Print version by Adam Wagner and Aaron Sánchez-Guerra
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan
Reporting for The Raleigh News & Observer - North Carolina News Service collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

RALEIGH, N.C. -- José and the other farmworkers who live in a grower-provided barracks at a Johnston County farm are used to going to bed late and waking up early.

It's just too hot inside to do anything else.

"There's no air conditioning in our housing, just intake fans," José told The News & Observer in Spanish during an interview in August. "All the workers have to get their own fans and ventilators to cool ourselves off.

"We struggle to fall asleep at night because of, well, that damn heat," he said. José and other farmworkers quoted in this series are only being identified by their first names to protect their employment.

Inside the long white building where José and about 20 other farmworkers stayed, there was one room for sleeping with beds lined up along the walls. Many workers had draped sheets around their beds for some privacy. At the foot of several beds, box fans had been propped up to provide some cool air.

It is common for North Carolina farmworkers to live in grower-provided housing, and it is common for that housing to lack air conditioning. Beyond making it hard to fall asleep, that can be a health risk, especially for agricultural workers.

When farmworkers come home at the end of the day, they immediately set about cooling off, changing clothes and finding water. When they cannot cool off, experts told The News & Observer, their bodies could be more susceptible to heat illness.

Climate is likely making workers' recovery more difficult, too. Warmer nights are among the telltale signs of a warming planet, and the decade from 2008 to 2017 in North Carolina included more nights when the low temperature stayed above 75 degrees Fahrenheit than any other on record, according to the N.C. Climate Science Report.

Box fans and cracked windows often aren't enough for workers to recover.

Less than half of the state's farmworker housing has air conditioning, said Gayle Thomas, the medical director of the N.C. Department for Health and Human Service's Farmworker Health Program. Most of the housing that does have air conditioning only has window units in the bedroom.

"I have not seen many farmworker camps that even have [window units]. Most of them I've seen just have big fans next to their beds, and they sleep with the fans on," Thomas said. "So not only are they exposed to heat at work, but when they come home, they don't have a place to recover."


MORE WARM NIGHTS COMING

It is alarming when scientists use words like "astounding."

That's what Kathie Dello, North Carolina's state climatologist, calls a graph showing the progression of North Carolina's average minimum temperature. After averaging 47.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the 20th Century, the annual minimum temperature has been above average since 2002.

And during the last five years, the average minimum temperature has hovered around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, reaching record highs each year.

That is, Dello said, almost entirely a consequence of nighttime temperatures failing to get as cool as they did for much of the 20th century. Nighttime temperatures are more sensitive to global warming because there is less air mass overnight, meaning the heat trapped by greenhouse gases has a more pronounced impact.

"We're doing a crazy experiment to our planet and it's just that much more sensitive [at night] because there's less to get warmed so it can heat up more," Dello said.

Making matters worse, the number of very warm nights is almost certain to dramatically increase over the rest of the century, according to experts.

Scientists working on the Climate Science Report looked at two warming scenarios: Under one, temperatures would increase by about 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, while the other studied an increase of about 6.7 degrees.

Either way, the number of very warm nights in North Carolina's Coastal Plain would spike. Under the 3.2 degree scenario, the increase would be between 14 to 45, while the 6.7 degree scenario would see 48 to 87 more very warm nights.

Dello said, "If you're somebody who doesn't have sufficient access to cooling or can't afford to run an air conditioner the entire night, you might be physiologically stressed."


NO REGULATIONS

There are no states that mandate cooling in farmworker housing. North Carolina's Migrant Housing Act requires growers to provide heating if the outside temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit but does not address cooling.

In emailed responses to The News & Observer, Cherie Berry, the longtime N.C. labor secretary, argued that federal and state laws don't require that homes have air conditioning.

"Until air conditioning is required of all private residences, I cannot see why we would burden farmers with a higher level of regulation than required of any other residence," wrote Berry, who is retiring this year.

Thomas Arcury and Sara Quandt have studied the impacts of heat on farm workers for more than a decade. The husband-wife team works out of Wake Forest University's Center for Worker Health.

Migrant farmworkers who are in North Carolina for the growing season on an H-2A visa have their housing provided by growers, Arcury said. That means that even if workers want air conditioning, it is virtually impossible to justify the investment.

"If you own your own house, you can air condition it. If you can rent a house, you can air condition it," Arcury said in an interview. "If you are in employer-provided housing then it's difficult to do such a thing, particularly if you are only there for a few months a year and you don't know if you are going back to that place."


CONDITIONS IN FARMWORKER HOUSING

During an interview with The News & Observer, Arcury recalled one research trip to farmworker housing next to a cantaloupe field. He initially tried to take measurements outside, but small bugs soon drove him indoors to a space without air conditioning.

After three or four hours doing interviews and collecting data inside the house, Arcury said, "I was soaking wet from perspiration from head to toe. My jeans were soaking wet. My shirt was soaking wet. ... If you have to sleep in those conditions, you're not going to recover from a day's work."

For one study, Quandt and Arcury visited 170 farmworker camps in North Carolina during the summer of 2010, with all visits coming after 4 p.m. They found that 55% of the workers they spoke with had no air conditioning at all, and 38.3% had window-mounted air conditioning units that are typically used to cool one room at a time. Only 6.6% had central air in their dwelling. Nearly 80% of workers had fans in their sleeping quarters.

The research team also measured the heat index inside the housing, or what the temperature actually feels like when the humidity is combined with the temperature. Heat indexes above 90 degrees Fahrenheit were common in sleeping quarters during summer months, they found.

"They're working all day in the heat, in the high humidity, doing strenuous labor which only compounds the heat. Then, if they get home and they're in a situation in which the inside of their dwelling is in the 80- or 90-degree Fahrenheit range, then they can't recover," Arcury said.

From mid-June to mid-July, 47.7% of the sleeping rooms measured reached 90 degrees, the heat index at which the National Weather Service urges extreme caution. That dipped slightly to 40.4% of rooms measured from the middle of July through the end of August before dropping to 11% in rooms measured from September through early October.

"This study suggests that farmworkers' recovery from the heat stress experienced during daily work will be affected by the [heat index] experienced at night. The [heat index] in sleeping rooms decreases later in the season, but dangerous levels still occur into the late summer," Quandt wrote.

In another study, Arcury interviewed 101 farmworkers about heat illness. He found that 35.6% of the workers reported experiencing at least one heat illness symptom while working outside, while 13.9% reported experiencing a symptom while working inside. The most common symptoms were hot, dry skin and dizziness.

Arcury also tried to figure out what might be causing heat illness. Personal characteristics like age or being a smoker were not associated with heat illness while working outdoors, he wrote. But working in wet clothes, harvesting and cutting the top of tobacco plants off were.

He also found that 66.7% of the workers who had gotten heat illness while working outside had spent time in an extremely hot house after work. Arcury called this "an important association" and wrote, "This result argues for changes in the [federal] Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act requiring that farmworkers be provided cooled living spaces."

"I'd honestly really like to have air conditioning here in our housing," said José, the Johnston County farmworker.

Instead, most workers have bought fans, like José has, and set them around their sleeping areas. When they need to cool off, the workers find reasons to go outside, like talking on the phone or doing a load of laundry.

It's the night time that's the worst, though. Once the workers eventually fall asleep, they wake up tired, José said.

"At times you don't want to go to work because you don't sleep because of the heat. But we have to keep at it."

This story is part of the Pulitzer Center's nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. For more information, go to pulitzercenter.org/connected-coastlines.

This story was produced with original reporting from Adam Wagner and Aaron Sanchez-Guerra for the Raleigh News & Observer, with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Read the full story here.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

This week, world leaders gather in Baku, Azerbaijan for the 29th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP29. Last year’s global climate conference broke new ground as the first to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from food, with over 100 countries signing a key declaration to deliver change in their food sectors by 2025. Food systems are responsible for a third of global emissions, mostly driven by meat, especially beef. Yet even as a chorus of researchers repeatedly stress the urgency of fixing our broken food systems, only a fraction of the countries who pledged support have made any progress.

Many Countries Still Need to Update Climate Plans, Despite Pledges

At COP28, 160 countries signed on to the UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. These countries play a significant role — the 160 make up 70 percent of farmers and 80 percent of emissions from agriculture. A key point of the declaration: the countries committed to adding agriculture and food systems into their national climate plans — also known as “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs). In other words, the agreement promised a concrete commitment to reduce food-related emissions.

Yet progress has been slow. Based on estimates, there are roughly just 40 countries on track to have a revised NDC in time for COP30 in Belém, Brazil next year, Edward Davey, a senior advisor for The Food and Land Use Coalition at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Sentient. That means 120 countries haven’t done any work to incorporate food into national climate plans so far.

While Davey says he is “very proud” of what was achieved at COP28 — calling it “a privilege to be involved in a supporting role to the UAE government as it brokered the food declaration” — he also expressed concern: “we do very much need to deliver on that declaration,” he wrote to Sentient in a subsequent email, stressing the critical importance of all 160 countries bringing revised NDCs to Brazil.

One country that has signaled they will bring a revised NDC to this year’s COP is the United Kingdom. The UK cannot possibly meet its net zero goals by 2035 and beyond if it doesn’t address diet shifts, Davey says.

And this isn’t just the case for the UK. Researchers at the World Resources Institute have warned that Global North countries cannot meet their international climate commitments without making dietary change — that is, shifting to more plant-forward diets — part of the solution.

For his part, Davey has recommended “forcefully” to the UK Government that its revised national climate plan should include solutions that address the way we farm and the way we eat. Davey cites strategies like better land management, changes to feed, reducing herd sizes, reducing food loss and waste precision breeding, among others. But dietary change — “people of the UK eating less meat per capita” — has to be in the mix too, he says.

There are obvious challenges. Shifting diets and the politics of meat consumption is a contentious subject in the UK, just as it is in the United States. And yet, meat consumption in the Global North plays a massive role in driving global emissions.

There are roughly 20 Global North countries –– including the UK and United States –– that contribute the majority of global agricultural and land use emissions, Davey says. “I think the UAE Declaration will succeed or fail [depending on] whether those 20 or so countries come back to Belém next year with a serious, quantifiable goal of food [and land use] management.”

At COP28, food system pledges also came from businesses and foundations. More than $7 billion was allocated last year from the UAE, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund among others. Jeff Bezos’ foundation committed $57 million into climate food solutions such as reducing methane emissions from livestock. Further, more than 200 non-state actors, including businesses, financial institutions and farmers, signed up to the a UN Call to Action to transform food systems. Large food companies like Nestle and Danone were also signatories.

The United Nations Roadmap Faces Delays and Scrutiny

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced a three-part roadmap for food systems at last year’s conference — aimed at curbing food-related emissions while also addressing global food security concerns. The UN has predicted the world’s population will hit 9.7 billion by the year 2050, so an ongoing global food system challenge is figuring out how to feed nearly 10 billion people without making climate pollution even worse.

The roadmap is supposed to illuminate a path forward — a way for countries to mesh food system change with climate and health goals.

Here too, however, progress has stalled. The full version of the first part of the roadmap has been very delayed and the current “brief” version has also drawn criticism. Experts from the U.S., Brazil and Norway published a comment in Nature earlier this year critiquing the roadmaps various “missed opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” among other issues. The guidelines on how to sustainably increase productivity in the Global South, while still protecting the environment, has also been left ambiguous, notes Beatriz Luraschi, a policy analyst at the European Climate Foundation.

Another setback to the roadmap was a letter to the FAO signed by more than 100 academics, calling for a controversial livestock “Pathways” report published at COP28 to be retracted over unclear and inaccurate methods. They called for the release of the roadmap to be “delayed until the FAO has engaged in serious dialogue with experts and civil society in a reflective process to assess what went wrong in the Pathways report,” as well as an overhaul of the FAO’s internal review processes.

That Pathways report seemingly promoted growing the livestock industry while ignoring emissions. The authors of a study mentioned in the report also spoke out separately, saying the FAO report “distorted” their research and underestimated the climate impact of reducing meat consumption.

These criticisms “cast a shadow over the roadmap,” says Davey, who is hopeful for the roadmap’s next installment.

The first two parts of the roadmap — both global and regional “pathways” — are due to be published at COP29. However, so far there has been no formal review or consultations with stakeholders, Luraschi says, so it’s still unclear whether the FAO will address the raised concerns in the new reports.

The Launch of a Dedicated Food Transformation Coalition

Despite the slow movement elsewhere, one coalition has made progress. The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) comprising Norway, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Cambodia, was born at last year’s COP to drive change in their country’s prospective food systems. The Alliance is “incredibly powerful [and] one of the best things that happened at COP28,” Davey says.

Supported in part by the Bezos Earth Fund, The Alliance acts across ten key priority areas to transform food systems, including food waste reduction and gender parity advancement. These sweeping focus areas are significant, says Clem Perry, director of partnerships for the Food and Land Use Coalition which acts as part of the ACF’s Secretariat, as each of these individual countries face their own unique challenges. “The production, the consumption, the trade flows, the land use challenges, the nutrition [and] health levels and challenges are very, very different in each [Alliance] country,” Perry tells Sentient.

Members of the Alliance spent this year in regular talks, both by phone and in person every three months, hashing out their biggest challenges and goals. “One of the most difficult trade-offs that we’ve been grappling with are those between improving or enhancing national feed production whilst not negatively impacting nature,” Perry says.

Sierra Leone has set an example of how to do this effectively by cracking down on their excessive rice imports and reforming their own national food system without encroaching on virgin rainforest. With a $100 million investment from the African Development Bank, Sierra Leone has put the infrastructure in place to increase rice production without deforesting. “In less than a year, that felt like a really significant and massive win and is exactly the kind of thing that we’re looking to replicate with other countries,” Perry says.

The hope is that countries can rally together to act as a collective to tackle food systems, Davey says, as we don’t want developed countries to simply offshore the environmental impact of farming to others. “We live in an integrated world. The decisions that one country takes [has] a bearing on another,” he says. It remains to be seen whether this week’s conference in Azerbaijan can correct the course.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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A small rural town in northwest Pennsylvania is using a combination of state and federal funds to implement "green" projects as part of its Climate Action Plan.

Meadville's plan started in 2018 by measuring its greenhouse gas emissions and setting local goals to reduce them, and to make the community more resilient.

Autumn Vogel, a member of the Meadville City Council, said an Environmental Advisory Council was created, and government funding has allowed them to open the bidding on a rooftop solar array on the Victor C. Leap Building, located downtown.

"That building just got a new roof and new utilities," Vogel explained. "It's already pretty efficient and so we will be able to do this rooftop solar installation thanks to some of the added capacity of our Shared Energy Manager; also some support we've gotten from PA Solar Center."

Vogel pointed out it has been financially feasible due to the Treasury's "direct pay" program, which will decrease the cost of the solar installation. Meadville is also one of two Pennsylvania communities, along with Reading, to receive support from the nonprofit Green Building Alliance Resilient Communities program.

Jaime Kinder, mayor of Meadville, said green projects require significant creativity and effort to secure federal and state funding, and said they've skillfully navigated the application process to get these funds. Kinder emphasized new projects now on the agenda include transportation upgrades.

"As far as something new, it would be to put solar on the fire department," Kinder noted. "We've already tried that, and we're going to keep pushing for that. And then some EVs, some charging stations. We have no public charging stations in our town. We're looking hopefully, to put some EV charging stations around 'the diamond.'"

Kinder added the Climate Action Plan also includes making Meadville more walkable, to improve accessibility and reduce car dependence. With a "Walk Works" grant, they are making plans for better crosswalks, sidewalks and bike paths.


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On Election Day, a broad coalition of conservationists, labor, and others helped defeat a ballot initiative to repeal Washington State's Climate Commitment Act. The act, passed in 2021, is the state's state's primary vehicle for reducing emissions and pollution and a major source of funding for clean energy infrastructure and climate initiatives.

Billy Wallace, political and legislative director with the Washington and Northern Idaho District Council of Laborers, said passage would have meant the loss of as many as 45,000 clean-energy jobs.

"We started building a coalition, and it ended up being a little over 600 groups, from labor, from environmental. The Catholic Church was on it, We had 21 of the 29 tribes sign on. So it was a very diversified coalition that came together to save this funding." he said.

Initiative 2117 was one of four ballot measures backed by the Let's Go Washington PAC funded primarily by conservative hedge-fund manager Bryan Heywood. Wallace said that over the next 8 years, Climate Commitment Act investments would create 45,000 jobs in Washington State.

Wallace added the coalition faced an uphill battle to help the public understand that jobs and the environment were both on the line.

"These are the investments, even in schools, clean air, clean water. And once we figured out we got to educate the people on what's going on, it was complicated. It was confusing for the general public. So we raised $18.4 million for this campaign from that big coalition," he continued.

Climate Jobs Washington and its member unions formed a coalition to protect the act. Wallace said labor organizations were instrumental in passing the original measure three years ago.

"It was crucial for our members. Our members work in the building trades. About 75%, 80% of the work we do is on prevailing wage work in transpo[rt]. So it was a no-brainer for us to jump in," he added.

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