As climate change continues to accelerate, the urgency to act has never been greater. While systemic change is critical, individual actions can collectively contribute significantly to reducing emissions. Here are seven impactful ways you can make a difference in 2025.

1. Adopt a Plant-Based Diet

Reducing meat consumption is one of the most effective ways to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock production is a significant contributor to methane and nitrous oxide emissions, both of which are far more potent than carbon dioxide.

• Why it matters: A vegan diet emits just 25% of the carbon compared to a meat-heavy diet.
• How to start: Gradually replace meat with plant-based meals. Explore vegetarian or vegan recipes to find options that work for you.
• Impact: Less water usage, reduced harm to biodiversity, and a significant reduction in carbon emissions.

2. Choose Trains Over Planes

Transportation accounts for 16% of global emissions, with flights being one of the most carbon-intensive modes of travel.

• Why it matters: Cutting back on flights can significantly reduce your personal carbon footprint.
• How to act: Use trains, buses, or carpool for longer distances. For shorter journeys, consider walking or biking.
• Impact: Reduced emissions, improved health, and opportunities for more meaningful travel experiences.

3. Buy Less, Buy Better Clothes

The fashion industry is responsible for 8-10% of global emissions. Fast fashion, in particular, drives unsustainable practices.

• Why it matters: The average person generates significant waste through discarded clothing.
• How to act: Buy second-hand, rent outfits, or upcycle your wardrobe. Wash clothes less frequently to reduce microplastic pollution.
• Impact: Reducing waste, conserving resources, and fostering a more sustainable fashion industry.

4. Lower Your Pets’ Carbon Pawprint

Pets, while beloved, have a surprisingly high environmental impact due to their diet and waste.

• Why it matters: A cat’s lifetime CO2 emissions can equal driving 7,500 miles in a petrol car.
• How to act: Opt for pet food made from sustainable proteins, like fish or insects. Use recycled waste bags for cleanup.
• Impact: Reduced emissions and a more eco-friendly way to care for your furry friends.

5. Rethink Your Home Heating

Heating buildings is a significant contributor to global emissions, especially when reliant on fossil fuels.

• Why it matters: Renewable heating can cut emissions while saving on energy bills.
• How to act: Invest in heat pumps, solar thermal systems, or better insulation. Use energy-efficient solutions like draught excluders and thick curtains.
• Impact: A warmer home with a smaller carbon footprint and lower energy costs.

6. Invest in a Greener Pension

Your financial decisions, including where you save and invest, can have a significant impact on sustainability.

• Why it matters: Pension funds are massive investors in global markets, often financing fossil fuels.
• How to act: Research your pension provider’s sustainability policies. Consider switching to a provider focused on green investments.
• Impact: Leveraging your savings to support renewable energy and sustainable practices.

7. Cut Down on Single-Use Plastics

Plastic waste contributes to pollution and emissions, with devastating effects on ecosystems and human health.

• Why it matters: Plastic production is projected to double by 2050, consuming a significant share of global fossil fuels.
• How to act:
  • Use reusable bags for shopping.
  • Switch to beeswax wraps instead of cling film.
  • Shop at zero-waste stores for refills.
  • Avoid single-use utensils and carry a reusable kit.
• Impact: Reducing waste, protecting marine life, and lowering the environmental burden of plastics.

Final Thoughts

Making small, sustainable changes in your daily life can collectively create a significant impact on the planet. Whether it’s altering your diet, rethinking your travel habits, or making more conscious consumer choices, your actions can inspire others and contribute to a greener future.

What’s your first step toward sustainability in 2025?

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Millions of tons of coal ash, a hazardous byproduct of burning coal, are sitting in ponds and landfills across the United States. Known for polluting waterways and soil, this waste could also hold a surprising treasure: rare earth elements essential for clean energy technologies.

A Hidden Treasure in Coal Ash

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin analyzed coal ash from power plants nationwide and found up to 11 million tons of rare earth elements embedded within it. This amount is nearly eight times the known domestic reserves of rare earths in the U.S., with an estimated market value of $8.4 billion.

“This discovery is a prime example of turning ‘trash into treasure,’” said Bridget Scanlon, a study co-author and research professor. “By recovering resources from waste, we can close the loop and reduce the need for new mining.”

What Are Rare Earth Elements?

Rare earth elements, such as scandium, neodymium, and yttrium, are crucial for clean technologies like electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines. Despite their name, these metals are not rare but challenging to extract due to their dispersion in ore. As global demand for clean energy grows, the need for rare earths is expected to increase sevenfold by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. Rare Earth Dilemma

Currently, the U.S. relies heavily on imports, sourcing over 95% of its rare earth elements from China. With only one large-scale domestic mine, Mountain Pass in California, this dependence creates significant supply chain vulnerabilities.

To address this, researchers are exploring unconventional sources like coal ash. Around 70 million tons of coal ash are produced annually in the U.S., with vast stockpiles readily available for extraction. “We need to diversify our sources, and coal byproducts offer a promising alternative,” Scanlon told CNN.

Challenges in Extraction

Extracting rare earth elements from coal ash is complex and costly. Concentrations in coal ash are lower than in traditional ore, and the process requires strong acids and bases, which are expensive and carry environmental risks. For instance, coal ash from the Appalachian Basin contains the highest levels of rare earths, but only 30% can be extracted. Meanwhile, ash from the Powder River Basin has lower concentrations but allows for over 70% extraction.

Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the Water Research Institute at West Virginia University, noted that the extraction process could also increase environmental impacts due to the additional chemicals required. Moreover, coal ash contains toxic substances like mercury, arsenic, and lead, making it a risky material to handle.

Turning Waste into Value

Despite these challenges, the potential value of rare earth extraction could offset the costs of safer coal ash storage and management. In April, the Biden administration allocated $17.5 million to projects aimed at extracting rare earths from coal waste. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm emphasized that these efforts would bolster national security, revitalize manufacturing, and support mining communities.

A Sustainable Approach

Some critics worry that monetizing coal ash could incentivize continued coal use, but researchers stress that their focus is on legacy waste. The Department of Energy estimates over 2 billion tons of coal ash are already stored across the U.S. “There’s no indication this will promote coal power,” a DOE spokesperson said.

The broader goal, according to Scanlon, is to find sustainable ways to extract multiple valuable materials from coal waste without burning it, transforming a toxic liability into a resource for a greener future.

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About four miles up the mountain from a broken sign that reads “You are inside a protected area,” miners had ripped into the soil in one of the most biodiverse regions of Colombia in search of gold, spilling poisonous mercury used in the extraction process into rivers that nourish this forest.

Colombia has pledged to close the illegal gold mines threatening this park, home to hundreds of species of birds, rare poisonous frogs and the nation’s emblematic Andean bears.

But Jaime Millán, one of only 13 permanent staff members overseeing a national park stretching across more than 480,000 acres and four ecosystems, knows it won’t be easy. “You have to understand the essence of the miner,” Millán said. “Where there’s gold, he’ll go.”

The lack of resources to protect wilderness in some of the most biodiverse places on Earth is at the heart of a major international conference starting Monday, just an hour away from the park.

Leaders from around the world are gathering in Cali for the next two weeks for a U.N. biodiversity summit, called COP16, where Colombia and other species-rich nations will urge wealthy ones to make good on financial commitments to protect natural habitats.

The world is in the midst of a global extinction crisis, with up to a million species at risk of disappearing forever due to shrinking habitats, rising temperatures and other threats posed by humans.

Around the world, ecosystems like this one are deteriorating, with potentially calamitous effects for people who depend on nature for food, water and keeping climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. Yet many of the world’s most ecologically rich countries — in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia — are often among the poorest financially.

“Today, those who emit the most are the ones who have the cheapest access to capital and those of us who are absorbing and mitigating those greenhouse gases are offering environmental services that are not recognized whatsoever,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister.

‘A transfer back’

The conference near this park is a follow-up to a watershed agreement reached two years ago to stem the loss of nature worldwide. Nearly 200 nations promised to safeguard about a third of Earth’s land and oceans.

The deal, forged in talks in Montreal, “was a game changer for biodiversity,” said Astrid Schomaker, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the treaty underpinning the talks.

The conference in Colombia represents the first time nations are officially coming together to assess how close they are to reaching those goals, including voluntary pledges by wealthier nations to support conservation in poorer ones.

“This is the first temperature check of, ‘So what are people doing on this?’” said Charles Barber, a former U.S. State Department diplomat who is now a director at the World Resources Institute.

Early data suggests countries need to give more to meet those money pledges.

Out of a goal of mobilizing $200 billion a year for conservation, developed countries promised to send at least $20 billion per year by 2025. Much of the rest will come in the form of funds that governments spend within their own borders.

Historically, many nations built wealth by extracting resources from poorer ones, noted David Obura, a coral reef ecologist in Kenya who chairs the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a U.N.-backed science group. “It’s a bit of a transfer back,” he said.
Yet so far, wealthy nations are ponying up only three-fourths of that annual amount, according to a recent report.

“They wrote a check in Montreal that they can’t cover, basically,” Barber said, adding that governments seek to make sure money sent abroad is being spent correctly. “That involves efforts to reduce corruption,” he added.

With territory encompassing huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest and coastlines stretching along both the Atlantic and Pacific, Colombia is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Yet the challenge of protecting a place like Farallones de Cali national park is complex and costly: A decades-long armed conflict, rooted in disputes over land, makes the job especially dangerous for park rangers like Millán.

The country’s protected national parks, often in isolated mountainous or jungle regions, have been used as strategic staging points for armed groups to grow coca, used to make cocaine, and set up hideouts for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a rebel group.

National parks staff were often caught in the middle, threatened or even killed by these armed groups, according to Colombia’s peace jurisdiction. Millán himself has been threatened, after a group of miners saw him flying a drone over the area.

Authorities have stationed soldiers along the trail to the mines and are building control towers to keep watch. But Millán has many things he still needs: more staff, satellite radios and walkie talkies to communicate; better trekking gear to lead hikes.

Catalina Gutiérrez Chacón, the Colombia director for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the national parks system needs at least five times more funding than it receives, suggesting it needs a new structure to ensure more funds reach the park staff level to hire more permanent staff like Millán.

Local rangers

Right now, the world is falling short of the Montreal agreement’s biggest goal: Protecting 30 percent of Earth as wilderness.

As of August, only about 17.5 percent of Earth’s land and freshwaters and 8.5 percent of its oceans are safeguarded, according to a U.N. monitoring program. And as of Sunday evening, only 33 nations have provided updates on how they plan to protect nature ahead of the meeting in Cali, though Schomaker expected more plans to be put forward during the conference.

“That’s pretty slow, so we need to see acceleration of that,” said Andrew Deutz, a director at the World Wildlife Fund.

In addition to money, delegates at the COP will also be discussing how to ensure the people who live in these biodiversity havens thrive.

The situation in Colombia shows how fraught that question can be. Heading into Los Farallones, Millán points out one of the park’s greatest challenges: A more than 80-year-old paved road that existed long before the area was declared a protected national park in 1968.

Slicing through the national park, it has long made it accessible to land and gold prospectors. Generations of families built their lives in communities abutting the forest.

Large stretches of farmland, deforested long ago, create gaps in the otherwise lush mountain landscape and reveal the inherent tensions between the park’s environmentalists and its residents, who depend on the land for their livelihoods.

Now, some of those residents are becoming stewards of these wild places.

A brief drive on a dirt road, across a creek, leads to the home of 80-year-old Hernando Bolaños, whose father settled here when the land was considered vacant.

At one point, the Bolaños family raised more than 50 cows on their dairy farm. Now they own about half that number and have signed an agreement with the national park to restore the forest on their land. More than three years ago, Bolaños’s son, José, started separating the cows from a creek and fenced off an area to plant new trees. The area is now lush with vegetation.

He is now one of about 80 contractors working with the national park. But while José Bolaños works for the park, he never wears the uniform. Cutting through his land are the two main paths to reach the illegal gold mines.

“When I’m walking up to the mine, I’m usually alone,” he said. “I’ve run into miners and it’s dangerous.”

Millán, the park ranger, hopes that by turning this area into a tourist destination where locals can take visitors hiking, birdwatching and horseback riding, and offer them food and even cabins in which to stay, perhaps it will help keep the miners away for good.

Long term, he would like to turn the mining route into a hiking route. But it would require setting up training, infrastructure, a marketing campaign — the kinds of investments the park has difficulty making and that foreign money could help fund.

“This needs to be appropriated by the people from the community,” Millán said.

Source
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/10/21/cop16-colombia-biodiversity-wildlife-preservation/

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