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Climate crisis creates a health crisis, WHO reports
GENEVA — Scientific evidence documented in a series of articles presented by the World Health Organization this week highlights the harmful impact of climate change at key stages of the human life cycle.
“These provide important scientific evidence on how the health of pregnant women, newborns, children, adolescents and older people is affected by air pollution and different climate hazards, including wildfires, flooding and extreme heat,” Anayda Portela, director of the WHO’s department of maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and aging, said at a briefing Friday for journalists in Geneva.
“This evidence is critically important, because it shows the leading health risks for each of these groups for these different climate events,” Portela said.
She noted that the collection of articles published in the Journal of Global Health shows that climate-related health risks “have been crucially underestimated” for younger and older people and during pregnancy, “with serious, often life-threatening implications.”
The studies find that climate-related natural hazards have some “serious mental and physical health impacts” in pregnancy, and for younger and older people.
For example, the authors note that preterm births, which now are the leading cause of childhood deaths, “increase during heatwaves, while older people are more likely to suffer heart attacks or respiratory distress.”
They report that heatwaves also “affect cognitive function and therefore learning for children and adolescents.”
The World Meteorological Organization’s State of Global Climate report confirms 2023 as the hottest year on record and predicts that global temperatures over “the entire five-year 2024-2028 period will exceed 1.5 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial era,” which scientists warn could lead to rapid and irreversible changes in the climate.
According to the World Health Organization, between 2030 and 2050, climate change is projected to cause approximately “250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat stress alone.”
Portela also warned that air pollution increases the likelihood of high blood pressure during pregnancy, low birth weight, preterm birth and negative impacts on fetal brain and lung development.
“It raises risk of respiratory illness among children and older people,” she said, adding that they also face greater risks of “cancer, cardiovascular disease and pneumonia.”
The studies detail the many noxious effects on mental and physical well-being from climate-related natural disasters, including flooding and drought, as well as wildfires, which have been shown to increase respiratory disorders and cardiovascular mortality rates for older people.
“There is an urgent need to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to build climate resilience, to take specific actions that protect health at these various life stages,” Portela said.
Authors of the reports note that “few climate adaptation measures are tailored for the specific needs of women, infants, children and adolescents,” as well as older people who may have mobility and cognitive constraints.
Nevertheless, the WHO urges governments to prioritize climate change as a health issue, pointing out several specific actions they can take to promote and protect health at different life stages.
For example, this could include flexibility around work hours, preparing childcare and educational systems for extreme weather events and rising temperatures, and informing people and communities about various measures that can protect vulnerable people during heatwaves and periods of worsening air pollution.
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In many US cities, Black and Latino neighborhoods have less access to pharmacies
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Parts of the north side of Montgomery are defined by what it has lost: restaurants, grocery stores and a convenient pharmacy, the latter of which closed five years ago.
People who still live in the historically Black neighborhood of Newtown, like Sharon Harris, are frustrated. She goes to a different location of the same pharmacy chain, which is four miles from her home.
“You have to come back sometimes,” she said, “and then they wait so long to fill the prescription.”
In cities across the U.S., major retail pharmacies have closed hundreds of stores over the past few years and independents can’t always afford to stay open. That can leave residents of color without easy access to a business that provides not only prescriptions but also fundamental public health services like vaccinations, over-the-counter medicines and even food.
Closures create “a situation where there’s not just (a lack of) investment in terms of pharmacy development and expansion, but there’s no incentive to stay in those neighborhoods,” said Dima Qato, a professor of clinical pharmacy at the University of Southern California who has studied pharmacy access.
And an Associated Press analysis of licensing data from 44 states, data from the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs and the American Community Survey shows residents of neighborhoods that are majority Black and Hispanic have fewer pharmacies per capita than people who live in mostly white neighborhoods.
MAC Pharmacy is the only one serving about 20,000 people in a majority Black ZIP code in Cleveland. George Tadross, the part-owner and pharmacy manager, said he is adamant about making things as as easy as possible for his mostly older customers — sometimes by organizing their medications by day for them.
“You have to have a pharmacist to talk to,” he said. “My philosophy in the pharmacy business is you know your doctor, he knows everything about you. You need to know your pharmacist as well (because) the pharmacist is the only one that sees the whole medical treatment plan you have.”
Pharmacists play a role in managing chronic diseases like diabetes and heart-related issues, which Black and Hispanic people are more likely to be diagnosed with.
And when pharmacists or pharmacy technicians reflect their customer base — by speaking the same language or understanding the community — it can be easier to build a strong rapport and trust, said Jasmine Gonzalvo, who teaches at Purdue University’s College of Pharmacy and has researched the needs of Spanish-speaking patients at pharmacies.
She noted that if people don’t feel comfortable asking questions about the medication, then it might mean they don’t take it or don’t take it correctly.
“You don’t get a refill,” Gonzalvo said, “simply because there were barriers in the way of your communicating and feeling safe in that relationship with your pharmacist.”
That’s why Bert’s Pharmacy in Elizabeth, New Jersey, has “Spanish- and English-speaking staff all the time,” said owner and pharmacist Prakash Patel said. His business is located in an ZIP code where nearly 70% of the residents are Hispanic.
“We want to make sure, too, they understood everything,” Patel said. “We have Spanish-language labels for them, we print all the instructions in Spanish for them.”
In Montgomery, where Harris lives, the city is working on a development plan for the north side. A retail analysis in the plan shows a small pharmacy could generate $1.5 million in sales a year.
“There’s an opportunity there because you have what I call a captive market,” said Bob Gibbs, the director of Gibbs Planning Group, which did the analysis. “People that live in a lot of these neighborhoods have limited access to transportation … and they’re very loyal to local businesses that will treat them with respect.
“They will go out of their way just to go there. And they just don’t like having to drive … two miles to go to a drugstore. That’s unfair.”
Harris, though, doesn’t have much hope a new pharmacy will open.
“I don’t see it,” she said. “As long as they have (that CVS) they think it’s OK. … Everybody is waiting for them to do something on this side.”
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Former astronaut who took iconic photo of Earth dies in plane crash
seattle, washington — Retired Major General William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic “Earthrise” photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone plummeted into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90. His son, Greg Anders, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.
“The family is devastated,” Greg Anders said. “He was a great pilot, and we will miss him terribly.”
Anders said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program, given the ecological and philosophical impact it had, along with making sure the Apollo 8 command module and service module worked.
A report came in around 11:40 a.m. local time that an older-model plane had crashed into the water and had sunk near the north end of Jones Island, San Juan County Sheriff Eric Peter said.
Only the pilot was on board the Beech A45 airplane at the time, according to the Federal Aviation Association.
William Anders said in a 1997 NASA oral history interview that he didn’t think the Apollo 8 mission was risk-free but there were important national, patriotic and exploration reasons for going ahead.
He estimated there was about a one-in-three chance that the crew wouldn’t make it back and the same chance the mission would be a success and the same chance that the mission wouldn’t start to begin with. He said he suspected Christopher Columbus sailed with worse odds.
He recounted how the Earth looked fragile and seemingly physically insignificant yet was home.
“We’d been going backwards and upside down, didn’t really see the Earth or the sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earthrise,” he said. “That certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape really contrasted.”
The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA are investigating the crash.
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UN development agency installing solar energy at Zimbabwean clinics, hospitals
Zimbabwe is facing long hours of power cuts due to its dilapidated infrastructure and the impact of recurring droughts on hydropower. To help, the United Nations Development Program is installing solar panels on government-owned health facilities. Columbus Mavhunga reports from Bulawayo.
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SpaceX’s mega rocket completes its fourth test flight from Texas without exploding
Boca Chica, Texas — SpaceX’s mega Starship rocket completed its first full test flight Thursday, returning to Earth without exploding after blasting off from Texas.
The previous three test flights ended in explosions of the rocket and the spacecraft. This time, both managed to splash down in a controlled fashion.
The world’s largest and most powerful rocket — almost 121 meters tall — was empty as it soared above the Gulf of Mexico and headed east on a flight to the Indian Ocean.
Minutes after Thursday morning’s liftoff, the first-stage booster separated from the spacecraft and splashed into the gulf precisely as planned, after firing its engines.
An hour later, live views showed parts of the spacecraft breaking away during the intense heat of reentry, but it remained intact enough to transmit data all the way to its targeted splashdown site in the Indian Ocean.
“And we have splashdown!” SpaceX launch commentator Kate Tice announced from Mission Control at company headquarters in California.
It was a critical milestone in the company’s plan to eventually return Starship’s Super Heavy booster to its launch site for reuse.
SpaceX came close to avoiding explosion in March, but lost contact with the spacecraft as it careened out of space and blew up short of its goal. The booster also ruptured in flight, a quarter-mile above the gulf.
Last year’s two test flights ended in explosions shortly after blasting off from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. The first one cratered the pad at Boca Chica Beach and hurled debris for thousands of feet (meters).
SpaceX upgraded the software and made some rocket-flyback changes to improve the odds. The Federal Aviation Administration signed off Tuesday on this fourth demo, saying all safety requirements had been met.
Starship is designed to be fully reusable. That’s why SpaceX wants to control the booster’s entry into the gulf and the spacecraft’s descent into the Indian Ocean — it’s intended as practice for planned future landings. Nothing is being recovered from Thursday’s flight.
NASA has ordered a pair of Starships for two moon-landing missions by astronauts, on tap for later this decade. Each moon crew will rely on NASA’s own rocket and capsule to leave Earth, but meet up with Starship in lunar orbit for the ride down to the surface.
SpaceX already is selling tourist trips around the moon. The first private lunar customer, a Japanese tycoon, pulled out of the trip with his entourage last week, citing the oft-delayed schedule.
SpaceX’s founder and CEO has grander plans: Musk envisions fleets of Starships launching people and the infrastructure necessary to build a city on Mars.
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War traumatizes, haunts both Israeli and Palestinian children
Many Israeli and Palestinian children are suffering from trauma because of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the ensuing eight months of war between the two sides. Therapists in both communities say the emotional scars could linger for years. Linda Gradstein reports from Jerusalem.
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Novo Nordisk braces for generic challenge to Ozempic, Wegovy in China
SHANGHAI, China — Novo Nordisk is facing the prospect of intensifying competition in the promising Chinese market, where drugmakers are developing at least 15 generic versions of its diabetes drug Ozempic and weight loss treatment Wegovy, clinical trial records showed.
The Danish drugmaker has high hopes that demand for its blockbuster drugs will surge in China, which is estimated to have the world’s highest number of people who are overweight or obese.
Ozempic won approval from China in 2021, and Novo Nordisk saw sales of the drug in the greater China region double to $698 million last year. It is expecting Wegovy to be approved this year.
But the patent on semaglutide, the active ingredient in both Wegovy and Ozempic, expires in China in 2026. Novo is also in the midst of a legal fight in the country over the patent.
An adverse court ruling could make it lose its semaglutide exclusivity even sooner and turn China into the first major market where Novo is stripped of patent protection for the drugs.
Those circumstances have drawn several Chinese drugmakers to the fray. At least 11 semaglutide drug candidates from Chinese firms are in the final stages of clinical trials, according to records in a clinical trial database reviewed by Reuters.
“Ozempic has witnessed unprecedented success in mainland China … and with patent expiry so close, Chinese drugmakers are looking to capitalize (on) this segment as soon as possible,” said Karan Verma, a health care research and data analyst at information services provider Clarivate.
Front-runner Hangzhou Jiuyuan Gene Engineering has already developed one treatment that it says has “similar clinical efficacy and safety” as Ozempic and applied for approval for sale in April. The company has not published efficacy data and did not respond to a request for information.
The company said in January that it expected approval in the second half of 2025, but it cautioned that it would not be able to commercialize the drug before Novo’s patent expires in 2026, unless a Chinese court makes a final ruling that the patent is invalid.
The Danish company’s semaglutide patent is expiring in China far ahead of its expiry in key markets such as Japan, Europe and the U.S. Analysts attribute variations in patent expiry timelines to term extensions Novo has won in specific regions.
Even more pressing for Novo is the China patent office’s 2022 ruling that the patent is invalid for reasons related to experimental data availability, which the company has challenged.
China’s top court said it was not able to say when verdicts are likely ready.
A Novo spokesperson said it “welcomes healthy competition” and was awaiting a court decision on its patent case. The spokesperson did not answer follow-up queries on the matter.
Other Chinese drugmakers who are running the final stages of clinical trials for Ozempic generics include United Laboratories, CSPC Pharmaceutical Group, Huadong Medicine and a subsidiary of Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group.
CSPC said in May it expected approval for its semaglutide diabetes drug in 2026.
Brokerage Jefferies estimated in an October report that semaglutide drugs from United Laboratories will be launched for diabetes in 2025 and obesity in 2027. United Laboratories did not respond to a request for comment.
Impact on prices
The number of adults who are overweight or obese in China is projected to reach 540 million and 150 million, respectively, in 2030, up 2.8 and 7.5 times from 2000 levels, according to a 2020 study by Chinese public health researchers.
If shown to be as safe and effective as Novo’s, Chinese drugmakers’ products will increase competition and bring down prices, analysts say.
Goldman Sachs analysts estimated in an August report that generics could lead to a price reduction of around 25% for semaglutide in China. The weekly Ozempic injection costs around $100 for each 3mL dose through China’s public hospital network, Clarivate’s Verma said.
Novo acknowledges the intensifying competition.
“In 2026 and 2027 we might see a few more players showing up due to the clinical trials” in progress, Maziar Mike Doustdar, a Novo executive vice president, told investors in March, referring to the China market.
But he also questioned the capability of some of the players to provide meaningful volumes, adding, “We will watch it as we get closer.”
Novo also faces competition from internationally well-known firms, including Eli Lilly, whose diabetes drug Mounjaro received approval from China in May. HSBC analysts expect China’s approval this year or in the first half of 2025 for Lilly’s weight loss drug with the same active ingredient.
Eli Lilly did not reply to a request for a comment on Chinese approval of the drug, which in the U.S. is called Zepbound.
Supplies of both Wegovy and Zepbound remain constrained, but the companies have been increasing production.
Zuo Ya-Jun, general manager of weight loss drugmaker Shanghai Benemae Pharmaceutical, said a product being competitive would depend on distinguishing features such as efficacy, durability of the treatment and a company’s sales abilities.
“It will be a market with fierce competition, but who will be [the leader] is hard to say,” she said.
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UN chief warns target to limit global warming is slipping away
NEW YORK — The U.N. secretary-general said Wednesday that the world is “at a moment of truth” to reach targets in the 2015 Paris climate accord to limit global warming, as the planet has just experienced the 12 hottest consecutive months on record.
“The truth is, almost ten years since the Paris Agreement was adopted, the target of limiting long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is hanging by a thread,” Antonio Guterres told an audience at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where exhibits about extinct dinosaurs offered their own planetary warning.
“The World Meteorological Organization reports today that there is an 80% chance the global annual average temperature will exceed the 1.5-degree limit in at least one of the next five years,” he said.
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he warned in a special climate speech under the museum’s famous blue whale, marking World Environment Day.
The U.N. chief said the richest 1% of countries are emitting as much pollution as two-thirds of all humanity.
He said the planet is emitting around 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually and will burn through its remaining “carbon budget” of around 200 billion tons well before 2030. Guterres also said global emissions need to fall 9% each year between now and 2030 in order to keep the 1.5 degree Celsius limit alive. Last year, they rose by 1%.
The bill for the climate crisis will keep growing without meaningful action.
“Even if emissions hit zero tomorrow, a recent study found that climate chaos will still cost at least $38 trillion a year by 2050,” Guterres said.
Fossil fuels
The climate crisis has been a signature issue of Guterres’ tenure since becoming the world’s top diplomat seven-and-a-half years ago. He has repeatedly called for the phasing out of coal and other fossil fuels in favor of cleaner renewable energies like wind and solar power — which already produce nearly a third of the world’s electricity.
He raised the ante Wednesday, urging banks to stop financing oil, coal and gas and invest in renewables instead. He called on countries to ban advertising from fossil fuel producers and said news and technology platforms should stop taking their advertising.
“I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end — and taking us all with you,” the U.N. chief said, adding that the oil and gas industry invested only 2.5% of its total spending on clean energy in the last year.
He urged public relations companies and lobbyists to stop enabling the industry’s “planetary destruction” and drop those clients.
“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action — with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns,” he said.
Leveling the field
The secretary-general reiterated his stance that those who have contributed the least to the climate crisis are suffering the most — mainly poorer nations in Africa and small island states. The G20 major economies produce 80% of the world’s emissions.
“It is a disgrace that the most vulnerable are being left stranded, struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create,” he said.
Guterres warned that the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees could mean survival or extinction for some small island nations and coastal communities.
“1.5 degrees is not a target. It is not a goal. It is a physical limit,” he said.
Global warming is already hurting the planet’s oceans, their coral reefs and marine ecosystems, and melting sea ice. Across the globe, severe floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and other climate-related catastrophes are becoming all too frequent.
The secretary-general said there must be more financing and technical support from richer countries to mitigate climate impacts and invest in renewables for lower income states. He also said a global early warning system must be in place by 2027, to protect everyone on Earth from hazardous weather, water or climate events.
He urged citizens to continue to make their voices heard and said it is time for leaders to decide whose side they are on.
“Now is the time to mobilize; now is the time to act; now is the time to deliver,” he said to a standing ovation. “This is our moment of truth.”
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Panel rejects psychedelic drug MDMA as a PTSD treatment
washington — Federal health advisers voted Tuesday against a first-of-a-kind proposal to begin using the mind-altering drug MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, handing a potentially major setback to advocates who had hoped to win a landmark federal approval and bring the banned drugs into the medical mainstream.
The panel of advisers to the Food and Drug Administration sided 10-1 against the overall benefits of MDMA when used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. They cited flawed study data, questionable research conduct and significant drug risks, including the potential for heart problems, injury and abuse.
“It seems like there are so many problems with the data — each one alone might be OK, but when you pile them on top of each other … there’s just a lot of questions I would have about how effective the treatment is,” said Dr. Melissa Decker Barone, a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The FDA is not required to follow the group’s advice and is expected to make its final decision by August, but the negative opinion could strengthen FDA’s rationale for rejecting the treatment.
The vote followed hours of pointed questions and criticisms about the research submitted on MDMA — sometimes called ecstasy or molly. Panelists pointed to flawed studies that could have skewed the results, missing follow-up data on patient outcomes, and a lack of diversity among participants. The vast majority of patients studied were white, with only five Black patients receiving MDMA, raising questions about the generalizability of the results.
“The fact that this study has so many white participants is problematic because I don’t want something to roll out that only helps this one group,” said Elizabeth Joniak-Grant, the group’s patient representative.
The FDA advisers also drew attention to allegations of misconduct in the trials that have recently surfaced in news stories and a report by the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which evaluates experimental drug treatments. The incidents include a 2018 report of apparent sexual misconduct by a therapist interacting with a patient.
Lykos Therapeutics, the company behind the study, said it previously reported the incident to the FDA and regulators in Canada, where the therapist is based. Lykos is essentially a corporate spinoff of the nation’s leading psychedelic advocacy group, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, which funded the studies. The group was founded in 1986 to promote the benefits of MDMA and other mind-altering substances.
MDMA is the first in a series of psychedelics — including LSD and psilocybin — that are expected to come before the FDA in the next few years. The panel’s negative ruling could further derail financial investments in the fledgling industry, which has mainly been funded by a small number of wealthy backers.
MDMA’s main effect is triggering feelings of intimacy, connection and euphoria. When used to enhance talk therapy, the drug appears to help patients process their trauma and let go of disturbing thoughts and memories.
But the panel struggled with the reliability of those results, given the difficulties of objectively testing psychedelic drugs.
Because MDMA causes intense, psychological experiences, almost all patients in two key studies of the drug were able to guess whether they had received the MDMA or a dummy pill. That’s the opposite of the approach generally required for high-quality drug research, in which bias is minimized by “blinding” patients and researchers to whether they received the drug under investigation.
“I’m not convinced at all that this drug is effective based on the data I saw,” said Dr. Rajesh Narendran, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who chaired the panel.
Panelists also noted the difficulty of knowing how much of patients’ improvement came from MDMA versus simply undergoing the extensive therapy, which totaled more than 80 hours for many patients. Results were further marred by other complicating factors, including a large number of patients who had previously used MDMA or other psychedelics drugs recreationally.
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In Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, a hidden underground world is under threat by the Maya Train
AKTUN TUYUL CAVE SYSTEM, Mexico — Rays of sunlight slice through pools of crystal water as clusters of fish cast shadows on the limestone below. Arching over the emerald basin are walls of stalactites dripping down the cavern ceiling, which opens to a dense jungle.
These glowing sinkhole lakes — known as cenotes — are a part of one of Mexico’s natural wonders: A fragile system of an estimated 10,000 subterranean caverns, rivers and lakes that wind almost surreptitiously beneath Mexico’s southern Yucatan peninsula.
Now, construction of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s crown jewel project — the Maya Train — is rapidly destroying part of that hidden underground world, already under threat by development and mass tourism. As the caverns are thrust into the spotlight in the lead-up to the country’s presidential elections, scientists and environmentalists warn that the train will mean long-term environmental ruin.
Deep in the jungle, the roar of heavy machinery cuts through the cave’s gentle “drip, drip, drip.” Just a few meters above, construction of the train line is in full swing. The caverns rumble as government workers use massive metal drills that bore into limestone, embedding an estimated 15,000 steel pillars into the caverns.
Engineer Guillermo D’Christy looks upon the once immaculate cave, now coated with a layer of concrete and broken stalactites, icicle-shaped rock formations normally hanging from the roof of the cave. A mix of grief and anger is painted upon the face of D’Christy, who has long studied the waters running through the caves.
“Pouring concrete into a cavern, directly into the aquifer, without any concern or care,” D’Christy said. “That’s total ecocide.”
A tourism boon, but at what cost?
For nearly 1,460 kilometers, (1,000 miles) the high-speed Maya Train will wind its way around Mexico’s southern Yucatan Peninsula. When it’s completed, it’ll connect tourist hubs like Cancun and Playa del Carmen to dense jungle, remote communities and archaeological sites, drawing development and money into long-neglected rural swathes of the country.
The more than $30 billion train is among the keystone projects of Mexico’s outgoing President López Obrador, who has spent his six years in office portraying himself as a champion of the country’s long-forgotten poor.
“The Maya Train will be our legacy of development for the southeast of Mexico,” the president wrote in a post on the social platform X last year.
With Mexico holding elections on Sunday, the future of the train, and López Obrador’s legacy, is uncertain. Both leading candidates to replace him have made promises for a green agenda, but also supported the economic promises the train brings.
At issue is the path the train takes.
It was originally planned to run along the region’s highway in more urban areas. But after waves of complaints by hotel owners, the government moved one of the final sections of the line deeper into the jungle, atop the most important cave system in the country. It’s plowed down millions of trees, a chunk of the largest tropical forest in the Americas after the Amazon.
The caves contain one of the biggest aquifers in Mexico and act as the region’s main water source, crucial at a time when the nation faces a deepening water crisis. In 2022, archaeologists also discovered some of the oldest human remains in North America within the caverns.
The area was once a reef nestled beneath the Caribbean Sea but changing sea levels pushed Mexico’s southern peninsula out of the ocean as a mass of limestone. Water sculpted the porous stone into caves over millions of years.
It produced the open-face freshwater caverns, “cenotes,” and underground rivers that are in equal parts awe-inspiring and delicate, explained Emiliano Monroy-Ríos, a geologist at Northwestern University studying the region.
“These ecosystems are very, very fragile,” Monroy-Ríos said. “They are building upon a land that is like Gruyere cheese, full of caves and cavities of different sizes and at different depths.”
López Obrador promised his government would prevent damage to the Great Mayan Aquifer by elevating the sections of the train on thousands of hefty steel pillars buried deep into the ground.
But the populist leader was met with an uproar in late January when environmentalists and scientists posted videos showing government drills carving tunnels into the tops of caverns, implanting rows of 2-meter-wide (6-foot-wide) steel pillars.
López Obrador responded angrily to the videos, calling them “staged” by his political enemies.
“These pseudo-environmentalists are liars,” López Obrador said in a news briefing. “Don’t watch those videos because they’re specialists in staging.”
Associated Press journalists traveled to construction sites along the Maya Train route where López Obrador denied causing any environmental damage. What they saw directly contradicted the president’s claims.
Documenting destruction
D’Christy treks through dense rainforest and clicks on his headlight as he climbs into a split in a rock.
The engineer and hydrological expert has spent 25 years roving the intricate cave system, tracking the quality of the waters. Like many of the people studying the mysteries of the ancient cave system, his once tame job was inadvertently turned turbulent with the rise of the train project.
Today, he wanders into a small section of the caverns known as Aktun Tuyul, less than an hour from the tourist city of Playa del Carmen. As the 58-year-old Mexican walks past layers of stalactites and steel pillars burrowing into the rock formations, the cave’s darkness is broken by wagon wheel-sized holes drilled into the roof of the cave, where even more pillars will be implanted.
D’Christy wades through waist-deep water, now turned a murky brown by corroded metal from the pillars and pushes his body through a narrow passage in the rock.
Sitting next to one of more than a dozen pillars embedded into this cavern, he pulls out a series of syringes and bottles, taking a sample of the water next to the metal.
“It clearly has a color characteristic of iron contamination,” he said, holding up a syringe of foggy yellow water. “We’re going to take a sample.”
D’Christy pours the water into a glass vial, mixing it with a chemical that turns it a deep blue, indicating the water contains traces of iron from the poles. Next to other pillars, he presses his ear to the metal, listening to globs of concrete pour into the hollow tube.
Across the cave system, stalactites broken off by vibrations from train construction litter the ground like rubble following an earthquake. In other caverns, the concrete filling the pillars has spilled out to coat the limestone ground.
While the long-term environmental consequences of the construction are unknown, what is certain is that it is transforming the entire ecosystem, said geologist Monroy-Ríos.
“Just by drilling, before you even put in the pillars, you are killing an entire ecosystem that was in those caves” he said. “Why? Because now light is coming in, the gases within have changed, and there are very sensitive species that live in total darkness. They have already killed hundreds of millions” of organisms.
But the geologist’s greatest concern continues to be that the morphing limestone upon which the train is built and caves underneath the pillars could cause a collapse of the line. Scientists have long warned of the risks of building on soluble rock like limestone.
Already, sections of highway in the Yucatan have warped or caved in, and the Maya Train has been marred by a series of accidents, including a March train derailment, which government officials blamed on a loose clamp set by contractors.
Further damage to the limestone could lead to another accident that could be deadly. If a cargo train derailed, it could cause an oil spill that could permanently devastate the aquifer, Monroy-Ríos said.
‘It will benefit us all’
Not everyone is opposed to the train running through the remote communities. Some see an unprecedented economic opportunity, a chance to help poor families earn money.
Maria Norma de los Angeles and her family have long lived off a modest flow of tourists in their community of Jacinto Pat, tucked in a stretch of jungle in the southern coastal state, Quintana Roo.
They offer temazcal baths, traditional Mayan steam rooms meant to purify and relax the body, and charge visiting foreigners to swim in a nearby cenote.
The family, like many along the train’s path, was originally opposed to the project because they worried it would destroy the cenotes drawing tourists.
But their feelings about the train began to change when government officials contracted local people to build the track, De los Angeles said. They also promised to bring communities electricity, a sewage system and running water, and agreed to pay more for the land the train would pass over.
“It has its pros and its cons,” De los Angeles said as her family gathered to kill a pig to eat for her father’s birthday. “But there will be a moment when we see an economic spillover … I know that it will benefit us all.”
That’s the mentality of many Mexicans toward both the train and López Obrador. Many are willing to overlook the controversies of the populist and his train, in favor of his charisma and the strong economy seen during his presidency.
The 70-year-old leader has connected with Mexico’s long-invisible working class in a way few leaders have in recent history. López Obrador’s government has raised the minimum wage and provided cash handouts to older Mexicans and students. The government says more than 5 million people have been pulled out of poverty while López Obrador was president.
Luruama de la Cruz, a California resident whose family comes from the local town of Leona Vicario, said she bought her father tickets to the train for his birthday because it was a dream of his.
“A dream made reality,” De la Cruz says as she rode the train and took a video on her phone, meandering past passengers wearing “Maya Train” T-shirts and watching an interview between López Obrador and Russian state media.
“Whenever you build something, something else is destroyed,” she said, adding that family members worked on train construction. “This is for the good of the people.”
A rush to build the track
López Obrador has fast-tracked construction of the train to try to keep promises to complete it before June elections, something that has appeared all but impossible. The moves he’s made have only deepened his ongoing clashes with the country’s judiciary, further fueling criticisms that his government is undermining democratic institutions.
In a violation of Mexican law, the government didn’t carry out a comprehensive study to assess the potential environmental impacts before starting construction. That’s led to blindly plowing into caverns with no clue what’s being damaged, scientists and independent lawyers say.
“Our president has little respect for the law. He’s in a sort of tug of war for power and he does what he wants,” said Claudia Aguilar, a lawyer at Mexico’s Free School of Law.
When a judge ordered construction of the line be suspended until an adequate report of how the train would affect the caves was carried out, López Obrador ignored the ruling, and the work continued.
At the same time, much of the project has been cloaked in secrecy as López Obrador has charged Mexico’s military with construction and blocked the release of information in the name of “national security.”
While Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional, López Obrador disregarded that ruling, too, saying it was to protect his project from “corrupt” critics.
When the AP requested an interview with leadership of the Maya Train project, spokesperson Mariana Galicia said they were “ordered that we cannot give interviews” but could respond to questions sent over email to “better control” the information shared. They did not respond to questions sent by email.
‘Swimming in poop’
Meanwhile, thousands of passengers are already riding sections of the train that have been built. The atmosphere above is far-removed from the conflicts playing out around the caverns.
Hotels and clubs host raves and even music festivals in some of the cenotes, with one club boasting it “takes the relaxation and wellness experience to another level. Let yourself be enveloped by this sacred, timeless place.”
Luxurious beach hotels and booming clubs packed with drunk, khaki-clad tourists dominate the coastal tourist city of Playa del Carmen. Once a Mayan settlement, the city is among many in the Yucatan Peninsula that in recent decades have been converted into a party hub for vacationing foreigners.
In the caves below, biologist Roberto Rojo paddles through a sea of trash.
Under the arching cavern roof, Rojo and a group of volunteers push a green kayak through a cenote, filling bulking bags of glass beer bottles, plastic tubes, metal grating, plastic Coca-Cola bottles, rotten wooden planks and even a printer.
“You don’t even want to know what many of those things are,” Rojo said.
It’s a fate Rojo and many others worry may await hundreds of cenotes, caves and underground lakes and rivers along the new Maya Train line.
“It’s not just the train, but everything the train brings with it – urban developments, hotel developments,” said water expert D’Christy. “Rather than solving a problem, they’re coming in and making a big problem worse.”
Millions of tourists a year flock to the region, affecting the entire underground as the industry guzzles water and sewage seeps through the earth and into the caves, killing fish and other wildlife. In 2022, authorities found that the water of more than a dozen of the caverns near the tourist city of Tulum was tainted with E. Coli bacteria.
Last year, the environmental organization Va Por La Tierra estimated that approximately 95% of the cenotes in Yucatan state — where the Maya Train cuts through — were already contaminated due to the lack of a sufficient sewage system. Scuba diving master Bernardette Carrión even told the AP that tourists admiring the splendor of the caves “are swimming in poop.”
The underground system is connected to the sea, so waste trickles out to the ocean, where scientists say it feeds seaweed-like algae piling up on Caribbean coastlines, spurring on a slate of other environmental and health hazards.
Rojo and other volunteers created the organization known as “Urban Cenotes” in Playa del Carmen to clean the water system, cave by cave.
“We’re trying to return the dignity that these spaces have had for thousands of years, that are now being turned into landfills, sewers and drains,” Rojo said.
But it’s an uphill battle for the hundreds of volunteers, and something they worry will become impossible as pollution expands into rural areas with the Maya Train, deepening ongoing pollution caused by pig farms and massive soy plantations.
Looking forward, they’re uncertain about what will come as June elections ended Sunday night, with López Obrador leaving office in the coming months. The leader will likely be replaced by either race front-runner and ally Claudia Sheinbaum or rival ex-Senator Xóchitl Gálvez.
Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist who leads the race by a comfortable margin, has portrayed herself as a champion for the environment, but has supported López Obrador’s fossil-fuel agenda and made few remarks about the environmental damage the train has wrought.
Little more than a week before Sunday’s presidential election, Sheinbaum said she was meeting with leaders of neighboring Guatemala and Belize in talks to extend the Maya Train to Central America.
Gálvez, a López Obrador opponent, has taken advantage of the controversy to tear into her adversaries, calling the train’s damage “irreversible” and a “consequence of the negligence of the government because they didn’t do any environmental impact studies.” Months earlier, though, she said she would also continue with plans to extend the train.
Meanwhile, groups like Rojo’s do everything they can to salvage an ecosystem that took millennia to form. They worry they might not have all that much time left.
“I’m not going to sit quietly and wait for the government to solve things,” Rojo said. “The people who live in the Yucatan peninsula are on the verge of a water crisis.”
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Extreme heat: Climate change’s silent killer
Geneva — Nearly 62,000 people died from heat-related stress in the summer of 2022 in Europe alone, and, according to a new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, “With further global warming, we can expect an increase in the intensity, frequency, and duration of heatwaves.”
The report launched ahead of Heat Action Day on Sunday, June 2, looks at the role climate change is playing in increasing the number of extreme heat days around the world over the last 12 months.
“What we are now going through is a very silent but increasingly common killer — heat, that was particularly disastrous last year,” said climatologist Friederike Otto, co-lead of World Weather Attribution at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the report.
Speaking from London last Tuesday, she told journalists in Geneva that this May was hotter than any May ever experienced before, as were all months for the past 12 months.
“Every heat wave that is happening today is hotter and lasts longer than it would have without human-induced climate change. That is without the burning of coal, oil and gas and we also see many more heat waves than we have otherwise,” she said noting that temperatures right now were around 50° C (122° F) in India and Pakistan.
The World Meteorological Organization confirms that 2023 was the hottest year on record, reaching 1.45° C (2.6° F) above the pre-industrial average, almost reaching the Paris Climate Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5° C.
According to the report, the average inhabitant of the planet has experienced 26 more extremely hot days, “which probably would not have occurred without climate change.” Or put another way, 6.8 billion people —78 percent of world’s population — have experienced at least 31 days of extreme heat.
“But, of course, we are not average people. We live in a specific place, in a specific country,” said Otto. “So, for example if you lived in Ecuador, it was not 26 more days, but it was 170 more days. In other words, in the last 12 months, the people in Ecuador experienced 180 days of extreme heat. Without climate change, it would have been just 10. So, it is six months of extreme heat, instead of 10 days.”
She noted that extreme heat was dangerous and responsible for thousands of deaths every year. She said, “Heat harmed especially vulnerable people: the elderly, the very young, those with pre-existing health conditions” as well as healthy people exposed to extreme temperatures, “like outdoor workers in construction or agriculture and people living in refugee camps.”
The World Health Organization, previewing a new collection of papers to be published this week in the Journal of Global Health, says the studies show “climate-related health risks have been crucially underestimated” for younger and older people and during pregnancy, “with serious, often life-threatening implications.”
Taking extreme heat for example, WHO says the authors note that preterm births — the leading cause of childhood deaths, “spike during heatwaves, while older people are more likely to suffer heart attacks or respiratory distress.”
Heat Action Day, which is organized by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, aims to draw attention to the threat of extreme heat and to what can be done to mitigate it.
In a statement to mark Heat Action Day, Jagan Chapagain, secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, “Flooding and hurricanes may capture the headlines, but the impacts of extreme heat are equally deadly.
“That is why Heat Action Day matters so much,” he said. “We need to focus attention on climate change’s silent killer. The IFRC is making heat and urban action to reduce its impacts a priority.”
Climatologist Otto said the burning of fossil fuels must stop to prevent the situation from becoming worse.
“Heat kills. But it does not have to kill. There are many solutions, some of which are low or no cost, ranging from individual action to population-scale interventions that reduce the urban heat island effect.
“At an individual level, people can cool their bodies by self-dousing with water, using cooling devices or modifying their built environment to increase shade” around their homes.
But she observed that individual action alone is not enough. She said action had to be taken at the community, city, regional and country levels as well.
“Cities can develop and implement heat action plans that outline how they will prepare for the heat season, respond to imminent heat waves, and plan for the future.
“And on a large scale, policies can be introduced to incorporate cooling needs into social protection programs, supplement energy costs for the most vulnerable and building codes can be updated to encourage better housing,” she said.
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