Recent Events

Clean Water

Clean water is a fundamental human right recognized by the United Nations, yet it is still out of reach for billions of people. In January 2026, researchers at the United Nations University warned that the world is entering an era of “global water bankruptcy,” meaning that overuse and pollution have pushed many water systems past the point where they can reliably recover.

This crisis reflects the tragedy of the commons. When people or institutions chase short term benefits from a shared and limited resource, the group pays the long term cost. Water is a commons in exactly this way. Today, industrial demand adds pressure in places that are already water stressed, including the water used to cool large data centers that support AI systems. Reporting on data center growth has noted that some facilities can draw very large volumes of water each day, which can strain local supplies when drought or competing needs already exist.

The harms are not shared evenly. The same UN analysis emphasizes that the burdens fall disproportionately on smallholder farmers, Indigenous Peoples, low-income urban residents, and women and youth, while the benefits of overuse often accrue to more powerful actors. Water insecurity is not only an environmental problem. It is a human problem that can drive hunger, illness, displacement, and conflict.

Arctic Blast

A late January to early February 2026 Arctic blast pushed a deep pool of polar air far into the central and eastern United States, with a rapidly strengthening coastal storm helping pull the cold south and intensify snow and wind along its track. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described subzero air spreading across the Plains, Midwest, and Northeast, with wind chills dropping into the minus 20s and 30s in some areas. In the Upper Midwest, National Weather Service offices documented extreme wind chills and issued extreme cold products during the peak of the outbreak.

The impacts were widespread and messy. Associated Press and Reuters reported heavy snow and ice from the South into the Mid Atlantic and beyond, major travel disruption with thousands of flight cancellations, and significant power outages in multiple states. Some of the most unusual effects showed up in the South, including hard freezes in Florida that damaged crops and caused cold stunned iguanas to fall from trees, while North Carolina saw major crash totals during heavy snow.

Patagonia Wildfires

Wildfires have been burning across Patagonia since early January 2026, with some of the most severe impacts reported in Chubut Province. The blazes have reached Los Alerces National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site known for ancient alerce trees, and reporting has put the burned area at more than 110,000 acres, roughly 36,000 hectares.

The fires have also become a political flashpoint for Javier Milei. Environmental groups and firefighters have criticized austerity measures they say weakened prevention and response capacity, while the government has announced emergency steps and firefighting funding as winds and heat threatened containment.

The Effects of AI on the Environment

Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms such as Gemini and ChatGPT have enabled rapid deployment in many industries, improving worker productivity and advancing scientific research. Although this advancement in technology is exciting, the environmental consequences cannot be ignored. First off, training these generative AI models requires a staggering amount of electricity, leading to increased carbon dioxide emissions and pressure on the electric grid. But why does AI require so much energy? Training an AI model sometimes requires up to trillions of parameters, a coding term that determines how a model responds to certain prompts. Parameters allow the AI to learn more patterns to answer more queries. The more parameters there are, the bigger the model is and the more energy it uses. Additionally, AI models are constantly running in order to respond to billions of questions daily, using even more energy with every question asked. This results in an increased demand for electricity when we’re currently facing a significant environmental crisis of greenhouse gas emissions from use of fossil fuels for electricity.

Besides electricity, boatloads of water are needed to cool the hardware used when training AI models. AI models are trained inside a data center, a temperature-controlled building that houses computing infrastructure such as servers, data storage drives, and network equipment. Although data centers have been around since the 1940s, generative AI requires seven to eight times more energy than a typical computing workload. Scientists estimate the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2688 megawatts at the end of 2022 to 5341 megawatts at the end of 2023, the year ChatGPT was introduced. Chilled water is used to cool a data center by absorbing heat from computing equipment. It has been estimated that for every kilowatt hour of energy a data center consumes, it would need two liters of water.

It is important for AI users to understand the environmental impacts of AI. An everyday user doesn’t think much about the effects of AI. The quick and easy access to answers and information is enough for most users to lose an incentive to cut back on use. Data centers are impacting local communities’ land-use decisions, water quality, and electricity pricing. If we keep going on this path of AI development, we are on a path towards massive carbon emissions and an unignorable water footprint.

Tips: Finding native plants

Native plants support native wildlife, serving as pillars of their ecosystems. For example, a native oak species can support over 550 caterpillar species in a region, while some non-native species might not support any. So, what might be some ways to find native plants?

• https://web.uri.edu/rinativeplants/: The RI Native Plant Guide has an interactive database, revised in 2024, that allows gardeners to become familiar with Rhode Island’s plants. You can use interactive filters and find important information about each plant, such as its mature height and whether or not it’s a habitat for pollinators.

• https://nativeplantfinder.nwf.org/Plants: The National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder has a large listing that allows you to save your favorite varieties.

• https://www.audubon.org/native-plants: Audubon’s native plant finder allows you to find plants specifically to attract local birds.

What’s your favorite source of info for native plants? Let us know!