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“She was traumatized by the flood and wasn’t getting a nutrient-rich diet for several weeks.”
Ashwini Khandekar was in her first few months of pregnancy when the flood came. This was July 2021, the peak of the annual monsoon season, when a downpour destroyed more than 300 houses in Ganeshwadi, a village 400 kilometers south of Mumbai in India’s Maharashtra state. Authorities instructed Khandekar and her husband to evacuate, she told me, “but I couldn’t leave my house because all the evacuation centers were full. I had nowhere to go.” Though in the end her home was spared, for the next 15 days, Khandekar lived in constant fear, praying until the waters finally abated.
Four months later, Khandekar went to the doctor for a prenatal checkup. Her child, she learned, showed signs of anencephaly, a condition in which the fetal brain and skull fail to develop normally. Usually, babies born with anencephaly die within a few hours, and most pregnancies end in miscarriage. To cross-check the doctor’s claims, Khandekar visited eight more hospitals. Everyone confirmed the same. “I was heartbroken,” she said.
When a community health-care worker, Kavita Magdum, examined Khandekar’s medical records, she found that Khandekar had suffered from a severe deficiency of iron and folic acid, a known risk factor for anencephaly. This, in turn, pointed back to the storm. “She was traumatized by the flood and wasn’t getting a nutrient-rich diet for several weeks,” Magdum told me. The roads in and out of the village were closed for 20 days, cutting off food supplies. During this time, she ate only cooked rice and wheat flatbread. Sometimes she didn’t eat at all.
By the end of December, a month after she learned of her child’s condition, Khandekar had lost the pregnancy. She was 20 years old at the time.
Though tragic, stories like Khandekar’s are not rare. A research paper published in Nature this year found that from 2010 to 2020, maternal exposure to floods led to an average of 107,888 lost pregnancies per year in low- and middle-income countries, with South Asia reporting the most cases. Lack of access to nutrient-rich foods was one of the causes the researchers identified, along with physical and mental stress, disease, and lack of housing and safe childbirth services.
This year’s monsoon season will begin in June and stretch through September. The Indian Government has forecast above-average rainfall this year, at 106% of the long-term average. In the first two decades of this century, floods impacted 1.5 billion people in Asia, accounting for 93% of the globally affected population. Last year, over 80% of hydrometeorological disasters in Asia were floods and storms.
About 89% of the world’s flood-exposed population resides in low- and middle-income countries that lack adequate health-care facilities. India alone has more than 378 million women of childbearing age, and has experienced an average of 17 yearly flood events in the past two decades. Floods affected more than 218 million people in India from 2015 to 2020, and destroyed crops on nearly 35 million hectares of farmland, leading to rampant food insecurity. During this time, stillbirths in India increased 28.6%.
For women and their children, the risk begins even before a pregnancy occurs. Simran Jamadar was also 20 years old and living in Maharashtra’s tiny Kanwad village when the floods arrived in 2021. “The water was at least four feet in our house at 5 p.m.,” said Jamadar, forcing her to evacuate. Walking through muddy water with her family to the evacuation center 10 kilometers away, she had to tread carefully lest she disturb an unseen snake. After she reached her destination, she spent 12 days crammed in with 6,000 people from 15 villages. Overstressed and underslept, Jamadar found it difficult to eat. On top of everything else, the experience brought up painful memories from just over a year before, when another flood had wiped out her home, along with all its furniture, crucial papers, and six months of food supplies.
Five months later, still grappling with the trauma of the flood, Jamadar became pregnant. At about the seven-month mark, she experienced a sudden and unbearable stomachache and vomited. Sonography reports showed that she had developed an incompetent cervix — a weakened womb unable to hold a baby. Six hours later, Jamadar gave birth. The child was born and “passed away within a day,” Anita Kamble, a community health-care worker from Jamadar’s village, told me.
Kamble spoke to more than 30 community health-care workers from the flood-affected villages and found a similar pattern of stillbirths associated with stress — even when that stress began before the women became pregnant. This squares with other findings from the Nature study, which showed a significant association between pregnancy loss and exposure to floods even six months before conception. A controlled study of 340 women from Sweden who’d been pregnant in the same year found that 54% of those who experienced stress during pregnancy such as depression or anxiety gave birth prematurely.
With flooding, disruptions and their attending stressors can last for months, and sometimes even years. “The trauma was visible on her face,” Kamble said of Jamadar.
“The most important buffer for stressed pregnant women is social support,” Gloria Giarratano, a professor of nursing at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, told me. That includes resources to help cope with psychiatric stressors. Giarratano was the lead author of a study of women in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, which found that women without a network of trusted people to rely on were the most likely to become depressed while pregnant. The more support they have, Giarratano told me, the more that risk decreases.
India, however, for its population of 1.3 billion people, has just 9,000 psychiatrists and 1,000 psychologists. In the face of this challenge, community health-care workers like Magdum and Kamble have devised ad hoc solutions.
What India lacks in licensed medical practitioners, it somewhat makes up for in community-based health programs. India has over a million all-women community health-care workers, known as Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHAs, who make public health care accessible. Appointed for every 1,000 people from the same village, they are responsible for at least 70 health-care tasks, including providing ante- and postnatal care and ensuring that infants and children are vaccinated on time. In the past seven years, they have gone beyond their duty to help pregnant women recover from the trauma caused by floods and other climate disasters.
After Jamadar lost her baby, for instance, Kamble began visiting her every three to four days, asking about her problems and listening patiently to the answers, sometimes for several hours. Often, Jamadar spoke of her fear of floods. Kamble started talking to more women and found that they all needed someone to share their frustration and fears with. “In several villages, even today, women aren’t allowed to talk about their stress,” Kamble told me.
She started organizing informal discussions in the community where women including Jamadar could be free to share their trauma — and where Kamble could monitor their stress levels and nutrition. “I knew I wasn’t alone in this, and listening to others gave me confidence that we could recover together,” Jamadar told me.
In April 2024, Jamadar gave birth to a child, Aiza, without complications. “From the start, we did everything right and made sure Jamadar wasn’t stressed,” Kamble told me proudly.
In addition to listening, Kamble also started making a list of where pregnant women could be evacuated safely in case of another flood. She would then check if these places had essential facilities like access to good-quality drinking water and sanitation. ASHAs also started pre-arranging private vehicle transport for pregnant women in case of emergency.
Through lengthy and careful community engagement, the ASHAs have started to compile lists of women they expect to become pregnant well before they actually are. “Three months before someone decides to conceive, we start providing them with iron and folic acid tablets,” Magdum told me. This has helped her reduce the anemia rate in her village by 50%. “Earlier, people didn’t take it seriously, but now everyone inquires beforehand about the tablets,” she said.
None of this has been easy, especially because many ASHAs themselves are victims of recurring floods and have faced tremendous personal losses. The state doesn’t consider them full-time workers, and pays them only an honorarium based on the number of tasks completed. In India’s wealthiest state, Maharashtra, the average income is just 4,000 to 7,000 Indian Rupees, or $48 to $83, per month, and often the payments are delayed. As a result, many ASHAs are forced to double up as farmworkers to make ends meet.
Despite the challenges, ASHAs keep coming up with solutions. “If we stop working insuch stressful times, how will the health-care system survive?” asked Kamble, who handles around 20 pregnancy cases every year and has counseled over 100 pregnant women since 2017. Since ASHAs are unionized, they often meet to discuss best practices and share their experiences. Today, thousands of ASHAs across India are helping women recover emotionally from the trauma caused by climate change.
“ASHA means hope in several Indian languages,” Kamble said, “and I am proud to bring a smile and hope to several women.”
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The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.