In April 2025, this perfect crescent of sand located 300 kilometers from Athens, celebrated as one of Greece’s most spectacular beaches, was transformed into a highly secured film set. Its crystal-clear waters served as the backdrop for The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster scheduled for theatrical release on July 17, 2026.

Right here, three massive triremes sailed the bay carrying Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as the goddess Athena, while the famous Nestor’s Cave, opening up beneath the castle, was used as Polyphemus’ lair. 

The region of Messenia, with its Venetian and Ottoman castles, a rural hinterland dominated by olive trees, and still-wild coastlines, was chosen by the production precisely to evoke the epic nature of the myth. Yet, behind the Hollywood postcard and the undeniable beauty of these places, this land is proving to be increasingly fragile, exposed to deep environmental, social, and economic wounds.

This is not the first time. The release of a major film has become a familiar mechanism by which cinema rapidly reshapes the destiny of places, and rarely gently. After Game of Thrones, Dubrovnik saw over 1.2 million visitors descend on a city of 42,000 residents, prompting UNESCO to warn its Old Town could no longer absorb the daily influx. 

After The Beach, Maya Bay received up to 5,000 visitors a day until its coral reef was decimated and its beach structurally destroyed forcing a years-long closure. Messenia is the next candidate, and the wave has not yet arrived. 

A Picture-Perfect Postcard on the Verge of Collapse

“Based on data analyzed over the past 30 years, the average temperature in Messenia, in line with the country’s trend, has increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius,” explains Dr. Kostas Lagouvardos, Director of Research at the National Observatory of Athens. “This is a very high figure, compounded by a substantial increase in heatwaves and the near-total disappearance of snow.” 

Lagouvardos warns that when combining these data points, it becomes clear that the climate emergency is no longer a future threat, but a present reality pushing the territory toward progressive aridity. 

The combination of increasingly scorching summers and snowless winters drastically reduces groundwater recharge, exposing the region to chronic water scarcity precisely during the months of peak tourist influx. This alteration puts a strain on local communities, threatening biodiversity and the area’s famous olive groves.

From the Navarino fortress, the view spans the entire area: the beach, the curve of the dunes, and, right behind them, the Gialova lagoon. This ecosystem, protected by the Natura 2000 network, hosts 17 habitats and over 73 protected species. It is a picture-perfect postcard that hides an equilibrium on the verge of collapse. 

According to the European project COASTAL, the entirety of Messenia relies 100% on groundwater, which is being drained by intensive extraction for both hotels and crops. 

Receiving no more fresh water, the lagoon suffers from critical salinity for 30% of the year, which suffocates its biodiversity. The ecosystem is caught in a vice: in summer, it is overloaded by wastewater from mass tourism; in autumn, by residues from olive mills. Added to this is the chemical cocktail of nitrogen and phosphorus washed down by rain, from the fertilizers used in intensive agriculture and neighboring luxury golf courses. The result is an algal bloom that deprives the water of oxygen.

Tourism Monoculture Invading the Territory

Beyond the lagoon, the panorama opens into an even wider gulf: the Navarino Bay. To the right lies the town of Pylos; to the left stands the massive Costa Navarino complex. This network of resorts and exclusive private residences, owned by TEMES, a company belonging to the Constantakopoulos family, features four 18-hole golf courses, an agora with a private marina, and swimming pools in almost every home. 

It is a gated paradise that has hosted the British Royal Family, world leaders, and VIPs such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who purchased two villas here, and Cristiano Ronaldo, who signed his transfer to Juventus on this very spot.

“Despite being presented as an eco-friendly luxury tourist facility, it is not,” says Ioannis Spilanis, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Environment of the University of the Aegean and Director of the Sustainable Tourism Observatory of the Aegean. “The water consumption of such a model is simply incompatible with the resources of this region.”

But the tourism-driven environmental impact of the area extends beyond the Costa Navarino complex. For a few years now, Messenia has been at the center of heavy investments. In 2010, the airport of Kalamata, the region’s capital, handled just 50,000 passengers; today, it consistently exceeds 180.000 arrivals with direct flights from Central and Northern Europe. 

Furthermore, the airport was recently leased for 40 years to a consortium of companies, including Pileas SA, a subsidiary of the Konstantakopoulos Group, the same family that owns Costa Navarino, and the German giant Fraport, to triple passenger flows. 

A short distance away, since 2023, the hills of Messenia have turned into an open-air construction site. The new Southwest Highway, a project worth over 300 million euros, will cut travel times to the resorts and the Methoni fortress, another set for The Odyssey, where Tom Holland, playing Telemachus, meets the wise Nestor.

“Although Messenia has not yet reached the saturation levels of some islands and we cannot talk about true overtourism, the pattern is the same”, Spilanis warns, “it is a tourism monoculture that invades the territory, depriving communities of their uniqueness.”

The Environmental Impact of Visibility 

In Pylos, just a few kilometers from Costa Navarino, Georgia Visviki, a lawyer and consultant for the Legal Service of the Municipality of Pylos-Nestor, sits in her office. The blue of the sea is visible from her windows, while wedding guests are gathering in the small harbor out front. 

“Everything has two sides,” the lawyer says, “on one hand, these investments bring capital and jobs, even if seasonal. On the other hand, I fear the environmental impact, given that waste is already a problem today, in addition to the loss of cultural identity.”

Visviki is also the president of the Pylos Women’s Association, an organization dedicated to preserving the traditions and culture of the area. “This has always been a multicultural area, open to the outside world, first by the Venetians and Ottomans, and later by the Italians,” she explains, “we have unique music and dances, and a cuisine rooted in our land, made of wine, olive oil, lemons, and oranges.”

In Pylos, the traces of these passing civilizations are still alive, carved in stone. A prime example is the Church of the Transfiguration, located inside the New Fortress, which preserves intact the architecture of its previous life as an Ottoman mosque. 

“What we want is balanced development, a sustainable tourism that does not exploit the local community but integrates with the territory,” Visviki concludes, “the movie will bring a further wave of visibility, and the region is not yet ready to handle it.”

The Tracks of Rural Resilience

Heading north through Messenia, surrounded by olive groves and greenhouses, and moving inland, one reaches the village of Dessillas, boasting 130 years of history, perched on a hillside. 

At the old station, a large group of visitors crowds around the railway lines.

“We are inaugurating a new trail that follows the railway lines between Dessillas and Diavolitsi,” explains Marios Gkrogkos, from the Amiamo Dessillas association. “It is a way to build a bridge between the memory of this place and its future, proving that abandonment can be fought through culture and community participation,” he adds.

In a region with high rates of depopulation, the association has performed a small miracle of rural resilience. They didn’t just clean up the old tracks to make a walking trail, but they have also converted the historic abandoned station into a public library, restoring a social hub to the village. 

This slow-paced walk along the railway ties is not just a local attraction, but the core of a regional debate on slow mobility and the recovery of historic infrastructure to counter depopulation. 

This initiative aligns with the vision of the Ethos social cooperative in Kalamata, which is active in the “Peloponnese Trails” project. “Reactivating the railway in Messenia wouldn’t require new investments, since the network already exists. It would provide vital lifelines for the villages,” Ethos representatives explain, “residents could move back into family homes, commute to Kalamata, save on rent, and alleviate the housing crisis in the cities, while also creating jobs.” 

It is a gamble on authentic identity that clashes with the Hollywood spotlight. “The Odyssey will offer nothing extra to Messenia. On the contrary, we believe it is Messenia providing value to the film, and not the other way around,” the Ethos representatives conclude.

Human-Scale Tourism

Indeed, the beauty of Messenia reveals itself in every village. Heading south toward Koroni, one encounters the hamlet of Vounaria, which for nearly a century was one of the neuralgic centers of Greek pottery. It was an artform that seemed abandoned since 1990, when the last historic kiln closed its doors. But in 2018 it breathed again thanks to the determination of Maria Basilogiannakopoulou.

“I realized that even in Athens, there was strong recognition of the value of this craft, so I convinced myself to return to the places I used to visit as a child,” the artisan explains, “the type of tourism we have here causes great damage. People mistakenly think that money can only be made from that, and so they end up abandoning century-old traditions.”

In Vasilitsi, in the far south of the region, stands another outpost of cultural resistance. The house of Marilena and Voisilios is located just a few meters from the village square. Passing through the gate, visitors enter a garden that leads to their taverna. Inside, an ancient loom, historic photos, and dozens of 20th-century radios are preserved. 

“Our daughter is a primary school teacher, and every year she brings her students here,” Marilena explains, “We organize loom weaving courses, we created an educational vegetable garden, and we take field trips into nature.” 

The couple decided to return to Vasilitsi after living in Athens for several years. “This area is a paradise,” Voisilios says, “but a tourism monoculture cannot be faced alone; we need to network. If we truly valued our culture, which is unique, local youth wouldn’t be forced to work as waiters at Costa Navarino.”

Traces Not Scars

Right across from the couple’s home lives Aris Christopoulos. Together with five other partners, he founded Apo Kardias, a farmers’ collective dedicated to producing organic olive oil. The collective, officially established in 2021, owns several plots of land in Cape Gallo, the southern tip of Messenia, which falls within the Natura 2000 network. 

“We export mostly to Germany. I don’t think tourism is an absolute evil; it all depends on the model implemented,” Aris explains, while driving his pickup truck. The paved road gives way to an increasingly twisting dirt track. Reaching the top of a hill, the horizon opens wide: Nothing but olive trees and the Mediterranean Sea. 

“We sell abroad, especially to people who have been here and developed an emotional bond with our land,” Aris adds, “we don’t want mega-projects or gigantic resorts, but a human-scale tourism, connected to the territory and capable of leaving deep traces, not scars.”

Traces or scars; it is within this fragile boundary that the destiny of Messenia is being played out, a region currently suspended at a deep identity crossroads. On one side is the mirage of mega-resorts and luxury housing developments, which risks turning the land into a beautiful but empty shell. On the other hand is the silent resistance of those who reopen abandoned stations, restart old looms, and defend olive groves. 

The spotlights on the film set have turned off, but the movie’s release will trigger an inevitable media and social media backlash. It is a pressure for which no land can truly call itself ready, as the cases of Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones or Maya Bay after The Beach have already proven.

The post More Scars Than Traces: Christopher Nolan Filmed His The Odyssey in Messenia, But Can the Region Survive the Spotlight? appeared first on Untold.

Mustapha is one of over 100,000 workers–mostly migrants from North and West Africa–who tend the vegetables grown under more than 32,000 hectares (320km2) of plastic-covered greenhouses in the Spanish province of Almería, nestled along the south-east coast of the Mediterranean. The region produces over 3 million tonnes of produce (tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, peppers, aubergines and more) destined for export to western Europe–Germany, France, and the UK mainly. 

Most of the 14,000 farming families have grown food in these greenhouses since Franco gave them small parcels of land in the 1940s, with the sole purpose of achieving national food security. Some are now extremely wealthy. Some struggle to make a profit. Probably, all of them employ migrant workers and the vast majority are likely to be doing so illegally–low-paid undocumented labour is the only way many of them can make ends meet. 

Food Imperialism

The Spanish government has recently announced the regularisation of almost 1 million undocumented workers–many of the workers in Almería who are given papers will try to move on from exhausting greenhouse work to better-paid jobs in restaurants and hotels. The empty jobs will soon be filled by people surviving the grueling journey on foot from Istanbul or by small wooden boat from West Africa to the Canaries. There are always people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by poor trade agreements and overfishing back home.

This is food imperialism – the way in which corporations and nations in the Global North exert control over the Global South by dictating what food is produced and exported to ensure the world’s wealthiest citizens have a constant supply of affordable, year-round produce on their supermarket shelves.

Our food system is the product of hundreds of years of unequal distribution and control of global power. The British Empire controlled the production of sugar and palm oil to feed its malnourished and tired workers back home–relying on slave labour and productive lands in the tropics to provide the expendable resources needed to continue to reap profits as they deplete these lands and waste their people. A lot has changed since the empires of old–today’s empires belong to the likes of Unilever and Cargill. Food is still treated as a commodity to generate profits, but the playbook of actions needed to keep the bloated food system functioning is less of a secret these days.

When my co-hosts and I began interviewing experts for our new podcast series, Edible Empire, we wanted to map out this modern playbook and uncover who really pays the hidden costs of our food. What we found is that today’s corporate giants rely on the exact same mechanisms of control as the empires of the past. As political economists like Professors Raj Patel and Harriet Friedmann point out, the global food system has always been structured around these regimes of power, transitioning from colonial monopolies to corporate ones. Today, as Professors Jennifer Clapp and Phil Howard warn, an unprecedented concentration of corporate power means a handful of firms now dictate global agricultural policy, market access, and ultimately, what ends up on our plates.

Palm oil is a perfect example of food imperialism–the ubiquitous, often hidden ingredient across foods and cosmetics, driving catastrophic deforestation across Southeast Asia. Researchers like Professor Jonathan Robins have documented how this versatile crop came to be embedded in global capitalism, while activists and researchers on the ground, such as Farwiza Farhan and Professor Helena Varkkey, see the direct ecological and social fallout—vital rainforests cleared and Indigenous livelihoods lost to feed Western consumerism under the guise of sustainable development.

The same pattern plays out in the intensive dairy farms half a world away in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the work of researchers like Drs Mike Joy and Milena Bojovic highlights the severe local ecological degradation caused by industrial farming. The harm extends far beyond New Zealand’s borders, however; as artist and researcher Dr Crystal Bennes notes, this intensive system relies on phosphate fertiliser extracted from the illegally occupied territory of Western Sahara, where half the population has been displaced to refugee camps in Algeria. It is a textbook example of hidden externalities: wealth is accumulated in the Global North, while the geopolitical, social, and environmental damage is borne by vulnerable populations in the Global South, hidden from view from consumers.

Awareness is Everything

Neoliberalism has created extreme freedom in food markets, allowing continued profiteering as ecosystems collapse and livelihoods fail–Mustapha left his home in The Gambia because his family could no longer find enough fish to sell at the market, and no money meant no food. He stepped into a small wooden fishing boat and took the 11-day journey to Tenerife knowing that 1-in-5 people who took that journey would die. 

He was a lucky one—he made it to Spain and found a job (most days) in the greenhouses in Almería. Living in a slum made from discarded pallets and greenhouse plastic, he could save enough money to send a little home to support his sisters and parents. But as investigators like Hazel Healy and Brigitte Wear have revealed, the fish back home continue to be exploited by the Global North. Their populations have been destroyed by industrial overextraction for the production of fishmeal. These pellets have been fed for decades to carnivorous salmon in thousands of farms dotted around the fjords of Norway—salmon that are then exported to wealthy countries around the world. As West African marine ecologists and activists like Dr Aliou Ba and researchers like María Alonso Martínez have documented, this creates a bleak cycle where local food security is stolen to supply luxury seafood abroad.

This is food imperialism.

Ultimately, our damaging food system relies on a lack of public awareness to continue; the inner workings of these complex, global supply chains are too easily hidden from view. But awareness is everything, and there are alternative paths forward. Thinkers and activists like Anitra Nelson, Million Belay, Ali Thomas, and Chris Smaje offer powerful visions of hope rooted in degrowth, food sovereignty, minimising food waste, and agroecology. They show that smallholder farming and local food networks can dismantle this corporate stranglehold, replacing exploitation with equity.

To challenge this system, we first have to see it clearly. We need to understand where our food comes from, and recognize that the choices we are presented with on supermarket shelves are not really choices at all.

Neal Haddaway, Benjamin Eitelberg, and Emma Strutt are the creators of Edible Empire, a new podcast series exploring the hidden costs of the global food system. You can listen to the full interviews and subscribe to the series at www.thesalmonandthetomato.org/listen. 

The post Edible Empire: How Our Food Supply Chains are Destroying the Planet appeared first on Untold.

“I only worry about my child,” she said, unfolding medical records worn soft from handling respiratory problems. “The doctor told me I had to move. But we don’t have any place to go.”

Morocco’s government has issued 416 permits authorising the import of European waste — clothes, rubber tires, industrial byproducts — burned as fuel in cement kilns across the Casablanca-Settat region, including within 15 kilometers of her home. In 2024 alone, actual imports reached 821,500 tonnes, nearly triple the annual average of the previous three years, a surge consistent with companies racing to ship before the approaching EU export ban. European corporations save over $52 million every year by shipping their waste here instead of processing it at home. 

Fatima doesn’t know all of that, what she does know is that her son can’t breathe, and that some nights the smell reaches dozens of kilometers from the landfill.

An investigation, based on exclusive trade data from the Basel Action Network, customs records, and Freedom of Information responses, found that European countries shipped at least 36,611 tons of waste to Morocco in a single year — 93 percent of it classified as “reusable” despite declared values as low as €0.10 per kilogram, a price that suggests disposal, not resale. 

The Economics of Dumping

Understanding why European waste ends up in Moroccan communities requires following the money. The arithmetic is brutally simple.

Treating waste properly in Europe costs estimated conservatively about $100 per ton. Shipping it to Morocco and burning it in cement kilns costs approximately $36 to $39. For a company processing 100,000 tons annually, the savings exceed $6 million a year. Across the entire waste trade, European corporations pocket more than $52 million annually — calculated from the roughly $62 gap between European treatment costs and Moroccan processing costs, applied across the 821,500 tonnes imported in 2024.

Data obtained from the Basel Action Network (BAN) covering September 2024 through September 2025, reveals how the pipeline operates. In that 12 month period alone, European countries shipped 36,611 tons of documented waste to Morocco, including clothing, plastics, paper, and electronics. The real volume is likely higher; this figure represents only what was officially recorded under waste codes. Shipments reclassified as “secondary raw materials,” “reusable goods,” or “alternative fuel” before leaving Europe drop out of waste tracking entirely.

Spain emerges as Europe’s primary waste gateway to Morocco, handling nearly 80 percent of clothing exports and two-thirds of plastic waste, 73 tons of worn clothing shipped daily from a single country. Spanish waste management companies profit from both low transport costs across the Mediterranean and Morocco’s minimal environmental oversight.

The declared values tell their own story. Romania declares clothing at €0.10 per kilogram. Poland declares identical goods at €1.02, a tenfold difference for the same customs code. Industry sale prices for sorted reusable clothing run between €0.50 and €1.50 per kilogram; Poland’s declaration sits inside that band, Romania’s far below it. 

The gap suggests not just different markets but different goods—genuinely reusable clothing commands higher prices, while low declared values indicate material destined for disposal rather than resale.

According to the European Environment Agency, the fate of used textiles exported from the EU is “highly uncertain,” with material unfit for reuse mostly ending up in open landfills and informal waste streams. 

Ninety-three percent of waste in the Basel data is classified as “worn clothing.” But industry estimates suggest only half or less of such shipments actually reach secondhand markets. The rest becomes Morocco’s problem—feeding the cement kilns at Jorf Lasfar, Morocco’s largest industrial port zone 120 kilometers south of Casablanca, entering industrial facilities across the Casablanca-Settat region, disappearing into a system with no transparency about what happens next.

Major corporate players are embedded in this supply chain. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” (ESF) for cement manufacturers. When contacted, CHIMIREC Maroc denied any involvement in European waste imports and exports, stating it processes exclusively domestic waste. LafargeHolcim’s Ecoval subsidiary is the country’s primary industrial waste treatment provider. Ciments du Maroc, owned by Germany’s Heidelberg Materials, operates a grinding center near the Jorf Lasfar port, a documented entry point for European waste shipments. LafargeHolcim and Ciments du Maroc did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 2016, the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development has issued 416 permits for waste imports, authorizing more than 2.5 million tons of European waste to enter the country. In 2024 alone, imports reached 821,500 tons—nearly a third of the entire decade’s total in a single year, a surge consistent with the approaching EU ban deadline. 

The Moroccan total is larger than the 36,611 tonnes recorded by BAN because the two datasets measure different stages of the same pipeline: BAN tracks European shipments still declared under waste codes — clothing, plastics, paper, electronics — while Morocco’s ministry counts everything that arrives as “recyclable raw materials”. 

The gap between the two figures is essentially the volume reclassified out of the waste category before it leaves Europe. The ministry has described the program as a strategic pillar of Morocco’s circular economy, projecting 60,000 jobs by 2030. The government frames waste as a valuable resource essential for industrial energy, a narrative that obscures the health costs borne by communities like those in Mediouna.

The Loopholes

International law nominally restricts wealthy nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones. The Basel Convention, ratified by over 190 countries, requires “Prior Informed Consent” for transboundary movements of hazardous materials. But that consent, as the convention is written, operates between governments — not between governments and residents who live downwind.

In practice, the regulations contain loopholes large enough to drive a container ship through. 

Reclassified materials require none of these protections. A single word change on a customs form,  from “waste” to “secondary raw material”, transforms a regulated substance into an unregulated commodity.

Trade records obtained for this investigation reveal the scale of the fiction. 93 percent of waste shipped to Morocco is classified as “reusable clothing” or “secondary materials,” but declared values of €0.10 per kilogram suggest these shipments are waste destined for disposal, not genuine merchandise.

According to data collected through a Freedom of Information Request, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) told us that between 2020 and 2023, no Italian waste was registered as having been sent to Morocco “for disposal purposes” — but, in the same response, acknowledged that “small quantities” were shipped during 2021, 2022 and 2023 “for the purpose of material recovery.” 

UN Comtrade records for 2023 show approximately 817 tonnes of Italian rubber waste reaching Morocco that year, worth around $427,000. The following year, in August 2024 alone, Morocco’s Ministry of Energy Transition authorised the import of 20,000 tonnes of waste specifically from Italy. 

This glaring contradiction could be the result of a regulatory loophole in how Europe counts what leaves its ports: under EU law, burning waste in a cement kiln is officially classified as “energy recovery” rather than “disposal” .

Through labeling their exported garbage as alternative fuel for Moroccan kilns or misclassifying it as reusable merchandise at customs, European countries can legally erase millions of tons of waste from their disposal ledgers, outsourcing their pollution while keeping their domestic recycling statistics pristine. 

Cristina Guarda, Italian MPE from the Greens/EFA, confirms that the topic is on the European agenda. “The goal is to reduce the areas where opacity can take root, clarify responsibilities throughout the supply chain, and establish the principle that exports are acceptable only if companies can genuinely demonstrate environmentally sound management, with equivalent and verifiable standards”

The Human Cost

One hundred twenty kilometers south of Casablanca, the industrial zone at Jorf Lasfar stretches along Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Container ships dock at a port with 37-million-ton annual capacity. Cement plants rise in silhouette against the sky. Trucks move constantly between the port and processing facilities, carrying material that began its journey in European cities and will end it in Moroccan furnaces.

The health impacts accumulate invisibly. Communities living near Moroccan cement plants face an excess risk of respiratory disease, cancer incidence and mortality, predominantly affecting the respiratory tract in both children and adults. 

Research consistently finds that people living near cement plants are up to nearly five times more likely to report respiratory symptoms than those with no such exposure. In Morocco specifically, occupational cement exposure has been directly linked to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, one of the leading causes of respiratory mortality.

When rubber tires burn in cement kilns without adequate emission controls, they release dioxins and furans, among the most toxic substances known to science, along with heavy metals including lead, mercury, and cadmium. A peer-reviewed study measuring emissions from cement kilns burning hazardous waste found dioxin levels more than four times higher than baseline (1.57 vs. 6.49 nanograms per cubic metre) — and rising further as more hazardous waste was added to the fuel mix, with emissions rising further as the co-processing ratio increases.

A synthesis by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has documented that where emissions controls on such kilns are inadequate, surrounding communities show elevated rates of respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal illness.

Morocco cannot yet manage its own domestic waste crisis. The Mediouna landfill alone receives 1.2 million tonnes a year and is approaching saturation. In November 2024, the World Bank approved a $250 million programme to upgrade the country’s landfills — a tacit acknowledgement that existing capacity is inadequate before any additional burden from imports. Casablanca cannot absorb more pollution, let alone safely process hundreds of thousands of tons shipped from Europe each year. 

When the government approved more than two million tons of new waste imports from various European countries in August 2024, activist Mohamed Benata of the Environmental Assembly of Northern Morocco called it “incompatible with the spirit of citizenship” and unconstitutional. In 2016, similar outrage over Italian waste imports sparked widespread protests and social media campaigns, forcing the government to suspend the imports. Yet despite this resistance, the waste continues to arrive.

European corporate accountability law, for its part, does not reach far enough to catch what happens after the shipments leave port. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, adopted by the EU in 2024 to oblige large companies to police human rights and environmental harms across their supply chains, stops at the point of sale. 

“CSDDD ends with handing over the goods more or less,” Miriam Saage-Maaß, legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said of the directive’s reach. Whether European exporters bear any legal responsibility for what happens to their waste inside Moroccan cement kilns, she added, “depends on how direct EU exporters are connected to the waste burning.”

“The EU is strengthening controls and obligations,” says Guarda, while mentioning the new 2024 Waste Shipment Regulation that sets out stricter rules on the export of waste to non-EU countries. “But the real leap forward must be cultural and industrial,” she adds. “Circularity cannot become an elegant way to outsource health and environmental impacts to other communities. We need a pathway that reduces the problem at the source, increases producer responsibility and leads to waste management that is consistent with climate and health protection objectives, without creating ‘sacrifice zones’ outside Europe.”

Time is running out, but not for the reasons Fatima might hope. From 21 November 2026, the EU will ban all plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries like Morocco, with no approved-list escape route for plastics. For other non-hazardous waste such as metals and paper, exports will be banned from May 2027 unless a country is on an approved list; Morocco submitted its application to be included by the 21 February 2025 deadline.

Whether that ban will actually stop the flow, or simply push it through new classification channels, is contested. When the regulation was adopted in 2024, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international environmental NGO, warned that its real effect on waste exports would depend on how strictly EU member states transpose and enforce it, and on whether the remaining loopholes are closed. 

One such channel is already emerging inside EU policy itself, in December 2025, the European Commission proposed Union-wide end-of-waste criteria for mechanically recycled plastics, which would allow such materials to circulate across the bloc without being classified as waste at all.

“The longer the chain of parties involved, the shorter the chain of enforcement: controls on thousands of containers travelling through ports are extremely complex. The official data we have on Morocco could be not everything that it’s actually exported, but unofficial flows are undetectable”, says Paola Ficco, environmental lawyer and director of the magazine Rivista Rifiuti.

Back in Mediouna, Fatima remains caught in the middle. While Europe celebrates its recycling milestones and Morocco counts the jobs and greens its image, she and families like hers in Casablanca are plagued by air and soil pollution from domestic and exported waste.

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

The post Toxic Trade: How Europe Exports Its Waste to Morocco and Calls It Recycling appeared first on Untold.

Growing up in a leftist household, I looked at this change in diet as a way in which companies and neoliberal governments were erasing parts of our cultural identity and social cohesion, so I became obsessed with reading the brand names, places of origin, and lists of ingredients of food in the supermarket.

One thing I started noticing in my teens, and has worsened over time, is the limited variety of options. Don’t get me wrong, long supermarket corridors are colorful and filled with over 50 kinds each of bread, cereals, canned soups, chocolate, peanut butter, cookies, ice cream, potato chips, dog food, cheese analogs, frozen meals, and infant formula, but producers are usually no more than three, and ingredients often include things I wouldn’t be able to place in nature. 

From those ingredients that sound natural, there’s one that troubles me and is present in all the food items mentioned above: palm oil, a main product from the plant called Elais guineensis Jacq.

Beyond the Package

Oil palm derived ingredients are found in food under many names: vegetable oil, vegetable fat, palmate, palmitate, palm stearine, or stearate acid. In cleaning products, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate, glyceryl, cetyl palmitate, stearic acid, or palmitoyl are often derived from it too.

Healthwise, oil palm derived products aren’t bad, and are used to create nice textures in many items. Even more, palm oil is usually recognized as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. 

So you might wonder, why does this ingredient make you so angry? Are you simply an angry woman? Well, sure, and the world really needs more of us, but I’d also say we have to take all magical ingredients with a pinch of doubt.

That’s why I decided to dig deeper. Beyond my gut feeling or political instinct, I wanted to understand who actually stands to gain from this ingredient taking over our supermarket shelves, and at what cost. Was it improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers? Was it driving local development, or merely feeding a system of industrial agriculture that thrives on cheap land, cheap labor, and even cheaper ecosystems? Those questions led me to look beyond the pretty packaging and start piecing together a bigger, messier picture that connected oil palms to deforestation and land grabbing.

Around 2018, in the spirit of making something powerful out of my anger towards the industrialization of agriculture and food production, and understanding the full chain of actors benefiting from this, I joined a group of people investigating oil palm in Mexico, on the ground and from space, using satellite imagery.

Hidden Costs

Around the world, oil palm’s high productivity and versatility have led to its rapid and consistent increase in demand and production. Plantations are productive for several decades, so they can be understood as long periods of steady, year-long income by farmers. However, this crop is also associated with high rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and significant social, environmental and health impacts to smallholder farmers due to the intensive use of agrochemicals and polluting oil extraction processes. 

In addition, if you’re growing oil palm and at some point decide not to do it anymore, removing the plants is quite expensive – a 2012 study on Malaysian plantations estimated the cost of removing a hectare of oil palm at RM 34,500 (over USD 10,000 at that time).

Furthermore, when we talk about biofuels we usually forget to say that soil is not a renewable resource and, for this purpose, oil palm would most likely be produced as a monocrop in an industrialized way, a practice that does not regenerate the soil.

Initiatives like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) have been trying to regulate production and reduce these impacts, but many organizations have questioned their efficacy and standards.

In Mexico, the first attempts to establish oil palm plantations began in the 1950s, but production and demand only took off in the late 1990s, when the government classified it as a strategic crop–a crop that’s highly competitive in the market and/or important for food security–and a series of policies were designed to promote its cultivation and commerce at the federal or state levels. 

In 2017, the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER) published the National Agricultural Plan for the Period of 2017 to 2030, where they included the recommended market strategies to increase production and satisfy domestic needs, and maps indicating which regions were agro-ecologically suitable for each of the 38 strategic crops. 

In the case of oil palm, the suitability map indicated that 14.2 million hectares of the national territory were suitable for oil palm cultivation, an area almost the size of Nepal.

Unequal Maps

The SADER’s suitability maps were based on maps from other institutions, like the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SAGARPA), the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP), and the Institute for Productive Reconversion and Tropical Agriculture (IRPAT). Such maps are typically publicly available at very low resolutions and use different mixes of data climatic and topographic data (obtained from meteorological stations), edaphic characteristics (obtained from local studies), and cultivation areas (obtained from satellite data).

Observations of the Earth from satellite data, aka remote sensing data, have been used for the identification and analysis of crops of strategic importance, with the purpose of estimating their yields, preventing risks associated with climate change, and identifying socio-environmental impacts. At the moment, commercial satellites can return imagery with a resolution of around 30 cm per pixel every few hours, and software for satellite imagery management, like EarthExplorer or Google Earth have been accessible since the early 2000s, but high-resolution data is typically very costly and affordable only to large institutions and governments. 

Although subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options are more affordable, publicly available data–more likely to be accessible to smallholder farmers–is usually provided at lower resolution, typically 5-500 m per pixel, updated from daily to every few weeks. Also, feature identification and classification can be done manually by humans or with data-driven algorithms to cover larger areas, but results should always be verified against on-the-ground data to avoid confusion between crops and ecosystems. 

For example, distinguishing primary forest from oil palm data plantations is not a simple task. Manual methodologies are typically highly accurate, but unsustainable for large studies, which might explain why SADER gathered data from multiple institutions using different methodologies.

In any case, when agricultural policies rely heavily on remote sensing data, many issues on the ground are obscured, like the full breadth of environmental impacts of a crop’s cultivation, or the desired futures of those working the land. Even more, the lack of, or unequal access to, high-resolution data, raises questions about the adequacy and power imbalances promoted by those policies.

Follow the Data

In 2019, trying to understand the impacts of SADER’s recommendation of turning such a large amount of land into oil palm cropland, we decided to dig deeper into this topic. Afterall, we were city people and maybe farmers were very happy with their job prospects, or using palm oil derived products was the least impactful thing on the environment.

We contacted people involved in oil palm production, like the women farmer organizations “Agua y Vida, Mujeres, Derechos y Ambiente” and “Casa de la Mujer Ixim Antsetic”, and people in academia and the government, and we started looking at all publicly available information about oil palm production in Mexico. Despite abundant governmental data and scientific literature, it was hard to say who was benefiting the most out of oil palm production in the country. 

We didn’t find any publicly available interactive map of oil palm plantations at the national level, which we thought crucial for smallholder farmers and other non-governmental policy-makers to contribute to the design of agricultural policies. 

So we decided to create it.

It took us two years of gathering and analyzing publicly available data on oil palm’s socio-environmental impacts, production and cropland from 2014 to 2019. We followed a semi-automatic remote sensing analysis methodology running Python scripts over publicly available Google Earth satellite images to create our publicly available high-resolution oil palm plantations map, and a report explaining our findings. 

Considering the potential of these mappings, we decided to call ourselves the Observatorio Agroindustrial en México, or OBSAM with the aim of expanding this study to all the strategic crops in the country. 

Our map showed the distribution and expansion of oil palm at the national level. The data had the potential for identifying spatial relationships with transportation and other infrastructure projects, other agricultural programs, or the coverage of governmental sustainable rural development programs.

Expansion and Deforestation

We identified 62,057 hectares (ha) of oil palm plantations, usually close to transportation infrastructure and areas of scrubland, rainfed agriculture, pastureland and secondary vegetation. 

From these, 4,022ha were inside natural protected areas, mainly in the Palenque National Park, and the Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve (EBR) both in the Southern state of Chiapas–researchers, civil society actors, farmers, and media, had long reported this and asked for controlling the crop’s expansion in these areas, but no official response had been given to these concerns. 

In addition, oil palm plantations were found in five terrestrial and seven hydrological regions of importance for biodiversity conservation, as defined by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO). Finally, comparisons against official data for forest cover from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for 2017 and 2018, identified a link between oil palm and deforestation in more than 5,400 ha of forests and jungle.

Our literature review also showed that there were indeed multiple opinions about oil palm’s benefits and impacts around the world, depending usually on the level of access to technology and subsidies, labor force, land ownership, social organizing, and decision-making power of those who grow it. 

In Mexico, technological requirements for its cultivation have led to the replacement of itinerant traditional agricultural methods, like roza-tumba-quema –an itinerary agricultural technique practiced in tropical regions for around 10,000 years where land is cleared (roza-tumba), burnt (quema) and then let to rest for a prolonged period of time, recently modernised to roza-tumba-pica (clear-burn-add organic matter) to prevent wildfires. 

In addition, hard labor requirements have pushed women to do less specialized and lower income jobs, and the lack of a local market has led to economic dependency on gathering and extraction centers, which are not always easily accessible and typically private. 

Even more, around half of oil palm production in the country was carried out by smallholder farmers in communal land, or ejidos, of less than 50 ha, which often exposed them to other impacts observed around the world: land concentration, foreignization and grabbing.

In 2018, the estimated revenue per hectare of oil palm was around MXN 38 (less than USD 2), but production was relatively profitable in places like southern Chiapas, where smallholder farmers are typically landowners and have created cooperatives and organizations that help them access governmental financial incentives.

Food Insecurity

So what kind of information, governmental policies and mechanisms would benefit smallholder oil palm producers, improve production, and limit social and environmental impacts?

Turns out that this was not a revolutionary question, and around the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was also trying to understand this. In 2022, FAO found that around 37% of the world’s land was dedicated to agriculture and over 80% of farms around the world were under two hectares (20,000m2) in size. Such smallholder farmers produced around 35% of the entire world’s food, despite occupying only around 12% of all agricultural land. 

The FAO highlighted the need for detailed data–Earth observations included– that helped understand regional differences in agricultural practices and production, so that policy-makers could design agricultural plans that aligned to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). These goals have the stated aim of bringing “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” by promoting sustainable production, improving the productivity and livelihood of smallholder farmers, addressing inequalities, and guaranteeing food security worldwide. 

The FAO’s data means that 35% of food was being grown in around 4.5% of the world’s land by 2022. Although this might sound like our dreams of food security are easy to achieve, we have to be careful with our steps ahead because there’s a limit to how much of the world’s land is suitable for agriculture. Developing some suitable land might carry severe social and environmental impacts, and not all current agricultural land will remain productive in the future due to climate change and impactful land use.

Elusive Answers

As our findings proved the importance of carrying out the independent monitoring of this crop’s expansion, we decided to continue gathering and analyzing data to verify some impacts reported by multiple independent organizations. This way, in 2023, OBSAM published a second mapping with data from 2016 to 2022 and created a publicly available visualizing tool.

Our improved methodology detected 7,559 ha inside natural protected areas, mainly in the EBR and the Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve in Veracruz, something that had already been reported by peasant organizations but not evidenced in existing mappings. 

This time, to address the lack of verification in situ, the mapping was compared against publicly available data for the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, prepared by the General Coordination of Corridors and Biological Resources (CGCRB) and oil palm producers in the municipalities of Benemérito de las Américas and Marqués de Comillas, showing a large number of errors in the CGCRB archive. Comparisons against official data on forest cover now showed oil palm driven deforestation in 7,317 ha.

OBSAM is now expecting to release a third mapping with data until 2023, to enable the comparison between the three different mappings and identify new, growing and abandoned plantations, which would allow us to understand the paths of deforestation and land use changes. 

We’ve also gathered infrastructure maps and contacted people investigating the corporate side of oil palm commercialization, so we hope to get closer to understanding its relationship with important infrastructure projects and which policies are benefiting which actors the most.

However, many questions remained unsolved and to analyze all strategic crops and offer alternatives to oil palm production we would need to develop closer ties with people in communities located in the vicinity of oil palm plantations, to understand agricultural practices and challenges, develop participatory mapping tools for verification of satellite analysis and identify other datasets to capture what is meaningful and desirable by people on the ground. 

It is still unclear which existing agricultural practices and policies are benefiting smallholder farmers the most, but supermarkets continue to have more and more products containing palm oil derived products, so somebody must be making big profits and we would prefer it if it was them.

*If you want to support our work, or if you’re doing something similar and you want to share your struggles with someone in the same boat, full access to OBSAM mappings is granted under request. We are a group of people addressing data-access inequalities, and supporting smallholder farmers, academic research, and non-commercial enterprises. You can think of this as positive action in land observations and policy-making.

The post Deforestation, Data Gaps, and Small Farmers: Mapping the True Costs of Mexico’s Palm Oil appeared first on Untold.

That silence has enveloped south Lebanon, and it is becoming yet another moral failure of an era defined by live streamed genocides, the death of international law, and pride in war crimes.

What is happening in south Lebanon is not, by any serious measure, a proportionate military campaign. It is the systematic hollowing out of a people from their ancestral land, and an eradication of life from that land itself.

To date, Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023 have killed more than 7,000 people and injured more than 24,000, according to conservative numbers by the Lebanese Health Ministry, with the majority civilians. More than one million people – a fifth of the population – are displaced, while medical workers, journalists, and civilian infrastructure have been systematically targeted.

This mass displacement is not a byproduct of the war. It is its stated objective. Israeli officials explicitly stated in late March 2026 that they were demolishing south Lebanon houses and villages “in accordance with the model as Gaza,” and that 600,000 displaced people would not be allowed to return “until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed.”

Despite a ceasefire agreed in November 2024, over 15,000 Israeli violations were recorded by UNIFIL, with Amnesty International documenting near-daily Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon throughout the 15 months period, until March 2, 2026, when Israel formally resumed full-scale war.

A Civilizational Wound

South Lebanon is not simply territory. It is among the most layered, historically dense regions in West Asia. The villages of Jabal Amel carry centuries of Islamic scholarship, poetry, and legal tradition. This is a land that has outlasted empires. Tyre (Sour) is one of the oldest continuously populated cities on earth, an ancient Phoenician port that gave the world its purple dye and the alphabet’s early spread. It has been sacked, rebuilt, and survived Alexander the Great, the Crusaders, and every empire that passed through. On October 23, 2024, Israeli airstrikes destroyed large swathes of the city, with one strike landing 50 metres from the ancient ruins, today the city is under evacuation orders by the Israeli army. 

Then there is Nabatieh,  the beating heart of Jabal Amel, and another city under evacuation orders. Its name is tied to the Nabataean traders who moved between Sidon and Damascus. For centuries it has connected the mountains to the coast, the inland villages to the sea, a crossroads where the whole of the south converged. 

At its centre, the Monday Market stretches back 500 years, a weekly ritual that survived Ottoman rule, civil war, and years of Israeli occupation. By late 2024, roughly 85 percent of the city’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed, along with some 300 businesses. Israel did not stop at the ceasefire, what remained was struck again when fighting resumed. A UNDP assessment found that “58 percent of agricultural assets in the Nabatieh district had been destroyed”, the highest proportion anywhere in the south. 

Nabatieh, like other towns and villages in the South, has been destroyed before, in 1978, in 1982, and in 2006. People rebuilt each time. 

What Israeli airstrikes and ground incursions are doing to this landscape is beyond the mass murder of people. It is destroying a world, systematically flattening architecture that predates the state of Israel itself, obliterating millennial olive groves and family homes, forcing the flight of entire communities whose roots run deeper than most nations. When heritage sites, mosques, and village squares are reduced to powder, something is lost that no reconstruction can return.

This is ethnic cleansing: the forced displacement of a population from its ancestral land through systematic terror.

Killing the Land Itself

But Israel’s war on Lebanon does not stop at human communities. It extends into the soil, the forests, the water, the animals, and the very biological substrate of the south. This is not collateral damage. It is a deliberate strategy, and it is documented.

During the 2024 Israeli war, Lebanon lost around 1,910 hectares of prime farmland, 47,000 olive trees, and roughly 1,200 hectares of oak forests, some of the last remaining native woodland in the region. Among the casualties was Harj al-Raheb, the Monk Forest, on the southern edge of Ayta ash-Shaab, a 16-hectare woodland of ecological and cultural richness that had endured for centuries. Satellite images now show white craters where green canopy once stood, alongside extensive bulldozing that stripped the terrain bare. Fire and phosphorus erased in months what has lived there for millennia.

The weapon of choice for much of this destruction is white phosphorus, a chemical substance that ignites on contact with oxygen, burns at up to 800 degrees Celsius, and releases thick toxic smoke. Human Rights Watch verified its use in at least 17 municipalities across south Lebanon. In at least five of those, the munitions were used in populated areas, landing on the roofs of residential buildings. The stated rationale is to burn down fields for visibility. Trees, in other words, are a threat. Forests must be destroyed. Nature itself is the enemy, just as the US military had done in Vietnam using napalm to burn life during their murderous imperial campaign against the country’s national liberation movement. 

More than 918 hectares were hit in 191 documented white phosphorus attacks from October 2023 until the 2024 ceasefire alone, according to data collected by Lebanese researcher Ahmad Baydoun and the environmental group Green Southerners. The long-term consequences remain unknown, but easy to predict. 

Even though Israel shelled Lebanon with white phosphorus repeatedly between 1982 and 2006 in its various wars of aggression, there have been no local studies on its long-term environmental impact, due to lack of resources, political inaction, or the difficulty in accessing samples. The poison persists in the soil; but the science to measure it has been mostly unused.

Then, as if to ensure that whatever survived the bombs and fire could not sustain life, came the herbicides. In early February 2026, Israeli planes sprayed toxic chemical substances across Lebanon’s southern border, covering approximately 8.5 square kilometres of agricultural land, forests, and livestock grazing areas with glyphosate at concentrations up to 50 times higher than standard agricultural use. Lebanon’s agriculture and environmental ministries found glyphosate levels 20 to 30 times above average in soil samples from the affected area. Glyphosate is banned in Lebanon and classified by the World Health Organization as potentially carcinogenic to humans.

The targeted area contained ancient oak, terebinth, and laurel forests that provide habitat for wildlife, alongside olive groves that produce oil and soap, tobacco plantations, and grazing land. As environmental researcher Hisham Younes, founder and president of Lebanese environmental group Green Southerners, puts it: “This spraying does not take place over an intact ecosystem or healthy soil. It occurs over land already severely stressed and degraded by the intensive use of white phosphorus, incendiary munitions, and the accumulation of heavy-metal residues from sustained bombardment.” 

The glyphosate is not the beginning of the destruction. It is the finishing blow, applied to a landscape already burned, bombed, and poisoned, ensuring that even if people are allowed to return, there is nothing left to return to. That life will no longer be possible, for humans, plants, and animals alike.

Lebanon’s agriculture minister described the spraying as “consistent with known practices along the border, where such substances are used to create vegetation-free zones, effectively resulting in systematic desertification.” Lebanon’s government-backed environmental report has gone further, formally accusing Israel of ecocide and documenting damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality, concluding that the scale and intentionality of the destruction “constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide.”

Israel’s war, as is the case with previous colonial wars across the world, is one on the land as a living system, on the biological heritage of a civilization, on the ecosystems that sustain human and non-human life alike, waged with chemical weapons, incendiary munitions, and bulldozers, in full view of the world.

The US War Machine

The south of Lebanon is home to communities that have lived in this region for over a thousand years. Entire villages have been evacuated by force and erased. Families have been killed in their homes, in their cars, on roads marked for civilian evacuation.

This is not incidental. Striking the predominantly Shia population of south Lebanon, and Lebanon in general is the goal. When a religious community becomes a military target in the eyes of the aggressor, and in the narratives of much of the regional and international media, we have crossed into the now too common space of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

None of this happens in a vacuum. The bombs falling on Lebanese villages are, in a direct and documented sense, US bombs. The aircraft delivering them are US aircraft. The intelligence enabling the targeting has, by multiple credible accounts, has US fingerprints.

The United States has not merely failed to restrain Israel, it has actively armed, funded, and provided diplomatic cover for a campaign that has drawn condemnation from human rights organizations, UN officials, and international legal bodies, both in Palestine and in Lebanon. Each time a resolution calling for accountability has come before international bodies, the US position has been to obstruct, or sanction international judges, rapporteurs, and any organization that dares speak the truth.

This makes the United States not a neutral broker or a concerned ally urging restraint, but a co-belligerent (together with various other Western and Arab countries). When cluster munitions, bunker-busting bombs, and incendiary weapons are supplied to a military deploying them in densely populated civilian areas and ecologically sensitive forests, the supplier shares responsibility for what follows, including the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and ecocide.

One Unhinged Logic

It is impossible to understand Lebanon in isolation from Gaza. What we are witnessing is a single operational and ideological logic playing out across two theaters. In Gaza, the world has watched the near-total destruction of a civilian population with hospitals bombed, aid blocked, famine used as a weapon, with mounting horror and mounting futility. The patterns have become undeniable: this is not warfare constrained by the laws of armed conflict. It is warfare that has discarded those laws entirely and proudly.

Lebanon is the expansion of that logic northward. The same targeting of civilian, medical, and vital infrastructure. The same displacement of hundreds of thousands. The same deliberate erasure of agricultural and ecological life. The same impunity. Having encountered no meaningful international consequences in Gaza, the methods were exported. Why wouldn’t they be? The world demonstrated, repeatedly, that there would be no price.

This is what unchecked military power looks like when it is also diplomatically shielded: it grows, and it finds new applications for the same tools, from bombs to bulldozers to crop-killing herbicides.

The Silence of States and People

What is most disorienting and perhaps most dangerous about this moment is not just the actions of Israel and the United States. It is the silence of everyone else.

For Gaza, Arab states have issued statements of concern that function as moral performance without consequence while they maintained trade and security cooperation as the genocide was ongoing. For Lebanon, it was mostly silence. Most Arab governments offered barely even the performance.

European governments, with a handful of exceptions, oscillated between performative concern and active complicity over Gaza, and extended that into near-total silence on Lebanon. 

Solidarity movements outside the region have fractured along political, sectarian, and national lines. The Shia identity of the majority of the victims has meant limited solidarity in the sectarian environment plaguing the Arab world. Hezbollah’s violent role in Syria has complicated it further. But these are not explanations. Across the globe, Palestine solidarity networks have been almost entirely absent in opposing the ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon. Very few, if any, have mobilized.

Apparently this is not an important story, not compared to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. International media has been comfortable looking away while an entire civilian ecosystem is chemically sterilized and an ancient people are expelled from their land.

The principle that civilians deserve protection from collective punishment does not carry an asterisk that reads “unless their politics or sectarian identity are disagreeable.” 

Beyond Lebanon.

We are watching, in real time, the collapse of the international legal order – with all its deficiencies – that was constructed after 1945 precisely to prevent this kind of impunity. The Geneva Conventions, the Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, these institutions exist because the world looked at the ruins of the Second World War and said: never again, and we will build structures to ensure it. Those structures are not being eroded. They are being actively demolished, with US and Western diplomatic tools serving as the wrecking ball.

If a nuclear-armed, Western-backed state can conduct what legal scholars describe as ethnic cleansing and genocide, with full documentation, in real time, broadcast on every platform, and face no meaningful consequences, then the message is clear: the rules do not apply to the powerful. They never did, perhaps. But the pretense that they did was itself a form of protection, however limited, for the vulnerable. That pretense is gone now.

For Lebanon specifically, the consequences may be generational. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from the south creates demographic and psychological wounds that will shape Lebanese politics for decades. A country already broken by corruption, economic collapse, and sectarian divisions is being further hollowed out. The question is not only whether south Lebanon can be liberated and rebuilt, but whether the Lebanese state, such as it is, can survive another existential blow.

What is being asked of the world is not complicated. It requires the application of consistent principles: that civilians may not be collectively punished, that ancient communities may not be erased from their land, that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, and that silence in the face of documented atrocity is itself a moral choice.

The south of Lebanon is burning. Its people are scattered and left alone to face a ruthless war machine. Its forests are ash. Its soil is poisoned.

The world knows. And the world, for the most part, has decided to look away.

History will not be kind to this moment. The question is whether we wait for history’s verdict, or whether some of us, states, institutions, ordinary people with a voice, choose to act before there is nothing left to save.

The post Bombed, Poisoned, and Ignored: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of South Lebanon appeared first on Untold.

“Almost all rivers in Europe have been regulated, impounded, and channelised. In the Alps, the largest free-flowing river section still preserving its natural dynamics lies along the Tagliamento,” explains Professor Klement Tockner, Director General of the Senckenberg Institute for Climate and Biodiversity in Frankfurt.

For decades, Tockner has studied the Tagliamento, which flows from the Carnic Alps to the Upper Adriatic Sea in northeastern Italy, near the Slovenian border, as a living model of river restoration. Its wide, shifting gravel bed and braided channels preserve the ecological dynamics that once characterised many Alpine rivers. This is what makes it, according to Tockner, “the most valuable river in the Alpine Arc.”

Today, the Tagliamento is under threat. In spring 2024, the regional government of Friuli Venezia Giulia approved plans for a €200 million flood-control barrier between the towns of Dignano and Spilimbergo, as part of its Flood Risk Management Plan. 

“For us, the Tagliamento is identity. It’s the symbol of beauty,” says Valentina Sovran. She is one of the residents of Dignano (Udine) who, in September 2025, travelled to Brussels to submit two petitions calling for the protection of the Tagliamento. 

Strolling on the vast sandy riverbed, where emerging braided channels form small streams and islets, Valentina Sovran and other elder residents recall stories dating back generations, with the Tagliamento always as a protagonist: a grandmother who washed the clothes on the pebbled banks at dusk, the only free moment amid the duties of a large family; a great-grandfather who worked as a boatman before the construction of the bridge of Dignano; or the kilometers walked as young boys from the mountains to swim and play with friends in the gravel beaches.

A Unique Ecosystem Under Threat

The scientific community has also mobilised: Professor Tockner is among the first signatories of an appeal signed by more than 800 international scientists warning that the proposed infrastructure would have a destructive impact on this unique ecosystem. In addition, it would violate multiple EU directives, including the Water Framework Directive, the Birds and Habitats Directives, and the Nature Restoration Law.

The latter, approved in July 2024 as a key element of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, requires Member States to remove obsolete or non-functional barriers and restore free-flowing conditions to at least 25,000 kilometres of rivers by 2030. As Foivos Mouchlianitis from Dam Removal Europe explains, removing barriers improves river connectivity, supports fish populations, and increases resilience to both droughts and floods.

At the time, Italy opposed the measure, together with Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden. Now, member states have until September 2026 to draw up a National Restoration Plan. Italy’s approach, however, has yet to change course. 

The Friuli Venezia Giulia regional government and the Italian Ministry for the Environment and Energy Security have already allocated €30 million for infrastructure works on the Tagliamento and designated the proposed ‘lamination barrier’ as a strategic project for flood risk management, which is especially high in the lower Friulian plain, classified as high risk by the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA). 

So Beautiful, Yet So Frightening

While residents in the middle and upper reaches of the Tagliamento River have organised into various committees fighting to preserve the river’s naturality, the situation downstream is markedly different. 

The Tagliamento in Latisana, 45km south of Spilimbergo, appears as a more regulated waterway. The first row of houses along its banks and the historic port – a key hub of trade with Venice as early as the 12th century – no longer exist; in their place stand high concrete embankments built to protect the town. ‘The Tagliamento is so beautiful, yet so frightening,’ says resident Giorgio Mattassi, now retired, as he walks along the river banks.

“We need substantial infrastructural interventions upstream for our safety,” states Sandro Vignotto, a councillor in Latisana. “We don’t care where or what they are; we simply want the process to move forward.” In 2025, Latisana commemorated the devastating floods which hit the town in September 1965, followed by an even more destructive event the following year. 

“People upstream don’t understand that flooding is a tragedy. It destroys lives, animals, and homes; the economy collapses, and people are forced to migrate,” says Giorgio Mattassi, who experienced the floods of the 1960s in Latisana as a child.

In November 2025, a series of floods, caused by abnormally heavy rainfall, struck a nearby area in Friuli Venezia Giulia, producing an estimated €80 million in damages, two deaths, and the displacement of hundreds of people. 

“We recognise the importance of flood prevention,” says Fabio Masotti, a regular visitor to the Tagliamento. A passionate photographer, he loves observing how the braided channels change course and colour depending on their depth and the sunlight. 

He comes to walk on the riverbed with his children and to go canoeing. “But flood prevention solutions should be nature-based and work with nature, not against it. In our territory extreme weather events are increasing due to climate change, aggravated by excessive urbanisation and the overexploitation of rivers, for example, through aggressive gravel extraction. The Tagliamento provides vital ecosystem services and plays a key regenerative role,” he adds. 

Propaganda and Polarisation

Fabio is one of the most active members of the organisation Noi siamo Tagliamento (We are the Tagliamento). Alongside other committees, they organise events, conferences and public meetings to inform the local population. 

According to them, political propaganda has polarised the discussion around the Tagliamento, pitting residents of the valley against those in the middle course. “For reasons of political opportunism, the Region is pushing for large engineering works that would supposedly protect them permanently from future floods. They want the votes from the valley, since those areas are wealthier and more populated.” Fabio Masotti adds. 

The Tagliamento flows into the Adriatic near some of Northern Italy’s most intensively developed tourist areas, including Bibione and Lignano Sabbiadoro, coastal towns that host millions of visitors every year and rely heavily on seasonal tourism. However, scientists warn that flood protection can never be absolute. Instead, efforts must focus on reducing vulnerability, mitigating potential damage, waterproofing buildings, and relocating where necessary.

After months of stagnation and a lack of transparency regarding the Region’s plans for the Tagliamento, the tender for evaluating alternative project designs, as required by law, will be officially launched in February 2026.

Pirates of Tagliamento

“The priority should be to consider what we call a systemic or integrated solution,” Professor Tockner argues. “Instead of a barrier, alternative solutions could include enlarging the river section downstream of Cornino and increasing natural retention capacity there,” he adds. “You could achieve similar flood control while improving, rather than deteriorating, ecological conditions. Protecting nature means protecting people.”

Professor Marco Petti from the University of Udine, who studied the Tagliamento for decades from a hydraulic perspective, also underlines the necessity of an integrated solution. “As an engineer, I don’t think nature-based solutions are not naturalising the river alone is enough,” he says. “But it would be better to distribute water volumes management along the entire river through smaller, less invasive interventions. Relying on a single mega-structure would be damaging.”

Professor Tockner suggests that designating the Tagliamento as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve could offer a way to recognise the inseparable link between nature and culture. “If we are not able to protect the last free-flowing rivers in Europe,” he warns, “then promoting restoration of degraded ecosystems risks becoming obsolete.”

“In ancient times, the pirates of the Tagliamento would go raiding on rafts,” recalls Fabio Masotti. “Today, we feel a bit like pirates too, adventurers and guardians of our River. We need to fight to protect it. We cannot delegate this responsibility to anyone else.”

*This reporting was carried out with the support of Journalismfund Europe

The post The Battle to Preserve the Last Wild River of the Alps – A Photo Story appeared first on Untold.

The air grew particularly suffocating between September and October 2025, when local authorities reported 122 cases of intoxication and asphyxiation caused by toxic fumes. Gas leaks from GCT’s facilities are widely blamed. 

On 15 October, the civil movement Stop Pollution mobilized 40,000 residents for a mass demonstration, followed by a general strike called by the national trade union UGTT, which drew more than 130,000 participants. The city of Gabès has around 150,000 citizens. 

The last protest took place on 17 December 2025, the anniversary of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution.

The Little Tunisian Chernobyl

Phosphate, one of Tunisia’s key natural resources, is largely destined for export. In 2023, Tunisia ranked as the world’s tenth-largest exporter of phosphate fertilizers, earning 61.7 million US dollars. The main destinations were Bangladesh, Brazil, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Phosphate fertilizers are widely used in intensive agriculture to boost crop yields. The practice can lead to the accumulation of toxic heavy metals such as cadmium in both soil and crops. And if these are the risks downstream, the dangers upstream are far greater. The combination of extractivism and export-oriented production has compromised Gabès as a whole, to the point that it is now dubbed the “Little Tunisian Chernobyl.” 

Today, the gulf the city overlooks is polluted by phosphogypsum, an industrial by-product of phosphoric acid production. It is generated by treating phosphate rock—extracted from the Gafsa mines, 150 kilometers from Gabès—with sulfuric acid. Studies have shown that phosphogypsum contains high levels of uranium and radium, both radioactive elements.

Dying Meadows of the Sea

According to a 2021 study by Oréade-Brèche on biodiversity loss in Tunisia, every ton of phosphoric acid produced generates between four and five tons of phosphogypsum. Over the past 25 years, an estimated 70 million tons of phosphogypsum have been discharged into the Gulf of Gabès, contaminating sediments across roughly 60 square kilometers. 

Marine flora and fauna have borne the brunt of this pollution. Combined with rising sea temperatures driven by climate change, the contamination is causing the progressive disappearance of Posidonia oceanica, a Mediterranean seagrass that serves as a vital refuge for fish species, crustaceans, and mollusks. 

Posidonia also plays a crucial ecological role: it helps prevent coastal erosion and oxygenates seawater by absorbing CO₂. These seagrass meadows account for 10% of the ocean’s carbon storage capacity—twice as much per square kilometer as terrestrial forests. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Gulf of Gabès hosted the largest Posidonia meadows in the Mediterranean; today, phosphogypsum discharges are estimated to have destroyed around 90% of them. In their place, the invasive alien algae Caulerpa has taken hold.

The disappearance of Posidonia has dealt a severe economic blow to small-scale fisheries, causing losses that exceed the added value of Gabès’ phosphate-processing industry.

Once known for its rich fisheries, the sea off Gabès is now grappling with a drastic decline in fish stocks. Pollution has coincided with industrial trawling by large fishing vessels, progressively stripping artisanal fishers of their livelihoods. 

Suffocating Protests

Moreover, as a 2018 European Commission study on the economic impact of industrial pollution in the region illustrates, there is a correlation between rising cases of chronic bronchitis and asthma in the neighborhoods of Ghannouch, Chott Essalem, and Gabès city, and the pollution generated by GCT’s activities.

Air pollution from sulfur dioxide, ammonia, fine particulate matter, and fluorides lies at the root of the region’s cases of intoxication and asphyxiation. According to the European Commission, concentrations of these substances near the GCT plant far exceed both Tunisian and international standards. 

Confronted with this reality, the people of Gabès began to raise their voices. Already in 2012, a group of residents founded Stop Pollution, a social movement demanding the dismantling of GCT’s polluting facilities. Since then, the group has organized protests, raised awareness, and informed the public on issues related to energy transition.

In 2017, the movement achieved its first major breakthrough: then–prime minister Youssef Chahed approved a plan to dismantle the six phosphate-processing units in Gabès and rehabilitate the sites in line with international standards. Yet the decision was never implemented. Instead, the government reversed course entirely.

Last March, the restricted Ministerial Council decided to raise phosphate production from under 3 million tons a year to 14 million by 2030, including expanded transport and processing capacity. The move comes amid a surge in global fertilizer prices. The plan also sets the stage for a pilot unit to produce green ammonia in Ghannouch. 

In 2024, Tunisia signed six memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with several European multinationals for the production of green hydrogen. The national green hydrogen strategy sets an annual production target of 8.3 million tons by 2050, with 6.3 million tons intended for export to Europe. This strategy has been supported since 2022 by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GiZ) through the project “Green Hydrogen for Sustainable Growth and a Low-Carbon Economy in Tunisia (H2Vert.TUN).” 

The exported hydrogen would be transported via the SoutH2 Corridor, which will connect Tunisia and Algeria to Italy, Austria, and Germany.

Environmental obstacles were swiftly sidestepped: phosphogypsum was removed from the list of substances classified as hazardous to human health.

Meanwhile, Gabès continues to suffer. On 17 October last year, Gabès’ citizens filed a petition before the Gabès First Instance Tribunal requesting the immediate closure of GCT’s polluting units. The preliminary hearing was scheduled for 23 October; however, the examination of the case has been postponed several times. 

The next hearing is expected to take place on 12 February. Assisted by the regional section of the Bar Association and the Regional Council of the Medical Association — which will present health data collected in Gabès — Stop Pollution and the people of Gabès have launched an unprecedented legal action. As Amir Ammar, a PhD student in Law, states in Village de la Justice, this is the first class action that “directly targets a major industrial actor (and a public one at that) in order to stop environmental harm in Tunisia.”

To understand what the people of Gabès endure each day—and how upcoming industrial projects could worsen the environmental crisis—we spoke with Aziz Chebbi, researcher in international law and political science, and activist with Stop Pollution.

Nadia Addezio: How have residents’ health and the state of the environment in Gabès changed over the years? 

Aziz Chebbi: Since 1972, since the Groupe Chimique Tunisien began operating in the Gabès region, the area has suffered environmental damage across three fronts: air, land and sea. First, marine pollution: phosphogypsum waste is discharged daily into the waters of Chott Essalem in Gabès. These discharges have had a direct impact on the livelihoods of local fishers, many of whom have lost their jobs and been forced to abandon a profession passed down through generations.

Then there is soil pollution: heavy metals in the land around Gabès have severely compromised local agriculture. The region’s emblematic oases have been deteriorating steadily, and farming activities have been deeply affected for more than 50 years. Finally, air pollution has taken a dramatic toll on residents’ health. The area records very high cancer rates, as well as frequent fainting episodes among students, especially in September and October.

Pollution across these three fronts devastates daily life in Gabès, undermining people’s health, their economy, and their dignity. Every day, residents simply aspire to breathe clean air and live in an environment that respects human dignity, as guaranteed by the principles of the Tunisian Constitution.

Between 2012 and 2017, numerous grassroots mobilizations helped secure a government decree—issued on 29 June 2017—ordering the dismantling of the polluting plants in the Gabès region. However, the decree was never published in the Official Gazette by the then-President of the Republic Béji Caïd Essebsi. As a result, the authorities failed to acknowledge the scale of the harm caused by the GCT and neither acted on nor upheld that decision.

Unfortunately, from 2017 to today, no government has shown real political will to enact or advance this measure. No significant progress has been made, leaving residents in a constant state of waiting for a sincere political commitment to environmental justice in Gabès.

NA: How did you respond to the government’s decision to revive phosphate production and remove phosphogypsum from the list of hazardous substances? Do you have any direct dialogue with the government or with the GCT?

AC: For years, the government has failed to consult civil society organizations or citizens when drafting its decisions and administrative decrees. In March 2025, it adopted a measure stating that phosphogypsum would no longer be classified as a hazardous substance, paving the way for its “valorization” and for the creation of a pilot plant to produce green ammonia. Faced with this decision—which we consider extremely worrying—we organized several demonstrations.

Because the announcement came during Ramadan, we held a protest in Tunis in April 2025, followed by a large march in the Gabès region in May. At the same time, we published statements and held several press conferences to spark public debate about these government decisions. We also carried out awareness campaigns among Gabès residents to explain the environmental and health risks associated with these policies. 

These efforts culminated in September 2025, a period marked by numerous fainting incidents among students and by heightened toxic emissions from the GCT’s facilities. More and more citizens are adopting our narrative and mobilizing with growing determination toward our shared goal: the complete dismantling of these polluting plants.

NA: The paradox is that the GCT provides jobs. What do GCT workers think? 

AC: In reality, GCT workers are themselves residents of the Gabès region, with children who attend local schools. During recent demonstrations, we noticed a significant development: a growing number of workers—through their unions or individually—support our actions and take part in mobilizations on the ground. Recently, there have even been fainting incidents among workers inside the GCT itself.

NA: As you mentioned, there is now talk of a possible green transition for the industrial hub. Among the proposed projects is the production of green ammonia, part of Tunisia’s national energy strategy and its plans for green hydrogen. How is this project perceived in Gabès? 

AC: There are two essential points on this issue. The first concerns our refusal, as a social movement, of any new installation within the Groupe Chimique Tunisien complex. Establishing a new entity on that site would mean completely disregarding the citizens’ core demand: the environmental rehabilitation of the Gabès region.

The second point concerns the national green hydrogen strategy, which includes the production of green ammonia. We view this strategy as a neo-colonial dynamic, imposed by GIZ, and designed exclusively to meet German energy needs. 

Berlin is seeking to externalize its energy production to countries in the Global South—Namibia, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt—turning them into suppliers of green energy. Producing green ammonia requires green hydrogen, which demands vast amounts of water and renewable energy. It is an extremely energy-intensive process. Tunisia does possess abundant natural resources such as sun and wind, but these resources should meet our own energy needs, not feed German power grids.

Moreover, Tunisia currently has no real domestic demand for green hydrogen within its industrial sector. If, in the future, industries arise that require it, the decision should be made collectively, through a participatory process involving citizens, experts, and civil society, based on a transparent assessment of benefits and risks. It should not be dictated by a strategy conceived in ministerial offices in partnership with a German cooperation agency that has no stake in Tunisia’s needs or priorities.

This project is therefore not an opportunity but a real threat: it risks worsening the environmental crisis in Gabès, particularly through the seawater desalination projects required for green hydrogen production. The discharge of brine into the sea will have severe consequences for marine biodiversity and for numerous local species already weakened by decades of industrial pollution.

NA: What will be the collective’s next steps?

AC: So far, the public authorities have shown no reaction. In the face of this governmental silence, we will continue our mobilizations and maintain our demand for the dismantling of the polluting facilities in the Gabès region. Residents fully support our actions and share our demands. Every time we call for mobilization, the population responds. We will go all the way to obtain a clear political decision and a concrete response from the authorities, one that meets the legitimate expectations of the region’s inhabitants.

Gabès could be a paradise on earth: the oasis system that surrounds the sea, the mountains and the desert is an exceptional national heritage that must be preserved and valued. Alternatives do exist. Agricultural development, ecological and community-based tourism, and activities linked to the sea can offer new, sustainable job opportunities.

The GCT, by contrast, brings nothing but harm and threats to the environment and health of the Gabès region. The current jobs tied to this industry can be replaced by local, sustainable and non-colonial economic alternatives.

The post Gabès Is Suffocating: Breathing Under Phosphate, Protest, and Green Colonialism appeared first on Untold.

This is the primary industry for 80% of Lamu residents, yet declining marine ecosystems and the controversial Lamu Port-South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET), a massive oil pipeline and infrastructure project connecting South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda, have posed serious threats. Daily catches declined from an average of 40 kg to 10kg, and sometimes none at all.

Aswif, a captain in his fifties, says that he has turned to giving dhow (a traditional boat) rides to tourists over recent years although he had been fishing since boyhood. “There are simply no more fish to catch,” he says.

Pollution and the Weight of Extraction

Lamu has been on the frontlines of the global plastic pollution issue: waste management on the island is nearly nonexistent, according to UNESCO, plus heated controversies over oil pipeline developments. Employment rates are dismal, with less than 33% of youths (ages 18-34) working; most work in agriculture, yet the sector has the lowest labor productivity according to the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis.

Across Kenya, settler colonialism continues to haunt the present: low-income locals are systemically marginalized and excluded for the prioritization of upper echelon interests, often with a foreign tilt.

Lamu lacks any form of door-to-door waste collection, unlike other urban areas in Kenya––yet tourists and mainland investors have been found to be significant waste contributors.

Researchers argue that plastic pollution equates to waste colonialism, where capitalist cycles of production and consumption manifest as ecological imperialism, costs that are disproportionately borne by island villagers.

James Waikibia, a Nairobi-based plastic waste campaigner, believes that phrases such as waste colonialism––perhaps holding merit––can be overhyped, used by civil society to look for grants. “It should not detract from the government’s responsibility––their inefficiency and lack of interest in addressing foundational issues” he says.

In the absence of any official system to address the problem, individual action is filling the gap. Earth Love, founded in 2019, is one such attempt. The project emerged from local frustration with Lamu’s worsening waste crisis and the absence of public infrastructure, offering a space where people can work directly with the land.

Regeneration in a Ruined Landscape

For 30-year-old Abu Bakar, born and raised in Lamu, the shift began during the pandemic. After years working as a fishing-boat captain, he visited the site and was struck by its unlikely potential. “The place was looking crazy,” he recalls. “You don’t expect a dumping site to be a place where you can plant [fruits and vegetables].” Clearing the land took more than a year. What followed convinced him that restoration—however slow—was possible.

Bakar now works in regenerative agriculture and in the local biochar trade, converting “bones” like coconut shells and tree trunks into carbon-rich material that strengthens soil health. Three years on, he has become a permaculture consultant, despite financial barriers that stopped him from completing his water-engineering diploma. “I’d like to think that I’m someone who is curious and can learn new skills,” he says. “And I hope that through this work others will have the same spirit.”

As residents of Shela, a village nestled on southeastern Lamu, trickle into the organization’s grounds with baskets of waste––at times loaded on the backs of donkeys––the handful of employees begin the sorting process, separating glass bottles from cuttings from palm and banana trees. The former will be repurposed into construction materials or household decor, while the latter will be composted into both dry and wet fertilizers.

Still, progress is fragile. Residents bring glass and green waste for sorting, but long-ingrained habits are hard to shift. “It can feel like we are taking one step forward but two steps back,” he admits. Sometimes garbage bags appear at the shamba’s gate instead of the proper drop-off point. “There is progress, but sometimes I feel depressed,” he says. That same morning, someone had dumped a tractor-load of construction debris on a public footpath. Staring at the mess, Bakar shook his head. “People need to learn that this is not okay–that they shouldn’t treat the land like this.”

At the Roots

Some researchers have dubbed Lamu the cradle of Swahili civilization. Besides its intricate and amalgamated history––trading grounds for the Arabs, Chinese, and Portuguese since the 15th century––it mediated economic and social interactions between the African mainland and Indian Ocean world for nearly 500 years beginning in the 14th century.

To this day, elements of the island’s long, winding history are evident in both its habits and architecture: many of the homes on Shela feature traditional Swahili architecture, constructed from mangrove timber and coral stones, replete with inner courtyards and verandas, decorated with intricately carved wooden doors.

41-year-old Khautar Abdulaziz, a homemaker in Shela, believes that Lamu reflects Kenya’s broader waste problem. Its insularity as a small island exacerbates the far reaches of plastic pollution, which harms everything from fishing to the marine ecosystem altogether.

“In the past, older people managed solid waste by burying it, burning it, or reusing items like clay pots and baskets,” explains Abdulaziz. “In recent years, things have changed because of the increase in plastic and other non-bio degradable materials. Now, [the volume of] waste has grown, and managing it has become much harder.”

Bakar hopes that through his work with the community, he can share a sense of self-resilience with other Lamu residents, such as growing their own food rather than importing everything at a marked-up cost from the Kenyan mainland. “I don’t want to be the only person who knows this,” Bakar emphasizes. “My goal is to spread this knowledge.”

Colonial Legacies, Plastic Economies

Abdulaziz sees a more rooted cause to Lamu’s current waste dilemma. “I believe the source of the waste problem is mainly the increase in plastic use, population growth, and poor waste disposal practices,” she says. Furthermore, increasing numbers of tourists, with the infrastructure and businesses to accommodate them are overloading inadequate waste management systems.

To Waikibia, the plastic pollution campaigner, a root cause is misplaced priorities–the national focus is on building roads and large-scale foreign investments. “The government has failed to invest in modern infrastructure to recycling companies by cutting down on taxes, educating the public about littering, or the dangers that come with the toxic chemical fumes from burning waste.”

He refers to the plastic bag ban that was enacted in 2017: “Everyone was proud of it, there was a sense of moving in a positive direction.” While this proved that things can be done, plastic is everywhere, in everything––it all needs to be managed better.”

In villages such as Shela, high poverty levels mean that residents buy food and household items in small quantities packaged in plastic sachets. And when it comes to waste disposal, it’s out of sight, out of mind.

“In Lamu, they are not even dumpsites––just open places where people throw their trash. When the rains come, or the wind blows, it goes everywhere––but that’s where we need intervention and sensitization––understanding that these are all actions that will come back to bite us,” Waikibia explains. “You see waste leaking into the environment because it’s not a priority.”

The post “No More Fish to Catch”: A Kenyan Island’s Fight Against Plastic Pollution and the Burden of Colonialism appeared first on Untold.

While the world focuses on Iran’s nuclear program and political tensions, a quieter, deadlier crisis is unfolding: water scarcity. It is not simply caused by drought—but the result of decades of mismanagement, resource plundering, and neglect that have now brought Iran to the brink of a social and environmental catastrophe. 

From dried-up wetlands in Gavkhouni to the migration of millions to the north, water is not only an environmental issue but has become a fault line of ethnic and political division in the country and beyond. 

Mohammad Bazargan, Secretary of the Water and Environment Task Force in Iran’s Expediency Council, recently warned that the country is dangerously close to a full-blown water and soil crisis. His statement marks one of the strongest public acknowledgments by an official.

If trends continue, by 2050, a large portion of Iran’s southern population may be forced to migrate northward in search of livable conditions—adding enormous pressure to already overstretched regions. Bazargan has warned that we could soon reach a point where “there won’t be enough room for people to sleep, let alone enough food to eat.”

A looming catastrophe

Iran’s water crisis is one of the most urgent yet least seriously addressed national issues. Despite mounting warnings and visible environmental consequences, attention to this looming catastrophe remains largely superficial—if not entirely absent. More dangerously, the worsening water situation carries the potential to inflame ethnic tensions and deepen existing social divides.

The crisis stretches far beyond simple drought. From drying lakes and polluted rivers to environmental degradation, land subsidence, mass unemployment, and large-scale migration to northern regions, water mismanagement is silently reshaping Iran’s demographic and political landscape.

What was once a sociological concern is now rapidly transforming into a socio-hydropolitical crisis — a term increasingly used to describe conflicts that stem from water scarcity.

People migrating to northern provinces, abandoning their homes due to drought and water shortages, are becoming what experts call climate refugees. Some villages have experienced complete abandonment. This slow, creeping process of climate-induced migration has been unfolding for years—quietly, steadily—until it reached today’s critical threshold. Decision-makers have long neglected this form of migration, which, unlike sudden disasters, leaves deeper social and political impacts.

More than a drought

At the core of the problem is not just mismanagement, but a misguided philosophy of control. Although Iran has several laws on water management, such as the Law of Equitable Water Distribution and the Comprehensive Water Law, successive administrations have approached water not as a public resource, but as something to be dominated and owned. This top-down view has severely weakened Iran’s institutional capacity to implement sustainable solutions.

According to Abbas Keshavarz, Iran has overdrawn its groundwater reserves by an estimated 150 to 350 billion cubic meters—a staggering depletion that places aquifers on the verge of collapse. This figure reflects the total amount of groundwater overuse in recent decades due to unsustainable extraction practices.

In contrast, Mohammad Hossein Bazargan, Secretary of the Water and Environment Task Force of the Expediency Council, highlights that Iran has lost around 50 billion cubic meters of groundwater over the past 150 years—a number that refers specifically to irreversible losses, meaning water reserves that can no longer be naturally replenished.

The difference in these figures stems from the type and timeframe of measurement: Keshavarz refers to the overall extraction, while Bazargan focuses on permanent depletion of non-renewable reserves. Regardless of the estimate, both warn that the situation is reaching a critical point. Water is no longer just an environmental issue—it is becoming a national fault line.

While some, like Bazargan, may still refer to this crisis as a ‘drought,’ such terminology grossly oversimplifies the situation. The term evokes a temporary condition—a few dry years, less rainfall or snow, and the hope of a forthcoming ‘wet season.’ But this is no longer our reality.

For earlier generations, water scarcity was local and seasonal. If a spring or river ran low, the cause was likely a lack of rainfall. But today, when major cities like Isfahan and Yazd face water shortages, the state implements inter-basin water transfer projects—redirecting water from wetter provinces like Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari to drier regions. 

As Issa Kalantari, former head of Iran’s Department of Environment, pointed out, the problem is not low inflow. During the Safavid era, Sheikh Baha’i calculated the flow of the Zayandeh Rud River at around 700 million cubic meters annually. Today, the same river sees a flow of 1.85 billion cubic meters—yet it is dry and excessive consumption prevents any water from reaching critical ecosystems. For instance, Gavkhouni, once a vibrant wetland, has suffered worse than even Lake Jazmourian, which still occasionally receives flood waters while Gavkhouni does not.

Water wisdom

Kalantari warned in 2014 that Iran would only have 15 years of water left for agriculture if consumption remained unchecked. That leaves just four years from now. The core of the crisis, experts say, is clear: Iran’s rainfall has remained relatively consistent, but extraction from underground aquifers—waters that take centuries or millennia to replenish—has skyrocketed. 

This unchecked overuse lies at the heart of Iran’s water emergency. Keshavarz notes that oil wealth shifted Iran away from its ancient qanat systems—ingenious underground channels—toward a destructive reliance on deep wells, unraveling centuries of water wisdom.

According to Iran’s former head of the Department of Environment, the country originally possessed around 500 billion cubic meters of fossil water—ancient underground reserves. However, 200 billion cubic meters of this freshwater have already been consumed, and the remaining 300 billion cubic meters are saline, rendering them unsuitable even for agriculture.

While water scarcity has now reached nearly every corner of the country—including typically lush provinces like Gilan and Mazandaran—the crisis is not evenly distributed. The Iranian Central Plateau, located to the east of the Zagros Mountains and south of the Alborz range, faces the most critical conditions. Experts caution that these regions may eventually force entire populations to relocate.

What’s striking, however, is the deafening silence from current environmental officials. In Iran, it is common for officials to only speak out after leaving office—whether by resignation, dismissal, or the end of their term. When in power, accountability and proactive responsibility are often absent. The water crisis deepens, but institutional responses continue to arrive too late.

Mismanagement and policy failures

One of the primary drivers of Iran’s worsening water crisis is the government’s policy of excessive groundwater extraction. According to Mostafa Fadaei-Fard, head of the Flood Evaluation Committee of Iran’s National Committee on Large Dams, over 37 million people in western and northern provinces may be forced to migrate due to the depletion of aquifers.

Projects like the Koohrang water transfer channel have diverted massive volumes of water from river sources to the city of Isfahan, sustaining industrial and agricultural sectors in drought-stricken central Iran. However, the environmental and social costs of such policies are mounting. 

Keshavarz highlights how land reforms in the 1960s, combined with lax regulations, spurred a drilling frenzy. Today, Iran counts 660,000 legal wells and 360,000 illegal ones, bleeding its groundwater dry.

Military-linked companies, particularly those affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have seized lands around Lake Urmia, engaging in high-water-consumption agriculture, notably watermelon farming. 

Producing one kilogram of watermelon consumes roughly 250 liters of water, yet the price of watermelon is relatively low at the expense of local communities facing severe water scarcity. This paradox has led many to claim that Iran now offers the cheapest water in the world.

Household water consumption in Iran is estimated at 6–7 billion cubic meters annually. Of the 400 billion cubic meters of annual precipitation, 270 billion evaporates, leaving 130 billion, of which nearly 110 billion cubic meters is consumed. A staggering 70–90% of this is used in agriculture, yet Iran’s irrigation efficiency is only around 30% compared to neighbors like Turkey and Iraq, which have irrigation efficiencies above 50%, meaning up to 50 billion cubic meters of water is wasted every year. 

Urban water loss is also a critical concern: 25–30% of water is lost in city water networks due to leaks, outdated infrastructure, and poor management. By comparison, this figure is under 10% in the global north.  

In many Iranian cities, drinking water is still used to irrigate green spaces, whereas treated wastewater is commonly used for this purpose elsewhere. Meanwhile, industrial zones, including steel, petrochemical, tile, and ceramic factories in the central desert, consume massive volumes of water. For example, Mobarakeh Steel Company uses around 210 million cubic meters of water annually—nearly 40% of the total water used in the provinces of Yazd, Kerman, and Isfahan combined.

The government’s dam-building spree has also exacerbated the crisis. Iran has entered the 21st century facing what experts call a “human-made drought” due to unsustainable practices. In 2012, Iran had 316 dams; by 2018, that number had surged to 647. In 2019, the government announced plans to construct 109 new dams within two years, many of them military-led or aimed at altering demographic patterns, and built without environmental assessments.

This rapid dam construction has led to significant water loss. For instance, the Latyan Dam, one of Tehran’s five main drinking water sources with a capacity of 95 million cubic meters, currently holds only 9 million cubic meters. Water levels in other major dams such as those in Minab, Zayandeh-Rood, and Saveh have also dropped to critical lows.

Groundwater levels in Tehran have fallen an average of 12 meters over the past two decades, causing land subsidence in urban areas. The policies pursued by both the current and previous administrations have pushed Iran toward an irreversible water disaster, one that intertwines environmental collapse with political and social instability.

Migration, Somalia, and social tensions

Both global and historical experiences show numerous examples of severe water scarcity leading to social and political crises. One of the most alarming cases is that of Somalia.

Since the beginning of 2020 , approximately 1.3 million Somalis have been forced to migrate due to the water crisis. Considering Somalia’s population of 16 million, this means 8% of the entire nation has become internally displaced within a single year.

​Certainly, while it’s an oversimplification to attribute Somalia’s conflicts and state failure solely to water scarcity, it’s important to recognize that water-related challenges play a significant role in exacerbating existing vulnerabilities.​ 

For instance, the 2011 famine in Somalia, which led to the deaths of over 250,000 people, was primarily caused by severe drought conditions. This environmental crisis intensified existing political instability and conflict, highlighting how water scarcity can act as a catalyst in fragile contexts.​ 

Moreover, a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) emphasizes that environmental degradation, including water scarcity, contributes to conflict dynamics in Somalia by undermining livelihoods and fueling competition over scarce resources.​ Therefore, while water scarcity is not the root cause of Somalia’s complex challenges, it is a critical factor that, if overlooked, can hinder efforts toward peace and stability

The case of Somalia offers a warning. Could Iran follow the same path? 

A study by the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center indicates that 282 cities in Iran are currently facing high water stress. The same study reports that average rainfall has declined by 36% compared to the past 52-year average. In provinces like Hormozgan, Sistan and Baluchestan, Fars, Kerman, Razavi Khorasan, and South Khorasan, the reduction is even more dramatic—between 50% and 85%.

Iran has now been confronting water scarcity for over two decades. According to the World Resources Institute, Iran ranks fourth globally among countries facing an extreme water crisis. The country is essentially on the brink of what experts call “Day Zero” — the moment when water reserves might entirely run out.

Ethno-hydrological and climatic fault lines

The internal migration from arid to cooler, water-rich regions in Iran is intensifying existing social fractures. In a country characterized by diverse ethnic groups, water scarcity further inflames pre-existing tensions. Rather than uniting people in crisis, water is becoming a divisive force, fueling mistrust and resentment between regions and communities.

One stark example is the Koohrang water transfer project, along with the Beheshtabad and Golab canals, which collectively transport nearly two billion cubic meters of water annually to Isfahan. For years, this transfer triggered protests from neighboring provinces inhabited largely by Lur communities, who accuse the Persian-majority Isfahan of “plundering” their water. 

During Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, in an attempt to appease protestors in Chaharmahal, Bakhtiari and Lorestan, villagers were granted unrestricted permission to drill wells. This unregulated access quickly depleted underground water reserves and worsened the crisis. Ahmadinejad famously dismissed Ministry of Energy restrictions as “bureaucratic nonsense,” encouraging anyone to dig wherever possible. Such populist policies, compounded by ill-informed parliamentary decisions, have deepened Iran’s water crisis.

Ethnic fault lines are increasingly intertwined with water politics.

In Khuzestan, a major Arab-populated province with rich water resources, the transfer of water from the Karun River—Iran’s largest—has sparked anger among Arab residents. They accuse the state of “Arab-cleansing” and favoring Lur populations in the region. The Koohrang-3 Tunnel project, which submerged several villages, triggered an influx of migrants into Khuzestan, exacerbating ethnic tensions. 

In northwest Iran, Lake Urmia—once the country’s largest lake—has nearly dried up. The region straddles East and West Azerbaijan, inhabited by Turks and Kurds. Despite numerous proposed solutions, the lake remains a source of inter-ethnic tension. The Zab River transfer project, designed to refill the lake, has sparked opposition among local Kurdish communities, who argue that their water is being diverted to Turkish-speaking regions at their expense. As demographic shifts intensify—Azerbaijanis migrating to Tehran and Kurds moving into Urmia—a new crisis of ethno-demographic imbalance looms.

Other controversial megaprojects, such as transferring water from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf or from the Oman Sea to central provinces like Isfahan, have drawn harsh criticism from economists and environmentalists. Critics argue that these projects are unrealistic and ecologically destructive, benefiting only industrial interests in provinces like Isfahan, which already dominate Iran’s economic landscape. 

There is growing concern that these projects are driven not by necessity, but by powerful lobbying from industrial elites, at the expense of Baluchi and Arab communities in southern Iran.

These ethnic, environmental, and economic pressures, coupled with poor governance, over-construction of dams, and inefficient water management, have pushed Iran toward an ecological and social catastrophe. Some experts argue that misguided self-sufficiency policies in agriculture have led to over-extraction of groundwater and irreversible land subsidence.

The consequences are alarming: rapid rural-to-urban migration, population surges in northern provinces, and creeping demographic transformation. Yet, the government responds by securitizing the crisis, rather than addressing its root causes.

Iran is also in water disputes with neighboring countries—such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. However, it is not just external challenges, but internal mismanagement and the weakness of the Islamic Republic’s governance model that are at the core of this crisis.

Ethnic and identity-based tensions, exacerbated by crippling sanctions, state repression, and erosion of the middle class, are escalating. 

Water is Iran’s most urgent existential crisis. And if this reality continues to be ignored, the hydro-ethnic conflict may become the greatest threat to Iran’s territorial and social cohesion. 

Water is the blood of the earth, a shared vein running through us all—blue brothers and sisters, not bound by blood but by this liquid lifeline. Yet, like the parched earth, we too have cracked and splintered from its absence. Forced to romanticize our misery, we weep—for the waterless in Sudan and Somalia, for the salt-scattered people around Lake Urmia, for throats choked dry under the sun of injustice.

The post The Countdown to Iran’s Day Zero: A Crisis of Water, Not War appeared first on Untold.

‘You road I enter upon and look around,

I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here’ 

Walt Whitman

—

ALLIUM TRIQUETRUM 

It’s late April and, as we ascend wooden steps into Heane Wood, the life of the woodland is emerging from dormancy with a rude burst of colour, sound and smell. I have two co-pilgrims with me for this final stretch. Rasheeqa is a forager and herbalist, so within minutes we’re chewing on three cornered leeks and collecting garlic mustard leaves for lunch. I crouch low to the ground, senses attuning to the undergrowth. Upright again, my eyes adjust to the range of visibility. The woodland, though a small pocket, feels vast and rich. 

Crossing a stile out of the woods into open fields, we step into bright sunlight. I turn to the sky and close my eyes, orienting my face towards the sun by warmth. I can hear nesting rooks on the other side of the fields. As each car approaches, they crescendo then fade with its passing. Their feral symphony, unheard by the drivers, continues as my attention moves on.

GLECHOMA HEDERACEA 

We stop for another rest, luxuriating in the easy walking, bountiful fields and pilgrim conviviality. I stir a handful of ground ivy into a little kettle. As the earthy brew diffuses into my body, the word renewal stews in me, a prism through which to peer out at my surroundings and maybe, if angled appropriately, to look back into the dark pool of my own consciousness. 

The word feels like a leaf dropped into water, its overlapping contexts eddying gently outwards. Renewal as the search for stories that brings me here. Renewal as the shape-shifting grief patterns of recent years. As the flowering of the season around us. As the re-enchantment of the land that walking makes manifest. As post-Brexit cultural regeneration. As the window of recalibration briefly offered by the pandemic. As the systemic transition from modernity to who knows what. Renewal as the very act of pilgrimage itself, putting one foot in front of the other until I reach a destination which, of course, isn’t a destination but another point of departure.

PLANTAGO MAJOR 

Rasheeqa has made a pilgrim tincture of plantain, to counter inflammation of the feet, nettle, to help circulation and mugwort, for visionary dreaming. These three herbs are named in the Old English healing spell known as the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ – mucgcwyrt, wegbrade and netelan. Plantain was known as waybread in old English because it grows best on trodden paths:

And you, Waybread, plant-mother!
You’re open to the east, yet mighty within:
Carts creaked over you, women rode over you,
over you brides bellowed, over you bulls snorted!

You withstood it all—and you pushed back:
You withstood venom, you withstood air-illness,
you withstood the horror who travels over land.

I am struck by how the plants in the spell are addressed personally as animate beings, as responsable entities, as allies in the struggle against the nebulous ‘horror who travels over land’ and realise how far we have come from such a foundational understanding. I place plantain leaves in my boots to stop my feet swelling and becoming painful.

Ingesting plants from the landscape we pass through, laying them on my skin, I approach an altered sense of human-ness, one that responds to environment, one motivated by sensing rather than making sense. Maybe it is the time of year and the elation of Spring, but my body feels more resonant. It seems to hum at the same frequency as my surroundings. I write the words ‘wild belonging’ in my notebook. 

FAGUS SYLVATICA

We sleep on the bell-ringers platform in the church at Barham. Waking early to the sun streaming in through stained glass, I muse on the day’s walk to Canterbury. The city has been one of Europe’s major pilgrim destinations for more than a thousand years, and it is likely that the route I have been following these months is one that committed European pilgrims would have trodden between Canterbury and Santiago De Compostela. This is not my final destination, but there is a wall painting in the cathedral that I want to see – a depiction of the life of St Eustace that inspired Russell Hoban to write Riddley Walker. The novel charts the progress of a twelve-year-old boy-seer through this same landscape that I have been walking, roughly two millennia in the future, ‘at the bitter end of the nuclear road’. Towards the close of the novel, the main character has a pilgrim epiphany in the ruins of Canterbury Castle: 

‘I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER.’

The only power is no power. 

The words walk with me still. 

What if we really tried to let go of power? How could we go about disinvesting in modernity’s urge for human domination over a subordinated nature? What would it look like – this re-alignment of humanity within planetary cycles of relinquishment and renewal? 

What would it feel like?

The day’s walking is relatively short so we can make time for way marking rituals. My other co-pilgrim, Adam, is a musician and yoga teacher. He’s also an electrician and solar expert but that won’t help us today. Mid-afternoon, we are walking through lush bluebells that carpet Trenley Woods on the edge of Canterbury, when suddenly the flowers disappear in a marked line, as if a spell has been cast. Rounding the corner, we come into the presence of a huge beech tree, whose bark is covered in the arborglyphs of generations of lovestruck youth and godstruck pilgrims. There is magic here, whatever we mean by magic, so we burn some sage and I sing a song that I think of as magical because it finds its way into the lives of people I sing it to, and because that’s how it found its way into my life. It includes the line ‘Let grief be a falling leaf at the dawning of the day’, words that hold within them everything I am trying to say here. A few weeks later Adam is asked to sing it at a wake.

CORYLUS AVELLANA 

We reach Canterbury cathedral too late to be let in, but the gate guard takes pity and nods us through. We enter the cathedral just as the final strains of evensong are fading. It’s enough to feel the acoustics of the place, the sound of the organ reverberating in the caverns above. Even my hazel staff tapping on the floor sounds celestial. As I listen to its echoes, I remember there is a decision I must take. According to tradition, pilgrims to Canterbury throw their staff into the sea at Whitstable, seven miles away, but the act seems to mark an end that I don’t really feel. I understand, now, a pilgrim’s relationship with their staff. An alchemical reaction has taken place these last few months: this is not just a tent pole, chin rest, and bramble clearer, but also a quietly insistent teacher, reaffirming its woodiness in my sweaty hand, clacking against pebble, thudding on dry earth, locked into an ungainly but relentless collaboration with the rhythm of my feet, when rhythm is all that is left.    

ARTEMESIA VULGARIS

My feet crunch the pebbles underfoot and I look out onto a rolling brown sea. The end of my pilgrimage is a mysterious sand formation known as The Street, an ancient tidal pathway that stretches for a kilometre out into the Thames estuary at Whitstable. The tide is in when we arrive, and I need to leave before it goes out again, so the Street is neither visible nor accessible. I’m used to this kind of non-event at the end of pilgrimage; it warns me not to celebrate an ending without understanding that it is also a beginning. I’ll come back one day soon, when I can walk out into the middle of the sea at night, surrounded by stars and water, and think about where this road to nowhere goes next.

And so to mugwort, the dreaming plant. What do I dream of? What visions appear? It’s easy to imagine systemic renewal, less easy to place ourselves within it, or move towards it as an individual. We can gesture towards such goals by using less plastic, avoiding flying, or trying not to drive a car so much, but surely we mostly understand now that these small changes fall hopelessly short of the mark. They can only be rituals to ward off the darkness, to help us feel some agency. The best I can hope for is that we might collectively re-orient ourselves towards a way of being in the world that welcomes grief in, acknowledges entanglement, exercises care, foregrounds slowness, practices togetherness and seeks renewal. 

Renewal isn’t about the new. It’s about being able to revisit the familiar, the old, the ancient, even, with the benefit of what we’ve learnt in the meantime. Nor is it a new idea to revisit our relationship with the land. Yet pilgrimage allows us moments to step towards a more ancient future and holds fleeting spaces for us to re-imagine our place in it all over again.

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