Environment.org

Since January, the Trump Administration has frozen vast swathes of federal spending under a series of Executive Orders, including at the United States Department of Agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of lawful, signed, active contracts and grants – supporting critical conservation payments, farmer technical assistance, sustainable agriculture research, market infrastructure, and so much more, and representing billions of dollars in federal funding – are frozen, which threatens farms, jobs, and livelihoods in communities nationwide.

Federal courts have delivered ruling after ruling that the funding freeze must be lifted – but to date, the Administration has yet to act to unfreeze funding and with every passing week, the situation worsens: farmers and organizations are facing layoffs, work stoppages, and rising debt due to the federal government’s failure to honor its legally binding financial commitments.

Farmers, ranchers, and advocates are speaking out. …

America’s avocado obsession is destroying Mexico’s forests. Is there a fix?

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| Pollution

Avocados are entrenched in American cuisine. The rich, creamy fruit, swaddled in a coarse skin, is often smashed into guacamole, slathered on toast, or minced into salads.

The nation’s demand for Persea americana has surged by 600 percent since 1998. Most of the avocados consumed in the U.S., and many of those eaten elsewhere in the world, are a single variety grown in Michoacán, a state in west-central Mexico with an immensely profitable export industry worth at least $ 2 billion annually. But this “green gold rush” has come at a steep climatic cost, as vast tracts of protected land are razed for orchards.

“We are losing the forest,” said Alejandro Méndez López, who has been the secretary of environment in Michoacán since 2022. Every year, up to 24,700 acres are illegally cleared for avocado production. “The main …

Extreme weather events have strong but different impacts on plant and insect phenology

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| Climate

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 21 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02248-7

Using community data of 581 angiosperm and 172 Lepidoptera species, the authors consider the impacts of extreme weather events (EWE) on the timing of life events (phenology). They show high responsiveness of phenology to EWEs and highlight the potential for EWEs to drive phenological mismatches.
Nature Climate Change…

What climate change means for bird flu — and the soaring price of eggs

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| Pollution

Buying eggs at the grocery store has become a major headache for U.S. consumers, with the average price of a dozen large eggs in a typical American city reaching $ 4.95 last month. Since the start of 2020, the cost of eggs has increased by nearly 240 percent, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Recently, acquiring eggs has become a game of luck — as shoppers find barren cooler cases and limits on how many cartons they can buy at the grocery store. The kitchen staple has gotten so hard to come by that thieves stole 100,000 eggs — worth $ 40,000 — off of a distribution trailer in Pennsylvania earlier this month.

President Donald Trump ran his reelection campaign on, among other things, a promise to bring down the cost of groceries. But in …

Comment: NSAC Responds to “First Tranche” Release of Popular Conservation Funding

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| Sustainability

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Laura Zaks
National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition
press@sustainableagriculture.net
Tel. 347.563.6408

Comment: NSAC Responds to “First Tranche” Release of Popular Conservation Funding

Washington, DC, February 21, 2025 – Today, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) released the following statement attributable to Mike Lavender, NSAC Policy Director, in response to USDA’s announcement that it would release a fraction of paused conservation investments.

“While USDA fires its staff and deliberates whether or not to honor its own legal contracts, tens of thousands of farmers are being left in limbo. The ‘first tranche’ released this week represents roughly one percent of the IRA funding USDA guaranteed farmers through signed contracts from CSP and EQIP alone beginning in FY2023 – meaning that from coast to coast, countless farmers are waking up today still uncertain of how they’ll make ends meet or whether

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Republicans once embraced ‘green banks.’ Trump is trying to raid them.

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| Pollution

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $ 20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.”

The Biden administration’s plan, Zeldin said, was for the bank to distribute the money to a handful of nonprofits, which would then send it out to “NGOs and others” for climate-related spending. But he vowed to stop that plan. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said.

But the scheme Zeldin described is not …

The role of cross- and interdisciplinary climate research centres

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| Climate

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02249-6

Climate research centres provide valuable support to scholars wanting to engage with interdisciplinary research. Fully leveraging this support requires strategic individual efforts. We outline how scholars can achieve collaborative synergy at the intersection of top-down institutional support and bottom-up individual action.
Nature Climate Change…

Comment: NSAC Responds to Senate Confirmation of Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins

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| Sustainability

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Laura Zaks
National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition
press@sustainableagriculture.net
Tel. 347.563.6408

Comment: NSAC Responds to Senate Confirmation of Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins

Washington, DC, February 13, 2025 – Today, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) released the following statement attributable to Mike Lavender, NSAC Policy Director, in response to the Senate confirmation of Brooke Rollins as Secretary of Agriculture with a 72-28 vote:

“Secretary Rollins’ first order of business must be to relieve and reverse the pain and confusion being felt by farmers and communities nationwide from the federal funding freeze. This includes honoring legal obligations to farmers and organizations by immediately releasing funding on all signed contracts. For weeks now, farmers and communities have been subjected to the chaos and uncertainty of an indiscriminate federal funding freeze, including unlawful contract terminations. Other critical work lies ahead

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