Battle Over Facial Recognition in New Orleans Will Shape Future of Surveillance


Edith Romero, an organizer in New Orleans, discusses the dangers of the growing surveillance state.
By Ed Vogel , TruthoutPublishedJanuary 17, 2026

The New Orleans City Council and New Orleans Police Department continue to push for facial recognition technology, despite persistent community opposition.  John Lund via Getty Images

While New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago have all received significant attention when it comes to police use of surveillance technologies, the small city of New Orleans has for years been the laboratory for a sophisticated surveillance apparatus deployed by the city’s police department and other policing bodies.

Just last year, New Orleans was in the news as the city considered setting a new surveillance precedent in the United States. First, a privately run camera network, Project N.O.L.A., was exposed for deploying facial recognition technology, including “live use” (meaning Project N.O.L.A. was identifying people in real time as they walked through the city). All of this was done in close collaboration with the local police, despite these uses violating a 2022 ordinance that placed narrow limits on the use of facial recognition.

Then the city flirted with formally approving the use of live facial recognition technology, which would have been a first in the United States. If enacted, live facial recognition technology would allow police to identify individuals as they move about New Orleans in real time. All of this occurred in the months before the Trump administration deployed Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, wielding an array of surveillance technologies, to terrorize and kidnap New Orleans residents. Of course, New Orleans residents have organized and actively fought back against the police and their spying, offering lessons for organizers across the country.

Edith Romero, an organizer with Eye on Surveillance (EOS), spoke with Truthout about the history of Eye on Surveillance, Project NOLA, the use of facial recognition technology in New Orleans and why we should all be watching what’s happening there if we’re concerned about the growing surveillance state.

Ed Vogel: Who is Eye on Surveillance and what do you do?

Edith Romero: In 2020, the Eye on Surveillance (EOS) coalition campaigned for and passed a surveillance ordinance ban that prohibited cell site simulators, facial recognition, and other surveillance technologies. Unfortunately, this ordinance was amended a couple of years later to approve loopholes for the use of facial recognition technology. EOS continues working to halt the expansion of surveillance locally, to change narratives regarding surveillance, and to build a New Orleans that is truly safe for everyone. At this moment while we face the occupation of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), ICE, and National Guard troops, we are even more committed and engaged in the fight against surveillance, with the clear understanding that surveillance is being deployed to kidnap and terrorize our communities of color.


New Orleans Resists ICE Invasion Despite Surveillance and State Repression
Before ICE descended on New Orleans, GOP lawmakers made it a crime to interfere with immigration enforcement. By Mike Ludwig , Truthout/TheAppeal  December 9, 2025

EOS has done some amazing organizing to make the problem of surveillance legible in New Orleans and across the country. Can you share more about your organizing strategy to challenge surveillance systems and infrastructure?

Our organizing strategy has always been community and coalition building. Surveillance affects us all, especially our communities of color. That is why we work with immigrants, Black and Brown residents of New Orleans, teacher unions, civic organizations, and local organizations to unite under the same mission: building a New Orleans free of surveillance. Surveillance truly impacts all of us, in every aspect of our lives; we bring forward the interconnectedness of shared struggles via our fight against surveillance through community meetings, teach-ins both in person and virtual, online educational campaigns and creative community events such as community scouting of local surveillance cameras. Relationship building is key for nurturing movements and narrative change towards a world that truly takes care of all of us. Relationship building has not only enabled the victory of getting the live facial recognition surveillance ordinance withdrawn but has strengthened community power and narrative change regarding surveillance and the root causes of safety, resources, and community care.

How have you leveraged your base building towards policy change?

Base building is essential for policy change. We know surveillance is an issue that transcends time, lived experience, and identities. To build a wide coalition that truly represented the broad harm, danger, and systemic inequities that surveillance upholds, we brought together organizations whose work doesn’t necessarily focus on surveillance, but was a reflection of how surveillance permeates almost every aspect of our lives. We worked with formerly incarcerated community leaders who teach about the dangers of surveillance for those on parole, especially in emergency situations, we brought in immigrant community members whose lives are constantly monitored and whose families are separated by ICE/CBP with the aid of surveillance weapons, we talked with teachers who provided insight into the school-to-prison pipeline and how surveillance of our youth is seeping into our education system. Base building enables a holistic perspective regarding the harm and racism that surveillance embodies, countering narratives that erroneously attribute safety to overpolicing and surveillance. The goal is to truly have conversations and demand policy that resources communities rather than corporate interests that sacrifice our wellbeing.

From the outside, it feels like the use of facial recognition technology in New Orleans is a perpetual issue. Can you trace for us what has changed regarding facial recognition technology since the policy victory in 2021?

After our victory with the surveillance ban in 2021, which banned four different surveillance technologies including facial recognition, we had to mobilize continuously against the City Council and NOPD as they continued to push for the approval of facial recognition against persistent community opposition. In 2022, City Council added amendments to the surveillance ban that approved facial recognition for “violent offenses,” opening the door to the use of facial recognition by NOPD. Fast forward to 2025, City Council and NOPD again introduced an ordinance to expand facial recognition and other surveillance technologies even further, with the goal of approving live facial recognition in all the city cameras. NOPD and City Council try to sell surveillance as the ultimate solution for crime and safety, even though research and lessons from history show that safety comes from resourcing community, not surveillance or overpolicing. New Orleans heavily invests in surveillance; for example, the French Quarter is the most surveilled area of all the city, and even so, we still have tragedies like the New Year’s Day attack last year. Surveillance will never bring safety, and as of late we have seen how surveillance is being weaponized through drones, facial recognition apps, and license plate readers to kidnap our communities of color through the violent CBP operation in New Orleans, Catahoula Crunch.

How did you learn that NOPD was using facial recognition in real time?

For a while, we had knowledge about Project NOLA secretly spying on us with banned facial recognition cameras. However, we weren’t aware of the extremely close relationship between Project NOLA and NOPD. In early 2025, The Washington Post reported that NOPD was using Project NOLA to bypass the surveillance ban on facial recognition. Through this reporting we learned that despite the ban, Project NOLA would send alerts and work intimately with NOPD officers, sending live facial recognition alerts to their phones, providing feeds of their cameras to certain officers, or communicating about certain people of interest that they wanted to be tracked through live facial recognition.

Can you contextualize the use of facial recognition in New Orleans and describe the specific communities who are targeted by the police?

Facial recognition in New Orleans has to be considered in the context of the deep history of Black enslavement, Jim Crow, and racism in Louisiana, as well as the fact that Louisiana is the incarceration capital of the world. As we know, facial recognition is a deeply biased technology, one that reinforces the systemic racism that exists in our modern-day society. Research finds that facial recognition misidentifies people of color, leading to arrests of people like Randal Reid, a man from Atlanta, who was arrested by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office for crimes in Louisiana that he did not commit. Surveillance historically has been used as an excuse to overpolice and criminalize people of color, starting from the lantern laws that were put in place to surveil enslaved Africans when they moved at night through the carrying of lanterns, to the CIA operations that targeted prominent Black civil rights leaders, to the Patriot Act that demonized Muslim and Arab community members to institute surveillance of U.S. citizens and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

New Orleans is a majority Black city (55 percent, according to the 2024 census) with a sizable Latine and immigrant community, a city that is constantly being labeled as a sacrifice zone for climate crisis induced hurricanes or cancer-causing factories. It is appalling for New Orleans to constantly be used as a testing ground for racist surveillance, considering the amount of harm this technology would bring to an under-resourced city that depends on hospitality revenue from a Black and Latine labor force.

The NOPD says that they are no longer using real time facial recognition technology but there is an effort to enshrine its use into law. Tell us about the proposed ordinance and how EOS is challenging it?

Ordinance 35,137, introduced in May 2025, was a joint attempt by NOPD and City Council to approve live facial recognition in New Orleans, right after their possibly illegal partnership with Project NOLA was exposed by The Washington Post on a national level. EOS quickly mobilized against this dangerous ordinance, bringing together multiple diverse local organizations to oppose it. This included Step Up Louisiana, Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and immigrant rights organizations. National organizations such as MediaJustice, Fight for the Future, and Southerners Against Surveillance Systems & Infrastructure (SASSI) also joined the fight against live facial recognition in New Orleans, echoing the understanding that an assault on New Orleans’ through racist surveillance tech is an assault on our collective safety, dignity, and privacy. Surveillance is a danger to everyone, and a coalition of organizations that have diverse perspectives and communities is best situated to denounce the imminent harm posed by live facial recognition. Through public community events, meetings with council members, and campaigns to inform local communities of the danger posed by facial recognition and surveillance, EOS was able to shift public narratives, build diverse coalitions against surveillance and ultimately, get City Council to withdraw the live facial recognition ordinance.

Who is Project NOLA, the organization facilitating this vast camera apparatus?

Project NOLA is a spy network of thousands of private cameras in New Orleans as well as other cities across the country, that uses banned live facial recognition technology through their status as a non-profit. Project NOLA is owned and managed by Bryan Lagarde, an ex-NOPD officer who also hosts Project NOLA footage in reality TV crime shows. He pays himself $220,000 a year for this work and his family populates the executive board of Project NOLA. Project NOLA cameras are installed in business, houses, and private properties throughout Louisiana and even other cities such as Midfield and Fairfield, Alabama. Project NOLA’s purpose is to bypass city law and, through loopholes, facilitate law enforcement with the use of dangerous, racist live facial recognition alongside other highly invasive surveillance technology including license plate readers. Project NOLA has sole discretion and zero community accountability regarding what, how, and where their invasive video footage is stored, disposed, used, or even shared. We know Project NOLA is sharing their video streams with the Louisiana State Police, FBI, and select NOPD officers. If Project NOLA decides to, they could easily share these camera streams with facial recognition with ICE or CBP, facilitating the kidnapping and racial profiling of people of color.

How do the police, elected officials, Project NOLA, and others in New Orleans align and shape the narrative to justify the use of facial recognition and other surveillance tools?

Police, elected officials, Project NOLA, and people who have financial interests that benefit from surveillance justify and sell facial recognition as the ultimate solution for community safety. According to these people in positions of power, more cameras mean less crimes. It also means more incarceration, more profit for private prisons and detention centers, and a lazy, degrading direction to take when trying to ignore the extreme lack of resources in our communities. Real community safety doesn’t take shortcuts, it doesn’t incarcerate, and it surely doesn’t come from surveillance.

Louisiana recently passed Act 399. Can you tell us more about what this legislation does and how it compounds the potential harms of surveillance tools like facial recognition in New Orleans?

Act 399 is a state law designed by right-wing state legislators with the purpose of scaring, intimidating, and silencing any type of action that can seem to be against immigration enforcement in the state of Louisiana. As of December 26, 2025, no one has been prosecuted by this state law, but it has a chilling effect on the people of Louisiana, promoting fear of incarceration for providing mutual aid, recording ICE, or in any way supporting our immigrant communities. ICE, CBP, and our right-wing Gov. Jeff Landry could use Act 399 to force Project NOLA to share their cameras, video streams, and racist surveillance technology with and for violent “immigration enforcement” attacks.

Why do you think people from around the country should be paying attention to this fight in New Orleans?

The fight in New Orleans is one that every city will eventually face. New Orleans is the laboratory for mass surveillance experiments that eventually may spread to the rest of the country. If live facial recognition would have been approved in New Orleans in 2025, it would have provided a blueprint and example for the rest of the country to follow. Surveillance affects us all, whether in one corner of the country or another, or in Palestine where these surveillance technologies were first tested on Palestinians, because it creates a ripple effect of mass surveillance expansion that decimates privacy and constitutional rights, and perpetuates the long history of systemic racism and criminalization of poor people and people of color. At this conjuncture, when the U.S. federal government is increasingly attacking free speech and kidnapping people of color through racial profiling, the threat and danger of surveillance is even more palpable as is the need to fight it and build a better future for our communities.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Ed Vogel is a researcher and organizer.

Trump admin orders federal employees to investigate USDA researchers

Lisa Song, Sharon Lerner

Pro Publica

January 19, 2026 

ALTERNET

The Trump administration is directing employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate foreign scientists who collaborate with the agency on research papers for evidence of “subversive or criminal activity.”

The new directive, part of a broader effort to increase scrutiny of research done with foreign partners, asks workers in the agency’s research arm to use Google to check the backgrounds of all foreign nationals collaborating with its scientists. The names of flagged scientists are being sent to national security experts at the agency, according to records reviewed by ProPublica

At a meeting last month, USDA supervisors pushed back against the instructions, with one calling it “dystopic” and others expressing shock and confusion, according to an audio recording reviewed by ProPublica.

The USDA frequently collaborates with scientists based at universities in the U.S. and abroad. Some agency workers told ProPublica they were uncomfortable with the new requirement because they felt it could put those scientists in the crosshairs of the administration. Students and postdocs are particularly vulnerable as many are in the U.S. on temporary visas and green cards, the employees said.

Jennifer Jones, director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the directive a “throwback to McCarthyism” that could encourage scientists to avoid working with the “best and brightest” researchers from around the world.

“Asking scientists to spy on and report on their fellow co-authors” is a “classic hallmark of authoritarianism,” Jones said. The Union of Concerned Scientists is an organization that advocates for scientific integrity.

Jones, who hadn’t heard of the instructions until contacted by ProPublica, said she had never witnessed policies so extreme during prior administrations or in her former career as an academic scientist.

The new policy applies to pending scientific publications co-authored by employees in the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, which conducts research on crop yields, invasive species, plant genetics and other agricultural issues.

The USDA instructed employees to stop agency researchers from collaborating on or publishing papers with scientists from “countries of concern,” including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.

But the agency is also vetting scientists from nations not considered “countries of concern” before deciding whether USDA researchers can publish papers with them. Employees are including the names of foreign co-authors from nations such as Canada and Germany on lists shared with the department’s Office of Homeland Security, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. That office leads the USDA’s security initiatives and includes a division that works with federal intelligence agencies. The records don’t say what the office plans to do with the lists of names.

Asked about the changes, the USDA sent a statement noting that in his first term, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum designed to strengthen protections of U.S.-funded research across the federal government against foreign government interference. “USDA under the Biden Administration spent four years failing to implement this directive,” the statement said. The agency said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last year rolled out “long-needed changes within USDA’s research enterprise, including a prohibition on authoring a publication with a foreign national from a country of concern.”

International research has been essential to the Agricultural Research Service’s work, according to a page of the USDA website last updated in 2024: “From learning how to mitigate diseases before they reach the United States, to testing models and crops in diverse growing conditions, to accessing resources not available in the United States, cooperation with international partners provides solutions to current and future agricultural challenges.”

Still, the U.S. government has long been worried about agricultural researchers acting as spies, sometimes with good reason. In 2016, the Chinese scientist Mo Hailong was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to steal patented corn seeds. And in 2022, Xiang Haitao, admitted to stealing a trade secret from Monsanto.

National security questions have also been raised about recent increases in foreign ownership of agricultural land. In 2022, Congress allocated money for a center to educate U.S. researchers about how to safeguard their data in international collaborations.

Since Trump took office last year, foreign researchers have faced increased obstacles. In March, a French researcher traveling to a conference was denied entry to the U.S. after a search of his phone at the airport turned up messages critical of Trump. The National Institutes of Health blocked researchers from China, Russia and other “countries of concern” from accessing various biomedical databases last spring. And in August, the Department of Homeland Security proposed shortening the length of time foreign students could remain in the country.

But the latest USDA instructions represent a significant escalation, casting suspicion on all researchers from outside the U.S. and asking agency staff to vet the foreign nationals they collaborate with. It’s unclear if employees at other federal agencies have been given similar directions.

The new USDA policy was announced internally in November and followed a July memo from Rollins that highlighted the national security risks of working with scientists who are not U.S. citizens.

“Foreign competitors benefit from USDA-funded projects, receiving loans that support overseas businesses, and grants that enable foreign competitors to undermine U.S. economic and strategic interests,” Rollins wrote in the memo. “Preventing this is the responsibility of every USDA employee.” The memo called for the department to “place America First” by taking a number of steps, including scrutinizing and making lists of the agency’s arrangements to work with foreign researchers and prohibiting USDA employees from participating in foreign programs to recruit scientists, “malign or otherwise.”

Rollins, a lawyer who studied agricultural development, co-founded the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute before being tapped to head the agency.

There have long been restrictions on collaborating with researchers from certain countries, such as Iran and China. But these new instructions create blanket bans on working with scientists from “countries of concern.”

In a late November email to staff members of the Agricultural Research Service at one area office, a research leader instructed managers to immediately stop all research with scientists who come from — or collaborate with institutions in — “countries of concern.”

The email also instructed employees to reject papers with foreign authors if they deal with “sensitive subjects” such as “diversity” or “climate change.” National security concerns were listed as another cause for rejection, with USDA research service employees instructed to ask if a foreigner could use the research against American farmers.

In the audio recording of the December meeting, some employees expressed alarm about the instructions to investigate their fellow scientists. The “part of figuring out if they are foreign … by Googling is very dystopic,” said one person at the meeting, which involved leadership from the Agricultural Research Service.

Faced with questions about how to ascertain the citizenship of a co-author, another person at the meeting said researchers should do their best with a Google search, then put the name on the list “and let Homeland Security do their behind the scenes search.”

Rollins’ July memo specifies that, within 60 days of receiving a list of “current arrangements” that involve foreign people or entities, the USDA’s Office of Homeland Security along with its offices of Chief Scientist and General Counsel should decide which arrangements to terminate. The USDA laid off 70 employees from “countries of concern” last summer as a result of the policy change laid out in the memo, NPR reported.

The USDA and Department of Homeland Security declined to answer questions about what happens to the foreign researchers flagged by the staff beyond potentially having their research papers rejected.

The documents also suggested new guidance would be issued on Jan. 1, but the USDA employees ProPublica interviewed said that the vetting work was continuing and that they had not received any written updates. The staff spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly.

Scientists are often evaluated based on their output of new scientific research. Delaying or denying publication of pending papers could derail a researcher’s career. Over the past 40 years, the number of international collaborations among scientists has increased across the board, according to Caroline Wagner, an emeritus professor of public policy at the Ohio State University. “The more elite the researcher, the more likely they’re working at the international level,” said Wagner, who has spent more than 25 years researching international collaboration in science and technology.

The changes in how the USDA is approaching collaboration with foreign researchers, she said, “will certainly reduce the novelty, the innovative nature of science and decrease these flows of knowledge that have been extremely productive for science over the last years.”

‘What Climate Breakdown Looks Like’: 50,000+ Flee Wildfires as Chile Declares ‘State of Catastrophe’

“The first priority, as you know, in these emergencies is always to fight and extinguish the fire. But we cannot forget, at any time, that there are human tragedies here,” said the country’s president.


This photo shows the site of a forest fire in Penco, Biobío region, Chile on January 18, 2026.
(Photo by Xinhua via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jan 19, 2026
PCOMMON DREAMS

On the heels of another historically hot year for Earth, disasters tied to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency have yet again turned deadly, with wildfires in Chile’s Ñuble and Biobío regions killing at least 18 people—a figure that Chilean President Gabriel Boric said he expects to rise.

The South American leader on Sunday declared a “state of catastrophe” in the two regions, where ongoing wildfires have also forced more than 50,000 people to evacuate. The Associated Press reported that during a Sunday press conference in Concepción, Boric estimated that “certainly more than a thousand” homes had already been impacted in just Biobío.
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“The first priority, as you know, in these emergencies is always to fight and extinguish the fire. But we cannot forget, at any time, that there are human tragedies here, families who are suffering,” the president said. “These are difficult times.”

According to the BBC, “The bulk of the evacuations were carried out in the cities of Penco and Lirquen, just north of Concepción, which have a combined population of 60,000.”



Some Penco residents told the AP that they were surprised by the fire overnight.

“Many people didn’t evacuate. They stayed in their houses because they thought the fire would stop at the edge of the forest,” 55-year-old John Guzmán told the outlet. “It was completely out of control. No one expected it.”

Chile’s National Forest Corporation (CONAF) said that as of late Monday morning, crews were fighting 26 fires across the regions.

As Reuters detailed:
Authorities say adverse conditions like strong winds and high temperatures helped wildfires spread and complicated firefighters’ abilities to control the fires. Much of Chile was under extreme heat alerts, with temperatures expected to reach up to 38ºC (100ºF) from Santiago to Biobío on Sunday and Monday.

Both Chile and Argentina have experienced extreme temperatures and heatwaves since the beginning of the year, with devastating wildfires breaking out in Argentina’s Patagonia earlier this month.

Scientists have warned and research continues to show that, as one Australian expert who led a relevant 2024 study put it to the Guardian, “the fingerprints of climate change are all over” the world’s rise in extreme wildfires.

“We’ve long seen model projections of how fire weather is increasing with climate change,” Calum Cunningham of Australia’s University of Tasmania said when that study was released. “But now we’re at the point where the wildfires themselves, the manifestation of climate change, are occurring in front of our eyes. This is the effect of what we’re doing to the atmosphere, so action is urgent.”

Sharing the Guardian‘s report on the current fires in Chile, British climate scientist Bill McGuire declared: “This is what climate breakdown looks like. But this is just the beginning...”



The most recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, where world leaders aim to coordinate a global response to the planetary crisis, was held in another South American nation that has faced devastating wildfires—and those intentionally set by various industries—in recent years: Brazil. COP30 concluded in November with a deal that doesn’t even include the words “fossil fuels.”

“This is an empty deal,” Nikki Reisch of the Center for International Environmental Law said at the time. “COP30 provides a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks—they lie with the people and movements leading the way toward a just, equitable, fossil-free future. The science is settled and the law is clear: We must keep fossil fuels in the ground and make polluters pay.”

 

Climate risks to insurance and reinsurance of global supply chains

– a new report from Stockholm Environment Institute 

Stockholm Environment Institute

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Global supply chains are increasingly exposed to climate-related disruptions, redrawing the boundaries of what can be insured and how risk is distributed across the global economy. In recent years insured catastrophe losses have grown by roughly 5–7% per year in real terms. As insurers retreat from high-risk geographies and sectors, the burden of loss increasingly shifts to public budgets, enterprises, and households.

Disruption of international supply chains are a major systemic risk for Europe and countries beyond – alongside food insecurity, energy instability and financial stress. The 2021 floods in Germany and Belgium paralysed logistics and manufacturing across Europe and droughts in southern Europe in 2022 cut harvests and strained water supplies.

“Climate shocks are now driving supply-chain shocks, cascading through interconnected networks rather than remaining isolated disasters. As local weather extremes ripple through interdependent systems, they can quickly become global shortages and delays that threaten economic security,” says Dr. Mikael A. Mikaelsson, Policy Fellow at Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

Insurance and reinsurance, the financial mechanisms normally absorbing these shocks, are being tested by the growing complexity, frequency, and severity of climate hazards. The report Insurance and reinsurance under climate stress: managing systemic risk in global supply chains draws on interviews with leading experts from several of Europe’s top (re)insurance actors to examine how these sectors are responding to climate change challenges and the emerging limits of traditional risk-transfer models.

Without substantial changes to business models, regulation, and public-private coordination, there is a risk the sector will undermine stability by amplifying systemic climate stress, the report says.

“Climate risk is becoming systemic faster than insurance systems can adapt – and when losses can no longer be diversified, insurance stops working as designed,” says Mikael A. Mikaelsson.

Key findings

• The physical and financial foundations of insurability are eroding. As hazards increase in number and intensity, assets concentrate in exposed regions and correlated losses across portfolios are undermining the principle of diversification on which (re)insurance depends, accelerating market withdrawals and widening protection gaps.
• While innovative solutions, such as parametric products, Contingent Business Interruption (CBI) cover and resilience-linked assessments, offer valuable tools, they are limited in scope and reliability.
• The scope of insurance coverage remains narrowly focused on assets and direct damages, excluding slow-onset, indirect and social dimensions of climate risk. Climate-related risks to human health and productivity among supply-chain workers are particularly under-recognized.
• Structural and technical limits – including reliance on historical data, incomplete climate-adjusted modelling, and fragmented risk metrics – undermine insurers’ ability to anticipate systemic exposure. There is a need for harmonized standards and forward-looking, probabilistic models.
• Short-term underwriting cycles and annual repricing prevent insurance from supporting long-term adaptation, since the focus on immediate solvency and profitability conflicts with the multi-decadal nature of climate risk.
• Risks to labour in supply chains are effectively invisible to current life and health insurance systems, particularly in physically exposed roles such as agriculture, construction, and logistics. Workers in such roles often fall outside formal insurance systems, and even when insured, climate-related illness, productivity loss, or mental health impacts are rarely recognized or compensated.

“Insurance alone cannot manage systemic climate risk. Without stronger adaptation, better data, and coordinated public–private governance, risk transfer will increasingly fail where resilience is needed most,” says Mikael A. Mikaelsson.

About the report

The report is based on a literature review and expert consultations with senior climate risk specialists across the European (re)insurance ecosystem. Based on the findings, three recommendations are directed at policymakers and regulators, the (re)insurance sector, and businesses whose operations depend on insurable and resilient supply chains.

For further information, contact:

In Stockholm, Sweden

Mikael Allan Mikaelsson, Policy Fellow, SEI, mikael.mikaelsson@sei.org, +46 73 050 1818

Ulrika Lamberth, Senior Press Officer, SEI, ulrika.lamberth@sei.org, + 46 73 801 7053

In Seattle, US

Lynsi Burton, Communications Officer, SEI US, lynsi.burton@sei.org, +1 360 485 3041

Stockholm Environment Institute is an international non-profit research institute that tackles climate, environment and sustainable development challenges. We empower partners to meet these challenges through cutting-edge research, knowledge, tools and capacity building. Through SEI’s HQ and seven centres around the world, we engage with policy, practice and development action for a sustainable, prosperous future for all. www.sei.org @SEIresearch

Global warming and CO2 emissions 56 million years ago resulted in massive forest fires and soil erosion

Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research

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56 million years ago, the Earth was already warm. ‘As a result, there was a lot of vegetation, even at high latitudes. That means that a lot of carbon was stored in, for example, vast coniferous forests.’ Biologist Mei Nelissen is conducting PhD research at NIOZ and Utrecht University. She analysed pollen and spores in clearly layered sediment that her supervisors had drilled from the seabed in the Norwegian Sea in 2021. This revealed unique information in great detail – even per season – about what happened when the Earth warmed by five degrees in a short period of time those 56 million years ago.

Layers in drill cores

Nelissen: 'We could see that within a maximum of three hundred years from the start of the explosive increase in CO2, the conifer-dominated vegetation disappeared at the studied site and many ferns appeared. The ecosystems on land were disrupted for thousands of years; an increase in charcoal indicates that there were more forest fires. An increase in clay minerals in the sea sediment also indicates that entire sections of land washed into the sea due to erosion.' Thanks to the exceptionally well-defined layers in the sediment – even per season! – researchers were able to demonstrate for the first time how quickly trees and plants respond to disruption.

More was already known about the major impact on the sea, says Nelissen. ‘In drill cores from the deep sea, for example, we see that there is suddenly no more calcium carbonate, because the seawater rapidly acidified due to all the CO2 it absorbed. This made the water too acidic for organisms to form calcium carbonate skeletons or shells.’

Even faster warming now than then

What was going on? The period around 56 million years ago is known as the PETM: Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. It was already warm and ‘suddenly’ it became even warmer. Nelissen: 'The cause is unknown; it is probably a combination of factors. Methane hydrates in the seabed became unstable due to the heat, which led to methane emissions. There was also a lot of volcanic activity during that period.' Nowadays, climate change is mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. ‘Today, CO2 emissions are about two to ten times faster than in the PETM, but the rate at which CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased at that time is closest to the increase caused by human emissions. In geological terms, such a rate is unprecedented.’

The disruption amplified the warming

It is important to know what consequences the disruption of the carbon cycle and warming had at that time, because we can deduce what lies ahead if the rapid warming of today continues, the researchers write. We are already seeing more forest fires, but we also expect more extreme weather with more intense rainfall, flooding and drought. Nelissen: 'We must take this seriously. Our results are consistent with findings from other researchers in other areas. We now know that terrestrial ecosystems can respond quickly and dramatically to climate change. The carbon released into the atmosphere by the terrestrial disturbances, including fires and soil erosion,can further exacerbate global warming.'

Milestone in the research

Nelissen's supervisors Joost Frieling (University of Oxford and Ghent University) and Henk Brinkhuis (NIOZ and Utrecht University) went on a sea expedition with the International Ocean Discovery Program in 2021 to take sediment samples.

The drill cores turned out to be particularly clearly ‘laminated’: they showed very distinct layers, even per season. When they found the microfossils of the algae Apectodinium augustum, they happily posed for a photo together. Nelissen: ‘That's when my PhD position came about. This microfossil was proof that this beautifully preserved sediment comes from the PETM period, the period that researchers are keen to learn more about.’

[Article]

Widespread terrestrial ecosystem disruption at the onset of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, PNAS, Mei Nelissen, Debra A. Willard, Han van Konijnenburg-van Cittert, Gabriel J. Bowen, Teuntje Hollaar, Appy Sluijs, Joost Frieling, Henk Brinkhuis

---

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Widespread terrestrial ecosystem disruption at the onset of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

Article Publication Date

19-Jan-2026