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Climate Confidential began publishing smart, independent reporting on the crossroads of environment and technology in March 2014. It was funded by readers and dedicated to deepening the popular conversation about people, businesses, and society reckoning with climate change. Readers found a mix of original features on topics ranging from the environmental implications of self-driving cars and the next generation of GMOs to new insights on renewable energy development.

As part of our mission to expand the reach of environmental journalism in a time of historic changes in earth systems, technology, and media, Climate Confidential stories were designed to roam free. Originally released on the subscription-based Beacon platform, Climate Confidential stories have also been published by The Atlantic, Ensia, Scientific American, Modern Farmer, Pacific Standard, Quartz, and many other partners.

The Climate Confidential team reformed in 2015 with new ambitions. This site is an archive of our first year.

The Putah Creek Legacy: A model for fixing Calif. rivers?

When Putah Creek ran dry in 1989, amid a multi-year California drought, neighboring counties went to court over whether the creek, and its fish, deserved water. Now, a glimmer of hope has sprung from this battleground, because today, despite another drought, the creek has water — and farmers, cities, and other neighbors in its watershed do, too.

Our second Local Edition story, co-published with The Davis Enterprise and made possible by funding from readers like you, looks back at what happened at Putah Creek and whether the remarkable success story could be repeated elsewhere.

Dig in and explore the five-part series, complete with interactive maps, archival documents, and community contributions of life along the creek.

Editor’s Note: Borders, Limits, and Climate Talks

“Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing….The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.” — Tove Jansson

Credit: Todd Quackenbush/Unsplash

This month, Climate Confidential is telling stories on the theme of borders and limits. It seems appropriate, here in the twilight of 2014 and near the end of a window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic climate change. As the World Bank’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, Rachel Kyte, warned this week, recent studies suggest that:

“If we continue with business as usual … today’s teenagers will be left with a planet of more heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and loss of water and food security in many regions. It will impact their health, crops, and businesses, as well as livability.”

But if humanity is knocking on the door of a dire climate future, a growing number of countries are also on the cusp of doing something to slow warming.

A SimCity for Climate Proofing the Urban Boom

Looking to a future of ever-larger urban populations, a group of real-estate developers, architects, and scientists are building detailed computer simulations of the interplay among infrastructure, inhabitants, and resources for a planned 600-acre development on Chicago’s South Side. The final story in our population series delves into this technology and others that could help prevent environmentally costly missteps in building for the urban boom.

Nothing says Thanksgiving like a crowded airport. On the day before the holiday, passenger volume in the United States’ busiest airports spikes to more than double a typical travel day. But forecasters for the U.S. tourism industry say that pretty soon, Thanksgiving-like crowds could be the new normal — unless more money flows into expanding airport infrastructure.

Travelers this week will catch a tiny glimpse of one of the major puzzles of this century: As our species moves increasingly into cities, how will we accommodate rising numbers of people in a given space, and where should we direct infrastructure investments?

Depopulation’s Downside

Humanity’s burgeoning numbers are putting pressure on food, water, energy, land, and other species. So fewer people is better, right?

Not necessarily. In our first Local Edition story, co-published with The Japan Times, independent reporter Winifred Bird, uncovers the unexpected result of Japan’s population decline: increasing energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. Winifred explains why this head-scratching result is emerging, a clarion call to other depopulating regions of the globe on how to shrink smarter.

The story is illustrated with wonderful photos by Skye Hohmann, of Japanese villages that are feeling the brunt of depopulation.

You can read the full story on The Japan Times’ website or on Beacon Reader.

This story was made possible through our subscribers’ generous support to the Local Edition project campaign. Thanks!

The Killing Fields: As Human Numbers Rise, Other Species Decline

I’ve read about elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade. I’m aware of shrinking forests worldwide and how rising temperatures threaten to magnify deadly insect-borne diseases. Yet I don’t always connect the dots between these particular crises and our swelling human population and the demands we make on various ecosystems.

After spending an hour inside the fourth floor office of biologist Rodolfo Dirzo on the sprawling Stanford University campus last week, however, the links between the stressors we are putting on ecosystems and species and the stressors we are placing on our own species became clear.

Dirzo, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, coined the term “Anthropocene defaunation” to describe biodiversity loss caused by human activity.

Consider these numbers from a paper Dirzo published in the journal Science this past July: 322 species of vertebrates on land have died off since 1500. The abundance of the remaining creatures has fallen 25 percent on average.

In the last 500 million years, the planet has gone through five major extinction events, the most famous being the die-off of dinosaurs when meteors crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. Now many scientists concur that we are entering the sixth major extinction, driven by one species: that’s us, Homo sapiens.

“We calculated that the rate of extinction is hundreds or thousands times more intense than it used to be. It’s very intense,” said Dirzo.

Dirzo, who earned his Ph.D. in ecology at the University of Wales, spent his childhood in Mexico, climbing trees, collecting insects, and checking out plants and animals in the wilderness. He has continued that exploration, albeit in a more disciplined fashion, throughout his career.

Read the rest of my conversation and video clips with Dirzo at Climate Confidential on Beacon.

Population Stories: Antonia Malchik, Writer and Environmentalist

Continued from “Sex, Lies, and Sea Level Rise”.  Antonia responded to a call we put out on Facebook for stories from environmentalists who have children. She indicated that a conference on population and climate change, and reading Weisman’s Countdown, had shifted her thinking and that concerns about environmental impact had contributed to her opting for permanent birth control. We wanted to hear more.

Did you feel any sort of primal drive to have children or to have more children? 

I did earlier, before I had kids and after my first. I’d intended to have more — but for very selfish reasons. I’m an introvert and thought I could save myself from talking to boring people by surrounding myself with my own tribe. (I did actually say that.) I still experience the twinge sometimes, like I’d like to have more, but am relieved that it’s not a strong urge.

We resist primal drives all the time: by committing to monogamous relationships, by choosing healthy diets, by using reason instead of emotions to guide our decisions. The primal drive to have children, and then more children, is intense. It takes a lot of deep thinking about what you really want your whole life to look like to talk your body out of its craving. I knew I wanted my whole life to look different than what it would be if I had more kids. I wanted to work more, to focus on my children and their resilience, to become involved in my community, to actually have time to do things like hike and explore in the wildernesses I care about so much.

Population Stories: Roger-Mark De Souza, Director of Population, Environmental Security, and Resilience for the Wilson Center

Continued from “Sex, Lies, and Sea Level Rise”. In this Q&A, Roger-Mark De Souza, a leading expert on population and the environment with the Wilson Center, discusses both global trends and data, and his own personal story.

How did you come to be interested in population issues?

I’m originally from the Caribbean — from Trinidad and Tobago — and I came to Washington, D.C., for graduate school and stayed. After graduation, I worked with the environmental NGO World Resources Institute (WRI), whose president at the time had been appointed by President Clinton to co-chair the U.S. President’s Council on Sustainable Development. I was the special assistant to WRI’s president, so I worked a lot on this council. The council addressed various key issues: energy consumption, land use, sustainable communities, international engagement, and agriculture. One of the last issues that the council addressed was population and consumption; there was a lot of controversy around whether we’d even touch it. That was really interesting. To me, population dynamics — the size, distribution, and composition of populations — are such an integral part of sustainable development. It touches on human well-being, environmental preservation, and equity all at once.

That experience with the council made me reflect on my childhood in the Caribbean and going into local communities with my youth group as a teenager to talk to folks about how they could improve their lives. I remember I met a 17-year-old woman who had three children, and it had a huge impact on me because she was similar to me. She was my age, was educated, and went to a very good high school. I was just so surprised because she could have easily been any one of my friends. As we chatted about her future and the future of her children, we looked at each other, and I whispered, “Have you ever thought about family planning?” It was just not something young people were really thinking about.

Population Stories: Brook Meakins, Attorney and Founder of Drowning Islands

Continued from “Sex, Lies, and Sea Level Rise”

Working with Drowning Islands, a group she founded to advocate for people in island states affected by global-warming-induced sea level rise, Brook Meakins has conducted fact-finding missions to Fiji, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Grenada, the Maldives, and the Marshall Islands, as well as islands and coastal communities all over the world. More than many other people, Meakins has seen the impacts of climate change first-hand, but that’s not the only reason she has chosen not to have children. Here she explains the various factors that influenced her decision.

Can you walk me through your thought process around having kids?
My husband and I both have really large families; everyone is divorced and remarried. I have a 9-year-old little brother, lots of other siblings, tons of nieces and nephews. In the past year we found out that we’re going to have two more [nieces and nephews] next year. And we love being Auntie and Uncle; we take that role pretty seriously. I wouldn’t want to make a negative comment about having children, but we have just come to a really different decision when it comes to having kids. I’m really serious and passionate about adoption and was quite confident from an early age that I didn’t want to have a biological child.

Editor’s Note: The P Word

Of all the big, seemingly intractable problems associated with the environment, the biggest is us. It’s not you or me or us or them. It’s all of us and all of them — and all of those who are to come.

But the topic of population is largely absent from policymaking, campaigning, debating, and even dinner table conversations about natural resource depletion, climate change, biodiversity, environmental health, or the natural world. The issues swirling around fertility, family planning, the choice to procreate, and the impacts of procreation are just too personal. They are too fraught with emotions, guilt, and I-know-better-than-you-isms. They are at once too familial and too global.

But get ready, folks: We’re going there. For the month of November (and beyond) we’ll be talking all about the P Word.

We’re not going to back into the personal stuff, either. Amy Westervelt kicks it off later this week with a collection of stark, frank discussions with a range of people about how they weighed the issues surrounding child choice and climate in their own lives. You’ll likely resonate with some of the opinions and worldviews expressed — in fact, they might be literally your own, as we’ve partly crowd-sourced the story with Climate Confidential readers. But some points of view you might find wrong-headed or myopic — and if you do, tell us! We want to keep the conversation going. Comment on the story or send us a tweet, using #thePword.