Leaves 27 (9) - September 2025

        Newsletter of the
         INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT FORUM
         Volume 27, Number 9 --- 15 September 2025    

Website: iefworld.org
Article submission: newsletter@iefworld.org Deadline next issue 10 October 2025
Secretariat Email: ief@iefworld.org Christine Muller General Secretary 
Postal address: 12B Chemin de Maisonneuve, CH-1219 Chatelaine, Geneva, Switzerland
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From the Editor, Request for information for upcoming newsletters

This newsletter is an opportunity for IEF members to share their experiences, activities, and  initiatives that are taking place at the community level on environment, climate change  and sustainability. All members are welcome to contribute information about related  activities, upcoming conferences, news from like-minded organizations, recommended  websites, book reviews, etc. Please send information to newsletter@iefworld.org.

Please share the Leaves newsletter and IEF membership  information with family, friends and associates, and encourage interested persons to consider becoming a member of the IEF.

IEF Members and Associates: 
This is the Time to Engage in Public Discourse!

Are you participating in some way in the dialogues preceding COP30? Now is the time to be engaged! Read all about it and how you can be part of this global conversation in the August LEAVES and here. 

If you live in the Americas, you are invited to participate in a Zoom dialogue on Sunday, September 28, 2025, at 
11am Los Angeles 
12 noon Guatemala City 
1pm Bogota, Lima 
2pm Eastern Time (US, Canada, Bolivia) 
3pm Buenos Aires, Santiago 
Register in advance for this meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hgzITFLzRFClheGyA0RQKA 

IEF Climate Change Course

We are excited to report that the IEF Climate Change course has 100 participants representing 32 countries and all continents except for Antarctica! The course is running for 10 weeks: 1 September – 9 November. Registration for the course is now closed.

One of the biggest challenges in global environmental governance is to hold governments to account for the pledges they have made and the agreements they have signed up to. IEF members Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen and Arthur Lyon Dahl have just published a paper on this issue: "Turning Words into Action: Designing Accountability Mechanisms with Impact for Multilateral Environmental Agreements" in the journal Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations, 31(3):375-388, 26 August 2025.

States join many multilateral environmental agreements, but lack of enforcement hinders their effectiveness and implementation. Even when science shows the gravity of the environmental degradation and solutions are available, the political will is lacking. When trust is lacking, accountability mechanisms can help establish trust. This Global Forum brief offers insights into the conditions under which accountability mechanisms can strengthen the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements, depending on whether states are driven by power, interest, identity, practice, or lack of capacity. We explore accountability mechanisms that in their design enable learning on how to address complex problems, as well as building capacity for addressing them, including shared, broad, and dynamic accountability. Recommendations are offered for two categories of impactful accountability mechanisms: those aimed at creating incentives and those aimed at enabling learning. Both are relatively easy wins, yet they are likely to face substantial resistance from states concerned about the erosion of their power and sovereignty. [from the abstract]

Download the pdf file

The broken relationship between humans and nature, despite a half-century of scientific research and valid efforts, is leading to existential crises. Most solutions, like the Sustainable Development Goals, largely address the material side of human development. Yet scientific knowledge has proven insufficient to motivate the fundamental transformation in society called for by the Club of Rome and Earth4All. Powerful interests continue to block the necessary changes in the economic system and institutions of governance towards a just and sustainable world society in all its diversity.

Humanity has a potential far beyond our material existence, often called moral, ethical or spiritual, and featured in all faith traditions and Indigenous worldviews. Beyond the science, transformative learning needs to focus on cultivating the higher human values of cooperation, solidarity, moderation, humility, self-sacrifice and service, and empowering their expression across the wonderful diversity of the human family, to motivate the necessary transformation in our families, communities, institutions and global society. Donella Meadows herself laid out the importance of new paradigms and values as leverage points for systems transformation.

The central purpose of the International Environment Forum (IEF) since its founding nearly 30 years ago has been to provide its membership, partners and the wider public with a deeper understanding of the science behind climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and all the other challenges to the Earth System and human wellbeing, as well as a systemic perspective on their underlying causes in our economic system, social organisation, institutions and governance. Systemic change must start with a new paradigm of a higher human purpose founded in justice and equity, enabling all to refine their character and to contribute to advancing civilisation.

You can read IEF’s entire contribution here.

No Limits to Hope forum: https://weecnetwork.org/no-limits-to-hope-forum/ 

If you wanted to see what inspirational change looks like, you should’ve tuned in to today’s Asia-Pacific Youth Environment Forum (#APYEF2025). It’s one thing to say #youth will inherit the future, but it’s another thing entirely to witness capable, action-ready young leaders taking charge of it.

From morning until night, I watched remarkable youth share their work with utter resolve. There were stories of youth running #plastic-free initiatives, others doing mangrove and ecosystem #restoration, women working on community awareness for #climatechange, scientists doing coral reef #rehabilitation, and many more bridging the gap between science and #Indigenous perspectives.

We heard stories of challenges, but more importantly, of solutions.

One that really struck me was a youth leader speaking about the importance of incorporating spiritual principles into environmental work. She invited us to think beyond circular economies and to consider a ‘spiritual economy’, one rooted in care, compassion and charity. She was speaking my language.

And perhaps the best part: this wasn’t just a feel-good session. These youth have been working collectively on the Asia-Pacific Youth Environment Manifesto — a statement of intentions and recommendations that will feed into regional policy discussions and be submitted to the UN Environment Assembly (#UNEA) later this year.

Sure, it’s just a document. But after a wild year marked by fragmentation, multilateral fatigue, and sluggish environmental progress, today felt like a much-needed jolt of momentum, driven by those who have the most at stake and the least time to waste.

We know we need stronger environmental action, and after today, it’s clear young people aren’t just calling for it, they’re already steering the way. Like the master navigators this region is known for, they’re reading the winds, adjusting the sails, and plotting a course through turbulent seas. The journey ahead will be rough, but with this leadership guiding our collective canoe, there’s every reason to believe we’ll reach the shore.

Huge respect to Children and Youth Major Group to UNEP and all the youth leaders making the future we want a real possibility.

Unity is a fundamental concept. It is essential to the science of complex systems, at the heart of building community, and a central purpose and goal of the Bahá’í Faith and many ethical and spiritual traditions. Here Robert Atkinson has written a book that explores all of these dimensions. He draws on many sources, academic, philosophical and practical case studies, leading to a broad introduction to the Bahá’í teachings and example as the primary instrument to lead finally to the world unity and ever-advancing civilisation that is our ultimate goal.

Do you want to know more about the book including a summary of its main points? Then continue reading here.   

IEF member Austin Bowden-Kerby wrote from Tuvalu on 27 August about the extreme loss of corals in Tuvalu, an island nation in the mid-Pacific consisting entirely of atolls, rings of coral reefs and islets around a large lagoon, but no more than a few metres above sea level.

Austin said that in 2018 Tuvalu had the most amazing coral reefs he had ever seen, with thickets of heavy branched Acropora staghorn corals towering 5+ meters high. But now they stand as dead thickets of scum-covered coral skeletons. Fish clean patches of the dead branches, but the colourful plankton feeding fish are gone.

In two hours of searching, dragged on a rope behind the boat, he saw just one small-branched colony of Acropora, three small Pocillopora, and some sparse Porites found among the wasteland. Everything was DEAD as far as the eye can see.

This was extinction level bleaching and all coral species but Porites and perhaps Pocillopora are now ecologically and reproductively extinct in Tuvalu, and many coral species are likely biologically extinct as well. But if two colonies or even a hundred of a species have survived, they will not produce offspring as they will be too far from any others of their kind. There are no coral reefs upcurrent to the east from which to receive coral larvae, so recovery looks unlikely. And the animals that eat live corals will eventually have their way.

NOAA predictions put Tuvalu at condition 3 bleaching, but this impact was much much worse, similar to the condition 5 bleaching that hit Kiritimati Atoll in 2015.

It has been a year and a half since the massacre of the very system that created the nation, Austin wrote, but the government has been silent. The mother of the nation has been murdered by the fossil fuel industry. And the nation is distracted by their phones and has been seduced by foreign aid, air conditioned offices, and near constant travel to international meetings that produce nothing but words.

Much could be done to search far and wide looking for survivors to reboot recovery (as Austin has done elsewhere). This will depend on the sons and daughters of this nation - a nation that was created and nurtured by a reef, yet that connection has now seemingly been forgotten. And much the same could be said for Kiribati.

Austin asked us to be thankful for what corals we have left in our own nations, and work to ensure their survival, because Tuvalu and Kiribati could soon be our future if we are not well prepared.

IEF president Arthur Dahl, also a coral reef specialist, just read in the Guardian Weekly of 22 August a six-page feature article by Atul Dev entitled "How to leave a sinking nation" about Tuvalu and its rising sea level. It mostly discusses the challenges and options of migration as sea level rise makes atolls uninhabitable. But it also describes some local opinion that the atolls are dynamic, eroding in some places and accreting in others. It also quotes geomorphologist Paul Kench, now professor at the National University of Singapore, who studies atoll dynamics, with some eroding, but Tuvalu's land area increasing 2.9% since the Second World War. His 2018 paper of coastal changes in Tuvalu showed that, out of 101 islets, 73 had accreted 80.7 hectares, and 28 eroding 7.24 hectares.

Arthur was formerly ecological advisor to all the Pacific Island countries. He has visited Tuvalu and the other atoll countries, and has long warned about this risk and written about it on the IEF website. He has often thought that sea level rise might permit the upward growth of atoll reefs, just as they grew up in the past from submerging volcanoes. But if the sea level rise was too rapid, the reef could not keep up, and might only later catch up, too late for the human population. Of course that assumes a healthy coral reef. With the die-off Austin has described, the atolls are doomed to drown. The past is no longer a guide to the future. Nature cannot help.

IEF member Carol Curtis, who lived for many years on atolls in the Marshall Islands, has read about the increase of land in Tuvalu. Assuming the land is no higher than what exists today, as the sea rises, the groundwater rises too, and since, at least in the Marshalls, it is less than a metre below land level, during king tides it can be less.  So when this water, that is becoming more and more brackish with each passing year, hits the very shallow root systems of all the vegetation, then it will all die and people will be living on pieces of sand, whether the atoll islands are growing or eroding. This will destroy the atolls long before the ocean washes over all the land, and the four atoll nations disappear.

On 28 August, Austin spent several hours again in the water, and saw a few scattered Porites and Pocillopora colonies and a few massive Pavona among the carnage. This may be many thousand at the scale of the reef, but the precious and vulnerable Acropora corals that formerly dominated the reefs are now gone.

Austin did share some very good news. Back in 2018, he had moved roughly 100 corals from the hot pocket reefs to cooler outer reefs, as he has done in Fiji and elsewhere. Seven Acropora corals of three species have survived the extreme heat, in spite of the nursery collapsing and most branches perishing in the sand.  This is more proof that hot to cooler translocation works, and now there is a bit to work with.  Also there was a 12cm fragment of a wild purple Acropora right beside the nursery, which is strange as that is the only live Acropora coral that he has found on the reef so far. This coral may have acquired some of the heat adapted symbiotic algae from the nursery corals, perhaps, he guesses, shared on the teeth of a coral-eating butterfly fish.

Austin is meeting with the Minister Simon Kofe Friday afternoon. He is the one who, as Foreign Minister, addressed the world at COP26 in 2021 while standing in water (see The Guardian article).

SOURCES: Emails from Austin Bowden-Kerby, Arthur Dahl and Carol Curtis, 27-28 August 2025.
ADDITIONAL SOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/aug/14/how-to-leave-a-sinking-nation-tuvalus-dreams-of-dry-land 

The World Council of Churches (WCC) has launched the Living Planet Monitor that collects data on a wide variety of indicators about issues of land, water and food, and the impacts of climate change. It aims to encourage action on these basic elements of human survival and development, as well as the faith-based responses to these issues. It collects stories of grass-roots projects addressing these concerns.

It aims to provide a global outlook, regional perspectives, and the country situation. The first issue covers part of Africa. A second issue on other parts of Africa is due before the end of the year, and then they will look at South Asia.

While they come from a Christian perspective, they would like to receive examples of case studies from other faiths.

The WCC has also just launched the Ecumenical Decade of Climate Justice Action 2025-2034. The aim is to describe a spiritual journey of transformation, lamenting our present situation and cultivating a shift rooted in care for the creation. They want to change the unjust economic system, challenging governments and corporations and proposing practical responses, such as establishing the crime of ecocide, debt cancellation, and building community resilience. The website should soon be ready.

The World Academy of Art and Science has issued a recent paper on Sources and Solutions for Global Turbulence summarised here.

Our era is defined by unprecedented uncertainty, distrust, and insecurity. The world faces a multidimensional polycrisis with political, economic, technological, social, and environmental dimensions without traditional solutions. This turbulence stems from rapid globalization, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing conflicts, climate change, and the opportunity and threat of artificial intelligence.

These are more than isolated crises, reflecting our struggle to adapt to the fastest changes in human history. Population growth has accelerated to eight billion. Global economic output has multiplied 100-fold in 200 years. We have become an interconnected global society communicating instantaneously, yet our institutions, values, and governance structures have not kept up with technological advances. This turbulence manifests as a clash between progressive forces driving global integration, technological convergence, and universal values, and reactionary movements resisting change through nationalism, authoritarianism, and cultural retrenchment. The result is social polarization, institutional weakness, and the erosion of multilateral cooperation. Power is shifting to new configurations: from national governments to corporations, from scientific authority to populist narratives, from the middle class to extremes of wealth and poverty. Understanding these dynamics is essential to any response.

We need to understand the deep causes of today’s turbulence, the consequences that follow, and the solutions required to go toward a more inclusive and sustainable future.

Continue reading this article here.

SOURCES: https://www.greaterpacificcapital.com/thought-leadership/turbulent-times-a-framework-for-navigating-global-crisis-through-conscious-transformation 
https://www.cadmusjournal.org/files/pdfreprints/vol5issue4/Sources-and-Solutions-for-Global-Turbulence-GJacobs-KPatel-Cadmus-V5-I4-Reprint.pdf 

The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, new research has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The AMOC is already weakening as a result of the climate crisis.

A new analysis of climate models run beyond 2100 to 2300 and 2500 shows that the tipping point that makes an AMOC shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed in 10 to 20 years, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.

If carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while intermediate emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions respecting the Paris agreement, an AMOC shutdown happened in 25% of the models. The AMOC slows drastically by 2100 and completely shuts off thereafter. Beyond the tipping point in the next decade or two, the shutdown of the AMOC becomes inevitable owing to a self-amplifying feedback.

The shutdown risk is more serious than many people realise. AMOC collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels. Even a 10% risk of an AMOC collapse would be far too high.

Scientists have already spotted warning signs of a tipping point with a downward trend over the past five to 10 years, consistent with the models’ projections. Air temperatures are rising rapidly in the Arctic because of the climate crisis, meaning the ocean cools more slowly there. Warmer water is less dense and therefore sinks into the depths more slowly. This slowing allows more rainfall to accumulate in the salty surface waters, also making it less dense, and further slowing the sinking, forming the feedback loop. The true figures could be even worse, because the models did not include the meltwater from the Greenland ice cap that is also freshening the ocean waters.

Even if a collapse is uncertain, a major weakening is expected, and that alone could have serious impacts on Europe’s climate in the decades to come.

SOURCE: based on Damian Carrington in The Guardian, 28 August 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/aug/28/collapse-critical-a…

ORIGINAL PAPER: Sybren Drijfhout, Joran R Angevaare, Jennifer Mecking, René M van Westen and Stefan Rahmstorf. Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections. Environ. Res. Lett. 20 (2025) 094062 28 August 2025. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adfa3b/pdf

Plastics Treaty negotiations collapse - now in limbo

Negotiations for a global plastics treaty in Geneva, during the first two weeks of August, stalled, leaving a major international effort to combat plastic pollution in limbo. The talks, which began in 2022 with a resolution signed by 175 countries, ended on August 15 without consensus.

The core problem was a fundamental disagreement between two main groups of nations. The High Ambition Coalition, a majority of countries, pushed for a treaty with legally binding measures to reduce plastic production and regulate plastic chemicals and problematic products.

On the other side were a small number of oil-producing nations—including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran—who argued for a weaker treaty focused solely on non-binding reporting and waste management. Since plastics are made primarily from petrochemicals, these "petro-states" blocked any serious measures to reverse the plastics crisis.

"It's an Empty Shell"
The majority of countries rejected a watered-down draft treaty that was presented for possible adoption at the negotiation session. As Camila Zepeda, Mexico's head of delegation, stated, "It's not even a treaty, it's an empty shell." The draft also lacked obligations on financing, making it, in the words of Micronesian negotiator Dennis Clare, "a waste management framework without any clear funding."

This collapse points to the profound difficulty of getting those most responsible for environmental damage to agree to the regulations necessary to protect the environment. As Mr. Clare put it, the issue wasn't the talks themselves, but "the logic of continuing or concluding them in a forum with dedicated obstructionists."

Disappointment, but Still Hope
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen expressed "disappointment" over the collapse, acknowledging that progress was made, but stressing that the failure puts people and the planet at risk. She indicated the need to remain committed to the process, emphasizing that stopping plastic pollution is a long-term effort and that "this work will not stop."

What's Next? Three Possible Paths Forward
According to Felix Wertli, Swiss Ambassador for the Environment, the international community now faces three possible paths forward: 

• Continue Negotiations: While this option maintains a multilateral approach, it risks ongoing deadlock and a weak treaty. 
• Form a Coalition of the Willing: A group of motivated countries could take the lead and create their own, more ambitious agreement. 
• Build on Existing Agreements: The international community could leverage existing frameworks, such as the Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste, to address plastic pollution.

For Wertli, one thing is clear: inaction isn’t an option. Plastic pollution continues to grow, and the world urgently needs cooperative solutions.

A Change in Mindset Is Critical
The failure to reach a meaningful agreement underscores a profound lack of ambition. Chris Guillot, co-founder of the nonprofit AwareNearth and a Steering Committee Member of MEGA was present during the long deliberations. He noted, "as long as plastic is seen more as a miracle and economic solution rather than an existential threat, no agreement will be reached."

Unlike the Montreal Protocol, which succeeded by treating ozone depletion as a critical threat, progress on plastics demands a similar shift: a change in mindset and political will that prioritizes intergenerational justice, governance, and ethical responsibility over all else.

Source: Mobilizing an Earth Governance Alliance, September 2025 Newsletter
IEF is a co-sponsoring organisation in MEGA

Lewis Akenji of the Hot or Cool Institute and Janez Potocnik of the International Resource Panel, both members of the Club of Rome, have proposed an international body to manage the world’s dwindling natural resources. For the global economy to stay stable, competitive and sustainable, they call for an urgent rethink of how we manage the world’s natural resources.

Our economy is based on highly extractive and inefficient systems, with the sectors that provide our most essential services – food, housing, mobility and energy – the most resource-intensive and environmentally damaging. The extraction and processing of materials drives around 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, over 90% of land-related biodiversity loss and water stress, and 40% of particulate matter pollution.

The economy is also profoundly unfair, with rich countries using six times more materials per capita than low-income countries. As natural resource stocks shrink with the growing demand for critical minerals, the consequences are conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, potential land grabs in Greenland and Ukraine, and rising tensions in the South China Sea. The American government expressed interest in annexing Canada for its resources.

Despite its fundamental importance, international governance of resource use has long been overlooked or avoided. While governments have recently begun developing resource efficiency and circular economy strategies, most still focus on downstream issues like recycling. An international framework is needed to oversee how resources are extracted, traded and used, built on principles of equity, transparency and long-term resilience. An International Materials Agency is proposed as the central hub for this effort.

The agency would offer reliable, accessible data on material flows and their environmental impacts. It would also provide guidance on global standards and policy development, conduct country-level risk assessments for critical supply chains, and support both governments and businesses in aligning their resource use with climate and development goals.

To ensure fair access, especially for low-income countries, mechanisms should guarantee that developing nations can obtain the materials they need to decarbonise and grow, possibly through the establishment of resource trusts, which would help prevent deepening global inequality and rising instability.

Measurement with traditional metrics such as GDP or recycling rates is inadequate. It is necessary to track how systems of provisioning for key sectors like food, housing, transport and energy contribute to wellbeing while staying within planetary boundaries. Spending could then prioritised on those that are most efficient. Circular economy strategies could go further by establishing legally binding material targets and embedding these across food, housing, mobility and energy systems.

This calls for a transparent and justice-based framework for international resource governance, helping to meet climate and nature commitments, while increasing fairness. The IPCC set a clear climate target of limiting global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius. It is time for a similar benchmark for resource use, one that aligns economic activity with ecological limits and human wellbeing. Otherwise, the scramble for dwindling resources will only intensify, and ordinary people will pay an ever-increasing price.

SOURCE: based on https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity/why-we-need-an-international-body-manage-worlds-dwindling-natural-resources-2025-08-13/