Experts issue warning over increasing threat to millions of vulnerable people: 'A fight for global justice'
According to a report by the Daily Observer, some of the poorest communities, often the least responsible for carbon pollution, are facing harsher living conditions, economic instability, and even displacement.
Climate-related poverty happens when major environmental changes make it harder for people to meet their basic needs. Rising sea levels and disasters like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires can significantly impact resources, disrupt livelihoods, and result in economic hardships.
And when flash floods wash away entire villages or droughts cripple food production, it's the poorest communities — the ones that don't have enough to recover on their own — that struggle the hardest.
An example of climate-induced hardship is 2013's Typhoon Haiyan, which displaced millions of Filipinos and destroyed homes and livelihoods. In another part of the world, long droughts and desertification in Africa's Sahel wiped out farms, leading to food insecurity and malnutrition.
The growing crisis strains healthcare, infrastructure, and government resources — problems already visible in areas battling severe drought and water shortages. Even regions once safe from extreme weather are now seeing displacement risks as the climate changes.
While investing in solutions requires significant resources, ignoring the problem costs far more. Rising hunger, mass migration, and global conflicts are already warning signs. Tackling climate-induced poverty today is not only smart but also necessary. Fighting it is also "a fight for global justice," as the Daily Observer noted.
At-risk nations can invest in drought-tolerant crops and solar-powered irrigation to safeguard food supplies. They can also build flood defenses, permeable pavement, and early warning systems to help protect their communities from future disasters.
Switching to renewable energy can reduce dependence on dirty energy sources, which account for the bulk of the human-caused pollution warming our climate, as NASA notes.
Meanwhile, programs aimed at bolstering local resilience are essential to make climate change solutions more accessible for all. By investing in sustainable strategies now, we can protect vulnerable communities and help foster a safer future for everyone.
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Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Atlantic
How Scientific Empires End
Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison. The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.'s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. Sagdeev said that his school books described Stalin as the father of all fields of knowledge, and credited the Soviets with every technological invention that had ever been invented. Later, at scientific conferences, Sagdeev heard physicists criticize the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the grounds that it conflicted with Marxism. By 1973, when Sagdeev was made director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, the nation's top center for space science, the Soviets had ceded leadership in orbit to NASA. American astronauts had flown around the moon and left a thousand bootprints on its surface. Sagdeev's institute was short on money. Many people who worked there had the right Communist Party connections, but no scientific training. Eventually, he himself had to join the party. 'It was the only way to secure stable funding,' he told me when we spoke in June. In 1985, Sagdeev briefly gained the ear of power. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become general secretary at 54, young for the Soviet gerontocracy. He promised broad reforms and appointed Sagdeev as an adviser. The two traveled to Geneva together for Gorbachev's first arms talks with Ronald Reagan. But Sagdeev's view of Gorbachev began to dim when the premier filled important scientific positions with men whom Sagdeev saw as cronies. In 1988, Sagdeev wrote a letter to Gorbachev to warn him that the leaders of the Soviet supercomputer program had deceived him. They claimed to be keeping pace with the United States, but had in fact fallen far behind, and would soon be surpassed by the Chinese. Gorbachev never replied. Sagdeev got a hint as to how his letter had been received when his invitation to join a state visit to Poland was abruptly withdrawn. 'I was excommunicated,' he told me. Sagdeev took stock of his situation. The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev's most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year. I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump's second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she's not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.) The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. 'It's very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,' Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University's undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now. Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science—the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others—and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility—or else be subject to correction by political appointees. Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it's drying up. Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don't lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany's elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France's Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American ' science refugees.' The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this. Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. Sumerians invented wheels that carried the king's war chariots swiftly across the Mesopotamian plains. Their priest astronomers stood atop ziggurats watching the sky. But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard. Science in ancient Egypt and Greece followed a similar pattern: It thrived during good times and fell off in periods of plague, chaos, and impoverishment. But not every case of scientific decline has played out this way. Some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage. Spanish science, for example, suffered grievously during the Inquisition. Scientists feared for their lives. They retreated from pursuits and associations that had a secular tinge and thought twice before corresponding with suspected heretics. The exchange of ideas slowed in Spain, and its research excellence declined relative to the rest of Europe. In the 17th century, the Spanish made almost no contribution to the ongoing Scientific Revolution. The Soviets sabotaged their own success in biomedicine. In the 1920s, the U.S.S.R. had one of the most advanced genetics programs in the world, but that was before Stalin empowered Trofim Lysenko, a political appointee who didn't believe in Mendelian inheritance. Lysenko would eventually purge thousands of apostate biologists from their jobs, and ban the study of genetics outright. Some of the scientists were tossed into the Gulag; others starved or faced firing squads. As a consequence of all this, the Soviets played no role in the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure. When the ban on 'anti-Marxist' genetics was finally lifted, Gordin told me, the U.S.S.R. was a generation behind in molecular biology and couldn't catch up. But it was Adolf Hitler who possessed the greatest talent for scientific self-harm. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. Germans had pioneered the modern research university by requiring that professors not only transmit knowledge but advance it, too. During the early 20th century, German scientists racked up Nobel Prizes. Physicists from greater Europe and the U.S. converged on Berlin, Göttingen, and Munich to hear about the strange new quantum universe from Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein. When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged Germany's universities of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule. Many scientists were murdered. Others fled the country. Quite a few settled in America. That's how Einstein got to Princeton. After Hans Bethe was dismissed from his professorship in Tübingen, he landed at Cornell. Then he went to MIT to work on the radar technology that would reveal German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Some historians have argued that radar was more important to Allied victory than the Manhattan Project. But of course, that, too, was staffed with European scientific refugees, including Leo Szilard, a Jewish physicist who fled Berlin the year that Hitler took power; Edward Teller, who went on to build the first hydrogen bomb; and John von Neumann, who invented the architecture of the modern computer. In a very short time, the center of gravity for science just up and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, it was American scientists who most regularly journeyed to Stockholm to receive medals. It was American scientists who built on von Neumann's work to take an early lead in the Information Age that the U.S. has still not relinquished. And it was American scientists who developed the vaccines for polio and measles. During the postwar period, Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR, sought to make America's advantage in the sciences permanent. Bush hadn't liked the way that the U.S. had to scramble to staff up the radar and atomic-bomb projects. He wanted a robust supply of scientists on hand at American universities in case the Cold War turned hot. He argued for the creation of the National Science Foundation to fund basic research, and promised that its efforts would improve both the economy and national defense. Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America's research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump's interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: 'This is an unparalleled destruction from within.' I reached out to the office of Michael Kratsios, the president's science and technology adviser, several times while reporting this story. I asked whether Kratsios, who holds the role that once belonged to Vannevar Bush, had any response to the claim that the Trump administration's attack on science was unprecedented. I asked about the possibility that its policies will drive away American researchers, and will deter foreigners from working in American labs. I was hoping to find out how the man responsible for maintaining U.S. scientific dominance was engaging with this apparent slide into mediocrity. I did not receive a reply. All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers have already made clear that they do not intend to approve Trump's full requested cuts at the NIH, NSF, and NASA. Those agencies will still have access to tens of billions of dollars in federal funds next year—and blue-state attorneys general have won back some of this year's canceled grants in court. Research institutions still have some fight left in them; some are suing the administration for executive overreach. Universities in red states are hoping that their governors will soon summon the courage to take a stand on their behalf. 'Politically speaking, it's one thing to shut down research at Harvard,' Steven Shapin, a science historian at the school, told me. 'It's another thing to shut down the University of Arkansas.' The U.S. government doesn't bankroll all of American scientific research. Philanthropists and private companies support some of it, and will continue to. The U.S. shouldn't face the kind of rapid collapse that occurred in the Soviet Union, where no robust private sector existed to absorb scientists. But even corporations with large R&D budgets don't typically fund open-ended inquiry into fundamental scientific questions. With the possible exception of Bell Labs in its heyday, they focus on projects that have immediate commercial promise. Their shareholders would riot if they dumped $10 billion into a space telescope or particle collider that takes decades to build and generates little revenue. A privatized system of American science will be distorted toward short-term work, and people who want to run longer-term experiments with more expensive facilities will go elsewhere. 'American science could lose a whole generation,' Shapin said. 'Young people are already starting to get the message that science isn't as valued as it once was.' If the U.S. is no longer the world's technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America's technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America, Shapin said. Science might further decentralize into a multipolar order like the one that held during the 19th century, when the British, French, and Germans vied for technical supremacy. Read: 'This is not how we do science, ever' Or maybe, by the midway point of the 21st century, China will be the world's dominant scientific power, as it was, arguably, a millennium ago. The Chinese have recovered from Mao Zedong's own squandering of expertise during the Cultural Revolution. They have rebuilt their research institutions, and Xi Jinping's government keeps them well funded. China's universities now rank among the world's best, and their scientists routinely publish in Science, Nature, and other top journals. Elite researchers who were born in China and then spent years or even decades in U.S. labs have started to return. What the country can't yet do well is recruit elite foreign scientists, who by dint of their vocation tend to value freedom of speech. Whatever happens next, existing knowledge is unlikely to be lost, at least not en masse. Humans are better at preserving it now, even amid the rise and fall of civilizations. Things used to be more touch-and-go: The Greek model of the cosmos might have been forgotten, and the Copernican revolution greatly delayed, had Islamic scribes not secured it in Baghdad's House of Wisdom. But books and journals are now stored in a network of libraries and data centers that stretches across all seven continents, and machine translation has made them understandable by any scientist, anywhere. Nature's secrets will continue to be uncovered, even if Americans aren't the ones who see them first. In 1990, Roald Sagdeev moved to America. He found leaving the Soviet Union difficult. His two brothers lived not far from his house in Moscow, and when he said goodbye to them, he worried that it would be for the last time. Sagdeev thought about going to Europe, but the U.S. seemed more promising. He'd met many Americans on diplomatic visits there, including his future wife. He'd befriended others while helping to run the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz missions. When Carl Sagan visited the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow, Sagdeev had shown him around, and the two remained close. To avoid arousing the suspicions of the Soviet authorities, Sagdeev flew to Hungary first, and only once he was safely there did he book a ticket to the U.S. He accepted a professorship at the University of Maryland and settled in Washington, D.C. It took him years to ride out the culture shock. He still remembers being pulled over for a traffic infraction, and mistakenly presenting his Soviet ID card. American science is what ultimately won Sagdeev over to his new home. He was awestruck by the ambition of the U.S. research agenda, and he liked that it was backed by real money. He appreciated that scientists could move freely between institutions, and didn't have to grovel before party leaders to get funding. But when I last spoke with Sagdeev, on July 4, he was feeling melancholy about the state of American science. Once again, he is watching a great scientific power in decline. He has read about the proposed funding cuts in the newspaper. He has heard about a group of researchers who are planning to leave the country. Sagdeev is 92 years old, and has no plans to join them. But as an American, it pains him to see them go.
New York Times
5 hours ago
- New York Times
What Happened When Their Art Was Banned
Of the 26 executive orders President Donald Trump signed on the first day of his second term, one was billed as 'restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,' barring the government from 'any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.' In his address to Congress a few weeks later, Trump reiterated this point: 'I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It's back.' Free speech has long been, as NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik put it, 'an article of faith' for conservative politicians and especially, recently, for the MAGA right, which has argued that their views have been suppressed by left-leaning social media platforms and misconstrued in the mainstream press. (Some on the left have expressed similar concerns about their views.) Yet what's transpired since late January wouldn't meet a free speech absolutist's definition of unfettered discourse. Federal mandates targeting diversity or racial and gender equality have resulted in bans or attempted bans on words, ideas, books and people. Employees at NASA and other agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures. The Department of Defense briefly excised a tribute to Jackie Robinson's army service from the Pentagon website and instructed West Point to adjust its curriculum, in an attempt to purge U.S. military institutions of 'divisive concepts and gender ideology.' In March, a Turkish grad student in Massachusetts was taken off the street by plainclothes officers in masks and held without charges for weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention center, seemingly for the crime of having co-authored an opinion essay in the Tufts University student newspaper critical of the school's response to Israel's actions in Gaza. American artists have long seen their creative freedom attacked by governments of all political persuasions. They've also been the ones to speak out when others are too frightened to do so. We spoke with several seasoned artists in various fields about their own experience with having been censored. In some cases, that censorship, decades old, feels like a relic of another political moment, of other culture wars, even as it resonates with what's happening now: same wars, new battles. It almost always affected careers and artists' tolerance for risk — but not always negatively. For censorship can also be a rallying cry, a reminder of why artists make art in the first place. — M.H. Miller John Waters, 79, Film Director and Writer After Waters's third feature, 'Pink Flamingos,' debuted in 1972, the Detroit Free Press compared it to 'a septic tank explosion.' The film follows a criminal named Babs Johnson (played by the drag queen Divine, a frequent collaborator of the director's who died in 1988) as she fights the Marbles, a couple who run a black-market baby ring and deal heroin to children, to retain her title as the 'filthiest person alive.' With scenes involving unsimulated fellatio and the human consumption of dog feces, the cult classic, which was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2021, nearly 50 years after its initial release, has been occasionally banned in parts of the United States, though it has never been cut to avoid an X rating. — Nick Haramis To play a movie in a Baltimore theater back then, you had to submit it to the Maryland State Board of Censors [a three-member committee that operated for 65 years beginning in 1916]. I never did that. Instead, I screened 'Mondo Trasho' (1969) and 'Multiple Maniacs' (1970) in church basements. When 'Pink Flamingos' opened in 1972, I rented a hall at the University of Baltimore. Then 'Female Trouble' (1974) opened at a theater, and the censors had to see it. That's when one of them said, 'You can have that cunnilingus scene.' I said, 'Well, that's a man — that's not a vagina.' And that's when she said, 'Don't tell me about sex. I was married to an Italian!' She handed me scissors, and I had to cut the scene out of a brand-new print. Way later, 'Multiple Maniacs,' which she'd never seen, played in a theater. She went insane because of the rosary job [a sex act involving holy beads]. She took it to court and the judge said, 'My eyes were insulted for 90 minutes, but it's not illegal.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
16 hours ago
- Washington Post
Tracking Trump: The Fed keeps interest rates steady; new tariffs on India; Texas Republicans' redistricting; and more
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady. Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on Indian goods. Texas Republicans revealed their redistricting plan. The Justice Department is pursuing scant details in Epstein declassification. The Trump administration halted, then released health funds. Trump's top vaccine regulator at the FDA was ousted. NASA cuts have sparked concerns about astronaut safety.
