Marina Silva’s achievements may seem borderline miraculous. Since taking office for a second run as Brazil’s environment and climate minister in 2023, the country has quickly and dramatically reversed deforestation trends with strict enforcement of environment rules that had been abandoned by her predecessor. According to the most recent official account released last fall, Amazon deforestation had fallen to the lowest level in a decade. In 2023 alone, it dropped nearly in half from the prior year. “When we took office, we had deforestation on an ascending curve that was out of control,” she told me on April 30. “We had to rebuild institutions, command and control organizations, and increase public funding.” And yet, as we met in her office in Brasília, she was careful not to linger too long on the success. The Amazon rain forest is dangerously close to a tipping point that could rapidly reshape not just the world’s most famous rainforest biome but the whole planet. Once reached, the Amazon would lose the ability to sustain itself and vast swathes would transform into savannah, resulting in the loss of biodiversity and also a massive release of carbon dioxide. To halt it, she says, leaders will need to embrace new mechanisms to stop legal deforestation and catalyze efforts to reforest degraded land—all while continuing ongoing enforcement work. But, she says, saving the Amazon will require work beyond Brazil’s borders: the world will need to slow its burning of fossil fuels. Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily “Even if we can nullify deforestation, with climate change, if we don't reduce carbon from fossil fuel emissions, the forest will be destroyed anyway,” she says. For Silva, who was born and raised to a family of rubber tappers in the remote Amazonian state of Acre, this is the next step on a lifelong journey of Amazon protection. But it’s also a key, potentially make or break moment as Brazil occupies the center of the climate movement this year as it hosts the annual U.N. climate conference, COP30, in November. “We're already at the limit, at the changing, shifting point of the climate crisis,” she says. “There was a window of opportunity of not shooting over the 1.5 degree limit, and now it's just a sliver.” Even a seasoned climate expert would be forgiven for struggling to track all the work happening in Brazil ahead of COP30. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known simply as Lula, has made climate a top priority with ministers across the government focused on tackling the issue. Silva, a national figure in Brazil who finished third in the 2014 presidential election, has turned her ministry into a central node in the effort. Advertisement While I was in Brazil, the government announced a $2 billion financing program to reforest up to 1 million hectares (about the size of the island of Hawaii) of degraded land in the Amazon. And in recent months Silva has doubled down on work with her counterpart in the finance ministry on a $125 billion fund aimed at protecting tropical forests around the world. Beyond the rain forest work, the government has rolled out a carbon price for domestic industries—and talked about how it might work with other countries to harmonize equivalent policies elsewhere. Silva hopes that these efforts all come together at COP30 as part of a broader effort to make the conference a pivotal moment for the implementation of climate initiatives globally. She described the emerging COP30 goal as a “global ethical stocktake”: Lula and U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres will hear from a wide group of stakeholders—from philosophers to Indigenous people to political leadership—with an eye to helping the world chart a plan for putting climate solutions into action. “We can't keep pushing things off,” she says. “We need to implement.” Advertisement It goes without saying that this year’s climate negotiations will be rife with challenges—perhaps none more significant than the challenge posed by the U.S. pullback from the international Paris climate engagement. Silva did not mince words on the role of the U.S. and the Trump Administration in muddying global climate discussions. Without my prompting, she criticized everything from his exiting the Paris Agreement to his decision to ice the National Climate Assessment. All of that leaves a massive gap in the necessary climate action, she says: “Things have become more difficult, especially with the decisions of the Trump Administration.” My visit to Brasilia happened to coincide with a key meeting of the BRICS countries—a group of emerging market countries that cooperate as a counterweight to U.S. and European power. In my hotel, I spotted the Chinese foreign minister walking through the lobby with his entourage along with other country delegations. But Silva says the rest of the world can't replace the actions needed from the U.S. “We can't be deniers, not with geopolitics, not with climate,” she told me. “The vacuum created by the U.S. is the U.S.’s vacuum.” Advertisement She pointed to challenging geopolitics, in part, to respond to questions about Lula’s own climate leadership. Despite his focus on the issue, some environmental activists have criticized him, saying he is moving too slowly and not doing enough. One area of particular concern: new oil exploration efforts in the Amazon region currently under consideration. Asked about the pending decision, Silva first pivoted to the stone-cold geopolitical realities. Oil demand remains high and supply is strained. The U.S. position has created a sense across the globe that fossil fuels will be around for a while. The solution, she says, is a well-managed transition. “What I defend is a fair transition, a planned transition for everybody,” she says. “When I say fair and planned, it's because it's not magic.” COP30, with Brazil at the helm, is a good place to start implementing such a transition.

As military tensions continue to flare up between India and Pakistan, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed earlier this week to stop water from crossing the border into Pakistan, saying "India's water will be used for India's interests." On April 23, Modi suspended a 1960 treaty that allows the two countries to share water from the Indus Basin. Building infrastructure to stop the flow of water into Pakistan, however, would take India years to carry out, and the move would further strain the resources of a water-scarce country. Pakistan’s water resources have already been burdened by climate change, as the country faces rising temperatures, droughts, and melting glaciers and superfloods that are impacting the timing of water flow. Now, India’s moves could exacerbate the crisis—and present long-term challenges for Pakistan’s agricultural sector. Many Pakistanis currently lack access to clean and reliable water sources—in part due to climate change. In the months after the 2022 floods killed at least 1,700 people, more than 10 million people were left without access to safe drinking water, according to a UNICEF report. “There's been quite a lot of difficulty for local populations to have access to water on a consistent basis,” says Bhargabi Bharadwaj, research associate at the Environment and Society Center at Chatham House. “This is already being felt at local population level, even scrapping this most recent escalation on the Indus Water Treaty agreement.” Why does India control Pakistan’s water supply? When the South Asian subcontinent was cleaved by the British in 1947, boundaries were drawn that divided the Indus River along India and Pakistan. “The problem starts on day one,” says Hassaan Khan, assistant professor of urban and environmental policy at Tufts University. Much of the headwaters are located in India, despite most irrigation systems falling in Pakistan. “Around 80% of Pakistan's agriculture and the third of its hydropower depends on the water from the Indus Basin region,” says Bharadwaj. “There is a greater dependency on this basin for Pakistan than there is for India.” Advertisement The Indus Waters Treaty was drawn up in 1960 by the World Bank, and required the two countries to divide the river system’s water equally. The treaty included mechanisms to resolve disputes—and was designed to last in perpetuity. For India to cut Pakistan’s water supply altogether would be an impossible task. “Currently, India does not have the infrastructure capacity to really store excess water, which is what they'd be required to do if they're kind of trying to cut away from letting this water reach Pakistan,” says Bharadwaj. But still, experts say India could engineer small disruptions that would impact how much water flows into Pakistan. “Stopping the flow isn’t really possible,” says Khan. “What [India can do] is impact the timing of the flow—release more water one day and then stop. [It can] create these small disturbances, which, if they're not properly managed by Pakistan, can have an impact on the agricultural system.” Advertisement The impact would likely largely be felt during the low flow season—from December to February—when there’s less water to begin with. But Bharadwaj notes that the Indus Water Treaty was designed to withstand the many tussles the two countries have had over the years. “This isn’t the first time this has happened,” she says. “One of the very positive things about the Indus Water Treaty is that it has withstood two previous wars and another limited conflict between the two countries, and that can be, I think, largely attributed to the strength of its design.” Why does Pakistan have a water crisis? Pakistan’s water scarcity crisis can be traced back to before the country was founded. “The regions that now make up most of Pakistan as part of the Indus Basin, they're alluvial plains, so they're very fertile, but typically don't have that much rainfall,” says Daniel Haines, associate professor in the history of risk and disaster at University College London whose research focuses on South Asia. "The ambition to increase the acreage of farmland outstripped the amount of water that was available.” Advertisement As early as the 1930s and ‘40s, different regions of then colonial India were already disputing who would get what amount of water for agricultural projects, says Haines. Climate change and rapid population growth is now making things worse. Today, Pakistan is considered one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. And last winter was one of the driest in the country’s history, with the Pakistan Meteorological Department reporting 67% less rainfall than usual. According to the Germanwatch 2025 Climate Risk Index, Pakistan ranked as the most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change in 2022, as it faced one of the costliest disasters in world history caused by the flooding—putting much of the country’s agricultural land at risk and impacting drinking water. But farmlands are also becoming unusable due to increasing droughts, pushing more people into cities and placing a strain on urban water supplies. Advertisement “Cities now are increasingly water stressed, because water supply hasn't kept up with the increase in population,” says Khan. Over three-quarters of Pakistan’s renewable water resources come from outside its borders—mostly from the Indus Basin, and major cities rely on that for their drinking water. Any changes to the country's water supply will have major impacts on agriculture and livelihoods for millions, says Haines. “Because the water system in Pakistan is already so stressed, any kind of major disruption to even the timing, let alone the volume, would potentially have pretty serious consequences.”

Seven months after the death of Lilly Ledbetter, for whom Congress’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named after, a film about her life opens in theaters May 9. In the biopic Lilly, Patricia Clarkson stars as Ledbetter, a Goodyear employee who found out that she was getting paid less than fellow supervisors who were men, and follows her legal journey to the U.S. Supreme Court. The film culminates in the historic 2009 passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in Congress. Growing up in poverty gave Ledbetter the resilience necessary to endure a lengthy legal fight. She was born in 1938 in Alabama, when there were few career options for women. “She grew up without running water, without electricity, with only a high school education,” says Lanier Scott Isom, who helped Ledbetter put together her 2012 memoir Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond. “Her clothes were made out of feed sack material.” She was never afraid to get her hands dirty. For example, she worked at a chicken processing plant at one point to help her family make ends meet. In 1979, as a married mother of two children, she landed a job as a supervisor at Goodyear’s Gadsden, Alabama, plant. Her husband was always supportive of job, but she encountered many men who felt threatened by her. Ledbetter had always been outspoken about the sexual harassment she experienced on the job. As Isom explains: “One of her supervisors basically said [paraphrasing], ‘If you want to go to the motel down the street with me, I would ensure your promotion.’" Lilly writer and director Rachel Feldman adds: "There was one guy who could not stop talking about her underwear and what kind of bra she was wearing, and one man who said [paraphrasing], ‘I don't like women around here. What if I have to scratch my balls and fart?’” Work wasn’t the only place where Ledbetter encountered offensive men. When her son suffered from repeated ear infections growing up and needed surgery, a doctor suggested she earn the money by participating in a program where young surgeons were learning how to perform hysterectomies. Nineteen years into a job at Goodyear, she learned that a young man she had just trained was making more than she was. An anonymous tipster left her a note at work that had the salaries of her male counterparts written out, so she could see that she was making up to $2,000 a month less than they were.

Top negotiators from the United States and China are set to meet in Geneva on Saturday, as the world’s two largest economies seek to navigate a path away from a bruising trade war that has disrupted global supply chains, slowed economic growth, and sent shockwaves through industries from electronics to agriculture. The talks will mark the first face-to-face meeting between senior officials from the two countries since President Donald Trump imposed historically high 145% tariffs on most Chinese imports in early April. They come on the heels of Trump hailing a “full and comprehensive” trade agreement reached with the United Kingdom on Thursday that left many key sticking points unresolved.But hopes for a breakthrough this weekend with the Chinese remain muted. Trump—who has long decried the trade deficits the U.S. has with China and other countries—tried this week to frame the dramatic slowdown in shipments from China as a positive sign. “We were losing a trillion dollars a year, now we’re not losing anything, you know? That’s the way I look at it,” he said Thursday. Some analysts are skeptical that the meeting will result in any tangible outcomes. “The U.S. has not been particularly interested in what anybody else wants,” says Mary Lovely, an expert on U.S.-China Relations and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The U.S. is still dependent on China for many individual goods, so China still has a lot of power in this relationship.” Here’s what to know about Saturday’s trade negotiations between the U.S. and China.U.S. officials will be led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who have signaled that they view these initial talks as a chance to begin easing tensions. “My sense is that this will be about de-escalation, not about the big trade deal,” Bessent told Fox News on Tuesday. Chinese negotiators, led by Vice Premier He Lifeng, are arriving with similar caution, wary of making concessions without signs of U.S. compromise. “To pressure or coerce China in whatever way simply does not work,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian wrote on X. Still, the decision to bring senior negotiators from both sides to the table is being seen by some analysts as a positive step forward after months of economic brinkmanship. While expectations for a breakthrough remain low, the fact that both countries have agreed to talk signals a recognition of the steep costs of prolonged conflict. “If we see anything coming out about how the process might be continued, that would be a win,” Lovely says. Trump struck a defiant tone ahead of the talks, telling reporters Thursday that his Administration’s tariff strategy had left China “with absolutely no business” and expressed confidence that the talks would be “very substantive.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. The new Pope is an American. Do not for a minute think he wants to Make America Great Again. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost on Thursday became leader to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and took the name Leo XIV. But the former missionary stands to be an ideological check on a certain breed of American-styled Catholicism, which in recent years has been ascendant in Washington yet has drifted into more conservative lanes than its global brethren. With Vice President J.D. Vance and six of the nine Supreme Court Justices as part of his flock, Leo becomes the most powerful Catholic both in the world and among Americans. And Leo, known in Rome as “The Latin Yankee,” clearly represents a rejection by the Vatican of the intense lobbying from rich Americans to install a pontiff sympathetic to President Donald Trump, who went so far as to joke he should be a simultaneous Pope and President.“Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope,” Trump posted to his social media site. “It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!” Perhaps. But like his predecessor, Pope Francis, there’s a very good chance that Leo and Trump will clash on serious issues like immigration, human rights, and the environment. The new Pope has a history of amplifying messages in support of racial justice and gun safety, and against capital punishment. Read More: Where Pope Leo Stands on Specific Issues Another collision between the civic leader of the United States and the sacred leader of the Catholic Church seems inevitable, especially given Trump’s obsession with a nationalistic agenda that would co-opt Christianity in service of his political goals. Within hours of his election, the MAGAverse seemed to be gunning for the new pontiff in nakedly political terms. While Trump rushed to the White House driveway to praise the Chicago-born and Villanova-educated Leo, his legion of fans were less laudatory. “WOKE MARXIST POPE,” tweeted far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who also called Leo “just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”

As the richest woman in the world, Alice Walton could turn her sizable resources to any cause. She chose health. After her own experience in and out of hospitals to treat a bone infection following a car accident, she saw firsthand how “broken” the U.S. health care system is, she says—from the widely disparate health services that people living in different parts of the country can access, to the skewed financial system that incentivizes more tests and procedures instead of medical care that focuses on providing the best health outcomes. Her solution was to create the Alice Walton School of Medicine, which will open in her home state of Arkansas in July 2025 and will train doctors with an innovative approach that addresses the whole patient, including behaviors and lifestyle as well as their physical symptoms. “Doctors are not trained in nutrition and preventive care because they are not paid to do it,” says Walton. “The health system and medical schools are just reacting to what the system incentivizes.” Walton will cover tuition for the first five classes. “I wanted to create a school that really gives doctors training on, number one, how to keep patients healthy, and, number two, the financial incentives in the system and what they should be so we can move toward value-based payments,” she says. And because Walton is a longtime art collector, the medical school will also feature a heavy dose of exposure to art. The school is steps from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., which she opened in 2011 to share her collection with the public. Art helped her through her own health journey, and she’s convinced that it will play an important role in teaching both doctors and patients how to take better care of themselves. “I do believe that the art world and the health care world need to collide more, because both will benefit from it,” she says. “It’s going to be exciting to see what happens.”

More than 21,000 people in Africa contracted mpox in 2024—a bad number that could have been much worse without the help of Nicaise Ndembi, then senior adviser to the director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now the deputy director general of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI). In his time at Africa CDC, Ndembi helped manage the continent-wide response to mpox—strengthening surveillance and screening and providing vaccines and medicinal therapeutics—and the Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing, which created a framework for regional vaccine manufacturing and self-reliance. In his new role at the IVI, he will work to establish home-grown vaccine research and development, accelerating vaccine availability and distribution across Africa’s 54 countries. Correction, May 12 The original version of this story misstated Ndembi's former position and mischaracterized his roles in the mpox response and Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM). He was formerly senior adviser to the director-general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the head of the organization. He did not solely lead the mpox response in Africa or establish the PAVM; he was part of teams that did so.

Antibiotics are the workhorses of the medical world, critical for controlling infections and saving lives but rarely grabbing the attention that blockbuster treatments often do. Dame Emma Walmsley, CEO of the pharmaceutical company GSK, admits they have become “unfashionable.” But a new antibiotic for treating urinary tract infections (UTIs) might change that. In March, her team at GSK received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a new type of antibiotic, Blujepa, that interrupts the ability of UTI-causing bacteria, E. coli, to replicate. The drug targets two enzymes that E. coli use to untangle their genetic material in order to proliferate. And because Blujepa works through a novel approach, scientists hope the drug will make it harder for the bacteria to develop resistance against it. Focusing on a new antibiotic for UTIs, which haven’t had a novel therapy in decades, was intentional, Walmsley says. Half of women have a UTI at least once in their lifetime, and many experience repeat infections, raising the risk that the bacteria may become resistant to the antibiotics they take. Walmsley says GSK is also developing a different antibiotic to treat more complicated UTI cases as well.

Dr. Paul Offit knows a thing or two about public health and vaccines—and what he’s been seeing lately deeply troubles him. As director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory committee, Offit has long been a vocal proponent of robust vaccine programs. Having Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal vaccine skeptic, in the top health job in the federal government “couldn’t be worse,” Offit says. Already, measles is spreading dangerously among pockets of unvaccinated children—even killing some of them, an unheard-of situation in recent history—while the government’s message to get vaccinated is muted, at best. The FDA also canceled its meeting to plan for next year’s flu shot. “I feel like we have been invaded by a foreign country whose principal objective is to destroy the entire infrastructure of public health,” Offit says. In this new era, he is talking to anyone who will listen—patients, the media, policymakers—about the importance of vaccines. “Through my Substack posts and interviews, I have tried to emphasize the continued threat of RFK Jr. to the health and well-being of America's children,” he says.

Steve Beard knows that diverse health care is better health care. The belief drives his efforts as CEO of Adtalem Global Education, a corporation that operates institutions for higher learning including Chamberlain University, Walden University, and Ross University School of Medicine. “Science shows the benefits of a diverse health care workforce, and no one makes a larger contribution to that goal than Adtalem’s institutions,” Beard says. Under his leadership, Adtalem has made large strides in addressing shortages of health care workers while increasing racial representation. With more than 90,000 students currently enrolled at its schools, Adtalem has become one of the leading suppliers of doctors, nurses, veterinarians, and social workers to the U.S. workforce. Adtalem’s medical schools are major producers of Black physicians in the U.S.—and over the past year, 95% of its medical school graduates have successfully secured hospital residencies, helping to shore up critical areas like primary care and underserved communities. Beard’s institutions are at the forefront of technology. In 2024, Adtalem forged a new partnership with Hippocratic AI, developing curricula to train nursing students—and soon physicians—to use AI tools to monitor patients and improve follow-ups after treatment. “Some of these innovations will relieve administrative burdens in ways that create better quality of life, on the hospital floor and at the bedside,” Beard says.Beard’s path from first-generation college student to changemaker is a personal success story—and through Adtalem, it’s become a model for building the next generation of health care professionals.