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.”

The Trump Administration signed an executive order late last month aiming to fast-track approval for seabed mining critical minerals found in the deep sea. The move has faced international condemnation, particularly from experts who say that more research needs to be done into the impacts the practice might have on deep sea ecosystems, the majority of which remain unexplored. A new study published today in Science Advances shows just how little we know about the deep sea. According to the research, humans have observed less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor—an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. The deep sea refers to the part of the ocean below 200 meters (656 ft.), at which light begins to disappear. Despite making up more than 90% of the Earth’s marine environment, much of the deep-sea ecosystems is still a question mark for researchers. But the area is critical for maintaining our climate—absorbing about 90% of the excess heat and about 30% of the carbon dioxide that's been released into the atmosphere by human activities. “If all of that had stayed into the atmosphere, it would make life on Earth practically impossible,” says Katy Croff Bell, president of Ocean Discovery League, National Geographic Explorer, and lead author of the study. The area humans have explored is vastly limited—and heavily biased towards certain regions. Over 65% of visual observations have occurred within 200 nautical miles of three countries: the United States, Japan, and New Zealand, meaning that much of our assumptions about the deep sea are based on a minuscule sample size. “It’s like if we were to make all assumptions about terrestrial ecosystems from observations of 0.001% of land area, that would equate to smaller than the land area of Houston, Texas,” says Bell. To determine the amount of the seafloor we have explored, the team drew on data from approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives with observations conducted since 1958. The 0.001% also includes assumptions about the number of private dive records that are not publicly recorded. Because so little is still known about this ecosystem, many experts fear deep-sea mining could come with too great a risk to the environment. Thirty-two countries have called for a moratorium on the practice, and Bell hopes the study shows the need for further research before countries begin extractive—and potentially irreparable—mining practices in the deep sea. “[We need to know] what kind of impacts are we going to have on the deep sea, and will the deep sea recover from those activities?” Bell says. “That's a big open question right now. What we don't want to do is do irreparable harm to the deep ocean. So we really need this baseline information about the deep sea.”

From vehicle exhaust to manufacturing plumes, nearly every person in the world breathes in unhealthy air on a daily basis. The impact is deadly: air pollution is responsible for 7 million premature deaths around the world per year according to the World Health Organization (WHO), making it the second leading risk factor for death behind high blood pressure. But that number could be significantly cut, researchers say, if we reduce greenhouse gases and air pollutants. A new study published in the journal Earth’s Future on May 6 found that up to 250,000 deaths from poor air quality in central and western Europe alone could be prevented by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced. The researchers, from the University of Leeds in England, looked at the health impacts in Europe in 2014 and 2050 from exposure to two types of pollution. The first is fine particulate matter, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and pose the greatest health risks. This pollution comes from sources such as wildfires or construction sites. The other is surface level ozone, which forms when sunlight interacts with certain pollutants like nitrogen oxides, and is the result of things like vehicle exhaust and factory emissions. Exposure to these air pollutants can lead to long-term health complications, including stroke, heart disease, and pneumonia. Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily The team examined three scenarios in which policymakers took low, medium, and high levels of action to combat climate change, and created an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate the possible air quality in 2050. The researchers defined a high level of action as being one where emissions from the housing, industry, transport, and agricultural sectors are cut for 70% of the population of Western and Central Europe to below the WHO's air quality guideline for annual fine particulate matter. Doing so, they found, would improve air quality across the continent and lead to large reductions in mortality overall. And it could help tackle health inequities. Globally, poorer communities are more likely to be exposed to unhealthy air quality when compared with higher-income areas. Researchers found that disadvantaged regions of Europe currently have proportionally higher death rates compared to higher-income regions. Their findings show that a significant reduction in emissions—seen in the high action scenario—would help reduce that inequality. But under the medium and low impact scenarios health impacts would worsen, highlighting the necessity of aggressive climate mitigation practices. Advertisement Air pollution in Europe has been on the decline for the last two decades, as the E.U. has adopted more comprehensive clean air policies, however more work remains to be done. There are still regions across the E.U. that have pollutant concentrations that exceed the bloc’s current standards. The researchers hope that their findings might encourage policymakers to consider not just the health impacts of air pollution, but also how emissions reduction solutions can help marginalized communities who are disproportionately impacted. “The strategies that policymakers take to mitigate climate change will have considerable implications for human exposure to air quality, not least of which are the number of deaths,” lead author Connor Clayton, a PhD student in the School of Earth and Environment and the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at Leeds University, said in a press release. “But they also urgently need to consider the persistent inequity of exposure between wealthier and more deprived populations which continues to be an issue even though air pollution has reduced across Europe.”

For the last year, the energy and climate narrative has been intimately intertwined with questions about AI’s impact on energy demand. As tech companies race to construct new data centers, they’ve turned the U.S. emissions reduction story on its head. In this environment, Brazil senses an opportunity. Up to this point, the AI demand story has been a U.S. one, but Brazilian officials want to convince tech companies to set up shop in their country. They cite the nation’s strategic location as a central hub in South America and supportive policy environment, but the biggest selling point by far is the country’s electricity system: nearly 90% comes from renewable energy and Brazil already has good transmission infrastructure that moves electricity across the country. As I talked to officials on the ground in Brazil this week, the topic seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. “Our message to the world, on the basis of our plan, is that AI [power demand] is satiable with usage of renewable energy sources,” Luis Manuel Rebelo Fernandes, Brazil’s deputy minister of science, technology, and innovation, told me on a panel at the Web Summit in Rio de Janeiro. There are signs the bet is paying off: dozens of data centers are in development across Brazil as big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft pour billions into the sector there. It’s an important story for Brazil and the Latin American market, of course, but I share it also to illustrate the competitive dividend that can come from clean energy. As electricity in some emerging market countries increasingly comes from solar power, they may stand to gain foreign investment—not just from AI but also from any foreign investor who wants their products made cleanly. Brazil’s clean energy story begins long before climate change became a global concern. Beginning in the late 19th century, the country built dams to power its industry, harnessing some of Brazil’s 37,000 miles of waterways for fuel development. By the 1960s, the country was building mega dams that on their own provide much of the country’s power. Because dams aren’t necessarily near cities, Brazil built an extensive transmission system creating an integrated network. (Unlike the U.S., which is set up in a complex maze with three main regions with regulatory authority divided between states and the federal government.) In short, Brazil didn’t create a clean grid to be able to tout an environmental message. But, as big companies continue to work toward their climate goals (even if more quietly than before), the grid gives it a critical advantage. “Brazil is well positioned,” Luciana Aparecida da Costa, director of infrastructure, energy transition, and climate change at BNDES, the Brazilian development bank, told me in São Paulo. “But we know that we have to compete with other countries to attract this.” Advertisement Nonetheless, as much as the country’s electric grid is a selling point, Brazil still has questions to answer. Climate change has affected water levels, sparking concerns about the reliability of hydropower. And a rapid rise in electricity demand could stress the grid just as is happening in the U.S. To address those concerns, the Brazilian government has prioritized supporting new renewable energy generation to go along with new data centers. Funding to ensure that happens is a key plank in the county’s $4 billion AI plan launched last year. “Every expansion of high performance computing is associated in the plan to the development of dedicated sources of renewable energy,” said Fernandes. And private companies are looking to do the same. In April, for example, Reuters reported that TikTok parent company ByteDance was considering a massive data center investment in Brazil as the company grows its AI footprint—with new wind power attached. Advertisement To be clear, there’s no question that the AI race, as it stands today, is between the U.S. and China. That’s where the models that AI runs on are being developed, and where the most capital is being deployed. But Brazil’s pitch—and its early success—is a reminder of the competitive appeal of clean energy in the global market.

Severe storms hit the Pittsburgh area earlier this week—killing three and causing widespread power outages in the region. It’s the latest in a string of deadly storms in the U.S.—at least 24 people were killed after storms hit the south and midwest in early April, and at least 32 people were killed when storms swept through much of the country in mid-March. Following both storms, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), stepped in to provide assistance to individuals and counties. While Pittsburgh might not need FEMA aid, if the Trump Administration has it their way, many communities across the country could be left in the lurch on disaster recovery aid, as the administration looks to dismantle the agency and shift disaster response onto states. And climate change is only making it more complicated. The reality of leaving disaster response to states would be "devastating," says Allison Reilly, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland. “FEMA exists because there are times when the state can simply not respond.” Trump first posed the idea of overhauling FEMA while visiting North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in January. “I’d like to see the states take care of disasters, let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen. And I think you’re going to find it a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half and you’re going to get a lot quicker response," he said. One of his first executive orders was establishing a council to assess the effectiveness of the disaster response agency. Just days before the Pittsburgh storm, Trump appointed 13 people—including Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem—to review FEMA. The group is expected to submit a report to the president within 180 days, according to the executive order. Trump’s move to dismantle the agency comes as extreme weather events are only becoming more common—and more costly. In 2024, the U.S. saw 27 weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages each—second only to 2023, which had 28 billion-dollar events. And researchers predict an above-average hurricane season is on the horizon. “There's a tremendous opportunity for national emergency management capability to invest in… the impacts of climate change, and how can we better prepare,” says Jeff Schlegelmilch, associate professor of professional practice and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia Climate School. Advertisement FEMA wasn’t designed to meet our changing climate. “FEMA and the structure of disaster response and its inception was really designed to handle maybe one or two major disaster recoveries at a time. And currently there's over 100,” says Schlegelmilch. “The mechanisms of disaster response recovery have vastly outgrown [FEMA's capabilities].” Traditionally, FEMA has worked alongside state officials— not independent of them. The agency does more than just give out money: FEMA deploys experts in disaster response and recovery and maintains stockpiles of emergency equipment. Outsourcing this to states would prove to be more expensive, according to research from the Atlantic Council—and could lead to states bidding for emergency supplies and expertise in the event of a natural disaster. In the absence of FEMA, states would have to hire their own disaster response experts to be on standby. “It means that every state has to have such a large body of people who could respond to a disaster, but for exceedingly rare events,” says Reilly. “You're going to need a lot of people on staff with nothing to do for a long period of time until disaster happens. Or you're going to have states who are just completely ill prepared, which is probably more likely to happen.” Advertisement Larger states—like California or Texas—might have the funding to pick up the slack, but smaller states simply would not have the capacity to respond to natural disasters. Experts say that FEMA has very real issues that need to be addressed—the agency’s staff is stretched thin across an increasing number of disasters, and the agency often leaves behind low-income survivors in disaster response. “The need for emergency management reform is something that's actually been called on by people of all walks of life. If we can rebrand and create something for 21st century challenges, we should,” says Schlegelmilch. But getting rid of the system without a meaningful replacement will only cause harm, says Schlegelmilch. “That shock [for] municipalities from that sudden change of one system to suddenly nothing being there [would] be very measurable in terms of lost lives and livelihoods.”

Mark Carney was elected to a full term as Canada’s prime minister Monday with a campaign agenda focused squarely on pushing back on attacks from his counterpart to the South, President Donald Trump. Insofar as climate was a factor on the campaign trail, it was mainly about Carney ditching a key part of his predecessor’s signature carbon tax. But just by virtue of his resume as a leading voice on climate and finance he becomes a climate prime minister that the environmental movement can claim as its own. The ascendance of Carney as a climate prime minister who didn’t talk about climate is all the more striking when considered alongside last year’s election in Mexico of Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist who also avoided talking about the issue in her campaign. She ran on continuing her predecessor’s work, most importantly popular social programs. (The previous president rarely talked about climate.) The result is that the U.S., where Trump has nixed climate policies left and right, is now the regional outlier, squeezed in the middle of a climate sandwich, with implications for the longtime allyship between the three countries. Beyond that, the success of both Carney and Sheinbaum offers an opportunity for reflection. For the last 15 years, advocates in the U.S. have pushed for climate to take a bigger role on the political stage. The logic being that making climate a top-tier issue would result in more climate leaders in elected office and, in turn, better climate policy. The results, as evidenced by the Biden campaign and presidency, have been mixed: the U.S. has enacted big climate policies but it’s unclear whether the country can sustain them. Carney and Sheinbaum offer an opportunity to test a different theory. Few who work on climate change would have chosen a route that involved actively not talking about the climate crisis. But if the two leaders can use their positions to implement climate policy strategically while the public remains focused on trade, geopolitics, and bread and butter issues, they will have forged a new model for what it means to be a climate leader. Anyone who has spent time working at the intersection of climate and economics will have seen Carney in action. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Carney later ran Canada’s central bank beginning in 2008 before running the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. After leaving the world of monetary policy, he put climate at the center of his work. As the vice chairman at Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management, he ran the firm’s ESG portfolio and impact investing, launching funds aimed at financing clean energy investments in emerging markets. And, in his spare time, beginning in 2021 he chaired the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which helps financial institutions advance the energy transition. Over the course of the last five years, it was almost impossible to have a conversation about climate finance without hearing Carney’s name invoked. Advertisement As the Canadian electoral campaign wound on, I took a look back at the notes from my last conversation with Carney in 2022. He covered a range of subjects when we spoke, from the role of nuclear energy to the gap between climate targets and policies. He focused in particular on the role of financial institutions in fostering the transition. But the line that struck me most was a simple one, almost a cliche: “We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.” At the time, we were discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how the conflict had created new incentives for fossil fuel producers across the globe, but the sentiment could just as easily apply today. To an activist focused on big systemic change, Carney’s climate policy, buried deep in a section on his campaign site titled “Build,” might look almost like dreary stuff compared to bold ideas like a Green New Deal or even a carbon tax. But his proposals—including tax incentives, transition bonds, and a mechanism to tax high-carbon imports—are designed to move the needle all the same. “Different parties, different individuals have different views on whether you use pricing or regulation or subsidies,” he told me in 2022. “Spoiler alert: It is always some combination of the three.” Advertisement These efforts might be just drab enough to fly under the radar while also giving companies what they need to keep investing in the transition. To the south, Sheinbaum, who contributed to the important U.N. climate science reports before her career took a political turn, came out the gate with a modulation of her predecessor’s approach to climate. She promised more renewable energy, and a cap on oil production. But those promises have been far from central talking points as she too has focused on Trump’s trade war. Does it matter that the U.S. is out of step with its two neighbors, stuck between a climate scientist to the South and a climate economist to the North? In the short term, it might not change things all that much. But, in the long term, the significance shouldn’t be understated. Trump’s destruction of global trade norms means that the world will need to rewrite the rules of the road almost from scratch. For many countries, those new rules will include climate. Carney references a border tax on his campaign site. Moreover, both Canada and Mexico are home to rich mineral supply chains necessary for the energy transition. Both leaders have suggested they want to work with the U.S., but it’s also possible to imagine they choose to work with more reliable partners elsewhere. Advertisement “Critical minerals in particular are a potentially useful tool,” Canada’s energy and natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson told me in March, referring to the possibility that the country looks to partner with other nations to develop them to the exclusion of the U.S. But “we're not there yet.” It’s easy to imagine how we could be soon.

Prime Minister Mark Carney clinched a narrow win against Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party in Canada’s historic election on Monday night, securing a fourth term for the Liberal Party. The election was framed as a fight against U.S. President Donald Trump and his threats against the country—with all other issues falling by the wayside. Even Carney’s climate background wasn’t enough to put climate action on center stage—one recent poll found that climate change wasn’t among the top 10 priorities for Canadian voters. It’s a big shift from previous elections. “It doesn't really seem like this election was a climate change election,” says Jennifer Winter, professor at the school of public policy at the University of Calgary whose research focuses on climate policies. “The two overriding narratives, have been Trump and U.S. tariffs and its effect on Canada, and then the other predominant narrative is cost of living.” But the Liberal Party’s win means that Canada will likely stay the course on many existing environmental policies—including a zero-emission vehicle sales mandate along with clean electricity and fuel regulations. “In most respects, it is a continuation of a slate of policies that were put in place by the Liberal government under Justin Trudeau,” says Kathryn Harrison, professor of political science at the University of British Columbia. Carney’s career has often straddled the line between the private sector and the climate fight. He became a U.N. Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance in 2019, and in 2021 launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, an initiative aimed at bringing together financial institutions to support the transition to a net-zero economy. His experiences were reflected in many of the Liberal’s campaign proposals, Harrison says. “A couple of the items you see in the platform, [like] that commitment to sustainable investment guidelines, is very consistent with Carney's work as a special envoy,” she says. Carney, however, has vowed to make Canada “an energy superpower”—both in clean energy, as well as oil and gas. Harrison says the shift comes as Canada is looking to distance itself from importing natural resources from the U.S. “He seemed to be envisioning a pipeline that would serve Canada's own oil demand, rather than proposing new pipelines to get more of Canada's oil to the coast or to export it to [other] markets.” Advertisement And after first taking office when former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped down in March, one of Carney’s first moves was to scrap the country’s carbon tax, a divisive climate policy that placed an added fee on consumers using fossil fuels. The initiative was often blamed for rising costs of living in the country—even though 80% of families received more money in rebates than they paid in the tax. An essential next step for Carney, experts say, will be to find a replacement for the carbon tax. “It opens up the question of if Canada is still going to meet its emissions reduction goals without consumer emissions pricing, and what would replace it,” says Green. “I think this is one of the key things that will be answered in the coming weeks and months after the election.” Some, meanwhile, believe the government needs to think bigger. Canada wasn’t on track to meet emission reduction standards even with the carbon tax, says Rick Smith, president of the Canadian Climate Institute, who notes that the new leadership could provide momentum for Canada to embrace more ambitious policies. “There's a number of policies that need to be improved, that need to be added to the table to get the country back on track for the scale of emission reductions that we committed to under the powers agreement,” says Smith. While much debate has focused on the future of the consumer carbon tax, he recommends Canada instead focuses on solutions with greater potential for reducing emissions, like accelerated methane reduction policies or the creation of a national carbon market. “The question needs to be broadened.”

More and more, climate change is taking a toll not only on communities, the environment, and the economy, but also on human minds. In recent years, researchers have been describing what they variously label eco-distress, exo-anxiety, or even eco-grief—a suite of symptoms including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder—linked to experiencing severe weather events or simply living in a world in which climate change is becoming a growing crisis. Whatever name the phenomenon goes by, it spares no one; simply by dint of being exposed to a warming world, you have cause to feel distress about it. Last year was the warmest one on record, edging out 2023, which had briefly held the number one spot. The top 10 warmest years have all occurred since 2014. Extreme weather and other disasters linked to climate change—including wildfires, droughts, floods, and hurricanes—are all on the rise. Experts are finding, however, that one demographic may suffer more than others: young people. A recent flurry of papers has documented significant and growing levels of climate anxiety in the 25-and-under group, with even preschoolers sometimes showing symptoms. “You come across it in children as young as three,” says Elizabeth Haase, a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. “You find them on TikTok, sobbing about losing their teddy bears or sobbing that animals they loved got killed” in an extreme weather event. Now, researchers in peer-reviewed studies are putting empirical meat on those anecdotal bones. In one April 2025 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists surveyed nearly 3,000 young people in the U.S. aged 16-to-24 and found that approximately 20% of them were afraid to have children—worrying about bringing a new generation into a steadily warming world. That figure jumped to over 30% among young people who had experienced a severe-weather event first hand. An earlier 2021 study in The Lancet surveyed 10,000 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries, and came up with even more concerning results. Overall, nearly 60% of respondents described themselves as very or extremely worried about climate change and nearly 85% were at least moderately concerned. More than 45% of the total said that those feelings adversely affected their daily functioning. Fully 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they believe the adults in charge have failed to take care of the planet—leaving the problem to the generations to follow. Advertisement “I think it’s different for young people,” said one 16-year-old cited in the study. “For us, the destruction of the planet is personal.” “It’s the people who have contributed the least to the problem who are facing the challenge of dealing with the consequences,” says Emma Lawrance, Climate Care Center lead at Imperial College London and a co-author of the PNAS paper. “They’ve been let down by the adults who were supposed to keep them safe.” If kids are being hit especially hard by the ravages of climate change it’s in part because of one of the great gifts of youth—a nimble, pliable, very plastic brain. That can be handy when it comes to learning new things and acquiring new skills, but it carries a potential price in mental health, because a nimble brain is also an impressionable one. According to Lawrance, the large majority of mental health problems—up to 75%—begin before the age of 24. The 2021 Lancet study surveyed its 10,000 subjects on a whole range of emotional metrics and found that they were indeed being hit hard—and early in life—by climate-related distress. Two-thirds of them reported that they were feeling sadness related to climate change; nearly 51% described themselves as feeling helpless; 62% were anxious; 67% were afraid; and just 31% said they were optimistic that the climate problem could be solved. Significantly, another 57% said they were angry over the mess the world has become. “We see kids having more reactive or situational depression,” says Haase. That is the type of depression that arises—sometimes quite rationally—from a current set of problems or circumstances, and is different from endogenous, or persistent, free-floating depression. Looking further into the downstream effect of climate trauma, one 2024 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports surveyed nearly 39,000 high school students living in 22 urban public-school districts in the U.S., to determine how they were faring emotionally two years, five years, and 10 years after a severe weather event or disaster. Overall, those 22 districts endured a total of 83 federally declared climate-related disasters in the decade leading up to the study. The investigators were looking for signs of mental distress, defined as feeling prolonged sadness or hopelessness or suffering from short sleep duration. Across the sample group, they found that the young people who had experienced the highest number of disasters had a 25% greater rate of mental distress when they were exposed to a disaster within the previous two years, and a 20% higher rate at five years. There was no significant difference when the disaster took place 10 years in the past. Advertisement “We were alarmed to find that climate-related disasters already were affecting so many teens in the U.S.,” says Amy Auchincloss, associate professor of epidemiology at Drexel University School of Public Health and the lead author of the paper. “Disasters can upend adolescents’ lives for extended periods, for example [by] interrupting school and social and physical support services. And their family’s material circumstances could worsen.” Some of the distress young people experience can be either ameliorated or exacerbated by the people around them, especially adults, when the kids seek to talk about their climate anxiety. A 2024 paper in The Lancet surveyed nearly 16,000 young people in all 50 states and asked them, among other things, about the perceived and desired responses they got when they tried to give voice to their feelings. Nearly 62% reported that they at least tried to talk to others about climate change, and nearly 58% said they felt ignored or dismissed. Over 70% said they wished others would be more open to discussing the problem, and over 66% said they wanted their parents’ and grandparents’ generations to understand their feelings. Advertisement “One of the things that’s very damaging to children across the spectrum on any issue is invalidation,” says Haase, who was not involved in the study. “A child expresses a profound emotion and the parent dismisses it or shows contempt for it; this is very damaging in a global psychological way.” Listening is not the only way adults can help the young people in their lives cope better. For those kids who are already receiving psychological counseling or considering it, Haase urges therapists to work in what she describes as a “climate-aware” way. “I think we really need to know exactly what therapeutic techniques are going to help most,” she says. “There is not [yet] a manual or developed psychotherapy for working with youth with climate distress.” Helping kids find a better balance between fretting about the future and remaining hopeful about it can also be a powerful tool. “How do they sit with some of those difficult emotions?” Haase says. “How do they have space for those challenging emotions but also look to a future that they want and that there is still so much to be joyful about?” It is up to adults to help kids find that middle road. Auchincloss also stresses the particular importance of practicing these interventions in lower-wealth communities that often get hit harder by climate-related disasters, such as flood-prone regions in the developing world or city centers that suffer from urban heat islands in the summer. If there is anything good that can come from all of this distress it’s that a worried or anxious or angry person can become a very motivated person, taking action through public protests or boycotts or reducing carbon use or simply voting out politicians who are resistant to taking climate action. “Many young people have channeled their despair into action and become world leaders in the movement to preserve a livable climate,” says Auchincloss. “They have been calling for a radical re-envisioning of business-as-usual.” A problem not of the children’s making will require—unjustly—a generation of activists to set the world to rights.

It didn’t take long for Elon Musk’s political advocacy and work in the Trump Administration to erode Tesla’s position as America’s uncontestable electric vehicle leader. As left-leaning consumers and outraged moderates complained about his crusade to remake the U.S. government, Tesla’s car sales declined in the first quarter of 2025 from the previous year. And, on Tuesday, the company reported a 71% decline in net income for the same period. All of this has been reflected in a share price that has declined more than 40% since its peak last December. Not too long ago, Tesla’s struggles would have been seen as a warning sign for broader EV takeup—and the push for decarbonizing transportation more broadly. The company was the first in the U.S. to market an electric car with mass appeal and remains the biggest purveyor of such vehicles stateside. But the bigger picture has evolved: the success of EVs is no longer tethered to Tesla’s success. EV sales in the U.S. increased year-over-year for nearly every other automaker. In Europe, Volkswagen’s EV sales overtook those of Tesla, making the German company the continent’s top EV producer. Globally, Chinese automaker BYD was the best selling EV brand in the first quarter. Projections vary, but analysts still expect EV deployment to continue at pace—in the U.S. and around the world. Tesla forged the path to EVs, but it may not be the leader that takes the U.S. all the way to an electric future. Just from looking at the numbers, it would be easy to roll your eyes at the suggestion that Tesla has lost any of its prowess. Despite the decline in sales, the company remains far and away the biggest seller of EVs. And, at the time of writing, it has a formidable financial position with a market cap of $880 billion—worth more than 20 times the Ford Motor Company. “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large-scale, large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” Musk said on the earnings call. But there’s more to Tesla’s market cap than EVs. On the company’s earnings call this week, Elon Musk and other senior executives did discuss the planned release of a new, lower-priced model, but much of the focus centered on plans for autonomous vehicles and AI-powered robots. Indeed, its valuation, which is more than 140 times its earnings, can in large part be interpreted as a bet that the company will have new technology breakthroughs beyond just selling EVs. Advertisement Meanwhile, the picture for other automakers is complicated, to say the least. Many have pulled back on their EV ambitions, nixing some of the most ambitious plans for new factories amid evolving consumer sentiment and political whiplash in the U.S. as the new administration pulls back supportive policies. Even still, legacy automakers continue to roll out new models to fight for market share—including a range of lower-priced EVs aimed at attracting less wealthy consumers. Chevrolet, Ford, and Rivian all have models coming down the road aimed at the middle of the market—and do so without the political baggage that Musk has attached to Tesla. Globally, Chinese EVs have entered new markets at a price point well below those of any Western manufactured cars. There’s no question that the path ahead remains complicated for EV deployment—and decarbonization of the transport sector. But, for the first time, looking to Tesla may not provide such a representative view. Advertisement To get this story in your inbox, subscribe to the TIME CO2 Leadership Report newsletter here.