PITTSBURGH -- In southwestern Pennsylvania, the health effects of an industrial fire more than two years ago are just now coming to light.

A new study in the journal "Toxics" found asthma-related doctor and emergency-room visits doubled in Clairton, after a fire at the U.S. Steel coke plant there in December 2018.

The fire left the plant's air-pollution control equipment out of commission for three months.

Dr. Deborah Gentile, allergy and asthma specialist and medical director of Community Partners in Asthma Care and the study's senior author, said because U.S. Steel kept the plant running, emissions were 25 to 35 times higher than they were before the fire.

"And what we were able to show with the Clairton Coke Works fire was that, you know, on top of that chronic exposure to pollution, when you have an acute event that raises the air-pollution levels even more, you see these acute effects on asthma," Gentile explained.

The study showed the increase in asthma cases correlated with higher levels of sulfur dioxide surrounding the plant. U.S. Steel announced in April it plans to shut down three of its high-polluting coke batteries in Clairton by 2023.

Community members in the region have expressed frustration that they weren't notified about the fire in the immediate aftermath.

Howard Rieger, a Pittsburgh resident and founder of East End Neighbors Fight Pollution, said it's unacceptable there was no county alert system in place to warn people of environmental and public health hazards.

"How about a text message on our phones?" Rieger suggested. "You know, when we're told we are going to get five inches of snow tomorrow, we get an alert, why couldn't we get an alert about this? So, to a certain extent, I think the county was culpable. To a great extent, the company was culpable."

Rieger added just this year, in April, Allegheny County started sending public air-quality alerts.

Last week, environmental groups requested a federal court require U.S. Steel to confirm allegations that the company violated the Clean Air Act more than 12,000 times at its Mon Valley area plants in 2018 and 2019, in connection to a lawsuit.

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.