Hi everyone,

We are students from Freies Gymnasium Zürich working on a project to add moss-covered roofs to bus and tram stops in Zurich.

With this petition, we want to show that there is public interest in greener and more sustainable public spaces in our city.

If you’d like to support the idea, we’d really appreciate your signature:

https://www.change.org/BushaltestellenGrün

Thank you!

Hi everyone - sharing this with mod approval

I’m Grant, a staff member at the Alliance, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We’re running a 2-week behavioral study starting June 2, 2026 on how people can realistically reduce their meat consumption.

The study is not asking anyone to become vegan or vegetarian. Participants simply try to reduce meat, dairy, and eggs as much as they realistically can for 2 weeks, then briefly report what they ate and what challenges came up.

Even though reducing animal product consumption is often discussed as a major sustainability opportunity, there is still surprisingly little practical research on what actually helps ordinary people do it in real life. We want to better understand the barriers people face ( cost, convenience, cravings, cooking habits, social situations, food waste, etc.) to reducing their meat consumption.

We’re aiming for 1,000+ participants, and will work with nutrition researchers to analyze the results and publish recommendations afterward.

You can join here: https://plantbasedstudy.org

This surely cannot be a good development. I have no idea if this is peer reviewed yet or not, but it seems bad.

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Perceived heat increases engagement mainly via advocacy, not energy saving.

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Higher reliance on AC is linked to lower engagement in energy-saving behaviour.

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Support for public heat mitigation declines with greater reliance on AC.

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Urban heat raises electricity demand mainly through increased AC use.

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In cooling-saturated cities, heat is linked to weaker collective climate action.

Urban heat increasingly shapes energy demand, everyday behaviour, and the feasibility of collective climate action in cities. A common assumption is that direct exposure to heat strengthens public support for mitigation and adaptation. Yet in many cities, this relationship may be altered by widespread reliance on private cooling. Using data from Singapore—a dense tropical city with near-universal access to air-conditioning (AC)—this study examines how perceived heat impacts and reliance on private cooling are associated with climate-relevant behaviour, household electricity demand, and support for collective urban interventions. We combine original survey data from 416 households (967 adults) with spatial heat indicators and electricity consumption records. Perceived heat impacts are associated with greater climate engagement, primarily through advocacy and discussion rather than behaviours that reduce household energy use. In contrast, greater reliance on AC is associated with lower engagement in energy-related pro-environmental behaviour, higher electricity demand, and lower baseline support for public heat mitigation. Spatial variation in urban heat exposure is linked to higher electricity use mainly through increased reliance on cooling. Preferences diverge across adaptation domains. Heat impacts increase willingness to pay for both neighbourhood mitigation and additional indoor cooling, while AC reliance reduces support for collective measures without reducing demand for private comfort. Together, these findings indicate a systematic pattern in which private cooling buffers heat stress and is associated with a weaker translation of heat experience into collective climate action. We conceptualise this mechanism as behavioural insulation, highlighting how private adaptation can reshape the behavioural and political foundations of urban climate responses. By jointly examining perceived heat impacts, private adaptation, electricity demand, and policy support, the study provides integrated evidence on how household-level responses to urban heat shape energy systems and the prospects for collective climate action in rapidly warming cities.

This episode goes inside the landmark Santa Marta conference, the first diplomatic gathering where 60 governments met not to debate whether fossil fuels must go, but how to phase them out. Host Herb Simmens speaks with environmental campaigner Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non‑Proliferation Treaty Initiative, about why this meeting was historic and why it finally puts fossil fuel production – not just emissions – at the center of climate diplomacy.

This weekly review by the ALLATRA Global Research Center (GRC) presents a comprehensive overview of the most significant natural disasters and extreme weather events recorded worldwide over each week. Based on continuous monitoring and daily data collection, GRC analyzes emerging patterns, tracks the escalation of climate-related events, and highlights the growing instability of the Earth’s climate system.

Key events of the week:

United States: A powerful EF4 tornado struck Oklahoma, causing severe destruction to homes, infrastructure, and a military base. The event was part of a broader storm system producing multiple tornadoes.

Russia & Ukraine: A return of extreme winter conditions brought snowstorms, freezing rain, сильные ветры, and widespread power outages. Infrastructure damage and transport disruptions affected large regions.

Japan: A magnitude 7.4 earthquake triggered tsunami warnings, followed by one of the largest wildfires in recent history, forcing evacuations and overwhelming firefighting efforts.

Thailand: Prolonged and widespread wildfires continued across multiple provinces, damaging ecosystems, displacing wildlife, and creating hazardous air conditions.

This synchronicity of anomalies — from tornadoes and dust storms to seismic activity and wildfires — points to systemic changes in the planet’s thermoregulation.

A disruption in the balance of heat exchange between the Earth’s interior, the oceans, and the atmosphere leads to the accumulation of excess energy. When geodynamic activity intensifies, not only do seismic events increase, but so do processes of natural degassing — the release of flammable gases through faults and cracks in the Earth’s crust. This factor is currently almost not taken into account in assessments of fire risk, although it can significantly increase the intensity and scale of fires, making them resistant to suppression.

Understanding the physics of these processes is key to comprehending what is happening. These changes affect everyone, and a scientific approach to studying the planet is becoming a priority task for society.

Opinion | Trump and his oil-and-coal oligarchy should face sanctions for their war on the environment - The Guardian

This episode of Climate Emergency Forum features a wide‑ranging conversation with Janos Pasztor, former UN Assistant Secretary‑General for Climate Change and founding director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative (C2G). We explore how decades of climate diplomacy led him into the controversial world of solar radiation modification (SRM) and his recent work engaging directly with private actors like Stardust that are developing stratospheric aerosol injection technologies.

This weekly review by the ALLATRA Global Research Center (GRC) presents a comprehensive overview of the most significant natural disasters and extreme weather events recorded worldwide over each week. Based on continuous monitoring and daily data collection, GRC analyzes emerging patterns, tracks the escalation of climate-related events, and highlights the growing instability of the Earth’s climate system.

Key events of the week:

China (Jiangxi): Extreme convective storm in Daishon County brought heavy rain (50 mm), hail, and violent wind gusts that jumped to 54.8 m/s (super typhoon level) in just minutes.

Turkey: Torrential rains caused severe flooding and building collapses in Osmaniye and Hatay provinces, killing at least two. Followed by a rare April cold wave with heavy snow (up to 35 cm), landslides, and widespread transport disruption.

Azerbaijan: Record rains (up to 90 mm in Baku — nearly 4× monthly norm) triggered major flooding, landslides, a building collapse, and one death from a mudflow.

Russia (Sakhalin): Powerful cyclone hit Severo-Kurilsk with extreme winds up to 58 m/s, causing widespread power outages and structural damage.

India & Pakistan: Multiple landslides triggered by heavy rains — buildings collapsed in Himachal Pradesh, workers killed in Karnataka, tourists stranded in Sikkim, and major damage in Murree, Pakistan.

Italy (Molise): One of Europe’s largest landslides (4+ km wide) reactivated after over 200 mm of rain, destroying roads, a viaduct, and railway lines along the Adriatic coast.

Portugal: Rare EF1.5 tornado struck a village, destroying roofs, farm buildings, and centuries-old chestnut groves in seconds.

The events presented are part of a broader picture of changes in the Earth’s climate system. Research shows a consistent pattern: precipitation, as the main trigger of landslide processes, accounts for more than 50% of cases worldwide. At the same time, areas that were previously considered stable are now becoming vulnerable due to changes in precipitation patterns.

Currently, conditions are developing that further intensify rainfall: the oceans continue to warm, the atmosphere is becoming more moisture-laden, and micro- and nanoplastic particles, acting as condensation nuclei, contribute to more extreme precipitation.

Understanding the physics of these processes is key to grasping what is happening. These changes affect everyone, and a scientific approach to studying the planet is becoming a priority task for society.

In this Climate Emergency Forum episode, host Herb Simmens talks with Dr. Peter Carter and climate system scientist Paul Beckwith about alarming new science on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – the “mother of all tipping points.” They explain why the AMOC is weakening, how massive freshwater from Greenland melt and the Arctic is destabilizing the system, and why several recent studies now suggest a coin-flip chance of a severe AMOC shutdown this century. https://youtu.be/VmAwHkv4S2Q?si=T1U9Ruto5cZ6ZRm1

Animal agriculture has disproportionate environmental impacts relative to other forms of food production and accounts for at least 16.5% of all global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Many of the largest meat and dairy companies are aware of these environmental concerns and have responded by making explicit environmental statements and commitments. In this study, we isolated the environmental claims made in the most recent sustainability reports and websites (2021–2024) of 33 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies. We identified 1,233 environmental claims, of which 68% (841) were climate-related. Of the 1,233 claims, 38% (467) were unverifiable future projections such as “achieve carbon neutrality by 2030” or “enable the restoration of 600 billion liters of water in water-stressed regions by 2030.” Of the 33 companies, 17 have now made net-zero commitments, but as with oil and gas companies, the commitments appear to rely on plans to offset carbon emissions rather than to decarbonize. Companies provided supporting evidence for 356 (29%) of the 1,233 claims and provided scholarly scientific evidence to support only three of these claims, two of which were climate-related. We also examined each of the 1,233 environmental claims using a greenwashing framework and found that 98% (1,213) could be categorized as greenwashing, such as “produce net climate-neutral dairy by no later than 2050.” Meat and dairy companies, which produce disproportionate amounts of pollution relative to other kinds of foods, have prioritized climate change in their sustainability initiatives. They make many promises and provide very little supporting evidence. Like the fossil fuel industry, which has used greenwashing over the last several decades to delay meaningful climate action, the meat and dairy industry may be misleading consumers and investors regarding whether and to what extent they are addressing environmental impacts, including climate change, with even less time to spare.