But climate change has turned this transient phenomenon into a moving target. Tokyo’s sakura peak this year was around March 19, which is up to a week earlier than usual. Early arrivals between 2021 and 2023 in Kyoto smashed 1,200-year-old records. The main culprit is rising temperatures, but erratic winters may also threaten a tree’s ability to bloom at all. Research suggests that under a medium emissions scenario, peak bloom may move up another week by 2100.

“To me, the cherry blossom record really captures how extreme these changes are,” Elizabeth Wolkovich, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who studies plant communities and climate change, told National Geographic.

The study of recurring biological events such as flowering and leaf emergence, known as phenology, has arguably become one of the most powerful tools for understanding climate change. Studies by Wolkovich show that rising temperatures are advancing spring biological events across the globe, with plant phenology shifting by roughly four to six days for every degree Celsius of warming. Her research has also found that experimental studies often underestimate how rapidly plants respond to warming compared with long-term observational records.

For more than 1,200 years, Kyoto’s cherry blossoms have been documented in imperial court diaries, temple records, aristocratic journals and historical chronicles, creating one of the world’s longest continuous phenological datasets. Yasuyuki Aono and Shizuka Saito, two researchers affiliated with Osaka Metropolitan University and Fujicco Co. Ltd., have reconstructed temperatures of medieval Kyoto by “gap-filling” cherry blossom records beginning in 812 CE. Their research suggests that peak bloom dates remained relatively stable around mid-April throughout the medieval period, making the recent string of record-breaking early blooms especially striking against a millennium of historical precedent.

This shift is changing how people experience one of Japan’s most important seasonal traditions. Hanami, the centuries-old practice of gathering under blooming cherry trees, is traditionally timed around the short window of peak cherry blossom, often coordinated through workplace outings, school calendars and travel itineraries. As flowering now arrives earlier and with greater variability, these social rhythms are increasingly strained. Visitors and locals alike rely on increasingly precise forecasts, yet even small temperature fluctuations can shift peak bloom by days, compressing or displacing long-planned gatherings. What emerges is a subtle reordering of seasonal life: a cultural calendar once anchored in predictable natural cycles is now being recalibrated in real time to a climate that is less stable, making hanami not only a ritual of appreciation, but also one of adaptation.

If current warming trends continue, the timing of cherry blossoms may keep shifting beyond familiar seasonal boundaries, leaving a tradition once anchored in predictability to unfold within an increasingly uncertain climate future.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. Alexandre Paquet is a Toronto-based researcher writing about video games and culture industries.

The post With climate change, an ancient cherry blossom tradition in Japan shifts appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Before the Biden administration could finalize the rule, Donald Trump was re-elected president, ushering in another era of deregulation. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to revise or repeal 63 workplace regulations that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said “stifle growth and limit opportunity.”

OSHA’s heat-stress rule wasn’t among them. And though the new administration has the power to withdraw the draft regulation, it hasn’t. Instead, OSHA has continued to move it forward: the agency is currently in the middle of soliciting input from the general public about the proposed policy. Some labour experts say that this process, typically bureaucratic and onerous even in the absence of political interference, is moving along faster than expected – perhaps a sign that civil servants at OSHA feel a true sense of urgency to protect vulnerable workers from heat stress as yearly temperatures set record after record.

But labour advocacy groups focused on workers along the food supply chain – many of whom work outside, like farmworkers, or in poorly ventilated spaces, like warehouse and meat-processing facilities – say workers have waited too long for basic life-saving protections. Earlier this month, Senator Alex Padilla and Congresswoman Judy Chu, both from California, reintroduced a bill to Congress that, if passed, would direct OSHA to enact a federal heat standard for workers swiftly.

It’s a largely symbolic move, as the rulemaking process is already underway, and the legislation is unlikely to advance in a Republican-controlled Congress. But the bill signals that Democratic lawmakers are watching closely and urgently expect a final rule four years after OSHA first began drafting its proposed rule. The message is clear: however fast OSHA is moving, it hasn’t been enough to protect workers from the worst impacts of climate change. “Since OSHA started its heat-stress rulemaking in 2021, over 144 lives have been lost to heat-related hazards,” Padilla said in a statement emailed to Grist. “We know how to prevent heat-related illnesses to ensure that these family members are able to come home at the end of their shift.”

The lawmaker added that the issue is “a matter of life or death.”

Heat is the deadliest form of extreme weather, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 986 workers died from heat exposure on the job from 1992 to 2022, or about 34 per year.

This is very likely an undercount. Prolonged heat exposure can exacerbate underlying health problems like cardiovascular issues, making it difficult for medical professionals to discern when illness and death is attributable to extreme heat. As heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions continue to push global temperatures higher, experts expect heat-related illnesses and deaths to follow.

The life-threatening impacts of exposure to extreme heat in the workplace have been on the federal government’s radar for more than 50 years. Labour unions and farmworkers have long pushed for federal and local heat standards. In 2006, California became the first state to enact its own heat protections for outdoor workers, after an investigation by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health found 46 cases of heat-related illnesses the year prior. Legislative efforts to protect workers or nudge OSHA along often follow or name farmworkers who died from heat stress. Padilla and Chu’s bill from this year is named after Asunción Valdivia, a 53-year-old who died in California in 2004 after picking grapes for 10 hours straight in 105°F heat.

OSHA’s proposed heat standard would require employers to establish plans to avoid and monitor for signs of heat illness and to help new hires acclimate to working in high heat. “That should be implemented yesterday,” says Nichelle Harriott, policy director of HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Food Alliance, a national coalition of food and farmworkers. “There really is no cause for this to be taking as long as it has.”

In late June and early July, OSHA held virtual hearings in which it heard testimony from people both for and against a federal heat standard. According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst from the National Employment Law Project who attended the hearings, employees from the agency seemed engaged and asked substantive questions. “It was very informative,” she says. OSHA didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

As written, OSHA’s proposed heat rule would apply to about 36 million workers in the United States. Christman notes that sedentary workers – those who sit for most of the work day – are currently excluded from the federal standard. Ironically, at one point during the agency’s hearings, participants had to take an unscheduled break after the air conditioning stopped working in the Department of Labor building where OSHA staff were sitting. “They had to be evacuated because it was too hot to sit there and be on a Zoom call,” Christman says. She estimates that if sedentary workers were non-exempt, the number of U.S. workers covered by the rule would nearly double to 66 million.

From her point of view, OSHA is moving “very fast on this – for OSHA.” But Christman acknowledges that, even in a best-case scenario, regulations would not be on the books for another 12 to 14 months. At that point, OSHA would publish guidance for employers on how to comply with the regulation, as well as respond to any legal challenges to the final rule. That process, “in an optimistic world,” she says, could take between two and four years.

The life-threatening impacts of exposure to extreme heat in the workplace have been on the federal government’s radar for more than 50 years.

For many farmworkers, as well as other workers along the food supply chain, that’s too long to wait. “For decades, millions of workers have been waiting for federal heat standards that never came,” says Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount, a member-led immigrant rights organization based in South Florida.

The group has spearheaded multiple campaigns to draw public attention to how sweltering temperatures affect outdoor workers in the region, including plant nursery workers. Londoño says that some agricultural workers have told WeCount it already feels like the hottest summer of their lifetime.

In response to the news of Padilla and Chu’s bill, Londoño says, “We appreciate any step by a lawmaker trying to protect workers, especially as we’re seeing, once again, a record-breaking summer.” But he cast doubt on OSHA’s ability to enforce regulations around heat stress, particularly in the agricultural sector. “We know that there are employers across the country who are routinely violating the laws that already exist,” he says. “And so adding on new laws and regulations that we do need doesn’t automatically mean that workers will be protected.”

WeCount’s organizing is hampered by Florida’s Republican governor and state legislature, which passed a law last year prohibiting local governments from enacting their own heat standards. In the absence of politicians who will stand for workers, WeCount members are trying to publicize the risks that agricultural workers take on. Their latest campaign, Planting Justice, centres on local plant nursery workers, who grow indoor houseplants.

The goal is to try to educate consumers about the labour that goes into providing their monsteras, pothos, snake plants and other indoor houseplants. “If you buy indoor houseplants, it’s very possible that that plant came from workers in Florida,” Londoño says, “workers who are being denied water, shade and rest breaks by working in record-breaking heat, including 90- or 100-degree heat temperatures.”

Down the line, the nursery workers hope to solidify a set of demands and bring those concerns to companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s that sit at the top of the indoor-plant supply chain. Similar tactics have worked for agricultural workers in other sectors; the Fair Food Program, first established by tomato pickers in 2011 in Florida, has won stringent heat protections for farmworkers in part by building strong support for labourers’ demands among consumers.

“Right now we are looking at every possible solution or strategy that can help workers reach these protections,” Londoño says. “What workers actually need is a guarantee that every single day they’ll be able to go to work and return home alive.” This kind of worker-led organizing will continue, he says, whether or not OSHA delivers its own heat standard.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

The post As Trump targets labour rights, a bid to protect workers from extreme heat is advancing appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The plant – operated by CertainTeed Canada, a division of the French construction giant Saint-Gobain – will transition from the use of fossil fuels to clean power provided by Hydro-Québec and increase its use of recycled materials to cut its reliance on incoming shipments of virgin gypsum.

Such carbon-reduction initiatives are becoming increasingly common among industrial operators, data-centre developers and electrical utilities, all of which are pushing to find efficiencies to cut their emissions in response to regulatory, consumer and investor pressure. Cities, countries and corporations are looking for ways to get ahead of the climate crisis, with a range of measures driving green trends behind the scenes.

Herewith, Corporate Knights’ annual survey of important trends for 2025:

More cities will be designing for extreme heat

The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record, and there’s every reason to expect more of the same this year, with similar results. A growing number of urban regions that now endure extended periods of extreme temperatures are looking at responding more proactively to deadly heat waves. As Corporate Knights reported last year, several city regions have appointed “chief heat officers” to spearhead a range of measures, from public health initiatives to safety practices for firms with outdoor employees, and many more municipally driven extreme-heat strategies will roll out 2025.

Indeed, planners, designers, landscape architects and municipal governments are stepping up their efforts to alter or adapt the built forms in cities in 2025 to mitigate the urban heat-island effect. From the construction of shade structures in public spaces to the use of light-coloured exteriors on buildings and white paint on paved surfaces, expect to see more of them in urban centres around the world. Many cities are also adopting more aggressive approaches to tree planting on streets, along bike paths and in parks, creating more green corridors and replacing hard impervious surfaces.

More new builds will also have fewer staircases. Some North American jurisdictions (British Columbia and Washington State, among others) are easing up on fire codes to allow single-stair apartment buildings, which are commonplace in much of the world. This reform provides a range of benefits, not least of which is cross-ventilation within individual apartments, reducing the need for air conditioning.

Power-hungry data centres face a reckoning

The Canadian government’s decision, late in 2024, to incentivize major pension plans to invest up to $15 billion in “green” data centres is the latest piece of evidence about the growing recognition of artificial intelligence’s heavy carbon footprint. The program is aimed at encouraging data-centre developers and tech giants to use low-carbon electricity to power the huge amount of cooling required to allow these vast server farms to operate safely.

There have been several recent developments on this front, including Microsoft’s move, announced in September, to purchase 20 years of electricity from a refurbished reactor at Three Mile Island. “The agreement is intended to provide the company with a clean source of energy as power-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) expand,” the BBC reported.

Other developers are anticipating the arrival of small nuclear reactors as a means of providing low-carbon electricity, although these modular plants are still 10 to 15 years from coming online.

As data centres pop up in urban areas, some architects and critics have called out the monolithic and dehumanizing design of these “anti-monuments,” while data-centre developers are looking to reduce embodied carbon, using modular construction techniques and even employing green materials like cross-laminated timber.

Such changes reflect the data-centre industry’s awareness that increasingly stringent regulation is on the way. Starting in fall 2024, the European Union is targeting data centres with tougher regulations, including the disclosure of energy and water consumption. Other jurisdictions, including Australia, Singapore and a growing number of U.S. state governments, are following suit with their own regulations.

Giant ‘grid’ batteries are making renewables more viable

As wind and solar installations account for an ever-larger supply of renewable electricity, some utilities and systems operators have realized they need to figure out how to make better use of these low-cost/low-carbon sources. Systems operators for decades stored power behind hydro dams, using the renewable electricity to pump water up into reservoirs.

But in recent years, so-called long-duration energy storage (LDES) has become an increasingly viable low-carbon alternative. Citing International Energy Agency forecasts, The Economist reported in November that grid storage has become the fastest-growing energy technology, with 80 gigawatts forecast to be added in 2025, three times the level achieved in 2021. (For comparison, Canada has electricity capacity of 149 GW nationwide.)

The idea behind grid storage is to create what are effectively giant banks of batteries that can be recharged with renewable power when the wind blows and the sun shines. These batteries can then be discharged over the course of eight or 12 hours, thereby providing backup low-carbon power to the grid at scale.

China has the world’s largest supply of grid-storage capacity, but other jurisdictions will be racing to catch up over the next decade.

In the United States, California leads the pack, announcing the procurement last year of two gigawatts of 12- to 24-hour LDES, to be built out in the 2030s. Which is critical, since California requires solar and energy storage in new homes.

Elsewhere, Australian authorities are also commissioning several LDES projects, typically providing hundreds of megawatts of capacity using various technologies, including a 200-megawatt compressed air system with eight hours of capacity, developed by Toronto-based Hydrostor.

Tariffs will help fight climate change

At a period when the incoming Trump administration has threatened large-scale tariffs as a means of driving investment into the United States, the European Union’s carbon border tax, or “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM), adopted in 2023, will become a hot topic of diplomatic debate as the 27-nation bloc spends this year preparing for the launch in 2026.

An EU innovation, CBAMs are essentially carbon levies on imported goods and commodities, designed to mitigate against carbon “leakage,” or the problem of importers in high-regulation regions bringing in materials from countries with lax carbon policies. A few jurisdictions, such as Brazil and the United Kingdom, have followed suit, while the Canadian government is considering its own version, although, like so many trade-related files, this one is up in the air.

Not surprisingly, this policy approach received a good deal of pushback last year from Brazilian and Indian steelmakers. It seems likely that the chorus of objections will grow louder this year as EU member states ramp up their CBAM regulations.

Either way, CBAM will play a key role in 2025 in aligning trade policy with the broader climate targets.

Given the anticipated political headwinds facing climate policy, 2025 may be the year in which rapidly maturing climate technologies and resiliency solutions will be called upon to prove their own significance in combating extreme weather and intensified stresses on our energy systems.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist, author and editor. He writes about cities, climate and cleantech.

The post Four climate-saving trends for 2025 appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Yet, for millennia, civilizations knew how to shelter humans in hot and dry climates.

As an architectural designer and researcher studying urban resilience, I have examined many of the techniques and the lessons these ancient civilizations can offer for living in hotter and drier conditions.

With global temperatures rising, studies show that dangerously hot summers like those in 2023 and 2024 will become increasingly common, and intense storms might result in more power outages. To prepare for an even hotter future, designers today could learn from the past.

Sumerians: Keeping cool together

The Sumerians lived about 6,000 years ago in a hot and dry climate that is now southern Iraq. Even then, they had techniques for managing the heat.

Archaeologists studying remnants of Mesopotamian cities describe how Sumerian buildings used thick walls and small windows that could minimize heat exposure and keep indoor temperatures cool.

The Sumerians built their walls and roofs with materials such as adobe or mud that can absorb heat during the day and release it during the nighttime.

They also constructed buildings right next to each other, which reduced the number of walls exposed to the intense solar radiation. Small courtyards provided lighting and ventilation. Narrow streets ensured shade throughout the day and allowed pedestrians to move comfortably through the city.

Ancient Egyptians: Harnessing the wind

The ancient Egyptians also used materials that could help keep the heat out. Palaces were made of stone and had courtyards. Residential buildings were made of mud brick.

Many people also adopted a nomadic behaviour within their buildings to escape the heat: they used rooftop terraces, which were cooler at night, as sleeping quarters.

To cool buildings, the Egyptians developed a unique technology called the mulqaf, which consists of tall wall openings facing the prevailing winds. These openings act as scoops to capture wind and funnel it downward to help cool the building. The entering wind creates air circulation that helps vent heat out through other openings.

The mulqaf principle could also be scaled up to cool larger spaces. Known as a wind catcher, it is currently used in buildings in the Middle East and Central Asia, making them comfortable without air conditioning, even during very hot periods.

RELATED:

Here’s the secret to cooling India’s buildings

Can we build greener homes with used diapers? These engineers did

When buildings mimic nature

Ancient Puebloans: Working with the sun

Civilizations on other continents and at other times developed similar strategies for living in hot and dry climates, and they developed their own unique solutions, too.

The Puebloans in what today is the U.S. Southwest used small windows, materials such as mud brick and rock, and designed buildings with shared walls to minimize the heat getting in.

They also understood the importance of solar orientation. The ancient Puebloans built entire communities under the overhang of south-facing cliffs. This orientation ensured that their buildings were shaded and stayed cooler during the summertime but received sunlight and radiated heat to stay warmer during the wintertime.

Their descendants adopted similar orientation and other urban-planning strategies, and adobe homes are still common in the U.S. Southwest.

Muslim caliphates: Using every drop of rain where it falls

Modern water management is also rarely designed for dry climates. Stormwater infrastructure is created to funnel runoff from rainstorms away from the city as fast as possible. Yet, the same cities must bring in water for people and gardens, sometimes from faraway sources.

During the eighth century, the Muslim caliphates in arid lands of northern Africa and the south of Spain designed their buildings with rainwater-harvesting techniques to capture water. Runoff from rainfall was collected throughout the roof and directed to cisterns. The slope of the roof and the courtyard floor directed the water so it could be used to irrigate the vegetated landscapes of their courtyards.

Modern-day Mendoza, Argentina, uses this approach to irrigate the plants and trees lining its magnificent city streets.

Mayans and Teotihuacans: Capturing rainwater for later

At the city scale, people also collected and stored stormwater to withstand the dry season.

The ancient Teotihuacan city of Xochicalco and many Mayan cities in what today is Mexico and Central America used their pyramids, plazas and aqueducts to direct stormwater to large cisterns for future use. Plants were often used to help clean the water.

Scientists today are exploring ways to store rainwater with good quality in India and other countries. Rainwater harvesting and green infrastructure are now recognized as effective strategies to increase urban resilience.

Putting these lessons to work

Each of these ancient cultures offers lessons for staying cool in hot, dry climates that modern designers can learn from today.

Some architects are already using them to improve designs. For example, buildings in the northern hemisphere can be oriented to maximize southern exposure. South-facing windows combined with shading devices can help reduce solar radiation in the summer but allow solar heating in winter. Harvesting rainwater and using it to irrigate gardens and landscapes can help reduce water consumption, adapt to drier conditions and increase urban resilience.

Retrofitting modern cities and their glass towers for better heat control isn’t simple, but there are techniques that can be adapted to new designs for living better in hotter and drier climates and for relying less on constant summer air conditioning. These ancient civilizations can teach us how.

Adriana Zuniga-Teran is assistant professor of urban geography at the University of Arizona.

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

The post Here’s what we can learn from ancient societies about keeping buildings cool in heat waves appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The report, published this week in the journal Earth System Science Data, shed light on the impact of global wildfires that are increasing in ferocity and frequency. It looked at several “high impact” wildfire events in Canada, Greece, the western Amazon region and northern parts of South America between March 2023 and February 2024. While the geographic territory burned was slightly below the average of previous years, at a total of 3.9 million square kilometres, fire carbon emissions climbed to 8.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the study found.

The discrepancy is largely due to record-breaking emissions in Canadian boreal forests, the authors of the landmark State of Wildfires report note. “By the end of the century, events of similar magnitude to 2023 in Canada are projected to occur 6.3–10.8 times more frequently under a medium–high emission scenario,” the authors write.

Last year saw record-breaking fires around the globe. In Canada, severe drought conditions and high amounts of dry fuels caused 150,000 square kilometres – the size of the state of Illinois – to burn, forcing the evacuation of 232,000 people. Similar conditions led Greece to see an unprecedented level of wildfires, with around 900 square kilometres burned. Other places bore a major human toll, with more than 100 people losing their lives in Hawaii, when fires devastated Maui in August, and 131 in Chile.

“In Canada and Greece, a mix of severe fire weather and plenty of dry vegetation reinforced one another to drive a major uptick in the number and extent of fires last year,” Francesca Di Giuseppe, a senior scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, said in a statement. “But our analysis also shows that factors such as suppression and landscape fragmentation related to human activities likely played important roles in limiting the final extent of the burned areas.”

RELATED:

• The fire beast is everywhere. A checklist for fighting back.
• My clear-sky reflections on living with B.C.‘s smoke and wildfire
• Tree planting in the face of wildfires

With growing emissions came worsening air quality. The study found that the concentration of aerosols, chemical species and greenhouse gases exceeded the recommended limits in many regions of Canada and the United States at peak wildfire moments. People living in more than half of U.S. states experienced up to two weeks of excessive exposure. “The biggest impacts on air quality were experienced close to the fires, particularly in western and northwestern Canada and in Quebec in the east of the country,” the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), a climate arm of the European Union, said in a statement. CAMS provided data for the State of Wildfires report.

The evidence continues to point to climate change playing a role in more severe fire conditions, although the impact of humans on the specific landscape varied. In some cases, the area burned by fires would have been greater if it had not been altered by people. Agriculture and forestry activity can reduce the density of vegetation, as they do in Canada and Greece, but in places like the Amazon, they create fuel that exacerbates fires, CAMS researchers said. The probability of experiencing high fire weather has increased significantly as a result of human influence, the report authors write, with an estimated 2.9- to 3.6-fold increase in Canada last year and a 20- to 28-fold increase in Amazonia.

As residents of Jasper, Alberta, return to what is left of their mountain community after wildfires forced evacuations last month, researchers say that they hope their report provides crucial insights that help build resilience against future wildfires, and make us all better prepared for what may come.

The post Canadian boreal wildfires drove up carbon emissions last year appeared first on Corporate Knights.