Fewer food crops Biofuels policy has been a failure for the climate, new report claims Report: An expansion of biofuels policy under Trump would lead to more greenhouse gas emissions. Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News – Jun 14, 2025 7:10 am | 24 An ethanol production plant on March 20, 2024 near Ravenna, Nebraska. Credit: David Madison/Getty Images An ethanol production plant on March 20, 2024 near Ravenna, Nebraska. Credit: David Madison/Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. The American Midwest is home to some of the richest, most productive farmland in the world, enabling its transformation into a vast corn- and soy-producing machine—a conversion spurred largely by decades-long policies that support the production of biofuels. But a new report takes a big swing at the ethanol orthodoxy of American agriculture, criticizing the industry for causing economic and social imbalances across rural communities and saying that the expansion of biofuels will increase greenhouse gas emissions, despite their purported climate benefits. The report, from the World Resources Institute, which has been critical of US biofuel policy in the past, draws from 100 academic studies on biofuel impacts. It concludes that ethanol policy has been largely a failure and ought to be reconsidered, especially as the world needs more land to produce food to meet growing demand. “Multiple studies show that US biofuel policies have reshaped crop production, displacing food crops and driving up emissions from land conversion, tillage, and fertilizer use,” said the report’s lead author, Haley Leslie-Bole. “Corn-based ethanol, in particular, has contributed to nutrient runoff, degraded water quality and harmed wildlife habitat. As climate pressures grow, increasing irrigation and refining for first-gen biofuels could deepen water scarcity in already drought-prone parts of the Midwest.” The conversion of Midwestern agricultural land has been sweeping. Between 2004 and 2024, ethanol production increased by nearly 500 percent. Corn and soybeans are now grown on 92 and 86 million acres of land respectively—and roughly a third of those crops go to produce ethanol. That means about 30 million acres of land that could be used to grow food crops are instead being used to produce ethanol, despite ethanol only accounting for 6 percent of the country’s transportation fuel. The biofuels industry—which includes refiners, corn and soy growers and the influential agriculture lobby writ large—has long insisted that corn- and soy-based biofuels provide an energy-efficient alternative to fossil-based fuels. Congress and the US Department of Agriculture have agreed. The country’s primary biofuels policy, the Renewable Fuel Standard, requires that biofuels provide a greenhouse gas reduction over fossil fuels: The law says that ethanol from new plants must deliver a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to gasoline. In addition to greenhouse gas reductions, the industry and its allies in Congress have also continued to say that ethanol is a primary mainstay of the rural economy, benefiting communities across the Midwest. But a growing body of research—much of which the industry has tried to debunk and deride—suggests that ethanol actually may not provide the benefits that policies require. It may, in fact, produce more greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels it was intended to replace. Recent research says that biofuel refiners also emit significant amounts of carcinogenic and dangerous substances, including hexane and formaldehyde, in greater amounts than petroleum refineries. The new report points to research saying that increased production of biofuels from corn and soy could actually raise greenhouse gas emissions, largely from carbon emissions linked to clearing land in other countries to compensate for the use of land in the Midwest. On top of that, corn is an especially fertilizer-hungry crop requiring large amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which releases huge amounts of nitrous oxide when it interacts with the soil. American farming is, by far, the largest source of domestic nitrous oxide emissions already—about 50 percent. If biofuel policies lead to expanded production, emissions of this enormously powerful greenhouse gas will likely increase, too. The new report concludes that not only will the expansion of ethanol increase greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also failed to provide the social and financial benefits to Midwestern communities that lawmakers and the industry say it has. (The report defines the Midwest as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.) “The benefits from biofuels remain concentrated in the hands of a few,” Leslie-Bole said. “As subsidies flow, so may the trend of farmland consolidation, increasing inaccessibility of farmland in the Midwest, and locking out emerging or low-resource farmers. This means the benefits of biofuels production are flowing to fewer people, while more are left bearing the costs.” New policies being considered in state legislatures and Congress, including additional tax credits and support for biofuel-based aviation fuel, could expand production, potentially causing more land conversion and greenhouse gas emissions, widening the gap between the rural communities and rich agribusinesses at a time when food demand is climbing and, critics say, land should be used to grow food instead. President Donald Trump’s tax cut bill, passed by the House and currently being negotiated in the Senate, would not only extend tax credits for biofuels producers, it specifically excludes calculations of emissions from land conversion when determining what qualifies as a low-emission fuel. The primary biofuels industry trade groups, including Growth Energy and the Renewable Fuels Association, did not respond to Inside Climate News requests for comment or interviews. An employee with the Clean Fuels Alliance America, which represents biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuel producers, not ethanol, said the report vastly overstates the carbon emissions from crop-based fuels by comparing the farmed land to natural landscapes, which no longer exist. They also noted that the impact of soy-based fuels in 2024 was more than $42 billion, providing over 100,000 jobs. “Ten percent of the value of every bushel of soybeans is linked to biomass-based fuel,” they said. Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News 24 Comments

Climate change is making everything worse — including apparently threatening the dairy that makes our precious cheese.In interviews with Science News, veterinary researchers and dairy farmers alike warned that changes to the climate that affect cows are impacting not only affects the nutritional value of the cheeses produced from their milk, but also the color, texture, and even taste.Researchers from the Université Clermont Auvergne, which is located in the mountainous Central France region that produces a delicious firm cheese known as Cantal, explained in a new paper for the Journal of Dairy Science that grass shortages caused by climate change can greatly affect how cows' milk, and the subsequent cheese created from it, tastes.At regular intervals throughout a five-month testing period in 2021, the scientists sampled milk from two groups of cows, each containing 20 cows from two different breeds that were either allowed to graze on grass like normal or only graze part-time while being fed a supplemental diet that featured corn and other concentrated foods.As the researchers found, the corn-fed cohort consistently produced the same amount of milk and less methane than their grass-fed counterparts — but the taste of the resulting milk products was less savory and rich than the grass-fed bovines.Moreover, the milk from the grass-fed cows contained more omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the heart, and lactic acids, which act as probiotics."Farmers are looking for feed with better yields than grass or that are more resilient to droughts," explained Matthieu Bouchon, the fittingly-named lead author of the study.Still, those same farmers want to know how supplementing their cows' feed will change the nutritional value and taste, Bouchon said — and one farmer who spoke to Science News affirmed anecdotally, this effect is bearing out in other parts of the world, too."We were having lots of problems with milk protein and fat content due to the heat," Gustavo Abijaodi, a dairy farmer in Brazil, told the website. "If we can stabilize heat effects, the cattle will respond with better and more nutritious milk."The heat also seems to be getting to the way cows eat and behave as well."Cows produce heat to digest food — so if they are already feeling hot, they’ll eat less to lower their temperature," noted Marina Danes, a dairy scientist at Brazil's Federal University of Lavras. "This process spirals into immunosuppression, leaving the animal vulnerable to disease."Whether it's the food quality or the heat affecting the cows, the effects are palpable — or, in this case, edible."If climate change progresses the way it’s going, we’ll feel it in our cheese," remarked Bouchon, the French researcher.More on cattle science: Brazilian "Supercows" Reportedly Close to Achieving World DominationShare This Article

The housing crisis in Canada’s North, which has particularly affected the majority Indigenous population in northern communities, has been of ongoing concern to firms such as Taylor Architecture Group (TAG). Formerly known as Pin/Taylor, the firm was established in Yellowknife in 1983. TAG’s Principal, Simon Taylor, says that despite recent political gains for First Nations, “by and large, life is not improving up here.” Taylor and his colleagues have designed many different types of housing across the North. But the problems exceed the normal scope of architectural practice. TAG’s Manager of Research and Development, Kristel Derkowski, says, “We can design the units well, but it doesn’t solve many of the underlying problems.” To respond, she says, “we’ve backed up the process to look at the root causes more.” As a result, “the design challenges are informed by much broader systemic research.”  We spoke to Derkowski about her research, and the work that Taylor Architecture Group is doing to act on it. Here’s what she has to say. Inadequate housing from the start The Northwest Territories is about 51% Indigenous. Most non-Indigenous people are concentrated in the capital city of Yellowknife. Outside of Yellowknife, the territory is very much majority Indigenous.  The federal government got involved in delivering housing to the far North in 1959. There were problems with this program right from the beginning. One issue was that when the houses were first delivered, they were designed and fabricated down south, and they were completely inadequate for the climate. The houses from that initial program were called “Matchbox houses” because they were so small. These early stages of housing delivery helped establish the precedent that a lower standard of housing was acceptable for northern Indigenous residents compared to Euro-Canadian residents elsewhere. In many cases, that double-standard persists to this day. The houses were also inappropriately designed for northern cultures. It’s been said in the research that the way that these houses were delivered to northern settlements was a significant factor in people being divorced from their traditional lifestyles, their traditional hierarchies, the way that they understood home. It was imposing a Euro-Canadian model on Indigenous communities and their ways of life.  Part of what the federal government was trying to do was to impose a cash economy and stimulate a market. They were delivering houses and asking for rent. But there weren’t a lot of opportunities to earn cash. This housing was delivered around the sites of former fur trading posts—but the fur trade had collapsed by 1930. There weren’t a lot of jobs. There wasn’t a lot of wage-based employment. And yet, rental payments were being collected in cash, and the rental payments increased significantly over the span of a couple decades.  The imposition of a cash economy created problems culturally. It’s been said that public housing delivery, in combination with other social policies, served to introduce the concept of poverty in the far North, where it hadn’t existed before. These policies created a situation where Indigenous northerners couldn’t afford to be adequately housed, because housing demanded cash, and cash wasn’t always available. That’s a big theme that continues to persist today. Most of the territory’s communities remain “non-market”: there is no housing market. There are different kinds of economies in the North—and not all of them revolve wholly around cash. And yet government policies do. The governments’ ideas about housing do, too. So there’s a conflict there.  The federal exit from social housing After 1969, the federal government devolved housing to the territorial government. The Government of Northwest Territories created the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation. By 1974, the housing corporation took over all the stock of federal housing and started to administer it, in addition to building their own. The housing corporation was rapidly building new housing stock from 1975 up until the mid-1990s. But beginning in the early 1990s, the federal government terminated federal spending on new social housing across the whole country. A couple of years after that, they also decided to allow operational agreements with social housing providers to expire. It didn’t happen that quickly—and maybe not everybody noticed, because it wasn’t a drastic change where all operational funding disappeared immediately. But at that time, the federal government was in 25- to 50-year operational agreements with various housing providers across the country. After 1995, these long-term operating agreements were no longer being renewed—not just in the North, but everywhere in Canada.  With the housing corporation up here, that change started in 1996, and we have until 2038 before the federal contribution of operational funding reaches zero. As a result, beginning in 1996, the number of units owned by the NWT Housing Corporation plateaued. There was a little bump in housing stock after that—another 200 units or so in the early 2000s. But basically, the Northwest Territories was stuck for 25 years, from 1996 to 2021, with the same number of public housing units. In 1990, there was a report on housing in the NWT that was funded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). That report noted that housing was already in a crisis state. At that time, in 1990, researchers said it would take 30 more years to meet existing housing need, if housing production continued at the current rate. The other problem is that houses were so inadequately constructed to begin with, that they generally needed replacement after 15 years. So housing in the Northwest Territories already had serious problems in 1990. Then in 1996, the housing corporation stopped building more. So if you compare the total number of social housing units with the total need for subsidized housing in the territory, you can see a severely widening gap in recent decades. We’ve seen a serious escalation in housing need. The Northwest Territories has a very, very small tax base, and it’s extremely expensive to provide services here. Most of our funding for public services comes from the federal government. The NWT on its own does not have a lot of buying power. So ever since the federal government stopped providing operational funding for housing, the territorial government has been hard-pressed to replace that funding with its own internal resources. I should probably note that this wasn’t only a problem for the Northwest Territories. Across Canada, we have seen mass homelessness visibly emerge since the ’90s. This is related, at least in part, to the federal government’s decisions to terminate funding for social housing at that time. Today’s housing crisis Getting to present-day conditions in the NWT, we now have some “market” communities and some “non-market” communities. There are 33 communities total in the NWT, and at least 27 of these don’t have a housing market: there’s no private rental market and there’s no resale market. This relates back to the conflict I mentioned before: the cash economy did not entirely take root. In simple terms, there isn’t enough local employment or income opportunity for a housing market—in conventional terms—to work.  Yellowknife is an outlier in the territory. Economic opportunity is concentrated in the capital city. We also have five other “market” communities that are regional centres for the territorial government, where more employment and economic activity take place. Across the non-market communities, on average, the rate of unsuitable or inadequate housing is about five times what it is elsewhere in Canada. Rates of unemployment are about five times what they are in Yellowknife. On top of this, the communities with the highest concentration of Indigenous residents also have the highest rates of unsuitable or inadequate housing, and also have the lowest income opportunity. These statistics clearly show that the inequalities in the territory are highly racialized.  Given the situation in non-market communities, there is a severe affordability crisis in terms of the cost to deliver housing. It’s very, very expensive to build housing here. A single detached home costs over a million dollars to build in a place like Fort Good Hope (Rádeyı̨lı̨kóé). We’re talking about a very modest three-bedroom house, smaller than what you’d typically build in the South. The million-dollar price tag on each house is a serious issue. Meanwhile, in a non-market community, the potential resale value is extremely low. So there’s a massive gap between the cost of construction and the value of the home once built—and that’s why you have no housing market. It means that private development is impossible. That’s why, until recently, only the federal and territorial governments have been building new homes in non-market communities. It’s so expensive to do, and as soon as the house is built, its value plummets.  The costs of living are also very high. According to the NWT Bureau of Statistics, the estimated living costs for an individual in Fort Good Hope are about 1.8 times what it costs to live in Edmonton. Then when it comes to housing specifically, there are further issues with operations and maintenance. The NWT is not tied into the North American hydro grid, and in most communities, electricity is produced by a diesel generator. This is extremely expensive. Everything needs to be shipped in, including fuel. So costs for heating fuel are high as well, as are the heating loads. Then, maintenance and repairs can be very difficult, and of course, very costly. If you need any specialized parts or specialized labour, you are flying those parts and those people in from down South. So to take on the costs of homeownership, on top of the costs of living—in a place where income opportunity is limited to begin with—this is extremely challenging. And from a statistical or systemic perspective, this is simply not in reach for most community members. In 2021, the NWT Housing Corporation underwent a strategic renewal and became Housing Northwest Territories. Their mandate went into a kind of flux. They started to pivot from being the primary landlord in the territory towards being a partner to other third-party housing providers, which might be Indigenous governments, community housing providers, nonprofits, municipalities. But those other organisations, in most cases, aren’t equipped or haven’t stepped forward to take on social housing. Even though the federal government is releasing capital funding for affordable housing again, northern communities can’t always capitalize on that, because the source of funding for operations remains in question. Housing in non-market communities essentially needs to be subsidized—not just in terms of construction, but also in terms of operations. But that operational funding is no longer available. I can’t stress enough how critical this issue is for the North. Fort Good Hope and “one thing that (kind of) worked” I’ll talk a bit about Fort Good Hope. I don’t want to be speaking on behalf of the community here, but I will share a bit about the realities on the ground, as a way of putting things into context.  Fort Good Hope, or Rádeyı̨lı̨kóé, is on the Mackenzie River, close to the Arctic Circle. There’s a winter road that’s open at best from January until March—the window is getting narrower because of climate change. There were also barges running each summer for material transportation, but those have been cancelled for the past two years because of droughts linked to climate change. Aside from that, it’s a fly-in community. It’s very remote. It has about 500-600 people. According to census data, less than half of those people live in what’s considered acceptable housing.  The biggest problem is housing adequacy. That’s CMHC’s term for housing in need of major repairs. This applies to about 36% of households in Fort Good Hope. In terms of ownership, almost 40% of the community’s housing stock is managed by Housing NWT. That’s a combination of public housing units and market housing units—which are for professionals like teachers and nurses. There’s also a pretty high percentage of owner-occupied units—about 46%.  The story told by the community is that when public housing arrived in the 1960s, the people were living in owner-built log homes. Federal agents arrived and they considered some of those homes to be inadequate or unacceptable, and they bulldozed those homes, then replaced some of them—but maybe not all—with public housing units. Then residents had no choice but to rent from the people who took their homes away. This was not a good way to start up a public housing system. The state of housing in Fort Good Hope Then there was an issue with the rental rates, which drastically increased over time. During a presentation to a government committee in the ’80s, a community member explained that they had initially accepted a place in public housing for a rental fee of $2 a month in 1971. By 1984, the same community member was expected to pay $267 a month. That might not sound like much in today’s terms, but it was roughly a 13,000% increase for that same tenant—and it’s not like they had any other housing options to choose from. So by that point, they’re stuck with paying whatever is asked.  On top of that, the housing units were poorly built and rapidly deteriorated. One description from that era said the walls were four inches thick, with windows oriented north, and water tanks that froze in the winter and fell through the floor. The single heating source was right next to the only door—residents were concerned about the fire hazard that obviously created. Ultimately the community said: “We don’t actually want any more public housing units. We want to go back to homeownership, which was what we had before.”  So Fort Good Hope was a leader in housing at that time and continues to be to this day. The community approached the territorial government and made a proposal: “Give us the block funding for home construction, we’ll administer it ourselves, we’ll help people build houses, and they can keep them.” That actually worked really well. That was the start of the Homeownership Assistance Program (HAP) that ran for about ten years, beginning in 1982. The program expanded across the whole territory after it was piloted in Fort Good Hope. The HAP is still spoken about and written about as the one thing that kind of worked.  Self-built log cabins remain from Fort Good Hope’s 1980s Homeownership Program (HAP). Funding was cost-shared between the federal and territorial governments. Through the program, material packages were purchased for clients who were deemed eligible. The client would then contribute their own sweat equity in the form of hauling logs and putting in time on site. They had two years to finish building the house. Then, as long as they lived in that home for five more years, the loan would be forgiven, and they would continue owning the house with no ongoing loan payments. In some cases, there were no mechanical systems provided as part of this package, but the residents would add to the house over the years. A lot of these units are still standing and still lived in today. Many of them are comparatively well-maintained in contrast with other types of housing—for example, public housing units. It’s also worth noting that the one-time cost of the materials package was—from the government’s perspective—only a fraction of the cost to build and maintain a public housing unit over its lifespan. At the time, it cost about $50,000 to $80,000 to build a HAP home, whereas the lifetime cost of a public housing unit is in the order of $2,000,000. This program was considered very successful in many places, especially in Fort Good Hope. It created about 40% of their local housing stock at that time, which went from about 100 units to about 140. It’s a small community, so that’s quite significant.  What were the successful principles? The community-based decision-making power to allocate the funding. The sweat equity component, which brought homeownership within the range of being attainable for people—because there wasn’t cash needing to be transferred, when the cash wasn’t available. Local materials—they harvested the logs from the land, and the fact that residents could maintain the homes themselves. The Fort Good Hope Construction Centre. Rendering by Taylor Architecture Group The Fort Good Hope Construction Centre The HAP ended the same year that the federal government terminated new spending on social housing. By the late 1990s, the creation of new public housing stock or new homeownership units had gone down to negligible levels. But more recently, things started to change. The federal government started to release money to build affordable housing. Simultaneously, Indigenous governments are working towards Self-Government and settling their Land Claims. Federal funds have started to flow directly to Indigenous groups. Given these changes, the landscape of Northern housing has started to evolve. In 2016, Fort Good Hope created the K’asho Got’ine Housing Society, based on the precedent of the 1980s Fort Good Hope Housing Society. They said: “We did this before, maybe we can do it again.” The community incorporated a non-profit and came up with a five-year plan to meet housing need in their community. One thing the community did right away was start up a crew to deliver housing maintenance and repairs. This is being run by Ne’Rahten Developments Ltd., which is the business arm of Yamoga Land Corporation (the local Indigenous Government). Over the span of a few years, they built up a crew of skilled workers. Then Ne’Rahten started thinking, “Why can’t we do more? Why can’t we build our own housing?” They identified a need for a space where people could work year-round, and first get training, then employment, in a stable all-season environment. This was the initial vision for the Fort Good Hope Construction Centre, and this is where TAG got involved. We had some seed funding through the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge when we partnered with Fort Good Hope. We worked with the community for over a year to get the capital funding lined up for the project. This process required us to take on a different role than the one you typically would as an architect. It wasn’t just schematic-design-to-construction-administration. One thing we did pretty early on was a housing design workshop that was open to the whole community, to start understanding what type of housing people would really want to see. Another piece was a lot of outreach and advocacy to build up support for the project and partnerships—for example, with Housing Northwest Territories and Aurora College. We also reached out to our federal MP, the NWT Legislative Assembly and different MLAs, and we talked to a lot of different people about the link between employment and housing. The idea was that the Fort Good Hope Construction Centre would be a demonstration project. Ultimately, funding did come through for the project—from both CMHC and National Indigenous Housing Collaborative Inc. The facility itself will not be architecturally spectacular. It’s basically a big shed where you could build a modular house. But the idea is that the construction of those houses is combined with training, and it creates year-round indoor jobs. It intends to combat the short construction seasons, and the fact that people would otherwise be laid off between projects—which makes it very hard to progress with your training or your career. At the same time, the Construction Centre will build up a skilled labour force that otherwise wouldn’t exist—because when there’s no work, skilled people tend to leave the community. And, importantly, the idea is to keep capital funding in the community. So when there’s a new arena that needs to get built, when there’s a new school that needs to get built, you have a crew of people who are ready to take that on. Rather than flying in skilled labourers, you actually have the community doing it themselves. It’s working towards self-determination in housing too, because if those modular housing units are being built in the community, by community members, then eventually they’re taking over design decisions and decisions about maintenance—in a way that hasn’t really happened for decades. Transitional homeownership My research also looked at a transitional homeownership model that adapts some of the successful principles of the 1980s HAP. Right now, in non-market communities, there are serious gaps in the housing continuum—that is, the different types of housing options available to people. For the most part, you have public housing, and you have homelessness—mostly in the form of hidden homelessness, where people are sleeping on the couches of relatives. Then, in some cases, you have inherited homeownership—where people got homes through the HAP or some other government program. But for the most part, not a lot of people in non-market communities are actually moving into homeownership anymore. I asked the local housing manager in Fort Good Hope: “When’s the last time someone built a house in the community?” She said, “I can only think of one person. It was probably about 20 years ago, and that person actually went to the bank and got a mortgage. If people have a home, it’s usually inherited from their parents or from relatives.” And that situation is a bit of a problem in itself, because it means that people can’t move out of public housing. Public housing traps you in a lot of ways. For example, it punishes employment, because rent is geared to income. It’s been said many times that this model disincentivizes employment. I was in a workshop last year where an Indigenous person spoke up and said, “Actually, it’s not disincentivizing, it punishes employment. It takes things away from you.” Somebody at the territorial housing corporation in Yellowknife told me, “We have clients who are over the income threshold for public housing, but there’s nowhere else they can go.” Theoretically, they would go to the private housing market, they would go to market housing, or they would go to homeownership, but those options don’t exist or they aren’t within reach.  So the idea with the transitional homeownership model is to create an option that could allow the highest income earners in a non-market community to move towards homeownership. This could take some pressure off the public housing system. And it would almost be like a wealth distribution measure: people who are able to afford the cost of operating and maintaining a home then have that option, instead of remaining in government-subsidized housing. For those who cannot, the public housing system is still an option—and maybe a few more public housing units are freed up.  I’ve developed about 36 recommendations for a transitional homeownership model in northern non-market communities. The recommendations are meant to be actioned at various scales: at the scale of the individual household, the scale of the housing provider, and the scale of the whole community. The idea is that if you look at housing as part of a whole system, then there are certain moves that might make sense here—in a non-market context especially—that wouldn’t make sense elsewhere. So for example, we’re in a situation where a house doesn’t appreciate in value. It’s not a financial asset, it’s actually a financial liability, and it’s something that costs a lot to maintain over the years. Giving someone a house in a non-market community is actually giving them a burden, but some residents would be quite willing to take this on, just to have an option of getting out of public housing. It just takes a shift in mindset to start considering solutions for that kind of context. One particularly interesting feature of non-market communities is that they’re still functioning with a mixed economy: partially a subsistence-based or traditional economy, and partially a cash economy. I think that’s actually a strength that hasn’t been tapped into by territorial and federal policies. In the far North, in-kind and traditional economies are still very much a way of life. People subsidize their groceries with “country food,” which means food that was harvested from the land. And instead of paying for fuel tank refills in cash, many households in non-market communities are burning wood as their primary heat source. In communities south of the treeline, like Fort Good Hope, that wood is also harvested from the land. Despite there being no exchange of cash involved, these are critical economic activities—and they are also part of a sustainable, resilient economy grounded in local resources and traditional skills. This concept of the mixed economy could be tapped into as part of a housing model, by bringing back the idea of a ‘sweat equity’ contribution instead of a down payment—just like in the HAP. Contributing time and labour is still an economic exchange, but it bypasses the ‘cash’ part—the part that’s still hard to come by in a non-market community. Labour doesn’t have to be manual labour, either. There are all kinds of work that need to take place in a community: maybe taking training courses and working on projects at the Construction Centre, maybe helping out at the Band Office, or providing childcare services for other working parents—and so on. So it could be more inclusive than a model that focuses on manual labour. Another thing to highlight is a rent-to-own trial period. Not every client will be equipped to take on the burdens of homeownership. So you can give people a trial period. If it doesn’t work out and they can’t pay for operations and maintenance, they could continue renting without losing their home. Then it’s worth touching on some basic design principles for the homeownership units. In the North, the solutions that work are often the simplest—not the most technologically innovative. When you’re in a remote location, specialized replacement parts and specialized labour are both difficult to come by. And new technologies aren’t always designed for extreme climates—especially as we trend towards the digital. So rather than installing technologically complex, high-efficiency systems, it actually makes more sense to build something that people are comfortable with, familiar with, and willing to maintain. In a southern context, people suggest solutions like solar panels to manage energy loads. But in the North, the best thing you can do for energy is put a woodstove in the house. That’s something we’ve heard loud and clear in many communities. Even if people can’t afford to fill their fuel tank, they’re still able to keep chopping wood—or their neighbour is, or their brother, or their kid, and so on. It’s just a different way of looking at things and a way of bringing things back down to earth, back within reach of community members.  Regulatory barriers to housing access: Revisiting the National Building Code On that note, there’s one more project I’ll touch on briefly. TAG is working on a research study, funded by Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, which looks at regulatory barriers to housing access in the North. The National Building Code (NBC) has evolved largely to serve the southern market context, where constraints and resources are both very different than they are up here. Technical solutions in the NBC are based on assumptions that, in some cases, simply don’t apply in northern communities. Here’s a very simple example: minimum distance to a fire hydrant. Most of our communities don’t have fire hydrants at all. We don’t have municipal services. The closest hydrant might be thousands of kilometres away. So what do we do instead? We just have different constraints to consider. That’s just one example but there are many more. We are looking closely at the NBC, and we are also working with a couple of different communities in different situations. The idea is to identify where there are conflicts between what’s regulated and what’s actually feasible, viable, and practical when it comes to on-the-ground realities. Then we’ll look at some alternative solutions for housing. The idea is to meet the intent of the NBC, but arrive at some technical solutions that are more practical to build, easier to maintain, and more appropriate for northern communities.  All of the projects I’ve just described are fairly recent, and very much still ongoing. We’ll see how it all plays out. I’m sure we’re going to run into a lot of new barriers and learn a lot more on the way, but it’s an incremental trial-and-error process. Even with the Construction Centre, we’re saying that this is a demonstration project, but how—or if—it rolls out in other communities would be totally community-dependent, and it could look very, very different from place to place.  In doing any research on Northern housing, one of the consistent findings is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Northern communities are not all the same. There are all kinds of different governance structures, different climates, ground conditions, transportation routes, different population sizes, different people, different cultures. Communities are Dene, Métis, Inuvialuit, as well as non-Indigenous, all with different ways of being. One-size-fits-all solutions don’t work—they never have. And the housing crisis is complex, and it’s difficult to unravel. So we’re trying to move forward with a few different approaches, maybe in a few different places, and we’re hoping that some communities, some organizations, or even some individual people, will see some positive impacts.  As appeared in the June 2025 issue of Canadian Architect magazine  The post Insites: Addressing the Northern housing crisis appeared first on Canadian Architect.

In Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California, trees that have persisted through rain and shine for thousands of years are now facing multiple threats triggered by a changing climate. Scientists and park managers once thought giant sequoia forests were nearly impervious to stressors like wildfire, drought and pests. Yet, even very large trees are proving vulnerable, particularly when those stressors are amplified by rising temperatures and increasing weather extremes. The rapid pace of climate change—combined with threats like the spread of invasive species and diseases—can affect ecosystems in ways that defy expectations based on past experiences. As a result, Western forests are transitioning to grasslands or shrublands after unprecedented wildfires. Woody plants are expanding into coastal wetlands. Coral reefs are being lost entirely. To protect these places, which are valued for their natural beauty and the benefits they provide for recreation, clean water and wildlife, forest and land managers increasingly must anticipate risks they have never seen before. And they must prepare for what those risks will mean for stewardship as ecosystems rapidly transform. As ecologists and a climate scientist, we’re helping them figure out how to do that. Managing changing ecosystems Traditional management approaches focus on maintaining or restoring how ecosystems looked and functioned historically. However, that doesn’t always work when ecosystems are subjected to new and rapidly shifting conditions. Ecosystems have many moving parts—plants, animals, fungi, and microbes; and the soil, air and water in which they live—that interact with one another in complex ways. When the climate changes, it’s like shifting the ground on which everything rests. The results can undermine the integrity of the system, leading to ecological changes that are hard to predict. To plan for an uncertain future, natural resource managers need to consider many different ways changes in climate and ecosystems could affect their landscapes. Essentially, what scenarios are possible? Preparing for multiple possibilities At Sequoia and Kings Canyon, park managers were aware that climate change posed some big risks to the iconic trees under their care. More than a decade ago, they undertook a major effort to explore different scenarios that could play out in the future. It’s a good thing they did, because some of the more extreme possibilities they imagined happened sooner than expected. In 2014, drought in California caused the giant sequoias’ foliage to die back, something never documented before. In 2017, sequoia trees began dying from insect damage. And, in 2020 and 2021, fires burned through sequoia groves, killing thousands of ancient trees. While these extreme events came as a surprise to many people, thinking through the possibilities ahead of time meant the park managers had already begun to take steps that proved beneficial. One example was prioritizing prescribed burns to remove undergrowth that could fuel hotter, more destructive fires. The key to effective planning is a thoughtful consideration of a suite of strategies that are likely to succeed in the face of many different changes in climates and ecosystems. That involves thinking through wide-ranging potential outcomes to see how different strategies might fare under each scenario—including preparing for catastrophic possibilities, even those considered unlikely. For example, prescribed burning may reduce risks from both catastrophic wildfire and drought by reducing the density of plant growth, whereas suppressing all fires could increase those risks in the long run. Strategies undertaken today have consequences for decades to come. Managers need to have confidence that they are making good investments when they put limited resources toward actions like forest thinning, invasive species control, buying seeds or replanting trees. Scenarios can help inform those investment choices. Constructing credible scenarios of ecological change to inform this type of planning requires considering the most important unknowns. Scenarios look not only at how the climate could change, but also how complex ecosystems could react and what surprises might lay beyond the horizon. Scientists at the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center are collaborating with managers in the Nebraska Sandhills to develop scenarios of future ecological change under different climate conditions, disturbance events like fires and extreme droughts, and land uses like grazing. [Photos: T. Walz, M. Lavin, C. Helzer, O. Richmond, NPS (top to bottom)., CC BY] Key ingredients for crafting ecological scenarios To provide some guidance to people tasked with managing these landscapes, we brought together a group of experts in ecology, climate science, and natural resource management from across universities and government agencies. We identified three key ingredients for constructing credible ecological scenarios: 1. Embracing ecological uncertainty: Instead of banking on one “most likely” outcome for ecosystems in a changing climate, managers can better prepare by mapping out multiple possibilities. In Nebraska’s Sandhills, we are exploring how this mostly intact native prairie could transform, with outcomes as divergent as woodlands and open dunes. 2. Thinking in trajectories: It’s helpful to consider not just the outcomes, but also the potential pathways for getting there. Will ecological changes unfold gradually or all at once? By envisioning different pathways through which ecosystems might respond to climate change and other stressors, natural resource managers can identify critical moments where specific actions, such as removing tree seedlings encroaching into grasslands, can steer ecosystems toward a more desirable future. 3. Preparing for surprises: Planning for rare disasters or sudden species collapses helps managers respond nimbly when the unexpected strikes, such as a severe drought leading to widespread erosion. Being prepared for abrupt changes and having contingency plans can mean the difference between quickly helping an ecosystem recover and losing it entirely. Over the past decade, access to climate model projections through easy-to-use websites has revolutionized resource managers’ ability to explore different scenarios of how the local climate might change. What managers are missing today is similar access to ecological model projections and tools that can help them anticipate possible changes in ecosystems. To bridge this gap, we believe the scientific community should prioritize developing ecological projections and decision-support tools that can empower managers to plan for ecological uncertainty with greater confidence and foresight. Ecological scenarios don’t eliminate uncertainty, but they can help to navigate it more effectively by identifying strategic actions to manage forests and other ecosystems. Kyra Clark-Wolf is a research scientist in ecological transformation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Brian W. Miller is a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Imtiaz Rangwala is a research scientist in climate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Remember the banana peels, apple cores, and leftover pizza you recently threw in the garbage? Today, your food waste—and your neighbors’—is emitting climate-warming greenhouse gases as it decomposes in a nearby municipal landfill. Buried food scraps and yard waste at 51 dumps across Colorado generate an amount of methane equivalent to driving 1 million gasoline-powered cars for a year. About 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a period of 20 years, methane accounts for 11% of global emissions that scientists say are warming the atmosphere and contributing to more intense and severe weather, wildfires, and drought. Landfills are the third-largest source of methane pollution in Colorado, after agriculture and fossil fuel extraction. Draft methane rules released last month by the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment would, for the first time, require some dump operators to measure and quantify methane releases and to fix leaks. The proposal mandates that waste managers install a gas collection system if their dump generates a certain amount of the climate-warming gas.  It also addresses loopholes in federal law that allow waste to sit for five years before such systems are required—even though science has shown that half of all food waste decays within about three and a half years. The draft rule surpasses U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards in the amount of landfill area operators must monitor for emissions. It’s set to be heard by the state’s Air Quality Control Commission in August. Proposed regulations require the elimination of open gas flares—burning emissions directly into the atmosphere—and urge the use of biocovers and biofilters, which rely on bacteria to break down gases. The 70-page draft also calls for more routine and thorough monitoring of a dump surface with advanced technologies like satellites, which recently recorded large plumes of methane escaping from a Denver-area landfill. “We’ve had our eyes opened thanks to technology that has made the invisible, visible—now we know the extent of the problem, which is much greater than what estimates have portrayed,” said Katherine Blauvelt, circular economy director at Industrious Labs, a nonprofit working to decarbonize industry.  “When landfill operators fail to control leaks, we know harmful pollutants are coming along for the ride.” Cancer-causing volatile organic compounds, such as benzene and toluene, escape with methane leaching from landfills. These chemicals also contribute to the formation of lung-damaging ozone pollution, an increasing problem for the 3.6 million people who live in the greater Denver metropolitan area. Indeed, the region along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains ranked sixth in the nation for the most polluted air—with unhealthy ozone levels reported on one out of every 10 days, on average, according to the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. The state is also woefully behind in its compliance with federal air quality standards. State officials and environmental advocates agree that reducing methane emissions from landfills, which are easier to mitigate than cow burps, for example, is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to slow warming in the short term. “Waste deposited in landfills continues producing methane for decades as it breaks down—and it’s one sector where Colorado has yet to directly take action to reduce these greenhouse gases,” said Tim Taylor, a supervisor in the state’s air pollution control division, in an online hearing last February on the proposed landfill methane rules. Colorado’s draft regulations are similar to those in California, Oregon, Maryland, and Washington, he added. More than 10 landfills in the state are already required under federal rules to have gas collection and control systems. Yet even with such technology in place, disposal facilities routinely exceed federal methane emissions caps. The state’s health department has also identified a dozen municipal solid waste landfills, based on a preliminary analysis, that would be required to put such systems in place under the proposed rules, Zachary Aedo, an agency spokesman, said in an email to Capital & Main. Many of these facilities are operated by counties, some of which expressed concerns about their ability to pay for such systems. “We are a small rural county, and a multimillion-dollar containment system is going to be more than we can build,” testified Delta County Commissioner Craig Fuller at the February hearing. “The financial equation of this whole thing is absolutely mind-boggling—we are struggling as it is to provide health and human services.” Other county officials embraced the proposed tightening of rules. “Landfills across Colorado, including in Eagle County, are leading sources of methane pollution,” said Eagle County Commissioner Matt Scherr in a March 6 statement. “As a local elected official I support a robust rule that embraces advanced technologies to cut pollution, protect public health and help the methane mitigation industry thrive.” For larger landfill companies, like Waste Management, which operates 283 active disposal sites nationwide, figuring out which technology works to best monitor emissions from a dump’s surface is proving a complex challenge. The company is testing technologies at facilities with different topographies and climate fluctuations to understand what causes emissions releases, said Amy Banister, Waste Management senior director of air programs. “Landfills are complicated, emissions vary over time, and we have emissions 24/7,” said Banister at an online meeting last September of a technical group created by Colorado health department officials. “Drones produced a lot of false positives—and we need more work understanding how fixed sensors can be applied in a landfill environment.” State health officials suggested municipalities could offset the costs of installing gas collection systems at disposal sites by converting methane into energy. Several landfill operations in Colorado currently have such waste-to-energy systems—which send power they generate to the state’s power grid. “We are mindful of the costs of complying with this rule and how tipping fees may be impacted,” said Taylor, an air quality supervisor, at the February hearing. “Analyses conducted in other states of their landfill methane rules found there wasn’t an increase in tipping fees as a result of regulations over time.” Tipping fees are paid by those who dispose of waste in a landfill. If operators passed on compliance costs to households, a state analysis found, the yearly average annual fee would increase $22.90 per household. Colorado’s push comes as the EPA issued an enforcement alert in September that found “recurring Clean Air Act compliance issues” at municipal solid waste landfills that led to the “significant release of methane,” based on 100 inspections conducted over three years.  Such violations included improper design and installation of gas collection and control systems, failure to maintain adequate “cover integrity,” and improper monitoring of facilities for emissions. To address gaps in federal regulations, which require operators to measure emissions four times a year by walking in a grid pattern across the face of the landfill with a handheld sensor, Colorado’s draft rules require third-party monitoring. Such measurements must be conducted offsite by an entity approved by the state’s air pollution control division that uses a satellite, aircraft or mobile monitoring platform. The infrequency of such grid walks—which skip spots that operators deem dangerous—contributes to the undercounting of methane emissions from landfills, according to a satellite-based analysis. An international team of scientists estimated potent greenhouse gas emissions from landfills are 50% higher than EPA estimates. Satellites like one operated by nonprofit Carbon Mapper found large methane plumes outside the quarterly monitoring periods over the Tower Landfill in Commerce City, northeast of Denver. The satellite allowed scientists to see parts of the landfill not accessible with traditional monitoring—measurements that found that such landfills are underreporting their methane emissions to state regulators, said Tia Scarpelli, a research scientist and waste sector lead at Carbon Mapper. “Landfill emissions tend to be quite persistent—if a landfill is emitting when it’s first observed, it’s likely to be emitting later on,” she added. Scarpelli cautioned that it’s important for regulators to investigate with operators what was happening on the landfill surface at the time the leak was measured. Tower Landfill’s operator, Allied Waste Systems of Colorado, provided reasons for such large methane releases in a January 2024 report to the state’s health department, including equipment malfunctions. The fix for about 22 emissions events over the federal methane limits detected in August 2023 by surface monitoring: “Soil added as cover maintenance.” Like many dumps across Colorado and the nation, the Tower Landfill is located near a community that’s already disproportionately impacted by emissions from industrial activities. “These landfills are not only driving climate change, they are also driving a public health crisis in our community,” said Guadalupe Solis, director of environmental justice programs at Cultivando, a nonprofit led by Latina and Indigenous women in northern Denver. “The Tower Landfill is near nursing homes, clinics, near schools with majority Hispanic students.” Physicians in the state warned that those who live the closest to dumps suffer the worst health effects from pollutants like benzene and hydrogen sulfide, which are linked to cancer, heart, and other health conditions. “People living near landfills, like myself, my family and my patients, experience higher exposure to air pollution,” testified Dr. Nikita Habermehl, a specialist in pediatric emergency medicine who lives near a landfill in Larimer County, at the February 26 public hearing, “leading to increased rates of respiratory issues and headaches and asthma worsened by poor air quality.” —By Jennifer Oldham, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

LUBBOCK — Every winter, after the sea of cotton has been harvested in the South Plains and the ground looks barren, technicians with the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District check the water levels in nearly 75,000 wells across 16 counties. For years, their measurements have shown what farmers and water conservationists fear most—the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground water source that’s the lifeblood of the South Plains agriculture industry, is running dry. That’s because of a century-old law called the rule of capture. The rule is simple: If you own the land above an aquifer in Texas, the water underneath is yours. You can use as much as you want, as long as it’s not wasted or taken maliciously. The same applies to your neighbor. If they happen to use more water than you, then that’s just bad luck. To put it another way, landowners can mostly pump as much water as they choose without facing liability to surrounding landowners whose wells might be depleted as a result. Following the Dust Bowl—and to stave off catastrophe—state lawmakers created groundwater conservation districts in 1949 to protect what water is left. But their power to restrict landowners is limited. “The mission is to save as much water possible for as long as possible, with as little impact on private property rights as possible,” said Jason Coleman, manager for the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District. “How do you do that? It’s a difficult task.” A 1953 map of the wells in Lubbock County hangs in the office of the groundwater district. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] Rapid population growth, climate change, and aging water infrastructure all threaten the state’s water supply. Texas does not have enough water to meet demand if the state is stricken with a historic drought, according to the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency that manages Texas’ water supply. Lawmakers want to invest in every corner to save the state’s water. This week, they reached a historic $20 billion deal on water projects. High Plains Underground Water District General Manager Jason Coleman stands in the district’s meeting room on May 21 in Lubbock. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] But no one wants to touch the rule of capture. In a state known for rugged individualism, politically speaking, reforming the law is tantamount to stripping away freedoms. “There probably are opportunities to vest groundwater districts with additional authority,” said Amy Hardberger, director for the Texas Tech University Center for Water Law and Policy. “I don’t think the political climate is going to do that.” State Sen. Charles Perry, a Lubbock Republican, and Rep. Cody Harris, a Palestine Republican, led the effort on water in Austin this year. Neither responded to requests for comment. Carlos Rubinstein, a water expert with consulting firm RSAH2O and a former chairman of the water development board, said the rule has been relied upon so long that it would be near impossible to undo the law. “I think it’s better to spend time working within the rules,” Rubinstein said. “And respect the rule of capture, yet also recognize that, in and of itself, it causes problems.” Even though groundwater districts were created to regulate groundwater, the law effectively stops them from doing so, or they risk major lawsuits. The state water plan, which spells out how the state’s water is to be used, acknowledges the shortfall. Groundwater availability is expected to decline by 25% by 2070, mostly due to reduced supply in the Ogallala and Edwards-Trinity aquifers. Together, the aquifers stretch across West Texas and up through the Panhandle. By itself, the Ogallala has an estimated three trillion gallons of water. Though the overwhelming majority in Texas is used by farmers. It’s expected to face a 50% decline by 2070. Groundwater is 54% of the state’s total water supply and is the state’s most vulnerable natural resource. It’s created by rainfall and other precipitation, and seeps into the ground. Like surface water, groundwater is heavily affected by ongoing droughts and prolonged heat waves. However, the state has more say in regulating surface water than it does groundwater. Surface water laws have provisions that cut supply to newer users in a drought and prohibit transferring surface water outside of basins. Historically, groundwater has been used by agriculture in the High Plains. However, as surface water evaporates at a quicker clip, cities and businesses are increasingly interested in tapping the underground resource. As Texas’ population continues to grow and surface water declines, groundwater will be the prize in future fights for water. In many ways, the damage is done in the High Plains, a region that spans from the top of the Panhandle down past Lubbock. The Ogallala Aquifer runs beneath the region, and it’s faced depletion to the point of no return, according to experts. Simply put: The Ogallala is not refilling to keep up with demand. “It’s a creeping disaster,” said Robert Mace, executive director of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment. “It isn’t like you wake up tomorrow and nobody can pump anymore. It’s just happening slowly, every year.” [Image: Yuriko Schumacher/The Texas Tribune] Groundwater districts and the law The High Plains Water District was the first groundwater district created in Texas. Over a protracted multi-year fight, the Legislature created these new local government bodies in 1949, with voter approval, enshrining the new stewards of groundwater into the state Constitution. If the lawmakers hoped to embolden local officials to manage the troves of water under the soil, they failed. There are areas with groundwater that don’t have conservation districts. Each groundwater districts has different powers. In practice, most water districts permit wells and make decisions on spacing and location to meet the needs of the property owner. The one thing all groundwater districts have in common: They stop short of telling landowners they can’t pump water. In the seven decades since groundwater districts were created, a series of lawsuits have effectively strangled groundwater districts. Even as water levels decline from use and drought, districts still get regular requests for new wells. They won’t say no out of fear of litigation. The field technician coverage area is seen in Nathaniel Bibbs’ office at the High Plains Underground Water District. Bibbs is a permit assistant for the district. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] “You have a host of different decisions to make as it pertains to management of groundwater,” Coleman said. “That list has grown over the years.” The possibility of lawsuits makes groundwater districts hesitant to regulate usage or put limitations on new well permits. Groundwater districts have to defend themselves in lawsuits, and most lack the resources to do so. A well spacing guide is seen in Nathaniel Bibbs’ office. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] “The law works against us in that way,” Hardberger, with Texas Tech University, said. “It means one large tool in our toolbox, regulation, is limited.” The most recent example is a lawsuit between the Braggs Farm and the Edwards Aquifer Authority. The farm requested permits for two pecan orchards in Medina County, outside San Antonio. The authority granted only one and limited how much water could be used based on state law. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision. The authority said it followed the statute set by the Legislature to determine the permit. “That’s all they were guaranteed,” said Gregory Ellis, the first general manager of the authority, referring to the water available to the farm. The Braggs family filed a takings lawsuit against the authority. This kind of claim can be filed when any level of government—including groundwater districts—takes private property for public use without paying for the owner’s losses. Braggs won. It is the only successful water-related takings claim in Texas, and it made groundwater laws murkier. It cost the authority $4.5 million. “I think it should have been paid by the state Legislature,” Ellis said. “They’re the ones who designed that permitting system. But that didn’t happen.” An appeals court upheld the ruling in 2013, and the Texas Supreme Court denied petitions to consider appeals. However, the state’s supreme court has previously suggested the Legislature could enhance the powers of the groundwater districts and regulate groundwater like surface water, just as many other states have done. While the laws are complicated, Ellis said the fundamental rule of capture has benefits. It has saved Texas’ legal system from a flurry of lawsuits between well owners. “If they had said ‘Yes, you can sue your neighbor for damaging your well,’ where does it stop?” Ellis asked. “Everybody sues everybody.” Coleman, the High Plains district’s manager, said some people want groundwater districts to have more power, while others think they have too much. Well owners want restrictions for others, but not on them, he said. “You’re charged as a district with trying to apply things uniformly and fairly,” Coleman said. Can’t reverse the past Two tractors were dropping seeds around Walt Hagood’s farm as he turned on his irrigation system for the first time this year. He didn’t plan on using much water. It’s too precious. The cotton farm stretches across 2,350 acres on the outskirts of Wolfforth, a town 12 miles southwest of Lubbock. Hagood irrigates about 80 acres of land, and prays that rain takes care of the rest. Walt Hagood drives across his farm on May 12, in Wolfforth. Hagood utilizes “dry farming,” a technique that relies on natural rainfall. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] “We used to have a lot of irrigated land with adequate water to make a crop,” Hagood said. “We don’t have that anymore.” The High Plains is home to cotton and cattle, multi-billion-dollar agricultural industries. The success is in large part due to the Ogallala. Since its discovery, the aquifer has helped farms around the region spring up through irrigation, a way for farmers to water their crops instead of waiting for rain that may not come. But as water in the aquifer declines, there are growing concerns that there won’t be enough water to support agriculture in the future. At the peak of irrigation development, more than 8.5 million acres were irrigated in Texas. About 65% of that was in the High Plains. In the decades since the irrigation boom, High Plains farmers have resorted to methods that might save water and keep their livelihoods afloat. They’ve changed their irrigation systems so water is used more efficiently. They grow cover crops so their soil is more likely to soak up rainwater. Some use apps to see where water is needed so it’s not wasted. A furrow irrigation is seen at Walt Hagood’s cotton farm. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] Farmers who have not changed their irrigation systems might not have a choice in the near future. It can take a week to pump an inch of water in some areas from the aquifer because of how little water is left. As conditions change underground, they are forced to drill deeper for water. That causes additional problems. Calcium can build up, and the water is of poorer quality. And when the water is used to spray crops through a pivot irrigation system, it’s more of a humidifier as water quickly evaporates in the heat. According to the groundwater district’s most recent management plan, 2 million acres in the district use groundwater for irrigation. About 95% of water from the Ogallala is used for irrigated agriculture. The plan states that the irrigated farms “afford economic stability to the area and support a number of other industries.” The state water plan shows groundwater supply is expected to decline, and drought won’t be the only factor causing a shortage. Demand for municipal use outweighs irrigation use, reflecting the state’s future growth. In Region O, which is the South Plains, water for irrigation declines by 2070 while demand for municipal use rises because of population growth in the region. Coleman, with the High Plains groundwater district, often thinks about how the aquifer will hold up with future growth. There are some factors at play with water planning that are nearly impossible to predict and account for, Coleman said. Declining surface water could make groundwater a source for municipalities that didn’t depend on it before. Regions known for having big, open patches of land, like the High Plains, could be attractive to incoming businesses. People could move to the country and want to drill a well, with no understanding of water availability. The state will continue to grow, Coleman said, and all the incoming businesses and industries will undoubtedly need water. “We could say ‘Well, it’s no one’s fault. We didn’t know that factory would need 20,000 acre-feet of water a year,” Coleman said. “It’s not happening right now, but what’s around the corner?” Coleman said this puts agriculture in a tenuous position. The region is full of small towns that depend on agriculture and have supporting businesses, like cotton gins, equipment and feed stores, and pesticide and fertilizer sprayers. This puts pressure on the High Plains water district, along with the two regional water planning groups in the region, to keep agriculture alive. “Districts are not trying to reduce pumping down to a sustainable level,” said Mace with the Meadows Foundation. “And I don’t fault them for that, because doing that is economic devastation in a region with farmers.” Hagood, the cotton farmer, doesn’t think reforming groundwater rights is the way to solve it. What’s done is done, he said. “Our U.S. Constitution protects our private property rights, and that’s what this is all about,” Hagood said. “Any time we have a regulation and people are given more authority, it doesn’t work out right for everybody.” Rapid population growth, climate change, and aging water infrastructure all threaten the state’s water supply. [Photo: Annie Rice for The Texas Tribune] What can be done The state water plan recommends irrigation conservation as a strategy. It’s also the least costly water management method. But that strategy is fraught. Farmers need to irrigate in times of drought, and telling them to stop can draw criticism. In Eastern New Mexico, the Ogallala Land and Water Conservancy, a nonprofit organization, has been retiring irrigation wells. Landowners keep their water rights, and the organization pays them to stop irrigating their farms. Landowners get paid every year as part of the voluntary agreement, and they can end it at any point. Ladona Clayton, executive director of the organization, said they have been criticized, with their efforts being called a “war” and “land grab.” They also get pushback on why the responsibility falls on farmers. She said it’s because of how much water is used for irrigation. They have to be aggressive in their approach, she said. The aquifer supplies water to the Cannon Air Force Base. “We don’t want them to stop agricultural production,” Clayton said. “But for me to say it will be the same level that irrigation can support would be untrue.” There is another possible lifeline that people in the High Plains are eyeing as a solution: the Dockum Aquifer. It’s a minor aquifer that underlies part of the Ogallala, so it would be accessible to farmers and ranchers in the region. The High Plains Water District also oversees this aquifer. If it seems too good to be true—that the most irrigated part of Texas would just so happen to have another abundant supply of water flowing underneath—it’s because there’s a catch. The Dockum is full of extremely salty brackish water. Some counties can use the water for irrigation and drinking water without treatment, but it’s unusable in others. According to the groundwater district, a test well in Lubbock County pulled up water that was as salty as seawater. Rubinstein, the former water development board chairman, said there are pockets of brackish groundwater in Texas that haven’t been tapped yet. It would be enough to meet the needs on the horizon, but it would also be very expensive to obtain and use. A landowner would have to go deeper to get it, then pump the water over a longer distance. “That costs money, and then you have to treat it on top of that,” Rubinstein said. “But, it is water.” Landowners have expressed interest in using desalination, a treatment method to lower dissolved salt levels. Desalination of produced and brackish water is one of the ideas that was being floated around at the Legislature this year, along with building a pipeline to move water across the state. Hagood, the farmer, is skeptical. He thinks whatever water they move could get used up before it makes it all the way to West Texas. There is always brackish groundwater. Another aquifer brings the chance of history repeating—if the Dockum aquifer is treated so its water is usable, will people drain it, too? Hagood said there would have to be limits. Disclosure: Edwards Aquifer Authority and Texas Tech University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here. This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The big Leslie Benzies interview: MindsEye, Everywhere, and the double-edged sword of GTA How Build A Rocket Boy developed its debut project Feature by Samuel Roberts Editorial Director Published on May 30, 2025 As the producer behind the Grand Theft Auto games from GTA 3 through to GTA 5, as well as Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire, any project with Leslie Benzies' name on it is going to be a lightning rod for attention. MindsEye, the first game from Benzies' studio Build A Rocket Boy, is getting plenty of it – even if some of that attention has been less positive. MindsEye is a single-player third-person shooter with vehicle gameplay, set in a Las Vegas-style city called Redrock. It's a techno-thriller story about a former soldier called Jacob Diaz – but it's clear from visiting BARB in Edinburgh this week that the game is envisioned as a gateway into something much larger, both in the fiction of MindsEye, and for players who pick the game up. That includes a user-generated content platform called Build.MindsEye, where players on PC can create levels using relatively straightforward tools that incorporate any object in the game. When asked if third-person shooter levels or driving sections were the limits of the build side of MindsEye, the developers showed other examples of how they can be used, like massively increasing the proportions of a basketball, dropping it into the world, and functionally making an in-game version of Rocket League. Still, while MindsEye launches on June 10, 2025, for PC and consoles, many questions remain unanswered, including the future of its long-gestating Everywhere project. Benzies sat down with GamesIndustry.biz earlier this week to talk us through his vision for the game. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Image credit: Austin Hargrave What's your grand vision for MindsEye? What will it be at launch, and where is it going in the future? MindsEye is one story in an epic universe. The other stories take place at different time periods, and [at] different locations in the universe. This story is Jacob Diaz's story. There are also other stories within MindsEye, so we tell the backstories of other characters Jacob will meet. That's the way we're going to fill out the universe over time – so when you travel around, all the stories will be connected by one overarching theme, and each story will have different mechanics. And we'll give these mechanics to players within the creator tools. What will happen with the game after launch? [The studio] will support the game through Play.MindsEye, with continuous new content. Some of the content, like races, are made just for fun. But [with] most of the content, we'll try and incorporate it into the story. So once you've played the big overarching ten-year plan, you'll have a very good idea of what this universe looks like. We have plans to add multiplayer, [and] we have plans to make a full open world. And of course, we've also got to look at what players are creating, and incorporate that into our plans. Given the ease of the tools, we think there's going to be a high percentage of players who will jump in and give it a pop, see how it feels. Hopefully some will create compelling content we can then promote and make that part of our plans to push to other players. Is it best to think of MindsEye as the first game in a series of games? Or one game as part of a larger experience? MindsEye sits bang in the middle of our story. So, we're going to go back 10,000 years, then we're going to go forward a certain amount of time. It's the relevant piece of the puzzle that will have players asking questions of what the bigger story is. We've intentionally not released footage of huge parts of the game, because we don't want to spoil anything for players. But this story does take some unusual twists. What's your vision for the multiplayer component of the game? I guess there's two sides to the answer. The dream from the building side is to allow players the opportunity to create their own multiplayer open world games with ease. So anyone could pick up the game, jump in, drive around, stop at a point where they see something of interest, build a little mission, jump back in the car, drive again, build another mission. Once you've built a couple of hundred of these, you've built your own open world game. So, that's the build side. From our side, we want to [create] a place where people can socialise, play together, and engage in the stories that we build. So, we do have plans next year to launch an open world multiplayer game that takes place a year after MindsEye finishes. In the interim, we also have an open world free roam game that spans from when MindsEye finishes to the launch of the open world multiplayer game. All of these stories interconnect in a fairly unique and original way, which I think players like these days. They like the complexity of deeper stories. You're selling the base game at launch, with a pass for upcoming content additions. Do you have a vision for how you're going to package future stories in the overarching MindsEye experience? It depends on the scale of the story. Some will be free, and some will be paid. After you left Rockstar Games, what came next? What led to you building the studio? I spent a few years looking into some other things: going [into] some property development. Using some of the games experience, we made a thing called VR-Chitect, which allowed you to build houses and view them in VR. I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles at this point, and this is when the droughts were very bad. I got into [making] these machines that would suck water out of the air. Still sitting in my back garden in Los Angeles is this big clunky machine, it works like an air-conditioning unit. It could suck up one thousand litres of water. So I got involved with that. But there's really nothing like making games. The different types of people – the lawyers, the accountants, the programmers, the artists, the dancers, the singers – that bunch of people in one big pot, all working together, and turning something from a piece of paper into [something on the] screen – that's where I get my excitement. Since I was a kid, that's what I've wanted to do. I thought, 'I better get back into making games' because nothing else was as much fun. What was the journey towards creating MindsEye as your first standalone release? Your first game's always your hardest. You have to build systems, you have to build the team. Everything is new. You don't really see a lot on the screen until way down the line, because you're building underlying systems, physics systems, the gameplay systems. It's a slow start, but what you end up with is an engine, and obviously we use Unreal, which provides a certain level of support and building. On top of that, we've got to build our own stuff. [Plus], we have to pack up everything we build and present it nicely for the creator tools. So it adds this extra layer of complexity to everything. But now, given where we are, the speed that we can iterate, we can very quickly place enemies, place vehicles, place puzzles, whatever, and get a feel for a game. We've now got a great, experienced team – a lot of talented guys in there. In the old days, you'd get a game, stick it on the shelf, and you'd wave goodbye. It's not like that anymore. You're continually fixing things. When you release a game, you've suddenly got, not a hundred testers, but hopefully millions of testers. You've got to continually fix, continually optimise, and especially with the tools that we've got, we want to continually create new content. So MindsEye is a standalone game, and Everywhere is not mentioned anywhere on the Steam page. But obviously there's a strong 'build' component to this game, which was part of the Everywhere pitch. What does this mean for Everywhere, and what was behind the decision to package the game this way? This is all part of a bigger story and ecosystem that we've got planned. Everywhere is going to show up again pretty soon. Everything we're working on, there's a story behind it – a big overarching story. So Everywhere will come back, and it fits into this story somewhere. I can't tell you [where], because it would be a spoiler. But that's going to reappear soon, and it will all be a part of the same product. "I'm not sure it would've been smart as a company to say, 'we are going to compete with the biggest game on the planet'" Leslie Benzies, Build A Rocket Boy In terms of the tools, the tool doesn't really care what world you're building in. It sits separately. So any game we create, it will naturally work on top of it. But we're big fans of keeping everything thematically connected, or connected through a narrative, and you'll see it. The bigger story will become obvious, once you've played through all of MindsEye. Then you might start to see how it all connects together, to the Everywhere world. Has the landscape for something like Everywhere, or the build component to MindsEye, changed as platforms like UEFN have taken off or Roblox has become so huge? It's great to see these tools being used by people. I build a lot with my son, and when he builds, I see the excitement he gets. It reminds me of when I was a kid with my Dragon 32 computer, managing to get a little character moving on the screen – that excitement of, 'wow, I did that'. Giving that to other people is massive. It's still very difficult to build in Roblox. For example, when my son wants to do it, I have to jump in. I used to be a programmer, and I struggle to build in there. When he wants to run around and scream with his friends he's in Roblox; when he wants to build he'll jump into Minecraft, because Minecraft is a much easier system to build within. And I think we sit somewhere in the middle: you can get very high quality, fun games, but they're very easy to build. I think we're at the infancy of this in video games. We're at the very beginning of it, and we're going to see way, way more of it. It doesn't necessarily have to be presenting it to your friends, or to an audience. I think the process of creating for a human being is fun in itself. MindsEye has been positioned as a linear game. You are best known for creating open world games. What was behind the decision to make MindsEye a more linear, narrative-driven experience? I think certain stories are more difficult to present to players in an open world setting. Open world gives you freedom – you don't necessarily want freedom to portray a story. For MindsEye, it's a very set time in a character, Jacob Diaz's, life. You pick up as Jacob when he arrives in Redrock, and then you leave Jacob at a certain point in the future. And so, it'd be very difficult for us to have an open world in there. It's horses for courses: it depends what you're doing. But for Jacob's story, it had to be a linear game. Having said that, there are open world experiences in there, and we can build them through Build.MindsEye. There is a free roam open world mode, where you play [as] a different character and you see his time, from the end of MindsEye, to the point of our next big planned launch. Again, they're all connected through a narrative, and we really want to show the universe, show the stories that have taken place in the universe, the characters in that universe, and see how they've experienced the same experience but from different viewpoints. "The dream from the building side is to allow players the opportunity to create their own multiplayer open world games with ease" Leslie Benzies, Build A Rocket Boy Was there ever a discussion about creating a more traditional GTA competitor? In design, you look at a lot of different options. I'm not sure it would've been smart as a company to say, 'we are going to compete with the biggest game on the planet'. I'm not sure that would be the best business decision to make. We went through a bunch of different designs, and to tell our story, this is what we landed on. MindsEye is priced more like a game from a decade ago at $60, and it'll take around 20 hours to finish. Can you talk about how you settled on the game's length and scope, and how you made that decision around price? So you've got the MindsEye campaign, and yes, it'll be about 20ish hours. But you do have all this other side content: there's going to be this continuous stream of content. These days, there are so many different options for people. It's not just games: there's streaming TV, so many good shows out there. I don't think you can have filler content in games. I think people want the meat, and they want the potatoes. We've tried to make as much meat as we can, if that makes sense. I think that's a good length for a game. What you also find through data, is that [with] big games, people don't play them all. The majority of people – 60% or 70% of people – don't actually play games to the end. So when you're making something, I would prefer – I'm sure the team would say the same – [that] you had the whole experience from start to finish, and not create this 200-hour game. Create something that is finishable, but have some side things that will fill out the universe. A lot of the side missions on the play side of MindsEye do fill out the characters' back stories, or do fill out what was happening in the world. On price: the world's in a funny place. People are worried about the price of eggs. So value for money, I think people appreciate that when times are difficult. I was curious why you waited until quite late in the day to reveal the build element of the game, only because it seemed you were being quite church and state with how MindsEye is releasing versus what Everywhere is. So in general, we believe – and again, it goes back to the amount of information, the amount of options people have these days – I don't think you can have extended marketing times. It's very expensive, we're a start-up. I think you lose interest from people. There are so many things for people to do, that if you extend it, you're not punching through to the place you need to be. I've seen other games, nine years before launch, it's getting talked about. I'm not sure that's the way of the world these days. You'll see there are games that never go to market: the day of launch was the marketing campaign, and it worked very well. So I think we tried to compress ours down for that reason. On the MindsEye.Play [continuous content] part of it, yeah, maybe we should've got that out there sooner, but it is a nice little surprise to give players. That's the thing with marketing – you never know what's the right or wrong way to do it, you've got to go with your gut, your senses, and test it. Being who you are, it brings a certain level of expectation and attention. Do you find it a double-edged sword, launching a new studio and launching a new game, with your background? Yes. There's always comparisons, and I think that's how humans work. As kids, we're taught to put a triangle into a triangular hole, and a square into a square hole. I think we do that for the rest of our lives, and we like to describe something new as 'it's X plus Y, with a bit of Z in there'. It makes things easy for us. It's maybe humans optimising the way we communicate. So there are comparisons. It serves us well in some ways, it doesn't serve us well in others. Dave Grohl said it well when he formed the Foo Fighters: nobody's interested in the Foo Fighters, all they were interested in was Nirvana. The guys have built something very cool, and I just hope people can see it for what it's trying to be.

The land under South Africa steadily rose between 2012 and 2020, a new GPS-based study finds, and drought may be the main driver.

Mark Whaling and a crew raced up and down a hill in a tanker truck as they battled a wildfire in Los Angeles County, scrambling to get water from a street hydrant in time to stay ahead of flames moving up a ridge. A helicopter flew in to drop water, but it had to fly a long distance to refill—and a fire that might have been stopped went on to destroy homes. As they fought that early 2000s blaze, Whaling says, he spotted a sealed, million-gallon water tank nearby that firefighters had no way of accessing. He thought that was ridiculous. “We don’t tell fire engines, ‘Protect the city and go find your own water.’ We put fire hydrants every 600 feet all around cities,” said Whaling, who has since retired from the county fire department. “But when it comes to the helicopters, we weren’t supporting them as robustly as we should.” His frustration sparked an idea: the Heli-Hydrant, a relatively small, open tank that can be rapidly filled with water, enabling helicopters to fill up faster for urban fires rather than flying to sometimes distant lakes or ponds. As wildfires become more frequent, Whaling’s invention is getting the attention of officials eager to boost preparedness. First used for the 2020 Blue Ridge Fire in Yorba Linda, 10 Heli-Hydrants have been built across Southern California and 16 more are in progress, according to Whaling. Helicopters are essential for firefighting. They can drop 1,000 gallons (about 3,785 liters) of water at once—some much more. That is far more than hoses can get on a fire all at once, and can be the best way to attack fires that are difficult for ground crews to reach. But pilots sometimes have to fly a long way to scoop up water. And in drought-prone areas, natural sources can sometimes dry up or diminish, so they’re hard to draw from. In Southern California’s Riverside County, helicopters have had to fly up to 10 miles (about 16 kilometers) to find water, eating critical time from battling fires. An innovative solution On a remote plot in the Southern California town of Cabazon, contractor Glenn Chavez stood on a ladder and peered into an empty Heli-Hydrant. A radio in hand, he clicked a button to activate the system and watched as water roared into the tank. In about six minutes, it filled with 8,500 gallons (32,176 liters). Chavez, a general contractor, was testing the Cabazon Water District’s latest investment—a second Heli-Hydrant that local officials are counting on to help protect the town. At $300,000, it cost slightly less than the average price of a single home in Cabazon. “Living in a beautiful desert community, you’re going to have risks of fire,” said Michael Pollack, the district’s general manager. “And to have these Heli-Hydrants is a major advantage. People will have a little bit of comfort knowing that they have another tool for fighting fires in their community.” Pilots can remotely activate the tanks from half a mile away, with the tank typically filling quickly from a city’s water system. Helicopters can fill up in less than a minute. Once it’s activated, solar panels and backup batteries ensure the system can still be used during power outages. And at night, lights from the tank and a tower nearby guide pilots toward it. In November, fire responders in San Diego put the product to the test when the 48-acre Garden Fire in Fallbrook, a community known for its avocado groves, prompted evacuation orders and warnings. Helicopters tapped the tank nearly 40 times. Pilot Ben Brown said its proximity to the fire saved not just time but fuel. “They’re great for when you don’t have other water sources,” he said. “The more dip sites, especially in some of the more arid environments in the county, the better.” But they don’t always help Heli-Hydrants have raised some concerns about their placement in urban areas where houses, buildings, and power lines can be obstacles to flight and they might have to squeeze into tighter spaces. In those cases, firefighters may choose to fly farther to a natural source that gives the helicopter more room, said Warren Voth, a deputy pilot with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. A pilot’s goal is to always to face the wind while entering and exiting an area, for safety, and they need room to accomplish that. In some cases, the municipal systems needed to fill Heli-Hydrants could go empty during major fires. As the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles burned, three 1-million gallon tanks that helped pressurize city hydrants in the Pacific Palisades ran dry as demand soared and burning pipes leaked water. Other times, helicopters just can’t access them. When winds are fierce, flying is nearly impossible; hurricane-force winds that supercharged the Los Angeles infernos initially grounded firefighting aircraft. When multiple helicopters respond to large blazes, they can’t all use the Heli-Hydrant. And smoke can make it hard to see it. Portable water tanks can accomplish some of the things that Heli-Hydrants do, but can require time, people, and equipment to set up. A Heli-Hydrant gives one community hope Areas where wildland vegetation intersects with human development have always been vulnerable to fires, but more people are living in them today, and climate change is creating conditions that can make these regions drier and more flammable. Jake Wiley has seen intensifying wildfires devastate his community. Two blazes—in 2007 and 2017—collectively scorched more than 400 structures in San Diego. The last one forced Wiley, now general manager for the Rainbow Municipal Water District, to evacuate. That fire also prompted local agencies to install a Heli-Hydrant—and when the Garden Fire erupted in November, it played a big role helping firefighters protect homes. “It seems like when you’ve seen the worst, you haven’t yet,” Wiley said. “Anything we can do helps.” The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment. —By Dorany Pineda and Brittany Peterson, Associated Press