- Melting ice and permafrost in Svalbard, Norway, are releasing toxic metals into waterways, a sign of things to come in other Arctic communities.
- Water scarcity has emerged as a leading factor for food insecurity in landlocked developing countries, especially in central Asia.
- A federal appeals court has upheld legislation that gives the state of Oklahoma total authority over environmental and water programs on tribal land.
- In the Brazilian Amazon, a swath of wetlands the size of Belgium has been filled in the past 40 years.
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Tap water in one of the world’s northernmost towns is no longer drinkable, the Guardian reports. It’s a result of rapidly thawing permafrost releasing toxic heavy metals into the community supply.
Longyearbyen, a municipality in Svalbard, Norway, is one of the fastest-warming places in the world. Located just 800 miles from the North Pole, temperatures there are rising between five and seven times the global average. Melting permafrost exposes underlying bedrock to the open air; pyrite, also known as fool’s gold, generates acid in such conditions, which is leaking into waterways. This includes those that feed a 1.5 mile-long lake, called Isdammen, Longyearbyen’s main source of drinking water.
Manganese levels in the supply were found to be 25 times higher than levels determined safe by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Sulphate and nickel levels have also spiked, adding further urgency to the issue. Harsh winter conditions, officials say, complicate possible solutions, which include the installation of a desalination plant or other filtering technologies.
“These ingredients [bedrock rich in pyrite and heavy metals] and thawing permafrost are present in other parts of the Arctic so this could be a first example of how climate change can impact freshwater, for example in northern Canada and Alaska,” Marjolaine Verret, a researcher at the University Center in Svalbard, tells the Guardian.
Water scarcity is a leading factor for why 57 percent of the people who live in the world’s 32 developing landlocked countries cannot afford a healthy diet.
Around one in six people in these countries — home in total to 600 million people, a majority of which are in southeastern Africa and Central Asia — face hunger, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which convened this month in Uzbekistan, one of only two double landlocked countries in the world, to discuss these issues.
Rising costs associated with importing food by plane are substantial; Euronews reports that logistics costs per metric ton of food are 75 percent higher in landlocked developing countries, compared to developing countries that are connected to the sea. But water scarcity is a mounting concern, experts say, especially in Central Asia, where irrigation sources needed to grow food domestically are depleting.
According to the Caspian Policy Center, in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, 98 percent of glaciers — which provide 80 percent of Central Asia’s total river runoff — have retreated in the past decade, and are melting at four times the global average. The long-term effects skew existential. “Given the warming climate, at some point it appears the ice and the water will run out,” the center forecasts.
The Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has upheld a Trump administration decision to give the federal Environmental Protection Agency unconditional authority on tribal lands in Oklahoma, Native News Online reports.
The 2-1 decision affirms a 2005 law infamously called the “Midnight Rider,” because it was added to a piece of largely unrelated legislation without discussion and at the last minute. The language gave the state of Oklahoma the power to control 26 environmental programs, including the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, on Indigenous land.
In 2020, Gov. Kevin Stitt invoked the Midnight Rider to gain control of environmental programs in Indian country; in January 2025, this request was approved, but on the condition that tribes be consulted in decision-making. Just several months later, this condition was thrown out, prompting the Pawnee Nation to sue.
“The Indian canons rest upon a foundation of respect for tribal sovereignty and the federal government’s general trust responsibility to the tribes. Here, however, EPA relies on the rider – an uncodified, last-minute addition to a 2005 transportation funding bill – to lay down a vast upheaval of environmental and Indian policy in Oklahoma,” wrote the lone dissenting judge, Richard Federico. “This court should not so readily acquiesce to the total displacement of the tribes as the first sovereigns of their land absent a clear statement from Congress to the contrary.”
A new study published this month in the journal Nature suggests that more than six percent of the floodplain forests and other wetland areas in the Brazilian Amazon — a swath of land the size of Belgium — has been destroyed and filled within the past 40 years.
Recent trends are especially disconcerting: a third of this clearing occurred between 2015 and 2024, the Brazil-based researchers tell Mongabay.
River systems and freshwater ecosystems comprise 30 percent of the Brazilian Amazon, supporting fisheries, drinking water, and irrigation for community agriculture. Crucially, the analysis found clear relationships between vulnerability to filling, and the designations certain areas receive from the federal government.
Public land that had not yet been given one of the 13 types of land designations was most-often filled, with a median of 14 percent being deforested. Wetlands under the control of the military were the least filled, with a land conversion rate of under 0.01 percent.
“Brazilian Amazon wetlands need urgent attention and investment in bioeconomic activities that preserve their ecological integrity,” the study’s authors write.
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