🗞️ In Climate News

• 🇳🇿 State of emergency as high winds and floods hit New Zealand

  • The area of low pressure quickly deepened in the Tasman Sea off the west coast of New Zealand and travelled eastwards, with the centre of low pressure moving across the northern island and creating very strong winds, particularly through the Cook Strait, the body of water that separates the two islands.

• 🇺🇸 Justice department sues Michigan and Hawaii over climate suits against big oil

  • The suits, which legal experts say are unprecedented, mark the latest of the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental work and raise concern over states’ abilities to retain the power to take climate action without federal opposition.

• 🇬🇧 Lowest rainfall in 90 years as temperatures set to soar in Yorkshire

  • Just 78mm (3in) of rainfall has been recorded at Sheffield's Weston Park weather station since the start of February - the lowest since 1938.

    Typically we would expect to see around 184mm (7in) and, by contrast, the same period in 2024 was the sixth wettest on record, when 300mm (11.8in) fell.

• 🇮🇳 Climate change-driven heatwaves hit Delhi’s Red Fort market traders

  • Researchers from Greenpeace India and the newly formed Workers’ Collective for Climate Justice South Asia interviewed ten market sellers from the huge Lal Qila (Red Fort) Market, as well as activists and social workers supporting this community.

• 🇺🇸 EPA moves to cancel nearly 800 climate justice grants issued under Biden

  • The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to terminate 781 environmental justice grants aimed at protecting vulnerable communities, nearly doubling previous estimates and triggering legal battles over the move’s legality.

• 🇰🇷 South Korea's deadly fires made twice as likely by climate change, researchers say

  • Fires in the country's southeast blazed for nearly a week, killing 32 people and destroying around 5,000 buildings before they were brought under control in late March.

• 🇦🇺 Lake Bolac farmer found guilty of destroying Aboriginal rock formation

  • In 2021, the 65-year-old used an excavator to remove rocks from a 1,500-year-old, 300-metre-long stone arrangement resembling an eel on his Lake Bolac property. 

    The giant formation is known to Djap Wurrung traditional owners as the kuyang ceremonial ground and has been a recognised and registered site of Aboriginal significance since 1975.

• 🇨🇦 What Carney’s win means for environment and climate issues in Canada

  • Canada’s 2025 federal election campaign started on the heels of a prime minister stepping down and a tariff war brewing across the border. The dramatic twists upended what was an assumed Conservative win to instead keep the Liberals in power for their fourth consecutive term.

• 🇧🇷 Eucalyptus for Brazil’s steelmaking dries out communities in Minas Gerais

  • Acesita was privatized in 1992, and in 2011 the company and its plantations came under the control of Europe-based Aperam. Experts warn that these vast plantations have drained much of the water resources that once sustained the Alto Jequitinhonha Valley’s most marginalized communities, including quilombos, settlements established by formerly enslaved Africans.

📈 Cool Trends

• 🌍 A women-led accelerator reviving food security in Africa

• 👖 ‘You sold it – now recycle it’: the protesters mailing worn-out clothes to the shops they bought them from

♾️ eco-story

I met my six-year-old self last night.
She couldn’t sleep. She was scared.

She only wanted to talk about the seagulls and the cormorants, the fish and the dolphins she had seen covered in a thick, black layer—their feathers and wings glued together as they struggled to open them, their eyes shut. They were trying to survive under a petroleum blanket that spread faster than they could ever outrun it.

“Why?” she asked. “Why did they let it happen? Why are animals suffering? Why aren’t the waves moving? Why is the ocean black?”

I could have answered her. I could have explained that a handful of old men allowed it to happen. We could have talked about how they got away with it—how a carefully managed chain of irresponsibility and corruption let them walk free.

But she didn’t want to hear it. And even if she had, she wouldn’t have understood.

Twenty-three years later, I don’t think I understand it either.

🌏 The Culture Column

📺 What we’re watching: An Inconvenient Truth

📸 Profile of the week: @patiencenabukalu
📖 What we’re reading: Resistance Guide: How to Sustain the Movement to Win, by Paul Engler, Sophie Lasoff
🤯 Shocking fact we learnt this week: Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts, and those that engage a threshold of 3.5% of the population have virtually never failed to bring about change.