They want to be ‘Altadena strong.’ Finances are making it tough.
Every stuffed animal has a place in 9-year-old Cecily Wallinger’s new bedroom. There are the ones she carried with her when her family evacuated before a wildfire tore through their neighborhood of Altadena, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Others have been donated since. Foxes outnumber the plush cats and dogs and unicorns, and all are arranged in a neat semicircle. Some have hiding spaces, too.
“If you look at my bed, you can tell what my favorite animal is,” she says, giving a tour of what she describes as her “fun” but “temporary” home.
Her parents, Bridgette Campbell and Christopher Wallinger, moved with her to this Pasadena apartment after they realized their Spanish-style house, nestled on the corner of Olive Avenue and Harriet Street, was among the more than 9,400 structures destroyed in January’s Eaton blaze. They planned to stay here as they rebuilt in their beloved neighborhood.
Why We Wrote This
Nine months after the Eaton Fire, an Altadena family navigates the red tape that is hampering recovery for those who lost it all in the blaze. How much of their daughter’s childhood will be spent in limbo? The third in our series from Olive Avenue showing the long road after a natural disaster. Read Parts 1 and 2.
But these days, Ms. Campbell and Mr. Wallinger wonder what “temporary” really means.
“We’re really in such a holding pattern,” Ms. Campbell says.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
They are among the thousands of fire survivors thrust into a waiting game complicated by institutional hang-ups.
Some are waiting for insurance payouts that seem frustratingly slow to arrive. Others are waiting for design and permit approvals to begin rebuilding. Others are just waiting, not entirely sure what to do nine months after the Eaton Fire scorched their neighborhood.
Since January, the Monitor has been following the residents of one block of Altadena’s Olive Avenue, observing through their eyes a long recovery process usually overshadowed by a relentless news cycle. What does it mean to survive – and even thrive – after a disaster? After the initial shock and heartbreak, after the first phases of cleanup, how does a community move forward in the face of institutional roadblocks?
Cecily recently started another school year. Her parents wonder how old she will be by the time their new house is rebuilt in Altadena. Will she even want to go back after experiencing an urban lifestyle near downtown Pasadena? Will she remember the old neighborhood? And what will they tell her if, even after planning and saving and committing to rebuild, the finances of disaster recovery simply make that path impossible?
Do the numbers add up?
Ms. Campbell is a high school theater teacher. Mr. Wallinger is an actor. Their work is rooted in words, but lately, they have been mired in numbers.
It started with the couple learning they would receive roughly $525,000 from their insurer, USAA, to rebuild their house. That set in motion a series of budget decisions. Could they squeeze in a second bathroom? Yes. Could they afford the hardwood floors and Spanish tile roof that gave their original home its character? No.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Next came calculations related to the construction process. First, Los Angeles County must sign off on their design plans. Then they can submit building permits for the new house.
As of the end of September, permits for 257 single-family homes in the Eaton fire zone had been issued, according to a Los Angeles County dashboard. It’s averaging 75 business days for the county to issue permits for new residential units.
Given those constraints, the couple estimate it could be February or later before construction can begin on their new house. Their contractor, meanwhile, says it could take 12 to 18 months to complete the project because of inspections needed along the way. And therein lies a financial conundrum.
“We’re being told it could be two years until we’re able to move back into our house, and our [additional living expenses]” – insurance coverage that pays for temporary relocation – “runs out in a year,” Mr. Wallinger said in September. “We don’t know how we’re going to pay our mortgage and our rent.”
The mortgage for their fire-razed home is $4,700 a month. Rent for their two-bedroom Pasadena apartment is $3,700. They are also still shelling out $100 a month for homeowners’ insurance on a house that no longer exists in a bid to maintain coverage going forward. Without mortgage forbearance or some other kind of financial relief, the couple say it will be too much to bear.
When their apartment lease ends in February, it will be decision time. Downsize to a one-bedroom apartment? Temporarily move in with relatives? Live in an RV on their property?
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Six in 10 people displaced from the Eaton and Palisades fires say they will have no remaining temporary housing coverage within a year, according to a June survey commissioned by the nonprofit Department of Angels, which formed in the aftermath of the wildfires to assist with recovery. That survey also found that the majority of insured survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires say delays, denials, and underpayments are hampering their ability to recover.
At the end of August, members of a group dubbed the Eaton Fire Survivor Network gathered with state lawmakers to raise awareness about the insurance-related speed bumps hampering recovery.
“Every delayed payment, every denial of what is owed in someone’s policy, is not just paperwork to us – it’s a family forced to wait in limbo,” said Valerie Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council, during the press conference. Her family is among those who lost their home in the blaze. “It’s children who cannot go home. It’s elders living in temporary housing month after month with no end in sight and no promise of continued payment.”
State Farm officials said, as of mid-September, the insurer has paid more than $4.6 billion and received over 13,000 claims related to the January wildfires in the LA area.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“When we do receive a complaint, we take it seriously and our team works to resolve the issue with our customer,” the company said in a statement. “We would ask any customer with a question or concern to reach out to us directly so we can address it.”
“For Sale” signs sprout
Ms. Campbell and Mr. Wallinger consider themselves fortunate to know their expected insurance settlement. But peering into the future is a cautionary exercise.
The “For Sale” signs dotting parcels throughout Altadena foretell at least a degree of change. Two lots being sold border Ms. Campbell and Mr. Wallinger’s property. As they envision their rebuilt home, they are bracing themselves for the surrounding environment to look and feel different, too.
“When we were out there measuring the land before we said yes to the [design] plans, we were like, ‘OK, imagine a McMansion here, a triplex there,” Ms. Campbell says.
It won’t be the same neighborhood where Cecily rode her bike or played on a swing set with friends. The blaze wiped out what her parents describe as a 1980s-esque childhood, where neighborhood friends were just a door knock away. She could be 11 years or older by the time they can move back – and that’s assuming their plans stay relatively on track.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
In the meantime, a puppy named Ruby has helped their fourth-grade daughter cope. But nine months post-fire, Cecily still often falls asleep in her parents’ bed at night.
“I miss the trees,” Cecily says of her former Altadena home. “I miss all the …” Her voice trails off.
“What do I miss about it?” she says before pausing again. Then she sums it up in three words: “I miss everything.”
So do her parents. They have been clinging to an “Altadena strong” mentality, but doubt creeps in as they mull their financial horizon.
“It’s not even a thought of, ‘I would rather not go through this,’” Mr. Wallinger says of rebuilding. “There’s the possibility we will not be able to.”
Back home, at last
Farther south on Olive Avenue, at least one family has returned.
Daniel Quiroz and Joann Flores were among the displaced when the Monitor met them in late May. But by midsummer, the couple moved back into their fire-damaged house with their toddler, Darla.
It’s the same house, except with new floors and furnishings after heavy smoke and ash blanketed the interior. The couple also converted a portion of their garage into living space for Mr. Quiroz’s mother and sister, whose house on a parallel street burned down.
They’re navigating a dual reality – settled back in their own home while interacting with family and friends facing the prospect of rebuilding. Mr. Quiroz has been contacting architects for his mother and measuring her property.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
It’s a quieter Altadena right now. But Mr. Quiroz expects a brighter future.
“This neighborhood is going to boom,” he says. “Ten years.”
They’re grateful to be among the lucky ones already back.
“A lot of people can’t say the same,” Ms. Flores says. “But we’re so glad to be home.”
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For those who remain displaced, there is joy in seeing small progress. Ms. Campbell and Mr. Wallinger visit their Altadena property every four to six weeks. On one such recent trip, Ms. Campbell points to a twiggy plant in jubilation. It’s steps away from the stump of what used to be a towering 70-foot pine tree.
Could it be a replacement breaking through the ground? Maybe.
Fighting wildfire with fire: California residents, once wary, embrace ‘controlled burns’
For most of her life, Thea Maria Carlson did not like fire. Even though she had studied earth systems at Stanford University and knew, intellectually, that burning had an environmental purpose in her home of California, she still wanted nothing to do with it.
In 2015, the Valley Fire consumed a path toward her home in the rugged hills of Sonoma County, destroying small towns along the way. After firefighters extinguished that blaze – before it reached her part of the oak- and redwood-dappled Mayacamas Mountains – her neighbors began talking about how to prepare for the next wildfire. Some suggested they should burn the land themselves to mitigate any future blaze.
Ms. Carlson was unsure.
Why We Wrote This
California has spent decades trying to extinguish fires. But residents here are embracing the long-held Indigenous practice of coming together to intentionally burn land – to reduce the power of wildfires, help the ecosystem, and to transform fear into healing.
She knew that intentional fires were nothing new here; Indigenous people in California burned land for generations, until they were harshly persecuted by the state for doing so. Ranchers and other rural landowners have also long used fire as a way of stewarding their properties. But Ms. Carlson was hesitant to set fire to the land where she lived.
Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor
Fellow members of Monan’s Rill, a Quaker-founded intentional community, however, wanted to try it. They eventually agreed to hold what are called prescribed burns on two small portions of their 414 acres – with guidance from a growing coalition of scientists, land managers, and fire officials in the area who believed this practice was important for wildfire resilience and the environment.
These experts pointed out that plants and animals here evolved alongside fire and needed it to thrive. Generations of fire suppression – the philosophy of extinguishing any and all flames to protect people and property – had led to an unhealthy environment, they argued, one that had such a buildup of vegetative fuel that natural wildfires were becoming unnaturally supersized. All but two of the state’s largest wildfires between 1950 and 2023 took place since 2000, according to California government statistics; 10 of those were in 2020 and 2021. And those numbers do not include this year’s devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, which tore through Los Angeles County.
Ms. Carlson did not participate in those first prescribed burns. She watched the smoke from a distance, but was too afraid of fire to get close to the action.
She didn’t realize that this would be the beginning of a transformation: for her, for the land, and for her community. It would only be later, after the devastation and renewal that regularly come with fire, that she would step fully into a sweeping change that is happening across California as more people embrace the need to burn.
Over the past eight years, the number of citizen groups that come together to steward land through fire has increased from one in the state to around 30. Called prescribed burn associations, these groups have seen the number of volunteers skyrocket. New state legislation is making it easier for neighbors to join together and burn, and other laws are starting to allow tribal members to reclaim their traditional use of fire.
As a result, residents are turning one of California’s most disruptive challenges into one of its most powerful sources of connection, care, and love.
Ian Nelson/File
California’s long opposition to “controlled burns,” a long-standing Indigenous practice
For people who study fire, it is clear that California’s wildfires today are different from what they once were. The fire season is starting earlier and lasting longer, which some scientists have connected to human-caused atmospheric warming. But crucially, many researchers say, is the changing nature of the blazes. They are hotter and more destructive, and destroy trees and landscapes that once would have survived natural flames.
Fire officials began noticing these shifts as early as the 1980s.
For most of the 20th century, there had been unusually low wildfire activity in the western United States. Deadly wildfires across the northern Rocky Mountains in 1910 had ushered in a policy of “full suppression” firefighting, with new federal-state coordination. The Forest Service argued that even light burning by property owners was damaging for trees and landscapes. In other words, all fire was considered bad, something to be extinguished.
That included fires set by Indigenous people.
For generations, local tribes had burned both as a religious practice and to tend the ecosystem, explains Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environmental policy for the Karuk Tribe in Northern California.
“It is part of our ways of knowing and doing and learning that using fire in the right ways is part of our responsibility to the natural systems that we depend on,” Mr. Tripp says. Ceremonies incorporating fire took place throughout the year and served unique environmental purposes: attracting deer across a particular waterway, clearing one sort of plant so others could grow, prompting salmon up a river.
Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor
In 1911, federal law created new prohibitions on these cultural burns. California had a long history of persecuting Native people. The same law in 1850 that allowed for the enslavement of tribe members and the forced separation of children from their families also prohibited their burns. In 1918, Forest Service officials suggested any Native person found setting a fire should be shot.
By the end of the 20th century, though, some researchers were starting to question this full suppression policy. Researchers had found that some fire was necessary for local species – giant sequoias, for instance – to germinate.
In the 1960s, some officials suggested that a few “controlled burns” might help mitigate wildfire damage. By the 1990s, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, which are responsible for fire policy within the nearly half of California that is owned by the federal government, were conducting some burns.
The Bureau of Land Management was in charge of one such fire in early July 1999, outside the town of Lewiston, California.
About 250 miles north of San Francisco, the bureau intended to clear brushland ahead of the state’s driest summer month. But as the winds picked up that day, the fire jumped across its control line. Eventually raging across 2,000 acres, the blaze damaged the historic mining town, burning two dozen homes, and quickly stopped the burgeoning effort to intentionally burn forestland.
Firefighting organizations doubled down on suppression, recalls Fred Peterson, a longtime volunteer firefighter and vineyard owner who lives in the mountains overlooking Sonoma County’s picturesque Dry Creek Valley. “The goal was to put it out,” he says.
But then, Sonoma County went through a series of years that many people here simply describe as “apocalyptic.”
It would prompt Mr. Peterson, like Ms. Carlson, to change his relationship with both fire and the land he loves.
Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor
A skeptic of controlled burns becomes a believer
There used to be an expected pattern to the fire year in Sonoma County, Mr. Peterson says.
In a hot, dry summer, the flames might begin in late August. They might get more intense in September, or even October. If the dry Diablo winds swept in from the east, he would expect to be on call with the other firefighters of the Geyserville Fire Protection District to respond to blazes sweeping down from the surrounding hills. They prayed for the rainy season to come by late October, so that by November and through the winter and spring, the hills were green and the land relatively fire safe.
But in September 2016, the Sawmill Fire consumed 1,500 acres near the Geysers Geothermal Field, which Mr. Peterson can see across the valley from his house. Smoke sank into the valley. The next year, in October, the Tubbs Fire rushed on hurricane-level winds into the nearby city of Santa Rosa, destroying thousands of homes and killing 22 people. It was declared the most destructive wildfire in California’s history – but only until a year later, when the Camp Fire, north of Ms. Carlson and Mr. Peterson in Butte County, destroyed the town of Paradise, leaving 85 people dead.
Ms. Carlson remembers going to her mother’s house for dinner during this time. When she saw a thin ribbon of smoke curling from a candle, she felt a sense of panic.
Around this same time, the Nuns Fire also burned through Sonoma and Napa counties, destroying some 1,300 structures and killing three people. It swept through the Bouverie Preserve southeast of Santa Rosa.
But there, something stood out.
Two years earlier, the nonprofit Audubon Canyon Ranch had hired a fire ecologist named Sasha Berleman to help organize a prescribed burn at the Bouverie preserve, which it owns.
After years of planning, that burn took place in May 2017, just months before the Nuns Fire. It one of the first prescribed burns done in the region not organized and led by state or federal fire officials.
A native Californian, Dr. Berleman remembers being terrified of the fires that would roll through the increasingly populated hills around her hometown of Temecula, in the southern part of the state. She despaired of the way those hills had transformed from wildlands where she would play into miles of subdivisions; she worried about other ways humans were taxing her state’s environment.
Courtesy of Northern Sonoma County Fire Chief Marshall Turbeville/File
It was only after hearing a talk by a local member of the Pechanga tribe, who described the ways human-set fires could help the landscape, that she started to shift her perspective – both about fire and about the way people could exist in California.
“It sparked an interest in me,” she recalls. “Not only can this process that I was terrified of as a little kid be one of rejuvenation for the land; I’m hearing for the first time that humans have a role in tending the landscape.”
When she surveyed the preserve after firefighters contained the Nuns Fire, she was stunned to see how clearly the theories of her research manifested on the ground.
The fire, she says, had “left these beautiful, intact ecosystems where we had burned. And it had really dramatic, intense fire behavior everywhere else on the preserve – like, right across the line. And it just became this incredible story and talking point and ray of hope.”
She convinced her boss to let her start a fire research and training academy, called Fire Forward, for citizens and local fire officials who wanted to facilitate more intentional burning on the community level. She gave the presentation that convinced Ms. Carlson’s neighbors to burn. She also worked with the chief of the Northern Sonoma County Fire Protection District, Marshall Turbeville, on ways to coordinate and convince residents that intentional burning could be safer than waiting for a wildfire.
For Mr. Turbeville, the approach made sense. He had been fully part of the fire suppression approach when he started work with state and local fire departments in the 1990s. But he had come to believe that firefighters were facing an impossible battle. He and his colleagues were putting out all the fires that were possible to extinguish. But that left fires that couldn’t be stopped, and those burned ever more fiercely.
Fire, he recognized, was a natural process. And stopping that process, he said, was like damming a river – a human intervention that had environmental consequences well beyond what was intended. People were terrified of fire because they only saw the big, scary flames on the news, he believed. But that’s not what a burn needed to be. It was the difference between a flood washing away homes and a trickling creek.
Ian Nelson/File
One can’t “control” a fire – Mr. Turbeville didn’t like the term “controlled burn.” But with respect, and care, people could work with fire.
Still, he recognized that prescribed burning was expensive and, under the control of state or federal departments, could be highly regulated. It took years to secure environmental and safety permits to burn on state or federal land, and then it was tricky to find the window where clean air requirements, weather conditions, and personnel availability aligned.
So he was receptive when Dr. Berleman proposed an increase in prescribed burn associations in Sonoma County, where trained citizen “burn bosses” could manage the fire.
These sorts of groups operate across the U.S., with a particularly long history in the Southeast. But until 2017, there were none in California.
“All of my mentors and community from the prescribed fire world told me I was crazy when I started saying that I was going to make prescribed fire a thing in the North Bay Area,” Dr. Berleman says. “You’re surrounded by multimillion-dollar homes. The populations are high. There are roads and infrastructure everywhere. Everyone was telling me, ‘That’s not the place to be trying to get burns on the ground.’”
But given the ferocity of the wildfires in Sonoma County, Mr. Turbeville thought people in his region might be open to this new approach. “There are more and more people who understand the environmental consequences of not allowing a natural process to occur,” he says.
Mr. Peterson was one of them.
The chief had called him shortly after the Tubbs Fire subsided. Mr. Peterson listened as the chief described his feelings of helplessness watching home after home in suburban Santa Rosa explode into flames.
“He says, ‘We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results,’” Mr. Peterson recalls. “I’d never given consideration to prescribed burning. But he finally said, ‘Look, we can either burn it on our terms, or it’s gonna burn on its own time, on its own terms.’”
Between the end of 2019 and the middle of 2020, the two men worked together with Ms. Berleman to organize neighbors near Mr. Peterson’s home on Bradford Mountain to burn 30 acres in 3- to 10-acre units. They cut control lines and cleared foliage away from the bases of large trees and power poles. And then, with a combination of volunteers from the community and firefighters, they torched the earth and watched the low, crawling flames consume the underbrush.
That same year, however, fire came for Ms. Carlson’s home.
Courtesy of Northern Sonoma County Fire Chief Marshall Turbeville/File
How prescribed burns increase resilience against wildfire
The official cause of the Glass Fire, which started near a Napa County vineyard on Sept. 27, 2020, is still a mystery. But how it spread is not. Dry conditions and heavy winds swept the fire into Sonoma County, burning tens of thousands of acres as it traveled.
At Monan’s Rill, community members debated whether to evacuate. Ms. Carlson argued that they should leave. Eventually, with Dr. Berleman’s advice, they all did.
The fire swept through the mountains, consuming towering redwoods and gnarled oak trees, and up the steep hills toward Monan’s Rill. It burned 12 out of the 13 homes there – all but Ms. Carlson’s, which was set apart from the others. It destroyed communal structures, as well.
Days later, Ms. Carlson remembers trying to absorb a land charred black and in ruins. She and her neighbors started talking about whether they should even return given its fire risk. They had been dramatically underinsured, she says, and needed to rebuild homes from scratch. It felt daunting.
And then, someone showed her a photo of an area of Monan’s Rill that was still verdant and green, untouched by the wildfire: the land that they had burned intentionally a few years earlier.
It had, she recalls, a profound effect.
“I was like, OK, I think I want to move back to the land. But if I do, I need to learn how to use intentional fire. Because, obviously, that’s what the land needs to be healthy, and it’s what we need to keep the community safe.”
She signed up for a basic firefighting course and started training to pass the physical fitness tests, which included walking 3 miles in less than 45 minutes, carrying 45 pounds. She checked out books about the history of fire on the landscape, researched scientific articles, and listened to podcasts and webinars. And she walked the land.
“There were a lot of places I never walked because they were so thick with brush. But then, when all the brush burned, that first year, you could walk all over the whole 414 acres. And so, it was getting to know the land and seeing the resurrection of the land – this completely black landscape and the green coming back, what things just looked dead but were actually still alive.”
She read the works of an academic named Lenya Quinn-Davidson. A professor at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, Dr. Quinn-Davidson had started the state’s first prescribed burn association in Humboldt County in 2017. She was convinced of the importance of intentional – or “good” – fire. And she had concluded that it would be more effective to mobilize the private landowners who held more than 13 million acres in the state than to fight federal bureaucracy to allow for more burning on federal lands, she explained to interviewers. She also turned her attention to the policies facilitating this effort – and found a newly receptive audience in the California Legislature.
In 2021, California lawmakers passed a bill that changed liability rules to encourage more citizen prescribed burns, essentially creating a burn boss certification process. The next year, they established a claims fund to pay for damages connected to prescribed fires. And the state began to work with Indigenous tribes to restore their ability to conduct “cultural burns” outside of state certification processes.
“We have been experiencing a massive paradigm shift with regard to how the state of California conducts business related to all things wildfire resilience,” says Allison Jolley, director of The Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program at The Watershed Research and Training Center in Hayfork, California, an organization central to the “beneficial fire” effort in the state.
In 2023, the University of California’s Blodgett Forest Research Station published a 20-year study giving more evidence that prescribed fire significantly increases resilience against wildfire.
And the next year, the Point Fire ignited in Sonoma County, blazing across the mountains – straight toward Mr. Peterson’s home.
Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor
“There are neighbors helping neighbors.”
What happened with the Point Fire is similar to what happened after other prescribed burns. Firefighters stationed themselves at Mr. Peterson’s home. They set up positions along the fire lines and roads. And largely because of the area they had burned and cleared four years earlier, they were able to stop the blaze before it did significant damage to Mr. Peterson’s Bradford Mountain community.
Others in Sonoma County noticed this impact, says Mr. Turbeville. And residents in neighboring communities started organizing to set their own fires.
Prescribed burning is not one and done, Mr. Peterson cautions. Even since the Point Fire, flammable brush has grown around the oak trees. Part of living in California is constantly tending the land with fire in mind, he says.
But this effort has a growing number of helpers. Whenever Ms. Carlson, who is now one of dozens of California state certified burn bosses, posts online that she is planning a prescribed burn, she has more people offering to volunteer than she can use. Many drive up from San Francisco or surrounding urban areas, she says. Others live elsewhere in Sonoma County. All are hoping to do something positive for the land.
“Most people in the Bay Area are eager to lean in and experience a sense of healing around reconnecting with fire in a different, positive way, and then also building community around that,” says Dr. Berleman. “Everyone in the community who’s coming out had experienced these traumatic wildfires, and now they have this team of folks they are building relationships with, who are leaning into healing that relationship with fire.”
Spencer Klinefelter, program coordinator for the Central Coast Prescribed Burn Association, says he sees similar interest south of Ms. Carlson and Mr. Peterson. He works around Santa Cruz and sees college students, retirees, old-time ranchers, and even families volunteering together.
On one recent burn, he says, multigenerational ranching families on their all-terrain vehicles worked alongside environmentalist college students and professors, and then with volunteers from the local fire department, all while local tribal members sang traditional prayers to begin the burn.
“There’s a great collective sense that we’re sharing this work,” he says. “It’s been pretty powerful. There’s the traumatic side when people experience wildfire – and there’s the healing side where people come and experience [fire] this way.”
Even Lewiston, the Northern California town that burned in 1999, is considering prescribed burning again.
Miller Bailey, co-director of fire management for The Watershed Research and Training Center, has been talking with landowners there, as part of his work embedding with communities to talk about burning, its benefits, and how to mitigate its risks.
People know that “fire lives on this landscape, and it is coming now,” he says. “So, the landowners, and the folks that are coming to our communities, they are really bought in. And they’re saying, ‘Yes, I want to use this.’”
When they do, he says, the experience goes well beyond expectations. “People are coming together,” he says. “There are neighbors helping neighbors. There’s so much passion. It’s incredible.”
There is still much California needs to do to restore its relationship with this natural force, say those involved with this new approach. But more people are recognizing that if fire destroys, it can also regenerate and rejuvenate, says Ms. Carlson.
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On a recent day she walked along the 22 acres of Monan’s Rill that were intentionally burned this summer under her leadership. She had created the burn plan, had studied the ecology, had organized the volunteers and then, carefully, guided the group in igniting the flames.
She points to a spot of charred earth. There, a bright green tuft of grass is growing, healthily, in the August sunlight.
The EV tax credit is ending. How could that affect the US car market?
President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill, signed into law in July, ends a federal tax credit for electric vehicle purchases, and the Sept. 30 deadline to claim the credit might have helped spur EV sales.
They hit a record of 9.9% of total vehicle sales last month, up almost one percentage point from July. An estimated 146,332 EVs were purchased, a new quarterly record, according to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book Report for August.
“The current surge in EV sales is being driven by product innovation, motivated dealers, and an urgency ahead of the IRA tax credit phase-out,” says Stephanie Valdez Streaty, a senior analyst for Cox Automotive, in the report.
Why We Wrote This
The Biden administration promoted a tax credit for electric vehicle purchases in part as a way to reduce climate-warming emissions. President Trump is ending the credit, hoping to boost fossil fuels. The next move is up to consumers.
The Biden administration promoted the tax credit, part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, as a way to make EVs more affordable and accessible, help reduce the emissions that contribute to climate change, and pave the way for the United States to become a key player in the growing EV market.
People who bought new electric vehicles could claim a credit up to $7,500; people who bought used EVs could claim up to $4,000. The credit comes with income guidelines, detailed by the IRS.
The Trump administration says ending the credit is intended to “promote true consumer choice” and moves the U.S. away from “ill-conceived” policies that favor EVs. The White House says it wants to boost the oil and gas industry, support a traditional auto industry, and reduce government spending.
Where is the EV market headed?
Several states have EV consumer incentives, and manufacturers such as Tesla urged consumers to buy before the federal incentive ends. Anyone who makes a payment on a vehicle before the deadline can claim the credit, even if they don’t yet have possession of the vehicle itself.
Hyundai, Ford, and Lucid offered deals to clear inventories, deals for free home charger installation, and financing incentives, respectively.
EV sales are expected to dip after the credit ends, experts say, and automakers are preparing for a market slowdown come October. Experts suggest automakers might offer discounts and leverage leases in response.
Jose Juarez/AP/File
EV prices “may even be lower than today if the car companies already have more production planned or queued for 2026 than what the demand will be,” says Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center based at the University of California, Davis.
Ben Prochazka, who leads a group that advocates EV adoption, says the end of the tax credit won’t derail automakers’ focus on the vehicles, in part because they’ve already invested so much in the market.
“It’s just a question of how long it’s gonna take before they hit this sort of mass adoption phase,” says Prochazka, executive director of Electrification Coalition.
Dr. Tal says he’s concerned that the end of the federal tax credit will hurt the EV market.
“Without incentives and, more importantly, without supply-side regulations from California and the federal government, the share of EV sales will not grow every year, and most cars on the road will continue to emit high levels of [greenhouse gases],” he says.
On the international front, the U.S. is falling behind, says Kara Kockelman, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin. China has become the new global powerhouse for manufacturing EVs, producing an estimated 12.4 million in 2024, representing more than 70% of the global production.
“China has taken off and they are manufacturing really competitive, low-cost vehicles,” Dr. Kockelman says. Those vehicles could attract buyers in the U.S. market.
In 2024, U.S. automakers produced about 10.6 million vehicles, including EVs, according to data from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers. That same year, there were 4 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads, making up 1.4% of an estimated 292 million vehicles in the United States, according to Experian Automotive.
“It’s going to be really hard for the U.S. manufacturers to compete,” says Dr. Kockelman.
How will EVs stack up now against gas-powered cars?
EVs are limited in models, sizes, and price range.
“For many years, EVs were on the high end of the price [scale], says Dr. Tal. Auto manufacturers “don’t make an equivalent to the smaller and cheaper vehicles.”
Gas-powered vehicles have lower up-front costs than EVs. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, says that EVs “tend to be for the better off,” and the incentive is used mainly by those in the “top quintile” of income.
The Congressional Research Service cited a study of tax filing data from 2009-2021 published by Severin Borenstein and Lucas W. Davis of the University of California, Berkeley. The study found that people in the top 5% of “income distribution” made up 50% of those who used the EV tax benefit, and the bottom 60% in income received less than 3% of the benefits.
EV owners also frequently have a second or third vehicle for their household. In 2024, data shows that 80% of households who have purchased an EV also own a gasoline-powered vehicle, according to Experian’s Automotive Consumer Trend Report.
EVs are commonly used for short-distance drives, and multi-car households typically use their gas-powered vehicles for longer distances.
“If there’s an EV in a lot of these driveways, there’s also an SUV or a minivan or a regular gasoline-powered car. So you can see people are using the EVs in order to get around town. And then if they want to go somewhere like Lake Tahoe, then they take their regular gasoline-powered cars,” says Ms. Furchtgott-Roth.
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Though some states and the federal government have invested in charging stations, there are still “charging deserts” across the U.S., making public access to stations limited for users.
There are an estimated 75,000 charging stations throughout the U.S., according to a study by Congress. However, the American Petroleum Institute, a fossil-fuel trade group, says there are nearly twice as many gas stations nationwide.
How to create affordable housing for more people, and make a whole city a sponge
A push for social housing tackles affordability and supply across the U.S.
Affordable housing has historically been limited to low-income households, but new initiatives aim both for “permanent affordability” of properties and to serve more people.
In February, Seattle became the newest city to pursue mixed-income social housing, when voters approved a high-earner payroll tax for a development authority to build and maintain housing for a range of incomes. This adds to the success of Montgomery County, Maryland: Since 2021, it has been able to offer 30% of homes at below market rate through long-term public investment and low-interest loans.
Why We Wrote This
In our progress roundup, planners and governments are going big to address big problems. More places in the U.S. are taking a “permanent affordability” approach to housing, and in Copenhagen, a costly but comprehensive strategy is preparing the city for more floods.
In the past five years, voters and legislatures in cities like Atlanta and Chicago approved funds for mixed-income housing, and states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts funded pilots.
“Seattle’s voters showed that in light of a severe affordability crisis, a new role for the public sector and a new, dedicated fiscal revenue stream for housing were not only necessary, but possible,” writes urban historian Susanne Schindler.
Source: The Conversation
Copenhagen’s comprehensive “sponge city” plan serves as a model for other urban areas
Building upon strategies of flood adaptation pioneered in China, the Danish capital’s Cloudburst Management Plan combines surface-level green space, such as wetlands, with vast underground infrastructure to soak up, store, and slowly release stormwater.
Tom Little/Reuters
Planners unveiled the new system in 2012, a year after a storm pelted the city with 5 inches of rain in two hours. Now, the city is implementing 300 flood defenses, including a 5-acre renovation of the University of Copenhagen’s southern campus, parks with underground reservoirs, and “water highways” to funnel water to the harbor where needed.
Much work remains to better fortify Copenhagen against the kind of storm it faced in 2011. One study said that the frequency of 100-year floods will double for 40% of the globe by 2050. The Danish Meteorological Institute estimates the low-lying country will receive 55% more rain in winter by 2100. But with its rain retention features, Copenhagen’s system also provides benefits during times of drought.
Sources: Yale Environment 360, Climatic Change
Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court struck down a colonial-era law criminalizing same-sex relations
St. Lucia joins three other former anglophone countries that have decriminalized LGBTQ+ conduct in the past few years. Similar laws remain on the books in five Caribbean nations.
Although St. Lucia’s statute was not enforced, the court found that it stigmatized LGBTQ+ people in a way that could encourage “public humiliation, vilification and even physical attacks” and violate “the dignity of certain categories of citizens.”
Activists have hailed the decision as a win for civil liberties. “We’re not asking anyone to change their beliefs,” a group wrote in a statement to The Guardian. “These laws were outdated and violated the basic human rights of LGBTQ+ people.”
Sources: Human Rights Watch, The Guardian, Outright International
Seeds of the Egusi melon, a Nigerian staple food, flew with NASA
Part of a research mission studying the suitability of various foods in space, the seeds joined other culturally meaningful crops, including Armenian pomegranate and Pakistani wheat, so scientists can learn how low-gravity conditions affect seed characteristics such as genetic stability and lipid composition.
Temidayo Oniosun, a Nigerian scientist and businessman, chose Egusi seeds because of their prevalence and significance in West African cuisine. “People are realizing that space is not something that is in the abstract, especially Nigerians and Africans generally,” he said. “... For the first time, something that they connect to, something they eat almost every day is journeying through space.”
The project follows the inauguration of the Africa Space Agency in April, which seeks to coordinate spacefaring efforts among the 55 members of the African Union.
Sources: Forbes, Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute
Tajikistan decriminalized “liking” social media posts critical of the government
The move overturns a 2018 law to control online interactions deemed by officials to justify violence and terrorism.
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More than 1,500 Tajik citizens have been imprisoned for likes, comments, and reposts under the law that imposed a sentence of up to 15 years.
Dmitry Azarov/Kommersant Photo/Sipa/AP
Tajikistan has drawn attention for detaining activists and journalists. But in 2023, a man without obvious political ties posted a video that led to his arrest and a five-year sentence. In the video, which received a million views, Shahboz Sharifbek accused authorities of forcibly taking his brother to enlist in the army. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Mr. Sharifbek “warns that officials’ mistreatment of people, violation of their civic rights, and poverty ‘can push young people toward extremism and terrorism.’”
President Emomali Rahmon, who has been in office since 1994, was critical of some applications of the law last October. The legislature took it up in April, and Mr. Rahmon signed the new law in May.
Sources: Fix the News, The Times of Central Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
How to create affordable housing for more people, and make a whole city a sponge
A push for social housing tackles affordability and supply across the U.S.
Affordable housing has historically been limited to low-income households, but new initiatives aim both for “permanent affordability” of properties and to serve more people.
In February, Seattle became the newest city to pursue mixed-income social housing, when voters approved a high-earner payroll tax for a development authority to build and maintain housing for a range of incomes. This adds to the success of Montgomery County, Maryland: Since 2021, it has been able to offer 30% of homes at below market rate through long-term public investment and low-interest loans.
Why We Wrote This
In our progress roundup, planners and governments are going big to address big problems. More places in the U.S. are taking a “permanent affordability” approach to housing, and in Copenhagen, a costly but comprehensive strategy is preparing the city for more floods.
In the past five years, voters and legislatures in cities like Atlanta and Chicago approved funds for mixed-income housing, and states like Rhode Island and Massachusetts funded pilots.
“Seattle’s voters showed that in light of a severe affordability crisis, a new role for the public sector and a new, dedicated fiscal revenue stream for housing were not only necessary, but possible,” writes urban historian Susanne Schindler.
Source: The Conversation
Copenhagen’s comprehensive “sponge city” plan serves as a model for other urban areas
Building upon strategies of flood adaptation pioneered in China, the Danish capital’s Cloudburst Management Plan combines surface-level green space, such as wetlands, with vast underground infrastructure to soak up, store, and slowly release stormwater.
Tom Little/Reuters
Planners unveiled the new system in 2012, a year after a storm pelted the city with 5 inches of rain in two hours. Now, the city is implementing 300 flood defenses, including a 5-acre renovation of the University of Copenhagen’s southern campus, parks with underground reservoirs, and “water highways” to funnel water to the harbor where needed.
Much work remains to better fortify Copenhagen against the kind of storm it faced in 2011. One study said that the frequency of 100-year floods will double for 40% of the globe by 2050. The Danish Meteorological Institute estimates the low-lying country will receive 55% more rain in winter by 2100. But with its rain retention features, Copenhagen’s system also provides benefits during times of drought.
Sources: Yale Environment 360, Climatic Change
Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court struck down a colonial-era law criminalizing same-sex relations
St. Lucia joins three other former anglophone countries that have decriminalized LGBTQ+ conduct in the past few years. Similar laws remain on the books in five Caribbean nations.
Although St. Lucia’s statute was not enforced, the court found that it stigmatized LGBTQ+ people in a way that could encourage “public humiliation, vilification and even physical attacks” and violate “the dignity of certain categories of citizens.”
Activists have hailed the decision as a win for civil liberties. “We’re not asking anyone to change their beliefs,” a group wrote in a statement to The Guardian. “These laws were outdated and violated the basic human rights of LGBTQ+ people.”
Sources: Human Rights Watch, The Guardian, Outright International
Seeds of the Egusi melon, a Nigerian staple food, flew with NASA
Part of a research mission studying the suitability of various foods in space, the seeds joined other culturally meaningful crops, including Armenian pomegranate and Pakistani wheat, so scientists can learn how low-gravity conditions affect seed characteristics such as genetic stability and lipid composition.
Temidayo Oniosun, a Nigerian scientist and businessman, chose Egusi seeds because of their prevalence and significance in West African cuisine. “People are realizing that space is not something that is in the abstract, especially Nigerians and Africans generally,” he said. “... For the first time, something that they connect to, something they eat almost every day is journeying through space.”
The project follows the inauguration of the Africa Space Agency in April, which seeks to coordinate spacefaring efforts among the 55 members of the African Union.
Sources: Forbes, Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute
Tajikistan decriminalized “liking” social media posts critical of the government
The move overturns a 2018 law to control online interactions deemed by officials to justify violence and terrorism.
Deepen your worldview
with Monitor Highlights.
Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.
More than 1,500 Tajik citizens have been imprisoned for likes, comments, and reposts under the law that imposed a sentence of up to 15 years.
Dmitry Azarov/Kommersant Photo/Sipa/AP
Tajikistan has drawn attention for detaining activists and journalists. But in 2023, a man without obvious political ties posted a video that led to his arrest and a five-year sentence. In the video, which received a million views, Shahboz Sharifbek accused authorities of forcibly taking his brother to enlist in the army. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Mr. Sharifbek “warns that officials’ mistreatment of people, violation of their civic rights, and poverty ‘can push young people toward extremism and terrorism.’”
President Emomali Rahmon, who has been in office since 1994, was critical of some applications of the law last October. The legislature took it up in April, and Mr. Rahmon signed the new law in May.
Sources: Fix the News, The Times of Central Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
As cities seek ways to prevent floods, a California town has a success story to share
The city of Roseville, 19 miles northeast of Sacramento, regularly sits at the top of California’s “best places to live” lists. The traffic is reasonable, the weather sunny, and the homes comparatively affordable. There are bike paths and well-ranked schools and, on one recent morning, even an outdoor step aerobics class cheerfully underway in a downtown park.
But there is another reason this railroad town now with some 160,000 residents gets such high accolades. After two decades of careful municipal planning, it has no problem with flooding.
To outsiders, this might seem like a strange claim to fame for a city in California’s Central Valley, away from the coasts and rising sea levels. But as people here know, the Sacramento Valley sits in a highly vulnerable flood plain. During the 1980s and ’90s, this city made national news when its creeks overflowed due to heavy rain. Hundreds of homes were destroyed. President Bill Clinton came to console. And Roseville began a full-scale reimagining of how to protect itself from water.
Why We Wrote This
Recent disasters in Texas and North Carolina underscore how costly interior floods can be. After Roseville, California, was hit by destructive floods in the 1980s and ’90s, the city turned itself into a model of preparedness and hazard mitigation.
Now, a quarter century later, the city is regularly held up as a model as other municipalities across the United States increasingly focus on the risk of inland flooding. This summer’s flash flooding in Texas Hill Country was a stark reminder that floods away from the coasts are one of the deadliest, and most financially costly, severe weather events in the U.S.
“Roseville is one of those communities that is ahead of the curve,” says David Feldman, professor emeritus with the department of urban planning and public policy at the University of California, Irvine. “They definitely get it.”
Its approach is not flashy. Talk to Brian Walker, Roseville’s senior engineer and flood plain manager, and you’ll hear a lot about flood plain mapping and storm drainage, funding mechanisms and development ordinances. But this measured and deliberate approach has worked, he and others say.
Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor
Roseville was the first city in the U.S. to receive the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) top rating for flood preparedness; residents still receive discounts on home insurance policies because of it. Mr. Walker also works closely with businesses in town. New residential neighborhoods are booming across the city, and last year Bosch announced a $1.9 billion upgrade to its Roseville site, where it plans to produce and test semiconductors.
“Hazard mitigation has real-world implications for families and for businesses,” Mr. Walker says. “If we’re prepared, people can maybe hose out their garage that got a little bit wet and then get back to business.”
Growing awareness in local communities
Earlier this year, the National Weather Service predicted that 2025 would well surpass the annual average of 4,000 flash flood warnings. The reasons for this vary from location to location, but often include a growing number of extreme rain events, as well as infrastructure challenges. More inland flooding means an increased likelihood of tragedies, such as in Texas earlier this year and the destruction from Hurricane Helene in the mountains of North Carolina last year. Monetary strain on cities and towns from New Mexico to New Jersey, from Kentucky to Vermont, is also growing.
“Local communities are becoming more aware of [floods] for a number of reasons,” Dr. Feldman says. “The cost of flooding, and the ultimate costs on residents and local governments, is increasing.”
Some of these costs are direct, such as for emergency response during a crisis. But there is also infrastructure repair, lost tax revenue, and the expense of future mitigation projects.
And there is always the issue of insurance.
Homeowners who live in high-risk flood areas must have flood insurance to get a mortgage. But those policies are expensive. Many researchers also point out that FEMA maps do not consider future development or climate change, so they tend to underestimate flood risk.
“FEMA’s flood maps are based on a historical average, but we know that with climate change, the past isn’t going to be like the future in terms of the type of flooding that we see and the extent of flooding that we see,” says Joel Scata, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
This is why Roseville has long viewed federal flood maps as a minimum standard, says Mr. Walker.
“I think that FEMA’s maps are a huge asset for the country,” he says, adding that he and others in Placer County work regularly with FEMA to update maps and use them as a baseline. “FEMA doesn’t want to require communities to do what Roseville does. Roseville elected to say, ‘FEMA maps are great, but we want to do better.’”
SOURCE:
First Street Foundation
Roseville analyzes flood risk by looking ahead to future development plans, both residential and commercial, in addition to assessing current development, he says. Then, officials take the maximum possible build-out of all those areas and analyze the flood risk, stormwater runoff, and other hazards based on that. With that information, the city creates its own maps and hazard ratings for citizens to access.
Those areas alongside Roseville’s 78 miles of creeks, for instance, tend to be open space, which can help manage the fierce bouts of rain that happen when an atmospheric river drops a fire hose of water on this city.
That means more restrictions on development, Mr. Walker acknowledges. But it also means space for a vast network of bike trails and parks that have become one of the big draws of the city. Additionally, it has prevented the situation facing Florida and other states where pricey businesses and homes are built in those places most likely to flood.
“If there’s one thing that I would say that is the most beneficial for mitigating flood risk, I’d say it is Roseville’s choice to define our flood plains more conservatively,” Mr. Walker says. “So, we define the risk, and then we keep structures and development outside of those risky areas.”
Stephanie Hanes/The Christian Science Monitor
From containing water, to working with it
Across the street from Roseville’s city government offices, over a pedestrian bridge covering both a bike path and a creek, Mr. Walker points out the high-water marker from the city’s 1995 flood. It’s almost as tall as he is.
This park was under several feet of water, he says – and planners here do not forget it. When they renovated the pedestrian bridges, they made sure to make them extra high so that even a flooded creek would rush under them.
“We were very mindful about not inducing any flood risk to the area,” he says. “In all of our projects, we strive for having zero flood impact.”
This, says Dr. Feldman, is what cities will increasingly need to do. Historically, municipalities created infrastructure to try to contain water. (And after its flooding, Roseville, too, built levees.) Now, they must try to work with it.
“There’s a growing awareness of the fact that so-called structural measures to alleviate floods, that is to say, building of dams, levees, fortifications of various types, are not a panacea,” he says. “You have to be more imaginative.”
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Individuals and businesses also need to take more responsibility, Dr. Feldman argues. If developers build in an area at risk of flooding, they should have to bear a greater share of the wider costs of flood mitigation and repair. The city of Sacramento, for instance, has created a flood insurance model that essentially does this, he says.
“I think what we’re beginning to learn ... is that you do have to take action locally,” he says. “You cannot depend on the cavalry coming to the rescue after a flood disaster. You cannot depend solely upon the government, and you certainly can’t depend solely on flood insurance or even FEMA flood insurance. The risks are too great.”
Where cell phones help users save money, and pricey calls are now free
Incarcerated people can now make phone calls for free in New York state
The department of corrections recently negotiated a new rate it will now pay to its telecom provider. Five other states have adopted similar policies since New York City passed its law in 2018.
Previously, imprisoned New Yorkers were allowed three free phone calls, each lasting 15 minutes, per week. Calls after that cost 2.4 cents per minute. The change is expected to save 30,000 incarcerated people some $13.3 million per year, according to Worth Rises, an antiprison nonprofit. People imprisoned in New York can work but make only between 10 and 33 cents an hour, significantly less than the nationwide average of 86 cents an hour.
Why We Wrote This
In our progress roundup, phone communications – both basic and advanced – are enabling new benefits. In New York state, incarcerated people can make calls for free, facilitating better connections to family and friends. And mobile money services developed in Kenya are now shown to help people accumulate savings.
Studies have found that consistent contact with loved ones has benefits, from better parent-child relationships to incarcerated people being less likely to reoffend after release. New York has set a goal of slashing recidivism to 17%, from 19% today, by 2030.
Sources: Stateline, The New York Times, ILR Carow, Prison Policy Initiative
Access to mobile money is boosting people’s savings
In 2024, the number of sub-Saharan adults with formal savings grew to 35%, a 12-point increase since 2021.
Misper Apawu/AP/File
This coincides with the continued rise of mobile money – financial transactions on a basic cellphone first popularized in Kenya in 2007. The number of mobile money account holders in the region increased from 27% to 40% in the 2021-24 period. And among low- and middle-income economies, adults in sub-Saharan Africa have the highest rate of mobile money saving. In all four subregions of sub-Saharan Africa, people who saved in mobile accounts did so more frequently than those who banked traditionally.
Mobile accounts make banking more convenient and help prevent losses and theft, boosting people’s ability to save. “Once adults have these formal accounts and become comfortable using them, digital savings follow very strongly,” said Michael Wiegand of the Gates Foundation.
Sources: Semafor, World Bank Global Findex 2025, Our World In Data
“Dutch-style” intersections are helping prevent traffic collisions
In 2023 in the United States, 1,155 cyclists and six times as many pedestrians died in crashes with motor vehicles. But since 2015, more cities in the U.S. and Canada are installing “protected intersections,” common throughout the Netherlands, for improved safety.
One such city is Fremont, California. The intersections feature football-shaped corner islands that extend the protection of protected lanes so that bikers do not merge with car traffic at all. The islands make it easier for drivers to see bikers, lower turning speed, and reduce pedestrians’ crossing distance. The design can help prevent “right hook” collisions, where drivers turn into the path of the cyclist, and allow bikers to make left turns more safely.
Tanner Laws/Tulsa World/AP/File
A small analysis of a Dutch intersection in Fremont recorded a sharp decrease in collisions after installation. And a report by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration found that drivers using protected intersections yield to pedestrians more often.
Sources: Bloomberg, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, U.S. Federal Highway Administration
A small, portable heat shelter won a design contest in southern India
India is both the world’s most populous nation and among those most vulnerable to increasingly severe weather. In 2024, as temperatures in the capital topped 126 degrees Fahrenheit, the country’s worst heat wave in over a decade killed at least 110 people – a figure many public health experts called an undercount.
The Neralu, which means “shade” in Kannada, consists of lightweight frames and includes a shaded bench and manually operated slats to fan occupants. It costs about $175 to produce from recycled materials such as metal, plastic, and plywood. It can be easily disassembled, installed, and transported.
Aijaz Rahi/AP
Inspired by its designers’ conversations with outdoor workers, the Neralu was displayed at the Sweat and Concrete event in Bengaluru this May, which aimed to raise awareness about the dangers of extreme heat.
Source: The Associated Press
Australia's volunteer groups combat habitat fragmentation through long-term approaches
While protected areas such as national parks are vital to conservation, they are often surrounded by settlements that prevent animals from roaming their full habitat. Linking habitats with wildlife corridors often requires sustained investment that can be difficult for volunteer groups to muster.
Deepen your worldview
with Monitor Highlights.
Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.
But some groups in Australia have kept at it. Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, for example, doubled the size of a New South Wales forest by replanting 600 hectares (1,483 acres) and created a program to promote the trees’ genetic diversity in the long term. TREAT, another group, planted 17,000 trees in the 1990s to reconnect Wooroonooran National Park with a nearby lake.
More than 25 years later, research shows TREAT’s corridor is successful. While wider research is needed to evaluate effectiveness in other contexts, a range of species, from mammals to birds to vegetation, has made TREAT’s corridor home.
Source: The Conversation
Where cell phones help users save money, and pricey calls are now free
Incarcerated people can now make phone calls for free in New York state
The department of corrections recently negotiated a new rate it will now pay to its telecom provider. Five other states have adopted similar policies since New York City passed its law in 2018.
Previously, imprisoned New Yorkers were allowed three free phone calls, each lasting 15 minutes, per week. Calls after that cost 2.4 cents per minute. The change is expected to save 30,000 incarcerated people some $13.3 million per year, according to Worth Rises, an antiprison nonprofit. People imprisoned in New York can work but make only between 10 and 33 cents an hour, significantly less than the nationwide average of 86 cents an hour.
Why We Wrote This
In our progress roundup, phone communications – both basic and advanced – are enabling new benefits. In New York state, incarcerated people can make calls for free, facilitating better connections to family and friends. And mobile money services developed in Kenya are now shown to help people accumulate savings.
Studies have found that consistent contact with loved ones has benefits, from better parent-child relationships to incarcerated people being less likely to reoffend after release. New York has set a goal of slashing recidivism to 17%, from 19% today, by 2030.
Sources: Stateline, The New York Times, ILR Carow, Prison Policy Initiative
Access to mobile money is boosting people’s savings
In 2024, the number of sub-Saharan adults with formal savings grew to 35%, a 12-point increase since 2021.
Misper Apawu/AP/File
This coincides with the continued rise of mobile money – financial transactions on a basic cellphone first popularized in Kenya in 2007. The number of mobile money account holders in the region increased from 27% to 40% in the 2021-24 period. And among low- and middle-income economies, adults in sub-Saharan Africa have the highest rate of mobile money saving. In all four subregions of sub-Saharan Africa, people who saved in mobile accounts did so more frequently than those who banked traditionally.
Mobile accounts make banking more convenient and help prevent losses and theft, boosting people’s ability to save. “Once adults have these formal accounts and become comfortable using them, digital savings follow very strongly,” said Michael Wiegand of the Gates Foundation.
Sources: Semafor, World Bank Global Findex 2025, Our World In Data
“Dutch-style” intersections are helping prevent traffic collisions
In 2023 in the United States, 1,155 cyclists and six times as many pedestrians died in crashes with motor vehicles. But since 2015, more cities in the U.S. and Canada are installing “protected intersections,” common throughout the Netherlands, for improved safety.
One such city is Fremont, California. The intersections feature football-shaped corner islands that extend the protection of protected lanes so that bikers do not merge with car traffic at all. The islands make it easier for drivers to see bikers, lower turning speed, and reduce pedestrians’ crossing distance. The design can help prevent “right hook” collisions, where drivers turn into the path of the cyclist, and allow bikers to make left turns more safely.
Tanner Laws/Tulsa World/AP/File
A small analysis of a Dutch intersection in Fremont recorded a sharp decrease in collisions after installation. And a report by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration found that drivers using protected intersections yield to pedestrians more often.
Sources: Bloomberg, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, U.S. Federal Highway Administration
A small, portable heat shelter won a design contest in southern India
India is both the world’s most populous nation and among those most vulnerable to increasingly severe weather. In 2024, as temperatures in the capital topped 126 degrees Fahrenheit, the country’s worst heat wave in over a decade killed at least 110 people – a figure many public health experts called an undercount.
The Neralu, which means “shade” in Kannada, consists of lightweight frames and includes a shaded bench and manually operated slats to fan occupants. It costs about $175 to produce from recycled materials such as metal, plastic, and plywood. It can be easily disassembled, installed, and transported.
Aijaz Rahi/AP
Inspired by its designers’ conversations with outdoor workers, the Neralu was displayed at the Sweat and Concrete event in Bengaluru this May, which aimed to raise awareness about the dangers of extreme heat.
Source: The Associated Press
Australia's volunteer groups combat habitat fragmentation through long-term approaches
While protected areas such as national parks are vital to conservation, they are often surrounded by settlements that prevent animals from roaming their full habitat. Linking habitats with wildlife corridors often requires sustained investment that can be difficult for volunteer groups to muster.
Deepen your worldview
with Monitor Highlights.
Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.
But some groups in Australia have kept at it. Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, for example, doubled the size of a New South Wales forest by replanting 600 hectares (1,483 acres) and created a program to promote the trees’ genetic diversity in the long term. TREAT, another group, planted 17,000 trees in the 1990s to reconnect Wooroonooran National Park with a nearby lake.
More than 25 years later, research shows TREAT’s corridor is successful. While wider research is needed to evaluate effectiveness in other contexts, a range of species, from mammals to birds to vegetation, has made TREAT’s corridor home.
Source: The Conversation
Katrina holds lessons as US debates role of states and FEMA in disaster response
Twenty years after it deluged New Orleans and ravaged other Gulf Coast communities, Hurricane Katrina continues to hold central lessons for U.S. disaster response – including cautionary ones, as Washington may be poised to scale back federal aid for emergencies.
At issue is whether states or the federal government should bear more responsibility for disaster relief – including help for those most vulnerable to events like storms and floods.
The issue is gaining urgency from rising disaster costs. The number of billion-dollar storms has risen from three in 1980 to 25 in 2023. But even today, Katrina stands as the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, at over $200 billion in damage.
Why We Wrote This
Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call for states as well as for federal disaster response. Lessons in resilience have born fruit, but a proposed scaling back of FEMA’s role is stirring debate in an era of rising storm costs.
For many of those who were there, the scale of destruction felt apocalyptic, even as it took days for many outside New Orleans to grasp the enormity of the storm’s toll. What’s more, Hurricane Katrina didn’t just open the curtain on inequities born of class, race, and wealth – it ripped the whole curtain away.
“While Katrina was singular and extraordinary, it was also a bellwether for these other events that play out in the same way: An extreme weather event exacerbated by human impacts on the environment comes up against infrastructure never meant to withstand it,” says Brooklyn-based filmmaker Traci Curry, who directed National Geographic’s “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time.” “The result is the people who have the most vulnerabilities have the least ability to recover.”
Katrina spurred changes at FEMA and beyond
The storm led to reforms to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Congress mandated that the agency’s leader have emergency management experience, though today the senior official performing the duties of FEMA administrator, David Richardson, has no such background. A clunky top-down command structure at FEMA morphed into a nimbler bottom-up approach, using citizens, nongovernmental organizations, and religious organizations in an all-hands-on-deck manner.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Perhaps most notably, the determination by New Orleanians to take a stand in the vast Louisiana marshes helped to spark a resilience movement that spans the United States from coastal cities to creekside towns. At least 13 states now have disaster resilience offices. Coastal cities from Charleston, South Carolina, to Tampa, Florida, have taken major mitigation steps to counter rising sea levels that threaten residents.
Those efforts suggest a national will to address “challenging questions about what we’re willing to accept as risk but also layering in the really important issue of [people’s] deep place attachment,” says Gavin Smith, an expert on disaster recovery at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Responsibility shifting to the states?
After criticizing the federal response to Hurricane Helene last October, the Trump administration has prioritized emergency response reform, aiming for a downsized federal role to spur stronger state defenses. A bill in Congress would mandate that if states make approved investments in disaster mitigation, FEMA could cover up to 85% of recovery costs. Without those improvements, reimbursement would drop to 65%.
Such efforts are in part an admission that the “trajectory of the feds taking on an increasingly larger and larger share of responsibility toward disaster management is untenable,” says Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a disaster resilience expert at the Rand School of Public Policy in Santa Monica, California.
Sergio Flores/Reuters
At a July congressional hearing, Mr. Richardson, FEMA’s acting administrator, defended the agency’s response to the deadly floods in the Texas Hill Country, saying it was a model for putting financial and logistical control in the hands of states. But critics say the agency took over 72 hours to marshal its search-and-rescue crews and lacked call center support. Answering the criticism, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the state efforts in Texas nullified the need for the federal teams and said the call center reports were “fake news.” And, after an Arkansas tornado outbreak this spring, the administration at first rejected an emergency declaration to provide help, but then approved the declaration a month later.
Accounts like those have raised concerns about the limits of a more detached federal posture that could fail to take into account the varying resources and capabilities of states.
This week, dozens of current and former FEMA employees posted an open letter saying that poor management at the agency is risking another Katrina-style disaster. A number of those employees have since been placed on administrative leave, and Secretary Noem, taking a cue from President Donald Trump, is pledging to eliminate the agency “as it exists today” and improve U.S. emergency management.
Under cost shifts proposed by the Trump administration, Florida would have borne $563 million in additional costs after Hurricanes Ian and Nicole in 2022, equal to about 21% of the state’s rainy-day fund. Louisiana would have seen its whole rainy-day fund wiped out, without FEMA funding for a series of storms in 2020 and 2021.
“The basic idea [of resilience after Katrina] is, let’s not get siloed in, let’s work collectively to reduce risk and improve preparedness – let’s respond together and recover together,” says Professor Clark-Ginsberg. “The downside is that resilience can sometimes be an excuse for abandonment – that disasters happen, and it’s up to you to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps to survive.”
Rising efforts in North Carolina, Texas
States are adapting to the new reality, with efforts including a North Carolina bill to create a new centralized emergency response office. It’s a big deal because North Carolina has historically been on the leading edge of disaster relief policy, going back to Hurricane Floyd in 1998. Texas has bolstered its disaster response infrastructure after a series of hurricanes and snowstorms. Last year, Georgia began exploring a resilience office by looking at the experience of the state’s tiny Tybee Island, where City Hall has used federal funding and grants to improve stormwater management as surrounding seas rise.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Louisiana in many ways set the tone for these efforts after Katrina, when it created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, and New Orleans pioneered the creation of a chief resilience officer and an Office of Hazard Mitigation.
Today, the Crescent City is far better protected, in large part because residents crossed political and cultural barriers to “not just say what they didn’t want, but what they did need,” says Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Center for Environmental Law.
“It made it clear to a lot of us that it wasn’t enough to love New Orleans and south Louisiana,” he says. “You had to take care of it. And that comes with responsibility.”
A key question is, Will states muster the ability to pay the price? Complicating the issue is that the demographic center point of the U.S. has started leaning South, putting people and their homes into places that experience more hurricanes or other extreme weather. Since 2015, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida – all Republican-led states in the South – have received the most individual assistance payments from FEMA: more than $2 billion each.
“Even if the climate wasn’t changing and the disaster rate was constant, it would still cost more to address” investments in high-risk areas, because of population growth and construction costs, says Neil Malhotra, a Stanford University economist.
SOURCE:
Urban Institute, U.S. Census Bureau
Not long after Katrina passed over the city, Willie Taylor heard the crack of the Industrial Canal as it failed near the Lower Ninth Ward, flooding a community built in large measure by Black longshoremen and their families. After evacuating to a downtown convention center, he ended up in Houston, where he spent seven years working at the airport.
“At first, there was no place to come back to” given the widespread destruction, says Mr. Taylor. It took him years of paperwork to secure a grant for a modular home, where he now lives in retirement, helping to landscape the Lower Ninth in vague hopes of bringing back the homes on Flood Street.
“Houston was OK, but it wasn’t home,” he says. “I don’t know what would have happened if I couldn’t have returned. In a way, I had to make it happen.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
A slightly falling population in New Orleans and the checkerboard recovery in the Lower Ninth Ward reflect a countertrend: Even as more than 17 million Americans have moved into flood-risk areas, about 3.2 million have decamped from flood-risk areas to safer ground between 2000 and 2020 – in some cases leaving folks like Mr. Taylor mowing empty lots to keep the wild from reclaiming them.
Citizens as building blocks of resilience
Even as disasters may force reassessment of where people live, another legacy of Katrina is an awareness that citizens will rally to support one another.
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Random Cushing remembers, as an 8-year-old, his hometown hosting people displaced from a city he had never heard of: New Orleans. Today, Mr. Cushing is a street poet in the city, pulling his knees up to a portable Olivetti in the city’s Jackson Square. A sign on the tiny desk reads, “Poems For Strangers.” He is part of the “layers of the city,” as he puts it.
Such connections are a humanizing force – and an important bulwark of resilience as the nation faces increasingly complex disasters.
Referring to the goodwill that was extended to so many people displaced by Katrina, Ms. Curry, the filmmaker, says, “I just wish we could bottle that sort of spirit.”
Ford is a bellwether: Electric vehicles are coming, despite Trump policy shifts
President Donald Trump has positioned himself as a defender of gas cars, and a foe of any mandate to phase them out. But his U-turn on federal policy doesn’t spell the end of an electric revolution in Detroit, which has invested decades and hundreds of billions of dollars in developing electric vehicles, batteries, and their supply chains.
An announcement last week by Ford marks the most definitive statement yet by an American automaker that it is committed to the future of electric cars, no matter what happens in Washington.
CEO Jim Farley said the company will invest $5 billion in an all-new modular EV platform and assembly process that will make it easier and cheaper to produce electric models in the United States. The company also announced the first product to be built with this system: a small electric pickup set to debut in 2027 for under $30,000.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump is ending policies to promote electric cars. But carmakers like Ford are focused more on Chinese competition than on Washington politics. The company’s stunning goal: a small electric pickup priced below $30,000.
The announcement, at a union factory in Louisville, Kentucky, reflected what many in the auto industry say is an increasingly clear reality: Electric transportation – and the technology to produce it more affordably – is barreling ahead, regardless of American politics or culture. And if U.S. automakers don’t want to fall behind, they need to figure out how to strike a delicate balance among shifting political demands in Washington, the evolving tastes of American car buyers, and global competition, especially from China.
“It’s so difficult to impress on people who are not watching the industry that the next step in the automobile will be electric,” says Sam Fiorani, vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. “If you take your foot off the accelerator of EV development, China is not going to slow down. And once you lose the lead, you become an also-ran very quickly.”
Darron Cummings/AP
Ford’s announcement demonstrates its dedication to not becoming one of those also-rans by staying in the global competition.
Soon after he took office, Mr. Trump instructed Congress to eliminate the $7,500 purchase rebates for American-made EVs, as well as fuel economy standards for car manufacturers that effectively required EV production in order to comply. The administration has also done away with the Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate to regulate carbon emissions and California’s waiver to set its own air quality standards that are stricter than the rest of the nation. It recently implemented a federal road tax just for EVs that is about twice what an average driver pays in federal gas taxes.
All of this has made the environment for EVs “far more challenging in the U.S. market this year,” says Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars.com.
Pioneer of assembly lines, Ford aims to innovate again
To make EVs affordable, Ford envisions a massive overhaul of the production process. Its plans, years in the making, developed out of view. A small, dedicated skunkworks of management engineers, poached from EV and tech firms such as Apple, Tesla, Rivian, Lucid, and Amazon, has been working in Long Beach, California, far from Ford’s Detroit-area headquarters.
“The automotive industry in America is at a crossroads about new technology and about new competition from everywhere,” Mr. Farley told the assembled autoworkers. “We saw this coming for years. We knew that the Chinese would be the major player [in global EV competition.] For too long, legacy automakers played it safe. We needed a radical approach. We need to do it and be sustainable and make money, and we need to do it with American workers.”
Ford called its plan a “Model T moment,” because it aims to bring back a kind of modular production system that will allow it to easily build a variety of body styles on a single production line. Instead of a single car moving down an assembly line with workers adding parts along the way, the line will have three branches, like rivers coming together at the end, with front, middle, and rear sections that can be mixed and matched to meet demand. So a single center cabin could get a sedan, hatchback, SUV, or pickup back end. With each portion built separately, workers will no longer have to reach through doors to install large parts like dashboards, making production much more efficient – and safer.
Despite the anti-EV rhetoric coming out of Washington, 10% more EVs were sold during the first quarter of 2025 – nearly 300,000 vehicles – than during the same time frame in 2024, according to Cox Automotive data. Sales dropped in the second quarter, to 6% below last year, but they were still higher in the first six months of 2025 than they were in 2024. And the biggest drop in sales came from Tesla, which alone accounts for 46% of the U.S. EV market.
At the time, Tesla had shut down its Model Y factory in Texas in preparation to build an updated model with a new assembly process similar to the one Ford announced last week. Many potential Tesla buyers and existing owners also balked at CEO Elon Musk’s actions at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), giving rise to bumper stickers proclaiming, “Bought before I knew Elon was crazy,” or “This is my last Tesla.”
Excluding Tesla, EV sales actually rose 4% in the first half of 2025 compared with last year.
“If this administration had its way, [American automakers] would stop production of anything electrified; they would only build big trucks and SUVs,” says Samuel Abuelsamid, vice president of market research at the Detroit-based consultancy Telemetry. But “People in Japan are never going to buy [Ford] F-150s, because they won’t fit on their tiny roads. Markets like Japan and Korea don’t buy U.S. products because we don’t build anything they can use.”
China drives a changing global marketplace
Ford’s investment shows that Detroit is motivated more by Chinese competition than by Washington politics, analysts say.
Tatan Syuflana/AP
“The global EV environment is facing increasing domination from Chinese automakers,” says Mr. Brauer of iSeeCars.com. Chinese automakers have been gobbling up market share with EVs in Europe, where Ford and Stellantis have business worth tens of billions of dollars. EVs account for 49% of car sales in China, where Ford made $660 million last year, while business for both General Motors and Stellantis there has been faltering.
Now, U.S. automakers “are adapting, shifting products around,” says Mr. Abuelsamid. Going forward, legacy automakers will focus more on smaller, more affordable electric cars, such as the new small electric pickup that Ford announced, he says. GM is bringing back the affordable Chevrolet Bolt EV. And Hyundai and Kia have a raft of new smaller models in the wings. Legacy automakers have “realized they put too much emphasis on the high end of the market,” he says, in part trying to emulate Tesla’s success in selling $70,000 to $130,000 EVs.
“We’re committed to electrification,” says Marty Gunsberg, spokesperson for Ford Model e, in a statement to the Monitor. “We appreciate the administration’s work to align regulations with market realities, and we believe electric vehicles are a great customer solution. These are the vehicles that will go toe-to-toe with China. We ... think our investments speak for themselves.”
Cheaper batteries are also part of the effort to bring prices down. GM, Ford, and Tesla are transitioning to batteries using the lithium iron phosphate technology from power tools, which costs half as much as earlier EV technology that was akin to what’s used in laptop computers and cellphones.
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If there is a change in the EV market at the moment, then, it’s less a pullback from electric cars than a reflection that previous forecasts were too optimistic, says Mr. Fiorani, the analyst in Pennsylvania.
“The problem in both the U.S. and Europe is that regulators pushed [automakers] to produce more [EVs] than the markets could bear,” he says. “The whole industry was under the misperception that this was going to be a relatively quick transition to EVs, and that just wasn’t going to be the case.”
Yes, AI is power-hungry. But there’s more to surging electricity prices.
Across the country, many Americans are paying more for their electricity. In Massachusetts, rates increased almost 69% between 2014 and 2024; in West Virginia that number neared 62%, according to EnergySage, an online clean-energy marketplace.
In U.S. cities, electricity costs are increasing twice as fast as other household items, according to a recent consumer price index report for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, on average, the electricity prices for households nationwide are expected to rise 13% between 2022 and 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the federal government’s authority on energy data.
All of this depends on location, thanks to the country’s utility system and how electricity is distributed and sold. While many customers in the Pacific, New England, and Mid-Atlantic regions have been slammed by price increases, other residents – such as those in Nevada – have had stable, or even lower, electric bills.
Why We Wrote This
Rising electricity bills are stinging consumers across the United States. Experts say the trend reflects rising demand for electricity – including from AI – but also the need for upgraded and more adaptable power grids.
Overall, though, the trend has been upward. Part of this is basic economics: There is more demand for electricity. The price of one key fuel for power plants, natural gas, has also jumped. But there are other reasons, as well. And experts say there are also solutions.
SOURCE:
U.S. Energy Information Administration
Is demand for power rising?
The short answer is yes; we are using more electricity. This might be because of more air conditioners running during more heat waves, which in the United States have been steadily increasing since the 1960s. It’s also because of the trend of electrification – from battery-operated lawn mowers to cars – and the rising use of electric heat-pump systems for heating and cooling homes.
But a big new factor is data centers.
As the use of artificial intelligence expands, it’s being powered by the growth of enormous new data centers, which can use as much electricity as a small city. The number of U.S. data centers roughly doubled between 2021 and 2024, and experts predict these centers could account for 5% to 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030.
Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are investing more in training and running AI programs like ChatGPT. These programs are very costly in terms of energy; AI internet searches use 10 times more electricity than traditional searches.
Jenny Kane/AP/File
“We’ve never seen additional load coming on at this scale,” says Melissa Whited, vice president of consulting at Synapse Energy Economics. “Demand is spiking, but supply has not been able to catch up.”
If a utility has to build more power lines or power plants to get electricity to data centers, those costs are typically spread across their customer base – the same way any grid-upgrade costs get distributed to consumers.
“There’s no way to allocate those costs just to the data centers,” says Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “Everybody pays for those cost increases.”
For example, PJM Interconnection – a grid operator that covers a region stretching from New Jersey to Chicago to North Carolina – holds a yearly auction to make sure it will have enough supply to keep the lights on for all their customers. In 2024, the value of that auction spiked up to 800% of its value the previous year.
Monitoring Analytics, a watchdog charged with monitoring PJM, calculated in June that data centers were responsible for nearly 70% of that increase.
What about the supply side?
Many experts say that U.S. power grids need updating because of both their aging infrastructure and the need to adapt to a changing mix of power sources.
The years after World War II saw massive electricity growth, and many existing power plants date back to that era. The result is that much of the U.S. power grid is starting to become outdated. Meanwhile, reliance on coal-fired plants has been diminishing in favor of renewable sources that often supply power intermittently (such as when the sun is shining, for solar power). There have been challenges with both permitting new power facilities and connecting them to aging grids.
American Electric Power, one of the largest electricity companies in the country, has said that 30% of its transmission lines will need to be replaced over the next 10 years. The Department of Energy has found that almost 70% of transmission lines are near the end of their useful lifespan. This can leave them vulnerable to cyberattacks and increase the risk of power outages, as an increase in electricity demand from growth in manufacturing, massive data centers, and electric vehicles puts pressure on an already strained system.
Are there solutions in sight?
Experts see a number of steps that could expand power supply and grid reliability.
One example: Both political parties are working toward streamlining the process of bringing new energy sources online. Currently, a cumbersome permitting process has resulted in a yearslong backlog in adding new energy sources to the grid, much of it solar and battery storage. Lawmakers hope reforming that process will help the supply side of the electricity cost issue.
But many improvements to electric grids take time – and might cost in the short term.
According to the Department of Energy, major electricity outages caused by natural disasters have increased by almost 80% just since 2011. These events can force costly repairs to the electric grid. From 2019 to 2023, the California Public Utilities Commission authorized the state’s three largest utilities to collect $27 billion from ratepayers to cover wildfire prevention and insurance costs.
Many service providers are also trying another option: “hardening” the grid to make it more resilient to disasters in the first place. In California, utilities are paying to move power lines underground so they’re not at risk of sparking and causing wildfires. Electric companies in Florida are switching to concrete poles, clearing trees away from power lines, and installing advanced technologies to be more hurricane-ready.
When it comes to data centers, Severin Borenstein, the faculty director of the Energy Institute at the Berkeley Haas School of Business, cautions against reading too much into forecasts of spiking electricity demand and costs. AI development can be uncertain and difficult to predict, he says.
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He also believes policy solutions could stave off some of the high costs. For example, on Aug. 4, Google signed agreements with two utilities to reduce its AI data power consumption during times of peak demand on the electric grid. Dr. Borenstein says it’s a step that gives him tentative optimism. Also, companies such as Amazon are investing heavily in next-generation clean energy solutions, such as small modular nuclear reactors, which could help power their operations.
“Grid operators and regulators, I think, are getting smarter about this,” he says. “Developing these policies, though, is not something that happens overnight.”
Rise in extreme heat spurs efforts to keep workers safe
On a scorching afternoon, a steady beat echoes from a shaded corner at Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Joshua Rodriguez, a street drummer, taps out rhythms on a drum set of buckets, pans, and lids. Although the sun barely touches him through the leaves, the heavy heat of the day hangs in the air. When someone drops a few dollars into his tip bucket, he smiles and shouts, “Yes! I made some money.”
Most summer days, Mr. Rodriguez plays for hours, drawing steady crowds. But during a recent heat wave, the hall felt quieter. Fewer people stopped to listen. Even in the shade, he often takes a break from drumming to rest and hydrate.
Mr. Rodriguez is far from the only one affected by the summer’s heat. Heat domes have hovered over vast areas of the country. Across the contiguous 48 states, June temperatures were the seventh hottest in 131 years of record-keeping. Boston's mayor this week declared the city's third heat emergency of the summer, after seeing record-breaking temperatures push the city’s electrical grid near the edge even in early June.
Why We Wrote This
Summers have been getting longer and hotter, with more days of extreme heat. Some states, cities, and employers are taking steps to keep outdoor workers safer. A pending federal rule would take safety guidelines nationwide.
In recent years, recognition has been growing among officials in many cities that heat is something more than just a summer nuisance, it’s a workplace hazard. Boston is an example of how some cities are trying to grapple with the issue, with workers and employers themselves taking steps such as scaling back outdoor schedules. Efforts by employers, while essential, highlight the lack of clear, enforceable standards for heat safety – an absence the nation might be poised to address.
“Ultimately, we want to protect every single individual from their body temperature exceeding dangerous temperatures,” says Madeleine Scammell, an environmental health professor at Boston University School of Public Health.
Though federal law requires employers to provide safe working conditions under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's General Duty Clause, it’s often unclear what that means during times of extreme heat.
A proposed OSHA rule, not yet in effect but now out for public input, would begin to bridge the gap by mandating things such as rest breaks and water access above certain temperatures for people who work outdoors.
Goodluck Ajeh /The Christian Science Monitor
At the state level, such standards are a patchwork. Across the country, summers are growing hotter and longer, and workers are increasingly exposed to extreme heat. But few legal protections exist to ensure people's safety. In most states, including Massachusetts, there are no specific standards requiring rest breaks or shaded areas during high-heat conditions. State officials are trying to change that. Some states, such as California and Oregon, already protect workers through enforceable heat-safety regulations.
What counts as extreme heat?
To some degree, extreme heat is relative. What could be considered unusual in Boston might be a normal temperature in a state such as Arizona. “What we’re talking about is temperatures that are above expected or what is normal for the area in which you are,” says Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability.
The National Weather Service defines extreme heat using the heat index – a measure that combines temperature and humidity. But researchers say the index often falls short. “One of the things that some research in the past has shown is that the heat index can be off by as much as 15 degrees based on temperatures being in the sun versus being in a shade,” says Brian Bossak, a professor of public health at the College of Charleston.
Wind speed is another factor that affects whether people feel hot, comfortable, or even chilly. A metric that offers a more complete picture of how it actually feels, folding all these elements together, is called the WetBulb Globe Temperature. But it is still under development.
Rising responses by government
As extreme heat events become more frequent, Boston is beginning to take action, building on a Heat Resilience Solutions plan first launched in 2022.
City Councilor Liz Breadon says part of the effort is to plant “more trees so that we can actually increase the tree cover, especially in publicly owned spaces that the city controls, to increase our tree canopy.”
Also, the city is working on an ordinance that would require employers to offer cooling stations, access to water, and adequate breaks during work hours. The city councilors, in what Ms. Breadon describes as an advisory role, are trying to raise awareness at the state level for more changes.
“One of the reasons why Massachusetts doesn’t have its own standard yet is that we adopted the OSHA standards,” says Michael Flanagan, director of the state's Department of Labor Standards.
“Because they didn’t have one, as a result, we didn’t add one either,” he says.
That might soon change – in Massachusetts and nationwide.
The Department of Labor Standards is working with other state agencies and municipalities to create a heat-safety standard.
Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Nationally, a proposed rule to prevent heat-related injury and illness could cover more than 36 million workers in construction, agriculture, and other industries. Employers would be required to provide cool drinking water and shaded or air-conditioned break areas when temperatures reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit. When it’s 90 degrees or hotter, the rule would mandate at least a 15-minute break every two hours.
A bill in Congress, meanwhile, seeks to codify such practices. Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey, a Democrat, is among the lawmakers leading efforts to establish enforceable protections for workers exposed to extreme heat. With Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and others as co-sponsors, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act would require an OSHA heat-safety standard including water, shade, rest breaks, and emergency procedures for heat-related incidents.
What local organizations are doing
Alongside government efforts, local organizations in Boston are taking their own steps to adapt to rising temperatures. At DalMoros Fresh Pasta in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, staff rotate through different stations to avoid spending too much time in the restaurant’s hot kitchen.
For businesses with outdoor workers, adjustments are also underway. Some dog-walking companies have shortened their routes and schedules to protect both workers and pets. In addition to monitoring city-issued heat advisories, Jennifer Rumpza, owner and manager of Hounds About Town, says they rely on a simple test: “If we can’t hold our hand on a pavement without it burning our hands, for at least five seconds, then we can’t expect the dogs to do that either,” she says.
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Other groups are experimenting with wearable tech to better understand and manage heat exposure. Dr. Scammell says the Chelsea East Boston Heat Study, a collaborative study between environmental justice group GreenRoots and the Boston University School of Public Health, is in partnership with the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health to pilot an armband that records body temperature in real time. They are also testing various cooling strategies, including cooling bandanas, vests, and waist fans.
When summer temperatures rise, workers such as Ayaan Jibril, a boutique owner, are forced to stay home during hotter days and can’t open their businesses. “I make myself busy,” she says. “I make more phone calls, I find where I [can] buy more items, and what else I [can] sell.” For workers like her, staying safe in the heat is becoming another part of the job.
Where a women’s tax is canceled, and businesswomen’s decisions valued
Women leaders’ problem-solving helps make their businesses more resilient
In a small study of entrepreneurs in especially climate-vulnerable parts of Kenya and Senegal, women managers were more likely to enact decisions to safeguard a business instead of addressing short-term needs. For example, they would grow an additional or a different crop, instead of shedding employees.
According to the research, these strategies can reduce vulnerability to climate change and boost income stability.
Why We Wrote This
In our progress roundup, a close look at the unique impacts of daily life on women resulted in new policies in Malta, and a recommendation in Kenya and Senegal that women entrepreneurs deserve funding and support.
For governments and donors, investing in more women-led businesses could “offer strategic means to address climate justice concerns,” the authors wrote.
Sylvain Cherkaoui/AP/File
Small- and medium-sized businesses provide 80% of all job opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa and generate as much as 40% of some countries’ gross domestic product. At 24%, African women have the highest rates of entrepreneurship in the world by some estimates.
Sources: The Conversation, MIT Sloan, International Finance Corporation
Indigenous people gain self-governance in Colombia
Colombia’s new legal framework puts it on the cutting edge for Indigenous rights in Latin America, advocates say.
In the making since 2018, the decree gives Indigenous communities direct control over their land. It enables them to operate as local governments with public budgets and administrative power.
In other Amazon nations such as Brazil, Indigenous groups are often only given land grants, or rights of ownership. That often leaves communities to navigate overlapping jurisdictions, because Indigenous groups’ borders may stretch across multiple states or municipalities.
Advocates say they hope the system agreed to in May will push other countries to follow suit, and celebrated it as a win for Amazonian forests crucial to combating climate change.
Ivan Valencia/AP
Sources: The Associated Press, Rainforest Foundation Norway
Cost-sharing program keeps community solar projects alive in Massachusetts
Solar developers typically pay for expensive upgrades to the grid which are necessary to connect to a new solar project. But such plans often die early because of the cost. Now, a “build in advance, pay later” structure means ratepayers are helping out via their future electricity bills. Representing customers’ interests, the state’s attorney general’s office is one of the stakeholders who worked on the plan over six years, influencing a shift of some of the cost back to developers.
The plan will increase ratepayers’ bills in the short term, said Kate Tohme, of developer New Leaf Energy. However, “once the grid is modernized and we get distributed energy interconnected, it’s going to drastically decrease our electricity costs” by bringing renewable energy and batteries online.
Business Wire/AP/File
Source: Canary Media
Malta will provide free period products at all 58 middle and secondary schools
The Mediterranean country aims to eliminate stigma, normalize discussions on menstrual health, and ensure inclusive access. As part of Malta’s 2022 plan to promote gender equality, the value-added tax for menstrual products will be eliminated.
In the 2024 index by the European Institute for Gender Equality, Malta ranks 13th out of 27 countries. The nation’s equality commission, in its comments on the index, noted improvement over several years in the division of labor at home: 78% of women and 63% of men reported doing daily cooking and housework.
Sources: Times of Malta, National Commission for the Promotion of Equalit
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Seoul, South Korea, combats isolation among adults of all ages
Since 2021, support centers run by the city have sought to improve the quality of life for single-person households and offered counseling and classes such as pet care, cooking, and exercise. Residents can build connections through watching movies, volunteering, or dining out. About 152,000 people used the centers between 2022 and 2024.
Some 39% of Seoul’s 9.6 million residents live alone. As the proportion of people living alone has grown globally, researchers have recognized the benefits of supportive social networks. In a citywide survey of one-person households from April 2025, people ranked eating a balanced diet, dealing with household chores and health emergencies, and social isolation among the challenges.
Sources: The Korea Herald, Seoul Single-Person Household Portal
Where a women’s tax is canceled, and businesswomen’s decisions valued
Women leaders’ problem-solving helps make their businesses more resilient
In a small study of entrepreneurs in especially climate-vulnerable parts of Kenya and Senegal, women managers were more likely to enact decisions to safeguard a business instead of addressing short-term needs. For example, they would grow an additional or a different crop, instead of shedding employees.
According to the research, these strategies can reduce vulnerability to climate change and boost income stability.
Why We Wrote This
In our progress roundup, a close look at the unique impacts of daily life on women resulted in new policies in Malta, and a recommendation in Kenya and Senegal that women entrepreneurs deserve funding and support.
For governments and donors, investing in more women-led businesses could “offer strategic means to address climate justice concerns,” the authors wrote.
Sylvain Cherkaoui/AP/File
Small- and medium-sized businesses provide 80% of all job opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa and generate as much as 40% of some countries’ gross domestic product. At 24%, African women have the highest rates of entrepreneurship in the world by some estimates.
Sources: The Conversation, MIT Sloan, International Finance Corporation
Indigenous people gain self-governance in Colombia
Colombia’s new legal framework puts it on the cutting edge for Indigenous rights in Latin America, advocates say.
In the making since 2018, the decree gives Indigenous communities direct control over their land. It enables them to operate as local governments with public budgets and administrative power.
In other Amazon nations such as Brazil, Indigenous groups are often only given land grants, or rights of ownership. That often leaves communities to navigate overlapping jurisdictions, because Indigenous groups’ borders may stretch across multiple states or municipalities.
Advocates say they hope the system agreed to in May will push other countries to follow suit, and celebrated it as a win for Amazonian forests crucial to combating climate change.
Ivan Valencia/AP
Sources: The Associated Press, Rainforest Foundation Norway
Cost-sharing program keeps community solar projects alive in Massachusetts
Solar developers typically pay for expensive upgrades to the grid which are necessary to connect to a new solar project. But such plans often die early because of the cost. Now, a “build in advance, pay later” structure means ratepayers are helping out via their future electricity bills. Representing customers’ interests, the state’s attorney general’s office is one of the stakeholders who worked on the plan over six years, influencing a shift of some of the cost back to developers.
The plan will increase ratepayers’ bills in the short term, said Kate Tohme, of developer New Leaf Energy. However, “once the grid is modernized and we get distributed energy interconnected, it’s going to drastically decrease our electricity costs” by bringing renewable energy and batteries online.
Business Wire/AP/File
Source: Canary Media
Malta will provide free period products at all 58 middle and secondary schools
The Mediterranean country aims to eliminate stigma, normalize discussions on menstrual health, and ensure inclusive access. As part of Malta’s 2022 plan to promote gender equality, the value-added tax for menstrual products will be eliminated.
In the 2024 index by the European Institute for Gender Equality, Malta ranks 13th out of 27 countries. The nation’s equality commission, in its comments on the index, noted improvement over several years in the division of labor at home: 78% of women and 63% of men reported doing daily cooking and housework.
Sources: Times of Malta, National Commission for the Promotion of Equalit
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Seoul, South Korea, combats isolation among adults of all ages
Since 2021, support centers run by the city have sought to improve the quality of life for single-person households and offered counseling and classes such as pet care, cooking, and exercise. Residents can build connections through watching movies, volunteering, or dining out. About 152,000 people used the centers between 2022 and 2024.
Some 39% of Seoul’s 9.6 million residents live alone. As the proportion of people living alone has grown globally, researchers have recognized the benefits of supportive social networks. In a citywide survey of one-person households from April 2025, people ranked eating a balanced diet, dealing with household chores and health emergencies, and social isolation among the challenges.
Sources: The Korea Herald, Seoul Single-Person Household Portal
Where did your shrimp dinner really come from? This reporter surfaces hard details.
Award-winning journalist Ian Urbina has been writing about the largely hidden world of the oceans for a decade. He was originally drawn to the topic because he realized few other people were covering the two-thirds of Earth that’s covered in water. But he soon found a deeper mission: a desire to bring light to the life-or-death human and ecological struggles that have long been invisible to those of us on land.
This summer, his nonprofit journalism organization, the Outlaw Ocean Project, has released its podcast’s second season. Among other topics, these episodes detail the supply chain that underlies much of the world’s seafood – including the shrimp or ready-to-cook calamari sitting in the frozen section of the grocery store.
Those food items have stories that might involve everything from secret Chinese trawlers to captive labor to geopolitical deception.
Why We Wrote This
Many people have been learning about their food's “farm to table” story. But the journey from ocean to table is less known. Journalist Ian Urbina's work is shedding light on challenges in a largely unpoliced realm.
The Monitor talked recently with Mr. Urbina about the connections between our dinner plates and what happens in the remote, dangerous waters of the ocean – and how journalism can help. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Can we start with shrimp? I know a lot of people who go to the store, find a bag of frozen shrimp at a good price, and not think much about it. What’s important for them to know about that product?
Well, the first question would be, do we know anything about where it came from? If it’s foreign, which is the vast majority, the sky is the limit on concerns. The core principle is, the longer the supply chain, the more places there are for dark stuff to creep in. And so, if it’s something that’s coming from far, far away, and it’s trading hands 17 times before it ends up on your shelf, then that’s pretty worrisome. The climate impacts, the potential for forced labor, the potential use of antibiotics, the ocean health impacts – all those things are going to be much greater when you have a really long supply chain.
Your podcast delves into that supply chain – as it did during its first season. What surprised you from your reporting this time?
In 2015, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Guardian were all over the issue of sea slavery, as the term was called. And it was really focused on Thailand and the South China Sea. So, what was surprising to me, jumping to 2024 with the India investigation [Episode 5], is that the very things that drove the shrimp industry out of Thailand – a lot of Western brands left because they were not happy about the bad press about forced labor – the very things same things that we reported in 2014 are happening in India in terms of the captive labor, the conditions, debt bondage, violence. So that surprised me. But in some ways, it didn’t. Capital moves where it can do its thing.
But aren’t there seafood industry monitors, or certifications?
The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California has a ranking system, but historically, it is only worried about the environmental issues – is this species running out or not? They’ve sort of looked over in the direction of labor issues, but not really, and even on the “is this a safe species to be purchasing?” question, they are not really able to check the supply chains.
The private industry certification thing is a sham. It’s fundamentally flawed because the people being policed are paying the police, so there’s already a conflict of interest. Much of what is used to prove that rules are being followed are self-reported. These auditors never get on the vessels.
What was new in the China investigation was China [Episodes 6 and 7]. China is a black box where, if you are a journalism outfit, or you’re an NGO, or you’re a company, and you agree to go in there, you’re going to go in there playing by their rules. And if you break their rules, you’re going to get kicked out of the country. One of the rules is, you don’t mention the Uyghurs. You don’t mention North Korea. You don’t talk about human rights violations. And you’re not doing unannounced spot checks.
Ed Ou//The Outlaw Ocean Project
Chinese dominance in this supply chain comes up repeatedly in your episodes this season.
It’s the reality, and it only becomes more so by the month and by the year. And it’s really China’s dominance on the water generally, whether it’s navies, coast guards, technology, research, Big Pharma, mining the sea floor, companies looking to go into seabed mining. If it’s on the water, China is crushing everyone else.
On fishing, think of it this way: You have near-shore fishing and distant-water fishing. Distant-water fishing refers to ships that go outside of your national waters, so into high seas or foreign waters. Those are the vessels that tend to be industrial scale, so 40 or more guys, huge ships. And they tend to stay offshore anywhere from 6 months to 3 years and never come to port. They go really, really far. Some of them traverse the entire planet before they come back to home port.
So, if you’re going to measure the world’s countries on the size just of their presence on the water when it comes to fishing, China’s distant-water fleet, if you ask the Chinese government: 2,700 vessels. If you ask a think tank here in DC: 17,000 vessels. You ask us, we put the number at 6,500.
Even if you use the Chinese conservative number of 2,700 vessels, it’s still five times bigger than the next largest fleet.
Now, let’s go on land. So, a French ship goes out to Togo, fishes tuna, brings it back, freezes it, and then sends it to China to be processed. They freeze it again, send it back. A Spanish ship does squid. A U.S. ship does whatever.
Most of the processing left the United States and Europe in the late ’80s and early ’90s, because it’s really labor-intensive, environmentally pretty complicated, and needs to be done on scale. And China became the sweatshop of the planet in the late ’80s and early ’90s. So now, there is no processing capacity, really, outside of China.
So, what that means is, not only are they pulling more marine life out of the water, but much of the marine life being pulled out of the water by other folks is being is sent – because it’s so much cheaper and faster – to China.
Given all this, what would you recommend an everyday consumer do?
I think the first step that we all should take when we’re trying to answer the question of, “What do I do about any of this,” is step back and redefine who we are. Especially in the U.S., we think of ourselves as “consumers.” Like, we’re even called that normally, more so than parents, siblings, lovers, taxpayers, voters, donors. We wear lots of hats, and our sole identity isn’t just what we buy.
So first, step back and realize you wear like 12 different hats in your daily life. And with each, you can do something little that might help shed light or move the needle. If you’re a voter, you can think, “I’ve read about how bad this issue is – whatever the issue – and I kind of want to vote for this woman, or this guy, and but I want to see where they are on that. You’ve also got 11 other categories. Every year, I send $20 to some NGO doing good stuff. Who should it be? You’re at Thanksgiving, and there’s that grumpy uncle, and you’re having a civil conversation of political differences, and you bring up this topic, and you go a couple of rounds, respectfully. You’re trying to move the needle in all these capacities.
And, yes, you can also buy differently. You can jump on the internet and say, I love shrimp. I’m not giving it up, but I kind of want shrimp that’s not as bad. Let me just Google and see what brands seem to be better. And you spend 20 minutes educating yourself, and then, at Walmart, you choose that brand instead of that one.
Don’t get cornered into thinking this is an answer to the question of, “How do we win the war?” The war is unwinnable. You just fight battles every day and try to move in the right direction. Because if you don’t set that ground rule, you’ll get a skeptic who’s eager to say to you, “Oh, that doesn’t do anything.” OK, it probably doesn’t do much. It’s not going to win the war. It’s not going to solve the problem. It’s not going to end climate change or slavery or whatever. But something is more than nothing. And personally, I think it’s ethical to be trying. Even if you’re aware it’s not perfect.
Throughout the podcast season, you find yourself in moments that are quite dangerous. You’re jumping from one ship to another in the middle of the ocean. In Libya, your team is kidnapped and held at gunpoint. It’s a lot. What keeps you doing this work?
I’m not an adrenaline junkie. I don’t like danger, but sometimes it’s there in those places.
For me, even I was even really young, I struggled with the disparity that exists between those who won the lottery of birth and those who didn’t; how we might be right next to each other and how that just didn’t seem fair.
My parents kind of beat into me the idea of, “Hey, use your lottery to try to make things better. Choose what the things are and what you mean by better, but like, you got to do something.”
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So this is where I ended up doing something. … I don’t think I’m ever going to win the wars, but at least I’m fighting for something that feels worthy. And the fight for me is doing good journalism.
The Outlaw Ocean podcast, and other journalism from Mr. Urbina and his team, is available at www.theoutlawocean.com.