The weather was bound to be bad in 2024, the hottest year on Earth out of the last 125,000 of them.

In Saudi Arabia, temperatures climbed above 125°F during the hajj in June, killing 1,300 people on their annual pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. Across the Arabian Sea, a prolonged heat wave led to hundreds more deaths in southern Pakistan. Hurricane Helene brought 30 inches of rain to an already-waterlogged western North Carolina in September, filling mountain valleys with mudslides and floods that surged through homes in one of the most destructive hurricanes in recent memory. Then, in November, a year’s worth of rain fell on Valencia and across eastern Spain in just eight hours. The floodwaters swept through towns, and flash flood alerts came too late for people already on the road or trapped in garages underground.

As climate change intensifies extreme weather in multiple ways, the kind of push alerts that popped up on phones around Valencia are arriving more and more often. But overwhelm people with too many warnings about heat or flooding or bad air quality and they might start tuning them out, a phenomenon called alert fatigue that’s been troubling emergency managers. “It may be one of the biggest problems facing their field as climate disasters mount,” journalist Zoë Schlanger wrote in The Atlantic this summer.

The phrase comes from medicine, where overworked doctors blasted with hundreds of medical alerts every day got so many false alarms they learned to ignore them. Alert fatigue could also describe the dynamic of becoming numb to warnings about climate change more broadly. Since the late 1980s, scientists have been raising the alarm about the devastation that global warming would bring. Nearly two-thirds of Americans now understand that climate change is affecting their local communities, and yet they reelected Donald Trump, who has promised to boost fossil fuel production and undo much of President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.

It’s a paradox emblematic of an especially turbulent, anxiety-filled time. As 2024 draws to a close, dictionary editors have been sifting through the lexicon to choose a term that encapsulates the spirit of the previous months, with this year’s selections including “brat” and “brain rot.” For us, alert fatigue stood out as the winner in a year in which severe weather – and the accompanying push alerts – added to the chaos. The runners-up, from “climate homicide” to “underconsumption core,” captured other aspects of what it was like to live on our overheating planet in 2024.

Anti-tourism

The opposition to masses of vacationers taking over your town.

Thousands of locals took to the streets across southern Europe this year, calling for tourists to go home. These anti-tourism protests started in Spain’s Canary Islands this spring and from there spread to Barcelona, Majorca and Málaga, then to Venice, Italy and Lisbon. Residents argued that their governments, during a post-COVID travel boom, had started catering to visitors rather than to locals, turning their towns into theme parks and straining natural resources. Environmental groups like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund supported them. Tourism is responsible for about 8% of global carbon emissions, thanks in large part to the emissions involved with flying. Protesters aren’t calling for an end to all tourism (which plays an important role in their local economies), but for a more sustainable, limited version that allows them to reclaim the souls of their cities.

Carbon cowboys

Those seeking to profit off the carbon-storing potential of other people’s lands.

Companies have been buying carbon offsets for years, paying to protect, say, a forest to claim they’ve cancelled out the greenhouse gases they emit. Yet carbon-offset markets have been riddled with false promises and a lack of oversight, earning comparisons to the Wild West. The metaphor has extended to calling the companies involved in these schemes carbon cowboys. This year, investigations of lucrative conservation projects in Zimbabwe and the Amazon found that companies were failing to distribute money to the locals who were supposed to be rewarded, profiting off lands they often had no right to. “The system is very gameable,” Joseph Romm, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post. “And the victim is the planet, and all of humanity who suffers because we’re not reducing emissions, but get to pretend we are.”

Category 6

A not-yet-official classification for ultra-powerful hurricanes.

Category 5 has been synonymous with the scariest storms for decades. But as hurricanes have started to intensify more rapidly, some scientists have been making the case for expanding the Saffir-Simpson scale to include even scarier ones, creating a new category for storms with winds that top 192 miles per hour. A paper published earlier this year found that at least five storms had already passed the test for the Category 6 label, the strongest of which was Hurricane Patricia, which slammed into Mexico’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds peaking at 215 miles per hour. Tropical storms are fuelled by warm waters, meaning that as climate change warms the atmosphere and oceans, more and more powerful storms could be headed our way. One objection some experts have with creating a Category 6 is that it might double down on what’s already the biggest communication problem with hurricanes: flooding, not wind speed, is the deadliest risk of these storms.

Climate homicide

A new legal theory proposing that oil companies could be guilty of actual murder.

Climate change has killed roughly four million people since the year 2000, by one estimate. Some legal scholars are now making the case that oil companies like ExxonMobil, which have long understood that burning fossil fuels could have lethal consequences, could be charged with every type of homicide in the United States, except for first-degree murder. In a paper in Harvard Environmental Law Review this spring, David Arkush, the director of the climate program for the advocacy group Public Citizen, and Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington University, wrote that fossil fuel companies have been “killing members of the public at an accelerating rate.” While it’s unusual for criminal law cases to be brought against corporations instead of individuals, climate homicide could open up a new flank for fighting climate change in court. It has already gotten attention from law schools at Yale, New York University and Vermont Law School, along with district attorneys’ offices around the country.

Hot droughts

When extreme heat and drought happen at the same time

Combine a stretch of scarce rainfall with rising temperatures and you get what’s known as a hot drought – a double whammy of dry conditions, because heat enhances evaporation. According to a study published in the journal Science Advances in January, hot droughts have become more frequent and severe across the western United States, which is enduring its driest period since the 1500s. The Great Plains and parts of the Colorado River Basin are the most affected, the study found, with consequences for ecosystems, farming and city planning. “It is clear that anthropogenic drying has only just begun,” the study’s authors wrote.

Semi-dystopian

A term to describe a future that’s nearly as bad as some authors have imagined.

In May, The Guardian released the results of a survey that hundreds of climate scientists had participated in, showing that almost half of them thought greenhouse gas emissions would push the world at least 3°C (5.4°F) hotter than the preindustrial era by the end of this century. “I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one South African scientist, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Guardian. Ecological catastrophe has long been in the backdrop of dystopian fiction, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a 1993 novel set in a future California replete with raging infernos, scarce water and mass migration to more fertile lands. These days, what once sounded outlandish is looking more and more like reality – as climate fiction authors themselves are beginning to admit.

Snow-loss cliff

The point at which snowpack begins to disappear at an accelerating pace.

About two billion people in the Northern Hemisphere rely on snowmelt as a source of water. As winters warm, however, parts of the United States and Europe are close to a tipping point that could lead to a disastrous loss of snow, according to a study published in Nature in January. This snow-loss cliff sits at the point where the average winter temperature hovers around 17°F. Any warmer than that and snowpack loss begins accelerating irreversibly. While most of the Northern Hemisphere’s snow is in the far north and safe for now, millions of people live in places that have already crossed the temperature cliff. Regions like the western United States are on track to see a sharp decline in snowpack – further straining a region already struggling with drought.

Supercommuter

Someone who travels a very, very long distance to get to work.

The news site Fast Company did some back-of-the-napkin math and calculated that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s supercommute would emit 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to the annual energy use of 118 homes. He’s not the only supercommuter out there, with some people flying to high-paying jobs in New York City from places with lower housing costs, like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio. Long driving commutes also have a significant climate cost, with so-called gasoline superusers, the 10% of drivers who use the most fuel, guzzling more than a third of the country’s gas. Even though data suggest that working remotely instead of in an office can halve a person’s carbon footprint, businesses have been going in the opposite direction, forcing employees back to the office.

Underconsumption core

A social media trend with a new take on minimalism.

Behind the funny cat videos and chaotic cooking fails on TikTok, there’s a whole ecosystem of ads designed to make you spend money. In 2023, the push against out-of-control consumerism brought “deinfluencing.” In 2024, it morphed into even more of a mouthful: underconsumption core. The budget-friendly trend emphasizes buying only what you need and celebrating the old tank top or water bottle you’ve treasured since skinny jeans were the thing. (“Yes, being normal is now trending,” The New York Times quipped.) It’s a rejection of fast fashion, which has turned into a mounting climate and pollution problem. Well over half of Gen Z and millennial adults surveyed by Deloitte this year reported either avoiding fast fashion or wanting to do so in the future. Underconsumption core, TikToker Jade Taylor told Grist last month, is “a response to the type of normalized overconsumption that influencers have pushed with their marketing, but also due to climate anxiety and economic instability.”

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The voluntary market for carbon credits – separate from cap-and-trade markets regulated by governments – has grown slowly over the last few years, hobbled by loose definitions and lax credit verification. A recent peer-reviewed study of more than 2,000 carbon-credit projects found that only 16% of the projects achieved the carbon savings claimed.

Growth in this market could ramp up significantly, however, after the Conference of Parties (COP29) meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, approved a framework for recognizing carbon credits in the global accounting of carbon emissions. For the first time, carbon credits will be recognized under the Paris Agreement, enabling countries and companies to use offsets to meet their carbon-reduction targets, potentially giving a huge boost to carbon-credit trading.

The International Emissions Trading Association estimates a carbon market under Paris Agreement rules could save as much as US$250 billion per year by 2030 in mitigation costs, far larger than the savings under the current market.

“We have ended a decade-long wait and unlocked a critical tool for keeping 1.5 degrees in reach,” said COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev.

Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S. group advocating market-based solutions to climate change, cautiously praised the deal. “While its true impact will hinge on strong implementation that delivers measurable benefits for people and nature, this agreement represents a historic opportunity to elevate carbon markets as a tool for meaningful climate action.”

But some critics said that nothing of substance was achieved in Azerbaijan since the existing carbon market system remains. They fear the market will grow quickly, providing an inexpensive and easy way for emitters to meet their climate pledges without doing the hard and expensive work of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 guidelines will create “cowboy carbon markets at a time when the world needs a sheriff,” said Carbon Market Watch, an international advocacy group.

Persistent skepticism for carbon credits

Carbon credits are certificates issued by projects like reforestation or renewable-energy ventures for emissions avoided, reduced or removed. The certificates are purchased by large or hard-to-abate emitters like oil companies or airlines in order to offset their own emissions.

One of the big problems with the COP29 agreement is that there are no standards for what constitutes a quality carbon credit. Renewable-energy projects, for example, have sometimes been credited with generating “avoided emissions” even though the projects have resulted in no measurable emission reductions because the projects would have been built regardless of the credit. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market – a private organization – recently rejected renewables for its carbon-credit standard.

The fact that nations can set their own standards in country-to-country deals is a large loophole in the COP29 pact, making it “the biggest threat to the Paris Agreement,” Oxford University researcher Injy Johnstone told AFP (Agence France-Presse).

At least one major international bank, HSBC, is voting with its feet. Only days before COP29 approved the carbon agreement, the bank shut down plans to launch a major carbon trading desk, according to Bloomberg. The shutdown is a sign that buyers and traders have cooled on carbon offsets. Delta Airlines, Google and EasyJet are among a growing list of companies that have abandoned carbon-offset purchases, focusing instead on work to reduce their own emissions.

Do offsets still have a role in reducing emissions?

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), widely viewed as the gold standard for corporate carbon-reduction plans, recently expressed skepticism that carbon credits should be used by companies to offset their emissions.

SBTi has announced it will hold a consultation in 2025 on a new Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which is expected to include guidelines on how corporations can use carbon offsets to support their net-zero targets. SBTi’s final standard is expected to play a large role in establishing international guidelines for carbon-offset buyers.

While COP29 rushed through its carbon market framework, a related COP conference on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia, took a go-slow approach to the development of a similar market in nature-protection credits. A proposed framework presented at the conference would exclude trading of so-called biodiversity credits on secondary markets. If implemented, this exclusion would limit global trading in biodiversity credits.

“Global offsetting in biodiversity doesn’t work and we don’t support it,” said Amelia Fawcett, co-chair of the U.K./France-led International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits, which unveiled the proposed framework. She told the conference that nature credits should be used only in a very limited way, in local situations to offset harm in the same ecological ecosystem where the credit is traded.

An Lambrechts, a biodiversity expert at Greenpeace, said that development of carbon and biodiversity credits should be linked at next year’s COP climate meeting in Brazil. “At COP30 in Belém, in the Amazon, it’s time to connect the climate and biodiversity fights together.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the IETA’s estimate of mitigation cost savings. 

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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In a curiously organic way, a COP (Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) also works like this, as a chaotic yet seamless gathering of voices, interests and perspectives.

The endless summit corridors are packed with almost 60,000 participants, each navigating their way to uncertain outcomes at predetermined destinations: a negotiating table, a roundtable discussion or a profound conversation on the future of the climate. In this global microcosm, where governments, businesses, non-governmental organizations and academics converge, the interplay of interests is never stable, yet the wheels of the system remain constantly in motion.

My watch (and feet) can attest to the sheer scale of this gathering. During my time here I have been clocking more than 25,000 steps per day, roughly half a marathon, in my efforts to keep up with the rushing, incessantly conversing human tides.

Renewable price competitiveness isn’t enough

It is easy to point fingers at the more than 1,700 representatives from the oil and gas sectors attending COP29, yet their role in the energy transition is absolutely crucial. After COP28, even giants like ExxonMobil and Shell acknowledged that their future depends on diversifying their portfolios and transitioning to more sustainable business models. The current market is not, however, designed to make clean energy as profitable as oil and gas – complex systemic issues present roadblocks to a competitive transition.

The cost of solar energy has plummeted by 88% since 2010, and onshore wind by 68%. While this has helped to foster key industries such as electric vehicles and solar panels, clean energy is still far from being self-sufficient. Its success depends on a much more complex interplay between industry, governments and infrastructure.

In Spain, for instance, renewables account for 61.5% of installed capacity, with 78,968 megawatts (MW) of production, yet the stark reality is that there are 130 GW of renewable projects waiting to be connected to an electricity grid that is not ready to handle them.

Outdated infrastructure and slow bureaucratic processes are creating a bottleneck that prevents clean energy from being monetized, undermining its profitability and slowing its uptake. The complexities don’t stop there: further progress is also sorely needed in energy storage and data management, as well as in building optimized distribution networks.

The strategic necessity of climate negotiations

There is a paradoxical element to the climate struggle. As we move toward decarbonization, some renewable projects are having a highly detrimental impact on the environment, affecting precisely one of the other major global challenges: the recovery of biodiversity.

The Maestrazgo Cluster in Castellón, Spain, which envisages the installation of more than 125 wind turbines in Natura 2000 protected areas, is a clear example of this conflict. Local resistance, often framed as a NIMBY (not in my backyard) cause, is not only an aesthetic or territorial issue; it also houses deeper concerns about the preservation of unique ecosystems that could be lost forever.

As industries grapple with being competitive, the stakes are even higher for countries themselves. China and India are heading the technological race, so falling behind could lead to economic disaster. This is the main reason why figures like ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods are encouraging Donald Trump to join the climate negotiations – not out of altruism, but as a strategic necessity.

The energy transition requires more than just investment in renewables; it also means designing a system that can combine efficient grids, streamlined processes, stable public policies, conservation efforts and the needs of local communities. Ignoring any of these elements will not only further delay the transition; it will also expose us to fresh environmental and social crises. There are no easy solutions to these complex problems.

The role of carbon-credit trading

We are still waiting for the magic “commitment number” – the figure that developed countries decide to allocate to developing nations to fund their climate transition.

Why is this so important? Because many of these countries lack the resources to implement renewable-energy projects and adapt their infrastructures to reduce climate change. However, this funding is not just a matter of charity. It is also a way to ensure that all countries, regardless of their resources, can contribute to the fight against climate change.

In this sense, Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement represents a step toward a more orderly system by setting out a global framework for carbon-credit trading, under UN oversight. It aims to prevent double counting and fraud, as well as to restore confidence in a market that fell to $723 million in 2023 after multiple scandals.

Under this system, countries will be able to trade carbon credits produced by projects anywhere in the world, generating revenue to fund their own transitions. It replaces the former Clean Development Mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol and seeks to establish clear rules to deter fraud and double emission counting.

Channelling the chaos of COP29

COP29 offers a clear lesson: tension and complexity are inherent to the climate challenge. Much like entropy itself, the energy transition is a constantly shifting system with opposing forces that need to be balanced.

Solving this puzzle demands more than just funds and technological breakthroughs. It requires bold leadership, international cooperation and the ability to navigate a system where tensions – decarbonization versus conservation, efficiency versus climate justice – have to be carefully managed and balanced.

Energy is the driving force behind this process, not only in the physical sense, but also in the political and social realms. The question is whether we can channel COP29’s chaos into a more sustainable and orderly future. Entropy may be a challenge, but it is also an opportunity, a reminder that there is room to build something extraordinary, even within disorder.

Isabela del Alcázar is the chief purpose and sustainability officer at IE University.

This story first appeared in The Conversation; it has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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Several other companies around the world are also offering to arrange for collecting plastic from where it winds up and doesn’t belong (landfills, waterways, roadsides), and then verify credits, including Plastic Bank and Plastic Credit Exchange. “As the plastic credit market is still emerging, at this stage each issuing organization largely follows its own protocols that govern the process of creating credits,” says rePurpose Global, another crediting platform that “empowers business to act on plastic pollution.”

Who’s eligible to buy plastic credits? It currently depends on the verification organization. Verra, for example, allows anyone along the plastics pipeline to participate: plastic makers, companies that use plastic packaging, wholesalers, or even retailers. Peter Wang Hjemdahl, the co-founder of rePurpose, tells Mongabay that “Governments, philanthropies, individuals, and companies can all support verified plastic recovery because we need all hands on deck to tackle the plastic pollution crisis.”

Forbes reports that rePurpose already funds plastic recovery projects in six nations and is working with companies and organizations like Nestlé, WWF and the World Bank to create an international plastic offset standard.

A wary response

Critics say there’s good reason to be skeptical of organizations offering plastic credit verification. They point to Verra’s carbon credit program which came under scrutiny this year for lack of verifiability and for serving as an excuse for companies not to reduce their carbon footprint. A recent investigation found that 90% of Verra’s verified rainforest carbon offsets were worthless “phantom credits” that failed to represent genuine carbon reductions.

Verra counters that plastic credits will be easier to verify than atmospheric emissions because auditors can see the physical material flow, from collection to reuse, and don’t have to speculate or calculate as with invisible gases. Verra may also have learned from its carbon credits experience, and is on the spot to perform this time, suggests Bjørnufl Østvik, CEO of Ecogensus, a New York City-based company focused on global recycling and sustainable waste management. “I don’t think there’s going to be patience with another credit system” that goes wrong, he says.

Østvik estimates it could take at least a decade under the best possible scenario just to clean up existing plastic pollution, with verification programs being potentially helpful in that cleanup. “When you look beyond the 10-20-year time frame, or 10-30-year time frame … science will get to a point where waste [management] and recycling can evolve to where these types of programs [will then] start to become not needed.”

However, scientists emphasize that plastic cleanups and recycling can only deal with larger plastic waste. There is currently no technologically effective means for removing the microplastics that now pollute the environment — where these invisible particles pose risks to wildlife and even the climate.

A work in progress

Verra currently accredits four plastic credit projects, most recently opening one in Senegal, its first in Africa. There, it works with a local sustainability outfit called Africa Carbon & Commodities (ACC). It took a year and a half of setup and audit before Verra approved the Senegal program. It says 30 other accreditation projects are in the pipeline, while ACC plans to expand its operations into Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, and the Gambia.

ACC’s Deekali Plastic Project in Senegal provides paying jobs for landfill waste pickers, says managing director Nicole Dewing. They are trained as to what types of plastic can earn credits, since many types are not reusable. “They are not going to get paid if they bring the wrong kind of plastic,” she says.

Because of the lack of government-sponsored waste management programs in Senegal (population 17.9 million), analysts predict the small country will be deluged with more “unmanaged” plastic waste than the U.S. by 2025, Dewing says, especially along its Atlantic coast. ACC’s project turns some collected waste into plastic lumber, which is then crafted into tables, desks and chairs for schools. But ACC says it currently lacks the machinery to recycle and reuse plastic bottles.

Verra’s certification process allows plastic to be incinerated or turned into energy to replace fossil fuel, but rePurpose doesn’t credit incinerated plastic. Incineration, also called pyrolysis, and dubbed “chemical recycling” or “advanced recycling” by the plastics industry, is controversial for the pollution it causes.

Accuracy assurances

Plastic credit providers say they use all sorts of methods to confirm accuracy. rePurpose says it “collects chain-of-custody documentation from all stakeholders involved in the supply chain. The protocol ensures timely audits, spot checks, unannounced site visits, and impact verification from third-party auditors on an ongoing basis.”

rePurpose also says that “certifications are not a license to continue using plastic and keep contributing to the plastic waste problem.” Company co-founder Hjemdahl says that “we have long-term engagements with over 300 brands and organizations globally to help them pursue a comprehensive plastic action strategy,” of which credits are only a part.

In the meantime, he says, “we’ve [validated collection of] 38 million pounds [17,200 metric tons] of plastic [and more that hasn’t been validated] that would be in the environment today if we hadn’t existed.” The Southern Hemisphere countries rePurpose works in lack strategies to clean up plastic waste, so presumably anything collected is a plus, he adds.

As with other certifying organizations, rePurpose stresses its focus on accuracy, employing everything from visual inspections to outside auditors, Hjemdahl notes. “If there’s a discrepancy, we fix it,” using the most conservative figures.

He acknowledges that his company must take into consideration that those at various points along the recovery supply chain have incentives for providing different counts: Those selling the plastic want a higher count, whereas those buying (the plastic, not the credit) prefer to give a lower number. So certification inspectors need to check carefully at every step of the process.

Chris DeArmitt runs Phantom Plastics from Cincinnati, Ohio, which consults with business on plastics problems. He says credits can work because people won’t discard something if they find value in it. While people may throw away single-use bottles, he notes, “people don’t drop their credit cards.” He adds that “the credits thing is just a lot of people trying to enrich themselves,” but the system works because of financial incentives.

Greenwashing risk

Critics see plastic credit systems as little more than window dressing, giving firms an excuse to continue making and using plastic rather than finding alternatives. The NGO #BreakFreeFromPlastic, which calls itself “the global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution,” documented that a Verra-certified incinerator in Bali, Indonesia, was fouling the air. And in Brazil, where Nestlé was earning credits, the “certificates do not guarantee that the companies’ products are effectively recycled,” says the NGO, adding that Nestlé hasn’t proved its activity is helping, rather than harming, the environment.

“It’s a downstream approach dealing only with plastic waste, and while that may address legacy plastics, it completely disregards the impacts of plastic in the earlier stages of [the] life cycle (extraction, production, consumer use). Also, cleanups are not necessarily in areas where the pollution of production or transportation occurs,” says Marian Ledesma, zero waste campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia.

Credits give companies a pretext to keep making disposable plastics products, she adds. “Unfortunately, there has not been as much effort to look at plastic reduction,” or at using “different types of plastic” or substitute materials. Nothing in the certification system calls on manufacturers to make or use recyclable or biodegradable plastics or improve production, Ledesma says. Credits “give all the plastic makers an excuse to continue their plastic production.”

ACC’s Dewing counters that “people say this is greenwashing. [But] this is not greenwashing at all. It is getting the plastic out of the environment and getting it to have value.” Plastic was littered all over the road before the ACC initiative became active, Dewing said. Now she sees less of it.

A working paper issued last year by the International Solid Waste Association for the U.N. Environment Programme summed up the debate. It concluded that “plastic credit mechanisms can play a significant role within sustainable waste management systems, along with local and national policies such as producer responsibility schemes and waste prevention and reduction laws, but can also be a potential tool for greenwashing if not implemented properly. Plastic credits are not a long-term solution but rather a short-term remedy while we move to better waste and resource management systems.”

How representatives from the world’s nations will deal with plastic credits in the evolving U.N. plastics treaty negotiations is anyone’s guess.

Corrections: This article was updated on 10/23/23 to include minor corrections and clarifications made by Verra, rePurpose and ACC.

This article was first published by Mongabay.

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