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Rescue personnel walk near a building that collapsed after a strong earthquake struck central Myanmar on Friday, March 28, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Major earthquake strikes Southeast Asia, Israel passes judicial reform, Fox News wins advertisers, Pollution kills, HHS sees massive job cuts, Suspected US strikes hit Houthis
7.7: Two disastrous earthquakes, the first of 7.7 magnitude, struck Myanmar on Friday, destroying vital infrastructure across Southeast Asia. Videos of a collapsed bridge in Mandalay, Myanmar, and a fallen building in Bangkok, Thailand, have emerged. The number of casualties isn’t yet known, although several are feared trapped under a fallen skyscraper in the Thai capital. At least 144 people have been confirmed dead.
71,000: Israel’s right-wing government on Thursday passed a contentious law to allow politicians greater sway in judicial appointments, despite some 71,000 opposition amendments. The move is a part of the judicial overhaul that protesters have been fighting for over a year and comes amid Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial.
125: Since the US election, Fox News has gained 125 new high-profile advertisers as Rupert Murdoch’s cable network continues to draw soaring viewership during President Donald Trump’s second term. Businesses such as Amazon, GE Vernova, JPMorgan Chase, Netflix, and UBS have recently run ads on Fox News for the first time in over two years.
5.7 million: According to a new World Bank study, 5.7 million people are killed annually by air pollution. The global institution is calling on countries to take an integrated approach to halve the number of people breathing unhealthy air by 2040 and points to places like Mexico City, which has successfully curbed pollution, and Egypt and Turkey, which have put financing mechanisms in place to support emission reduction.
20,000: The Trump administration announced Thursday that it will cut 20,000 positions from the Department of Health and Human Services – 10,000 from job cuts and 10,000 from voluntary departures – as part of a major restructuring that its chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., says “will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.” RFK says the reorganization is intended to help the department prioritize the fight against chronic diseases, but critics fear it could hinder the critical agency, which includes Medicare and the Federal Drug Administration. And throughout the federal government, officials are planning for between 8% and 50% staff cuts, according to an internal White House document obtained by the Washington Post.
19: Two weeks after the Trump administration dropped its first bombs on Houthi rebels in Yemen — details of which were revealed over the now-infamous Signal chat — the United States is believed to have attacked again early Friday, firing at least 19 strikes. The extent of the damage is unclear, although the intensity of the bombardment has increased since the Biden administration first started pounding the Houthis.
Flags hung at the reconvening of the COP16 conference in Rome last month, with an inset image of Adrian Gahan, the ocean lead for Campaign for Nature.
What happened at the UN Biodiversity Summit in Rome, and what comes next?
Countries gathered in Rome in late February to finalize key decisions left unresolved after last year’s COP16 summit in Colombia. In Italy, negotiators agreed to the first global deal for finance conservation, which aims to achieve the landmark goal of protecting and restoring 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. Eurasia Group’s María José Valverde interviewed Adrian Gahan, the ocean lead for Campaign for Nature, a global campaign founded in 2018 to secure the 30x30 target, as we look ahead to the UN ocean conference and continue building on the nature agenda for 2025.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
María José Valverde: What are your expectations for the achievement of the 30x30 goal in the marine space, keeping all upcoming UN environmental processes (biodiversity, plastics, ocean, climate) in mind?
Adrian Gahan: This is an important year because we’re only five years away from the 2030 target. And the reality is that we're not making progress at the pace that we should. Something really important that can happen this year is the ratification of the High Seas Treaty. Whilst it’s been agreed, it needs to be ratified by at least 60 countries before it comes into legal effect, and at the moment, we’re at 17 countries. We should aim to get those remaining 43 countries in 2025, and we need to do it before Q4 for the treaty to come into legal effect this year. This would represent a significant step forward, and it'd be great if going into COP30 in Brazil we’re already counting down the ticker on the treaty taking legal effect.
Could you explain why this High Seas Treaty is so important?
Before this treaty was agreed in 2022, there was no legal instrument to manage biodiversity on the high seas, areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast. Instead, you had a patchwork of preexisting organizations — the International Whaling Commission, which is species-specific, and the International Seabed Authority, which covers the seabed but doesn't regulate the water column above the seabed. But they couldn’t establish marine protected areas covering the whole water column or all flora and fauna within it because they didn't have the legal capacity to do that. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty, or BBNJ, will allow countries to agree on setting parts of the international waters aside for nature in the context of all of these pre-existing organizations. And that is an innovation.
The high seas treaty could impact interests in critical minerals, deep sea mining, and those benefitting from marine genetic materials. The recently launched Cali Fund could also be a financial instrument for BBNJ areas. What are your thoughts on its potential implications?
This is one of the reasons why it’s taking countries a long time to ratify this treaty. They need to figure out what are the benefit-sharing mechanisms, what are the legal and financial instruments involved, etc. A lot of it has to be discovered as we go along. My headline observation around digital sequence information and the Cali Fund is that if it’s going to be meaningful, it has to be a regulatory requirement. That also needs to apply to BBNJ areas, which obviously have more complexity to it by definition because it’s beyond the territorial boundaries of any of these countries. But to be effective, it needs to be legally binding.
What’s at stake if we don't reach an agreement on finance at COP16.2, and what are the best- and worst-case scenarios for the marine sector?
The money is very important as part of the biodiversity COP process, not just because of the funding, but also because it’s a currency of seriousness. If we are asking the Global South to protect some of the last great wild places in the world that are providing vital infrastructure to the whole planet, then we need to be prepared to pay for it. This is not about charity – nor should it be considered aid. Donor countries need to show seriousness on this, and finance is one of the ways to do that.
It’s also important to consider our political context. Given budget and geopolitical constraints in the Global North, we need to continuously make the case as to why this is important. It is not just because nature is beautiful and special. We’re protecting it because it provides us all with an essential service, and this is an extension of our national security budget. We need to keep making that case. We also need to keep making the case that the private sector, which is making a lot of money and continuing to drop significant externalities onto this infrastructure, needs to pay its way. That’s an example of where governments need to intervene more in the market: tax and regulate.
The plastics negotiations have a lot of interlinkages with the biodiversity talks because of the Global Biodiversity Framework’s (GBF) Target 7 on pollution. Do you see any implications from the UN plastics treaty negotiations on your work?
We focus more on spatial targets and protection because the biggest threat to the global ocean, other than climate change, is not plastics, it’s overfishing. This is really worth reminding people. Plastics and pollution are very serious, but overfishing is a bigger threat. The crisis of overfishing is an absence of something, which is a harder narrative to sell than showing people an ocean full of plastic. The risk of the plastics narrative is that people think using paper straws means the crisis is solved. But, the ocean is facing so many more threats than plastic straws. However, the issue can be an important way to introduce people to the crises of climate change, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, and invasive species.
My final point on that is that the single biggest polluter of plastic in the ocean is not PepsiCo or Coca-Cola — it’s the global fishing industry. The single biggest source of plastic in the ocean is discarded fishing nets known as ghost gear. It doesn’t biodegrade, it’s hugely destructive, and it’s very helpful to the global fishing industry if everyone obsesses about plastic straws and bottles instead.
Conversations around fishing are tricky because they become a discussion about livelihoods and food security. How do you navigate these difficult issues?
It’s much easier to campaign against Coca-Cola than it is to campaign against local fishermen dropping their nets in the ocean. However, the most destructive fishing is conducted by very large and wealthy industrial fishing vessels, almost all owned by rich countries from Europe and Asia, not by local small-scale fishers. That said, there also needs to be training and engagement at the local level, which is difficult and time-consuming. One answer is to set parts of the ocean aside where you state there’s no fishing, and that makes it a lot easier to regulate. This requires government intervention and financial support for fishers who need to, for example, change their gear types or face a reduced catch for a short period while the spillover effect takes place. It becomes very complicated, and that’s why we’re making very slow progress toward the 30x30 goal.
One of the things we’ve been paying attention to is the nature tech market. What are some concrete examples of nature tech in the marine sector, and what role is the private sector playing?
I think it’s a really positive story. One of the most important, disruptive technologies that has helped in establishing and enforcing marine protected areas is satellite technology. I've been working for years on a UK program called Blue Belt. We work with local communities that are concerned about illegal fishing coming into their waters and far too remote to have their own enforcement capacity. The UK Government runs the satellite monitoring programs and then provides them with the intel. They can tag any suspicious activity and pursue the vessel legally through the Port State Measures Agreement. It’s a legal process where, if one of these vessels fishes illegally in these protected areas and then pulls into a port to offload the fish, the port state can take legal measures against the vessel, even though the vessel didn’t break any laws in that port state. This has been a very effective tool for protecting these areas.
This would not have been possible probably 15 years ago. That’s a really positive tech story to tell and something people should take some hope from because presumably this technology will only continue to improve and get more affordable. Bad news can be very overwhelming for people. So I think it’s good to remind people that good people are doing good things in the world.
María José (Majo) Valverde is a global sustainability analyst at Eurasia Group.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum attends the vice president?s dinner ahead of the inauguration of Trump, in Washington, U.S., January 18, 2025.
Doug Burgum’s coal-filled energy plan for AI
The AI race depends on fossil fuels. That was the message from Doug Burgum in his Senate confirmation hearing last Thursday.
Burgum is currently auditioning for two jobs. If confirmed by the US Senate, the former North Dakota governor will not only serve as secretary of the interior but also as the head of a new committee called the National Energy Council.
Burgum said that the US will lose its “AI arms race” with China unless it takes full advantage of fossil fuels. To run artificial intelligence models on advanced processors, data centers require copious amounts of electricity. He criticized wind and solar energy and said the country needs more “baseload” electricity from coal. “The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow,” Burgum told senators, signaling plans for a deregulatory environment in the energy sector.
Companies are rethinking their climate ambitions in the age of AI. In July, Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandtadmitted that the company’s goal to become carbon “net zero” by 2030 is now “extremely ambitious.” The Biden administration has encouraged the development of nuclear energy infrastructure as a way to get more “clean energy” to pursue AI at scale without further delaying progress on climate goals. Google and Microsoft have struck deals for nuclear energy, while Meta is seeking a deal of its own.
Burgum’s confirmation hearing showed that while Trump’s administration may be just as enthused about dominating global AI, it’ll be less stringent on using renewable or clean energy to do so.
A house burns as powerful winds fueling devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area force people to evacuate, in Altadena, California, on Jan. 8, 2025.
Wildfires are raging in Los Angeles. So is their politicization.
As wildfires scorched Los Angeles for a second day on Wednesday, hurricane-strength winds and limited water supplies complicated efforts to contain the flames. The three main fires – in the Pacific Palisades, the Pasadena area, and the rural San Fernando Valley – have burned thousands of acres, decimated hundreds of buildings, killed two people, and placed tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders.
Overnight, all the fire hydrants in the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood went dry, and officials are raising alarm bells that the city’s water system is outdated and ill-equipped to keep up with climate change, which is not only making fires more frequent in LA but also spreading them faster.
President Joe Biden is sending money to the region, thanks to the $100 billion in disaster aid passed by Congress before Christmas, $29 billion of which went to FEMA. Incoming President Donald Trump, meanwhile, accused Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday of blocking water to the region “to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water.” Trump appears to be referring to rules adjusting water allocations for cities and farms to protect areas where populations in Northern California where fish populations are depleting. But most of LA’s water is not imported from that region; it comes from groundwater and the aqueduct that runs east of the Sierra Nevada.
In the past, Trump has hesitated to give aid to Democratic-leaning states, and he has been critical of FEMA – falsely accusing the agency of misusing funds for illegal immigrants after Hurricane Helene. While he has not yet announced his pick to run the agency, its fate, and the fate of disaster-prone blue-states, could be fraught for the next four years.
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva greets UN General-Secretary Antonio Guterres ahead of the G20 summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Nov. 16, 2024.
Trump looms large over G20 Summit
What’s on the menu? Outgoing US President Joe Biden, together withUK PM Keir Starmer, are pushing for additional aid to Ukraine amid Russia’s latest missile barrage and North Korea’s troop deployment in Russia. As for Russian President Vladimir Putin, he made a point of skipping the gathering, sending Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead.
On climate change, with COP29 climate talks deadlocked in Azerbaijan, UN Chief Antonio Guterres called on the G20, responsible for 80% of global emissions, to step up. But the fly in the ointment may be Trump ally and climate skeptic, Argentinian President Javier Milei. French President Emmanuel Macronmet with Milei ahead of the summit in an effort to get Argentina to uphold the Paris Agreement, which the US is expected to exit again under Trump.
A spicy start. Brazil’s first lady, “Janja” Lula da Silva, sparked headlines at a G20 social event Saturdaywhen she quipped, “I’m not afraid of you, f**k you, Elon Musk,” while giving a talk on social media regulation. Brazil suspended Musk’s X platform earlier this year for ignoring court orders to block accounts accused of spreading fake news and hate messages. Musk responded online by predicting that her husband, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, would lose the upcoming Brazilian election.
For more on what’s expected from the G20 summit, check out our Q&A with Eurasia Group expert Julia Thomsonhere.Climate activists project a message onto the Embassy of Azerbaijan ahead of COP29 climate talks, in London, on Nov. 7, 2024.
Viewpoint: Trump to overshadow UN climate conference
Donald Trump’s election victory last week will loom large in the minds of delegates at this year’s UN climate conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The government, corporate, and civil society representatives meeting from Nov. 11-22 will be forced to reckon with the return of the climate skeptic who withdrew the world’s largest economy from the Paris Agreement during his first administration. We asked Eurasia Group expert Herbert Crowther how the prospect of Trump’s return to office will affect COP29 and UN efforts to mitigate climate change more broadly.
What has Trump’s attitude generally been toward climate concerns?
Trump was largely dismissive of climate change as a pertinent economic or political issue during his first administration. Though not prominently on display during the recent US election cycle, his attitude toward the issue has not changed since his first term – which will likely become more evident when he takes office next year. He will almost certainly move to scale back programs to develop new low-carbon technologies championed by President Joe Biden’s administration, including those created by the Inflation Reduction Act. That will put more burden on state and local-level officials, who helped fill the climate policy void during Trump’s first term and kept the US energy transition moving forward.
How will Trump’s election affect the mood at COP29?
Trump’s election will significantly dampen the atmosphere at COP29, both in terms of negotiating priorities and broader sentiment among negotiators. Trump’s election will make it harder to reach a consensus on ambitious new targets, particularly for climate finance. Delegates will not regard any commitments made by the outgoing Biden administration as very credible; consequently, other governments will be more reticent to make ambitious promises of their own. In terms of broader sentiment, many negotiators will already begin turning their attention to where the COP process will go next year when Trump takes office and likely withdraws the US from the Paris Agreement again (Biden’s administration rejoined the agreement). The COP process has been largely focused on advancing the key Paris aim of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Given this context, what COP29 objectives are likely still feasible?
One area where negotiations can still likely move forward involves the so-called Article 6 rules for the sale and purchase of carbon emissions credits. Talks around Article 6 have resumed this year after their very public breakdown last year at COP28. They will not be dramatically altered by the US election result and are still trending in a positive direction. For the issue of carbon market rules, the US has stuck to a negotiating position that is more aligned with that of emerging markets, meaning it is not a hurdle to reaching a deal in Baku.
What objectives are not?
Negotiations on assistance from developed economies to emerging market economies to finance climate change mitigation efforts is likely an area that will suffer the most at COP29 as a result of Trump’s victory. There was already limited room for consensus on a new umbrella target for global climate finance – the so-called New Collective Quantified Goal, or NCQG. Trump’s election will likely move the conversation even further away from targets like the $1 trillion in annual climate finance deployment that many emerging markets had been pushing for. Another important topic that will be affected by Trump’s election is the next round of country-level climate plans – the so-called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs. By next February, all parties to the Paris Agreement must submit new plans covering their emissions goals until 2035. With Trump’s election and a worsening outlook for agreements at Baku, more of these plans are likely to present cautious targets, which bodes poorly for medium-term efforts to combat climate change.
Where does the COP process go from here?
A second Trump administration will almost certainly withdraw from the Paris Agreement again. Though the COP process already survived one US absence during Trump’s first term, the global climate policy environment faces greater challenges today. The timeframe to meet targets is shorter, and tensions have intensified between industrialized and emerging markets over who bears the most blame for climate change and should pay for mitigation efforts. Many US states, corporations, and financial institutions will remain relevant players at COP and will continue to push the US energy transition forward, but they will not be able to compensate fully for the lack of federal policies. Meanwhile, the US absence will place greater pressure on China and the EU to assume more of a leadership role in COP and shoulder greater financing commitments. This year’s conference will provide some early signals about that, but 2025 — especially the buildup to COP30 — will be the real litmus test.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor, Eurasia Group
At a joint press conference in front of the Constitutional Court in Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, on August 29, 2024, youth climate litigants and citizen groups involved in climate lawsuits chant slogans emphasizing that the court ruling marks not the end, but the beginning of climate action. The Constitutional Court rules that the failure to set carbon emission reduction targets for the period from 2031 to 2049 is unconstitutional and orders the government to enact alternative legislation by February 2026.
South Korea’s climate verdict: A catalyst for worldwide legal action
South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled that the country’s climate change measures are insufficient for protecting the rights of citizens, particularly those of future generations. On Thursday, it ordered the government to go back to the drawing board to set more ambitious — and legally binding — carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond.
The ruling was based on a case involving 250 plaintiffs — one-third of them children or teenagers — upset by the absence of legally binding greenhouse gas emission targets. The court agreed with them and said the lack of targets beyond 2030 shifted an undue burden onto future generations.
“Environmental litigation is becoming a global phenomenon. A key catalyst is the UN’s 2022 resolution, which established a universal right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment,” says Franck Gbaguidi, director of global sustainability at Eurasia Group. “It has given more power to existing climate laws and made it easier to take legal action against environmental harm without necessarily needing to prove specific harm to health, life, or property.”
This ruling is the first of its kind in Asia, but it is “expected to trigger a domino effect across Asia, where many similar cases are in the works,” says Gbaguidi. It comes on the heels of similar rulings in Germany, Switzerland, India, and Montana that governments have a constitutional responsibility to their citizens, current and future, to combat climate change.
“We’re now entering an era of intense legal scrutiny on environmental policies, making it more likely for these cases to succeed,” says Gbaguidi. “This means we’ll see more strategic and sophisticated lawsuits against governments and companies, with courtrooms becoming key battlegrounds for climate change action.”Floodwaters cover a parking lot on the Yantic River after heavy rains in Norwichtown, Connecticut, U.S., January 10, 2024.
The rising costs of “once-in-a-thousand-years” floods
Last weekend, rainfall in the northeast caused heavy flooding in parts of the United States and Canada as the region experienced yet another wave of unprecedented flooding.
On Monday, the governor of Connecticutdeclared a state of emergency as officials began cleanup efforts. The flooding killed two residents and hundreds were evacuated. The floods also affected parts of New York and grounded flights at JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia.
Just outside Toronto, the city of Mississauga set a rainfallrecord with 5 inches of rain falling and flooding streets.
The cost of the flooding is still being tallied, but it’s going to be expensive. In July, a flood in Toronto that saw four inches fall led to insureddamages of more than CA$1 billion. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, severe weather events last year cost insurers over $3 billion, with year-over-year costs trending up, with billions more ininfrastructure damage.
In the US, the costs are even higher. The Joint Economic Committeeestimates that floods alone cost the country between $180 and $496 billion each year, including infrastructure costs to keep up with floods, which run into the tens of billions yearly on the low end.
Climate change is set to continue to drive up costs as extreme weather events become more frequent and damaging, putting stress on insurance rates, public coffers, and the accuracy of calling these increasingly common events “uncommon.”