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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:5:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:28:"Our favorite stories of 2021";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:81:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/24/1042912/our-favorite-stories-of-2021/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Fri, 24 Dec 2021 10:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1042912";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:293:"The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"The Editors";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32745:"
The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year.

We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which ones really stood out. Which stories did their colleagues publish that made them proud to work for MIT Technology Review? (And no, they weren’t allowed to choose their own.)

An edited version of the list runs below, but there was one story that our team kept coming back to as a touchstone for the kind of coverage that we do: <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/">Karen Hao’s investigation into Facebook</a>.

Abby Ivory-Ganja, our audience engagement editor, said it was “showstopping.” She added: “It’s easy to think of tech companies as monoliths and CEOs and not as groups of people. But Karen did such a great job explaining problems at Facebook through Joaquin Quiñonero Candela. This was one of TR’s most widely read stories of the year, and it’s no surprise why once you read it.”

Charlotte Jee, news editor, said: “This article was a bombshell when it came out in March. It revealed, in painstaking detail, the full extent to which Facebook knew its algorithms drove people towards harmful, hateful content—and chose not to do anything about it. Why? Because, as Karen so perfectly put it, ‘The reason is simple. Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: [Mark] Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth.’ If you read it now, in the light of the Facebook Papers, it looks so prescient.”

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/">How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1688" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JoaquinQuinoneroCandela-316.jpeg?w=3000" alt="Joaquin Quinonero Candela" class="wp-image-1020550" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JoaquinQuinoneroCandela-316.jpeg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JoaquinQuinoneroCandela-316.jpeg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JoaquinQuinoneroCandela-316.jpeg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JoaquinQuinoneroCandela-316.jpeg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/JoaquinQuinoneroCandela-316.jpeg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">WINNI WINTERMEYER</div>
</figure>

See if you agree. And then once you’re done reading that one, see what else the rest of our team chose as their top hits of the year.

Have a happy new year!

<h3>Michael Reilly, executive editor</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/27/1037118/moores-law-computer-chips/">Inside the machine that saved Moore’s Law</a>

A story about a giant, almost unbelievably complex machine that pushes engineering to the absolute max? Yes, please. Chip fabrication is not an easy subject to write about, but in Clive’s hands it’s a romp.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-silicon-valleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever/">Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley’s latest wild bet on living forever"><img loading="lazy" width="2954" height="1662" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c3gbtc-16x9-withbezos2.jpg?w=2954" alt="Death and Jeff Bezos" class="wp-image-1034382" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c3gbtc-16x9-withbezos2.jpg 2954w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c3gbtc-16x9-withbezos2.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c3gbtc-16x9-withbezos2.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c3gbtc-16x9-withbezos2.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/c3gbtc-16x9-withbezos2.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2954px) 100vw, 2954px" /></a><figcaption>Funders of a deep-pocketed new “rejuvenation” startup are said to include Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">ALAMY, GETTY (BEZOS)</div>
</figure>

“It’s been said that young people dream of being rich, and rich people dream of being young.” Mix that sentiment together with a bit of exciting science and some investment from Jeff Bezos and other billionaires and you’ve got Antonio Regalado’s deep dive into the frothy world of longevity research.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/02/1021635/beauty-filters-young-girls-augmented-reality-social-media/">Beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves</a>

We know algorithms are out there always nudging our thinking on things like shopping decisions and political opinions. Even so, this piece from Tate Ryan-Mosley is a stunner, showing just how far the algorithmic “optimization” of everything has seeped into young girls’ view of their own physical appearance.

<h3>Tanya Basu, senior reporter, humans and technology</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020725/diamandis-fraudulent-covid-treatment-peptides-amniotic-fluid/">First he held a superspreader event. Then he recommended fake cures.</a>

Eileen has a knack for not only finding these stories but being able to investigate and piece together what some people in tech might not want exposed. Written in March, it was a sign of themes to come in the rest of 2021: covid deniers, snake oil treatments, and people with egos that supersede common sense and safety.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/25/1021215/nft-artists-scams-profit-environment-blockchain/">S</a><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/25/1021215/nft-artists-scams-profit-environment-blockchain/">ome artists found a lifeline selling NFTs. Others worry it’s a trap.</a>

I feel like every NFT story is snarky and/or exclusionary, making them really hard for the average person to find something to care about in what’s arguably an important topic. Abby is able to hit that nerve here and exposes how a group of really vulnerable people who simply want to make art and a decent living are getting thrown under the bus by scammers.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1020478/feminist-internet-culture-activist-harassment-herd-signal/">A feminist internet would be better for everyone</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/01/1020478/feminist-internet-culture-activist-harassment-herd-signal/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1687" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/InaJang_MITTechReview_FeministInternet.jpg?w=3000" alt="conceptual illustration showing a hand holding a phone with long haircut silhouettes" class="wp-image-1020482" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/InaJang_MITTechReview_FeministInternet.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/InaJang_MITTechReview_FeministInternet.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/InaJang_MITTechReview_FeministInternet.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/InaJang_MITTechReview_FeministInternet.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/InaJang_MITTechReview_FeministInternet.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>Life online for women is toxic and filled with hate and sexism. Some activists say it’s time to reimagine how the whole thing works.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">INA JANG</div>
</figure>

It’s kind of sad that we have to make this statement in 2021, but here we are. What I love about this piece as a writer is the futuristic fiction that leads it off—and the realization that this isn’t science fiction anymore. What I love about this piece as a reader is that Charlotte has genuine hope and practical thoughts about the future of the internet that don’t make me feel like everything is lost. (Linda, our copy chief, agreed, saying: “As usual, Charlotte finds the brighter side.”)

<h3>Abby Ivory-Ganja, audience engagement editor</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/03/1025679/explainer-is-ransomware-getting-worse/">Why the ransomware crisis suddenly feels so relentless</a>

I loved this story from Patrick because it helped me understand the ransomware universe a little more. He really gives a view of the landscape from 36,000 feet, which I always appreciate.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/27/1038835/podcast-how-pricing-algorithms-learn-to-collude/">Podcast: How pricing algorithms learn to collude</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="AI could learn to form digital cartels in an effort to maximize profits"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1687" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/anaglyph-pricing.jpg?w=3000" alt="dynamic ticket pricing concept" class="wp-image-1038691" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/anaglyph-pricing.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/anaglyph-pricing.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/anaglyph-pricing.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/anaglyph-pricing.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/anaglyph-pricing.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>AI could learn to form digital cartels in an effort to maximize profits</figcaption><div class="image-credit">MS TECH | ENVATO</div>
</figure>

This episode of our podcast <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/supertopic/in-machines-we-trust/">In Machines We Trust</a> about how pricing algorithms learn to collude really blew my mind. Our podcast team did such a great job of pulling back the curtain behind the price of an Uber ride or books on Amazon. They make it so easy to understand something complicated, and we are all better for it.

<h3>Amy Nordrum, editorial director, special projects and operations</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/1027999/fbi-russia-ukraine-cybercrime-investigation-ransomware/">Inside the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine’s failed cybercrime investigation</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/1027999/fbi-russia-ukraine-cybercrime-investigation-ransomware/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1688" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Maxomatic_MIT_TR_Ukraine-FIN.jpg?w=3000" alt="conceptual illustration showing a police evidence board with reference to various people, places, and things in the story" class="wp-image-1027896" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Maxomatic_MIT_TR_Ukraine-FIN.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Maxomatic_MIT_TR_Ukraine-FIN.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Maxomatic_MIT_TR_Ukraine-FIN.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Maxomatic_MIT_TR_Ukraine-FIN.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Maxomatic_MIT_TR_Ukraine-FIN.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>Russia and Ukraine promised to cooperate and help catch the world’s most successful hackers. But things didn’t quite go to plan.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">MAX-O-MATIC</div>
</figure>

This was a riveting tale of how an effort to crack down on cybercriminals by one of the world’s top law enforcement agencies went sideways. It’s a richly reported piece chock full of detail that will make you feel you were along for the ride amid the investigation’s many twists and turns. By the end, the FBI agents’ frustration is palpable and you’ll have a greater appreciation of why it’s so difficult to bring cybercriminals to justice.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/27/1037286/music-future-research-instruments/">These impossible instruments could change the future of music</a>

This is a fun little story about how software is changing what it means to make music, in part by allowing musicians to create and play instruments that defy physics and that literally could not exist in the real world. There’s a funny backstory, too, about how one group’s painstaking effort to design software that very precisely imitates actual instruments was upended when real musicians got hold of it and started messing around.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/11/1017955/auditors-testing-ai-hiring-algorithms-bias-big-questions-remain/">Auditors are testing AI hiring algorithms for bias, but there’s no easy fix</a>

Much has been written about the problem of AI bias. One potential solution involves auditing the underlying algorithms for bias. A cottage industry of consultants has sprung up to do just that, but it’s far from perfect. This story breaks down one particular AI audit to illustrate the limits of this particular approach.

<h3>Niall Firth, editorial director, digital</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032111/conscious-ai-can-machines-think/">What an octopus’s mind can teach us about AI’s ultimate mystery</a>

Back in 2020, Will had ventured into controversial territory, tackling one of the most hotly contested topics in AI—whether a <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/15/1010461/artificial-general-intelligence-robots-ai-agi-deepmind-google-openai/">true artificial general intelligence is even possible</a>. In 2021 he decided to go one step further and ask: Could a machine ever be conscious? Drawing on philosophy of mind—and not afraid to get into truly deep conversations about the nature of consciousness—the story started out by asking what it would take for a machine to become conscious and self-aware. But it ended up with an even more complex conclusion: If a machine became conscious, would we even know? Come for the mind-bending philosophy, stay for the octopus anecdotes.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/29/1030260/facebook-whistleblower-sophie-zhang-global-political-manipulation/">She risked everything to expose Facebook. Now she’s telling her story.</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/29/1030260/facebook-whistleblower-sophie-zhang-global-political-manipulation/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1688" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CF3A6308_FINAL.jpg?w=3000" alt="Sophie Zhang" class="wp-image-1030154" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CF3A6308_FINAL.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CF3A6308_FINAL.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CF3A6308_FINAL.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CF3A6308_FINAL.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CF3A6308_FINAL.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK</div>
</figure>

Karen’s tenacious reporting over Facebook misinformation and troll farms has rightly been praised, but I thought this story was brilliantly done. Sophie Zhang was a whistleblower who had exposed how fake accounts and likes on Facebook were allowing politicians to sway the public in countries outside the US, and potentially enable election interference. The story had been told, but no one had written a profile of her before. Karen showed readers that “for Zhang, the explanation of why she cared so much is tied up in her identity.” Telling that story was an expert piece of profile-writing that required sensitivity and compassion.

<h3>James Temple, senior editor, climate and energy</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018374/peter-diamandis-covid-superspreader-a360-conference/">First he held a superspreader event. Then he recommended fake cures.</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020725/diamandis-fraudulent-covid-treatment-peptides-amniotic-fluid/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1688" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/interstellar-snake-oil-s.jpeg?w=3000" alt="snake oil remedy" class="wp-image-1020558" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/interstellar-snake-oil-s.jpeg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/interstellar-snake-oil-s.jpeg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/interstellar-snake-oil-s.jpeg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/interstellar-snake-oil-s.jpeg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/interstellar-snake-oil-s.jpeg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>After dozens of people caught the coronavirus at his expensive conference, tech mogul Peter Diamandis offered fraudulent covid-19 treatments to them, from injectable peptides to amniotic fluid.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">MS TECH | GETTY</div>
</figure>

One of my favorite Tech Review reads this year was Eileen Guo’s scoop on a <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/13/1018374/peter-diamandis-covid-superspreader-a360-conference/">high-priced business conference</a> that went forth in defiance of regional public health orders, and turned into a superspreader event. It was hosted by a high-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had cofounded a covid-19 vaccine company. The deeply sourced story described in fine detail both the warnings that were made in advance of the event and the aftermath, including the apparent effort to limit communications about the ensuing covid-19 infections.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/25/1027140/lab-leak-alina-chan/">They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab.</a>

Antonio Regalado <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/25/1027140/lab-leak-alina-chan/">wrote a must-read profile of Alina Chan</a>, the Broad Institute postdoc who helped revive the idea that covid-19 could have leaked from a lab in China. The story details how she researched and communicated the possibilities, the virologists she angered in doing so, and the pushback and even threats she’s received. But ultimately hers is a story about the nature of scientific uncertainty, and the sometimes fuzzy line between crackpot conspiracies, conjecture and unlikely ideas still in need of vigorous intellectual debate.

<h3>Charlotte Jee, news editor</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/16/1032001/how-to-talk-to-unvaccinated-people/">How to talk to unvaccinated people</a>

The stakes for conversations about the vaccines are sky-high, and the debate has caused private, painful rifts in so many families. Many of us see the shots as the only meaningful way out of the pandemic, and the primary means to keep loved ones alive and well, so it’s deeply infuriating when others don’t see it the same way. This thoughtful, well-researched piece by Tanya was a timely reminder that people who don’t want to get vaccinated are still people, and while it may still be worth your while to try to persuade them, you should do so in a respectful manner. No one ever persuaded anyone by yelling at them.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/15/1031804/digital-beauty-filters-photoshop-photo-editing-colorism-racism/">How beauty filters perpetuate colorism</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/15/1031804/digital-beauty-filters-photoshop-photo-editing-colorism-racism/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1693" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BeautyScoreColorism.jpg?w=3000" alt="Conceptual illustration of a young black woman's face with circles that zoom in on certain features, image is black and white with pink highlights" class="wp-image-1031793" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BeautyScoreColorism.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BeautyScoreColorism.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BeautyScoreColorism.jpg?resize=768,433 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BeautyScoreColorism.jpg?resize=1536,867 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/BeautyScoreColorism.jpg?resize=2048,1156 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>An ancient form of prejudice about skin color is flourishing in the modern internet age.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">JOAN WONG</div>
</figure>

Lots of us know by now that rather than erasing existing biases, many technologies amplify them. But every now and then you read something that makes you realize that the problem is even bigger—and more harmful—than you appreciated. This piece, which exposed how beauty filters perpetuate colorism (a form of discrimination against people with darker complexions), had that effect on me. It made me sad, it made me worried, and most of all it made me angry.

This piece can (and should) be read as a companion piece building on the excellent <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/02/1021635/beauty-filters-young-girls-augmented-reality-social-media/">article</a> Tate wrote in April about the impact of beauty filters on young girls’ self-image.

<h3>Eileen Guo, senior reporter, features and investigations</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020133/ai-algorithm-rate-beauty-score-attractive-face/">I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020133/ai-algorithm-rate-beauty-score-attractive-face/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1693" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BeautyScoreFinal2-gradient.png?w=3000" alt="conceptural illustration of 4 quadrants showing different people's faces with details called out for scoring" class="wp-image-1020135" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BeautyScoreFinal2-gradient.png 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BeautyScoreFinal2-gradient.png?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BeautyScoreFinal2-gradient.png?resize=768,433 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BeautyScoreFinal2-gradient.png?resize=1536,867 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BeautyScoreFinal2-gradient.png?resize=2048,1156 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>Computers are ranking the way people look—and the results are influencing the things we do, the posts we see, and the way we think.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">JOAN WONG</div>
</figure>

I loved Tate’s story series on how tech and tech platforms affect perceptions of beauty. All three stories are excellent and worth a read (“I asked an AI to tell me how beautiful I am,” “<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/02/1021635/beauty-filters-young-girls-augmented-reality-social-media/">Beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/15/1031804/digital-beauty-filters-photoshop-photo-editing-colorism-racism/">How digital beauty filters perpetuate digital colorism</a>”), as is the accompanying podcast episode. I love Tate’s willingness to include herself in her stories and her ability to do so in a way that is relatable: in the first story, she asks questions that the reader likely has as well, and she is empathetic in digging into the nuances of how beauty tech affects different communities differently. It’s also noteworthy to have this kind of in-depth treatment of “women + tech” issues, and I really hope she  does more of it!

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/30/1017086/cdc-44-million-vaccine-data-vams-problems/">What went wrong with America’s $44 million vaccine data system?</a>

Cat Ferguson’s timely and well-told investigation into the CDC’s Vaccine Administration Management System (VAMS), the largely ineffective and incredibly expensive website to schedule vaccine appointments, was the type of investigation that MIT Technology Review is best positioned to do. It answered the question everyone had, back in that phase of the pandemic, about why it was so hard to schedule vaccine appointments, and it did so with depth and detail that comes out of Cat’s deep expertise in health tech and her great sleuthing and reporting skills. And it shed light on an area that doesn’t get as much scrutiny as it should: government tech. Much less sexy than investigating Facebook, but just as important.

<h3>Tate Ryan-Mosely, reporter, digital rights and democracy </h3>

<a rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank" href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/29/1017811/california-climate-policy-carbon-credits-cause-co2-pollution/">The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere</a>

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/29/1017811/california-climate-policy-carbon-credits-cause-co2-pollution/"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="1687" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jon-han-featured-gradient.jpg?w=3000" alt="Conceptual illustration" class="wp-image-1024192" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jon-han-featured-gradient.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jon-han-featured-gradient.jpg?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jon-han-featured-gradient.jpg?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jon-han-featured-gradient.jpg?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/jon-han-featured-gradient.jpg?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /></a><figcaption>New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">JON HAN</div>
</figure>

James’s investigative reporting, a collaboration with ProPublica’s Lisa Song, was a momentous accounting of California’s carbon offset program. It found that companies could be gaming the system and undermining the climate goals of the project. It’s a super complicated subject, and James and Lisa were able to achieve an explanatory tone that made it accessible; it might be the story that I learned the most from this year. They also leaned into the nuances here, looking into questions of stewardship and how the program is impacting Native American tribes.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/30/1033941/afghanistan-biometric-databases-us-military-40-data-points/">This is the real story of the Afghan biometric databases abandoned to the Taliban</a>

Eileen and Hikmat’s super-impressive reporting added much-needed evidence about the tools the Taliban were likely to have at their disposal following the US withdrawal from the country. It will become an essential history lesson about the dangers of propping up a government with surveillance tools, only to have them fall into the wrong hands.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/08/1015890/trump-twitter-facebook-abuse-harassment-conspiracy/">Of course you could have seen this coming</a>

Abby’s quick take on the January 6 riot squarely placed the event as a continuation of forces that have been gathering for a long time. At the time of publishing, the noise around the riot was all-consuming and blurry, and her take offered clarity and analysis based on her years of reporting.

<h3>Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor, AI</h3>

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/14/1026148/ai-big-tech-timnit-gebru-paper-ethics/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/14/1026148/ai-big-tech-timnit-gebru-paper-ethics/">Inside the fight to reclaim AI from Big Tech’s control</a><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/14/1026148/ai-big-tech-timnit-gebru-paper-ethics/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/14/1026148/ai-big-tech-timnit-gebru-paper-ethics/"> </a> Karen Hao takes us behind the scenes at the birth of a movement, introducing the hopes and fears of the AI researchers pushing back against a status quo in which the world’s most powerful technology is fast becoming monopolised by the world’s most powerful companies.

<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/15/1035813/us-sold-iphone-exploit-uae/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/15/1035813/us-sold-iphone-exploit-uae/">This US company sold iPhone hacking tools to UAE spies</a> In a scoop that made other investigative journalists jealous, Patrick Howell O’Neill succeeded where others failed in unmasking a controversial company selling cyberweapons to foreign intelligence agencies. Few expose the shadowy international workings of cyber security so well.
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:30:"com-wordpress:feed-additions:1";a:1:{s:7:"post-id";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"1042912";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:1;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:60:"

";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"The China Initiative’s first academic guilty verdict raises more questions than it answers";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1043106/china-initiative-charles-lieber-trial-2/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 20:19:39 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Tech policy";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:16:"china initiative";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1043106";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:346:"Less than three hours after a jury in Boston began deliberating the fate of Harvard chemistry professor Charlies Lieber, the verdict was in: he was found guilty on Tuesday of six felony counts, including false statements and tax fraud, that stemmed from his failure to disclose affiliations and funding from a Chinese university and talent…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:21:"Eileen Guo, Jess Aloe";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11905:"
Less than three hours after a jury in Boston began deliberating the fate of Harvard chemistry professor Charlies Lieber, the verdict was in: he was found guilty on Tuesday of six felony counts, including false statements and tax fraud, that stemmed from his failure to disclose affiliations and funding from a Chinese university and talent recruitment program.

Lieber’s trial was closely watched not only for what it would mean for the star scientist, but also for any indications on the future of the controversial—and increasingly beleaguered—China Initiative, under which he was charged.

Launched in November 2018 by the Department of Justice, the China Initiative was meant to counter the threat of Chinese economic espionage but has, in practice, increasingly focused on academics accused of research integrity issues and has disproportionately targeted individuals of Chinese heritage, as an <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/02/1040656/china-initative-us-justice-department/">investigation</a> by MIT Technology Review found. Lieber was only the second academic charged under the initiative to face a jury—and the first to be convicted by one.

From the beginning the initiative has been criticized for facilitating racial profiling, and in recent months, it has suffered a series of setbacks stemming from the government’s own prosecutorial missteps. Over the summer, five cases against academics, mostly for alleged visa fraud, were dismissed without explanation. Then the trial of University of Tennessee-Knoxville professor Anming Hu, the <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/27/1027350/anming-hu-china-initiative-research-espionage-spying/">first research integrity case to go to trial</a>, led to a mistrial followed by a full acquittal—and accusations of misconduct by the investigating FBI agent.

Recently <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6872534688276258817/">former DOJ officials involved in the program</a>, among others, have called for an end to the effort or a significant change in its focus. Testifying on the matter before Congress, Attorney General Merrick Garland <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?515521-1/attorney-general-garland-testifies-senate-judiciary-committee-oversight-hearing">promised</a> that the Justice Department would be carrying out a review of the program.

Given this context, “if there had been an acquittal in this [the Lieber] case, it would have looked bad for the government,” says Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis, who has <a href="https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/vol111/iss1/3/">written</a> <a href="https://thechinacollection.org/charles-liebers-conviction-victory-china-initiative/?share=email&nb=1">extensively</a> on the initiative.

But the underlying facts of the case were strong—especially given the video footage of Lieber admitting to FBI agents that he received cash from a Chinese university, had a Chinese bank account, and hadn’t been (in his own words) “completely transparent by any stretch of the imagination” when asked about these and other issues by Harvard administrators and government investigators.

These facts made the Lieber case “an outlier” among China Initiative cases, according to one defense lawyer who followed the case for clues for his own client’s upcoming trial. While it’s not particularly useful for predicting how the government might handle future research integrity cases under the initiative, it has raised questions about a crucial component to the investigations—the talent recruitment programs.

Unanswered questions on the Thousand Talents Program

The question of Lieber’s innocence may be resolved, at least for now—his attorney, Marc Mukasey, <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisVillani44/status/1473434726199443457?s=20">told reporters</a> that they “respect the verdict but will keep fighting,” suggesting a potential appeal—but the trial has brought up additional questions about the China Initiative itself and, specifically, the Chinese “talent programs” that prompted such scrutiny.

Talent programs are government-sponsored recruitment plans designed to attract overseas experts (a.k.a. “talents”) to work in China. While collaboration with Chinese universities, including collaboration through talent programs, was long encouraged by US institutions, the federal government has become increasingly concerned about them in the past few years.

A <a href="https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2019-11-18%20PSI%20Staff%20Report%20-%20China's%20Talent%20Recruitment%20Plans%20Updated2.pdf">2019 Senate report </a>found that China funded over 200 talent programs that had collectively recruited over 7,000 participants. The report also warned that talent programs incentivized its members to “lie on grant applications to US grant-making agencies, set up ‘shadow labs’ in China working on research identical to their US research, and, in some cases, transfer US scientists’ hard-earned intellectual capital.”

<figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignright"><blockquote>“Part of what made Dr. Lieber a person to be interviewed was that he had many Chinese students, right?”<cite> —Marc Mukasey, Lieber’s defense attorney </cite></blockquote></figure>

MIT Technology Review’s data investigation found that 19 of the 77 known China Initiative cases (25%) were prompted by suspicions that defendants had participated in Chinese talent programs. Fourteen of these talent-program cases, meanwhile, alleged research integrity issues stemming from failures to disclose all affiliations to Chinese entities on grant documentation. None of the 14 cases involves charges that the scientist in question transferred US intellectual property to China.

Despite the government’s suspicion of talent programs, it is still not entirely clear whether disclosing participation in them is considered material or immaterial to the federal government.

This was a question that the defense attorney for the other China Initiative case, who was following the trial to better prepare his own client’s case and did not want to be named so as not to jeopardize it, hoped would be clarified in the course of the trial. Without that clarification, he said, some defendants could argue that they had not known it was material to report talent-program participation itself.

In the end, this was a moot issue in Lieber’s trial: he had covered up his participation, and income, both to Harvard University officials and then to government investigators, and the prosecutor did not have to clarify on the record whether participation in the Thousand Talents Program did or did not have to be reported.

“My ears perked up”

On the fifth day of the trial, Mukasey, Lieber’s defense attorney, asked Department of Defense investigator Amy Mousseau a series of questions about her motivations in investigating the chemist. Was it true, Mukasey asked, that the Naval Research Laboratory informed Mousseau that Lieber had “too many Chinese students in his lab?”

“Yes,” Mousseau responded.

US Attorney James Drabick objected to the question, however, so Mukasey rephrased it. “Part of what made Dr. Lieber a person to be interviewed was that he had many Chinese students, right?”

<figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignleft"><blockquote>“The trial was about individual guilt … not a policy discussion on the China Initiative.” <cite> —Seton Hall University law professor Margaret Lewis</cite></blockquote></figure>

When Mousseau did not immediately answer, he continued, “Did it come to your attention in connection with the investigation that Dr. Lieber had many Chinese students working in his lab, yes or no?”

“Yes,” Mousseau responded.

A <a href="https://twitter.com/newskingdollar/status/1473096502469926912">courtroom tweet</a> summarizing the exchange “made my ears perked up,” said Lewis, the law scholar, because “it goes to this fundamental question of ‘To what extent does the government, and US society more generally, see connectivity to China as a reason for enhanced suspicion?’”

It displays a “bias,” she adds, that goes against what the Justice Department has long claimed: that “their actions are purely based on what people have done, their conduct, and not by ethnicity, race, nationality, national origin, or any of those factors.”

But racial bias, which is well documented within the FBI and DOJ, according to Michael German, a former FBI special agent turned whistleblower and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, is not the only type of bias that this trial reveals. Another issue that he sees is selective prosecution.

“I’m sure if the Justice Department focused the same resource on investigating corporate executives rather than academics, they could find far more people who didn’t properly report all of their income,” he says. “Tax evasion”—the subject of two of the charges that Lieber was ultimately convicted of—“is a problem, but it isn’t the problem the China Initiative was intended to solve.”

For many critics of the China Initiative, there are broader and more fundamental questions that each case—regardless of outcome—highlights.

Are “years in prison the penalty that we, as society, think is appropriate for these kinds of disclosure violations?” asks Lewis, the law scholar. The verdict also doesn’t say anything, she adds, about another concern: that the China Initiative creates a “larger threat narrative attached to people with connections to China.”

That these issues remain unresolved at the end of Lieber’s trial is to be expected, according to Lewis. “The trial was about Lieber’s individual guilt,” she says, “not a policy discussion on the China Initiative.”

There’s also the question of what message the verdict is sending, says Aryani Ong, a civil rights attorney and the cofounder of Asian American Federal Employees for Nondiscrimination, given the widespread chilling effects that the initiative has had on scientists. The China Initiative has always been “part coordination of agency efforts related to the PRC” and “part politics, or more precisely, public signaling,” she says. “I see this case being used more as a warning … that US-China interactions are under intense scrutiny than as a thwarted act of actual espionage.”

Until those policy decisions are made, the China Initiative, and its prosecution of academics, will continue—<a href="https://airtable.com/shrF74HRHYuYBTNTe/tblTlMU7ezM5RziFk">five more research integrity cases </a>are scheduled for trial next year.

Like Lieber—and like Anming Hu—all five defendants are charged with making false statements.

Do you have more information, or questions you’d like answered, about the China Initiative? Please reach out to us at tips@technologyreview.com.

Additional reporting by Brandon Kingdollar

Correction: This article initially quoted Mukasey as saying “Naval Research Laboratory informed you that Lieber had ‘too many Chinese students in his lab?’” This was a paraphrased version of his question. The article has been updated. 
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:17:"From the archives";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:88:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041337/archive-oceans-water-climate-change/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041337";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:375:"November 1960 From “Climate Control and the Oceans”: Without a clear picture of how the ocean overturns and with no accurate time scale for interaction with the atmosphere, oceanographers and meteorologists alike are at a loss to explain adequately the general mechanism of the earth’s climate. Now man, with his carbon-dioxide-producing industry, has become yet…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"The Editors";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:2720:"
<h3>November 1960</h3>

From “Climate Control and the Oceans”: Without a clear picture of how the ocean overturns and with no accurate time scale for interaction with the atmosphere, oceanographers and meteorologists alike are at a loss to explain adequately the general mechanism of the earth’s climate. Now man, with his carbon-dioxide-producing industry, has become yet another unknown modifying factor. The influence of this new and geologically unique factor may be operating in any of several directions. It could be tending toward a new ice age or could be producing another great tropical epoch like that prevailing when coal and oil deposits were laid down. The interactions are so involved that experts do not yet know how to sort them out. One thing they are sure of—this influence is at work on a scale to dwarf all previous changes man has made.

<h3>April 1969</h3>

From “A Sterile Sea”: The modification is beginning. “Man, a land organism, is influencing the chemical composition of sea water more than any of the species that live within the marine environment,” said Edward D. Goldberg, Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For example, some 3,000 tons of mercury reach the oceans each year from natural continental sources and 4,000 tons from fungicides and industrial processes; the lead input to the oceans from automobile fuel is “roughly equivalent” to that from sedimentary action; pesticides, “a recent and novel entry to the marine environment,” now are widespread, and so are radioactive species; and man has introduced two new elements: sewage outfalls and accidental pollutions from man’s commerce. Perhaps half of all these contaminants are introduced into the ocean by activities in the U.S.

<h3>August 1980</h3>

From “Coal and Climate Stoking the Fires of Research”: One thing to avoid is running around warning that the Antarctic ice cap is going to melt and flood a lot of real estate. Some scientists have suggested that this could happen quickly—a highly speculative conclusion. As J. H. Mercer of the Institute of Polar Studies at Ohio State University pointed out, the projected warming could melt enough ice to raise global sea levels some five meters, but this would likely take several centuries. More sophisticated computer models should be developed, and it would be prudent to monitor the Antarctic ice by satellite regularly. Meanwhile, there’s little merit in the “scare-the-hell-out-of-them” approach typified by one prominent geophysicist, who stood on the U.S. Capitol steps indicating where the water would come to dramatize his case for restricting the use of coal.

";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:30:"com-wordpress:feed-additions:1";a:1:{s:7:"post-id";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"1041337";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:3;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:60:"

";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:32:"Elyse Flayme and the final flood";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:88:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041334/science-fiction-short-story-climate/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041334";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:455:"From: Boreal, Emily <Emily.Boreal@samphire.house> To: Picual, Jim <Jim.Picual@samphire.house>,Joss, Lillian <Lillian.Joss@samphire.house>,Gupta, Mohan <Mohan.Gupta@samphire.house> Cc: Executive Committee <Ex.Com@samphire.house> You sent me to find the god of a dying world, and I found her, but it didn’t turn out the way you expected. I’m not sorry for what I did, but I do owe you an explanation. Those…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:11:"Robin Sloan";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:22884:"
<div class="wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
From: Boreal, Emily <Emily.Boreal@samphire.house>

To: Picual, Jim <Jim.Picual@samphire.house>, Joss, Lillian <Lillian.Joss@samphire.house>, Gupta, Mohan <Mohan.Gupta@samphire.house>

Cc: Executive Committee <Ex.Com@samphire.house>
</div></div>

You sent me to find the god of a dying world, and I found her, but it didn’t turn out the way you expected. I’m not sorry for what I did, but I do owe you an explanation.

Those of you reading this know very well the problem we faced, but I assume this message will be forwarded to at least one board member, so I’ll go over the basics.

Molly Khan had written six books in as many years, starting with Elyse Flayme and the Ice Queen, surprise best seller, first in the series that became the heir—at last—to Potter. Even better, this series meant something, because the crisis that faced Molly’s mythic world of Arrenia was a clear parable for climate change. The books were urgent and serious, but also fun and charming and, as Molly’s characters grew up, not a little bit sexy. They were broccoli fried in bacon fat.

Six years, six books, and a glossy TV adaptation running in lockstep: so far, so profitable. But Molly Khan’s agent was good. The books were contracted one at a time rather than all at once, so with each success, her leverage increased. Furthermore, the TV show was not permitted to proceed without a book to guide it: there would be no Game of Thrones–ing ahead of the author’s imagination. Molly Khan’s agent was really good.

Molly’s seventh book would conclude the series. There we were, proud publishers, along with our counterparts at the streaming service: perched, poised, ready to proceed into the final stage of this billion-dollar project.

But the Green Tolkien did not submit her seventh manuscript. The due date passed, and Molly was silent. We knew the book’s title: Elyse Flayme and the Final Flood. Another month passed. That’s all we knew. Three more months. The actress who played Elyse was being pursued for a Star Wars movie. Everything stood frozen, waiting on the author, her imagination, her drowning world, its fate.

She would not reply to emails; would not answer the phone. She was holed up in her house in Bodega Bay, the one she bought with the money from the first Elyse Flayme book and never left. She was, apparently, staring at the ocean.

So you sent me to California.

My mission was simple: determine the cause of Molly’s delay and identify what was needed to finish the book. I was authorized to offer, as enticement, an additional 2% of total back-end across all media, which could easily amount to $20 million. On the plane to San Francisco, I imagined myself carrying a giant check. In the rental car up the coast, I imagined myself hauling a sack of gold bars.

You all warned me about Bodega Bay. I’d never been to California at all, so of course in my imagination it was Eden, warm and woozy and comfortable. This stretch of coast—cold to start and colder as I crept north, with the cliffs calving away into the black water and the geological fault line totally, hilariously apparent—this was a world ending, literally ending, in slow motion.

I found Molly’s house out on the edge of town, perched on a particularly ragged and desperate cliff. The house wasn’t large, but its design was very modern, a slanted box built from wood that might once have been dark but had long since been blasted pale by the salt wind.

We had met in person only once before but had corresponded at length, mostly in the comments attached to the manuscript for Elyse Flayme in the Ocean Beyond Oceans, her most recent book, now lingering on shelves. Molly had included my name in the acknowledgments: “My thanks also to Emily Boreal, who gets it.” This had come as a complete surprise, and even now, when I think of it, my face gets hot.

Molly answered the door in sweatpants.

“Of course it’s you,” she said. “Smart of them.”

I told her I was just here to help, if I could.

Molly nodded. “Fine. Let’s see if you can.”

On the flight, I wondered if Molly had suffered some kind of breakdown; the writer’s agony and ecstasy that, if we’re being honest, editors find sort of delicious. Encountering her, I had the sense not of a bulwark broken, but one currently loaded down almost unimaginably. Molly Khan was short and slender, swallowed up by her sweats; following her into the house, I was conscious of all the money, all the expectations, all the emotions balanced on that little body as if it were a fulcrum.

There were millions of readers, yes. Millions of viewers, sure. But the thing you really had to contend with was the cosplayers. Elyse Flayme had become a central symbol of the climate justice movement; at every rally, on the steps of every capitol, you found dozens of Elyses, and even more Osric Worldenders, partly because his cold wrath resonated powerfully and partly because his costume called for very short shorts. Molly had achieved the thing that had eluded a thousand earnest climate journalists; she had surpassed even the girl from Sweden. How? By transcribing, without flinching, the fears of a generation. They trusted her. Molly’s readers wrote steamy fan fiction and they marched on their centers of government.

It was those kids who now had Molly Khan tied into a knot.

“I can’t finish it,” she said simply. “I’ve considered every possibility.” She waved at a little desk that sat facing the ocean; a tower block of notebooks rose on its surface. “Arrenia can’t be ruined, because I can’t say, yeah, sorry, we’re doomed. No way. But it can’t be saved, either, because … well, it can’t. You know the story.”

I knew it very well. In Arrenia, the elves who lived on the coast of the Ghost Ocean had, through their misuse of magic, wrecked the climates, plural: meteorological and spiritual. The ocean was rising and the stars were raining down curses. To avert calamity, the elves would have to give up magic—immediately, decisively, forever.

The real achievement of the books was that they made this seem appropriately difficult. Magic was fucking awesome! No wonder the elves didn’t want to give it up. No wonder they might rather drown. In her fiction, Molly dramatized all the paradoxes. She danced inside the grinding gears of inevitability. There were revenant sharks in the Ghost Ocean. You could ride them.

“But aren’t the books actually about that tension?” I parried.

Molly looked at me witheringly. “Yes, but I still need an ending.”

I searched. “The ending could be about … not knowing …”

“Oh, Emily, yes! Very literary. I’ll end the series with Arrenia’s fate still hanging in the balance. I’ll say: That’s the point! We don’t know the future, do we? Meanwhile, I’ll haul my royalties away, go enjoy my life, because I’m part of the last generation for whom that’s even possible.”

She paused. I was already dead.

“Wonderful idea.”

I started reading Elyse Flayme in high school and continued through college. I was one of them, the millions who mothed to this author because she saw the climate nightmare clearly; because she stood beside us in the vise grip of energy and time. But we had put off the reckoning, all of us, author and readers alike. If a happy ending was impossible, but we refused to revel in doom … what did that leave?

Molly Khan poured wine and led me to the glassed-in balcony that projected off the back of the house. We talked while the sun dipped into the real ghost ocean. I asked her what it had been like, wrestling with the book. She told me about her notes, her experiments. Enough to fill five finales, she said. All abandoned.

I didn’t push her; didn’t even mention the offer I’d been authorized to make until halfway through the second bottle of wine.

“You could donate the money to climate activists,” I said lamely.

Molly shot me an acid look. “You know what I think about that kind of laundering.”

I did; everyone did. Elyse Flayme’s best friend Meritxell was always coming up with ways in which they could keep using magic and delay Arrenia’s destruction, and Elyse was always saying, We have to choose what matters to us, Mer.

We talked into the night. Mostly, I listened. I came to understand that Molly Khan had been cooped up in that house by herself for way too long. Her false starts came spilling out. The horizon faded to buzzing black as she ticked through the various versions she’d tried and rejected. She went digging in the notebooks for half-remembered lines. The truth is, they all sounded great to me, but Molly wasn’t satisfied.

All along, a certainty was growing in my mind.

Molly Khan emptied the second bottle of wine, and when I probed her about Elyse Flayme—asked what Elyse had kept hidden; what this avatar was capable of, in the end—she became animated. She had been rooting in the kitchen for more to drink, but this question brought her back out onto the balcony: she said one thing, then another, and another, all while I cheered her on. I was the only witness: there, in the dark above the ocean, out of nothing, came something: an ending.

Soon after that, Molly sat at her desk and started to type what she’d just explained. I collapsed on the bed in her little guest room. My last thought before sleep was that I had succeeded in my mission: unblocked the writer, secured the future of the franchise. Maybe I deserved a commission … just a tiny cut of that $20 million.

In the morning, I found Molly in the same place exactly. She had not slept. A low-slung district of coffee mugs had joined the tower block of notebooks on her desk. Her keyboard clattered like a subway car; she barreled down the track, not stopping at any of the stations. She was absolutely focused; no part of her moved except her fingers, careening toward their destination. Is this how she had written all the books?

I padded into the kitchen, afraid to disturb her because breaking the spell would be costly, and because I was afraid she would turn around and her eyes would be like Osric Worldender’s, shadowed pits crackling with black lightning.

I rustled in the refrigerator, found yogurt, and tapped out an update email, cc-ing most of the people now receiving this. As you might recall, I wrote that things were going well; that Molly appreciated our generosity; that she seemed very energized! This was all true. But I might also have added: The money was an insult; she had not slept; I was afraid to speak to her.

I fiddled with my phone while the clacking of the keys continued. While I waited, a few of you sent enthusiastic replies: Way to go! Yeah, Emily, great news! I guess you really do “get it”!

The clacking slowed, became a stately chug. The chug broke down into silence. Molly lifted her head and peeled herself away from her laptop. She looked out across the ocean and, from my perspective, was framed against it: a ragged silhouette, baggy sweatshirt and wild hair conspiring to make her into a witchy apparition.

In another world, she would have rolled her shoulders, put her head down, and finished the book. She would have committed to the page these events, which she had imagined and described to me the night before:

Elyse Flayme would have climbed the great tower at the center of Svanta City, using all the powers she’d accrued over the past six books to knock down the obstacles in her path, absolutely shredding the elvish security forces. Osric Worldender would have been there at her side, throwing black lightning, exultant. At the tower’s top, she would have found the Ghostburn Council, the ones who profited most from the use of magic. Among them would be Meritxell, her old friend, who had been catapulted into power in book five and aimed to transform the council from within. Meritxell, who—

Elyse Flayme would have killed them all. She would have abrogated all her values, crossed all the lines established in the previous six books. She would have done precisely the thing her foe from the first book, Mauna the Ice Queen, had stood poised to do: the massacre young Elyse had prevented, in an impassioned speech that kids still quoted on the hand-written signs they carried to rallies at capitols. THEY ARE ABOVE ALL AFRAID, one sign might read. WE WILL SAVE THEM WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT, might read another.

There would be no speeches in this final scene, just blue fire and black lightning and, in the space that death opened, a glimmer of hope.

In another world, that’s what Molly wrote, Final_Flood_v19_Final_ReallyFinal.docx. In this one, she—I don’t know how else to say it: she crumbled. I watched it happen, like a cliff sliding into the ocean. Exactly that heavy. Exactly that final.

She put her head down on the desk, and it stayed there. I wondered if she was crying. I wondered what I should do if she was crying. Then she stood, screamed once, and stalked out of the room.

In that moment, I was terrified. Would I have to soothe her? Was that my mission? I am not a soother. I do not soothe. I annotate. I stood frozen in the kitchen and strongly considered flight, but in a pulse of character development worthy of Elyse herself, I bested my chickenshit heart and hustled to pursue Molly Khan, who had exited not only the room but the house.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="1501" height="1514" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_fiction-dendritictrees2.jpg?w=1501" alt="abstract ink illustration" class="wp-image-1041765" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_fiction-dendritictrees2.jpg 1501w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_fiction-dendritictrees2.jpg?resize=150,150 150w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_fiction-dendritictrees2.jpg?resize=297,300 297w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_fiction-dendritictrees2.jpg?resize=768,775 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1501px) 100vw, 1501px" /><div class="image-credit">STEPHANIE ARNETT</div>
</figure>

Outside, thick fog had settled along the coast, and I could not locate any witchlike apparitions. I scrambled around, checked the front of the house, looked up and down the road, raked the coast with my eyes. Nothing.

Then I very gingerly approached the cliff, where I spotted a figure pacing the beach below. I hustled down switchbacking stairs to find Molly circling the sand, staring into the gray. The muscles across her face were tight. In her hair, I saw crumbs, along with a stalk of some hardy coastal grass. The wind whipped off the water, stung my eyes, extracted tears. There were tears in Molly’s eyes, too.

“IT DIDN’T WORK,” she shouted above the wind. “This is what happens. Like a loop, this whole year. I think I have an ending, and I get so excited, but I realize I can’t publish it, because it’s not what they deserve. THEY’RE BEYOND ME, EMILY! I can’t write what they deserve!”

If I had found Molly’s crumpled body on the beach, rather than her scowling face, I wouldn’t have been surprised; and it was that realization that shook me into action.

Because, as I said before, a certainty had been growing in my mind. The idea occurred to me first on the plane, but I had smothered it. It reappeared on the drive, but again, I pushed it aside, because I understood how dangerous it was. Now, though, I saw how deeply Molly Khan was suffering, and I saw—as she did—that she would never complete this book in the way she, or any of us, had planned.

What had Ambassador Agora said to Elyse Flayme in book three? “We cannot undo these curses with the same kind of magic that created them.”

I was certain what Molly Khan had to do, so I told her.

She looked at me, there on the beach, her eyes narrow. She asked for clarification: “Can I …?”

She was the god of a dying world. Of course she could.

We climbed up to the house, where Molly prepared a proper breakfast. For the first time, I detected a lightness in her. Ever since I’d arrived—and for the whole year prior—her brain had been whirring, searching, grasping. Failing. Now she allowed it to rest. She gave me a plate of eggs, perfect, then dialed her great and terrible agent. When Molly explained my idea, her agent’s reply shook the phone speaker: “THAT IS ABSOLUTELY UNHINGED. I LOVE IT. I MEAN, I HATE IT. BUT I LOVE IT!”

I presume you know what her agent loved and hated, because you’ve read Molly’s announcement, and perhaps some of the reactions to it, but just in case—and for the board member, hello—I’ll take this opportunity to make it perfectly clear:

Molly Khan will not submit her seventh book, but the series will not go unfinished.

Remember: Molly Khan retains all rights to Elyse Flayme and her world, and those rights include the power to commit them to the public domain, which she has now done.

Now anyone can write their own ending—and not only in the shadowy confines of fan fiction, but in the scrum of the market. They can publish it, sell it, get it made into a movie. In a stroke, Molly Khan has given up her control over Elyse Flayme. She has turned down the sack of gold bars I carried, and all the giant checks that might have followed, and given it all to … anyone who wants it?

We cannot undo these curses with the same kind of magic that created them.

Don’t worry: you will not be denied your final fountain of money. The public domain, after all, is open to you, too! You can commission a conclusion from one of Molly’s peers, or go hunting for the best one that bubbles up from the ferment of the fans. Every other publisher can do the same, though, so you’d better hurry.

The streaming service will now have total creative freedom, and for them it will be terrifying. Which ending will they choose? How will they justify it? They know the fans; they fear them; and they don’t have Molly to protect them anymore. This makes me very happy.

Here’s the last trick: Molly will write her own ending. It will be something from one of her notebooks; there’s so much to choose from. She’ll publish it just as she did in the very beginning, her fan-fiction days, using a pseudonym. As everyone pores over the ocean of alternatives, they’ll have to ask themselves: Is this one hers? Does it matter?

When I left Molly in Bodega Bay, she was back at her desk, but it felt different. There was no demonic clacking. She typed in normal-person bursts, just a bit at a time, before standing to circle the room. The desperate energy had dissipated. She browsed her shelves, plucked books to consult. When I left, she was lying on the couch, paging through Candide, legs kicked up in the air. She wore real pants. The Green Tolkien is gone, banished, thrown from that cliff. She is again—will now remain—Molly Khan.

Did we really believe we could do any good, buying and selling this climate fiction inside the same system that’s boiling the world? I don’t excuse myself. “Thanks also to Emily Boreal, who gets it,” Molly wrote—but I didn’t. I took a plane to reach her. I drove a car up the coast. In the end, I wanted Elyse Flayme to kill them, the stupid greedy ones, wanted the thrill of blood on the page—and then a safe flight home.

I’m on a train right now, Oakland to Chicago. You’ve probably figured it out: this message is my resignation. Thank you for sending me to Molly, so I could help her open this door, which I will now walk through. I have my own vision for the end of Arrenia. It’s darker than you might imagine. I came of age with Elyse Flayme, and now I have something I want to say through her. With her. I’ll send you my manuscript when it’s ready; maybe it will be the one you publish. Molly introduced me to her agent, who is a demon queen.

In the meantime, don’t be afraid. If you ever truly believed in Molly’s millions of readers—not just as consumers, but as collaborators, co-creators—then believe in them now.

She titled the book before she knew what it would become. The Final Flood is not one story you can control; it’s a thousand you cannot. Control is what got us here! I met Elyse Flayme in a big chain bookstore, and for that, I’m grateful. But now we have to leave it behind. We cannot undo these curses with the same kind of magic … you get it.

I’ve been on this train for two days; it’s just now passing through Denver. I’m searching for “Elyse Flayme” on all the big online bookstores, and they’re already appearing, all the different conclusions, self-published, totally legal, climbing the sales ranks together: Elyse Flayme and the Burning Tower; and the Last Spell; and the Moon’s Promise; and the New Magic; and the Absolutely Shortest Shorts.

How did they write these stories so fast? There can only be one explanation: they were writing them already.

Robin Sloan is the New York Times best-selling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:30:"com-wordpress:feed-additions:1";a:1:{s:7:"post-id";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"1041334";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:4;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:60:"

";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:62:"Another tool in the fight against climate change: storytelling";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:80:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041331/climate-change-storytelling/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041331";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:339:"It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful forms of climate action is to listen deeply to people already affected by the crisis. To ensure that solutions actually help communities…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Devi Lockwood";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14030:"
It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful forms of climate action is to listen deeply to people already affected by the crisis. To ensure that solutions actually help communities most at risk, we must first hear their stories.

Climate change is an environmental justice issue. The people most harmed by the problem are often those least at fault. Solutions that ignore people already living with the impacts of climate change—most of whom live in the Global South—risk perpetuating the same systemic inequality that delivered this mess to their doorsteps in the first place.

There is a lot of shouting about climate change, especially in North America and Europe. This makes it easy for the rest of the world to fall into a kind of silence—for Westerners to assume that they have nothing to add and should let the so-called “experts” speak. But we allneed to be talking about climate change and amplifying the voices of those suffering the most.

Climate science is crucial, but by contextualizing that science with the stories of people actively experiencing climate change, we can begin to think more creatively about technological solutions.

This needs to happen not only at major international gatherings like COP26, but also in an everyday way. In any powerful rooms where decisions are made, there should be people who can speak firsthand about the climate crisis. Storytelling is an intervention into climate silence, an invitation to use the ancient human technology of connecting through language and narrative to counteract inaction. It is a way to get often powerless voices into powerful rooms.

That’s what I attempted to do by documenting stories of people already experiencing the effects of a climate in crisis.

In 2013, I was living in Boston during the marathon bombing. The city was put on lockdown, and when it lifted, all I wanted was to go outside: to walk and breathe and hear the sounds of other people. I needed to connect, to remind myself that not everyone is murderous. In a fit of inspiration, I cut open a broccoli box and wrote “Open call for stories” in Sharpie.

I wore the cardboard sign around my neck. People mostly stared. But some approached me. Once I started listening to strangers, I didn’t want to stop.

That summer, I rode my bicycle down the Mississippi River on a mission to listen to any stories that people had to share. I brought the sign with me. One story was so sticky that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months, and it ultimately set me off on a trip around the world.

<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">“We fight for the protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.” </blockquote>

I met 57-year-old Franny Connetti 80 miles south of New Orleans, when I stopped in front of her office to check the air in my tires; she invited me in to get out of the afternoon sun. Franny shared her lunch of fried shrimp with me. Between bites she told me how Hurricane Isaac had washed away her home and her neighborhood in 2012.

Despite that tragedy, she and her husband moved back to their plot of land, in a mobile home, just a few months after the storm.

“We fight for the protection of our levees. We fight for our marsh every time we have a hurricane,” she told me. “I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”

Twenty miles ahead, I could see where the ocean lapped over the road at high tide. “Water on Road,” an orange sign read. Locals jokingly refer to the endpoint of Louisiana State Highway 23 as “The End of the World.” Imagining the road I had been biking underwater was chilling.

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="2000" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-DSC01985_3.jpg?w=3000" alt="Devi with sign" class="wp-image-1041874" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-DSC01985_3.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-DSC01985_3.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-DSC01985_3.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-DSC01985_3.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-DSC01985_3.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /><figcaption>The author at Monasavu Dam in Fiji in 2014.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">DEVI LOCKWOOD</div>
</figure>

Here was one front line of climate change, one story. What would it mean, I wondered, to put this in dialogue with stories from other parts of the world—from other front lines with localized impacts that were experienced through water? My goal became to listen to and amplify those stories.

Water is how most of the world will experience climate change. It’s not a human construct, like a degree Celsius. It’s something we acutely see and feel. When there’s not enough water, crops die, fires rage, and people thirst. When there’s too much, water becomes a destructive force, washing away homes and businesses and lives. It’s almost always easier to talk about water than to talk about climate change. But the two are deeply intertwined.

I also set out to address another problem: the language we use to discuss climate change is often abstract and inaccessible. We hear about feet of sea-level rise or parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what does this really mean for people’s everyday lives? I thought storytelling might bridge this divide.

One of the first stops on my journey was Tuvalu, a low-lying coral atoll nation in the South Pacific, 585 miles south of the equator. Home to around 10,000 people, Tuvalu is on track to become uninhabitable in my lifetime.

In 2014 Tauala Katea, a meteorologist, opened his computer to show me an image of a recent flood on one island. Seawater had bubbled up under the ground near where we were sitting. “This is what climate change looks like,” he said.

“In 2000, Tuvaluans living in the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he said. “The root crops seemed rotten, and the size was getting smaller and smaller.” Taro and pulaka, two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine, are grown in pits dug underground.

Tauala and his team traveled to the outer islands to take soil samples. The culprit was saltwater intrusion linked to sea-level rise. The seas have been rising four millimeters per year since measurements began in the early 1990s. While that might sound like a small amount, this change has a dramatic impact on Tuvaluans’ access to drinking water. The highest point is only 13 feet above sea level.

A lot has changed in Tuvalu as a result. The freshwater lens, a layer of groundwater that floats above denser seawater, has become salty and <a href="http://www.pacificwater.org/pages.cfm/country-information/tuvalu.html">contaminated</a>. Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are now a thing of the past. Each home now has a water tank attached to a corrugated-iron roof by a gutter. All the water for washing, cooking, and drinking now comes from the rain. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and used to wash clothes and dishes, as well as for bathing. The wells have been repurposed as trash heaps.

At times, families have to make tough decisions about how to allocate water. Angelina, a mother of three, told me that during a drought  a few years ago, her middle daughter, Siulai, was only a few months old. She, her husband, and their oldest daughter could swim in the sea to wash themselves and their clothes. “We only saved water to drink and cook,” she said. But her newborn’s skin was too delicate to bathe in the ocean. The salt water would give her a horrible rash. That meant Angelina had to decide between having water to drink and to bathe her child.

The stories I heard about water and climate change in Tuvalu reflected a sharp division along generational lines. Tuvaluans my age—like Angelina—don’t see their future on the islands and are applying for visas to live in New Zealand. Older Tuvaluans see climate change as an act of God and told me they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else; they didn’t want to leave the bones of their ancestors, which were buried in their front yards. Some things just cannot be moved.

Organizations like <a href="https://www.adaptation-undp.org/explore/polynesia/tuvalu">the United Nations Development Programme</a> are working to address climate change in Tuvalu by building seawalls and community water tanks. Ultimately these adaptations seem to be prolonging the inevitable. It is likely that within my lifetime, many Tuvaluans will be forced to call somewhere else home.

Tuvalu shows how climate change exacerbates both food and water insecurity—and how that insecurity drives migration. I saw this in many other places. Mess with the amount of water available in one location, and people will move.

In Thailand I met a modern dancer named Sun who moved to Bangkok from the rural north. He relocated to the city in part to practice his art, but also to take refuge from unpredictable rain patterns. Farming in Thailand is governed by the seasonal monsoons, which dump rain, fill river basins, and irrigate crops from roughly May to September. Or at least they used to. When we spoke in late May 2016, it was dry in Thailand. The rains were delayed. Water levels in the country’s biggest dams plummeted to less than 10% of their capacity—the worst drought in two decades.

“Right now it’s supposed to be the beginning of the rainy season, but there is no rain,” Sun told me. “How can I say it? I think the balance of the weather is changing. Some parts have a lot of rain, but some parts have none.” He leaned back in his chair, moving his hands like a fulcrum scale to express the imbalance. “That is the problem. The people who used to be farmers have to come to Bangkok because they want money and they want work,” he said. “There is no more work because of the weather.”

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" width="3000" height="2000" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-IMG_7820.jpg?w=3000" alt="family under sign in Nunavut" class="wp-image-1041875" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-IMG_7820.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-IMG_7820.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-IMG_7820.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-IMG_7820.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/JF22_reviews-IMG_7820.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /><figcaption>A family celebrates Nunavut Day near the waterfront in Igloolik, Nunavut, in 2018.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">DEVI LOCKWOOD</div>
</figure>

Migration to the city, in other words, is hastened by the rain. Any tech-driven climate solutions that fail to address climate migration—so central to the personal experience of Sun and many others in his generation around the world—will be at best incomplete, and at worst potentially dangerous. Solutions that address only one region, for example, could exacerbate migration pressures in another.

I heard stories about climate-driven food and water insecurity in the Arctic, too. Igloolik, Nunavut, 1,400 miles south of the North Pole, is a community of 1,700 people. Marie Airut, a 71-year-old elder, lives by the water. We spoke in her living room over cups of black tea.

“My husband died recently,” she told me. But when he was alive, they went hunting together in every season; it was their main source of food. “I’m not going to tell you what I don’t know. I’m going to tell you only the things that I have seen,” she said. In the 1970s and ’80s, the seal holes would open in late June, an ideal time for hunting baby seals. “But now if I try to go out hunting at the end of June, the holes are very big and the ice is really thin,” Marie told me. “The ice is melting too fast. It doesn’t melt from the top; it melts from the bottom.”

When the water is warmer, animals change their movement. Igloolik has always been known for its walrus hunting. But in recent years, hunters have had trouble reaching the animals. “I don’t think I can reach them anymore, unless you have 70 gallons of gas. They are that far now, because the ice is melting so fast,” Marie said. “It used to take us half a day to find walrus in the summer, but now if I go out with my boys, it would probably take us two days to get some walrus meat for the winter.”

Marie and her family used to make fermented walrus every year, “but this year I told my sons we’re not going walrus hunting,” she said. “They are too far.”

Devi Lockwood is the Ideas editor at Rest of World and the author of <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/1-001-Voices-on-Climate-Change/Devi-Lockwood/9781982146719">1,001 Voices on Climate Change</a>.

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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:53:"The US exports too much of its most valuable resource";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:88:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041328/export-droughts-water-food-clothing/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041328";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:334:"The Sulphur Springs Valley is a windswept desert in southeastern Arizona, bounded on three sides by forest-topped mountain ranges known as the sky islands. It can take an hour or more to drive between inhabited places in the valley, but the community there is tight-knit—many of the farmers went to the same high school (as…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:8:"Alok Jha";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:9177:"
The Sulphur Springs Valley is a windswept desert in southeastern Arizona, bounded on three sides by forest-topped mountain ranges known as the sky islands. It can take an hour or more to drive between inhabited places in the valley, but the community there is tight-knit—many of the farmers went to the same high school (as did their grandparents), and today they graze their cattle on the plains and grow corn, soybeans, and grapes.

All of this relies on an aquifer underneath the valley. This layer of rock and soil accumulated its moisture over tens of thousands of years—caught during the monsoon season, or as snow on the nearby mountaintop melted. For generations, farmers—and the many others who have migrated across the country to make this epic landscape their home—have greened their desert by digging wells a few hundred feet into the ground and tapping the groundwater below.

In the past decade, however, these wells have started to run dry. Travel beyond the homesteads and family-run farms you’ll see why—thousands of acres of neatly ordered trees bearing pecans and pistachios, vast fields of alfalfa and corn, huge dairy herds, and rows of greenhouses growing tomatoes cover the once-barren desert. This enormous carpet of industrial agriculture, with food grown for export to places around the world, takes deep wells to sustain. For every 100 acres or so, a corporate farm owner will dig a well as deep as 2,000 feet and pull up water from the ancient aquifer at up to 2,000 gallons per second, often 24 hours a day. The drilling rigs often resemble those used for oil.

There are almost no regulations governing the extraction of groundwater in Arizona. As long as the farms pay a permitting fee, they can pump as much as they like.

Added to the over-extraction of water from the aquifer, Arizona (along with the American Southwest in general) is now experiencing one of the worst droughts in hundreds of years, likely driven by global warming. As the region becomes hotter and drier, necessitating more extraction from the aquifer, less water trickles in from monsoons or snowmelt to replenish it.

<h3>What we don’t getabout the water cycle</h3>

In school we teach children about the water cycle, in which water moves from the oceans to the sky to the land to freshwater basins and eventually back to oceans. In this telling, the water we use never really disappears.

But these tales gloss over something important: the water cycle can take decades or hundreds of years to complete a turn. Much of the fresh water we use every day comes from groundwater, which can take hundreds or thousands of years to accumulate. If we use water faster than it can be replenished, or pollute it and dump it into the seas faster than the natural water cycle can clean it, the resource will eventually run out.

If you instead think of water as a finite material being used up in much the same way as oil or gas, you quickly start to see its presence in every part of the economy. More than 70% of the water we use is put into food production, for example. But water is also used to make everything from T-shirts to cars to computer chips.

<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">If they can’t find enough water within their own borders, the thinking goes, why not just import it (embedded in food) from somewhere else?</blockquote>

Like its cousin the carbon footprint, a water footprint can be a useful shortcut to understanding a product’s environmental impact—or your own. The water footprint of a cup of coffee is around 140 liters, for example. It takes about 15,000 liters to grow a kilogram of beef. A couple of slices of bread can rack up 100 liters. A kilogram of cotton (a pair of jeans and a shirt, say) can have a footprint of anything from 10,000 liters to more than 22,000 liters, depending on where it was grown.

This means that countries and companies, whenever they trade goods, are in effect moving massive amounts of water across borders. But because the water footprint of food or clothes or anything else is never acknowledged in this trade, the movement of water itself cannot be properly regulated.

Partly for this reason, richer countries such as Saudi Arabia and China have begun buying up land in other countries to compensate for their own lack of fresh water. If they can’t find enough water within their own borders, the thinking goes, why not just import it (embedded in food) from somewhere else? The problem is that the places they’ve been shopping are themselves water-stressed, including countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Sulphur Springs Valley in southwest Arizona.

Why Arizona? Because the land is cheap and well connected to airports, and because water-use regulations are almost nonexistent.

The United States is, in fact, the largest exporter of water on earth, according to Robert Glennon, a law professor at the University of Arizona and one of the country’s leading experts on water policy. Glennon calculated that during a recent severe drought, farmers in the American West used more than a hundred billion gallons of water to grow alfalfa that was then shipped mostly to China.

Across the US, groundwater is regulated by the “reasonable use” doctrine, which Glennon dismisses as “an oxymoron of the first order.” That policy permits “limitless use of the water so long as it’s for a reasonable purpose,” he says, “ and everything is reasonable … It’s just a recipe for exploitive use of the resources.”

<h3>Faster than you think</h3>

You might expect this to be a major international priority, but it’s not.

Maggie White, a senior manager of international policy at the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and a longtime water advocate, says that even though water is everywhere and is needed for everything, it has never been prioritized in regulations because it doesn’t have its own formal lobbying voice. The water needs of powerful industries like agriculture and energy get prioritized over the management of global water supplies.

White told me about the pushback she faced while trying to get the water crisis mentioned in the official texts of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. The sticking point for many negotiators was that water resources were seen as a local or national issue. As soon as they were brought into a multilateral agreement, they were perceived to rub up against sovereignty issues. Water has always been a source of contention between countries, so some might feel that there’s good reason to keep water out of the conversation—but whatever the reason, any discussion of water was edged aside.

To see just how global the impending crisis is, you might head into space. Since it was launched in 2002, NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission has measured how water moves around the world. It uses two satellites, each the size of a car, sweeping over the surface of the planet and responding to gravitational tugs from the masses below. When the two satellites move over a snowstorm or floods, the gravitational attraction of that extra water pulls the satellites closer to the surface. Over dry areas the satellites are less affected. By keeping track of the ups and downs of the satellites, scientists can map out regions of the world that are gaining or losing water over time.

Scientists already knew the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica were melting, but GRACE showed how much. Since 2002, Greenland has shed around 280 billion metric tons of ice annually, causing global sea level to rise by 0.8 millimeters per year. The Antarctic lost around 150 billion metric tons of ice per year in the same period. The glaciers of the Tibetan plateau and in Alaska and western Canada have retreated as well. GRACE also revealed that more than half of the world’s major aquifers were being depleted, including those in California’s Central Valley, the northwest Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, India, Pakistan, and the northern China plain.

The two key causes: human overuse of groundwater supplies, and the extreme droughts brought on by climate change. The climate crisis and the water crisis are therefore interlocked. GRACE showed that human fingerprints on the freshwater landscape are the dominant force changing patterns of water availability around the world, and that the threats to water security are coming faster than you think.

The locals whose families have lived in the Sulphur Springs Valley of Arizona for generations have already figured this out. With the above-ground water sources drying up, and with the aquifer being depleted, many of them have had little choice but to leave their homes and farms behind.

Alok Jha is science correspondent at The Economist in London and author of The Water Book (Headline, 2015).
";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:30:"com-wordpress:feed-additions:1";a:1:{s:7:"post-id";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7:"1041328";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}}}i:6;a:6:{s:4:"data";s:60:"

";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:40:"Our water infrastructure needs to change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:105:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041326/water-infrastructure-climate-change-drought-flooding/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041326";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:320:"In the world of water, 2021 was yet another year for the record books. Parts of Western Europe reeled from deadly floods that sent rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 to 1,000 years. Destructive floods hit central China as well, displacing more than a quarter of a million people from their homes. Meanwhile,…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Sandra Postel";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7789:"
In the world of water, 2021 was yet another year for the record books. Parts of Western Europe reeled from deadly floods that sent rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 to 1,000 years. Destructive floods hit central China as well, displacing more than a quarter of a million people from their homes. Meanwhile, a large swath of the southwestern United States remained locked in a megadrought—the second-driest 20-year period in 1,200 years.

One might think that the impressive water engineering installed in the US and elsewhere over the last century would safeguard society from such catastrophic events. Globally, some 60,000 large dams now capture and store water, allowing engineers to turn rivers on and off like plumbing works. Each year, the world’s cities collectively import the equivalent of 10 Colorado Rivers through vast networks of pipelines and canals. And thousands of miles of artificial levees protect cities and farms from flooding rivers.

In many ways, it’s hard to imagine our world of nearly 8 billion people and $85 trillion in annual goods and services without this water engineering. Cairo, Phoenix, and other large desert cities could never have grown to their present sizes. California’s sunny Central Valley would not have become such an abundant producer of vegetables, fruits, and nuts.

Yet when it comes to water, the past is no longer a good guide for the future. The heating of the planet is fundamentally altering the water cycle, and most of the world is unprepared for the consequences.

One of the most alarming wake-up calls came in 2018, when the city of Cape Town, South Africa, was nearly forced to shut off the drinking water taps of 4 million residents. Three consecutive years of drought had dried up its reservoirs. City officials began publicly announcing “Day Zero”—the date water would no longer flow to household faucets.

<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large">Tempting as it might be, the solution is not to further bend nature to our will by building bigger, higher, and longer versions of water-engineering infrastructure.</blockquote>

Conservation measures helped Cape Town push Day Zero further out—and then, luckily, the rains returned. But no city wants to rely on luck to bail it out of disaster. Scientists later determined that climate change had made Cape Town’s extreme drought five to six times more likely.

Droughts, floods, and other climate-related disasters come with big price tags. In 2017, three large hurricanes in the US were the primary cause of a record $306 billion in damages, more than six times the yearly average since 1980. While 2017 appears to be an outlier, climate scientists expect annual disaster costs of that magnitude to be common by the end of the century.

Tempting as it might be, the solution is not to further bend nature to our will by building bigger, higher, and longer versions of water-engineering infrastructure. It is to work more with natural processes, rather than against them, and to repair the water cycle, rather than continue to break it. Along with water-saving measures, such approaches can create more resilient water systems. They can also help solve our interconnected water, climate, and biodiversity crises simultaneously and cost-effectively.

As floods worsen, for example, instead of raising the height of levees—which often intensifies flooding downstream—we can consider ways to strategically reconnect rivers to their natural floodplains. In this way, we can mitigate floods, capture more carbon, recharge groundwater, and build critical habitat for fish, birds, and wildlife.

The Netherlands, a country renowned for its advanced water engineering, avoided major damage from the historic floods in July 2021 thanks to its new approach to flood control, which gives rivers room to spread out during flood events. The Maas River, which flows in from Belgium (where it is called the Meuse), broke its 1993 high-flow record last July, but it caused less damage than that earlier flood. One reason was a recently completed project that diverted floodwaters into a 1,300-acre wetland, which held the water and lowered parts of the raging Maas by more than a foot. The wetland also sequesters carbon and doubles as a nature preserve, offering valuable climate and wildlife benefits as well as recreation opportunities. Through its “Room for the River” program, the Dutch are implementing these nature-based flood control projects at 30 locations around the country.

Napa County, California, took a similar approach when redesigning its flood-control system for the Napa River. In the early 1900s, engineers straightened and deepened the Napa’s channel and filled in its wetlands and tidal marshes. After the area endured 11 serious floods between 1962 and 1997, local officials asked the US Army Corps of Engineers to collaborate on a “living river” strategy that would reconnect the Napa with its historical floodplain, move homes and businesses out of harm’s way, revitalize wetlands and marshlands, and construct levees and bypass channels in strategic locations. Residents voted to increase their local sales tax by half a cent to pay their share of the $366 million effort. In addition to gaining new trails for birding and hiking, the city of Napa has benefited from more than $1 billion in private investment that revitalized the downtown.

In an effort to scale nature-based systems, the US Congress directed the US Army Corps of Engineers in 2020 to consider them on equal footing with more conventional infrastructure. A significant shift in approach, however, will likely require changes in Corps rules and procedures, as well as additional funding.

Agricultural practices that rebuild soil health offer another strategy. Globally, soils can hold eight times as much water as all the world’s rivers combined, but we rarely think of soils as a water reservoir. Scientists have found that boosting organic matter in the soil by one percentage point can increase the soil’s water-holding capacity by up to 18,000 gallons per acre, creating resilience to both intense rains and dry spells.

This means farmland practices that regenerate soils, such as the planting of cover crops during the off-season, can not only boost yields and lower costs but improve water management and mitigate climate change. As an added bonus, cover crops reduce farm runoff, which means less nitrogen and phosphorus polluting rivers, streams, and aquifers. That, in turn, means fewer of the toxic algal blooms that threaten drinking water, coastal fisheries, and inland lakes around the world.

New policies and incentives that recognize the interconnections between climate, water, and agriculture are needed to expand the use of such nature-based solutions. The state of Maryland, for example, shares the cost of planting cover crops with farmers. Some 29% of the state’s farmland gets planted in cover crops, compared with about 6% of US farmland overall.

Holistic solutions don’t come easily, since they require thinking and acting outside of bureaucratic and professional silos. But they are key to a livable future.

While it is too late to avoid the impacts of climate change, we can avoid the worst of those impacts by investing more heavily in such nature-based water solutions.

Sandra Postel is the author of Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity and the 2021 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:42:"Climate change is helping sink Mexico City";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:87:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041305/mexico-city-sinking-climate-change/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041305";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:322:"The comings and goings of water define Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis sprawled across three dry lake beds. The city floods in the wet season and thirsts during regular droughts. CDMX, as the city of 21 million styles itself, pumps more water from the aquifer below it than it replenishes: the city sank some 12…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:13:"Lucas Laursen";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:7266:"
<div class="wp-block-group"><div class="wp-block-group__inner-container">
The comings and goings of water define Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis sprawled across three dry lake beds. The city floods in the wet season and thirsts during regular droughts.

CDMX, as the city of 21 million styles itself, pumps more water from the aquifer below it than it replenishes: the city sank some 12 meters in the last century and may sink another 30 meters before hitting rock bottom. The drier land also puts buildings at greater risk for earthquake damage.

Many Mexico City residents cannot rely on the faucets in their homes for water. In 2020, the city spent more than $4 million on water trucks, and residents spent around $187 million on bottled water.

Scientists predict that climate change will exacerbate these problems.

But residents are taking charge of water—and their climate futures—in a variety of ways that promise to buoy the city’s hydraulic balance and perhaps promote equitable access to safe drinking water.

Here we look at projections for Mexico City’s climate future and some of the approaches that residents are taking to mitigate the worst of the effects.

<h3>Total rainfall will decline</h3>

<h3>Some areas of Mexico City have higher climate-related risks than others</h3>

<h3>Residents are fighting back</h3>

<div class="wp-block-column" style="flex-basis:90%">
<h4>INDIGENOUS TECH : CHINAMPAS</h4>

The indigenous Mexica fenced in and filled lake areas, creating waterlogged farms to feed their island city. A collective of researchers, city planners, and farmers is adapting the approach to filter water for irrigation and reduce demand for aquifer water. 
</div>
</div>

<div class="wp-block-column" style="flex-basis:90%">
<h4>REFORESTATION</h4>

The state of Mexico is reforesting the slopes above the city, which should help capture rainwater and minimize landslides during the more frequent and intense storms powered by climate change.
</div>
</div>

<div class="wp-block-column" style="flex-basis:90%">
<h4>ROOFTOP RAIN CAPTURE</h4>

The nonprofit Isla Urbana has built more than 20,000 subsidized rooftop rain capture systems, focusing on neighborhoods with the least access to potable water. 
</div>
</div>

<div class="wp-block-column" style="flex-basis:90%">
<h4>INFILTRATION</h4>

The city has built public spaces such as the Parque Bicentenario, which boasts volcanic soil. Its porous ground directs rainfall to the aquifer, heading off flooding, reducing subsidence, preventing damage to infrastructure, and replenishing the drinking water supply. 
</div>
</div>
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";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";s:5:"child";a:4:{s:0:"";a:6:{s:5:"title";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:67:"Can data help quench the thirst of Pakistan’s most populous city?";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"link";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:92:"https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1041303/karachi-farmers-data-water-conservation/";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:7:"pubDate";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:31:"Thu, 23 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0000";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:8:"category";a:2:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"Climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}i:1;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:14:"climate change";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:4:"guid";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:43:"https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1041303";s:7:"attribs";a:1:{s:0:"";a:1:{s:11:"isPermaLink";s:5:"false";}}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}s:11:"description";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:312:"When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. Initially, they had dug a…";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:32:"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/";a:1:{s:7:"creator";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:15:"Mariya Karimjee";s:7:"attribs";a:0:{}s:8:"xml_base";s:0:"";s:17:"xml_base_explicit";b:0;s:8:"xml_lang";s:0:"";}}}s:40:"http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";a:1:{i:0;a:5:{s:4:"data";s:5479:"
When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. Initially, they had dug a well, boring into the aquifer that runs beneath the city. When that began drying up, they turned to the city’s system of water delivery trucks to supplement their supply. Ultimately, his family chose to dig an even deeper well, knowing as they did so that if everyone around them did the same thing, the city’s groundwater supply would be further imperiled. “This is like a competition where eventually everyone loses,” Rehman says. “I personally feel really bad that I have to do this, but I don’t have a choice.”

Pakistan is consistently listed as one of the countries most at risk from a water crisis. Rain falls more heavily there than it once did but not as often, a situation that makes replenishing groundwater reserves difficult. Hotter temperatures are increasing evaporation and creating thirstier crops. Eventually, snowmelt and glacier melt—two important sources of water for the country—will dwindle to a trickle.

But Pakistan isn’t facing a water problem purely because of climate change. Water conservationists say a mix of resource mismanagement, groundwater depletion, and inadequate water storage have pushed the system to a precarious point.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, which has a daily water shortfall of hundreds of millions of gallons. Despite that, water is consistently underpriced: usage isn’t metered, and many sources are unregulated.

Worried about the future of water in the city, Rehman started working for AquaAgro, a tech startup formed in 2016. The company’s premise was simple: use data to help farmers make better choices about irrigation schedules. Their device, which included a solar-powered box and a thumb-size soil meter, could monitor weather conditions like temperature, humidity, and pressure and measure the soil’s moisture content. The data was all uploaded to a portal, and farmers then received mobile alerts informing them when to water their crops.

At AquaAgro’s pilot farms, crop yields increased by 35% and water usage reduced by 50%. But when Rehman and his colleagues reached out to farmers about their product, they found few were interested. “It wasn’t a viable financial model,” Rehman says. “Because the price of water was so cheap, farmers weren’t motivated in cutting down their water consumption.”

<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-large"><meta charset="utf-8">“This is like a competition where eventually everyone loses.”</blockquote>

But water is no longer the abundant resource it used to be. Farms around the Karachi area that relied on groundwater to grow their crops now use everything from sewage streams to water trucks to stolen surface water. Karachi’s primary water utility company complains that a large amount of the city’s water is stolen from a 3,200-kilometer canal system that distributes water from a lake about two hours outside the city. “There’s a general perception that there is unauthorized use of water … by farms, theme parks, and people in informal settlements, among others,” says Farhan Anwar, a Karachi-based urban planner. But, he adds, “documentation is hard to find.”

Rehman hoped that AquaAgro could help with Karachi’s water crisis. If farms around the city used less water, perhaps there would be some left over for his children, and his children’s children. But by the end of 2019, the team at AquaAgro had concluded that their product might never be profitable. Their funding streams had dried up, and they disbanded soon after.

The team’s ideas haven’t been forgotten, though. Crop2X, a startup that grew in the same incubator as AquaAgro, is also working on data-driven ways to help farmers modernize. The company uses sensors and satellite imagery to help them identify which parcels of land aren’t operating at their maximum yield. “We’ve been able to use the satellite imagery to help identify pests and reduce the amount of fertilizer that’s being used,” says Laeeq Uz Zaman, the founder and CEO. “Those are things that are valuable for farmers.”

Uz Zaman hopes he can pull off a bait-and-switch: if he convinces farmers to buy in to a product they want—one that would help them reduce spending on fertilizer—perhaps they will eventually incorporate water-reduction strategies as well. In its weekly reports to clients, Crop2X includes water prescriptions, in part building on the data-based program AquaAgro developed.

The company’s general approach seems to be working for now. Currently, it has more than 1,500 acres of farmland using its services and it’s targeting 4,000 acres by 2025. The startup has started rolling out pilot programs at large corporate farms, hoping owners will see the utility of its methods. Still, Uz Zaman says, the major obstacle to its plan is the average farmer, who doubts that less water could ever result in more crops.

Mariya Karimjee is a freelance writer living and working in Karachi, Pakistan.
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In the waning weeks of 2017, many residents of Cape Town, South Africa, <a href="https://time.com/cape-town-south-africa-water-crisis/">lined</a> up day and night to fill old jugs with water from the city’s few natural springs. Palpable angst hung in the air. After months of warnings through an anomalously long drought, Cape Town was on the verge of becoming the world’s first major city to run out of water. Freshwater dams had dipped below 25% of capacity, and levels continued to fall. If the dams fell to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/world/africa/cape-town-water-day-zero.html">13.5% of capacity</a>, the municipal water network would shut down, and millions of residents would face severe water restrictions.

The dams never reached that critical <a href="https://www.vox.com/world/2018/2/9/16964416/cape-town-water-crisis-day-zero-south-africa">13.5% level</a>, dubbed Day Zero. The city instituted water restrictions, increased water tariffs, and spent the majority of its R1.4 billion ($86 million) <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2018-03-16-00-cape-towns-desalination-plant-budget-dries-up/">drought-related budget</a> to construct three emergency desalination plants, which delivered critical water supplies. Residents also took matters into their own hands, collecting water from the natural springs and installing rain catchment systems if they had the means.

Four months later, the rains returned, and dam levels rose. But the shadow of Day Zero still lingers over the city. “The citizens of Cape Town have not forgotten the fear caused by the drought and potential for the city to have run out of water,” says Kevin Winter, a lecturer in environmental and geographical science at the University of Cape Town.

Thanks to the memory of Day Zero, Winter says, average daily water use in the city is between 700 and 800 million liters, about half what it was in 2014. But even if consumption remains low, the next drought could challenge those efforts. And scientists <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29495">believe</a> that Cape Town will face more sustained droughts over the next 100 years because of climate change.

Although drought instigated the water crisis, experts say it was <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29495">exacerbated</a> by existing issues, including poor water management and infrastructure problems at dams and other collection points.

The city has a plan to address the situation. In consultation with researchers and scientists, it outlined a <a href="https://resource.capetown.gov.za/documentcentre/Documents/City%20strategies,%20plans%20and%20frameworks/Cape%20Town%20Water%20Strategy.pdf">new water strategy</a> in 2020 that aims to make the city’s water supply more resilient to future droughts. The planned approaches include diversifying water sources to include groundwater from wells and boreholes, recycled stormwater, treated wastewater, and household gray water, which could be reused for gardening and other applications that don’t require something clean enough to drink. There are also plans for more desalination, controls on water use, leak reduction, and infrastructure investment.

While the path is laid out, finding the political will to execute these reforms might be difficult. Expanding access to water has been a point of contention for the ruling African National Congress since the fall of apartheid in 1994. In most shantytowns, at least 2 million residents (out of Cape Town’s total population of about 4.6 million) can use city water only at <a href="http://www.acdi.uct.ac.za/urban-water-governance-resilience-cape-town">communal</a> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957178720300382">access</a> <a href="http://12.000.scripts.mit.edu/mission2017/case-studies/water-access-in-south-africa/">points</a>. The government has routinely <a href="https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/south-africa/2021-09-28-anc-promises-better-leadership-service-delivery-as-ramaphosa-unveils-manifesto/">promised</a>—and <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248973790_Access_to_Water_for_the_Urban_Poor_in_Cape_Town_Where_Equity_Meets_Cost_Recovery">failed</a>—to improve essential services like these for millions of poor South Africans.

All told, the city’s plan for better water resiliency calls for an investment of R5.4 billion ($335 million). As part of its water strategy, the city wants to build a new <a href="https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/city-of-cape-town-planning-to-build-r18bn-desalination-plant-94faeba8-5df9-4865-b84b-77d21488debf#:~:text=Cape%20Town%20%E2%80%93%20The%20City%20of,8%20billion.">R1.8 billion</a> ($112 million) desalination plant with a capacity of 50 million liters per day by 2026. At the same time, the three desalination plants commissioned in 2017 to combat Day Zero are being dismantled. Both the city and its contractors have been tight-lipped as to the exact reason why the plants have been decommissioned, but one contractor said there was <a href="https://www.capetown.gov.za/Media-and-news/Mission%20accomplished%20for%20Strandfontein%20temporary%20desalination%20plant">higher</a> <a href="https://www.capetownetc.com/news/city-decommissions-standfontein-desalination-plant/">demand</a> in “other areas.”

The private sector is not necessarily waiting for the city to remedy its water woes. The wine industry, for example, was hit exceptionally <a href="https://www.lallemandwine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Vineyards-in-the-Western-Cape-are-hit-hard-by-the-drought.pdf">hard</a> by the drought. Since then, many vineyards have established state-of-the-art water <a href="https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2018/02/drought-forcing-cape-wine-industry-to-rightsize/">management</a> <a href="https://www.saveur.com/cape-town-wine-farm-drought/">systems</a> designed around the concept of self-sufficiency. Tactics include reusing treated wastewater, collecting rainwater, and using elaborate irrigation systems that focus on reducing water waste. Vineyards have also spent heavily on internal research to ensure they are employing the best methods science has to offer.

Even so, Gerard Martin, the executive manager of Winetech, a nonprofit that receives funding from the South African wine industry, feels that at this stage he doesn’t know if either the city or the industry is ready for the next drought. “We are certainly preparing ourselves to address this in the future,” he says.

Joseph Dana is a writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.
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