr and an unspecified number of protesters had been arrested. It said some demonstrators carried firearms during the unrest.

It's unclear what sparked the violence. Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli told journalists Sunday there had been no deaths. A deputy to Fazli later said the violence wounded one civilian and 10 police officers, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency.

"Such protests are directed by the propaganda of opportunists from places and people that are recognized by us as foes," Fazli said. "You observe how they are fueling such incidents in the foreign media and in the cyberspace these days."

Khorramshahr and the wider Khuzestan province have seen pipeline bombings by Arab separatists in the past. Tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers were killed in the province during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

Exacerbating that unrest is the drought. The Iran Meteorological Organization estimates 97 percent of the country faced some form of drought. Analysts also blame government mismanagement for diverting water away from some farmers in favor of others.

"Although Iran has a history of drought, over the last decade, Iran has experienced its most prolonged, extensive and severe drought in over 30 years," said a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency.

Some 230 people were poisoned in Khuzestan province after a 20-hour water outage in Ramhormoz county led to drinking water not being chlorinated, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Sunday. The protests did not appear to be linked to the poisoning.

The protests overnight came after three days of demonstrations last week in Tehran, including protesters confronting police outside parliament and officers firing tear gas at the demonstrators. The rallies led to the temporary closure of the city's Grand Bazaar.

The anger is fueled by the Iranian rial plunging to 90,000 to the dollar — double the government rate of 42,000 — as people watch their savings dwindle and shopkeepers hold onto some goods, uncertain of their true value.

Similar economic protests roiled Iran and spread to some 75 cities and towns at the end of last year, becoming the largest demonstrations in the country since the months-long rallies following the 2009 disputed presidential election. At least 25 people were killed and nearly 5,000 arrested during the protests in late December and early January, which took place largely in Iran's provinces rather than the capital.

The economic crisis has been fueled by Trump's May 8 decision to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal and restore sanctions. International firms that made billion-dollar deals with Iran largely have pulled out of them, while the U.S. now is demanding its allies stop buying Iranian oil.

Iran's first Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri on Sunday mocked the U.S. for "begging the Saudis" to increase oil production to drive down rising global oil prices. Trump claimed Saturday that Saudi Arabia might increase its production by some 2 million barrels of oil a day after a call with King Salman. Saudi Arabia later acknowledged the call, but did not mention Trump's 2-million-barrel claim.

"If any country attempts to take Iran's place in the oil market in this battle, we will consider it a big treachery to the Iranian nation and the world community and they will surely pay for this betrayal someday," Jahangiri said, without elaborating.

Learn more US News

Nestlé’s special-use permit allows the company to use its pipelines, horizontal wells and water collection tunnels in the mountains north of San Bernardino.

District Ranger Joe Rechsteiner said in a statement that the decision ensures “the water withdrawal and conveyance infrastructure is under a current permit, and it provides for protection of forest resources.”

The permit comes with new conditions, including a requirement that the company take less water if necessary to maintain “minimum flows” of surface water.

The Forest Service said the watershed’s health is now rated as “impaired” and that water extraction will be allowed “when there is water available consistent with the forest’s Land Management Plan.”

The agency said that the company has 60 days to accept the terms of the permit, and that the three-year period will provide time to conduct more studies to “inform a longer-term decision.”

Nestlé acquired the operation in 1992, and has been paying $624 per year to the Forest Service for the permit. In 2016, Nestlé piped 32 million gallons of water from its sources in the national forest.

The Forest Service says its permit fees aren’t based on the volume of water it removes, but rather on the market value of using national forest lands. The agency said the initial fee for the new permit will be about $2,050 per year.

Nestlé's opponents have urged federal officials to shut down the company’s pipeline, arguing the siphoning of water harms spring-fed Strawberry Creek and the wildlife that depends on it.

Nestlé denies causing harm to the environment and has insisted it’s entitled to keep using the lucrative namesake source of Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water.

The company collects water using a system of 10 gravity-fed boreholes and two water tunnels drilled deep into the mountainside. The water flows downhill through a 4.5-mile steel pipeline to a roadside tank, where it’s pumped into tanker trucks and hauled to a bottling plant.

Alix Dunn, a spokesperson for Nestlé Waters North America, said the company “appreciates the time and effort the U.S. Forest Service dedicated to this decision regarding the permit renewal process at Arrowhead Springs.”

“We will carefully review the specifics of the decision, and will continue to comply with all permit requirements,” Dunn said in a statement, adding that the company has cooperated with the agency by providing dozens of environmental studies and reports.

Nestlé SA, headquartered in Vevey, Switzerland, is the world's largest food company, and its Paris-based subsidiary Nestlé Waters is the world’s largest water bottling company. Nestlé Waters North America is the biggest bottled water company in the United States.

Water from Arrowhead Springs was first bottled for sale more than a century ago. It’s named after the famed arrowhead-shaped natural rock formation on a mountainside north of San Bernardino and the springs near it — both hot and cold. The hot springs were once the central attraction of a glamorous resort, which closed in the late 1950s and now stands vacant at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains.

The wells and water pipelines on the mountainside have been authorized under various permits since 1929. Forest Service officials have said Nestlé’s most recent 1978 permit, which was issued to predecessor Arrowhead Puritas Waters Inc., remained in effect while they reviewed the company’s renewal application.

In 2016, the Forest Service had released a proposal to issue Nestlé a longer five-year permit. The agency said the new three-year permit may be extended for two one-year periods — if that time is needed for additional studies.

The decision was announced three weeks after environmental groups reached a settlement with the Forest Service in their legal fight over the permit. In the settlement, the groups agreed to drop their appeal and the agency agreed to issue a decision within 30 days.

The three groups — including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Story of Stuff Project and the Courage Campaign Institute — sued in 2015, accusing the Forest Service of violating the law by allowing the company to continue drawing water from the national forest. They’ve argued that the taking of water threatens a sensitive habitat and rare species ranging from mountain yellow-legged frogs to birds such as Southwestern willow flycatchers.

A federal judge sided with the Forest Service in 2016, ruling that the existing permit was still valid because in 1987 the company's predecessor requested a permit renewal and didn’t receive a response.

Nestlé says it has valid water rights in the national forest. But starting in 2015, critics filed several complaints with California’s State Water Resources Control Board questioning the company’s water rights claims.

State officials conducted a 20-month investigation and concluded in December that the company doesn’t seem to have valid rights for much of the water it’s been drawing from the forest north of San Bernardino. Nestlé disputed the findings, arguing in a written response in February that it has rights to take at least 88 million gallons each year – nearly three times as much as the amount that ran through its pipes in 2016.

State officials have said they’re studying comments that have been submitted in response to their investigation, and they may revise their report based on those comments.

The Forest Service said its decision “leaves any issue concerning the extent of Nestlé’s water rights to the State Water Resources Control Board,” which has authority over questions of water rights.

Nestlé’s opponents had been hoping for a different decision from the federal government.

"We're disappointed with the Forest Service's decision to issue a new permit, particularly in light of the ongoing investigation by the State Water Board into Nestlé's shaky claim to a water right,” Michael O'Heaney, executive director of The Story of Stuff Project. “While we need time to more fully understand the decision, in the days ahead we will certainly be studying our options for ensuring that the public's natural resources are protected."

Rechsteiner explained his decision in a 33-page memo, saying there are no “extraordinary circumstances” that would warrant additional analysis through an environmental assessment. In a seven-page appendix, he outlined an “adaptive management plan” that would require the company to reduce water extraction if necessary to maintain the flow of surface water downhill from Nestlé’s water sources.

The company had previously proposed voluntary measures, but Rechsteiner decided on mandatory conditions. He wrote that Nestlé will be required to carry out additional environmental and hydrologic studies, and to take less water “if monitoring shows that water extraction is impacting surface water flow.”

“The initial studies provided by the permittee suggest that water extraction is reducing surface flow in Strawberry Creek. The effect of this flow reduction has not been thoroughly studied,” Rechsteiner said. He said the company’s studies and field work by government officials “have demonstrated that the current water extraction is drying up surface water resources (springs and streams).”

The company will be required to study other sites in adjacent watershed for comparison, he wrote, “to determine what conditions would exist in Strawberry Creek without water extraction.”

The Forest Service is asking the company to submit a study plan, which may involve “suspending extraction for set time periods to evaluate any changes in streamflow.”

Last October, Desert Sun journalists visited Strawberry Creek to investigate how Nestlé’s use of water may be affecting the watershed. At a fork in the creek, the eastern branch was a free-flowing stream, but the western fork — downhill from Nestlé’s boreholes and water tunnels — was just a trickle, forming a series of shallow puddles hidden in a thicket of trees and bushes.

Under the new permit, the company will be required to monitor the streamflow downstream from its water sources and install “shut-off valves or other flow control devices.”

The extraction of water “will only be authorized when it is demonstrated by the user, and/or agreed to by the Forest Service, that the water extracted is excess to the current and reasonably foreseeable future needs of forest resources,” Rechsteiner wrote.

The Forest Service received more than 40,000 comments from the public on the permit renewal proposal. Some people voiced concerns that if Nestlé is tasked with carrying out studies, the findings may be biased.

Responding to that point, Rechsteiner said although Nestlé will pay to conduct the studies, as is typical, “the qualifications of the scientists and resource specialists completing the work will be reviewed and approved by Forest Service staff,” and the studies will be independently reviewed.

The company will be required maintain “minimum flows” in two locations near the springs and boreholes: 20 gallons-per-minute in one spot and about 6 gallons-per-minute in another.

“Nestlé must manage extraction to maintain those minimum flows,” the agency said. “If the initial actions do not maintain minimum flows, all extraction must cease until flows reach minimum levels required to meet hydrological and biological concerns.”

Some of the activists who’ve been pressing to shut down Nestlé’s pipeline said the measures seem insufficient.

“This new permit will allow Nestlé to continue draining this fragile watershed without adequate resource protections,” said Lisa Belenky, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Forest Service downplayed information about the damage Nestlé’s bottled-water operation is already doing and failed to do a robust environmental analysis, as the law requires. It doesn’t appear that the limited mitigation measures are adequate to prevent Nestlé from destroying plants and wildlife that have relied on Strawberry Creek for thousands of years.”

Learn more at Desert Sun

C40 and the IOC plan to work with interested cities, candidate cities and host cities of the Olympic Games to help them achieve their sustainability objectives, which will further contribute to their regions’ broader climate initiatives.

The IOC’s Sustainability Strategy, which is one of the pillars of the IOC’s strategic roadmap, Olympic Agenda 2020, concentrates on five focus areas, one of which is climate.

“Given that the next four editions of the Olympic Games will be held in significant cities that are part of the C40 network, this collaboration was a natural and fantastic opportunity,” said HSH Prince Albert II. “Our goal is to make the Olympic Games best fit the long-term needs and objectives of the host cities. That includes incorporating sustainability in all aspects of planning for and delivering the Olympic Games. By signing this MOU, we will be able to better assist current and future host cities of the Olympic Games in achieving their climate change goals by utilising the expertise and experience of the C40, and for both parties to showcase related initiatives and results.”

The host cities for the next three Olympic Games – Tokyo (in 2020), Paris (in 2024) and Los Angeles (in 2028) – are members of the C40 Steering Committee. The host of the next Olympic Winter Games, Beijing (in 2022), is also a key member of the C40 network, which groups together 96 cities committed to leading the way towards a healthier and more sustainable future.

“Hosting the Olympic Games is a unique privilege for any city, and provides an amazing opportunity to accelerate the climate and air quality initiatives that mayors need to implement for the future of their citizens,” said Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris and Chair of C40. “This partnership between the IOC and C40, two organisations with a long experience of showcasing cities, will ensure the Olympic Games and climate transition go hand in hand in securing a sustainable future for everyone.”

“The Olympic and Paralympic Games are one of the world’s largest sports events. Sport has the power to change the world,” said Yuriko Koike, Governor of Tokyo. “Tokyo, as the host city of the Olympic Games 2020, will play the role responsibly. We will work with the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee to demonstrate to the world that Tokyo works integrally on the environmental, social and economic aspects of 21st-century sustainable development, contributing to the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda.”

“Los Angeles is where the world comes to compete, and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games are an opportunity to showcase our city’s sustainable values,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “Climate change knows no boundaries, and only through global cooperation can we overcome this global challenge. Working together, the IOC and C40 can use the Olympic moment to help our planet heal and our people grow.”

Learn more at Olympic.org

SALIDA, Colo. (AP) — We were warned.

On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.”

Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous.

Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage.

Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees.

“The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we’re no longer thinking just about the future,” said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Climate change is here, it’s now and it’s hitting us hard from all sides.”

Warming hasn’t been just global, it’s been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined.

The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988.

South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States.

When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow that’s not on mountain tops, she said.

“T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child,” Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now he’s got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them.

And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large.

“You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year.

In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.

The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South.

Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken.

Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years night time summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: “Be careful what you ask for.”

The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming.

Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North America — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of local warming.

But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth’s warming.

“It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Since the 1800s scientists have demonstrated that certain gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap heat from the sun like a blanket. Human activities such as burning of coal, oil and gasoline are releasing more of those gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. U.S. and international science reports say that more than 90 percent of the warming that has happened since 1950 is man-made.

Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly.

“One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort,” said Deke Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years.

Arndt said average temperatures don’t tell the entire story: “It’s the extremes that these changes bring.”

The nation’s extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index.

The Northeast’s extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years.

And the summer’s named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record.

“The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.

Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Alaska’s annual average temperature has warmed 2.4 degrees since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter. Since 1988, Utqiagvik (oot-GAR’-vik), Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter.

“The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing,” said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city’s former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. “We live the climate change.”

The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

“There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable” at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth’s glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking.

“You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven’t in the last 15 or so years,” said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That’s enough to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep.

And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years.

With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That’s enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep.

It’s a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We’re in deep, and getting deeper.

“Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” NOAA’s Arndt said. “The train is in our living room now.”

Learn more at Associated Press

Olafur Eliasson‘s Little Sun has big plans. The Danish-Icelandic artist and co-founder of the social enterprise has teamed up with Swedish furniture giant Ikea to research and develop a new line of solar-powered products for the home.

News of the partnership comes as something of a surprise for the boutique operation. After all, Little Sun, which Eliasson co-founded with the engineer Frederik Ottesen, rolled out its first product just five years ago: a bright yellow, solar-power torch which sold for $30 at Art Basel Miami Beach back in 2013. Since then, Little Sun has gone on to develop a solar-powered table lamp and a mobile phone charger aimed at the millions of people who live off the grid. Ikea, meanwhile, boasts some 300 stores in 40 countries and millions of on-grid customers around the world.

The Swedish company’s juggernaut size—and the product expertise that girds it—is exactly what made a partnership appealing.

“I was keen to use the scale and the knowledge Ikea has on product development to create a relationship with Little Sun,” Eliasson tells artnet News. “Little Sun is primarily working with off-grid solutions and it’s about people at the very bottom of the pyramid who do not have access to clean energy. But Little Sun is also about learning how to have a relationship with sustainable energy in the so-called on-grid world.”

Eliasson says that research and development on new products will begin right away. “We have not established exactly what Little Sun can develop with Ikea. We are starting the design process next week,” he says. But he anticipates “a small range of objects that are inspired by solar power or use it like Little Sun itself.”

According to the artist, Ikea approached Little Sun, in part, because the company saw potential in developing solar-powered devices for the home but also because it was interested in the Little Sun ethos of sustainability. “I have followed the investment Ikea has made in sustainable products and recycling materials,” he says. “I hope to see a collaboration where that can be pushed even further.”

Eliasson’s own longstanding work in Ethiopia also played a role in attracting Ikea’s interest. “Ikea was curious that I teach at the university in Addis Ababa,” he says. The company is keen to get to know young artists and designers in Ethiopia and possibly develop other products with them, according to the artist.

Eliasson praised the work of the Ikea Foundation, a charity which helps children living in poverty gain better access to education, healthcare, and housing. He is also interested in how a company set up in a remote part of Sweden in 1947 became such a big design company and a leader in what it calls “design democratization.”

Of course, he is also a longstanding customer. The artist may typically make his own furniture, but he admits he’s bought plenty of Ikea’s kitchen products. “Growing up in Copenhagen you cannot avoid having a relationship with Ikea,” he says. “It is simply a part of everything.”

Learn more at artnet

Using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own numbers, two Harvard scientists have calculated that 80,000 more lives will be lost per decade if President Donald Trump's administration fulfills its plans to roll back clean air and water protections.

The researchers, terming their tally "an extremely conservative estimate," also estimated that the repeal of regulations will lead to respiratory problems for more than 1 million people. Their essay was published Tuesday in the authoritative Journal of the American Medical Association.

"We felt it was important to take a comprehensive view," said Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician and co-director of the Data Science Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Some people, when looking at one specific repealing of a rule, might not think it's important. We wanted to put some numbers on the whole systematic repeal of rule after rule."

She and David Cutler, an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, drew their calculation from the health risk assessments that the EPA conducted during the Obama administration when determining the impact of rules it proposed. Last week, the Trump administration signaled it plans to overhaul the way that those cost-benefit studies are conducted. The agency is taking comments for the next 30 days on its plan, which has the potential to reduce the weight given to human health and climate benefits.

Dominici and Cutler decried creating greater risks to the public's health for the benefit of "a relatively few well-connected companies."

"The effects of the Trump administration's policies seem clear, even through the haze they will create," they wrote.

Pruitt's EPA Challenging the Assessments

The EPA dismissed the article because it was not peer-reviewed but appeared instead in the JAMA Forum, where researchers offer perspectives. "This is not a scientific article, it's a political article," the EPA said in response to InsideClimate News' request for comment.

But Dominici noted that she and Cutler pulled the numbers directly from the EPA risk assessments that had been developed for each of the rules they analyzed. "The EPA numbers themselves all rely on peer-reviewed science," Dominici said.

The EPA numbers, in fact, are being challenged and in some cases scaled back by the Trump administration as it seeks to revoke or replace Obama-era rules. But these moves face numerous legal challenges, and the agency will have to show that it has not acted arbitrarily or capriciously to pass muster in the courts.

It's hard to argue against the ample evidence that if air quality standards are relaxed, the health of those who breathe the air will suffer. The same goes for standards for water, pesticides, toxic waste and so on. Runaway climate change, too, would present a wide range of public health risks.

One Rollback, Majority of Respiratory Illnesses

The largest and most immediate health consequences are likely to come through erosion of air quality, Cutler and Domenici wrote. They included in their calculation the repeal of President Barack Obama's signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, as well as the rollback of vehicle fuel economy standards and Trump's tariffs on solar power components from abroad.

About 90 percent of the increase in respiratory ailments can be attributed to one deregulatory move—the effort to re-open a loophole that allowed trucks that don't comply with pollution rules to remain on the road, the authors found.

Public health scientists have been raising increasing alarms as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has advanced Trump's deregulatory agenda. They have protested Pruitt's move to bar government-funded scientists from sitting on the agency's Science Advisory Board, and nearly 1,000 scientists signed a letter opposing Pruitt's plan to place restrictions on the EPA's use of science.

Pruitt's 'Secret Science' Plan Targets Health Data

In their JAMA essay, Dominici and Cutler singled out the move to curb agency use of science as one of the most potentially consequential, because Pruitt is targeting epidemiological studies of human subjects. Although Pruitt calls this a move for greater "transparency," Dominici said it would in fact bar EPA consideration of precisely the kinds of studies that formed the basis of the calculations that she and Cutler did.

"They are attacking the science because the science is what is putting the number of deaths where they are," she said. "It's a tactic to discredit the science, so that health impact analysis will not be able to be done any more."

The EPA, which received more than 150,000 public comments in 30 days on its proposal to restrict agency science, has extended the comment periodon that proposal through August. The agency also has set a July 17 hearing in Washington, D.C., on the plan.

Learn more at Inside Climate News

CALIFORNIA, TO HURRICANE HARVEY IN HOUSTON, AND HISTORIC FLOODING AND WINTER STORMS IN BOSTON, cities across the U.S. are on the frontlines of climate change impacts.

But they are also at the forefront of climate solutions.

A network of over 400 cities representing nearly 70 million Americans – the Climate Mayors network – is working collectively to advance climate initiatives even as the federal government takes a back seat.

“A year ago, when the president pulled out of the Paris Agreement, what he didn’t realize was he was lighting a fire under America’s mayors,” Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh said during a recent Mayors Climate Summit held at Boston University.

Washington D.C. may want to say climate change isn’t real, but we know it is, and you’re facing it every day.

The summit brought together 25 mayors from cities around the country and abroad to share best practices and discuss how municipalities are moving forward on addressing the existential threat of climate change.

Despite the current state of climate denial gripping the federal government, the mayors at the summit spoke of the urgency of the climate crisis, referencing impacts already occurring in their cities.

“In Houston, we have to face the reality of climate change, when you’re dealing with three 500-year floods in three years … We don’t have a choice,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. “If we don’t move with a sense of urgency, then our cities will suffer.”

No nation individually or even several nations working collectively can solve this problem for us.

Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy addressed the summit, speaking of cities’ refusal to accept climate denial. “Washington D.C. may want to say climate change isn’t real, but we know it is, and you’re facing it every day,” she said. Climate denial, she quipped, is “sticking your head in the sand and guess what’s out there exposed – your butt! So we have to go kick a few butts of those who have their heads in the sand.”

Cities are already doing this, from setting clean energy and carbon reduction targets, to planning for resiliency, to working collectively with businesses and other municipalities to implement solutions.

Going renewable

Many cities are pledging to reduce emissions and get to 100% renewable energy.

Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski said her city has a goal of 100% renewable energy for electricity by 2032, and has also committed to reduce carbon emissions 80% by 2040. Other cities are striving for carbon neutrality. Boston launched its Carbon Free Boston initiative in 2017, and Los Angeles just announced its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 at the climate summit. The Republican-controlled city of Carmel, Indiana, even passed a carbon neutral resolution in recent months.

Green electricity

Cities are coming together for a collective purchasing of renewable energy.

Boston is leading a new initiative challenging cities to evaluate opportunities for sourcing more green electricity by 2040.

“Today I’m proud to announce a historic initiative that could create green jobs, cut emissions and help us meet the goals of the Paris Agreement after all. We can prove to the president that renewable energy can power America,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said during the opening of the climate summit.

The Request for Information (RFI) will compile the energy demand data across participating U.S. cities and ask renewable energy developers for price estimates for projects that would meet their collective energy demand. “If successful, this will save cities, including Boston, millions of dollars,” said Mayor Walsh. Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Orlando have already signed on.

Local resilience

Since local communities are on the frontlines of climate impacts, planning for adaptation and resilience is key.

Mayor Walsh mentioned several resiliency initiatives underway in Boston, including a seawall in East Boston, raising streets in Charlestown, and reconstructing parks in the North End. “The resiliency issue in particular requires a lot of planning,” said Bud Ris of Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission, a group that has worked extensively on the city’s Climate Ready Boston plan.

“What is needed going forward is a really concerted effort for the private sector and the public sector to work together on the finance strategy to implement the solutions.” In Houston, the City Council recently approved a new building standard for elevating buildings located in floodplains. The city is looking into other resiliency efforts as well. “We have to rise to the occasion from a local level to put in place mitigation and resiliency steps that will reduce our future costs,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner.

Public-private partnerships

Another key strategy for cities is working collaboratively and forming partnerships with the private sector.

“In Kansas City, public-private partnerships are huge in our smart connected cities effort,” said Kansas City Mayor Sly Jones, referring to the Smart City program that includes improvements like more efficient and sustainable transportation and infrastructure.

If we don’t move with a sense of urgency, then our cities will suffer.

Salt Lake City is working with the utility company Rocky Mountain Power to bring more clean energy to the city, while other municipalities have partnered with GE Solar for a collective purchasing of large-scale solar projects. Cities are also working with one another to leverage resources and share ideas. The Climate Mayors network is central to this strategy. Last year the Climate Mayors, led by the City of Los Angeles, issued an Electric Vehicle Request for Information (EV RFI) with 30 other cities in efforts to aggregate municipal demand of electric vehicles across the country. The new Renewable Energy RFI follows this successful model.

THESE ARE JUST SOME OF THE WAYS CITIES ARE LEADING THE CHARGE on confronting the climate crisis.

“The innovation that will be generated largely in cities, that’s where the solutions will be found, that’s where the industries and jobs of tomorrow will emerge,” said Don Iveson, mayor of Edmonton, Alberta.

“No nation individually or even several nations working collectively can solve this problem for us,” added former Secretary of State John Kerry. “This has to happen from the grassroots up.”

Learn more at GOOD

Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday.

The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than they had hoped.

The result also reinforces that nations have a short window — perhaps no more than a decade — to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if they hope to avert some of the worst consequences of climate change.

Antarctica, the planet’s largest ice sheet, lost 219 billion tons of ice annually from 2012 through 2017 — approximately triple the 73 billion-ton melt rate of a decade ago, the scientists concluded. From 1992 through 1997, Antarctica lost 49 billion tons of ice annually.

The study is the product of a large group of Antarctic experts who collectively reviewed 24 recent measurements of Antarctic ice loss, reconciling their differences to produce the most definitive figures yet on changes in Antarctica. Their results — known formally as the “Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise” (IMBIE) — were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus,” said Isabella Velicogna, an Antarctic expert at the University of California at Irvine and one of the many authors from institutions in 14 countries. The lead authors was Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in England and Erik Ivins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The detailed record shows an acceleration, starting around 2002,” Beata Csatho, one of the study authors and a glaciologist at the University at Buffalo, said in an email.

Csatho noted that comparing the first and last five-year periods in the record reveals an even steeper acceleration. “Actually, if you compare 1997-2002 to 2012-2017, the increase is even larger, a factor of more than 5!!” she wrote.

For the total period from 1992 through the present, the ice sheet has lost nearly 3 trillion tons of ice, equating to just less than 8 millimeters of sea-level rise. Forty percent of that loss has occurred in the past five years.

The rapid, recent changes are almost entirely driven by the West Antarctic ice sheet, which scientists have long viewed as an Achilles’ heel. It is known to be losing ice rapidly because it is being melted from below by warm ocean waters, a process that is rendering its largest glaciers unstable.

West Antarctica lost 159 billion tons of ice a year from 2012 through 2017, compared with 65 billion tons from 2002 through 2007.

The growth is largely attributable to just two huge glaciers: Pine Island and Thwaites. The latter is increasingly being viewed as posing a potential planetary emergency because of its enormous size and its role as a gateway that could allow the ocean to someday access the entirety of West Antarctica, turning the marine-based ice sheet into a new sea.

Pine Island is now losing about 45 billion tons per year, and Thwaites is losing 50 billion. Both numbers are higher than the annual losses for any other glacier in the world.

“The increasing mass loss that they’re finding is really worrying, particularly looking at the West Antarctic, the area that’s changing most rapidly,” said Christine Dow, a glaciologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who was not involved in the research. “And it’s the area that we’re most worried about, because it’s below sea level.”

“If you start removing mass from there, you can have a very large-scale evacuation of ice into the ocean and significant sea-level rise,” Dow said.

Dow is the lead author of a just-published study outlining one process that could be driving, and could worsen, some of Antarctica’s ice losses.

She and her co-authors found that at numerous major glaciers including Pine Island, warm ocean waters are helping to carve out deep crevasses underneath the floating ice shelves that brace these glaciers in place. The shelves then tend to crack at these thinned-out points and break off large pieces, weakening their ability to hold back the flow of glacial ice into the ocean.

“Anywhere you have thinner ice, it’s going to be weaker,” Dow said.

In addition to West Antarctica, another increase in ice losses in the past decade came from the smaller glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula, which are also melting rapidly but contain less potential to raise the sea level.

The largest part of the continent, East Antarctica, has remained more stable and did not contribute much melt to the ocean during the period of study, the assessment says. However, in the past five years, it too has begun to lose ice, perhaps as much as 28 billion tons per year, although the uncertainty surrounding this number remains high.

What’s happening in East Antarctica is important because it has, by far, the most ice to give, being capable of raising sea levels by well over 100 feet. A single East Antarctic glacier, Totten, has the potential to unleash as much total sea-level rise as the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, or more.

“We cannot count on East Antarctica to be the quiet player, and we start to observe change there in some sectors that have potential, and they’re vulnerable,” Velicogna said.

Scientists have previously raised fears about a scenario in which ice loss from Antarctica takes on an explosive rate.

In a controversial 2016 study, former NASA scientist James Hansen and a team of colleagues, including Velicogna, found that Earth’s sea level could rise above one meter (or 3.3 feet) within 50 years if polar ice-sheet loss doubles every 10 years. A tripling every decade, were it to continue, would reach that volume of sea level rise even sooner.

There is no proof the current rate of change in Antarctica will continue. Scientists can’t see the future, but they do fear continuing and even worsening losses.

“I don’t know if it’s going to keep exactly tripling, but I think it has a lot of potential to keep significantly increasing,” Velicogna said.

The changes will not be steady, in any case, said Knut Christianson, an Antarctic researcher at the University of Washington. “We will not necessarily see solely rapid retreat,” Christianson in an email, noting that as glaciers such as Pine Island retreat down a submarine, downhill slope, they will sometimes encounter bumps that slow their movement. So we should expect “periods of stability interspersed with rapid retreat,” he said.

Under high greenhouse-gas emissions, the worst-case projections of sea-level rise eventually reach over a centimeter each year, said Rob DeConto, an Antarctic expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who was not involved in the new study.

We’re nowhere near that point yet.

“We’re still talking about roughly a half a millimeter per year,” DeConto said. “That isn’t going to sound horribly unmanageable. But remember for the Northern Hemisphere, for North America, the fact that the location in West Antarctica is where the action is amplifies that rate of sea-level rise by up to about an additional 25 percent in a city like Boston or New York.”

That’s because as Antarctica’s mass shrinks, the ice sheet’s gravitational pull on the ocean relaxes somewhat, and the seas travel back across the globe to pile up far away — with U.S. coasts being one prime destination.

Whether Antarctic mass loss keeps worsening depends on choices made today, argued DeConto, who co-authored a separate paper in this week’s Nature outlining two visions of Antarctica in 2070.

Continuing high emissions could deliver massive sea-level rise — but strong compliance with the Paris climate agreement, while unable to stop changes happening now, could help to control how much they worsen.

“The kinds of changes that we see today, if they were not to increase much more . . . then maybe we’re talking about something that is manageable for coastal stakeholders,” DeConto said.

Or alternatively, he continued, Antarctica could drive faster changes, ones that “begin to exceed what we’re going to be able to cope with.”

Learn more at Washington Post

THE FRANTIC PHONE calls to the Community Water Center began in the summer of 2014. In the 7,000-strong unincorporated community of East Porterville, nestled against California's Sierra Nevada mountains, homeowners' wells were failing amid a historic drought. Folks were hauling water from their workplaces or from agricultural wells. Parents were sending their kids to shower at the local high school. Residents with still-functional wells were snaking hoses over fences to nourish their neighbors.

"People were in dire straits. They were desperate," says Ryan Jensen of the Central Valley's Community Water Center. "Elderly people or people battling chronic illnesses that need water to be able to deal with their health issues had no access to it. There was just absolute desperation."

In total, the wells at 300 properties had failed. So a local nonprofit distributed 275-gallon tanks and officials trucked in water. That didn't cut it.

On account of being unincorporated, East Porterville only had a handful of buildings connected to the water system in Porterville proper. So beginning in August 2016, workers hurried to connect 750 homes, the last of which tapped into Porterville this past February.

East Porterville's situation is extreme, but it is not an outlier. If anything, it is a harbinger. "It was only an outlier in the concentration and sheer number of people who lived in a very small area that were affected by this," Jensen says. "There's approximately 300 communities in the state of California and more than a million residents who don't have reliable access to safe drinking water, and that's not even counting people who are on domestic wells."

California is in trouble. Computer models show that with climate change will come harsher droughts and less frequent, yet more powerful storms. The state is not ready for this new reality, but one city south of Porterville could teach California how to survive desiccation: Los Angeles.

That is not a typo. Agreed, Los Angeles doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation as a responsible consumer of water. After all, in the early 1900s it drained Owens Lake, 200 miles away, materializing a dust bowl in its place and giving local residents the old ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. These days, it imports the vast majority of its water from Northern California and the Colorado River to the east at a cost of hundreds of millions a year.

But Los Angeles is in the midst of an aqueous awakening, setting an ambitious goal to cut its reliance on imported water in half by 2025 by following an increasingly urgent rule of good water policy: diversification. In a nutshell, that means getting your water from a range of sources—rain capture, aquifers, wells, desalination, even right out of the air. A study from UCLA earlier this year even said the city could feasibly reach 100 percent locally sourced water. To do it, the city is diving into a series of high- and low-tech campaigns that could transform Los Angeles into a model city for water management.

Again, not a typo.

Water Begins With Dirt

Art Castro of the LA Department of Water and Power stands atop his city's future: the San Fernando aquifer, which sprawls for 175 square miles. It is, essentially, a giant underground water tank that can provide some 28 billion gallons of water. (Usage fluctuates from month to month and year to year, but in July 2017, Angelenos consumed 102 gallons a day per capita.) Behind Castro, tractors push massive amounts of dirt. Dirt to the left, dirt to the right. In fact, this place is nothing but dirt, which is weird considering it's just 25 miles north of downtown LA. This should be concrete. Maybe a condo complex or two.

Concrete, though, is the enemy of Los Angeles' future. Back when the city sprouted, designers laid it out to channel stormwater away as quickly as possible. City Planning 101. SoCal's notorious downpours and flash floods were a menace. There were properties and human lives to consider, after all. "Now there's been there's been a shift in that thinking," Castro says. "Now we see stormwater as an asset."

The answer is this rare empty plot of land, the 150-acre Tujunga Spreading Grounds, laid out in 1930 and preserved as open space to this day. Stormwater flows in, gathering in giant basins and slowly percolating into the dirt and, eventually, the aquifer. When these crews are done excavating 1.9 million cubic yards of soil to consolidate 19 basins into 9 deeper basins (fewer berms = more surface area for soakage), enough water will be captured each year to hydrate an average of 50,000 households.

Sure, the LADWP serves more than 4 million customers, so it's but a drip. But the Tujunga Spreading Grounds are just the start. A mile and a half away in a frenetic LA street is a beautified median—some nice little trees, shrubs, and dirt, with a walking path meandering through—that doubles as a spreading ground in miniature. Stormwater from the neighborhood flows here and soaks into the ground, instead of flowing to the sea.

It may only collect enough for 150 households, but that ain't bad for a single median. And the thing about medians is, LA has a few of them: The city can duplicate this project wherever the soils are permeable enough to accept water. A storm that dumps 1 inch of rain will deposit over 8 billion gallons of water on Los Angeles. (The LADWP supplies about 160 billion gallons a year.) Of course, you're not going to collect all the stormwater that falls on Los Angeles, but catchment projects like the Tujunga spreading grounds and green medians can grab a fraction that would otherwise drain to the sea.

And grab the city must. Climate change will not be kind to Southern California. "More droughts, more floods, and more warm temperatures all will result in more water when we don't want it, and less water when we do," says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley.

Which means that when Los Angeles gets those rare deluges, it needs to somehow get that water into that aquifer, where it can be drawn on in times of want. "We understand that we're sitting on a gold mine," Castro says.

Water, Water, Everywhere

Not every city is so geologically fortunate, though. A hundred miles south of Los Angeles is the coastal city of Carlsbad, near San Diego. Just off the beach, up a well-manicured hill, sits a nondescript building—not the kind of place you'd think would suck in 100 million gallons of seawater and turn it into 50 million gallons of fresh drinking water every day.

But step inside the Carlsbad Desalination Plant and the scale becomes clear: row after row of stacked tubes loaded with membranes poked full of minuscule holes. Pump saltwater through these at a staggering 900 pounds per square inch (for reference, the air in your car tire is around 30 psi) and you can filter out viruses, bacteria, and, of course, salt. This is known as reverse osmosis.

Unlike Los Angeles, San Diego isn't sitting on an aquifer goldmine, says Jessica Jones, director of communications for Poseidon Water, which operates the plant. "So we have very few local supplies. Having such a high dependence on imported supplies makes a project like this perfect for this county, because we'll always need it."

For this county being the operative phrase. Desalination has been around for decades, yet hasn't really taken off—for good reason. Pumping millions of gallons of water at 900 psi isn't exactly energy efficient, though that's changing with new technologies. At this plant, they use exchangers that recycle pressure that would otherwise be lost, and they claim it has reduced the energy consumption of the reverse osmosis process by half.

San Diego knows full well it has a water diversity problem. Almost all its water comes from Northern California and the Colorado River. Problem is, eight other states get a taste of the Colorado before California. "We're at the end of a very long straw," Jones says.

Desalination is still expensive, yes. But for San Diego, it could well be a critical fallback if, say, an earthquake cuts off the supply of imported water. That said, desalination ain't for everyone. Where plenty of rain falls, there's not much of a case for spending money to tap into the sea.

Still, relying on a single source of water is extremely perilous. "Diversification is important for water management in the same way that it's important for your financial portfolio," says Kiparsky, of the Wheeler Water Institute.

If you bet all your money on one company and that company craters, you're broke. Spread your money around, though, and you can ride out the rough times. Same goes for water: Los Angeles is betting big on catchment, and San Diego diversified its portfolio with desalination. At no small expense, sure, but in the end San Diego has better prepared itself for an uncertain future.

Back up in Los Angeles, they're taking another, more … contentious step to prepare themselves for that uncertainty: recycled toilet water.

Waste Not, Want Not

For a facility that processes the wastewater of 4.5 million people, the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant doesn't smell nearly as bad as you'd expect. Until, that is, you start making your way to the headworks, where giant mechanized rakes scoop out inorganic material—cloth and such. The stench is eye-wateringly spectacular.

After scooping, Hyperion further refines most of the water until it's safe to pump 5 miles out to sea. Around 40 million gallons a day, however, flow down the road to the Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility, where a complex filtering system turns the fairly-clean-but-nowhere-near-drinkable stuff into water so pure, it'll make you very, very sick if you drink enough of it. (More on that in a moment.)

That level of purity is the result of the very same process that turns seawater fresh down in Carlsbad: reverse osmosis. The water is pumped through membranes, which sort out nasties like viruses and the many pharmaceuticals that come out with urine. It's even blasted with UV light to make sure nothing biological gets through. The end product is very nearly pure hydrogen and oxygen, which would actually end up leaching minerals out of pipes, not to mention the human body. "If you were to drink enough of that water, it could pull calcium from your bones," says Christiana Daisy, operations manager at West Basin Municipal Water District, which runs the facility. So they actually have to add minerals back in.

For now, the purified water doesn't go into customers' taps. Instead, it's injected into the ground to act as a kind of barrier between seawater and fresh groundwater. But the idea is to one day recycle wastewater and put it right back into the system. The industry is moving cautiously, though, given what you might call a considerable "ick" factor for the public. But hell, if Texas can go toilet to tap, why can't California?

Here's the thing, though: You've been drinking recycled wastewater this whole time. "Somebody upstream of you is using the water, treating it, and then discharging it back," says USC engineer Amy Childress, who specializes in the membranes that make desalination and wastewater treatment possible. "And then that water is treated again and used as drinking water."

Are reverse osmosis processes like desalination and wastewater treatment still expensive? Sure. But they rely on technology, and technology generally improves. Membranes will get more efficient, and prices will fall. That'll help more communities diversify their water portfolios.

Which is an immediate, not future, concern. "Fresh" water isn't always as fresh as you're expecting it to be. "There are a lot of places in the US that people wouldn't think have issues with water supply—the East Coast for example," Childress says. "In places where we weren't considering desalination in the past, even if it's just brackish groundwater, we're now maybe needing to desalinate." This could grow increasingly relevant as rising seas begin to infiltrate supplies of fresh groundwater.

But maybe pulling water from the ground isn't the only way to go about this—perhaps you can pull it from the air too. Nets in Chile, for instance, collect fog as drinking water, though the efficiency is only 2 percent, max. But MIT researchers recently developed a system that ionizes fog droplets, making them attracted to mesh, thus raising the efficiency to 99 percent. And over at UC Berkeley, engineers have concocted a fancy sponge-like material that collects moisture from cool desert air at night and releases it as drinking water when things heat up during the day.

All well and good, but technology will only get us so far. We can't just engineer our way out of this one. "It's got to be a conservation mind-set," Childress says. "We have to start valuing water more."

Lessons From the State of Plenty

This is bigger than Los Angeles. This is about fundamentally changing humanity's perverse relationship with water.

You don't appreciate water, because no one in the developed world really does, save for the residents of East Porterville, which very nearly withered and fell from the vine that is bountiful California. "Ultimately, if things were to get far worse, I think we could see this happening in bigger cities," says Jensen of the Community Water Center. "But I think the bigger, more likely problem is that wide swaths of ruralCalifornia may have to pack up and move."

Not everyone is as lucky as Los Angeles, with its piles of money and sprawling aquifer, or San Diego, with its piles of money and desalination plant. In the developed and developing worlds alike, those without the means or conditions to diversify their water sources face peril. Water wars will rage, and communities will perish.

Those communities fortunate enough to be able to engineer their way toward water security damn well better start thinking about it. Take it from La La Land: It's never too late to change.

Learn more at WIRED

Our world is currently powered by human-generated electricity.

And while it doesn’t seem like we’re going to run out of electricity any time soon, that doesn’t mean it’s a sustainable resource. Power plants emit pollution into the air on a daily basis, meaning that generating electricity is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

Solar energy is working to combat that. The idea is simple: Use a natural resource — the sun — for electricity instead of nonrenewable resources.

Other than pointing out the occasional set of solar panels on the roof of a mansion, a lot of us are pretty unaware of the advancements solar energy has made in the last few years.

Here are two recently emergent solar-based technologies:

Solar-Powered Roads

TOKYO HAS RECENTLY ANNOUNCED PLANS to build solar roads to help make their 2020 Olympics into an eco-friendly event. These experimental roadways are made with load-bearing solar panels that are covered in a special resin, according to the Independent. Cars can drive on these durable roads while the panels generate electricity for adjacent communities.

Japan’s solar road was installed in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, in May 2018. The shop’s manager has high hopes for the development: “The solar road system can generate 16,145 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, covering about 9% of the entire electricity that the store consumes.”

And in China – the world’s leading solar energy producer — a photovoltaic expressway recently promised a new future for clean energy (until thieves stole one of the panels, that is).

Last year, solar-powered pavement technology was also tested out along Route 66. If roadways using solar-powered technology catch on, it could help encourage clean energy use in the U.S. In fact, the Jefferson City News Tribune reports that the LED-embedded solar panels along the famed highway “will be used to generate electricity for the Route 66 Welcome Center.”

According to Solar Roadway, the company behind this technology, the solar-powered pavement along Route 66 can generate clean energy and also has thermal LED bulbs that can melt snow during winter.

Wearable Solar

WEARABLE SOLAR GOES FAR BEYOND solar-powered watches. In 2016, the textiles industry discovered that solar panels can be stitched into panels of fabric. Solar textiles can not only increase the renewable energy that’s collected, they can also increase the number of solar devices in your home. For example, these solar textiles can be stitched into curtains, tablecloths, and even car upholstery, allowing heated seats to be powered by renewable energy.

Solar innovation isn’t going anywhere. Within just the last few years, we’ve made solar a seamless part of everyday life, literally weaving it into the clothes on our backs.

Learn more at GOOD

In early 2015, Pope Francis released his encyclical on the environment, Laudato sí. In it, the pontiff argues that, regardless of religious faith, “the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.” The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has taken this call to heart.

On May 7, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, D.C., offered a blessing at the District’s Mt. Olivet Cemetery, which dates back to 1858. That blessing was directed at the new, green infrastructure that has eliminated some of the cemetery’s impervious surfaces, making it a friendlier receptacle for rainwater. The changes also help reduce an annual fee of nearly $140,000 associated with water run-off, or $25.18 for every 1000 square feet of impervious cover.

Impervious surfaces make won’t allow water to pass through them. Concrete, asphalt and metal structures can end up creating steams of water that rush into urban drainage systems and then overload water treatment plants. If that happens, the excess water simply gets flushed directly into local water ways, complete with whatever bacteria, pollutants, trash and sediment it happens to pick up along the way. Untreated stormwater run-off has contributed to creating a critical situation in the Chesapeake Bay, which has been grappling with pollution issues for years.

Chieko Noguchi, spokesperson for the Archdiocese, explained some of the changes made in Mt. Olivet Cemetery to make it more absorbent: “Unused access roads were replaced with water-filtering bio-retention cells, and in some cases, wide roads were narrowed down to one-lane roads.”

Prior to the modifications, the cemetery had 437,000 square feet of impervious surfaces. Noguchi says that 18,000 square feet have been removed so far. The more sophisticated water-retention structures are also being helped by newly planted flower beds, shrubs and trees.

“Because it was in a cemetery, we also wanted to make sure that none of the burial sites were disturbed,” says Noguchi And, it was also very important to us that any of the construction work would happen around any already-scheduled burials, and we didn’t want it to impede with anyone coming to visit their loved ones in the cemetery.”

To finance the landscaping changes to Mt. Olivet, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., worked with District Stormwater LLC, a new investment fund jointly managed by NatureVest, the investment arm of The Nature Conservancy, and Encourage Capital, an investment firm that specializes in investing capital to address social and environmental issues. The fund itself received $1.7 million in seed capital from Prudential, the insurance and financial services giant.

Instead of making the Archdiocese repay District Stormwater LLC for financing the stormwater retention work, the fund will seek repayment from a whole new market — from the sale of stormwater retention credits.

In 2013, the Washington, D.C. Department of Energy and the Environmentlaunched new rules that govern how new properties — or old ones undergoing significant remodeling — deal with stormwater. The new rules create tradeable stormwater retention credits, enabling developers to comply with the more stringent stormwater retention rules while also generating investment capital for stormwater retention projects. If a property doesn’t meet its new stormwater retention volume requirements, developers can choose to make improvements to satisfy those requirements, or if the cost of those improvements is too much, they can purchase stormwater retention credits from those who can make such investments at other locations, such as the Archdiocese of Washington D.C

With its green lawns and trees but also plenty of access roads across vast acreage, not to mention its proximity to the Anacostia River, Mt. Olivet Cemetery presented an opportunity for a test case.

It was The Nature Conservancy that approached the Archdiocese with a proposal to identify and finance stormwater retention improvements. After making the improvements, generating stormwater retention credits for the Archdiocese, the credits can then be sold on the stormwater retention credit market to repay the up-front investment from District Stormwater LLC.

“[The new stormwater credit market] is great because it provides an opportunity to bring in new sources of funding to do conservation projects and also show that you can use private equity [to finance] conservation outcomes,” says Kahlil Kettering, The Nature Convervancy’s Urban Conservation Director. “It’s a new way to bring different partners to the table.”

As a “sunset cemetery” that will soon reach capacity and will remain a sanctified space, Kettering saw a key opening for long-term stormwater retention improvements at Mt. Olivet — there isn’t open land that could be threatened by sale to developers who would replace it with impervious surface.

“We know whatever we do there will be there for a very long time and will have a huge benefit for our rivers in D.C.,” says Kettering.

Noguchi also adds that as part of the Catholic Church, the Archdiocese will also have opportunities to share information and encourage similar stormwater retention improvements on church property across the country. “We’re doing something unique and innovative to deal with something that the secular world is deeply engaged in,” says Noguchi.

Learn more at Next City

When a catastrophic earthquake hits California, buildings will topple and potentially hundreds could be killed.

But what gets less attention is the wrenching aftermath of such a huge temblor, which could leave whole neighborhoods torched by fires uninhabitable and hundreds of thousands of people without a home.

Officials are grappling with where all these quake refugees would go.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, more than 400,000 could be displaced in a magnitude 7 earthquake on the Hayward fault, which directly runs underneath cities like Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward and Fremont, said Ken Hudnut, the U.S. Geological Survey’s science advisor for risk reduction. And it’s possible that more than 250,000 people in Southern California could be forced out of their homes after a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault, Hudnut said.

Not everyone will need to stay in public shelters — many will stay with relatives, friends and hotels. Still, more than 175,000 people may have no other choice than stay at a public shelter in Southern California, which could be could be challenged with acute shortages of food, water and medicine, according to ShakeOut, a USGS report simulating a major Southern California earthquake.

And in the Bay Area, so many buildings built under minimal codes could be so damaged many may be forced to move away “for at least several months, and possibly permanently” due to the region’s housing shortage, according to a separate USGS report on a hypothetical Northern California earthquake, called HayWired.

“So many people will be displaced they won’t be able to stay within the metro area,” Keith Porter, a University of Colorado Boulder professor and chief engineer of the USGS earthquake reports, said of a major Bay Area earthquake. “So they’ll move away, just like they moved away from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.”

Arizona recently took a major step in dealing with this question. Officials in May launched a full-scale exercise that simulated a mass exodus of 400,000 evacuees from Southern California. The drill gave emergency workers a chance to consider how they would respond to the many elements of the disaster: providing food and shelter, helping unaccompanied minors, assisting in family reunification, and dealing with the transportation and resource hurdles.

The exercise was aimed at beginning to think about how to deal with such a refugee crisis, though experts in California said it’s unlikely that many people would end up in Arizona. It may actually be quite difficult to leave California after an earthquake moves one side of the San Andreas past the other by as much as 30 feet — severing routes to Phoenix on Interstate 10 in the Coachella Valley and Las Vegas on Interstate 15 at the Cajon Pass.

Also complicating problems would be a widespread lack of power, thwarting the ability of motorists to refuel. “If you choose to go, it’s going to be difficult to do so. It’s a pretty hot desert between you and Phoenix,” seismologist Lucy Jones said.

In the hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault, many people living in eastern L.A. County, Riverside, San Bernardino and the desert cities of the Coachella Valley will likely leave for less affected areas.

But even within Southern California, it’ll be hard to move around. Streets will be clogged with debris; traffic lights won’t work; bridges will be damaged, the USGS says.

Experts said it probably won’t be necessary for quake refugees to go all the way to Arizona or Nevada. Even if a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hits the southern San Andreas, areas farther away from the fault will still be habitable, such as Orange, Ventura and San Diego counties, Jones said.

“There’s going to be a lot of Southern California that’s not going to be devastated,” Jones said.

Which areas are most affected depends on which fault ruptures. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake on the Puente Hills thrust fault directly underneath downtown Los Angeles would be catastrophic there, but would leave Riverside in comparatively better shape.

Experts say it would be much better to shelter in place at home. Owners can take steps to do so by retrofitting older houses or apartments now at risk for sliding off its foundation or collapsing in an earthquake. Residents can prepare by storing water, food, medicine and other supplies to sustain themselves for, ideally, two weeks, or at least a minimum of 72 hours. A gallon of water per day per person is recommended.

Unfortunately, most Californians don’t bother to be prepared, and a failure to stock up on something as basic as drinking water could lead residents to leave even if their home is structurally sound.

“It’s clear the public doesn’t think about these things,” Hudnut said. “I’d rather be one of those people who doesn’t have to go and has more water stored.”

But a big wild card that would push someone to flee are fires following an earthquake, with shattered pipes expected to hamper firefighting.

Most hydrants in the East Bay will be dry in a magnitude 7 earthquake on the Hayward fault, according to an estimate by Charles Scawthorn, a risk consultant to the USGS, helping to allow fires to burn a building floor area equal to 52,000 single-family homes; in Southern California, it’s possible the equivalent of 133,000 single-family homes will be charred.

In three great urban earthquakes in modern history — Lisbon in 1755, San Francisco in 1906 and Tokyo in 1923 — it was the fires following the earthquake that was particularly devastating.

“The fires were overwhelming,” said Jones, author of “The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us and What We Can Do About Them.” “If the fire storms are getting going, and we’re going into Santa Ana conditions, and they haven’t been able to control the fires,” it’s possible that people may seek to flee to other states, Jones said.

But states like Arizona could have other problems than just dealing with evacuees. Those states could suffer fuel shortages from the severing of pipelines in California where they cross the San Andreas fault, Jones said.

While California may have to deal with a short-term shelter crisis, a longer-term concern is whether so many people move away permanently that communities wither, jobs are lost and businesses shutter, Jones said.

The only years that L.A. has ever lost population were the two years following the 1971 Sylmar and 1994 Northridge earthquakes, Jones said.

The 3½-day-simulation near Phoenix — planned over the course of a year, involving 75 agencies and more than 1,000 people — first focused on Arizona counties closest to California’s border.

“They will be the first to experience fuel or food shortages, cellphones getting overloaded and a medical surge,” said Judy Kioski, spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs. “We’re worried about where are people going to shelter, how do we feed them, and family reunification.”

The exercise included mass of tents on a field near Phoenix simulating a shelter; some acted as evacuees, others practiced how to render aid.

Some lessons have been already learned. “One of the things we identified was turning rest areas into locations where we could have additional information, and providing hard copies of information if cellphones go out,” Kioski said.

Previous drills have taken place in Utah, where the Wasatch fault zone threatens the Salt Lake City area with earthquakes as large as magnitude 7.5, and Missouri, where the New Madrid Seismic Zone generated several earthquakes between magnitudes 7 and 8 in the winter of 1811-12.

In California, officials have undergone their own emergency simulations and drills. Recently, a simulation was held envisioning a big tsunami wiping out roads in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, and officials flew C-130 aircraft and helicopters in an exercise to test how supplies could be flown in and which airports could be accessible, said Kelly Huston, a deputy director for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

In September, the Bay Area will undergo its annual Urban Shield training that tests the region’s response capabilities in a disaster; this year, the exercise will focus on mass care and sheltering.

Elements of emergency plans have already been put in force. When more than 100,000 people were ordered evacuated downstream of Oroville Dam last year amid fears an emergency spillway could collapse, officials moved to open up mass evacuation centers, including one in Sacramento.

But one lesson that has been learned is that most people aren’t inclined to flee long distances, as was the case in the Wine Country wildfires last year.

“We found most people want to stay near to or close to their homes,” Huston said, even if it meant pitching a tent in front a damaged property. That means a key priority may be, for instance, “to provide food and assistance to neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

At the Shiloh elementary school near Modesto, drinking fountains sit abandoned, covered in clear plastic.

At Mom and Pop's Diner, a fixture in the Merced County town of Dos Palos, regulars ask for bottled water because they know better than to consume what comes out of the tap.

And in rural Alpaugh, a few miles west of Highway 99 in Tulare County, residents such as Sandra Meraz have spent more than four decades worrying about what flows from their faucets.

"You drink the water at your own risk," said Meraz, 77. "And that shouldn't be. We have families here with young children."

An estimated 360,000 Californians are served by water systems with unsafe drinking water, according to a McClatchy analysis of data compiled by the State Water Resources Control Board. In many communities, people drink, shower, cook and wash dishes with water containing excessive amounts of pollutants, including arsenic, nitrates and uranium.

The state's water problem, however, is far more pervasive than that number indicates. At least 6 million Californians are served by water providers that have been in violation of state standards at some point since 2012, according to McClatchy's analysis. In some areas, contaminated water is such a common occurrence, residents have almost come to expect it.

"It's ubiquitous," said Darrin Polhemus, the state water board's deputy director for drinking water. "It's pretty extensive across broad swaths."

Now, after years of half solutions, the state is considering its most comprehensive actions to date. Gov. Jerry Brown has asked the Legislature to enact a statewide tax on drinking water to fix wells and treatment systems in distressed communities. Residents and businesses would pay a tax on their monthly water bills, while agriculture would contribute through taxes on fertilizer purchases and fees paid by dairy farmers and feedlot operators.

For the average Californian, the tax would mean paying an additional $11.40 per year.

Learn more at the Sacramento Bee

SORENG, India — Fifteen years ago, the tiny Indian state of Sikkim launched a radical experiment: Its leaders decided to phase out pesticides on every farm in the state, a move without precedent in India — and probably the world.

The change was especially significant for India, a country whose progress in agriculture was defined by the introduction of fertilizers and pesticides that rapidly boosted food production across the country, staving off famine and reducing the country’s reliance on foreign aid.

But with the indiscriminate use of pesticides came a spike in cancer rates in industrial farming areas. Rivers became polluted and soil infertile. Sikkim’s leaders say they were driven to go all- organic by those concerns and because pesticide residue — including from some chemicals banned in other countries — was tainting fish, vegetables and rice.

The cloud-wreathed Himalayan state is starting to see the dividends. Overall health has increased in the state, leaders say, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has embraced Sikkim and organic farming throughout India, pouring about $119 million into supporting organic farmers nationwide. India is betting that Sikkim can be the global model for other jurisdictions around the world that want to go all-organic.

In the years since the shift to organic, Sikkim has outlawed pesticides and chemical fertilizers, aided farmers in certifying about 190,000 acres of farmland as organic and on April 1 banned the import of many nonorganic vegetables from other states. The transition has not always been easy: Some farmers have complained that their crop yields have decreased and that they haven’t gotten enough support from the government.

The small state’s organic acres constitute just a sliver of India’s 5.6 million acres of chemical-free farmland, which itself is a fraction of India’s nearly 400 million acres of agricultural land. (The United States also has about 5 million acres of organic farmland.)

Demand for organic food is high in India and growing fast. Concern about pesticides and desire for chemical-free food are fueling a market that is growing 25 percent a year, more than the 16 percent globally, according to a recent study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India. The country’s market for packaged organic products is nearly $8 million now and is expected to top $12 million by 2020, the study said.

“This is a big moment for India,” said Radha Mohan Singh, the country’s minister of agriculture and farmers’ welfare.

In a brightly colored tent in a mountain town one recent day, Sikkim’s chief minister, Pawan Kumar Chamling, exhorted 300 or so constituents in the audience to embrace the eco-friendly lifestyle.

“The approach Sikkim has started will be adopted by the whole world tomorrow,” he said, in a speech that stretched five hours. “This is our vision!”

Chamling, 67, has been the principal driver of Sikkim’s move to go all-organic since his state legislature set up the program in 2003. He is largely self-educated, writes poetry in his spare time and is India’s longest-serving chief minister, in office since 1994.

“When we decided to go into organic farming in Sikkim, we faced so many challenges,” he said. “Agriculturists or cultivators had no idea what organic farming is, so education was our first priority. Slowly, people began to understand and supported us.”

But the executive order in March to ban the import of inorganic produce from neighboring states threw the state into turmoil, with prices of cabbage tripling in the markets, traders in revolt and the opposition party marching in protest.

Chamling dismissed these most recent events as “teething problems” and said he was confident the chaos would sort itself out. The state government is introducing seasonal price caps on organic vegetables for consumers to keep prices affordable.

There was no blueprint for change when Chamling began his efforts to preserve Sikkim’s fragile ecosystem, a land of hundreds of species of birds, wild orchids and glacier-fed streams, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-tallest peak. The state — population 610,000 — nestles among China, Bhutan and Nepal and was a separate kingdom until it merged with India in 1975.

India has just begun formulating its policies for organic farming after its “Green Revolution,” during which the country adopted modern farming methods of high-yield seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

To encourage farmers to make the switch to organic, Sikkim tapered off its supply of chemical pesticides and fertilizers — making their use a criminal offense in 2014 — launched education programs, and installed thousands of composting pits. By 2016, 190,000 acres of cultivable land had been certified organic. The state has also banned the use of plasticware. Roadside snack stalls use plates fashioned from leaves.

The transition, which took more than a decade, has not been easy. Some farmers say their income has decreased, and some have quit farming altogether. One farmer, Pem Dorjee Sherpa, who grows potatoes and cardamom, said his income has fallen dramatically since he switched to pesticide-free farming, and he complained that farmers need better access to markets, organic manure and training.

“The benefit of going organic has not reached us,” he said.

Sonam Taneja, the program manager for food safety and toxins at the Centre for Science and Environment, a research and advocacy organization in New Delhi, received similar feedback when she visited 16 farms across the state for a report that came out last year.

“The information I was getting was that farmers are struggling, fighting with pests, and yields are lower, and therefore they’re upset,” Taneja said. Productivity of most crops remained the same, except oranges, but the state will probably continue to have to rely on conventional produce from other states to feed itself, the study said.

In April, state officials opened two markets where farmers can sell their products directly to consumers and have added more than two dozen transport vehicles help them move their goods to markets more easily.

Officials say that the switch to all-organic has health benefits for Sikkimese, who are getting more nutritious food, and has rejuvenated the health of its soil as well as wildlife and dwindling bee populations. The country’s yield of large cardamom — dependent upon cross-pollination from bees — has increased more than 23 percent since 2014.

The country’s move to all- ­organic also has been a boon to its tourist industry, with a growing market for eco-tours and farm vacations. The Lonely Planet travel guide named it the world’s top destination in 2014, and the number of foreign visitors has more than doubled since 2011, the state’s tourism department says. As a consequence, tourism provides a growing share of the state’s gross domestic product, rising from 5 to nearly 8 percent by 2016-2017.

“It’s had a huge impact,” said Khorlo Bhutia, Sikkim’s secretary of horticulture and cash crop development. “It’s because of the good environment — chemical-free air, water, food — all these factors.”

Experts say that India’s organic product market has been driven by health-conscious, middle-class urbanites alarmed by the overuse of pesticides. But that’s changing. India is encouraging farmers to engage in a self-regulating organic certification process that is cheaper than outside consultants and will make organic food more accessible for the domestic market.

Choitresh Kumar Ganguly, an organic farmer from India who sits on board of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, said Sikkim can be a model for other states, such as Kerala and Meghalaya, that are planning to go all-organic. Sikkim’s neighbor, the kingdom of Bhutan, aspires to do so by 2020.

“Sikkim is of course way ahead, and their political will is much stronger than any other state,” Ganguly said. “They’ve done a good job. They did not use so many pesticides to begin with so it was easier for them to move out than it will be for many other states. Still, there’s huge awareness, and it’s growing slowly.”

Learn more at The Washington Post

The Earth is an ocean world. From space, this fact is obvious, whether the planet appears as a bluish dust mote at the edge of the solar system, a bright sapphire star from our planetary neighbors, or the blue marble we see in orbit. Our oceans are the lifeblood of Earth and are home to tens of thousands of fascinating species. They cover 72 percent of the planet, contain over 97 percent of its water, and produce half the oxygen we breathe in.

But perhaps all this is a little too easy to forget for us land-dwellers. Like many other ecosystems, the oceans are threatened by various human activities like over-fishing, global warming, acidification, and above all, pollution. Tons of plastic—such as grocery bags, food containers, bottles, and other disposable products—flow into the ocean daily from big cities.

The good news is, there’s room for hope. While our species is capable of disappointing actions, we are also capable of innovative progress. Here are some organizations and teams that are coming to the rescue by cleaning up the oceans.

The Ocean Cleanup

Backed with $30 million in funding and led by 22-year-old Boyan Slat, this foundation’s ingenious solution is based on the understanding that ocean currents tend to concentrate plastic into oceanic garbage patches. Their technology corrals floating plastic in these ocean currents with U-shaped screens, in which it’s trapped and shipped away to be recycled.

They estimate they can clean up to 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in less than 5 years. The company recently announced a lease agreement for part of the former Alameda Naval Air Station, where assembly of the first cleanup system will begin.

Seabin Project

The Seabin Project is installing floating rubbish bins (with a pump and filtration center) at harbors, marinas, and other major hotspots, cleaning up garbage and oil floating in the water. These hotspots are considered some of the major sources of ocean littering. On average, an individual Seabin catches around 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) per day, which is about a half a ton of debris a year.

With the simple mission to rid the planet’s oceans of pollution, the Seabin Project recognizes that ultimately, like many other problems in the world, the ultimate solution to ocean pollution lies with education and systemic change. Consequently, the organization has developed an open-source education program for schools to learn more about the oceanic littering problem and the solutions available. They are also actively involved in industry participation, legislation, and lobbying.

Recycling Technologies

Current recycling technology has limited capabilities, which leads to most of our “recycled” trash ending up in landfills or in the ocean.

British company Recycling Technologies has developed a revolutionary technology that turns all forms of plastic products into virgin plastic, wax, and oils, called Plaxx. This includes materials traditionally considered unrecyclable. Just last month, the company said they raised £3.7 million from crowdfunding, 200 percent more than their £1.2 million target. The company aims to leverage these funds in order to add 10 million tons of plastic recycling capacity worldwide by 2027. Moreover, they hope their technology will “close the circle on the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of plastic.”

5 Gyres Institute

While many organizations are invested in cleaning and recycling plastic waste, some are focused on preventing their flow to the ocean to begin with. 5 Gyres Institute researches plastic pollution in all five main subtropical gyres, and their study identifying plastic microbeads influenced President Obama’s signing of the Microbead-Free Waters Act.

The team focuses on activism by working with people, politicians, and corporations to stop emissions at the source. Founder Marcus Eriksen points out, “It’s far upstream trying to stop this flow of trash to sea. If you pick up what’s out there, you’re not stopping the problem continuing far into the future. You’ve got to stop the source.”

Origin Materials

Traditionally, bottles made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate) have been recyclable, but many other plastics come from nonrenewable petroleum-based sources. In fact, some bottles may only have 30 percent recyclable materials.

Backed by $80 million, Origin Materials (formerly Micromidas) plans to manufacture plastic bottles from completely renewable biomass materials, such as sawdust and cardboard. The company has produced bottles with up to 80 percent renewable materials at a pilot plant and is aiming to produce 100 percent bio-based bottles at commercial scale in the coming years.

A Global Challenge

What each of these companies has done is take a daunting global challenge and turn it into an opportunity for disruptive innovation and human progress. After all, as Peter Diamandis points out, “The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.” While ocean waste is definitely a problem, it is also an opportunity for innovative problem-solving.

These projects also represent how one global challenge can have many layers of solutions, taken from different angles by different stakeholders, such as startups, nonprofits, and activist groups. Like many of the threats that face us, they demonstrate how true progress comes not just from leveraging exponential technologies, but also from collaboration, education, and systemic legislative change.

Learn more at Singularity Hub

The US electricity system is at an extremely sensitive and uncertain juncture. More and more indicators point toward a future in which wind and solar power play a large role. But that future is not locked in. It still depends in large part on policies and economics that, while moving in the right direction, aren’t there yet.

And so the people who manage US electricity markets and infrastructure, who must make decisions with 20-, 30-, even 50-year consequences, are stuck making high-stakes bets in a haze of uncertainty.

That uncertainty has increased markedly under the recent Republican administration(somewhat ironically, given its oft-stated goal of “regulatory certainty”). Under President Obama, the feds established a consistent cross-agency push toward clean energy. The long-term trajectory was clear.

Now it’s been thrown into doubt. President Trump has embraced fossil fuels, and the owners of struggling coal plants are appealing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission(FERC) for bailouts.

Should utilities and market managers bet that the Trumpian revolt against modernity will succeed in slowing the growth of renewable energy? Or should they bet that it’s a passing phase and renewable energy will triumph?

A fascinating bit of new research from the energy geeks at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) sheds some light on the stakes involved.

In a nutshell, things will look different in an electricity system with lots of variable renewable energy (VRE) — different prices, a different shape of demand, different timing, different needs — and if the people managing the electricity system bet on low VRE and get high, they are going to screw up all sorts of things.

If the US gets serious about renewables, the electricity system will look very different

As of 2016, wind and solar power — VRE — provide 7.1 percent of US electricity. VRE affects utility and market decisions, but it is not yet central to them. The LBNL team (Joachim Seel, Andrew Mills, and Ryan Wiser) notes that “many long-lasting decisions for supply- and demand-side electricity infrastructure and programs are based on historical observations or assume a business-as-usual future with low shares of VRE.”

But what if VRE takes off? What if it hits 40 or 50 percent of national electricity supply by 2030? (Climate hawks would prefer an entirely decarbonized power sector by then; neither goal will be possible without a serious national policy push.) Would high VRE penetrations substantially change the decisions that energy regulators, policymakers, and investors need to make?

In a word, yes. They would.

The team modeled the effects of high (40 percent) VRE and found several notable changes relevant to the operation of wholesale energy markets. Here they are all at once, in a giant, info-packed chart!

Now that your eyes are bleeding, let’s back up and walk through the changes.

The team modeled four 2030 scenarios: a baseline, with VRE shares frozen at 2016 levels, and three high-VRE scenarios, one that’s wind at 30 percent share and solar at 10 percent, one that’s the reverse, and a “balanced” 20-20 scenario. They ran these four scenarios for each of four energy markets in the US: the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) covering Kansas, Oklahoma, and portions of surrounding states; the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

VRE will change prices and dynamics in energy markets

Here are some of the results, which will throw wholesale markets into a new equilibrium.

1) VRE reduces average wholesale power prices.

In all high-VRE scenarios, in all markets, average wholesale power prices go down. Depending on the scenario and region, the drop is anywhere from $5 to $16.

Note that average prices fall the most under the high-solar scenario, in every market but ERCOT. Unlike the other states, Texas is a bit isolated, running its own grid with few interconnections to other grids through which it can import or export power. It has to deal with all that solar on its own (more on that later).

Lower prices are good for consumers but bad for owners of big, uneconomic coal and nuclear plants, who rely on high prices to keep running. (Yes, it is a peculiar market in which most of the people responsible, including the president, view low prices as a threat.)

2) VRE bumps fossil fuels off the grid.

In high-VRE scenarios, markets see anywhere from 4 to 16 percent retirement in “firm capacity,” i.e., coal, oil, and steam turbines. The exception is CAISO, which sees a small, 2 to 4 percent boost in firm capacity via the growth of natural gas. (Natural gas also grows in SPP and NYISO, though it’s offset by coal and oil retirements.)

Notably, VRE reduces the amount of energy generated from fossil fuels (MWh) much faster than it reduces capacity (MW), anywhere from 25 to 50 percent (the most in NYISO). Basically, every new kWh from VRE displaces a kWh from fossil fuels.

3) VRE makes periods of very low prices and very low emissions more frequent.

Depending on the market and scenario, high VRE buildout reduces overall carbon emissions anywhere from 21 to 47 percent and “leads to an increase in frequency of hours with very low marginal emission rates ranging from 5% of all hours in CAISO (wind scenario) to 31% in SPP (solar scenario).”

Also more frequent under high VRE are periods in which wholesale power prices are extremely low, under $5 a MWh. (It’s these periods that so wreck the economics of big coal and nuclear plants.) The effect is especially pronounced in ERCOT under high solar.

4) VRE changes the shape of daily demand ...

This is the most interesting bit for the energy nerds. I and many others have written about the “duck curve” that shows up in the shape of diurnal (24-hour) demand in California as the share of solar power increases — you can see it on the top left in the chart below. LBNL’s research has revealed what shapes would appear in the demand curves of other regions in high-VRE scenarios.

As you can see, the duck effect is most pronounced in ERCOT, which has the least ability to export excess solar power (and ends up doing the most curtailment).

5) ... and pushes demand peaks later in the day.

VRE doesn’t have much effect on the timing of peak demand in CAISO, but in the three other areas, high VRE pushes diurnal peak demand back a few hours (and raises it higher).

6) VRE makes prices more volatile.

Power prices in high-VRE scenarios are lower on average, but they move around more. Solar scenarios are more volatile overall, though prices in high-wind scenarios swing over a wider range. In spring in California under a high-wind scenario, “energy prices in the morning may be at zero on some days while prices may reach up to $55/MWh on other days.”

7) VRE makes the services that support it much more valuable.

Along with the volatility of VRE comes a need for more services that provide flexibility and stability to compensate. “Ancillary services” for the grid include things like spinning reserves, frequency and voltage regulation, demand response, and, most notably, storage. Those services will command higher prices under high VRE, especially high solar, drawing more competitors into those markets (a good thing for storage).

So why do all these changes matter?

High VRE scenarios call for different decisions from utilities and regulators

The LBNL team set out to answer a question: How would the changes high VRE brings affect big decisions around electricity policy and infrastructure?

VRE turns out to be material to those decisions in all sorts of ways. In fact, LBNL offers a helpful table with (squints) 11 different kinds of supply- and demand-side electricity decisions, along with how high-VRE scenarios might affect them and how decisions might change in the face of high VRE.

I won’t burden you with a comprehensive review. Just a few examples LBNL highlights.

When considering a portfolio of energy efficiency measures, VRE will make it more important to consider their timing as well as their size.

For example, high shares of solar can depress prices during the day and shift peak times to the early evening. This indicates that traditional on-peak measures, like commercial office building air conditioning programs, may become less valuable while traditional off-peak measures, like street and residential lighting, may increase in value.

VRE will make it more important to electrify everything, even if, in some contexts (like building heating and cooling), it might mean a short-term reduction in energy efficiency. The more water heaters and electric vehicles are connected to the grid, providing storage and controllable demand, the more stable a high-VRE grid will be.

If nuclear plants are to survive in a high-VRE scenario (and climate hawks should want them to), they must become must more flexible, capable of ramping up and down in response to swings in VRE. That means “increasing R&D on flexible nuclear plant design and operations, addressing technical regulations on nuclear plant operations, or considering the size of the required incentive (if at all) to either keep nuclear plants operating in a low or high VRE future despite output curtailment, or to increase operational flexibility via plant retrofits.”

This is just a small selection of the kinds of decisions that will need to be made differently if the US is actually going to ramp up renewable energy fast enough to hit its midcentury carbon target.

Right now, the habits and patterns of decision-making shaped by low VRE penetration still have inertia, exacerbated by the lingering doubt Trump has imposed on power markets. But there are many reasons to believe that, Trump or no Trump, VRE numbers are going to keep rising at or faster than their current, already dizzying rates.

The renewable energy future is rapidly becoming the present. Everyone in and around the power sector needs to snap to and get ready for it.

Learn more at Vox

Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago.

It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands.

That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

Although the author of the study, Alex de Vries, an economist and data consultant based in the Netherlands, has shared these calculations publicly before, this is the first time that an analysis of bitcoin’s energy appetite has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.

Bitcoin continues to soar in popularity — mostly as a speculative investment. And like any supercharged speculative investment, it swings wildly. Within the past 18 months, the price of bitcoin has soared ten-fold, crashed by 75 percent, only to double again, all while hedge funds and wealthy libertarians debate the future of the virtual currency.

Beyond its tentative success as a get-rich-quick scheme, bitcoin has an increasingly real-world cost. The process of “mining” for coins requires a globally distributed computer network racing to solve math problems — and also helps keep any individual transaction confidential and tamper-proof. That, in turn, requires an ever-escalating arms race of computing power — and electricity use — which, at the moment, has no end in sight. A single bitcoin transaction is so energy intensive that it could power the average U.S. household for a month.

A fluctuating bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint growth rate to “just” 20 percent per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by January 2021.

That simply won’t happen — government regulators would surely come to their senses by then — but it is a sign of bitcoin’s disastrous growth rate. In recent months, bitcoin supporters have criticized de Vries for being too pessimistic about its energy usage. But, as de Vries writes in the study, his estimates could also be missing out on secretive or illegal participation in the network, meaning there’s maybe even more happening than meets the eye. In at least one instance that de Vries found, a researcher was caught diverting a National Science Foundation supercomputer to mining bitcoin.

It’s a telling social phenomenon of late capitalism that we are willing to construct elaborate computer networks to conduct secure transactions with each other — and in the process torpedoing our hopes at a clean energy future.

Learn more at Grist

Every city in the U.S. has a chief elected leader. Many cities have a chief technology officer. Several cities have a chief resilience officer. But, how many cities have a chief scientist?

In an era of climate change and limited resources, isn’t this an idea whose time has come?

I suggested this idea at the recent CitiesIPCC 2018 Conference in Edmonton, Canada, before a friendly audience of mayors, planners, policy makers, researchers, and yes, scientists to tentative applause.

Can a fully “smart city” exist without a scientific understanding of its complexities and contradictions? With rising sea levels and more severe storms, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps and other weather calamities, is a mayor equipped to make long-term decisions without the advice of a scientist?

Imagine you’re a mayor and your city is about to be hit by a powerful hurricane. You call your chief of police and emergency management lead, you get briefed by experts on energy, transportation and shelters. I bet you’ll even have a staffer recommend which fleece to wear.

But where is the scientist? Wouldn’t you want to know why this is happening, and more importantly, how to mitigate for or adapt to future events? How about the potential ramifications on future weather patterns, land formations, infrastructure, etc.?

In this era of professionalism, most cities have cabinet officials with backgrounds that include science and technology. However, because of the complex nature of research and the inherent conflicts between short- and long-term decision-making, wouldn’t it make sense to bring in an expert who can sift through the data and propose alternatives grounded in reason?

When I shared this idea on Twitter, scientist Emma Terama responded, “The first city to hire #ChiefScientist will be a frontrunner …. great idea” and challenged the city of Helsinki to consider the idea. Copenhagen resident Lykke Leonardsen wasn’t sure what difference a City Scientist would have. “Science is a lot of things and I fear it would be difficult to use for cities.” To which Terama responded, “I believe as with govt. depts. it’s about sending a msg.”

Emma also reminded me of the importance of social scientists. This was the other interesting thread coming out of CitiesIPCC — that addressing climate change will also require modifications in human behavior. Sounds reasonable, but how does a scientist used to crunching numbers and testing hypotheses take human factors into account?

The good news is that several mayors already get it. Don Iveson, mayor of Edmonton, convened the first-ever cities conference on climate change to ask mayors to join the Edmonton Declaration that commits city leaders to urgent, evidence-based action. This bold call to action challenges cities of all sizes to seriously consider the role of scientific research and data in building ambitious climate action plans, and it prioritizes science-based decision-making to reinforce the targets of the Paris Climate Accord Agreement.

Drafted in partnership with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, the Edmonton Declaration is the result of a Mayors Summit where city leaders from Canada, Ecuador, India and the United States joined with major city networks such as C40, UCLG and ICLEI in addition to key members of the scientific community. Mayor Iveson and other mayors will bring this declaration to the ICLEI World Congress in Montreal this June to gain wider approval.

“We know this is ambitious, but that’s the type of leadership we need right now,” says Mayor Iveson. “While nations plan, cities take action. It’s time for cities to take the mantle of climate leadership and employ the solutions that will provide a sustainable future for the generations to come.”

Recognizing that by 2050, more than two-thirds of humanity will be living in cities, ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability has made a major commitment to this effort. “Science gave us the wake-up call needed to get the Paris Agreement done,” says ICLEI Secretary General Gino Van Begin. “Now we must harness its potential for innovation to address the very present challenges that cities face in making the low-carbon transition happen. City leaders are already taking important steps in this direction, and we are calling on the scientific community to work with us to bridge gaps and identify evidence-based solutions for the present and future of our communities.”

This first CitiesIPCC Cities and Climate Change Science Conference was organized by the city of Edmonton and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) together with nine partners: C40, Cities Alliance, Future Earth, ICLEI, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), UN Environment, UN-Habitat, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). With this much brainpower applied to the issue, the future looks incredibly bright.

Learn more at nextcity.org

A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency finds that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air—even as the agency seeks to roll back regulations on pollution.

“Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east.” Marvin Gaye wasn’t an environmental scientist, but his 1971 single “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” provides a stark and useful environmental analysis, complete with warnings of overcrowding and climate change. The song doesn’t explicitly mention race, but its place in Gaye’s What’s Going On album portrays a black Vietnam veteran, coming back to his segregated community and envisioning the hell that people endure.

Gaye’s prophecies relied on the qualitative data of storytelling—of long-circulated anecdotes and warnings within black communities of bad air and water, poison, and cancer. But those warnings have been buttressed by study after study indicating that people of color face disproportionate risks from pollution, and that polluting industries are often located in the middle of their communities.

Late last week, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.”

The study focuses on particulate matter, a group of both natural and manmade microscopic suspensions of solids and liquids in the air that serve as air pollutants. Anthropogenic particulates include automobile fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, all of which have been linked to serious health problems. Particulate matter was named a known definite carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and it’s been named by the EPA as a contributor to several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has been implicated in both asthma prevalence and severity, low birth weights, and high blood pressure.

Read more at City Lab

Cape Town is in the unenviable situation of being the first major city in the modern era to face the threat of running out of drinking water.

However, the plight of the drought-hit South African city is just one extreme example of a problem that experts have long been warning about - water scarcity.

Despite covering about 70% of the Earth's surface, water, especially drinking water, is not as plentiful as one might think. Only 3% of it is fresh.

Over one billion people lack access to water and another 2.7 billion find it scarce for at least one month of the year. A 2014 survey of the world's 500 largest cities estimates that one in four are in a situation of "water stress"

According to UN-endorsed projections, global demand for fresh water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030, thanks to a combination of climate change, human action and population growth.

1. São Paulo

Brazil's financial capital and one of the 10 most populated cities in the world went through a similar ordeal to Cape Town in 2015, when the main reservoir fell below 4% capacity.

At the height of the crisis, the city of over 21.7 million inhabitants had less than 20 days of water supply and police had to escort water trucks to stop looting.

It is thought a drought that affected south-eastern Brazil between 2014 and 2017 was to blame, but a UN mission to São Paulo was critical of the state authorities "lack of proper planning and investments".

The water crisis was deemed "finished" in 2016, but in January 2017 the main reserves were 15% below expected for the period - putting the city's future water supply once again in doubt.

2. Bangalore

Local officials in the southern Indian city have been bamboozled by the growth of new property developments following Bangalore's rise as a technological hub and are struggling to manage the city's water and sewage systems.

To make matters worse, the city's antiquated plumbing needs an urgent upheaval; a report by the national government found that the city loses over half of its drinking water to waste.

Like China, India struggles with water pollution and Bangalore is no different: an in-depth inventory of the city's lakes found that 85% had water that could only be used for irrigation and industrial cooling.

Not a single lake had suitable water for drinking or bathing.

3. Beijing

The World Bank classifies water scarcity as when people in a determined location receive less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person a year.

In 2014, each of the more than 20 million inhabitants of Beijing had only 145 cubic metres.

China is home to almost 20% of the world's population but has only 7% of the world's fresh water.

A Columbia University study estimates that the country's reserves declined 13% between 2000 and 2009.

Graphene sieve makes seawater drinkable

And there's also a pollution problem. Official figures from 2015 showed that 40% of Beijing's surface water was polluted to the point of not being useful even for agriculture or industrial use.

The Chinese authorities have tried to address the problem by creating massive water diversion projects. They have also introduced educational programmes, as well as price hikes for heavy business users.

4. Cairo

Once crucial to the establishment of one of the world's greatest civilisations, the River Nile is struggling in modern times.

It is the source of 97% of Egypt's water but also the destination of increasing amounts of untreated agricultural, and residential waste.

5. Jakarta

Like many coastal cities, the Indonesian capital faces the threat of rising sea levels.

But in Jakarta the problem has been made worse by direct human action. Because less than half of the city's 10 million residents have access to piped water, illegal digging of wells is rife. This practice is draining the underground aquifers, almost literally deflating them.

As a consequence, about 40% of Jakarta now lies below sea level, according to World Bank estimates.

To make things worse, aquifers are not being replenished despite heavy rain because the prevalence of concrete and asphalt means that open fields cannot absorb rainfall.

6. Moscow

One-quarter of the world's fresh water reserves are in Russia, but the country is plagued by pollution problems caused by the industrial legacy of the Soviet era.

That is specifically worrying for Moscow, where the water supply is 70% dependent on surface water.

Official regulatory bodies admit that 35% to 60% of total drinking water reserves in Russia do not meet sanitary standards

Somalia drought claims dozens of lives

Raw waste water use on farms '50% higher'

7. Istanbul

According to official Turkish government figures, the country is technically in a situation of a water stress, since the per capita supply fell below 1,700 cubic metres in 2016.

Local experts have warned that the situation could worsen to water scarcity by 2030.

In recent years, heavily populated areas like Istanbul (14 million inhabitants) have begun to experience shortages in the drier months.

The city's reservoir levels declined to less than 30 percent of capacity at the beginning of 2014.

8. Mexico City

Water shortages are nothing new for many of the 21 million inhabitants of the Mexican capital.

One in five get just a few hours from their taps a week and another 20% have running water for just part of the day.

The city imports as much as 40% of its water from distant sources but has no large-scale operation for recycling wastewater. Water losses because of problems in the pipe network are also estimated at 40%.

9. London

Of all the cities in the world, London is not the first that springs to mind when one thinks of water shortages.

The reality is very different. With an average annual rainfall of about 600mm (less than the Paris average and only about half that of New York), London draws 80% of its water from rivers (the Thames and Lea).

According to the Greater London Authority, the city is pushing close to capacity and is likely to have supply problems by 2025 and "serious shortages" by 2040.

It looks likely that hosepipe bans could become more common in the future.

Free water in England to cut plastic waste

UK 'could adopt' Norway recycling system

10. Tokyo

The Japanese capital enjoys precipitation levels similar to that of Seattle on the US west coast, which has a reputation for rain. Rainfall, however, is concentrated during just four months of the year.

That water needs to be collected, as a drier-than-expected rainy season could lead to a drought. At least 750 private and public buildings in Tokyo have rainwater collection and utilisation systems.

Home to more than 30 million people, Tokyo has a water system that depends 70% on surface water (rivers, lakes, and melted snow).

Recent investment in the pipeline infrastructure aims also to reduce waste by leakage to only 3% in the near future.

11. Miami

The US state of Florida is among the five US states most hit by rain every year. However, there is a crisis brewing in its most famous city, Miami.

An early 20th Century project to drain nearby swamps had an unforeseen result; water from the Atlantic Ocean contaminated the Biscayne Aquifer, the city's main source of fresh water.

Learn more at BBC

The neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles is one of three communities in California to share in $140 million in grants aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions while chipping away at a host of urban ills, from public health disparities and housing shortages to pollution and displacement.

The grants, announced late last month, are the first to be released as part of the state’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program. The TCC program is designed to serve three overarching goals in disadvantaged communities—reducing emissions, strengthening economies, and improving public health. And it’s funded with the proceeds of California’s cap and trade system, enacted in 2013 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions statewide. In addition to Watts, which will receive $35 million to plant trees, create new affordable housing, and improve transportation infrastructure, $70 million was awarded to Fresno, and another $35 million to Ontario, a small city east of Los Angeles.

Randall Winston, executive director of the Strategic Growth Council, which was created in 2008 to coordinate all of California’s work on environmental planning, transportation, and economic development, says that the TCC grants are meant to help disadvantaged communities design their own solutions to urban and environmental problems. The Strategic Growth Council used a tool called CalEnviroScreen, which ranks California communities based on their relative burdens from pollution and other health and social indicators, to weigh applications. Even before the TCC grants were officially announced last month, the SGC had decided that half the money would go to Fresno, which includes all of the ten most disadvantaged census tracts in the state, measured by CalEnviroScreen. Another quarter of the money was set aside for L.A., which has the highest number of disadvantaged census tracts in the state.

“This program out of the gate sought to target the most polluted and poorest parts of the state,” Winston says.

The application from Watts rose to the top for a number of reasons, Winston says. The city, which is 72 percent Hispanic/Latino and 26 percent African-American, has lower levels of educational attainment, half the median income, and a greater portion of rent-burdened residents than the state as a whole, according to data gathered by Watts Rising Collaborative, the group that submitted the application. And the history of Watts—six days of riots in the 1960s were followed by a state commission report that identified many of the causes of disparities in the area but was largely ignored—provided a “powerful” backdrop to its application as well, Winston says.

But mostly it was the plan itself, and the team that put it together.

The Watts Rising Collaborative includes more than a dozen partner agencies, led by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. According to the collaborative’s organizational chart, responsibility for preparing the application fell to the housing authority and the City of Los Angeles, but top-level guidance on the plan was the purview of a community leadership council, which include neighborhood representatives. Applicants for TCC grants were required to sign contractual agreements spelling out how community engagement would be included in both the planning and implementation of the proposals, Winston says.

“To me that’s so important, because it speaks to how you can keep residents engaged,” Winston says. “These are long-term investments. It’s not the case that we’re looking to award $35 million and walk away. We’re looking to see the human infrastructure in place to sustain resident involvement and input. Watts has built up an infrastructure that is kind of like no other.”

The work that’s planned in Watts is focused around the Jordan Downs public housing project, which opened in the 1950s. According to the Watts Rising application, it will involve the construction of 216 new affordable housing units, 300 new solar roofs, 150 new energy-efficient homes, 118,000 square feet of retail, five miles of bike lanes, 30 blocks of pedestrian improvements, and 5,000 new trees. Plans also included new electric buses and an electric car-share program for the public housing development. In addition to the many community goals it will serve, it’s expected to offset around 70,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Jenny Scanlin, director of development services for the housing authority, says the collaborative set its goals first, and then used garage-sale stickers to price out various individual projects, to make decisions about priorities. It began by culling through the potpourri of planning and redevelopment documents that the neighborhood has worked on over the years. A lot of projects and initiatives were already in “various stages of germination and funding,” Scanlin says. And while Watts has a strong network of community groups formed to address various problems, such as the Watts Gang Task Force, Scanlin says that a new degree of participation was needed to compete for the grants.

“There was not necessarily a collaboration of folks working solely around environmental issues, or the confluence of economic, environmental, and public health issues, so we really had to create something new to be fully responsive to the call of TCC, or the intention of the program,” Scanlin says.

Importantly, the project will also be guided by a policy of non-displacement. The work that will be done in Watts is done to improve quality of life for the community that’s already there. Scanlin says that the housing authority, like others around the country, “learned some very important lessons” from the HOPE VI urban renewal program that began in the 1990s. Through that program, housing authorities “temporarily” displaced many public housing residents only to see many of them unable to return to rebuilt projects. Policies adopted by the Watts Rising Collaborative assert that no residents will be displaced, and that new units will be mostly targeted to extremely-low-income and very-low-income families.

“It’s about recognizing the importance of keeping this fabric of the community together and recognizing how tied our families are to Watts and the communities they live in, and not wanting to disturb those ties,” Scanlin says.

Winston says that a lot of the applications for TCC grants included non-displacement policies. And while the Strategic Growth Council can’t force local governments to adopt those policies, it is thinking through ways to incorporate non-displacement in future grants. The group will be updating its guidelines this spring and hopes to be able to solicit more grant applications late this year.

The program has already encouraged communities to think about ways to integrate investments in housing, transportation, infrastructure, and greening—areas that have traditionally been siloed, Winston says, with local recipients pursuing grants in piecemeal fashion. The TCC program is meant to bring those efforts together.

“We really do think this program is geared to change the way we think about our community investments,” Winston says.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve updated this article to correctly locate Watts within Los Angeles.

Learn more at NextCity