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The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.
The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago, at the insistence of more vulnerable nations, to forestall severe weather impacts and potential runaway warming that could lead to exceeding irreversible planetary tipping points. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. “Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the U.N.’s arbiters of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points — thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.
“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature,” says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter. If he and other scientists are right, then hopes currently being expressed of a temperature reset by reducing emissions after overshoot may be fanciful. Before we know it, there may be no way back.
Average global temperature compared to the preindustrial average. Source: Copernicus Climate Change Service. Yale Environment 360 / Made with Flourish
The effects of imminent 1.5-degree overshoot are already apparent in a rising tide of weather catastrophes: soaring heatstroke deaths in India, Africa, and the Middle East; unprecedented wildfires in the United States; and escalating property damage and floods from tropical storms and extreme precipitation.
Last year, Bailing Li of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center disclosed that her agency heldun-peer reviewed data showing a dramatic increase in the intensity of the world’s weather in the past five years. Meanwhile, the International Chamber of Commerce reported that extreme weather linked to the changing climate had cost the global economy more than $2 trillion in the past decade and damaged the lives and livelihoods of a fifth of the world’s population.
But that is just the start. Climate change is gathering pace. The last three years have been the hottest on record, with both 2023 and 2025 nearly reaching 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, and 2024 hitting 1.55 degrees.
A three-year breach of 1.5 degrees does not mean we have broken the Paris limit, which is framed as a long-term average. Conventionally, scientists measure this over 20 years, to smooth out year-on-year aberrations caused by natural cycles such as the El Niño oscillation. Using this method, it will be several more years before researchers can say for certain if warming has reached 1.5 degrees. But according to two studies published last year, the world has likely already surpassed this critical threshold.
Without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate. James Hansen, the Columbia University climatologist who first put climate change on the world’s front pages during testimony to Senate hearings in 1988, believes we could hit 2 degrees C as soon as 2045, a forecast based on several climate models under a high-emissions scenario.
A stream of meltwater atop the Greenland ice sheet. Ian Joughin / University of Washington
The reason for the escalation is that the climate system is in a pincer grip. First, emissions of planet-warming gases remain stubbornly high, and second, natural carbon sinks are weakening. The result is an accelerating rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2. 2024 saw the biggest jump ever.
The faltering natural sink is perplexing scientists. For as long as we know, nature has been quietly mitigating our damage to the climate by soaking up around half of all the CO2 we put into the air. Trees have grown faster in a warmer climate, capturing carbon in the process; oceans have been absorbing excess atmospheric CO2, burying it in the depths.
But now oceans are becoming more stratified, reducing their ability to remove CO2. And trees are succumbing to heat and drought.
A string of recent research papers has reported an “unprecedented” weakening of natural land-based carbon sinks in 2023 and 2024, triggered in part by an epidemic of extreme wildfires, which have doubled globally in the past two decades. African rainforests, previously responsible for around a fifth of the terrestrial take-up of CO2, recently turned from a long-term carbon sink to a source.
Looking forward, the predicted death of the Amazon rainforest would load billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. And the melting of Arctic permafrost, which is already underway, will unlock huge volumes of frozen methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Researchers last year concluded that this methane will have a “critical role … in amplifying climate change under overshoot scenarios,” making a comeback from that overshoot significantly harder.
Estimated temperature increases at which the planet crosses key tipping points. Source: Armstrong McKay et al., 2022. Yale Environment 360 / Made with Flourish
“We are seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems,” concluded Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”
These escalating impacts could soon lead to irreversible damage to the climate and ecosystems, scientists warn. In the past three years, unprecedented warming of the oceans has led to an epidemic of marine heat waves. The waters of northwest Europe last spring were up to 4 degrees C (7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. In the tropics, ocean heating is triggering a rising rate of cyclones, and ever more loss of coral.
Researchers say tropical coral reefs may have already crossed a tipping point, portending mass dieback. Studies suggest they may all be dead by mid-century, with massive repercussions for wider marine ecosystems and fish stocks, which are heavily dependent on reefs as nurseries and feeding grounds.
Near the poles, some ice sheets may already have been irreversibly destabilized. Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice every hour. The “current best assessment,” Watson says, is that this melting could become unstoppable at around 1.5 degrees. The giant Arctic island’s estimated 2,800 trillion tons of ice would take centuries to melt into the ocean. But that would eventually raise sea levels globally by around 23 feet. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet faces a similar fate.
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Likewise, ocean circulation systems could be approaching breakdown. These currents move vast amounts of heat around the globe, dictating much of the weather over adjacent land. Most at risk, modelers suggest, is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, which currently warms Europe and the eastern coast of North America with the Gulf Stream.
Hansen has argued that “shutdown of the AMOC is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming.” Other studies suggest it is unlikely this century, or that we may soon pass a tipping point beyond which it is inevitable. A 2025 Global Tipping Points Report, led by Lenton, said AMOC’s failure would “plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters.”
A modeling study of a range of potential tipping points by researchers at the Potsdam Institute found that if the world did not get back to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, there was a one in four chance at least one major global threshold — it listed the collapse of AMOC, the Amazon rainforest ecosystem, or the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheet — would be crossed. “If we were to also surpass 2 degrees C of global warming, tipping risks would escalate even more rapidly,” says coauthor Annika Ernest Högner.
There are also fears of a domino effect, in which crossing one tipping point triggers the exceeding of another. One scenario sees the melting of Greenland ice turning off the AMOC, which in turn is the final straw for the Amazon rainforest. But much remains unclear — including whether the risks of exceeding tipping points are less if the overshoot is short term.
Because tipping points are hard to model with any precision, and harder still to predict, they are often left out of climate projections — and hence are still largely ignored by climate negotiators. “Current policy thinking doesn’t usually take tipping points into account,” says Manjana Milkoreit of the University of Oslo, a lead author of the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report.
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Corals are disappearing, pushing Earth to its first major ‘tipping point’
The science is shaping up to suggest that the damage done by an imminent overshoot of the 1.5-degree threshold may not be easily undone. Still, that looks like the world we are entering. So, how could we draw carbon out of the atmosphere by achieving the “negative emissions” that might bring temperatures back down and, in the best-case scenario, stabilize the climate system?
The most obvious action is to bolster and increase carbon sinks by planting trees or encouraging natural forest regrowth. In the past decade, the world has developed a modest carbon market, using forestry and other projects that soak up CO2 to earn carbon credits that can be sold to offset carbon emissions by industry and nations.
The market has been widely discredited by failed, poorly monitored, and fraudulent forest schemes. But, if better managed and audited, it could be repurposed as part of an effort to generate negative emissions.
One proposal favored by many climate scientists would have the trees harvested and burned in power stations, so new carbon-grabbing trees could be planted on the vacated land. If the power-plant CO2 emissions were then captured and kept out of the atmosphere, the result could be an energy system that drew CO2 out of the air.
But the scientific consensus is that there isn’t room on a crowded planet for enough forests. Currently, work to protect and restore forests is soaking up an estimated 2 billion tons of CO2 annually. But lowering global temperatures by an average of even 0.1 degrees C would require a total of a hundred times more, according to the IPCC. And recent studies suggest 400 billion tons might be required to get back to 1.5 C by 2100.
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When will a vital system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean collapse? Depends on whom you ask.
Another idea is to industrialize carbon capture through the mass deployment of chemical plants that use solvents to extract CO2 from the air and convert it to inert material. This remains, at least for now, prohibitively expensive, costing hundreds of dollars for every ton removed.
Many scientists regard such carbon-capturing solutions as fanciful. And, given that we may need them in a hurry after some major planetary emergency such as warding off a tipping point, they could not be deployed fast enough. If a quick fix were needed — even a temporary one to “peak shave” temperatures while negative emissions were fast-tracked — we would need some form of outright geoengineering.
Most likely, these scientists say, this would involve shading the Earth from solar radiation by injecting into the stratosphere sulphur aerosols similar to those sometimes released in volcanic eruptions. Spraying from fleets of aircraft would have to continue for as long as the cooling was required. But it might work, and it might do so quickly and cheaply enough to be a realistic proposition. Researchers are enthusiastic. The British government last year invested $80 million to explore the potential of solar modification, including small-scale real-world experiments.
But others are horrified. They warn that leaving atmospheric greenhouse gas levels high will also leave the world’s weather systems fundamentally altered. Even if the shading can get us back to 1.5 C of warming, the weather will not revert.
“Having temperature targets makes solar engineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures,” says Watson. “But it does this not by reducing but increasing our interference in the climate system.” The world’s weather would still be broken. He likens it to “turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.”
IPCC scientists have consistently argued that achieving the Paris target will ultimately require some form of negative emissions. But it took until the 2025 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, for U.N. negotiators to acknowledge the need to address how to handle an overshoot, declaring in its final statement that “both the extent and duration of an overshoot need to be limited,” though without going into further detail. So far, only Denmark has a national negative emissions target — promising reductions of 110 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.
Negative emissions are “not a political project yet,” says Oliver Geden of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. And even the suggestion seems optimistic right now, when even modest international efforts to achieve “net zero” emissions by mid-century are falling far short, and the world’s second largest emitter, the U.S., has exited the entire project.
But the warnings are stark. Without action to draw down atmospheric carbon, the climate system will likely move into an era of accelerated warming that may be impossible to halt. Overshoot will be permanent.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Overshoot: The world is hitting point of no return on climate on Feb 8, 2026.
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This story was originally published by the Northern Journal.
Max Graham
Northern Journal
The Iñupiaq village of Nuiqsut has contended for decades with the westward expansion of oil development on Alaska’s North Slope.
Oil rigs have cropped up along the horizon, and industry roads now cut across the tundra just beyond the village.
The industry’s growth has been lucrative for Nuiqsut’s Indigenous-owned village corporation, Kuukpik, which owns land that’s coveted by multinational oil companies. But it also has provoked tensions among local leaders and some subsistence hunters and fishermen, who have objected to encroaching development.
Now, a proposal from one of the North Slope’s most prolific oil producers is driving a new conflict.
ConocoPhillips wants to drill wells and pump oil just two miles from the village, within clear view and potentially earshot of Nuiqsut’s center. The nearest existing drill site sits about five miles away.
Local leaders — even some who have historically supported and profited from oil production — say ConocoPhillips’ proposal is raising fundamental questions about the village’s relationship with the industry.
“There will be no way to ignore it, no way to pretend that Nuiqsut has not finally been overtaken by the oil fields,” George Sielak, Kuukpik Corp.’s president, said in an unusually pointed 17-page letter to federal regulators in October.
Since ConocoPhillips proposed the project, called CD-8, last year, it has garnered little attention outside Nuiqsut. But it continues to drive intense discussions between industry officials and tribal and corporate officials in the village of 500 people.
An oil ‘renaissance’ at a village’s doorstep
ConocoPhillips is a multinational petroleum company, headquartered in Houston. It’s a dominant player on the North Slope, producing about 170,000 barrels of oil a day there, and it is already planning to spend some $9 billion to build Willow, a huge new development west of Nuiqsut.
CD-8 would be the latest expansion of an existing ConocoPhillips field, called Alpine.
The project would involve building a new, 15-acre gravel pad on the tundra. From the pad, the company would drill wells to tap millions of barrels of oil in a geologic layer, the Nanushuk, that was overlooked by petroleum companies for decades.
Major discoveries in the Nanushuk in the past 10 years have led to an influx of investment and construction across Alaska’s oil patch, including both Willow and another huge field currently being built near Nuiqsut.
Beyond the CD-8 project, where ConocoPhillips would produce oil that’s already been discovered, the company is also planning extensive exploratory work to find new deposits in a nearby area this winter.
The North Slope oil “renaissance,” as some observers have labeled it, is poised to reverse the longstanding decline of crude flowing through the trans-Alaska pipeline.
The industry’s revival in the region could add to local and state coffers, and create new revenue streams for the North Slope’s Indigenous-owned corporations.
But the simmering tensions over CD-8 show how the rejuvenated industry still must navigate complex dynamics with the Alaskans who live closest to it, many of whom still depend on hunting and fishing for food.
ConocoPhillips is “working collaboratively and cooperatively” with regulators and stakeholders to analyze its proposal and alternatives, company spokesperson Dennis Nuss said in an email.
The company “remains committed to ongoing engagement with local and regional stakeholders to ensure their input is considered and questions are addressed,” he said.
The CD-8 project is far smaller than ConocoPhillips’ new Willow development, which spurred fierce national debate before the Biden administration approved it in 2023.
But the new proposal looms just as large for Nuiqsut residents.
“It’s a big deal,” Sielak said in a recent interview at Kuukpik’s Anchorage office. “It’s on our land, and it’s not in the right place.”
A ‘significant’ amount of oil
In permitting documents, ConocoPhillips says CD-8 could produce as much as 90 million barrels from up to 40 wells. At its peak, the project is estimated to produce some 32,000 barrels, valued at roughly $2 million at current prices, each day.
The estimated volume at CD-8 is only about 15% of what the company expects to produce at Willow, which is expected to start pumping oil in 2029.
But it’s still “a significant amount of oil,” said Mark Myers, a former state natural resources commissioner and former head of the U.S. Geological Survey. The crude is also “high quality,” he added, because it’s relatively light and easier to produce at high rates.
CD-8 is one of several new developments in the region targeting the sandstone and other rocks of the Nanushuk layer, about a mile underground.
It’s “necessary” to access oil that ConocoPhillips discovered in 2018 and that can’t be reached from the company’s existing infrastructure, according to Nuss, the company spokesperson.
The proposed drill site is near the boundary between ConocoPhillips’ oil leases and separate leases owned by an Australian multinational petroleum company, Santos.
Santos is building its own huge oil field called Pikka, which is expected to start producing from the same Nanushuk formation later this year.
The Pikka oil reservoir was initially identified by Texas wildcatter Bill Armstrong in 2013, in what was the first Nanushuk discovery.
Since Armstrong’s success, a string of additional discoveries in the Nanushuk have shown it to be a “very, very prolific” formation, Myers said.
“This is part of the larger play,” he said of the CD-8 proposal.
Some experts estimate that the Nanushuk, which extends well beyond CD-8 and Pikka, contains billions of barrels of untapped oil.
‘New and different questions’
Oil pumped from CD-8 would generate profits for the state of Alaska and the Indigenous-owned corporation for the whole North Slope, Arctic Slope Regional Corp.
Those two entities jointly own the area’s underground mineral rights and would receive what’s known as a royalty share of the value of oil ConocoPhillips produces.
Kuukpik, Nuiqsut’s village corporation, is also poised to benefit because it owns the surface of the land where ConocoPhillips is proposing to build its 15-acre drilling pad.
Kuukpik has long done lucrative business with ConocoPhillips, leasing land to the oil giant and performing contract work to generate profits for its some 700 Indigenous shareholders. Annual dividends to those shareholders have exceeded $30,000 in some years.
Since ConocoPhillips started to develop the area more than two decades ago, Kuukpik’s leaders have become known as savvy negotiators seeking to strike a balance between resource extraction, protecting the environment and preserving subsistence traditions.
In past years, they have fought some aspects of industry proposals and prompted companies to modify their development plans — in some cases by limiting construction or adding components, like a boat launch, to benefit the village. They’ve also endorsed some projects outright.
But CD-8, if built as proposed, would be different from any previous development near Nuiqsut, Sielak said in his October letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It would raise “new and different questions — questions that go to the very core of what daily life will be like in Nuiqsut,” he added.
Sielak and other local officials worry about noise and light pollution and other environmental and health effects of drilling so close to the village.
The pad would sit near a river channel where many community members hunt and fish, and within a half-mile of an 80-acre Native allotment — a piece of private property owned by a local family — that’s used for subsistence.
“You’ve got to ask yourself, thinking about your grandkids: Do you want your kids to see a drilling rig right outside your window?” said Sielak, who lives in Nuiqsut but was in Anchorage this month to meet with ConocoPhillips.
Elected leaders of Nuiqsut’s tribal government did not respond to a request for comment. They have said publicly that they’re [opposed](https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/df05e294-194a-4108-9e43-29e0e82f3ef4/downloads/a12325fd-5dac-4312-83a4-8ff9388e8d6e/NVN_Council_Comment_Letter_CD8_EIS_2025%20(Signe.pdf?ver=1763494516603&ref=northernjournal.com%29%C2%A0to the project, given its proximity to the village.
While Kuukpik’s leaders have concerns about ConocoPhillips’ initial plans for CD-8, they say they are waiting to take a formal position until the oil company weighs all of its options and produces a more complete proposal.
For now, Kuukpik is pushing ConocoPhillips to consider several alternatives to its preliminary proposal — each involving drilling in a different location, farther from Nuiqsut.
But ConocoPhillips’ ability to drill at different sites may be complicated by the boundaries of the company’s leases. Three of the four alternatives suggested by Kuukpik in its letter to regulators could involve drilling on nearby land leased not by ConocoPhillips but by Santos — and in recent years, the two companies have publicly feuded over access to North Slope infrastructure.
A Santos spokesperson did not respond to questions about Kuukpik’s suggestion that ConocoPhillips and Santos work together to mitigate impacts on Nuiqsut.
Nuss, the ConocoPhillips spokesperson, would not say whether his company would consider collaborating with Santos on CD-8.
Kuukpik has been discussing CD-8 with both ConocoPhillips and Santos, said Andy Mack, the Native corporation’s Anchorage-based chief executive and a former state natural resources commissioner.
“It will be interesting to see whether Conoco is actually flexible in their approach,” said Mack. “If you go back 25 years ago and look at the plans and the statements that were made then, nobody imagined that they would build a drill site two miles from the community.”
Northern Journal contributor Max Graham can be reached at max@northernjournal.com. He’s interested in any and all mining related stories, as well as introductory meetings with people in and around the industry.
The post Alaska’s oil renaissance has arrived at the doorstep of an Iñupiaq village appeared first on ICT.
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Alaska Native group sues Trump administration for nixing North Slope caribou protections
(ictnews.org)
Yereth Rosen
Alaska Beacon
Originally published on Alaska Beacon.
Representatives of Nuiqsut, an Inupiat village on the North Slope, have sued the Trump administration over the abrupt cancellation of a program that gave protections to the Teshekpuk Lake area and the caribou herd that uses it. Teshekpuk Lake is the largest lake in the Arctic region and known as a diverse and sensitive wetland ecosystem.
Nuiqsut Trilateral Inc., which comprises the Nuiqsut city government, the tribal government and the village for-profit corporation, filed the lawsuit on Jan. 28 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
The Trump administration’s cancellation violated subsistence rights and values that have been enshrined in law for half a century and are of utmost importance to the region’s Indigenous people, the lawsuit said.
At issue is a 2024 right-of-way agreement signed by the Biden administration’s Interior Department and the city of Nuiqsut, the village’s tribal government and Kuukpik Corporation, the village forprofit Native corporation. The three Nuiqsut entities have joined in an organization called Nuiqsut Trilateral Inc.
The right-of-way protects the Teshekpuk Lake area and about 1 million acres around it. The area is important to the caribou herd named for the lake, to vast numbers of migratory birds and to other wild resources harvested by the region’s Indigenous people for traditional subsistence purposes. The cancelled agreement gave the Nuiqsut organization some authority over activities in the protected area.
The agreement arose out of deliberations over development of the Willow project, the largest oil drilling project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. The Biden administration ultimately approved the project in 2023, but with caveats to protect the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd and other natural resources important to subsistence practices. Such protections were crucial to Kuukpik’s support of the Willow project, according to the lawsuit.
The Trump administration objected to those protections for the Teshekpuk Lake area, which might contain large quantities of undeveloped oil.
In her notice canceling the right-of-way, Interior Department Deputy Secretary Katharine MacGregor said the agreement violated the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act, or NPRPA. That is the 1976 law that governs management of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
“While granting any conservation right-of-way is unlikely to be lawful under the NPRPA for any amount of acres in this petroleum reserve, doing so across a surface area larger than the state of Rhode Island with a subsurface that is highly prospective for oil and gas development is clearly unlawful,” MacGregor said in her cancellation notice sent on Dec. 19 to the Nuiqsut organization.
The Secretary of the Interior has the right to grant rights-of-way to support development activities, but the law “plainly does not authorize a ROW for a non-use,” her cancellation notice said.
The Nuiqsut groups’ lawsuit responded sharply to the assertion that subsistence practices amount to a “non-use” of the area.
“That characterization fundamentally misapprehends the most basic concepts of “subsistence” on Alaska’s North Slope and is incompatible with the NPRPA’s plain text,” the complaint said.
Determining that subsistence is a “non-use” is “in tension with Congress’s recognition that ‘subsistence uses’ are, as the name implies, ‘uses’ of land and resources,” the complaint said.
Elsewhere, the complaint describes the importance of subsistence to the people of Nuiqsut. “Native communities in northern Alaska have relied on subsistence uses of natural resources since their ancestors crossed the Bering Strait thousands of years ago. Hunting and fishing, as well as communal sharing of resources, are key components of the Iñupiat culture and way of life: the Iñupiat people’s ‘physical and cultural survival depends on the continued harvest of natural resources.’”
For decades, Teshekpuk Lake and the lands adjacent to it have been protected from development to varying degrees. Protections date back to the Reagan administration.
But the Trump administration is seeking to open the entire area, including the lake itself, to oil development. President Donald Trump in December signed Congressional legislation that overturned other Biden administration protections for the area. And the Trump administration in December approved a new management plan that lifted development restrictions in that area.
The Department of the Interior declined to comment on the lawsuit. ConocoPhillips, which is not a party to the right-of-way agreement or the lawsuit over its cancellation, also declined to comment.
The post Alaska Native group sues Trump administration for nixing North Slope caribou protections appeared first on ICT.
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“I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.”
It was shortly after 10 p.m. on a cloudy December night, and Harrison, a coral researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University, was about 25 miles off the coast of northern Queensland. He was with a group of scientists, tourism operators, and Indigenous Australians who had spent the last few nights above the Great Barrier Reef — the largest living structure on the planet — looking for coral spawn.
And apparently, it has a smell.
Over a few nights in the Australian summer, shortly after the full moon, millions of corals across the Great Barrier Reef start bubbling out pearly bundles of sperm and eggs, known as spawn. It’s as if the reef is snowing upside down. Those bundles float to the surface and break apart. If all goes to plan, the eggs of one coral will encounter the sperm of another and grow into free-swimming coral larvae. Those larvae make their way to the reef, where they find a spot to “settle,” like a seed taking root, and then morph into what we know of as coral.
A team of researchers and tourism operators try to collect coral spawn above the Great Barrier Reef near Cairns one night in December. Harriet Spark for Vox
Spawning on the Great Barrier Reef has been called the largest reproductive event on Earth, and, in more colorful terms, “the world’s largest orgasm.” Coral spawn can be so abundant in some areas above the reef that it forms large, veiny slicks — as if there had been a chemical spill.
This was what the team was looking for out on the reef, and sniffing is one of the only ways to find it, said Harrison, who was among a small group of scientists who first documented the phenomenon of mass coral spawning in the 1980s. Some people say coral spawn smells like watermelon or fresh cow’s milk. To me it was just vaguely fishy.
“Here we go,” said Mark Gibbs, another scientist onboard and an engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, or AIMS, a government agency. All of a sudden the water around us was full of little orbs, as if hundreds of Beanie Babies had been ripped open. “Nets in the water!” Gibbs said to the crew. A few people onboard began skimming the water’s surface with modified pool nets for spawn and then dumping the contents into a large plastic bin.
That night, the team collected hundreds of thousands of coral eggs as part of a Herculean effort to try to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. Rising global temperatures, together with a raft of other challenges, threaten to destroy this iconic ecosystem — the gem of Australia, a World Heritage site, and one of the main engines of the country’s massive tourism industry. In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, or RRAP. The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is the largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted to protect a reef.
A pink skunk clownfish stares frightfully from its anemone home. Harriet Spark for Vox
The project involves robots, one of the world’s largest research aquariums, and droves of world-renowned scientists. The scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
But even then, will it be enough?
The first thing to know about the Great Barrier Reef is that it’s utterly enormous. It covers about 133,000 square miles, making it significantly larger than the entire country of Italy. And despite the name, it’s not really one reef but a collection of 3,000 or so individual ones that form a reef archipelago.
Another important detail is that the reef is still spectacular.
Over three days in December, I scuba dived offshore from Port Douglas and Cairns, coastal cities in Queensland that largely run on reef tourism, a whopping $5.3 billion annual industry. Descending onto the reef was like sinking into an alien city. Coral colonies twice my height rose from the seafloor, forming shapes mostly foreign to the terrestrial world. Life burst from every surface.
A pair of iconic clownfish in an anemone on a reef off the coast of Port Douglas. Harriet Spark for Vox
What really struck me was the color. Two decades of scuba diving had led me to believe that you can only find vivid blues, reds, oranges, and pinks in an artist’s imaginings of coral reefs, like in the scenes of Finding Nemo. But coral colonies on the reefs I saw here were just as vibrant. Some of the colonies of the antler-like staghorn coral were so blue it was as if they had been dipped in paint.
It’s easy to see how the reef — built from the bodies of some 450 species of hard coral — provides a foundation for life in the ocean. While cruising around large colonies of branching coral, I would see groups of young fish hiding out among their nubby calciferous fingers. The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 1,600 fish species, many of which are a source of food for Indigenous Australians and part of a $200 million commercial fishing industry.
“The reef is part of our life,” said Cindel Keyes, an Indigenous Australian of the Gunggandji peoples, near Cairns, who was part of the crew collecting coral spawn with Harrison. RRAP partners with First Nations peoples, many of whom have relied on the reef for thousands of years and are eager to help sustain it. “It’s there to provide for us, too,” Keyes, who comes from a family of fishers, told me.
The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, as many visitors assume from headlines. But in a matter of decades — by the time the children of today grow old — it very well could be.
Cindel Keyes, on a boat near Cairns, before spawn collection begins. Harriet Spark for Vox
The world’s coral reefs face all kinds of problems, from big storms to runoff from commercial farmland, but only one is proving truly existential: marine heat. Each piece of coral is not one animal but a colony of animals, known as polyps, and polyps are sensitive to heat. They get most of their food from a specific type of algae that lives within their tiny bodies. But when ocean temperatures climb too high, polyps eject or otherwise lose those algae, turn bleach-white, and begin to starve. If a coral colony is “bleached” for too long, it will die.
The global prognosis is bleak. The world has already lost about half of its coverage of coral reefs since the 1950s, not including steep losses over the last two decades. And should wealthy countries continue burning fossil fuels — pushing global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline — it will likely lose the rest of it.
Projections for the Great Barrier Reef are just as grim. A recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communicationsprojected that coral cover across the reef would decline, on average, by more than 50 percent over the next 15 years, under all emissions scenarios — including the most optimistic. The reef would only later recover to anything close to what it looks like today, the authors wrote, if there are immediate, near-impossibly steep emissions cuts. (The study was funded by RRAP.)
A dead colony of branching coral in the Agincourt reefs. Harriet Spark for Vox
The reef has already had a taste of this future: In the last decade alone, there have been six mass bleaching events. One of the worst years was 2016, when coral cover across the entire reef declined by an estimated 30 percent. Yet recent years have also been alarming. Surveys by AIMS found that bleaching last year affected a greater portion of the reef than any other year on record, contributing to record annual declines of hard coral in the northern and southern stretches of the reef.
“I’ve been suffering,” said Harrison, who’s been diving on the Great Barrier Reef for more than 40 years. “I’ve got chronic ecological grief. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, like when you see another mass bleaching. It can be quite crushing.”
The problem isn’t just bleaching but that these events are becoming so frequent that coral doesn’t have time to recover, said Mia Hoogenboom, a coral reef ecologist at Australia’s James Cook University, who’s also involved in RRAP.
Crew members Paco Mueller-Sheppard and Devante Cavalcante dump a bucket of spawn into one of the floating pools above a reef near Cairns. Harriet Spark for Vox
“The hopeful part is if we can take action now to help the system adapt to the changing environment, then we’ve got a good chance of keeping the resilience in the system,” Hoogenboom said. “But the longer we wait, the less chance we have to maintain the Great Barrier Reef as a functioning ecosystem.”
That night in December, after filling two large plastic bins onboard with coral spawn, the crew motored to a nearby spot on the reef where several inflatable pools were floating on the ocean’s surface. The boat slowly approached one of the pools — which looked a bit like a life raft — and two guys onboard dumped spawn into it.
The government established RRAP in 2018 with an ambitious goal: to identify tools that might help the reef cope with warming, refine them through research and testing, and then scale them up so they can help the reef at large. It is a massive undertaking. RRAP involves more than 300 scientists, engineers, and other experts across 20-plus institutions, including AIMS, which operates one of the world’s largest research aquariums called the National Sea Simulator. And it has a lot of money. The government committed roughly $135 million to the project, and it has another $154 million from private sources, including companies and foundations. It’s operating on the scale of decades, not years, said Cedric Robillot, RRAP’s executive director.
Scientists at RRAP have now honed in on several approaches that they think will work, and a key one is assisted reproduction — essentially, helping corals on the reef have babies. That’s what scientists were doing on the water after dark in December.
Research technician Elena Pfeffer points out pink bumps on the surface of branching coral in one of the autospawners, a sign it’s about to spawn. Harriet Spark for Vox
Normally, when corals spawn, only a fraction of their eggs get fertilized and grow into baby corals. They might get eaten by fish, for example, or swept out to sea, away from the reef, where the larvae can’t settle. That’s simply nature at work in normal conditions. But as the reef loses more and more of its coral, the eggs of one individual have a harder time meeting the sperm of another, leading to a fertility crisis.
RRAP is trying to improve those odds through what some have called coral IVF.
At sea, scientists skim spawn from the surface and then load them into those protected pools, which are anchored to the reef. Suspended inside the pools are thousands of palm-sized ceramic structures for the larval coral to settle on, like empty pots in a plant nursery. After a week or so, scientists will use those structures — which at that point should be growing baby corals — to reseed damaged parts of the reef.
Colonies of A. kenti spawning at SeaSim. Harriet Spark for Vox
With this approach, scientists can collect spawn from regions that appear more tolerant to warming and reseed areas where the corals have been killed off by heat. Heat tolerance is, to an extent, rooted in a coral’s DNA and passed down from parent to offspring. So those babies may be less likely to bleach and die. While baby corals are growing in those pools, scientists can also introduce specific kinds of algae — the ones that live symbiotically within polyps — that are more adapted to heat. That may make the coral itself more resistant to warming.
But what’s even more impressive is that scientists are also breeding corals on land, at the National Sea Simulator, to repopulate the reef. SeaSim, located a few hours south of Cairns on the outskirts of Townsville, is essentially a baby factory for coral.
I drove to SeaSim one evening in December with Robillot, a technophile with silver hair and a French accent. He first walked me through a warehouse-like room filled with several deep, rectangular tanks lit by blue light. The light caused bits of coral growing inside them to fluoresce. Other than the sound of running water, it was quiet.
Andrea Severati, a researcher at AIMS who designed many of the tanks at SeaSim, releases coral embyros into a large tank, where they’ll develop into larvae. Harriet Spark for Vox
The main event — one of the year’s biggest, for coral nerds anyway — was just outside.
SeaSim has several open-air tanks designed to breed corals with little human intervention. Those tanks, known as autospawners, mimic the conditions on the wild reef, including water temperature and light. So when scientists put adult corals inside them, the colonies will spawn naturally, as they would in the wild. The tanks collect their spawn automatically and mix it together in another container that creates the optimal density of coral sperm for fertilization.
Observing spawning isn’t easy. It typically happens just once a year for each species, and the timing can be unpredictable. But I got lucky: Colonies of a kind of branching coral known as Acropora kenti were set to spawn later that evening. Through glass panels on the side of the autospawners, I saw their orangish branches, bunched together like the base of a broom. They were covered in pink, acne-like bumps — the bundles of spawn they were getting ready to release — which was a clear sign it would happen soon.
A close-up view of coral embryos. Harriet Spark for Vox
As it grew dark, the dozen or so people around the tanks flipped on red headlamps to take a closer look. (White light can disrupt spawning.) Around 7:30 p.m., the show started. One colony after another popped out cream-colored balls. They hung for a moment just above the coral branches before floating to the surface and getting sucked into a pipe. It was a reminder that corals, which usually look as inert as rocks, really are alive. “It’s such a beautiful little phenomenon,” Robillot said, as we watched together. “It’s a sign that we still have vitality in the system.”
After spawning at SeaSim, scientists move the embryos into larger, indoor tanks, where they develop into larvae. Those larvae then get transferred to yet other tanks, settling on small tabs of concrete. Scientists then insert those tabs into slots on small ceramic structures — those same structures as the ones suspended in the floating pools at sea — which they’ll use to reseed the reef. One clear advantage of spawning corals in a lab is that scientists can breed individual corals that appear, through testing, to be more resistant to heat. Ideally, their babies will then be a bit more resistant, too.
During spawning late last year, SeaSim produced roughly 19 million coral embryos across three species.
“People often don’t understand the scale that we’re talking about,” said Carly Randall, a biologist at AIMS who works with RRAP. “We have massive numbers of autospawning systems lined up. We have automated image analysis to track survival and growth. It is like an industrial production facility.”
A dive boat from the company Quicksilver Group above a reef near Port Douglas. Harriet Spark for Vox
Including the spawn collection at sea, RRAP produced more than 35 million coral embryos last year that are now growing across tens of thousands of ceramic structures that will be dropped onto the reef. The goal RRAP is working toward, Robillot says, is to be able to stock the reef with 100 million corals every year that survive until they’re at least one year old. (Under the right conditions, each ceramic structure can produce one coral that lives until 1 year old in the ocean, Robillot told me. That means RRAP would need to release at least a million of those structures on the reef every year.)
On that scale, the project could help maintain at least some coral cover across the reef, even in the face of more than 2 degrees C of warming, Robillot said, citing unpublished research. One study, published in 2021 and partially funded by RRAP, suggests that a combination of interventions, including adding heat-tolerant corals, can delay the reef’s decline by several years.
“We are not replacing reefs,” Robillot said. “It’s just too big. We’re talking about starting to change the makeup of the population by adapting them to warmer temperatures and helping their recovery. If you systematically introduce corals that are more heat-tolerant over a period of 10 to 20 to 30 years, then over a hundred years, you significantly change the outlook for your population.”
A hawksbill turtle on a reef offshore from Cairns. Harriet Spark for Vox
The obvious deficiency of RRAP, and many other reef conservation projects, is that it doesn’t tackle the root problem: rising greenhouse gas emissions. While restoration might help maintain some version of coral reefs in the near term, those gains will only be temporary if the world doesn’t immediately rein in carbon emissions. “It all relies on the premise that the world will get its act together on emissions reductions,” Robillot said. “If we don’t do that, then there’s no point, because it’s a runaway train.”
Many groups involved in reef conservation have failed to reckon with this reality, even though they’re often on the front lines of climate change. During my trip, I would be on dive boats listening to biologists talk about restoration, while we burned diesel fuel and were served red meat — one of the most emissions-intensive foods. A lot of tour operators, some of whom work with RRAP, don’t talk about climate change much at all. Two of the guides who took me out on the reef even downplayed the threat of climate change to me.
Yolanda Waters, founder and CEO of Divers for Climate, a nonprofit network of scuba divers who care about climate change, said this isn’t surprising. “At the industry level, climate change is still very hush-hush,” said Waters, who previously worked in the reef tourism industry. “In most of those boats, climate messaging is just nonexistent.”
Coral blanketed the seafloor at a reef offshore from Cairns. Harriet Spark for Vox
This makes some sense. Tourism companies don’t want people to think the reef is dying. “When international headlines describe the Reef as ‘dying’ or ‘lost,’ it can create the impression that the visitor experience is no longer worthwhile, even though large parts of the Reef remain vibrant, actively managed, and accessible,” Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a trade group, told me by email. (I asked around, but no one could point me to data that clearly linked negative media stories to a drop in visitors to the Great Barrier Reef.)
Yet by failing to talk about the urgent threat of climate change, the tourism industry — a powerful force in Australia, that influences people from all over the world — is squandering an opportunity to educate the public about what is ultimately the only way to save the reef, said Tanya Murphy, a campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit advocacy group. Tourists are ending their vacation with the memory of, say, a shark or manta ray, not a new urge to fight against climate change, Waters said. So the status quo persists: People don’t connect reducing emissions with saving the reef, even though that’s “the only reef conservation action that can really be taken from anywhere,” she added.
(Not everyone in the tourism industry is so quiet. Eric Fisher, who works for a large Australian tourism company called Experience Co Limited, says he tells tourists that climate change is the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s what we tell people every day,” Fisher told me. “So as they fall in love with it, they’re more likely to leave with an understanding of that connection.”)
A school of purple queen fish. Harriet Spark for Vox
Keeping mum on climate change, while speaking loudly about restoration and other conservation efforts, including RRAP, can also take pressure off big polluters to address their carbon footprints, Waters and Murphy said. Polluters who fund reef conservation, including the government and energy companies, are given social license to operate without stricter emissions cuts, because the public thinks they’re doing enough, they said.
In reality, the Australian government continues to permit fossil fuel projects. Last year, for example, the Albanese administration, which is politically left of center, approved an extension of a gas project in Western Australia that Murphy and other advocates call “a big carbon bomb.” The extension of the project, known as the North West Shelf, will produce carbon emissions equivalent to about 20 percent of Australia’s current yearly carbon footprint, according to The Guardian.
A spokesperson for the Albanese government acknowledged in a statement to Vox that climate change is the biggest threat to coral reefs globally. “It underlines the need for Australia and the world to take urgent action, including reaching net zero emissions,” the statement, sent by Sarah Anderson, said. “The Albanese Government remains committed to action on climate change and our net zero targets.”
A school of small fish hides out in a colony of branching coral. Harriet Spark for Vox
Anderson highlighted a government policy called the Safeguard Mechanism, which sets emissions limits for the country’s largest polluters, including the North West Shelf Facility. Yet the policy only applies to Scope 1 emissions. That means it doesn’t limit emissions tied to gas that the North West Shelf project exports — the bulk of the project’s carbon footprint.
Although Australia has far fewer emissions compared to large economies like the US and China, the country is among the dirtiest on a per-capita basis. If any country can reduce its emissions, it should be Australia, Waters said. “We’re such a wealthy, privileged country,” Waters said. “We’ve got the biggest reef in the world. If we can do better, why wouldn’t we?”
On a stormy morning, near the end of my trip, we returned to the reef — this time, visiting another set of floating pools, offshore from Port Douglas. They had been filled with spawn several days earlier. Small corals were now growing on the ceramic structures, and they were ready to be deployed on the reef.
After a nauseating two-hour ride out to sea, a group of scientists and tourism operators jumped into small tenders and collected the structures from inside the pools. Then they motored around an area of the reef that had previously been damaged by a cyclone and started dropping coral babies off the side of the boat, one by one.
On a dive near Port Douglas we spotted broadclub cuttlefish — a cephalopod, like an octopuses — that decided to stick around. Harriet Spark for Vox
As it started to pour, and I noticed water flooding into the front of the tender, I couldn’t help but think about how absurd all of this was. Custom-made pools and ceramics. Hours and hours on the reef, floating in small boats in a vast ocean. Sniffing out spawn.
“You sort of think about the level of effort, that we’re going to try and rescue something that’s been on our planet for so many millions of years,” Harrison told me on the boat a few nights earlier. “It seems a bit ironic that humans now have to intervene to try and rescue corals.”
RRAP is making this process far more efficient, Robillot says — machines, not people, will eventually be dropping the ceramic structures off the boats, for example. But still, why not invest the money instead in climate advocacy or clean energy? Isn’t that an easier, perhaps better, way to help?
It can’t be either or, Robillot said. And it’s not, he contends. Many donors who fund the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a core RRAP partner and Robillot’s employer, are putting more of their money into climate action relative to reef conservation, he said. The government of Australia, meanwhile, says it’s spending billions on clean energy and green-lit a record number of renewable energy projects in 2025. Plus, while the scale of resources behind RRAP is certainly huge for coral reefs, it’s tiny compared to the cost of fixing the climate crisis. “We need trillions,” Robillot said.
Investing that roughly $300 million into fighting climate change could have a small impact on reefs decades from now. Putting it into projects like RRAP helps reefs today. It’s only a waste of money — worse than a waste of money — if that investment undermines climate action. And Robillot doesn’t think it does.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has been criticized for its ties to mining and energy companies, including Peabody Energy and BHP. The Reef Foundation currently receives money from mining giant Rio Tinto and BHP Foundation (which is funded by BHP) for projects unrelated to RRAP, the organization told Vox. “It is a bit concerning,” Murphy told me. “It’s really important that we get polluters to pay for the damage they’re causing. But that should be done as an obligatory tax and they should not be getting any marketing benefits from that.”
Robillot argues that these companies have not influenced RRAP’s work, or restricted what its staff can say about climate change. “If we can still scream that climate change is the main driver of loss of coral reefs, I don’t have an issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to only take money from people who do not have any impact on climate change. I don’t know anyone.”
Two of the floating pools above Arlington Reef, near Cairns, during sunset. Harriet Spark for Vox
Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP — for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change — it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.”
So much of reef conservation is absurd. We shouldn’t need to collect coral spunk from the open ocean in the middle of the night or breed these animals in tanks on land. Then again, these sorts of efforts are what scientists, Indigenous Australians, and the most thoughtful divers can do — what they are doing — to help the reef today.
“There’s so much work happening on the ground,” Waters, of Divers for Climate, told me. “All of those scientists, all of those [tourism] operators, are genuinely doing everything they can. It would be great for the Australian government to go, ‘Well, this is what we can do for reefs, too,’ pick up their game on climate, and show that we’re actually in it together.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the historic effort to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive on Feb 7, 2026.
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This story was originally published by Grist.
Anita Hofschneider
Grist
President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.
Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories.
Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations.
Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the mistakes of land-based mining.
“The terrestrial mining industry has not gotten it right with regards to Indigenous peoples,” Finn said. “Indigenous peoples have the right to give and to withdraw consent. Mining companies themselves need to design their operations around that right.”
It’s not yet clear which companies, if any, are interested in mining off Alaska. A spokesperson for The Metals Company, one of the leading publicly traded firms in the industry, said it has no plans to expand to Alaska. Oliver Gunasekara, chief executive officer of the startup Impossible Metals — which has asked Trump to allow mining around American Samoa despite Samoan opposition— said his company has no plans either.
“We do not have current plans in Alaska, as we do not know what resources are in the ocean,” he said. “If there are good nodule resources, we would be very interested.”
The potential lease area under consideration is larger than the state of California. Cooper Freeman, director of Alaska operations for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the scope is so broad that it includes ecologically important waters already closed to bottom trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the seafloor.
“A lot of these areas, particularly in the Aleutians, have been put off limits for bottom trawling because there are nurseries for commercially important fish and ecologically important species and habitat, ” Freeman said.
In its announcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency responsible for regulating deep-sea mining, said the proposed area included depths more than 4 miles deep near the Aleutian Trench and the abyssal plains of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, at depths as low as 3.5 miles. “BOEM is particularly interested in areas that have been identified by [the U.S. Geological Survey] as prospective for critical minerals as well as heavy minerals sands along the Seward Peninsula and Bering Sea coast.”
The waters are off the coast of a state that is home to more than 200 Alaska Native nations. Jasmine Monroe, who is Inupiaq, Yupik, and Cherokee, grew up in the village of Elim in Alaska’s Bering Strait region. She said she became concerned about what the proposal could mean for the seafood her community relies on after learning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up a 30-day public comment period last week on potential leases.
“We eat beluga meat, we eat walrus, we eat seal, we eat whale,” she said. “Whatever happens in the ocean, it really does affect our way of life.”
“It just feels like we don’t have any say on whether it happens or not,” she said. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us.”
The Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization representing Indigenous peoples of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.
Monroe, who works on water quality issues at the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, said she feels disempowered by what she described as a top-down approach and short timelines for public input.
Kate Finn from the Tallgrass Institute said Indigenous peoples have the right under international law to consent to activities in their territories and warned that U.S. federal regulations alone may not be sufficient for companies to meet international legal standards, particularly amid deregulation.
“Companies will miss that if they’re only relying on the U.S. federal government for consultation,” she said.
Finn added that Indigenous nations have their own economic and cultural priorities and that some have chosen to work with mining companies under specific conditions.
“There are Indigenous peoples who work well with companies and invite mining into their territories, and there is a track record there as well,” she said.
Monroe said she recognizes that seabed mining could supply minerals used in technologies like electric vehicle batteries, similar to other mining proposals she’s opposed in Alaska including a graphite mine that could pollute waters. But she doesn’t see electric vehicles in her community, and said the environmental and cultural cost is too high.
“It really feels like another false solution,” she said.
The post Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters appeared first on ICT.
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