1.

On April 6, the crew of Artemis II captured a view of Earth setting as they flew around the far side of the Moon, the first humans to journey there. The image echoed the “Earthrise” photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8, the first humans to orbit the moon. That earlier image became a symbol of the environmental movement we commemorate this week. Seen together, the two images serve as bookends, a reminder of how striking (and how singular) our planetary home happens to be.

See them here and here.

2.

Speaking of fossil fuels, delegates from at least 50 countries will gather this Friday in the Colombian port city of Santa Marta for five days of talks aimed at negotiating an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. The meeting – officially the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels and convened by Colombia and the Netherlands – was conceived in the final hours of COP30, where a coalition of roughly 80 countries pushing for roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels faced resistance from others unwilling to go beyond commitments made in Dubai two years earlier.

Neither the U.S. nor China, the two largest emitters, plan to participate. Further evidence of an increasingly multipolar world.

The Santa Marta meeting  highlights how coalitions of like-minded countries, working within multilateral frameworks, are trying to embed a transition away from coal, oil and gas into national plans. We’ll be watching to see how the talks might shape countries’ domestic policies.

Read here.

3.

Society cannot achieve its climate and development goals without keeping nature intact, contend Canadian conservationist Harvey Locke, Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and a global group of scientists, conservationists, and Indigenous people in a new study, “Nature Positive: halting and reversing biodiversity loss toward restoring Earth system stability.”

“Nature positive entails a conceptual shift from viewing the environment as a competing interest with society and the economy to recognizing it as the context for all human activity,” the authors write. In their framing, the UN Sustainable Development Goals move from a “sweet spot” of overlap among the environment, society and the economy to a hierarchy that places the latter two within the limits of the environment. The proposed paradigm shift aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 (from a 2020 baseline), supported by conservation, changes in production and consumption, new financial mechanisms, and stronger, more coordinated governance across the public and private sectors. For the specifics of their proposal, see page 10 of the report, which maps nature-positive actions and metrics to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, categorizing landscapes by levels of human impact.

Read here.

4.

For a practitioner perspective on assessing business impacts (and dependencies) on nature and biodiversity, I recommend this recent conversation on MSCI’s Sustainability Now podcast – “Are Investors Missing Biodiversity Risk?” – where my colleagues Bettina Meyer and host Gabriela de la Serna discuss the value of geospatially informed data on companies’ physical assets. While knowing where companies are headquartered can help raise awareness of exposure, it is insufficiently precise to inform investment decisions, Bettina explains. Nature-related risks can vary dramatically within a single country, and many companies rely on offshore production.

Listen here.

5.

AI is accelerating discovery in every field, including climate science. Here are two recent papers that highlight the diversity of experimentation. U.S. regions with higher climate risk show lower levels of human well-being, according to an analysis by researchers Stefano Maria Iacus of Harvard, Haodong Qi of Stockholm University and Devika Jain of Harvard, who use information from 2.6 billion geolocated tweets to generate an index measuring human flourishing across 46 indicators, from economic stability and social connectedness to subjective well-being. Their analysis, detailed in “Spatial Heterogeneity in Climate Risk and Human Flourishing: An Exploration with Generative AI,” finds, for example, that as heat and wind risks rise, populations report declines in material, physical and mental well-being, social relationships, trust in institutions and religious beliefs. People in hurricane-exposed, flood-prone and wildfire-risk regions also tend to perceive themselves as economically worse off. “The results underscore the need for climate adaptation and mitigation policies that address not only physical infrastructure but also social, psychological and institutional dimensions of well-being,” they write.

Weather forecasting requires substantial technical expertise to reconcile disparate datasets, complex tools and models, creating barriers for non-experts that limit broader participation in weather science, observe researchers from the University of California San Diego, who have taken the first steps toward creating an AI agent capable of analyzing and answering questions in natural language. In “Zephyrus: An Agentic Framework for Weather Science,” the researchers describe an agent that turns natural-language questions into executable code and renders the results back into clear, human-readable responses. The agent substantially outperforms text-only models and performs well on simpler tasks, such as identifying locations with specific weather conditions and answering structured, data-driven queries, according to the authors, who note that performance drops on more complex reasoning tasks. “Our vision is to democratize earth science,” Rose Yu, a study co-author, tells UC San Diego Today.

Read here and here.

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