- A federal appeals court affirmed the dismissal of a water pollution lawsuit on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution does not enshrine the right to safe drinking water.
- Thailand has issued a temporary nationwide data center moratorium as it establishes stricter water and energy-use standards for hyperscale projects.
- The United Nations has warned that a “supersized” El Niño phenomenon, which will increase the likelihood of extreme weather globally, will persist through February.
- Experts predict France will experience its smallest grape harvest in 30 years as a result of heatwaves, drought, and wildfires in wine regions.
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French vineyards are expecting to report a 30-year low in wine production this summer amid extreme heat and prolonged drought.
This year’s grape harvest is down 6 percent from last year, and 17 percent compared to the average from 2021 through 2025, the Guardian reports. A sizable share of these losses are due in part to wildfires that have raged across the country, which has experienced its hottest June, July, and August on record. From the beginning of the year to July, at least 115,000 acres of land has burned. In late July, some 220,000 people in the wine-growing region of Bordeaux were forced from their homes as flames encroached, Al Jazeera reports.
Though the fires themselves have largely avoided vineyards directly, their drifting smoke has had an outsize impact on grapes, tainting their taste and aroma and lowering their quality.
In a stark report published last week, the United Nations has warned that this summer’s “supersized” El Niño has yet to reach its peak intensity. It is “almost certain,” scientists say, that the weather phenomenon will persist into February 2027, “raising the prospect of months of extreme heat, floods, drought, and disruptive weather around the globe.”
The last few months globally have been defined by the outsize consequences of extreme weather, particularly for populations that contribute tiny fractions of global carbon emissions. These include the collapse of a glacier that spurred landslides and flooding killed hundreds of people in northern Nepal; long-standing droughts in South Sudan, which, in addition to civil war, have placed an estimated 22 million people in South Sudan in need of emergency-level food assistance; and widespread wildfires across Canada, made twice as likely by global warming, that have disproportionately affected the health and safety of First Nations communities.
Though the incidence of a stronger-than-usual El Niño cycle has not solely been attributed to human-caused climate change — the weather event occurs naturally every two to seven years, driven by waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean reaching higher temperatures — consistently increasing temperatures across the globe are setting the stage for more intense ramifications.
“The oceans are already exceptionally warm, providing a hotter baseline on which the natural climate cycle is playing out,” the UN says.
The forecast coincides with the grim report released just one day earlier: that the world will undoubtedly surpass 1.5° Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, a threshold that is “critical to avoiding the worst climate devastation.” International leaders in 2015 pledged to limit global warming below this standard. The new urgent aim, experts warn, is to curb the amount by which this level is eclipsed.
“Every fraction of a degree will cost lives, destroy livelihoods, deepen inequality and push ecosystems closer to irreversible damage,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe.”
A federal appeals court last week affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit filed in 2022 against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which plaintiffs said knowingly let its residents drink lead-contaminated water. This carelessness, lawyers argued, risked citizens’ physical health and violated their constitutional right to “bodily integrity.”
Despite EPA testing of Jackson’s public water systems revealing “persistent and concerning violations” of water safety policies — and no city, state, or federal officials acting to fix the problem or inform residents, Mother Jones reports — a Fifth Circuit judge struck down the plaintiffs’ argument on the basis that the U.S. Constitution does not enshrine a right to safe drinking water.
“We find no deeply rooted history or tradition establishing a constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis,” judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote in the ruling.
The government of Thailand, in response to widespread environmental and community concerns, has suspended the in-progress construction of 49 data centers and frozen the approvals for 117 proposed facilities across the country, Bloomberg reports.
It is not immediately clear how long this moratorium will last, though officials say its purpose is to ensure that the availability of water and electricity are fully considered for all new projects. Updated regulations for data center developments, they say, will be published within a month.
“Today’s decision doesn’t mean Thailand is closing the door to data center investment because the industry is critical to the country’s competitiveness,” Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas said at a press briefing last week, according to the South China Morning Post. “We simply want clear and consistent standards in place to ensure the industry can grow sustainably.”
Data Center Dynamics reports that Thailand has been a leader in Southeast Asia’s AI and data center space. In the first half of 2026, the country approved 88 projects worth a total of $27 billion.
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