Earth Gives

📢 Exciting news for educators! Our COP29 Teacher Guide is here, offering 10 powerful resources to help students explore global climate negotiations. 🌍This guide provides lesson plans, activities, and videos aligned with UNESCO’s curriculum guidance and SDGs.  Created in partnership with Council on Foreign Relations and Take Action Global, this guide will inspire real-world learning! Explore the Guide👉 https://bit.ly/3C8bEEC #COP29 #ClimateEducation #SustainableFuture #SDGs

As we see the escalating effects of the climate crisis play out in ‘natural’ disasters of fires and floods across the globe, progress can feel unbearably slow. Despite, or perhaps because of that, we keep going. This week’s stories of outrage and optimism (because we need both): 🔥 OUTRAGE 1: In a week of continuing natural disasters across the globe, COP16 ended with rich countries blocking a proposal to set up a new nature fund to help poorer nations restore their depleted natural environments. 🌱 OPTIMISM 1:  Positive COP16 outcomes included the creation of a permanent body for Indigenous peoples to officially consult on UN nature decisions and agreement on how companies should pay for the use of genetic information drawn from biodiversity. 🔥 OUTRAGE 2: The death toll from catastrophic flooding in Valencia, Spain, has reached 217. Thousands of troops have been sent to assist in devastated areas. Unless we get a handle on rising temperatures, we can expect worse to come. 🌱 OPTIMISM 2: The EU's greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 'huge' 8% in 2023. The decline is attributed to a surge in renewable energy use. However the EU is still not on track to meet its own climate action targets. 🔥 OUTRAGE 3:  While the EU’s emissions are down, globally it’s a different story: warming gases are accumulating faster than at any time in human existence, leaving us ‘wildly off track’ in our efforts to tackle climate change. 🌱 OPTIMISM 3: A global area of forest bigger than Mexico has the potential for natural forest restoration, which could store more than 23bn tonnes of carbon over the course of three decades, according to new research published in Nature. As always each news item we’ve included is a complex story in its own right, reduced here to a single line as a potential signpost for further reading. You can find the links to the news sources in the comments. 🎧 Feed your ears with more outrage and optimism - every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

🚨 “Chemical warfare” against forests...on the front page of The New York Times. We caught JBS red-handed sourcing from a rancher who used the key compound from Agent Orange to poison 200,000 acres of forest amidst the world’s largest concentration of jaguars and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We’re excited that the investigation is drawing such high profile attention after months of work. We hope it will drive action to prevent this kind of “War on Nature” from happening ever again. The story is pretty insane: A rancher, Claudecy Oliveira Lemes, was caught engaged in illegal deforestation and fined in 2019 by Brazilian authorities. That should have disqualified him from supplying any of the large cattle companies. Instead, he turned to herbicides to attempt to conceal his deforestation across an area the size of New York City because it is harder to detect from satellites than bulldozers or fire. But the chemicals not only destroy the forest, they leave a tell-tale chemical residue on the land and water. Fortunately, based on tips, the Brazilian environmental protection agency Ibama caught Lemes and is now seeking up to $1 billion in fines, a record in the state of Mato Grosso. Even after the deforestation was exposed, JBS still didn’t stop. We caught them selling cattle linked to Lemes as late as 2024. Companies like Stop & Shop, Costco Wholesale, and McDonald's’s have continued to do business with JBS despite repeated criminal behavior in their supply chain. We’re calling on them now to stop selling meat from any company that engages in this type of extreme negligence. There are 1.6 billion acres of previously deforested land where agriculture can expand without threatening native ecosystems. Time to only do business with companies responsible enough to deliver that. Huge thanks to reporters Jack Nicas and Flávia Milhorance for their outstanding work (read for free here): https://lnkd.in/emVhqmTX And of course my amazing colleagues who led this investigation Mariana Bombo Perozzi Gameiro, João Gonçalves, Carole Mitchell, Boris Patentreger, Alex Wijeratna, Maira Irigaray, Jackson Harris, Jordan McDonald, Sydney Jones. And our partners Joana Faggin and Marco Garcia of AidEnvironment and the incomparable André Campos, Poliana Dallabrida, and Marcel Gomes of Repórter Brasil.

🔊 The latest Hower Impact podcast features our very own Deborah McNamara and Bill Weihl and aims to help listeners better understand the conundrum of why companies who profess to care about sustainability often fail to back this up in the policy arena. Mike Hower digs into asking the tough questions like why are companies are so scared to speak up on climate policy during this pivotal moment and what can we all do to influence companies to do better? You don't want to miss listening to this one!👂👉 https://lnkd.in/gKTmxSUa