This is the same test I've been running across this series. In writing about Pakistan's grassroots solar boom and later about decentralized solar routing around colonial-style financing in Africa, the throughline was that neocolonialism in energy was never really about the fuel source. It was about who controls financing, ownership, and the terms of dependency. Mexico answered that question by locking state ownership into law, keeping CFE at a mandatory 54 percent stake in every generation project rather than opening the grid to whoever shows up with a checkbook. Indonesia is the biggest test case yet, because the country is trying to buy its way out of a resource-extraction relationship in real time, and the results so far are unfortunately a bit mixed.

In 2014, Indonesia banned raw nickel ore exports. It later tightened the ban in 2020. The logic is fairly straightforward: stop shipping cheap ore overseas and force processing, refining, and eventually battery and EV manufacturing to happen at home to spur on further economic development. President Prabowo Subianto has kept doubling down, breaking ground this spring on 13 new processing projects worth $7.2 billion.

By some measures, it worked. Nickel's export value climbed from roughly 17 trillion to 510 trillion rupiah under the policy, and foreign direct investment jumped more than 40 percent in a single year during the ramp-up. Korean industrial giants Hyundai and LG opened Indonesia's first EV battery cell plant in 2024, linking mineral extraction to component manufacturing in one place for the first time.

But here's the catch, and it's the same catch that shows up in every version of this development story I've covered: building the processing capacity is not the same as actually owning it. Chinese firms control roughly 75 percent of Indonesia's nickel refining capacity, supply most of the heavy machinery, and sulfuric acid the smelters run on. If the smelters are owned by overseas entities, how much of the profit truly stays at home?

Beyond just this, there’s an unfortunate dependency risk to the new developments when building your economy around a specific industry. When sulfur faced a shortage this spring (tied to shipping disruptions in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz) Indonesian battery producers had to cut output dramatically.

Of course, this type of dependency risk isn’t something new for developing nations (just look at how the aforementioned Middle East nations faired with oil dependency and then, now, looking to transition away). What matters more, is how the cost of such an endeavor will fall if the profits aren’t being reaped at home. Unfortunately for Indonesia, it seems the costs are falling disproportionately on the local people, not on the foreign capital financing it. More than three-quarters of the country’s on-site industrial power comes from coal plants: dedicated, off-grid stations built specifically to run smelters, invisible in energy transition accounting because they technically don’t touch the national grid. Nickel industry air pollution is projected to cause nearly 5,000 premature deaths annually by 2030, at an estimated yearly cost of $2.6 to $3.4 billion. Every ton of nickel produced releases an average of 93 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, and nickel processing alone accounted for 22 percent of Indonesia’s industrial and energy emissions in 2023.

Meanwhile, the impressive investment and export numbers shrink considerably once you take a look under the hood. Moody’s cut Indonesia’s sovereign outlook to negative in February, Fitch followed in March, and both cited weakening policy predictability, and there’s a longer-term risk sitting underneath all of it: global battery chemistry is shifting toward lithium-iron-phosphate formulations that need no nickel at all. Indonesia could finish building out this entire industrial base just as the market it’s built for starts to shrink, trapping the nation in industrial decline and mountains of debt with none of the large corporations built up to pivot to new industries through R&D budgets, since it is largely developed via foreign corporations.

This is the previously mentioned neo-colonial dependency trap in a slightly different set of clothes: localized costs & negative externalities, foreign-controlled profits, and a financing structure that locks in the relationship of dependency on foreign direct investment. Nigeria and Rwanda broke that pattern by decentralizing ownership of systems. Mexico broke it by writing a state ownership floor into its constitution. Indonesia can’t do either, now. You cannot decentralize a nickel smelter to household level, and Jakarta can’t simply legislate Chinese capital and machinery out of an industry it built with that capital and machinery in the first place as it would lose the market it sells to.

Indonesia’s situation is worth watching because the state is actively trying to change this, not just accept its fate. Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund Indonesia’s President Prabowo established in February 2025, has become the vehicle for that attempt. Its approach so far has been to diversify partners rather than pick a single champion. In 2025, Danantara signed a memorandum with France’s Eramet to build an integrated nickel-to-battery platform, including a stake in the Weda Bay processing complex currently majority-owned by China’s Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt. Months later, it signed a separate deal with China’s GEM for a $1.42 billion smelter. Playing both sides of the geopolitical game behind batteries isn’t indecision: it’s the closest thing to leverage Indonesia can get.

The big move that Indonesia is trying to make was forming a new state entity called PT Danantara Sumberdaya Indonesia, which is centralizing exports of strategic commodities: coal, palm oil, ferroalloys, and now nickel-linked products. This is done so contracts, pricing, and foreign-exchange receipts run through a single state channel. The explicit goal is closing the leakage of profits that let foreign partners extract value. It’s a realization that Indonesia’s real problem was never the resource or technical know-how. Rather, it was a tale as old as time. Simply foreign entities finding creative accounting for monetary gain.

Still, none of these new initiatives will work in improving the everyday living conditions of regular folks if the power feeding these smelters stays coal. Indonesia’s renewable potential is enormous and almost entirely untapped: the Institute for Essential Services Reform puts the country’s solar potential alone at nearly 6,750 gigawatts. Yet, coal capacity, the off-grid plants purpose-built for industrial sites, is on track to roughly double by the end of this year to over 11 gigawatts, and industry analysts expect total captive coal capacity to reach 26.2 gigawatts, nearly matching Vietnam’s entire coal fleet. Every one of those plants represents a loophole: they sit outside the national electricity plan, outside the Just Energy Transition Partnership targets, and outside the accountability structures that are supposed to govern the nation’s transition.

This is the same fork in the road that we saw with the Philippines’ dual-track energy transition: liberalized foreign capital chasing large-scale generation on one track, distributed and locally accountable power on the other, with the outcome depending entirely on which track actually could get any form of financing. Indonesia’s archipelago geography makes the distributed case even stronger than the Philippines’: island grids far from Java’s transmission lines are exactly where captive coal fills a gap that decentralized solar could. If the political and economic will was there.

In the end, what does a hub actually need, and is it worth it?

Indonesia has the mineral base. It has real, if imperfect, momentum on diversifying who owns its downstream industries. What it doesn’t have yet is proof that the value will stay at home, the power will get cleaner, or the industry can survive a battery chemistry shift. Danantara and the DSI export channel are Indonesia’s own answer to the same question every other country in this series has had to answer: how can we find some leverage to keep some value at home. It’s a weaker hand than Mexico’s and a slower one than Pakistan’s, but for the first time in a while, it’s actually Indonesia’s hand to play. Whether it holds true, determines if the nation will be a foot-note in the green transition or the future hub of batteries.

That phrase, “pothole politics,” has become the defining shorthand for Mamdani’s first year in office. At his 100-day rally in April, he framed it explicitly as an update to “sewer socialism,” the early-20th-century Milwaukee tradition of socialist mayors who won trust by running clean, competent municipal services before anything else. Government, he said, should be “not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork to fix the problems of this city no matter their size.”

Mamdani campaigned on a genuinely ambitious platform: free buses, city-owned grocery stores, a democratic-socialist policy agenda that made him a lightning rod nationally for both praise and disdain. Plenty of politicians who run on big ideas spend their first year in office defending those ideas against the reality of diverse political opinion. Mamdani has instead spent it filling holes in the road, thanking 311 call center staff in person, and building a reputation for showing up on the very issues he campaigned on.

Legitimacy is Built in the Streets

The pattern here isn’t really about potholes. It’s simply about sequencing events. Mamdani’s administration has treated basic service delivery as the precondition for pursuing structural change. By his 100-day mark, DOT crews had repaired more than 102,000 potholes (the fastest opening pace in over a decade) while the administration also moved on permanent housing court protections, a state pied-à-terre tax on second homes, and the first sites for city-owned grocery stores.

The theory of the case, laid out by Mamdani and Port Authority Executive Director Kathryn Garcia at a Regional Plan Association event in May, is that public trust in ambitious policy is downstream of public trust in basic competence of governance. If a city can’t keep its streets at the very minimum passable, voters have little reason to believe it can manage a public grocery chain or a universal childcare rollout. Fix the small, visible things first, and the credibility you earn gets spent on the harder stuff.

This governance lesson travels well beyond just the shiny skyline of New York, and it’s something that anyone who’s spent time frustrated by climate and housing policy stalling out at the local level should look at: ambition without visible follow-through erodes faith in government’s basic capacity, and that erosion eventually swallows the ambitious agenda. The mayors and city councils doing the best work on decarbonization right now are mostly the ones who’ve also gotten disciplined about trash pickup, transit schedules, and road maintenance in the first place.

It’s this execution-first instinct, more than the socialist policy platform that made Mamdani famous in the first place, that other cities should now be studying. A recent Governing profile makes this case abundantly clear: five months into his term, with the free-bus plan still unrealized and public grocery stores still unbuilt, Mamdani has become a national reference point mainly because he’s shown that a big, complex city can be run competently. Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell, who won voters over on transit funding only after establishing a back-to-basics track record, put the logic plainly to Governing: getting the core, chartered functions of local government right is what builds the trust to attempt anything bigger. Toronto’s city council is now borrowing the public-grocery-store idea outright, and a majority of New Yorkers, per Marist polling on his first 100 days, appear to believe he means it when he frames pothole repair as part of a larger commitment to a dignified life for working people. Mamdani himself put it about as clearly as the argument can be made: a government that can’t fix a pothole or a streetlight has no credibility asking to be trusted with the housing crisis or the cost of living.

Underneath the pothole-politics branding, a fair amount of Mamdani’s practical, show-up-and-fix-it governing style is showing up in climate and resilience policy specifically.

The administration marked Earth Day by releasing a NYCHA sustainability agenda that ties public housing investment directly to emissions reductions (heat pumps, solar tax abatements, high-efficiency fixtures) with the explicit argument that lower utility bills and cleaner air are the same affordability project, not competing priorities. NYC DOT has been widening protected bike lanes on corridors like Sixth Avenue, expanded the bike network ahead of this summer’s World Cup, and opened EV fast-charging infrastructure in Queens. None of it is headline-grabbing on its own. Yet, every little incremental change adds up, and all of it is the connective tissue between big decarbonization goals and the daily experience of getting around the city.

Last week’s piece argued that the most important climate summit this year isn’t COP, it’s your city council meeting, and laid out four levers ordinary residents can actually pull: tactical urbanism, protected bike lanes advocacy, well-sited green space, and zoning reform advocacy that treats housing choice as climate policy. The thesis was that resilience work isn’t just an environmental science problem, but rather it’s a permitting problem, a zoning problem, a paint-and-planter problem, decided by planning commissions and public works departments.

Mamdani’s first year is that thesis running at the scale of eight million people. Every lever from that piece has a direct analog in what’s actually happened in New York this year, not as coincidence but because they’re the same insight applied by different people.

What Mamdani adds to the previous articles framework isn’t a fifth lever, it’s an argument for why the first four work politically. Our piece said residents have to show up to the meetings where these tools get allocated. Mamdani’s bet is that a government visibly good at the small stuff earns the standing to ask for that same public patience and turnout on the harder fights, whether that’s a zoning change or a $124.7 billion budget. Perhaps there’s another echo of Paul Wellstone’s line from last week’s piece, about not really standing for the things you won’t fight hard for, applying as much to City Hall as it does to any resident deciding whether they should show up.

How to get involved where you live

The four levers from last week’s piece are still, like I said before, an actual to-do list for folks that want to advocate green policies locally. Yet, I could not in good conscious shy away from what good governance does or where it comes from. A few ways to advocate for this at your own city, informed by what’s working in New York:

• Find your city’s demonstration-project or quick-build program and propose a block. Tactical urbanism works precisely because it sidesteps the multi-year planning cycle, and a summer of proof is harder for a city council to ignore than a proposal.

• Push for protected, not painted, bike infrastructure at your next planning commission or DOT public comment period. The design choice, curbs, bollards, physical separation, is what actually shifts ridership, and it’s a specific, winnable ask compared to “more bike lanes.”

• Look top your city’s tree canopy, and show up when it’s discussed. Green space sited in historically neglected, heat-exposed neighborhoods does more collective good than the trees added where canopy already exists.

• Track whether your city is sequencing zoning reform the way Cambridge did: resilience standards first, density second. That order makes housing reform easier to sell, and it’s worth asking for by name at a council meeting.

• Judge your own city hall by the small stuff first, the way Mamdani is inviting New Yorkers to judge his. A responsive pothole line or streetlight repair system is a low-effort test of whether the basic service loop works, and a reasonable proxy for whether it can be trusted with the bigger fights.

The through-line connecting both pieces is pretty simple at the end of the day: climate progress at the local level rarely doesn’t really brand itself as climate policy. It looks like filled potholes, protected bike lanes, a public housing authority installing heat pumps, and a zoning map that provides affordable housing. The meetings where that gets decided are still the most important climate summit most of us will have access to this year, and supporting (and holding accountable) politicians who deliver on those promises is what truly can make a difference.

In late July, the city announced it had installed 1,066 energy-efficient air conditioning units for residents at properties run by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles. The rollout is part of the Heat Mitigation Home Improvement Program, a partnership between the Mayor’s Office, HACLA, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. LADWP’s Cool LA initiative (love the name) supplies the rebates that let the city buy units in bulk, which brings the cost down and speeds up installation across public housing.

That detail, buying in bulk, matters more than it sounds like it should. Climate plans are full of plenty of target dates for 2030 and 2045. An air conditioner installed this month in a HACLA unit is not really just a target. It’s something that can reduce heat stress for folks, in a building where someone used to sit through August with a box fan and a wet towel trying to cool down.

Bass made the announcement at Nickerson Gardens with Congresswoman Maxine Waters and leadership from HACLA and LADWP on hand, which tells you the administration wants this framed as a headline achievement for the city. The timing is worth noting, of course: Bass is heading into a November runoff after a bruising primary and a wildfire response that dented her approval numbers, which gives any sitting mayor reason to make good news as visible as possible before voters decide if they get the boot or not. That doesn’t make this initiative any less important, but it’s a reason to keep watching past election day (regardless of who wins), when the incentive to generate headlines fades and the incentive to quietly under-deliver does not.

The politics of that are obvious enough. The substance is that Los Angeles has one of the largest public housing stocks in the country sitting in a city where summer heat is getting longer and harsher, and a lot of those units did not have working central air until very recently.

To run point on all this, Bass appointed Daniela Simunovic as the city’s first Chief Heat Officer, a role that also has her leading the Climate Emergency and Mobilization Office. Simunovic comes in with more than two decades of environmental justice and climate work in California, which is the right resume for a job that is essentially about triage: deciding which neighborhoods get shade structures, cooling centers, and AC rebates first, and building a decision making process so that actions don’t have to be taken from scratch after every heat wave.

Cities creating heat officer positions is nothing new, though. Phoenix and Miami both have one. What is worth watching in LA is whether the office has actual budget authority or just a convening power. A coordinator without a checkbook tends to simply produce a lot of high quality reports. A coordinator with a checkbook produces benefits for a cities population. It’s the same test I applied to Chicago’s Green Infrastructure Strategy: rewilding vacant lots is a genuinely good idea, but it only becomes resilience infrastructure once someone with authority makes it happen.

Further out on the timeline, LA is folding heat into its Citywide Resilience Element, formerly the Safety Element, as part of the broader General Plan update. The most concrete piece of that so far is a pilot near the Sherman Way Orange Line station in Canoga Park, where planners have been testing street designs that cut heat exposure while making the walk to the bus rapid transit stop safer and more comfortable. Think shade trees, cool pavement, and better first-mile, last-mile connections, all built onto a corridor that gets, to be frank, brutally hot in the summer.

The point of doing this at one station is to build a template (as we talked about last week with individual actions). If the interventions work and the cost pencils out, the city has a playbook it can copy across dozens of other transit stops in neighborhoods that share the same problem: heat and transit dependency overlapping in exactly the places with the least tree canopy to buffer either one.

The research case for spending money this way comes largely from the Los Angeles Urban Cooling Collaborative, a partnership led by TreePeople. Their modeling found that roughly one in four deaths currently occurring during LA heat waves could be prevented through interventions like expanded tree canopy and more reflective surfaces, with the benefit concentrated heavily in low-income communities and communities of color. The demographic pattern behind that number is consistent across every study on this: older residents, Black and Latino communities, and people without reliable air conditioning bear the disproportionate weight of extreme heat in LA, largely because those are the same neighborhoods that got fewer trees, more asphalt, and older housing stock going back decades. The Cool LA Initiative and the Sherman Way pilot are both aimed, deliberately, at that overlap. It’s a familiar equity map: the same overlap between disinvestment and heat exposure that drove tree-canopy targeting in Atlanta and shaped which Chicago blocks got picked first for green infrastructure.

A plan with 50 measurable actions is easy to announce and frankly, hard to audit. The things worth tracking over the next year are concrete, though: how many more AC units get installed beyond the first 1,066, whether the Sherman Way pilot’s design elements actually get funded and built rather than just modeled, and whether the Chief Heat Officer’s office starts publishing the kind of neighborhood-level heat vulnerability data that would let residents and reporters check the city’s work. Los Angeles has made a credible start on the path to building a city for a changing climate. The next test is whether the follow-through matches the announcements: the same test cities around the world are currently running.

Then came the Omnibus bill.

By February 2026, the EU had rewritten large parts of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, sometimes called CS3D or CS-triple-D) before it ever took effect. The law survived, barely, and it came out a bit smaller. Here’s what’s actually left.

Strip away the acronym and CSDDD is a due diligence law at its heart. It requires large companies to identify and fix harm across five key areas:

• Supplier labor conditions: wages, safety, hours, the right to organize.

• Child labor: finding it in the supply chain and getting it out.

• Deforestation risk: land conversion tied to sourcing, especially soy, palm oil, and timber.

• Environmental pollution: soil contamination, water pollution, harmful emissions.

• Responsible sourcing: the contracts, audits, and supplier codes that make the first four enforceable instead of aspirational.

None of this is new territory. Companies have had voluntary codes of conduct for decades. What’s new: this is now a legal duty, not just some nice press release and promise.

The original 2024 threshold was EU companies with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million in worldwide turnover, plus non-EU companies pulling in €450 million inside the EU [HFW, 2024]. The Omnibus reforms, finalized in December 2025, tripled that bar: more than 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in global turnover for EU companies, and €1.5 billion in EU turnover for non-EU companies [AWE Blog, 2026].

That’s a lot of mid-size multinationals suddenly out of the direct scope of the bill. But “out of direct scope” doesn’t mean “completely unaffected.” Non-EU companies still get pulled in two ways: through their own EU revenue (if it clears the bar), or indirectly, because an EU company that is in scope will push due diligence requirements down through its supplier contracts. If your customer answers to Brussels, you’re doing this work too. Nobody asked you. Your purchase order just makes it obligatory.

What Brussels cut

The thresholds got the headlines, but unfortunately, the structural cuts to the bill matter much more:

No more forced contract termination. The original law said companies had to end a business relationship, as a last resort, if there was no realistic path to fixing an adverse impact. That requirement is gone.

The EU-wide civil liability regime is gone. Companies can still be sued. But the harmonized liability standard that would have made cross-border claims simpler got stripped out

Climate transition plans got scaled back. The original CSDDD required in-scope companies to adopt a climate transition plan aligned with the 1.5°C target, with 2030 targets and five-year checkpoints out to 2050. That standalone obligation is deleted.

Entity-by-entity mapping is out. Risk-based scoping is in. Companies no longer have to map every business partner across every tier of their supply chain. They run a scoping exercise instead and put resources where the risk is highest. This is the change that actually reshapes how compliance teams build their programs: less spreadsheet, more triage.

Here’s the part worth circling on the calendar, though:

• Member states transpose the directive into national law by July 26, 2028.

• In-scope companies must comply by July 26, 2029. One date for everyone now, instead of the original staggered rollout.

• First annual due diligence statements, published on company websites, cover financial years starting on or after January 1, 2030.

• The European Commission has to publish its first compliance guidelines by July 2027.

Three years out, and the rulebook on how to comply basically isn’t due for another year. That sounds like breathing room, but it isn’t, not really. Companies that wait until 2028 to start mapping supplier risk will be building a compliance program from zero under a hard deadline. The ones that start now will have three annual cycles to find the gaps before the law can fine them for having gaps in the first place.

CSDDD is the default regime, now, but not the only one. The Deforestation Regulation, the Conflict Minerals Regulation, the Forced Labour Regulation, and the Sustainable Batteries Regulation all take precedence where they overlap. A company sourcing palm oil or timber is already doing deforestation due diligence under a different law. CSDDD compliance there mostly means not duplicating work that’s already required under other legislation.

CSDDD survived the Omnibus fight, but it came out lighter: fewer companies covered, less legal exposure, a due diligence process built around prioritizing risk instead of mapping everything. The five core areas: labor conditions, child labor, deforestation, pollution, and sourcing accountability, are still the spine of the law. What changed is how hard companies have to work to prove they’re taking it seriously, and how much they stand to lose if they don’t. Hopefully, once all is said and done, the law will prove to still have some teeth.

So the Philippines is trying two different things to solve that vulnerability.

At the national level, the government fully opened its renewable energy sector to foreign capital. At the barangay level (the smallest form of government on the island chain), thousands of individual communities are building small, disconnected solar-and-battery systems designed to survive future storms that keep leveling the national grid. One track chases scale by inviting the outside world into the island nation. The other chases resilience by ensuring the community can survive without the outside world out entirely. Both are running right now, in the same country, aimed at the same problem: a coal-heavy, centralized system that keeps failing when it matters most.

I’ve written before about how most of the developing world’s energy history has followed the same basic pattern: a foreign company or nation finances an energy plant, dictates the terms of service, and the debt incurred by the hosting nation survives even when the power wasn’t delivered in full. Mexico’s answer was to lock the state into majority ownership of every project by constitutional amendment. Nigeria and Rwanda’s answer was to skip the national grid altogether and let villages own their own systems outright.

The Philippines picked neither of these options. In November 2022, the Department of Energy issued a ruling opening the entire renewable sector to 100 percent foreign ownership, removing a rule that had capped foreign equity in solar, wind, hydro, and tidal projects at 40 percent for over a decade. The Department of Justice backed the move with a genuinely creative bit of constitutional reasoning: the charter’s restriction on foreign ownership of natural resources applies to “potential energy,” and sunlight and wind, the DOJ argued, are technically kinetic, not potential, so the restriction never applied to them in the first place.

Whatever you think of the legal gymnastics and wordplay, the intent was straightforward: get foreign capital into the country as fast as possible, on foreign terms, because the country needs it to shore up its electricity grid. The DOE’s fourth renewables auction this year is offering up to 10.5 GW of new capacity, and the government has been fast-tracking projects hard enough to bring 1,471 MW online in a single month this spring. It’s working, at least by the metric of capacity added: solar additions outpaced new gas capacity in 2024, and coal generation is now falling for the first time in decades, a shift analysts increasingly credit to renewables rather than the LNG buildout that’s gotten most of the press.

There’s a catch that keeps this from being a clean handoff. Foreign-owned project companies still can’t own the land their solar farms sit on; that restriction is constitutional and untouched by the 2022 circular ruling. So the typical structure is a long-term lease from a Filipino landowner, sometimes paired with a usufruct arrangement. It’s a smaller check on foreign control than the previously mentioned 54 percent state stake, but it’s not nothing: whoever owns the panels still answers to whoever owns the ground underneath them.

Unfortunately, coal power isn’t being retired fast enough

Coal is still the backbone of the nation’s energy system, unfortunately, though. It made up 56 percent of generation in 2025, and the country has more total dependable capacity, nearly 28 GW against nineteen GW of peak demand, than it knows what to do with, while still suffering regular outages. The issue isn’t a shortage of power plants. It’s that two-thirds of that capacity is rigid baseload coal, forced to ramp up and down every day to follow demand it was never designed to follow, which wears the plants out faster and makes the whole system less reliable, not more.

Without early retirement, the Philippines’ coal fleet is on track to retire naturally sometime between 2047 and 2051. The government’s own energy secretary has put the cost of retrofitting or phasing out that fleet at up to $500 billion. In late 2025, the country started piloting “transition credits,” a new instrument meant to fund early coal retirement by monetizing the emissions the closure prevents. It’s unfortunately the kind of financing workaround you’d expect from a government that liberalized ownership and now needs to foot the bill for shutting down assets folks shouldn’t keep running.

While all that plays out at the national level, a completely different transition is happening at the local level, and it has basically nothing to do with any foreign investment laws.

The Microgrid Systems Act of 2022 let private developers build and operate small, independent solar-and-battery systems in off-grid communities without needing a congressional franchise, just clearance from the Energy Regulatory Commission. The pitch isn’t really about generation cost. It’s about what happens when a typhoon warning goes up. Generator-run municipalities lose fuel supply within 12 to 24 hours once the roads flood or the delivery trucks can’t get through; a solar-and-battery system just keeps running because it has no fuel dependency to interrupt in the first place. UNDP Philippines flagged this back in 2021: solar microgrids at evacuation centers meant covered courts stayed lit through blackouts that killed grid power for days.

The government has leaned into this directly rather than waiting for private developers to get there. It’s deployed Mobile Energy Storage units, essentially solar-and-battery systems on wheels, to disaster zones in Cagayan and remote parts of Palawan, powering command centers and hospitals within hours of a storm passing rather than the weeks it can take to restring downed transmission lines across an archipelago. And the engineering culture around this is genuinely different from what you’d see in a stable climate: Philippine solar installations are increasingly designed to trade some energy-capture efficiency for structural survival, because a farm that generates less power but is still standing after a supertyphoon beats one optimized for output that gets flattened in the first strong gust.

What’s interesting here isn’t that the Philippines picked a side between top-down liberalized development or bottom-up local government development. It’s that it didn’t. The national government is betting that opening the door to foreign capital is the fastest way to add gigawatts and finally bend the coal curve down. Individual municipalities are betting that the only real defense against a storm that takes out the national grid is a system small enough, and local enough, to not need the national grid at all.

Both bets are really answers to the same question I keep circling back to in this newsletter: who benefits once the money is spent and the storm that folks were preparing for arrives?

The Philippines is betting it doesn’t have to choose. Fast-track the capital at the top. Build out redundancy at the bottom. Whether that adds up to a country that’s actually more resilient by the time the next Typhoon Rai makes landfall is still an open question, one that depends less on solar panel costs at this point and more on whether the financing and the build-out keeps moving at the pace severe storms are setting.

Unfortunately for all the fanfare of 2022, here’s the number that tells you how far “breakthrough” and “adequate” still are from each other. As of mid-March, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage had pledges totaling $822 million of which about half of has actually been transferred. The fund’s first operational grant window is $250 million, with individual projects capped at $20 million. money that’s supposed to help countries rebuild after cyclones, floods, and slow-motion disasters like sea-level rise and desertification. Climate advocates working on the fund have put the comparison plainly: the money pledged so far covers a small fraction of one percent of what loss and damage actually costs every year.

To put that in perspective with just one country: Malawi’s recovery needs from four major disasters since 2015 (including Cyclone Freddy, which killed over 1,200 people and displaced half a million in 2023) add up to $1.7 billion, more than a quarter of the country’s entire national budget. One country’s bill is more than double what the entire global fund has managed to collect. At the end of the day, the bill for just one of these disasters would exhaust the Fund’s existing resources many times over.

Charity, not repair

The fund’s architecture is voluntary by design, which in and of itself tells you plenty regarding why the amount has been so far below expectations: Nobody is obligated to pay into it. France and Germany are the largest donors so far, at roughly $111 million and $98 million respectively. The United States, under the Biden administration, had pledged $17.5 million (itself a rather token sum for the country with the largest cumulative historical emissions on Earth). Then in early 2025, the Trump administration walked that pledge back entirely removing any hope for the measly amount previously proposed. At COP30 in Belém last year, the fund got exactly one new pledge, from Spain. That’s the trend line right now: not growing, unfortunately, holding roughly flat, with the country most responsible for the problem opting out.

Two contributors deserve special scrutiny here. China has pledged nothing to the fund at all. It still claims "developing country" status under a UN framework written in the 1990s, a classification that lets the world's second-largest cumulative emitter and current largest annual emitter sit on the sidelines as a potential recipient rather than a payer. That status made sense decades ago. It doesn't anymore, and China's government knows it, which is exactly why it isn't volunteering to update it.

Then there's the UK, the country where industrial fossil-fuel burning effectively started and which remains among the largest cumulative emitters on Earth two centuries later. Britain's opening pledge came to roughly £60 million, and advocacy groups at the time called it out for being repackaged from existing aid commitments rather than new money. A country whose entire economic rise was built on the emissions this fund exists to address showed up with about 5% of the funding: for just Malawi’s hurricane recovery needs in 2023.

This is the same pattern I wrote about last week covering development financing in the Global South a mechanism nominally designed to correct a historical imbalance, but structured so that the countries who caused the imbalance retain full discretion over whether, when, and how much to contribute. There’s no formula tying pledges to historical emissions, GDP, or anything else. It’s not a bill. It’s a request.

Loss and damage financing is the most morally stark piece of a much larger financing shortfall. At COP29, countries agreed to a New Collective Quantified Goal that calls on developed countries to mobilize at least $300 billion a year for developing nations by 2035, inside a wider push to scale up total climate finance to $1.3 trillion annually. That $300 billion figure sounds significant until you look at what independent analysts think is actually needed. UN Trade and Development has argued the real target should be closer to $900 billion starting now, climbing toward $1.46 trillion by 2030: roughly triple what was agreed.

Adaptation money, the category that funds things like sea walls, drought-resistant crops, and early warning systems, is in even worse shape. International adaptation finance to developing countries was $36 billion in 2023, just 18 percent of total climate finance flows, against an estimated need of $300 to $400 billion a year. Mitigation projects, the kind that generate returns and attract private investors, get funded. Adaptation and loss & damage, which mostly protect poor people who can’t offer a return on investment, don’t.

There’s an unfortunate second financing story tangled up in this one, and it complicates the easy version of the narrative. Under the Paris Agreement, countries were supposed to submit new 2035 emissions targets (Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs) by February 2025. Only 13 countries, about seven percent of signatories, hit that deadline. By this March, 104 of the 180 parties with an active NDC had eventually filed one. The plans that have come in aren’t close to sufficient: collectively they’d only cut emissions 8 to 9 percent by 2035 compared to 2019 levels, leaving a gap of roughly 24 gigatons of CO2-equivalent between where the world is headed and where it needs to be for 1.5°C.

There’s an interesting wrinkle to all of this: the countries still missing aren’t primarily the big emitters stonewalling out of self-interest anymore. By this spring, the holdouts were mostly smaller, poorer countries, with Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina, and the Philippines the largest emitters among them (albeit a few quickly developing nations). Writing a credible NDC takes technical capacity, modeling infrastructure, and staff time that wealthy environment ministries have and cash-strapped developing nations don’t. So the same countries being asked to wait indefinitely for loss and damage money are also the ones structurally least equipped to participate fully in the process that’s supposed to unlock it. The whole system assumes every country arrives at the table with roughly the same institutional capacity to plan, model, and negotiate. They don’t, and the gap tracks with wealth almost exactly.

What to watch at Antalya

COP31 runs November 9 to 20 in Antalya, Turkey, under an unusual arrangement where Turkey holds the formal presidency while Australia’s climate minister leads the actual negotiations: this compromise ended a three-year hosting fight between the two countries. Loss and damage will be a genuine test of whether COP30’s momentum in Belém was real or just a new development blip. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage is supposed to have its resource mobilization strategy in motion by then, and advocates are pushing hard for the fund to expand its donor base and move toward mandatory, formula-based contributions rather than one-off pledges announced for headlines.

Frankly, don’t expect a breakthrough. The structural problem isn’t a communications problem or a scheduling problem: it’s that the entire architecture treats climate reparations as optional generosity from the countries that caused the damage, extended at their convenience, in amounts they choose, on a timeline they set. Until the framing shifts from charity to obligations due to past and current damages, the fund will keep announcing pledges that sound impressive in a press release but fail to provide a meaningful impact to those that most need it.

Footnote: This financing gap isn’t abstract for the countries waiting on it, and some nations are already making choices no functioning aid system should force on them. Tuvalu is currently running two survival strategies at once: pumping sand behind seawalls to raise its land above projected sea levels, and running a visa lottery that could relocate a quarter of its population to Australia. Neither option was really a choice the country got to make freely, and both underline the same point running through this piece: the nations with the least responsibility for the climate crisis are the ones stuck negotiating the terms of their own survival, on financing that has yet to arrive.

It’s worth looking at just how overdue this type of assessment was. Australia is arguably the world’s most exposed advanced economy situated on an entire continent of drought, cyclone, bushfire, and flood risk wrapped around a population clustered on a few vulnerable coastlines. The risk assessment, built by the Australian Climate Service (a partnership of the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, the Bureau of Statistics, and Geoscience Australia), identifies priority risks across seven systems: economy, infrastructure, natural environment, health, communities, national security, and governance. It also includes, for the first time, risks specific to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, developed through dedicated engagement with those communities.

The findings aren’t exactly rosy. Sea-level rise threatens a growing number of residential and commercial buildings on multiple timelines out to 2100. Heatwaves, flood-driven disruption to freight corridors, and lengthening droughts all show up as top-tier risks, and (a detail that tends to get less attention than fire and flood) the assessment finds health risks escalate sharply without stronger adaptation, with knock-on effects for labor productivity that make this as much an economic story as an environmental one.

The National Adaptation Plan is the policy response: a framework for how federal, state, and territory governments coordinate action, built around the same seven systems. It points to work already underway: Australia’s first National Health and Climate Strategy, a National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, and the Disaster Ready Fund, the government’s flagship resilience-financing vehicle.

The Disaster Ready Fund is where the plan’s ambition runs into arithmetic. It commits up to $200 million a year, matched by states and territories, toward mitigation projects (flood levees, fire-resistant retrofits, early-warning systems) through 2028. That’s real money, and four funding rounds in, it’s financed hundreds of projects across every state and territory. But it replaced an earlier fund, the Emergency Response Fund, that critics say badly underdelivered its original promises: legislated with $4 billion in seed capital and a mandate to release $150 million a year, it had disbursed only a fraction of that by the time the 2022 east coast floods hit, even as it quietly earned hundreds of millions in interest. The renamed, better-funded successor was explicitly a course correction.

Even so, the scale gap is stark. The Insurance Council of Australia estimates the country needs to invest roughly $1.8 billion a year in disaster resilience by 2050 to keep pace with ever worsening risks. The current fund, at $200 million annually, covers roughly a ninth of that. This is the pattern that shows up in resilience policy everywhere, Chicago’s green infrastructure strategy, Atlanta’s Climate Resilient ATL, New York’s coastal defenses, where the first real planning document is also the first real acknowledgment that the price tag is bigger than what is being budgeted for. Australia has now had that acknowledgment nationally, on paper, for about a year.

If the risk assessment is the diagnosis, Australia’s insurance market is where the disease is already symptomatic. The Climate Council has estimated that one in 25 homes and commercial buildings nationally will become effectively uninsurable by 2030, with river flooding driving the majority of that risk and bushfire and flash flooding accounting for a good chunk of the rest. Queensland carries a disproportionate share: five of the ten most exposed federal electorates nationally are there, and in some local government areas, like Greater Shepparton in Victoria, more than half of properties are projected to be uninsurable within the end of the decade.

The regulatory data backs this up from a different angle. The prudential regulator APRA has found that about one in seven Australian homes is currently uninsured, a figure it projects could rise to one in four by 2050, an additional million households, with the protection gap in rural areas exceeding 40 percent under some scenarios. New South Wales and Queensland alone account for roughly 60 percent of uninsured households nationally, both now and in the 2050 projection. Between 2010 and 2025, home insurance premiums rose at more than double the rate of wages making it financially inaccessible to receive insurance on homes in an increasingly expensive housing market.

What’s notable is who’s now making the case that emissions policy alone won’t fix this. In August 2026, the Insurance Council of Australia told the Climate Change Authority (the government’s independent climate advisory body) that its policy framework can’t succeed by treating decarbonization as the whole strategy. The industry is asking the CCA to formally track adaptation and risk-reduction progress alongside emissions metrics essentially arguing that a country can hit its climate targets and still watch its housing stock become uninsurable if resilience investment doesn’t happen. It’s a rare instance of an industry, with albeit a direct financial stake, pushing government toward more intervention, not less, and it underscores how adaptation and mitigation have become genuinely separate policy tracks in Australia, each requiring its own funding case.

The timing of Australia’s other big 2025 climate announcement wasn’t an accident, either. Weeks after the risk assessment, the government released its 2035 emissions target: a cut of 62 to 70 percent below 2005 levels, alongside a national Net Zero Plan and six sector-specific decarbonization roadmaps, timed ahead of COP30. The target sits at the lower end of the range the Climate Change Authority had said was achievable, and it reaffirms Australia’s existing 2030 goal (43 percent below 2005 levels) and 2050 net-zero commitment.

Reading the mitigation and adaptation documents together is the point, though. The government’s own framing is that the country can no longer avoid climate impacts already locked in, but the scale of future impact still depends on how fast global emissions come down. This is precisely why an adaptation plan and a net-zero plan were released as a package rather than as separate initiatives years apart, the way they were under prior governments. It’s a more coherent sequencing than most countries manage, including, frankly, the United States.

The National Adaptation Plan itself concedes its central limitation: it’s a framework for coordinating action, not a fully costed delivery plan. The government’s timetable for negotiating an actual adaptation action agenda with the states runs out to 2026, which investor groups have already flagged as too slow given how fast the risk picture is deteriorating. And unlike the emissions target, which comes with a specific number attached, adaptation funding beyond the current Disaster Ready Fund cycle has no equivalent commitment locked in past 2028.

That gap between diagnosis and financing is familiar territory to anyone who’s followed this beat in other countries. Australia has done something genuinely difficult and overdue: it has told itself, in exhaustive and uncomfortable detail, what a warmer future costs in floods, fire, heat, and home values. Whether it spends what that future requires is still an open question, and, per the insurers now lobbying its own climate authority, one the market is no longer willing to wait around for.

Those are all big, city-scale stories: mayors, planning departments, multi-billion-dollar bond measures, but climate resilience gets discussed like it’s exclusively a national or region-wide engineering problem. Sometimes it is, of course, but a huge share of the work, though, happens at the street level, decided by city councils and planning commissions, not by Congress or the IPCC. Zoning boards. Public works departments. Not the most glamorous things to most folks, but if we’re serious about fighting climate change this is where to start. As Paul Wellstone once said, “if we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them.”

So, let’s look into what can be done.

Here are four levers that matter in your local climate fight, and what pulling on them actually looks like.

Tactical Urbanism: Prove It Before the City Builds It

Tactical urbanism is the practice of testing a permanent idea with a temporary intervention: paint in place of concrete, planters instead of permenant curbs, a weekend closure of a street instead of a summer-long shutdown. The C40 Knowledge Hub notes that these short- and medium-term projects are well suited to climate actions promoting walking, cycling, urban greening, and adaptive reuse of underused buildings and land, largely because they go around the multi-year planning cycles that often keep cities from responding fast to changing conditions.

The appeal for resilience work specifically is that it lowers the cost of being wrong. A pop-up cooling plaza with shade structures and misting in a parking lot tells you within a summer whether people will use it or not. Milan used this logic during (and after) the pandemic, converting streets into play space as part of its recovery and adaptation strategy, an approach documented by the Resilient Cities Network. Lima has run a similar program, Limeños al Bicentenario, converting empty and underutilized lots into accessible green infrastructure.

What this means for you: your city almost certainly has a “demonstration project,” “open streets,” or “quick-build” program, even if it’s not called that. These are usually the easiest entry point into local climate advocacy, because they don’t require winning a multi-year fight or withstanding a city council budget vote. You show up, you propose a block or empty lot, you help staff it and improve the place. If it works, it becomes the evidence base for the future permanent version. It’s much harder for a NIMBY to show up and say they don’t want a mixed-use event plaza in place of an empty lot when it has already proven that it works just the summer before.

Bike Paths: The Cheapest Infrastructure Dollar Your City Can Spend

The strongest case in this article is from something most folks might think is a bit unrelated: bike lanes. This is mostly because there is a plethora of information about just how CO2 emissions can be reduced with just bikes. A joint study from ITDP and the FIA Foundation examined protected bike lane networks in Bogotá and Guangzhou and found they prevent roughly 22,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per year in Bogotá and 16,000 tonnes in Guangzhou. The comparison that should embarrass every highway-widening proposal in the US: protected bike lane networks deliver roughly ten times the emissions reduction per dollar spent compared to metro rail systems, and outperform highway spending by an even wider margin.

Design matters more than the presence of a lane at all, though. Research out of the University of New Mexico found that protected and buffered bike lanes drive substantially more bicycle commuting than standard painted lanes, a finding that tracks with earlier survey work showing physically separated lanes attract nearly four times as many riders as streets with no bike infrastructure at all. Something anyone that has taken a bike ride on a busy highway would likely welcome. What this means in practice is rather specific: don’t settle for a just a painted stripe. Push for physical protection, curbs, bollards, planters, or even a grade-separated path, anything that separates a cyclist from a moving car. That’s the design choice that can actually make regular folks make the shift for their morning commutes.

There’s a resilience dividend beyond emissions, too. Transportation Alternatives’ NYC 25x25 campaign points out that less space dominated by cars reduces the urban heat island effect directly, on top of cutting the particulate matter from tire wear-down that drives asthma hospitalizations during heat waves and wildfire smoke events. Asphalt and idling engines are both heat sources. Removing either of these helps prepare your city for a warming future.

Urban Green Space: Location Beats Pure Acreage

The instinct to plant more trees and call it done is understandable albeit a bit incomplete. New research out of Victoria University, examining a 2026 extreme heat event in Melbourne, found that not all green space cools equally: a park’s cooling performance depends heavily on the urban form surrounding it, meaning where a park sits and how it’s enclosed matters just as much as whether it exists in the first place. A separate study out of Guangzhou reached a similar conclusion using land surface temperature data, finding that the distribution and morphology of green space, not just its total coverage, determines its heat-mitigation value, and a Chinese megacity study examined the tradeoff directly: increasing green space coverage lowered average land-surface temperatures by up to 4.73°C, but optimizing the spatial distribution of that same green space produced additional cooling on top of the original coverage gains.

Practically, this argues for a specific kind of civic pressure: not just “more parks,” but parks sited in the neighborhoods with the least tree canopy and the most heat-absorbing pavement, typically lower-income areas that were historically neglected or zoned for industrial use. A tree planted in a leafy neighborhood that already has canopy cover does less collective good than the same tree in a neighborhood that has none. If your city runs a canopy equity map or urban forestry plan, that’s the document that tells you where the next planting round should actually go, and it’s worth showing up to comment on it and advocate for folks that could really use the support.

Encouraging More Housing Choices: The Zoning Fight Is a Climate Fight

This is the least intuitive lever, the hardest to get action on, and arguably the most consequential. Exclusionary zoning, the practice of restricting large swaths of a city to detached single-family homes on large lots, does two things badly at once. First, it forces sprawl, and sprawl is inherently carbon-intensive: residential buildings account for roughly 6% of total US greenhouse gas emissions directly, rising past 16% once indirect electricity emissions are included, and single-family detached housing is the least efficient form per household within that sector. Second, it concentrates the people with the fewest resources to adapt into the neighborhoods with the least tree cover, the most pavement, and the highest flood exposure, a pattern, in the US, that can be traced directly back to redlining and racially restrictive covenants by Enterprise Community Partners, but something that can be seen in other cities around the world as well.

Cambridge, Massachusetts shows what it looks like when a city actually resolves that fight in the resilience-first direction. In February 2023 the city tied its zoning code directly to climate hazards, requiring new development to meet Flood Resilience and Green Factor standards: elevated habitable space above projected floodwater levels, mandatory trees, green roofs, or other heat-mitigating infrastructure. Two years later, per Smart Growth America, Cambridge went further and ended exclusionary zoning outright, allowing multifamily housing up to four stories by-right citywide, six stories where affordable units are included. The sequencing there is rather instructive: climate-resilience standards first, density reform second. It made the density politically easier to sell to folks, because it arrived packaged with visible flood and heat protections rather than as an abstract density mandate that NIMBYs will vehemently fight against.

The lessons learned across all four of these projects is the same: building good climate resilience isn’t a problem that can’t be overcome. It’s a permitting problem, a zoning problem, a paint-and-planter problem. The tools are already there in your city’s public works and planning departments. The question is whether folks are willing to show up to the meetings where they get allocated. After all, it’s your city, and it’s worth fighting to make it a better place. After all, we all do better when we all do better.

Yet, even with such challenges, there is a sense of optimism to be found. A literal light at the end of the tunnel so to say. Africa has 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources and less than 1 percent of current installed solar capacity. This represents a transformative natural gift, and if managed properly, the path to true energy independence and economic freedom.

Almost 600 million people in Africa still lack access to electricity, and more than 900 million still cook with biofuels such as wood. That’s fairly established and agreed upon, but what folks can’t agree on is why it’s still true after decades of “development” financing from foreign nations and multi-national organizations.

For a century, energy development in the Global South has followed a rather basic formula: a foreign company or state decides to finance a power plant, dictates the debt terms, and exports the profits out. Coal and gas plants in Africa are often still financed this way, with the added twist that the debt survives even when the plant doesn’t deliver reliable power.

Part of the answer: the financing itself reproduces colonial extraction patterns rather than breaking them. Large hydrogen and solar megaprojects pitched to North African states, for instance, have been criticized as a new resource grab: the power gets built to serve European energy security, the receiving country takes on the debt and the land-use costs, and the electricity doesn’t end up going to the nations that built it in the first place. A 2025 review of Africa’s energy landscape put it plainly: the continent’s renewable potential is constrained by neocolonial patterns of resource extraction combined with rigid fiscal limits (due to World Bank and IMF loans) and fossil fuel dependency inherited from the same donor groups now writing and sponsoring the climate checks.

Ghana is the clearest current example of what this development model produces. Under IMF-backed programs (originally meant to stabilize the country’s finances) the energy sector’s debt has continued to compound rather than resolving. By mid-2025, Ghana’s cumulative energy-sector liabilities had surpassed $3 billion, most of it owed to independent power producers and fuel suppliers that built and now run the country’s thermal plants. Even as Ghana prepared to exit its IMF Extended Credit Facility program this year, economists warned the energy debt still threatened spending on health and education, because the underlying structure, dollar-denominated power contracts serviced with Ghanan Cedi revenue, never actually changed. The IMF’s own prescription was more of the same medicine: raise tariffs on electricity, renegotiate a few contracts, tighten collections. That treats the debt as a management failure when in reality it is a structural one. Baked into a financing model where the plant, the fuel, and the loan all originate outside the country and get paid for in a currency the country lacks any control over. Solar, and specifically the decentralized, locally owned version of solar, is the first energy technology in a long time that doesn’t require accepting these deals.

Unfortunately, African nations received just about 2 percent of global clean energy investments despite, as previously stated, sitting on some of the best solar and wind resources on the planet. The IEA puts the continent’s real annual financing need at $190 billion through 2030. What it’s getting is not even a rounding error of that amount, while fossil fuel projects elsewhere in the world continue attracting billions in capital that developing nations are told is too risky for them.

Centralized power, whether coal, gas, or a mega-hydro dam, needs a grid, a national utility. Usually a foreign lender or multinational construction company will be standing behind all of it. That’s the underlying point where control gets exercised: whoever finances the plant sets the terms and receives the paychecks once it is done. Sure, a nation may receive billions in financing on paper, but if the company building this project is Australian and the electricity company running it is French, the money that flowed into the developing nation will ultimately flow right back out to these international conglomerates.

Decentralized solar routes around this by its inherent design. A mini-grid or a solar home system doesn’t need the national transmission network to exist first. It can be financed, built, and owned at the village or household level providing off-grid capabilities. We can even see that off-grid solar now serves more than 400 million people worldwide, and in Africa specifically, 62 mini-grids are fully operational with another 28 under construction. The World Bank projects mini-grids could reach 380 million Africans by 2030.

Nigeria, Rwanda, and Tanzania are the current proof of this concept working. Companies like M-KOPA, Bboxx, and d.light have built profitable businesses selling solar directly to households on pay-as-you-go terms, no state utility or foreign concessional loan required for the transaction to happen. That’s a fundamental change in type of power relationship than the stereotypical 25-year power purchase agreement negotiated between foreign utilities and finance ministries.

Yet, it’s falling costs that make this relationship possible in the first place, and as I previously wrote, Pakistan is the sharpest example of what happens once the price crosses a threshold. With no state solar program and no subsidy campaign, ordinary households simply started buying panels: cumulative imports went from under a gigawatt in 2018 to more than 51 gigawatts by early 2026, and by summer 2025 solar had become the country’s single largest source of electricity at peak hours. Nobody financed that aside from individuals around the nation. Global panel prices fell by roughly half on the back of Chinese manufacturing scale, grid tariffs rose 155 percent over three years, and the math worked in favor of Pakistani households now able to run on solar in some form. There’s no donor, no multilateral lender, and no foreign utility anywhere, which is precisely the point: once the hardware became cheap enough, the financing chokepoint that colonial-style energy deals depend on simply stops being necessary.

Ownership structures matter as much as the panels themselves here. In one mini-grid project in Mbiabet, Nigeria, a small grant let residents retain 20 percent ownership of the system, with locals being the ones to install and maintain the system. That’s a small number, but it’s the right direction: energy infrastructure that is community-built and community-owned, rather than infrastructure it just hosts and pays rent on to a faceless multi-national corporation.

Decentralization isn’t the only way to break the old financing pattern. Mexico is running a bit in the opposite direction: instead of routing around centralized ownership, it’s locking the state itself into the ownership structure by law. Under the previously talked about 2024 constitutional reform, the state utility CFE must hold at least 54 percent of any generation project, capping private capital at a minority stake. Foreign developers don’t get to show up with a checkbook and dictate terms the way Iberdrola once could; they come in as junior partners in a joint venture the state controls and manages for the people of the nation.

Unfortunately, the ultimate test of this model will be whether capital still shows up on those terms, but so far it has. CFE’s first competitive tender under the new mixed-investment scheme drew bids worth nearly five times what the government asked for. That’s a different answer to the financing-and-control problem than a Kenyan mini-grid financed by a Rocky Mountain Institute grant, but it’s aimed at the same underlying fear: that “development” ends with a foreign entity holding the leverage and extracting profits from a nation that can’t say no. Mexico’s bet is that you don’t need to decentralize the grid to keep that from happening. You just need to make sure the state can’t be voted off the board.

It’s not a clean win. The same reform that keeps ownership local also is slowing the buildout: transmission investments haven’t kept pace with demand, and Mexico’s own transition scorecard has fallen as a result. State control bought Mexico leverage over the terms of its energy build-out, yet when looking forward, the nation now has the flexibility and power to dictate terms, a luxury few others could dream of.

None of this is automatic, and folks should be skeptical of anyone selling solar as a clean escape from the old dynamics of neocolonialism. Researchers studying Sub-Saharan mini-grids have found that donor-installed systems without a real ownership or maintenance structure fail fast: some systems rated for 20 years don’t survive past year three. A solar panel dropped in by an NGO with no local support behind it is just a shinier version of the same top-down model that failed before it.

The honest version of the mini-grid sector today is still heavily donor- and grant-dependent, not necessarily some market-driven, neo-liberal miracle it gets sold as by places such as the IMF. About 3,000 mini-grids currently operate in Sub-Saharan Africa, and most run on grants and non-commercial capital rather than sustainable business models. That’s not a knock on solar itself but rather a reminder that hardware alone doesn’t rewire an imbalanced power relationship. The financing behind it is what truly will break the cycle.

There’s also a counter-argument worth looking into: some voices (albeit often from fossil-fuel-aligned think tanks so take it with a grain of salt) argue that restricting fossil fuel financing to Africa in the name of climate policy is its own form of colonial control, denying countries cheap, dispatchable power that wealthy nations used to industrialize in the first place. There’s a kernel of truth buried in there (albeit wrapped in a dangerous self-serving argument by fossil fuel companies trying to get every last drop of profit). Africans have contributed less than 3.5 percent of cumulative global emissions, and telling those countries to skip the fossil-fueled growth phase that every wealthy nation used is a hard sell when it comes from the same nations that burned our collective, global carbon budget in the past.

The difference is that solar, unlike a Western-financed gas plant, doesn’t require any trade-offs. It’s not “clean power instead of development.” When done right, it’s development that doesn’t require asking permission or taking on decades of foreign-currency debt first. It’s a pathway to leap-frog the years of pollution and environmental degradation that so many nations have faced on the path to development. In many ways, the argument comes down to fossil fuel aligned think tanks being unable to envision (or choosing to omit) a future that could exist where nations no longer rely those companies.

Neocolonialism in energy was never really about the fuel source itself. It was always about who controls financing, ownership, and the terms of dependency. A centralized coal plant and a centralized “green hydrogen” megaproject can both reproduce the same structures of oppression. A solar home system paid off in installments by the household that uses it cannot, because there’s no foreign creditor in the loop to begin with.

That’s the real reason solar matters here, and it’s a narrower, more useful claim than “renewables will liberate the Global South.” There isn’t one template for breaking the old patterns of neocolonialism. Nigeria and Rwanda are doing it by decentralizing ownership down to the individual village level. Mexico is doing it by locking the state’s ownership stake into the fundamental laws of the nation itself. Both are answers to the same question: who holds the leverage once the financing closes. Neither model removes the underlying problem of unequal access to capital on its own, and both come with real trade-offs. Closing the gap between nations is unfortunately still a financing and policy fight, not a technology one. But for the first time in a long time, developing nations have a fighting chance to dictate the rules on their terms.

The numbers she’s putting on the table are eye-popping. Renewables are supposed to climb from 24 percent of Mexico’s generation mix to 38 percent by 2030, backed by a 140 percent jump in solar generation, a 90 percent jump in geothermal, and a 70 percent jump in wind. In May, Sheinbaum stood at the National Anthropology Museum and authorized 5,000 megawatts of private renewable projects on top of 11,000 megawatts already in the pipeline, bringing total committed capacity to 16 gigawatts. CFE’s first competitive tender under the new mixed-investment scheme drew over 200 proposals worth nearly 38 gigawatts, more than five times what the government asked for. On paper, capital wants in.

For readers across Latin America, it’s impressive that a nation is being so bold and looking for transformational development. Mexico is the test case for whether a Latin American state can pursue an energy transition without simply handing the grid to whichever multinational corporation shows up with a checkbook, ready to plunder the nation for any wealth that it can receive (such as the oft referenced case of Cochabamba’s water supply in Bolivia). This is a question every country from Chile to Colombia to Brazil is wrestling with in its own way. Mexico’s answer, so far, is state control first, private capital second.

The underlying structural reasoning that shapes this development pattern comes down to Mexico’s 2024 constitutional reform: the state must control at least 54 percent of electricity generation, capping private participation at 46 percent. That’s not some type of temporary posturing for populism’s sake. It’s written into law, and it’s the direct legacy of López Obrador’s 2023 purchase of 13 Iberdrola power plants for $6 billion, a deal his government openly called a “new nationalization.” Returning the electricity grid to the public. The reform dissolved Mexico’s energy regulators and folded their functions into a new commission that reports directly to the executive branch.

Iberdrola’s response to that environment was to keep shrinking its footprint until it exited the Mexican market almost entirely. Unfortunately, this is an all too common the cautionary tale sitting in the back of every foreign investor’s mind when Sheinbaum’s government talks about welcoming private capital: the rules can tilt against them fast if it appears that they aren’t doing their due diligence. Yet, if a company is not meeting the needs of the people and instead price gauging, should nations just sit back and take the price gauging just because it enables development?

So when Sheinbaum’s team touts 16 gigawatts of committed capacity, it’s worth reading the fine print: the flagship “mixed investment” model requires CFE to hold at least 54 percent ownership of every project. Private companies aren’t building independent power plants and selling into an open market. They’re junior partners in state-led joint ventures. That’s a fundamentally different growth model than what drew capital into Chile’s liberalized renewables sector over the past decade, and it’s worth watching whether it can scale at the same pace.

Even if the capacity gets built, though, Mexico unfortunately has a more basic problem: the wires to move that power don’t exist yet, and the money to build them has dried up. A mid-2026 analysis from the think tank IMCO projects a structural power deficit of more than 48,000 gigawatt-hours by 2030, driven by electricity demand rising 13.4 percent nationally. More than 60 percent of the transmission network is already running near maximum capacity. Meanwhile, CFE’s transmission expansion budget was cut 16.7 percent in real terms for 2026, at the exact moment the gap is widest.

That execution gap shows up in the independent scorecards, too. Mexico fell to 59th place in the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Energy Transition Index, down 22 spots from 37th in 2018. The WEF’s own breakdown is telling: Mexico’s current system performance scores reasonably well, but its readiness for the transition lags 25 points behind, which is a nice way of saying the ambition has outrun the plumbing.

Nearshoring is one of the biggest reasons Mexico’s grid is under this much strain in the first place. Companies relocating manufacturing from Asia to serve the U.S. market have poured record capital into Mexico: $36.2 billion in foreign direct investment in 2023 and another $32.4 billion in 2024, much of it tied to nearshoring. Every new factory that opens in Monterrey, Ciudad Juárez, or Saltillo needs power, and industrial electricity tariffs have been climbing 4 to 6 percent a year, which is part of why manufacturers are turning to rooftop and industrial-scale solar just to control variable rate input costs.

But the same U.S.-China rivalry that’s feeding Mexico’s electricity demand is also making the solar build-out more expensive. China still dominates global panel manufacturing, and when Beijing ended subsidies for photovoltaic module production starting April 1, 2026, the effect rippled straight into Mexico: panel prices are expected to rise across the supply chain, since Mexico imports most of its solar hardware and pays for it in dollars against a weakening exchange rate. There’s a second layer of exposure sitting underneath Mexico’s own manufacturing boom, too. Washington has periodically weighed tariff exemptions for Mexico-assembled solar equipment, and some of the panel makers that would benefit are themselves majority-owned by Chinese firms, underscoring how deeply Chinese manufacturing is embedded in the global solar supply chain regardless of where final assembly happens. That question gets sharper heading into the first formal USMCA review, where tighter rules of origin around Chinese-content inputs could disqualify supply chains that Mexican manufacturers currently depend on.

In other words, Mexico’s renewable transition is being pulled in two directions by the same geopolitical current: nearshoring is generating the electricity demand that makes the transition urgent, while the trade politics behind that same nearshoring is making the hardware needed to meet that demand more expensive and less certain.

There’s a third thread here that Latin American readers should recognize, because it isn’t necessarily unique to Mexico: the gap between what a government labels “climate spending” and what it actually funds. A review of Mexico’s 2026 budget found that funds earmarked for renewable energy and environmental protection were routed instead toward infrastructure and oil-and-gas projects with no environmental component at all, including one case where more than $40 million for a train line was counted twice in the government’s own accounting.

That matters because Sheinbaum’s government is simultaneously investing in new oil exploration to shore up Pemex’s declining reserves. The climate-scientist president is presiding over an administration that needs both the renewable build-out and continued petroleum revenue to work at the same time, and the budget numbers suggest the political incentive still runs toward the latter when the two compete for the same peso.

Set next to its neighbors, Mexico’s approach is rather distinct. Chile built its renewables boom on a liberalized, competitive market that let private developers run wild. Colombia under Petro has leaned on a stronger regulatory body, CREG, to steer the transition rather than a state utility with hard ownership minimums. Mexico has chosen the opposite bet: keep the state in the driver’s seat, invite private capital only as a minority partner, and hope that they will hit 38 percent renewables by 2030, all while riding a nearshoring wave whose costs are set as much in Washington and Beijing as in Mexico City.

Right now, it appears to be working even with the challenges. The oversubscribed tenders suggest global capital is willing to take the deal Mexico is offering, even at 46 percent. But the grid data, the transmission budget cuts, the World Economic Forum’s own downgrade, and now a solar supply chain exposed to Chinese subsidy decisions all point the same direction: Mexico has set an ambitious target and a state-controlled path to get there, and right now execution, not ambition, is the bigger risk.

For the region at large, this is where the lessons are to be found. Not whether Mexico wants to decarbonize, but whether a state-led model can deliver a transition at the speed private markets have managed elsewhere in the region. If it can work in Mexico, perhaps the days of private companies taking advantage of unfair agreements may finally be behind the region.

The city’s answer to this issue, at least on paper, is rather simple: a bit of dirt and some native plants.

Chicago’s Department of Environment is finalizing its 2026 Green Infrastructure Strategy, the first major overhaul of the city’s stormwater approach since 2014. The pitch is straightforward: instead of routing every drop of rain into pipes, use permeable pavement, green roofs, bioswales, and rain gardens to catch water where it falls. Less water in the sewers means fewer overflows, less street flooding, and, as a side benefit, cooler neighborhoods and cleaner air in places that plant a lot of vegetation.

None of this is necessarily new science. Chicago’s had a green stormwater plan since 2014, and it worked well enough to survive a decade. What’s changing is the scale and vision that the city is putting forward. The 2026 update centers on three main priorities: getting city departments to actually coordinate instead of building green infrastructure in silos focused on solving neighborhood problems, building in long-term maintenance funding instead of treating these projects as install-and-forget, and steering investment toward the neighborhoods that flood hardest and have benefited least from past infrastructure spending. That maintenance piece is easy to overlook, but it’s the part that decides whether this works. A bioswale that nobody weeds or a permeable pavement stretch nobody vacuums out is a little bit of green landscaping, not infrastructure that the city can rely on in an emergency.

Worth noting: this update isn’t purely a Chicago-specific initiative. The state of Illinois required the city to revisit its decade-old plan as part of its Clean Water Act permit obligations. The city put out a request for proposals in late 2024, and the resulting draft strategy has now just wrapped up public comment.

The Green Infrastructure Strategy sits underneath a bigger document: Chicago’s 2022 Climate Action Plan, which sets a target of cutting the city’s emissions 62 percent by 2040 and reaching net-zero by 2050, organized around five buckets: buildings, energy, transportation, waste, and natural systems. The green infrastructure work falls into that last bucket, but it also touches the equity commitments that run through the whole plan (akin to the previously mentioned Atlanta plan). Chicago’s climate goals were built with an explicit “community health lens,” prioritizing frontline communities that carry the heaviest pollution burden and have the least existing infrastructure to fall back on when severe storms hit.

Flood risk in Chicago isn’t randomly distributed. Neighborhoods with more pavement, less tree canopy, and older infrastructure flood more, and those tend to be the same neighborhoods that got redlined, disinvested, and paved over decades ago. A green infrastructure strategy that doesn’t explicitly target those areas just reinforces the existing map of inequalities in the city. To its credit, the 2026 strategy names this directly as a design principle rather than an afterthought.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get enough attention: Chicago’s flooding problem is not a Chicago-only problem. It’s a northeastern Illinois problem, and the region is starting to plan for it on a much larger scale than via individual municipalities.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the region’s planning body, released its Transportation Resilience Improvement Plan this year, and the numbers are blunt. Flooding is the single biggest climate risk to the region’s transportation system, and CMAP’s own risk assessment found that roughly a third of the region’s highway miles and about half of its bus and train stops sit in areas of high or very high flood risk. That’s not a future-tense problem, but rather something that needs mitigation measures put in place here and now. Extreme heat adds an unfortunate secondary problem that can cause cracking to pavement and warping to rail lines.

CMAP’s plan leans on the same nature-based logic as Chicago’s own strategy. One example the agency points to: a stormwater detention project at Robbins Heritage Park that pairs native plantings along Midlothian Creek with channel improvements, reducing flood risk for 92 structures and area roadways while also giving the community a new park. It’s a small project, but it’s the model: green infrastructure doing double duty as flood control and neighborhood amenity, deployed at the scale of a creek rather than a single city block.

The plan also matters for money. Meeting the federal PROTECT program’s requirements for a resilience improvement plan positions the region to actually compete for federal resilience funding rather than watching it go to other states. In a funding environment where infrastructure dollars have become increasingly scarce and contested due to a public transit hostile Fed, having the paperwork in order is a prerequisite.

Strategies are not projects, though. Chicago’s 2014 green stormwater plan committed $50 million over five years to construction, which is real money but a rounding error against the scale of a 66-percent impervious surfaces city. The 2026 update is stronger on process, coordination, maintenance funding, and equity criteria, but it’s still a plan finalizing public comment, not even the first shovel in the ground. Whether it outperforms its predecessor depends on whether the maintenance dollars actually show up in future budgets, and whether the equity criteria survive contact with the whatever Chicago’s next mayor’s priorities.

The regional piece has its own version of this problem. CMAP can identify vulnerable roads and transit stops, and it can write persuasive federal grant applications, but the actual fixes belong to dozens of municipalities and agencies with their own budgets and timelines. A regional risk assessment is a coordination tool, not a construction contract.

Still, the shift in planning for green infrastructure is real. Chicago is no longer treating stormwater as a pipes-and-pumps problem to be engineered away. It’s treating it as a land-use problem, a housing-inequality problem, and now, formally, a transportation problem that crosses seven counties. Hopefully, folks in Chicago will start to see the benefits of working with nature rather than fighting against it.

The plan took 18 months to build and pulled in more than 2,100 residents along the way, plus a Climate Resilience Advisory Board meant to represent public and private sectors, academia, youth, and residents of the city’s most energy-burdened neighborhoods. Nearly 1,921 individual climate action recommendations came out of that engagement process, which the city then sorted into recurring themes: public health, emissions, resilience, mobility, housing affordability, and economic opportunity.

The plan sets five headline targets:

100% clean energy by 2035

59% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 with net zero by 2050

Fresh and affordable food within a half-mile of every resident by 2030

A reduced energy burden for the most impacted households

Expanded multimodal transportation

The clean energy and emissions targets aren’t anything new; they build on a City Council goal previously mentioned that Atlanta had adopted years earlier. What is new is the explicit framing of energy burden as a resilience issue rather than a side concern. Atlanta’s chief sustainability officer, Chandra Farley, has said households in the city commonly spend anywhere from 6% to 19% of their monthly income on utilities, well above the 6% threshold that federal researchers typically flag as “energy burdened.” That’s not an outlier problem in Atlanta, and its a growing issue across the country, but a Georgia Tech analysis found the city ranks fourth-highest in the country for median energy burden, trailing only Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham (Atlanta was third-highest among low-income households specifically). Separate ACEEE research has put Atlanta among the handful of major metros where a disproportionate share of households, particularly Black and Latino households, carry a high energy burden. However you look at the rankings, Atlanta has been sitting near the top of this list for years (largely due to its sub-tropical climate), and the plan is the first document to say so plainly and attach a target to fixing it for folks who need it most.

The plan also carries the city’s required Clean Energy Plan update, which was previously treated as a separate three-year exercise. Going forward, clean energy updates get folded into the broader climate planning cycle instead of running on their own track.

The plan organizes almost everything around three climate hazards: extreme heat, drought, and flooding. That’s a perhaps a bit narrower framing than a lot of coastal cities use, but it matches what actually hits a city like Atlanta. The city doesn’t have a hurricane or sea-level-rise problem. It has a heat-island problem built on decades of pavement and parking-lot expansion. Alongside this there’s a drought exposure issue tied to its position at the top of a river basin (rather than downstream of one), and an acute flooding problem driven by intense, short-duration rain events overwhelming stormwater systems that weren’t sized for the increasingly severe weather.

The heat island effect is the one issue showing up most visibly in the health data right now. Rising heat-related emergency room visits in the Atlanta area have become one of the recurring data points cited in coverage of the plan, tracking a broader national pattern: the CDC found heat-related ER visits nationally ran about 20% above the prior five-year average in 2023 alone.

If there’s one image that keeps recurring in how people talk about this plan, it’s the tree canopy map. Atlanta has long branded itself the City in a Forest, and citywide it’s not wrong: various studies have put overall canopy coverage somewhere in the high-40s to low-50s percent range, and the City Council has formally adopted a goal of maintaining 50% average canopy cover. When looking at an image from above, parts of Atlanta do indeed look like a forest. But “average” is the key part in that sentence. Coverage in Atlanta correlates strongly with land use and, by extension, with the city’s older patterns of residential investment: the highest concentrations sit on single-family residential land, while downtown and major transportation corridors run thin.

That gap matters for more than aesthetics. Tree canopy is one of the more direct levers a city has against urban heat island effect, and neighborhoods with thin canopy and heavy impervious surface run measurably hotter on summer afternoons than tree-dense neighborhoods a few miles away. When a plan built around extreme heat puts equity language front and center, the canopy map is a pretty clear indication as to why.

Atlanta’s climate messaging leans hard on its most visible urban project: the BeltLine, and it’s easy to see why. The project is converting 22 miles of former rail corridor into trails, transit, and parkland, and the greenspace component alone is substantial: roughly 1,300 acres of new greenspace, plus another 700 acres of restored greenspace, threading through and connecting more than 45 neighborhoods across the city, including several that have historically had the least access to green space and the thinnest canopy.

The engineering isn’t incidental. Segments of the BeltLine have been built around green stormwater infrastructure specifically, including bioswales, regenerative stormwater conveyance, and permeable surfaces designed to slow and filter runoff before it hits the sewer system. Historic Fourth Ward Park, one of the earlier completed BeltLine-adjacent parks, replaced a traditional gray stormwater system with a bioretention pond and underground cistern setup that the city estimates saved roughly $15 million compared to conventional drainage infrastructure, while also cutting flooding in surrounding neighborhoods that had a history of sewer overflow during storms. As of this spring, an arboretum running alongside the trail has become the world’s longest linear arboretum, with more than 600 plant species now managed by Trees Atlanta along the corridor.

None of that is framed in the plan as a standalone park amenity. It’s cited as the model for what green infrastructure can truly be, tying together the plan’s heat, flooding, and equity goals into one ammenity the city can point to and say: this is what it looks like when it works, and we want to make it work for your community too.

Plans like this live or die on implementation, and Atlanta’s own materials are candid that this is a three-to-five-year roadmap rather than a finished product. The energy burden and DEI-adjacent language in the plan has already drawn friction at the federal level; Farley told Utility Dive her office received a cease-and-desist letter tied to a federal grant addressing energy equity and building codes, a sign that some of the plan’s funding path may prove more contested than the plan itself. Meanwhile, the city has continued layering smaller programs underneath the broader framework, including a third consecutive year of Bloomberg Philanthropies youth climate funding explicitly tied to Climate Resilient ATL’s goals.

The real test won’t be whether Atlanta wrote an ambitious enough plan. Plenty of cities can do that. It’s whether the next few budget cycles actually move dollars into the neighborhoods that need it most.

Stockholm has 894,592 people in its municipal housing queue (more than the population of the city itself). This system aims to provide affordable housing to folks that need it within not only the city of Stockholm, but also the broader region from Södertälje in the south up to Märsta in the north. This unique system does provide a solid housing option, but unfortunately, with a nine-year average wait time for regular apartments city-wide and twenty-one years for the inner ring of city, it has become clear that something needs to change for quite some time. The debate over how to fix that split cleanly in November, when Christofer Fjellner, finance spokesperson for the opposition Moderate party (the traditional Swedish right wing), proposed protecting the city’s villa and garden-city neighborhoods from further densification, routing new housing to industrial land instead, cutting the housing que itself, and backing away from Stockholm’s own target of 140,000 new homes by 2035. It’s the Swedish version of an argument that’s played out in city council chambers on four continents: protect the low-density status quo, or admit that a city serious about both its housing crisis and its climate targets can’t keep doing that. Essentially, provide a market solution that is neither free nor fair.

This isn’t a matter of taste. The transit-oriented development research is consistent across countries: concentrating growth near transit in dense, mixed-use development can cut emissions by up to 26 percent compared with sprawl, and households in the densest parts of a metro area produce reliably lower emissions than households in the suburbs around them. Every hectare of land that gets reserved for detached houses instead of multi-unit buildings is a hectare that houses fewer people per unit of infrastructure, per kilometer of transit line, per ton of concrete and steel. Sprawl isn’t a neutral outcome of letting neighborhoods stay the way they are. It’s a choice, made one down-zoned parcel at a time, and it produces both climate costs as well as reduced land values. How can one argue for fiscal conservativism while activly promoting ideas that contradict both development as well as infrastructure costs?

Single-family zoning was obviously never a climate policy to begin with. It was a mid-century tool for managing who got to live where, built for an era when nobody was thinking about a carbon budget. Cities that still organize huge shares of their most connected land around one house per lot are running 1950s land-use rules against a 21st-century emissions problem, and Stockholm, with roughly 45,000 single-family properties covering about a fifth of the city’s land while housing a tenth of its population, is not an exception to that pattern. It’s a pretty clear textbook case of it.

The Social Democrat-led majority’s flagship response is Stockholmsradhus: standardized, cost-controlled townhouses in both rental and co-op tenure, with the first allocation already going to Stockholmshem for a project in Ormkärr, and a stated ambition to build the concept in every district outside the inner city rather than confining new supply to the last few industrial leftovers of the core city.

The Greens (Miljöpartiet) provide a different view, and deserve credit for it rather than a pass. In April, Miljöpartiet also called for scrapping the 140,000-home target, citing nature protection rather than fiscal caution. But where they actually diverge from the Moderates is instructive: rather than freezing all 45,000 single-family properties in place, MP’s platform proposes selective, owner-opt-in densification in chosen villa areas, protecting only the neighborhoods with genuine cultural or ecological value, alongside more land for municipal rental housing and a hard stop on converting existing rentals into co-ops. It’s the position that takes both halves of the problem seriously: not every acre of low-density land is precious, and not every acre of it needs to go to development.

The Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) goes further, and tackles the piece density alone doesn’t solve: affordability. In June, Vänsterpartiet proposed setting rent in advance based on what low- and middle-income tenants can actually pay, then adjusting land costs downward to fit, backed by state credit guarantees for builders. It’s a mechanism aimed directly at the households priced out even when supply increases: density brings emissions down, but only a price mechanism like this guarantees the new units go to the people who’ve been waiting nine years instead of the people who can win a bidding war against wealthier folks.

Stockholm’s left-bloc isn’t inventing this argument. Minneapolis became the first major U.S. city to eliminate single-family-only zoning in 2018, phased in from 2020, pairing it with upzoned transit corridors and the end of parking minimums. All moves that have helped the city reduce its housing costs relative to the national average. Oregon abolished single-family zoning statewide the following year. California ended it in 2021, legalizing duplexes and lot splits statewide. Auckland’s 2016 Unitary Plan upzoned three-quarters of the city’s inner residential land and is now one of the most-cited international case studies for zoning reform actually increasing supply. In every one of these cases, the opposition argument was structurally identical to Fjellner’s: protect existing character, protect existing property values, revisit the numbers later. In every one of these cases, the reform passed anyway, because the alternative was accepting that a city’s climate targets and its housing targets would keep pulling in opposite directions forever, and frankly, these proposals fly in the face of Fjellner’s own argument. Allowing people to build what is needed on a plot of land is more liberal than allowing only single family homes.

Fairness means not overselling this. The evidence from Minneapolis and Auckland is real but not uncomplicated. One early analysis of the Minneapolis 2040 plan found that price increases from up-zoning were concentrated in smaller, less expensive properties, exactly the housing stock lower-income buyers were most likely to rely on, a genuine equity concern for reform that leans on the market alone. Some housing researchers have also argued the single-family zoning ban got more political credit than construction results, with parking-minimum repeal and transit-corridor up-zoning doing more of the actual work. That’s precisely why Vänsterpartiet’s price-first mechanism matters more than it might first appear: density without an affordability backstop can raise land values before it lowers rents. And the Moderates’ underlying fiscal argument, that Stockholm’s municipal debt is approaching 100 billion kronor and capital costs are already crowding out welfare spending, is a real constraint on any government’s ability to build at scale, not just a cover story for protecting villa owners (even if that is ultimately the use here).

None of that rescues a plan whose central move is exempting the lowest-density, most land-hungry housing type from ever absorbing new supply. It’s an argument for building density to help reduce folks climate footprint and pursue a more livable city. Without a vision for densification like its historic downtown, Stockholm’s character might as well end up like that of Houston, Texas: a sea of single family housing and endless highways destroying the Swedish countryside. Hopefully, voters next month choose the classic charm of the innerstad.

References & Sources:

• SVT Nyheter, Moderaterna föreslår radhus i Stockholms stadsmiljö

• Bostadspolitik.se, Socialdemokraterna går till val på “Stockholmsradhus”

• Nyheter24, Vänsterpartiet: Ta större ansvar för bostäder – “för dyrt”

• Miljöpartiet i Stockholms stad, pressmeddelande april 2026

• Miljöpartiet, Stockholm ska byggas hållbart, grönt och blandat

• Urban Institute, Reducing Transportation Emissions Through Land-Use Policy

• One Final Effort, A Detailed Look at the Outcomes of Minneapolis’ Housing Reforms

• Journal of the American Planning Association, Upzoning and Single-Family Housing Prices

• Moderaternas förslag till budget 2026 för Stockholms stad

• Europe Unlocked, Housing in Sweden 2026

For most of the 20th century, urban shoreline design meant rigid defense: bulkheads, sea walls, poured concrete. Sea levels are rising. Coastal storms are intensifying. New York is now running one of the most ambitious climate adaptation programs in North America, and it’s built on a very different premise. Instead of grey seawalls that shelter neighborhoods from the water by removing them from it, Manhattan is turning its perimeter into a network of living, absorptive green infrastructure.

East Side Coastal Resiliency

The East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project runs 2.4 miles along the East River, from Montgomery Street north past East 23rd Street. It’s a $1.45 billion investment in hybrid infrastructure, and it’s built to protect more than 110,000 residents, including 28,000 people in NYCHA public housing, from future storm surges and tidal flooding.

The city didn’t build a wall between the Lower East Side and the river. Instead, designers elevated John V. Lindsay East River Park, raising it above FEMA’s projected flood elevations and turning the park itself into the primary flood barrier.

Topographical defense: Sections of the park were raised roughly 8 to 10 feet, using berms, floodwalls, and raised parkland to form a continuous barrier.

Deployable gates: The project uses 18 swinging or sliding flood gates that seal off vulnerable gaps during storm warnings, then reopen for daily public access. The first of those gates, installed in 2022, runs 42 feet long and 10 feet high.

ESCR grew out of HUD’s Rebuild by Design competition, launched after Sandy. The project’s first section, on the northern end, was completed in October 2024, two months ahead of schedule and $10 million under budget. The larger southern section, including the full East River Park reconstruction, is expected to wrap by the end of 2026.

Pier 26

East River Park is about height and land elevation. Pier 26 in Tribeca, a 2.5-acre pier designed by landscape architecture firm OLIN, takes a different approach: ecological restoration that recreates Manhattan’s pre-colonial shoreline.

At the pier’s western tip sits the Tide Deck, a 15,000-square-foot engineered rocky salt marsh built on a platform above 36 steel piles over the Hudson River Estuary. Designers picked 1,300 boulders from upstate New York and carved tidal pools into them for marine life, and planted the deck with native cordgrass and shrubs. It’s the first structure of its kind in New York City.

The mechanics: the boulders and marsh plantings dissipate wave energy from river currents and storm surges, taking pressure off the bulkhead walls behind them. The deck floods on the daily tidal cycle, submerged at high tide and exposed at low, letting filter feeders do their work while giving visitors a live look at estuarine ecology.

Walk the pier and you pass through five native ecological zones: woodland forest, coastal grassland, maritime scrub, rocky tidal zone, and the river itself. It’s a working shoreline that happens to double as a park.

Battery Coastal Resilience

At the southern tip of Manhattan, the Battery Coastal Resilience project shows how a historic public space adapts without losing its character.

The numbers: Battery Coastal Resilience is one piece of more than $2.7 billion in Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency (LMCR) investment, designed to eventually protect more than 100,000 residents, 300,000 jobs, and 12,000 businesses from coastal flooding.

The Battery’s historic wharf promenade is being raised roughly 5 feet, to 11 feet above Mean Sea Level, to hold through projected sea levels in 2100. Phase one, a $200 million piece of the larger effort, was completed in June 2026; phase two is due in 2027.

The construction approach has been impressive, too. Crews moved materials by barge on the city’s Blue Highways network instead of by truck, cutting more than 2,000 truck trips from Lower Manhattan streets and reducing transportation-related carbon emissions by more than 90 percent. Reclaimed granite, wood, and bronze went back into the rebuilt wharf.

New York isn’t the only city racing the tide. Miami is still arguing over sea walls. Jakarta is sinking faster than it can build. The difference here is the size of the project and the speed of putting it all together. Three billion dollars, three neighborhoods, one philosophy: work with the water instead of against it.

The real test won’t be just the ribbon-cutting. It’ll be the next storm. East River Park, Pier 26, and the Battery will all get hit eventually. If the gates seal, the marsh holds, and the raised parkland does its job, New York will have proven something worth exporting: that resilience doesn’t have to look like a fortress. It can be something the community cherishes year round.

In May, it seems that solar won, and it produced 51% of California’s electricity for the entire month. Not a single sunny afternoon. A full month. That’s a record, and no power grid of California’s size has ever crossed the 50% threshold on solar before.

Ember, the UK energy think tank that tracks this, confirmed California as the first major economy to clear the 50% solar mark for a whole month. Hungary came close last June, hitting 47%, but Hungary’s grid is a fraction of California’s size. This is the first time an economy this large has done it.

Ember analyst Nicolas Fulghum put the credit where it belongs: batteries. California’s battery storage capacity has grown from a measly 61 megawatts a decade ago to 16 gigawatts today. That’s a 26,000% increase. Batteries take the flood of midday solar and hold it for the evening peak, when people get home, crank the AC to escape the heat, and start cooking dinner. Ten years ago, any of that excess solar would have just gone to waste. Now, through the power of batteries, California is able to harness the sun even when it isn’t shining, but that’s not the full story.

References & Sources

• Canary Media, “California was mostly solar-powered in May — a global first”

• The Spokesman-Review, “California produced over half its May electricity from solar, a world record”

• MATR, “California Hits 51 Percent Solar Power for Entire Month”

• AOL/AP, “California produced over half its May electricity from solar, a world record”

• ArcaMax, “California produced over half its May electricity from solar, a world record”

• SEIA, “California Solar and Storage State Overview”

With this existential threat, Tuvalu is doing two things at once. It’s building new land out of the ocean, and it’s running a lottery to send a quarter of its citizens to Australia. Both are called resilience, yet only one of them keeps the country where it is.

Since 2017, Tuvalu has been reclaiming land from the lagoon. The Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, funded first by the Green Climate Fund and now by Australia, New Zealand, and the US, has pumped sand and coral fill behind seawalls to raise ground above projected 2100 sea levels. Phase one covered 2,780 meters of coastline on three islands. Phase two, finished in October 2025, added eight hectares of new, elevated land on Fogafale, the most crowded islet in the capital. Homes, a hospital, and schools now sit on ground that didn’t exist five years ago.

It’s a real bet on staying. It’s also expensive, incremental, and permanently contingent on someone else’s checkbook.

In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union, the first treaty anywhere to legally guarantee that a state’s sovereignty survives even if its land doesn’t. It also created something much more visible: a visa lottery. Starting in 2025, 280 Tuvaluans a year can win permanent Australian residency, no job offer required, full access to healthcare and public schools.

Demand blew past the cap almost immediately. Within four days of the first ballot opening, 3,125 people had registered, 30 percent of the country. By the close of the ballot, more than 8,750 Tuvaluans had applied, well over half the population, for 280 spots. At that ratio, every current resident of Tuvalu could theoretically win a place in Australia within about 40 years. The next ballot opens May 1, 2026.

The Falepili Union isn’t a gift. Article 4 requires Tuvalu to get Australia’s sign-off before entering any new security or defense arrangement with another state. Former Prime Minister and current opposition leader Enele Sopoaga called the deal “shameful,” arguing it hands over sovereign decision-making in exchange for migration slots and reverses Tuvalu’s political status by four decades. Parliament members complained they weren’t consulted before it was signed. Sopoaga ran on scrapping it in the 2024 election.

Yet, he lost. The current government kept the treaty and has since criticized Australia’s own climate record while keeping the visa pipeline open. Tuvalu doesn’t get to choose between sovereignty and survival. It had to trade a piece of one to buy time for the other.

Land reclamation says: we’re staying, build us the ground. The Falepili visa lottery says: we might not be able to, help us out. Tuvalu is running both simultaneously because neither one is a sure thing. The land could still go under faster than engineers can raise and protect it. The visa pipeline could dry up, get capped tighter, or get politically reversed in Canberra trapping folks in a situation that was caused by the most polluting nations.

Other low-lying Pacific states, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, are watching closely. Whatever Tuvalu ends up trading for its survival becomes the opening offer for everyone that comes after it, yet one can’t help but question why they should have to trade anything for a catastrophe that is not of their making.

Sources & References

• UNDP, Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project

• PINA, “Tuvalu and Partners Deliver Landmark Coastal Adaptation Project,” Oct. 2025

• DFAT, Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty

• Malay Mail, “Climate Exodus Begins,” June 2025

• The Australia Today / Devpolicy, “The First Falepili Union Visa Ballot: A Preliminary Assessment,” Aug. 2025

• Devpolicy, “Australia-Tuvalu Mobility Pathway,” July 2025

• RNZ, “Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union ‘Shameful’ - Former Tuvalu PM,” Nov. 2023

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Yet, even in the face of alarmingly worsening weather events, there are still some kernels of hope out there. I was inspired to write this following the previous articles on Latin America & Pakistan, and I truly believe that there is an ongoing shift to be optimistic about. So, let’s start with what’s going right in the United States.

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Let’s start with the raw numbers, because they’re startling. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects 86 GW of new utility-scale generating capacity to come online in 2026: the largest single-year addition since 2002, and nearly double the 53 GW added in 2025 [EIA, February 2026]. Solar and battery storage aren’t a footnote to that number. They’re the number. Combined, the two technologies account for 79% of everything being built this year [pv magazine, February 2026].

Solar alone is set to add 43.4 GW: a 60% jump over 2025, and the third straight year of record installations if the projects land on schedule [Mercom India, February 2026]. Battery storage is right behind it: 24 GW of new capacity, up from a record 15 GW last year [EIA, February 2026]. By early 2027, total US battery storage is projected to surge from 44.6 GW to more than 67 GW: a 51% jump in a single year [Electrek, April 2026].

Natural gas, by comparison, is adding just 6.3 GW this year. Renewables and storage together account for 93% of all new capacity coming online [pv magazine, February 2026]. This isn’t a marginal shift anymore. It’s the grid rebuilding itself around a different set of technologies, and the pace is rapidly accelerating.

Texas, not California, is the epicenter

Here’s the part that tends to surprise people outside the renewable energy industry: this boom is not concentrated in blue states. Texas alone will host roughly 40% of all new utility-scale solar construction in 2026, and 53% of new battery storage capacity [EIA, February 2026]. The state’s ERCOT grid (serving solely Texas), built without federal oversight and historically associated with fossil fuels, is now the country’s largest solar and battery market by a wide margin.

Zoom out further and the pattern holds. Since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, roughly three-fourths of clean energy manufacturing investment has landed in Republican-held congressional districts [Columbia Business School, February 2026]. One tracking analysis put it at $174.4 billion and 205,000 anticipated manufacturing jobs in Republican districts, compared to $61.9 billion and 122,600 jobs in Democratic ones [Atlas Public Policy/EDF, February 2026]. Georgia, South Carolina, Michigan, North Carolina, and Texas top the list for jobs created [Cipher News].

The first reason is structure behind the Inflation Reduction Act itself. Democrats were keen to spread out the spending from the bill to red and purple districts as a means of equitably sharing the benefits of new industries developing. On top of this, perhaps naively, it was utilized as potential political capital to align moderate Republicans towards renewable energy with future votes.

The second reason is simple: land, labor costs, interconnection queues, and state-level permitting have made red states the cheapest and fastest places to build. Clean energy in America has quietly stopped being a partisan project and started being a competitive one. States, at this current juncture, are chasing the investment because it pays, not because of who’s in the White House.

States are picking up where Washington stepped back

Federal retreat has a way of forcing state governments to do the job themselves, and 2026 is turning into a case study. Earlier this year the administration repealed the EPA’s endangerment finding, the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, prompting Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, California, and more than a dozen other states and cities to sue and lean harder on their own authority instead [Center for American Progress, April 2026]. In the first six months of 2026 alone, one conservation group tracked a dozen new state-level climate and clean energy policies moving through statehouses, on top of ten passed the year before [The Nature Conservancy, 2026].

The pattern shows up internationally too. At COP30 in Belém last November, only one elected US federal official showed up. More than 25 governors and mayors made the trip instead, California’s among them, positioning the state, the world’s fourth-largest economy on its own, as a reliable partner even as Washington checked out [Clean Air Task Force, April 2026]. New York, meanwhile, is leaning into nuclear power for the first time in its official energy planning, concluding that new nuclear capacity is actually the cheapest path to a zero-emissions grid by 2040, federal headwinds included [Clean Air Task Force, January 2026].

None of this fully offsets what’s been lost at the federal level, and some states, New York among them, are already missing their own near-term targets and quietly pushing deadlines back [Energy Security Freedom, July 2026]. But the through line is consistent: when the federal government steps back, states don’t uniformly follow. A lot of them step up.

This is the part of the story that should temper the optimism a bit. In mid-2025, Congress passed the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which phased out or restricted many of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, including incentives for wind, solar, and battery manufacturing [Salt Lake Tribune, July 2025]. Industry groups warned it would put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, many of them in the same red states that had benefited most: Texas, Florida, and Arizona among the hardest hit on paper [pv-tech, June 2025]. Democrats had bet that spreading investment into Republican districts would make the law politically durable. That bet, unfortunately, didn’t hold: Senate Republicans were keen to dismantle major pieces of it anyway.

And yet, look back at the EIA numbers. They’re from February and April of this year, well after that bill passed. Developers didn’t cancel their pipelines. They raced to finish projects before the credits disappeared, and the economics of solar and battery storage had already improved enough on their own that a lot of the buildout kept going regardless. That’s not a reason to be complacent about federal policy retreating from pushing the green revolution. Losing the credits will still raise electricity prices in a lot of states and will likely slow the next wave of projects that haven’t broken ground yet. But it is a reason to notice that the transition has developed its own momentum, like a snowball heading down a mountainside, separate from any single administration’s support.

None of this cancels out the challenges ahead. The physical damage from a warming planet is not going to pause while the grid modernizes or folks change habits. But energy transitions are slow-moving, systems, and large systems are exactly where good news tends to hide, because it doesn’t show up in a single news report until the change has already occurred.

What’s happening in the US right now is a grid that is quietly becoming cleaner and more resilient at the fastest pace in over two decades, built disproportionately by the states and workers who were told this technology wasn’t for them. It’s not the whole story of American energy policy, and it’s certainly not a guarantee of what happens next. But it’s real, it’s happening now, and it’s a genuine reason for cautious optimism for what’s next.

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Sources & References

• U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Today in Energy,” February 2026

• pv magazine USA/Global, “Solar and storage to lead record 86 GW of US capacity in 2026,” February 2026

• Mercom India, “US Forecast to Add 43.4 GW of Large-Scale Solar Capacity in 2026,” February 2026

• Electrek, “EIA: 80 GW of new solar, wind + storage capacity coming in 2026,” April 2026

• Columbia Business School, “How States Like Texas Are Driving the Clean Energy Boom in the Trump Era,” February 2026

• Atlas Public Policy / Environmental Defense Fund, “The State of Clean Energy,” February 2026

• Cipher News, “Majority of top states for jobs from new clean energy projects are GOP, battleground”

• pv-tech, “SEIA: ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ risks 330,000 clean energy jobs, many in Republican states,” June 2025

• Center for American Progress, “Congressional Republicans’ Plan To Cut Clean Energy Investments Would Cause Higher Energy Bills and Job Losses Across States,” 2025

• Center for American Progress, “State Climate Action in 2026: How States Are Delivering Real Benefits Through Climate and Clean Energy Policy,” April 2026

• The Nature Conservancy, “Starting 2026 Strong with State Climate and Clean Energy Policies,” 2026

• Clean Air Task Force, “States lead, impact follows: Why investing in state-level climate action will secure America’s climate future,” April 2026

• Clean Air Task Force, “2025 wins and emerging trends in state climate policy,” January 2026

• Energy Security Freedom (Substack), “New York’s ‘Clean Energy’ Plan Is Falling Further Behind, Facing Growing Risks, and Imposing Big Costs on Ratepayers,” July 2026

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Before I go anywhere new, I like to do some homework. How did this place come to be? Why does it look and feel the way it does? Malta rewards those questions more than most destinations. My knowledge going in wasn’t paper thin: the Knights of St John, the French occupation, and British colonialism before independence. That's a short postcard version, but the history runs much deeper. Ancient civilizations with semi-circle temples, bronze-age fort cities, Phoenicians sailors, Carthaginians, Romans. Arab rule followed and left its fingerprints on the Maltese language itself, which is the only Semitic language written in Latin script. Thousands of years of empires using this archipelago as a stepping stone at the center of rhe Mediterenean.

That was the main draw to me. Any rock in the Mediterranean can give you a sunset. Malta gives you layered civilization: megalithic temples older than Stonehenge, Baroque cathedrals, British phone booths still standing in Valletta. It's a small island that has been strategically important for longer than most countries have even existed.

But something else caught my attention, and it certainly wouldn’t be in any guidebooks. Just past the glittering harborfront developments and the cruise ship crowds, there's a visible unevenness: construction dust next to luxury towers, old villages absorbing new pressures they weren't built for, infrastructure straining in ways locals talk about openly and tourists mostly don't notice nor care about. Malta isn't hiding a secret. It's just that the secret doesn't make it into a short itinerary.

Malta has roughly half a million residents and 316 square kilometers of land, smaller than many cities. In 2025, it welcomed just over four million tourists, crossing that threshold for the first time in the country's history. That's eight tourists for every resident, in a single year. Malta International Airport moved 10 million passengers in 2025, a record.

Tourist spending hit €3.9 billion, up nearly 19% year-on-year and 44% higher than 2023. Guest nights topped 25.4 million, the sharpest increase recorded anywhere in the EU, running five times the European average growth rate. This isn't recovery from Covid anymore. Malta blew past its pre-pandemic baseline years ago and kept climbing. Tourist arrivals have roughly tripled since 2010.

Government officials are framing this as validation. Deputy Prime Minister Ian Borg called it proof that Malta's long-term tourism strategy is "clearly leaving its mark," pointing to rising per-visitor spend as evidence the country is climbing the value chain rather than just piling on volume.

Not everyone in Malta is celebrating. The country's Green Party has been blunt about it: chairperson Sandra Gauci argued that unchecked growth risks harming local communities and the environment, and that more tourists doesn't automatically mean better tourism or fairer economic benefits. She flagged traffic congestion, waste, and pressure on water and energy resources as the visible costs. Towns like St. Paul's Bay, Sliema, and Gozo are absorbing the brunt of it, with residents describing daily life increasingly disrupted by overcrowding.

The Grid Can't Keep Up

Malta just came off a five-day heatwave that pushed temperatures to 43°C, the highest ever recorded in the country in July. Air conditioning demand spiked, and the grid buckled under the strain. State utility, Enemalta, pointed to thermal stress on underground cables, but the outages hit hard enough that Prime Minister Robert Abela issued a public apology, and the failures reached the Office of the Prime Minister itself, along with hospitals, hotels, and homes.

The outages weren't isolated. Enemalta's own outage-tracking map collapsed under the strain, failing to register blackouts that residents in Xemxija, Żabbar, Birkirkara, Attard, Marsaskala, and St Paul's Bay were living through in real time. Valletta itself lost power, hitting homes, businesses, and government offices. This has become a continuous pattern rather than an anomaly. A year earlier, Tarxien residents sat without electricity for over three hours while Enemalta trucked in a diesel generator to hold the line temporarily. The opposition's shadow energy minister didn't mince words, calling Malta a "land of generators."

The Malta Chamber of Commerce has now formally called on the government to publish exactly how much investment is needed to fix this permanently, along with a real timeline. Their complaint is straightforward: demand has been rising for years, and grid investment hasn't kept pace. That gap didn't open overnight. Malta's resident population has grown by around 60,000 over five years, and the government has openly stated it wants to keep attracting roughly 14,000 additional residents a year to sustain economic growth. On top of this, four million tourists a year have started coming to the island in droves. population growth, all drawing power through a mid-20th-century distribution network, and the outcome isn't surprising. It’s just a matter of simple math for when the grid gives out.

Energy by the Numbers

Pull up the underlying energy data and the picture starts to look much worse:

Malta generates 84% of its electricity from fossil fuels. That's not just high, it's an outlier even among its own peers. Italy sits at 51% fossil fuels. Greece is at 50%. The EU average is 29%. Spain has pushed fossil fuels down to 25%, backed by nuclear and a renewables share above 55%. Malta is running an electricity system that looks like the rest of the Mediterranean did fifteen years ago, on an island with more annual sunshine than almost anywhere else in Europe. Renewables account for a shockingly low 16% of generation.

Malta ran almost entirely on imported heavy fuel oil for decades, burning it domestically at aging power stations. Around 2015 to 2016, the country made a pivot: it commissioned a new gas-fired plant and laid an interconnector to Sicily, shifting the bulk of generation to gas almost overnight. You can see it in the data as a sharp valley followed by a new plateau wherein oil collapsed with gas taking over completely. That was a genuine modernization, but it also means Malta swapped one single point of failure for another. The system still depends heavily on a small number of large thermal assets and an undersea link, with solar as a thin decorative, sustainable layer on top rather than a real second leg to the nations electricity mix. When demand spikes past what that setup was sized for, as it did during this month's 43°C heatwave, there isn't much redundancy to fall back on. Cables and substations built for a smaller, cooler, less tourist-saturated Malta take the hit.

Then, there's per capita consumption, and this is the chart that actually connects the dots between tourism and the grid. Maltese energy use per person rocketed from around 15,000 kWh in 1980 to a peak near 80,000 kWh in the early 2020s, before settling in the high 60,000s. For comparison, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria, three of the most populous and fastest growing countries on earth, are all still under 10,000 kWh per person. Malta's population hasn't grown fast enough to explain a jump like that on its own. What has grown is the number of air-conditioned hotel rooms, desalination plants running to supply water to millions of extra guests, restaurants, marinas, and rental cars, all metered against a resident population of half a million. Tourists don't show up in Malta's population count, but they absolutely show up in electricity demand.

The outage headlines stop looking like bad luck when compared to the data. Malta is running one of the most fossil fuel dependent, least diversified grids in the EU, built around a single gas project from a decade ago, and asking it to absorb energy demand per resident that rivals wealthy petrostates, driven substantially by a tourism sector that keeps setting new records. The generators idling on street corners in Tarxien and Valletta aren't a coincidence. They're what happens when demand outstrips a system's design assumptions for years running, and nobody adjusts to the new reality.

Who Gets the Dividend?

Stand on a rooftop pool in Sliema and Malta looks like a success story: cranes on the skyline, yachts in the marina, a tourism sector setting records every quarter: limitless growth. Walk a few streets back and you're in a town absorbing traffic, waste, water stress, and rolling blackouts.

The growing gap is the story of inequality, and it's not unique to Malta. It's the standard tension in every place that monetizes its own beauty: a coastline, a historic core, a climate. The revenue from that beauty flows fast and concentrates easily, toward hotel groups, property developers, airlines, and the government coffers that tax them. The costs flow slower and diffuse widely, landing on the people who already lived there before the tourists arrived. Grid strain, congestion, and rising rents don't show up on a tourism company’s quarterly earnings slide, but someone pays for them.

Malta's government is at least naming the tension. Officials talk about a "higher-value, lower-impact" tourism model, aiming for visitors who spend more so the island doesn't need to keep chasing raw volume. But the 2025 numbers show volume and spend rising together.

This is the question every popular place eventually has to answer: who is the beauty for, and who gets to cash in on it? Does tourism tax revenue get routed back into grid capacity, water infrastructure, and the neighborhoods absorbing the visitors? Or does it get treated as general revenue, folded into whatever the government wants to fund next, while Enemalta borrows against future budgets to buy diesel generators as a stopgap?

Malta hasn't answered that question yet. The blackouts happening this week are the answer showing up before the policy does.

Nonetheless, I'd still go back. The history is rich, the water is exactly as blue as advertised, and Valletta at golden hour is worth a flight on its own. But I’m left thinking less about the Knights of St John and more about a much more current siege: an island exponentially growing beyond its own means, with residents left to wonder whether reinvestment from growth ever comes back to them.

Numbers like that invite two thoughts: one saying look how far the country has come while the other says: look how far it still has to go. Both are true, and India is too big and diverse to fit into either one alone. It’s not a country so much as a mosaic: 1.4 billion people, 28 states, hundreds of distinct languages and cultures, and a development story that reads differently depending on which side of the street you’re standing in.

We can just look at how poverty has changed over this period as the clearest mark of rapid change. India’s extreme poverty rate fell from 16.2% in 2011 to 2.3% in 2023. In its most recent review to the UN, the government reported more than 240 million people had escaped multidimensional poverty over the last decade. These numbers are genuinely impressive, and even alone, would show a clear curve towards a bright future.

Yet, we can see even more promising signs for the country. The economy nearly quadrupled since 2000, per capita income has almost tripled, and India’s share of global GDP has doubled to 3.4%, making it the world’s fifth (or sixth depending on the source) largest economy surpassing nations such as Russia, Italy, and Brazil. That growth is reflected in the improvement of India’s SDGs as well. Urban unemployment has dropped to its lowest level since early 2019. At the heart of this growth, two industries carry a disproportionate share of this rising-standard-of-living story:

Pharmaceuticals: India supplies about 20% of the world’s generic medicines by volume and roughly 60% of global vaccine production, shipping to more than 150 countries and covering close to 60% of UNICEF’s vaccine needs, according to the government’s own account of the sector. Exports crossed $31 billion this fiscal year despite a rough patch in the US and Chinese markets.

High-tech: the IT and IT-enabled services sector generated an estimated $283 billion in FY25 revenue, and India’s Global Capability Centres, the offshored engineering and analytics arms of multinational firms, now employ 2.6 million people across more than 2,100 centers. Add a digital economy contributing close to 12% of GDP, and you get the outline of a country that’s climbed the value chain fast.

Then there’s the build-out most likely to reshape SDG 7 for the better: renewable energy. India’s non-fossil installed capacity hit 283.46 GW as of March 31, 2026, split across 150.26 GW of solar, 56.09 GW of wind, 51.41 GW of large hydro, and the rest split between bio and small hydro. The country added 55.29 GW of non-fossil capacity in FY2025-26 alone, the largest single-year jump on record and nearly double the previous best. That’s enough to push India past Brazil into third place globally for installed renewable capacity, behind only China and the US, according to IRENA’s 2026 statistics. In July 2025, renewables briefly supplied 51.5% of the country’s electricity demand, the first time clean power had crossed the halfway mark.

The momentum hasn’t slowed in 2026. India installed close to 29 GW of new solar and wind capacity in just the first half of the year, a record pace, with solar additions up 43% year-on-year. A chunk of that growth is happening on rooftops: the PM Surya Ghar scheme, which subsidizes residential solar, more than doubled rooftop installations in H1 2026 versus the same period a year earlier. Gujarat and Rajasthan, with their flat desert land and aggressive state policy, account for roughly half the country’s new solar and wind capacity between them. This is the sunniest part of India’s SDG story, quite literally: a decade ago the country had 35 GW of renewable capacity; it now has more than 280 GW, an eightfold increase.

Unfortunately, even with this rapid growth, there are still some growing pains: none of the 17 SDGs are on track globally by 2030, and India is no exception. Only about a third of India’s SDG targets are on pace to be met by 2030; nearly 43% are crawling forward; roughly a quarter have gone backwards.

The goal-by-goal dashboard for India displays this issue rather plainly:

Five goals sit in the worst tier, “major challenges remain”: zero hunger, good health and well-being, gender equality, sustainable cities and communities, and life below water. Seven more sit one notch up, “significant challenges remain”: clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work, industry and infrastructure, responsible consumption and production, life on land, peace and justice, and partnerships for the goals. Only no poverty, quality education, and reduced inequalities sit in the two least-troubled tiers, and reduced inequalities is the single goal the dashboard marks as already achieved.

The trend arrows are where the real meat is, though, because status and direction don’t always agree. Ten goals are moderately improving, including three of the five “major challenges” goals: health, gender equality, and life below water are all bad but steadily getting better. Five goals are plainly stagnate: hunger, sustainable cities, life on land, peace and institutions, and partnerships. And two goals are moving backwards outright: responsible consumption and production, and climate action the dashboard’s only unambiguous losses. Reduced inequalities, unfortunately, carries no trend data at all.

Hunger is the goal that most complicates the narrative of growth. Despite the poverty numbers, child stunting, wasting, and undernourishment remain stubborn, alongside a rising obesity burden that points to a food system in rapid and unequal transition rather than in balance. It’s rated a major challenge and it’s stagnating, not improving, which makes it the least forgiving spot on the whole dashboard. Health, by contrast, is a major challenge that’s moving in the right direction, tempered by the fact that air pollution and non-communicable disease mortality have both worsened even as the aggregate score climbs. And the two decreasing goals, consumption/production and climate, are the environmental half of the ledger: rapid urbanization has delivered electricity, water, and connectivity to hundreds of millions of people, but it has also produced some of the most polluted cities on the planet and a coastline and land base under mounting strain.

Then there’s the more institutional concerns during this period. India’s Press Freedom Index score has collapsed, from 59.51 in 2015 to 31.96 in 2026, the single worst move of any indicator in the country’s SDG profile. Gender equality sits in the “major challenges” tier despite decades of targeted policy, and female labor force participation, at 35.6%, is roughly half of what the World Bank says India needs by 2047 to capture its demographic dividend threatening the growth miracle with the “middle income trap” that has plagued developing nations in the past. Regional disparity compounds all of it: India still trails Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in the South Asia rankings, a reminder that national averages flatten enormous state-by-state variation.

A nation of nations, forging itself

What makes India’s SDG story different from, say, Vietnam’s or Indonesia’s is scale and heterogeneity working against each other. NITI Aayog coordinates the SDG agenda nationally, but the roll-out runs through 28 states with wildly different starting points, capacities, and politics. A policy that lifts Kerala’s numbers can leave Bihar’s completely untouched. A digital platform built for an urban middle class doesn’t automatically reach a village where broadband arrived only last year, even if broadband subscriptions rose nationally. That tension, between speed and unevenness, between a rapidly modernizing middle class and a countryside still catching up, between a state capable of building UPI and a state still fighting basic sanitation gaps, is what “nation of nations” really means in practice.

The World Bank frames India’s next chapter around Viksit Bharat, the government’s goal of upper-middle-income status by 2047, the centenary of economic independence. Getting there requires sustaining close to 8% annual growth for the next two decades, nearly doubling the investment rate, and doing something India has struggled with for a generation: turning economic growth into broadly shared human development, not just aggregate GDP that funnels wealth to a select elite. That’s what’s really at stake not just for the SDGs, but for the heart of India itself. Who will the development be for? All life, or a select few at the top.

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