Focus on Arts and Ecology

Across India and beyond, voters are being asked to go to the polls in dangerously high temperatures, with democracy as well as their health at risk. 

By Priyanka Thirumurthy, May 8, 2026

TD Achuthan went to vote at a school at 11am late last month. The 29-year-old resident of Chennai in Tamil Nadu was hoping to avoid long queues that typically form at polling sites later in the day, and the exposure to heat that comes with them.

When he arrived, there were at least 60 people in line, only a third of whom could fit into the shaded corridor. “The rest of us were in an open ground without tree cover and it was a gruelling experience,” says Achuthan.

Several Indian states concluded elections this month. In Chennai, the heat proved punishing for some voters.

Achuthan ended up waiting two hours to vote, one of which was spent baking under the sun. “It was an extremely exhausting experience,” he says. “I had to come back and sleep for a few hours to recover. Despite that, I felt dehydrated.”

As climate change drives temperatures and health risks ever higher, concern is growing that heat is harming suffrage as well as people’s health.

Polling booth officials at a site in Chennai told Dialogue Earth that tents were only erected in sites with more than five voting booths.

Between March and 25 July 2024, which included the campaigning and voting period for India’s last general elections, extreme heat led to over 370 confirmed deaths, according to official numbers some experts say are underestimates. In Uttar Pradesh alone, at least 33 polling staff died on the final day of voting due to intense heat.

On 24 April 2024, India’s minister of road transport, Nitin Gadkari, fainted on stage while addressing an election rally in western Maharashtra state. Shortly after recovering, he posted an update on X saying that he had felt “uncomfortable due to the heat”. Despite the rally occurring at 4.30pm, past the time afternoon temperatures normally peak, the temperature at his campaign site that day was 38C.

The general elections that year saw a voter turnout of 65.8% – a small but significant dip from the 2019 election, where turnout was 67.4%.

India’s capital New Delhi faced the lowest turnout in a decade, while Kerala’s turnout in 2024 was the lowest in the last 25 years. The chief electoral officer of Kerala, Sanjay Paul, told the News Minute that multiple voting sites saw huge turnout after 3pm, with people likely delaying voting due to intense heat. The outlet quoted an assistant returning officer as saying that long queues in the morning meant some people went home and, to avoid the heat, never returned to cast their vote.

There are many factors influencing the elections which took place over the last few weeks, and even before the votes were cast heat was already shaping campaigns.

“We need to urgently study how heat affects voter turnout. Summer elections are going to get increasingly challenging and will adversely impact voters and everyone involved,” says Abhiyant Tiwari, who leads on climate resilience and health at NRDC India, a company which advises on climate issues.

Hitting the most vulnerable

Heat exposure causes fatigue, cognitive impairment and cardiovascular strain, and with city temperatures higher due to the urban heat island effect, many workers struggle to recover after they finish gruelling shifts.

“By the time election day arrives, many workers are already physiologically depleted. Asking them to then stand in long queues in the open sun for hours can tip the balance into genuine health risk,” says Apekshita Varshney, founder of the non-profit HeatWatch.

This impact is likely to be felt disproportionately among the disadvantaged, and may lead to them choosing not to vote, she fears.

“We acknowledge the fact that heat can be quite crippling,” says an Indian election commission official who did not want to be named. They said there are “assured minimum facilities” at every polling station, including adequate shade, and that polling is supposed to open early and go on until 6pm to facilitate voting before and after rather than during peak heat.

A global issue

Between 2022 and 2025, at least 10 elections were affected by heatwaves in eight countries, according to a recent report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. They were the US, Mexico, Spain, France, Romania, India, the Maldives and the Philippines.

In the Philippines in May 2025, a heatwave drove temperatures to dangerous levels during that country’s general election. At some polling stations, voting machines reportedly malfunctioned due to the hot weather, causing delays that exposed voters to even more heat.

During the run up to Mexico’s 2024 general election, temperatures hit 50C in some parts of the country, with scores of deaths attributed to heat.

The US holds its federal elections in November. Even there, high temperatures have been causing problems in politics. In 2024, 11 people were sent to hospital for heat-related issues while waiting to enter an indoor campaign rally in Arizona where President Donald Trump was speaking.

And on 24 June 2025, temperatures at John F Kennedy Airport in New York City reached 102F (39C), making it the site’s hottest June day on record. The city’s vulnerable people including the elderly and chronically ill were cautioned to stay inside. It was the day of voting for the Democratic party mayoral candidate, who was widely expected to go on to be crowned mayor.

The city’s board of elections pledged to install fans and supply water at the polls. But Democratic politicians Gregory Meeks and Rodneyse Bichotte-Hermelyn issued a joint statement four days before the primary stating that “the NYC Board of Elections is not equipped to handle the heat wave”.

The NYC Board of Elections was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Solutions in sight

Experts say heat safety on election day comes down to three things: voting hours that allow peak heat to be avoided; crowd management that avoids people waiting in the sun; and polling booth infrastructure that prevents heat stress.

This could include evaporative coolers, fans and shaded outdoor areas, as well as fast lanes for vulnerable voters such as the elderly. In Chennai, provisions were made for elderly and disabled voters to cast their vote without waiting in line, several voters told Dialogue Earth.

Closing polls at 6pm, as India does, may not be sustainable on a warming planet, some say.

“It is clear from past voting patterns that crowds are highest before 10am and after 3pm. Given the nature of heat, it would be wise to change the timings of voting, allowing people to vote till 9pm instead of 6pm,” says Rajesh K, a researcher at the Integrated Rural Technology Center in Kerala.

A more radical option is to shift when the elections happen to ensure heat is avoided.

General elections in India often fall in the hot months of April, May and June. The primary reason is that the terms of the lower house and state legislatures frequently expire in May or early June, meaning elections are scheduled for the preceding weeks. The monsoon season from June to September is avoided for elections and campaigns as heavy rains can disrupt voting and make large areas inaccessible.

The Election Commission of India says the power to make such a change does not lie with them.

“We don’t have the luxury to tinker with these dates. Any change will need a higher level of decision making,” says the Indian election commission official. This might involve taking up the issue in parliament and passing legislation on it, says former chief election commissioner T S Krishnamurthy.

A shift to winter elections would bring its own institutional challenges, including the availability of teaching staff who constitute a large portion of election duty workers. But as heatwaves’ frequency, intensity and duration rise, conducting elections in the summer is increasingly being seen as a public health risk.

“Even a decade ago, heat was never considered a disruptive factor to the voting turnout. But we can no longer ignore its impact,” says Krishnamurthy.

He wants political parties to engage with the problem and the election commission to raise it as something that must be taken seriously. “Elections can be held between January and April. But this adjustment must be made through all-party consensus [and] legislative change,” he says.

While the debates about shifting long-standing election timetables to accommodate the changing world continue, more rapid responses may be needed to keep people safe in the meantime. Responses that recognise the threat heat has become, and ensure everyone is able to vote safely.

“We already have provisions for election postponement due to security concerns or natural disasters,” says Varshney. “Extreme heat, which is now a declared disaster in multiple states, should qualify on the same basis.”

Priyanka Thirumurthy

Ten years on from peace agreements with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, deforestation is thriving in the rainforest. 

By Juan Ortiz, May 11, 2026

Smoke from burning vegetation rises through the remaining trees, and clandestine tracks cut through pastures once thick with forest. Observed from our 14-seater plane passing above the Serranía de Chiribiquete national natural park in December, these fires signal the start of deforestation season in the Colombian Amazon.

Farmers set these fires to clear trees during the dry season and, in the months that follow, the burnt stumps will give way to pastures of coca. The plant is used in the traditional medicine of Andean Indigenous peoples, but, particularly in Colombia, it now also supplies a vast illegal cocaine network. Seen from the sky, the coca bushes look like green cotton balls, perfectly aligned in small rectangular patches nestled within the forest.

These fields explain much about the modern history of Colombia. Coca cultivation boomed in the 1980s and 90s, driven by the rise of drug cartels exporting internationally. The boom made violence and insecurity a feature of life in the country. In a bid to halt the violence, as well as the deforestation the industry drives, successive governments have pushed farmers to switch to other crops and activities, including cattle ranching.

This year marks a decade since the signing of a landmark peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), then the country’s main guerrilla group. However, the power vacuum created by FARC’s disbanding, combined with weak state enforcement, led to the emergence of splinter groups. They began to occupy public lands in the Colombian Amazon, often converting them into pastures or coca fields.

According to environmentalists, government support for cattle farming, combined with the failure to deal with armed groups, have compounded deforestation. Between 2015 and 2024, Colombia’s Amazon region lost almost 800,000 hectares of native forest. That makes this the period of the most rapid deforestation across the past 40 years. This is according to Dialogue Earth’s analysis of data from MapBiomas, an initiative that monitors land use and land cover via satellite.

Colombia’s Total Peace Programme seeks to establish new peace agreements and offer economic alternatives to dissident groups. As part of this, president Gustavo Petro has championed sustainable tourism and the bioeconomy (working in harmony with nature to generate income, such as transitioning to agroforestry, a more environmentally friendly form of agriculture) as substitutes for illegal activities.

But his policies have failed to stem the expansion of the deforestation arc – the strip of advancing agricultural frontier that cuts across the north-west of the Colombian Amazon. This is where the highest rates of forest clearing are concentrated.

The area under the greatest pressure covers the departments of Guaviare, Caquetá, Meta and Putumayo. Eighty per cent of the deforested land here has been converted into illegal pastures, usually for cattle, followed by 15% for coca plantations and 2% for clandestine transport routes. This has been established through long-term monitoring conducted by the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS).

Now, amidst a general election taking place between March and June, Colombia is once again debating a long-standing issue: how can the forest and its people coexist? It’s a question that intertwines armed conflict, organised crime and the challenges of managing the preservation of very remote areas. The outcome of these elections will shape the political agenda for the forest, and the strategies for tackling violence and deforestation in the region.

From coca to pasture

Some 400 km from Bogotá, Guaviare is the most accessible Amazonian destination for farmers from the Andean region. It has therefore been one of the main centres of coca expansion for decades.

Leaving the Andean department of Cundinamarca in 1995, Olmes Rodriguez arrived in Guaviare as a teenager. He was brought by his brothers, lured by the promises of prosperity offered by the coca industry.

Now 47, Rodriguez has worked within various stages of cocaine production, starting with raspagem (the harvesting of the leaves) and eventually becoming a coca “chemist”. This entails transforming the leaves into a paste that forms the basis of the drug cocaine, he tells Dialogue Earth.

He says the early years were lucrative. But in 2002, then-president Álvaro Uribe Vélez intensified the crackdown on illicit crops, leading farmers like Rodriguez to switch to livestock.

In the following years, livestock farming – including in protected areas and Indigenous territories – grew rapidly. But the ensuing expansion of pastureland was primarily associated with land grabbing and land speculation rather than cattle farming, according to a study by the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (Ideam).

Against this backdrop, livestock farming in the Amazon is a grey area: the farming itself is legal, but it often takes place on illegally cleared land. “Livestock farming is irregular, but it is not criminalised,” says Camilo González Posso, president of the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz).

Legacy of violence

These days, the apparent calm of the landscape, dominated by pastures and herds, is frequently disrupted by violence. In mid-January, 26 people were executed in an armed attack in El Retorno, 30 km from San José. Authorities believe the dead were members of an armed group called Estado Mayor Central. At least four minors were killed.

Control of Guaviare, which is currently home to around half a million cattle, is contested mainly between Estado Mayor Central and a rival faction called Bloque Jorge Suárez Briceño. Both are led by former FARC members.

Armed groups also profit from deforestation for farming. Gonzalez and other farmers, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said they have herds on large farms registered in the names of third parties. Furthermore, cattle farmers and land owners are extorted for protection money, known in Colombia as a “vaccine” or “revolutionary tax”.

Local producers told Dialogue Earth they have been targeted with these demands in recent years. One cattle farmer showed a handwritten receipt, with no recorded value, confirming payment of the “tax” to a FARC dissident group.

Extortion was also mentioned by Carlos, owner of the La Fortuna cattle weighbridge, a small roadside business near San José del Guaviare. His facility weighs animals before they are sold, setting the price of the cattle regardless of their origin. Well-versed in the local cattle market, he explains that the “vaccine” fee can vary: “In some places, one group calls the shots; in others, it’s another.”

Misplaced subsidies

Even so, the sector continues to receive state incentives, which include subsidised rural loans, generally without environmental protection requirements. Added to this is the Comprehensive Programme for the Replacement of Illicit Crops. This was created by the government to offer alternatives to coca, but in practice fuels irregular livestock farming and deforestation in the Amazon.

According to the FCDS, a third of the 42,000 beneficiary families in the region invested in cattle. Almost 80% of purchases under the scheme were allocated to this activity, and the herd grew by 86% between 2017 and 2024 – well above the national average.

In October 2025, the administrative court of Cundinamarca ruled the Colombian government should review policies and incentives that are harmful to the forest, and improve the traceability of products such as cattle, milk, gold and timber.

Some of these measures are being implemented by the national government, such as the updating of a traceability platform with real-time data. The tool is still being rolled out; results are yet to be published.

Dialogue Earth contacted the Ministry of the Environment for comment on other strategies adopted but had not received a response by the time of publication.

Progress on protected areas

After a long period of decline, coca cultivation has begun to recover in recent years. Reports from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime indicate the area of illegal plantations in the municipalities of the Colombian Amazon deforestation arc increased by almost 90% between 2019 and 2023, reaching 13,500 hectares. In total, the region had more than 64,000 hectares cultivating coca in 2023.

Davos trustee André Hoffmann on how short-term politics and fossil-fuel dependence are pulling the world away from climate action. 

By Dipankar Ghose, Patrick Moore, May 13, 2026

André Hoffmann has spent years arguing that business must move beyond its focus on short-term profit and help to build “sustainable prosperity” as the vice-chairman of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees.

It’s a cause he has backed beyond the world of business, too, across decades of philanthropy and leadership in environment and conservation nonprofits, including a ten-year stint as vice-president of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

In his 2024 book, The New Nature of Business, co-authored with journalist Peter Vanham, Hoffmann made the case for companies to account for their effects on nature and society – to put the cost to the planet on the balance sheet, as he likes to say.

But much has changed since. Speaking to Dialogue Earth, Hoffmann says the world has become “even more short term”, with war, deglobalisation, and authoritarian politics pulling against collective action. In a wide-ranging interview, he warns that climate resilience must shape long-term planning, describes calls to burn more fossil fuels from within the US administration as “pretty terrifying stuff”, and warns that a big financial crisis in the next few years is “not impossible at all.”

The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Dialogue Earth: Since you published your book, in late 2024, we’ve seen conflict, increased trade tensions, political swings and a corporate retreat from environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments. Has this had an impact on your vision for a “new nature” of business?

André Hoffmann: That’s an interesting way to open this conversation. Certain things come out reinforced by the current situation, others a little bit less emphasised. The world has become even more short term. Most of the businesses described in the book as working for sustainable prosperity have changed or adapted their strategies, and are navigating the current seas in a slightly different way. The short term is winning again. But the thing I would change in the book’s vision, if I were to take into account the last couple of years, is to put much more emphasis onto social capital: how can we move away from “me, me, me” to the “we”, to the “us”?

Countries can see a crisis like the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz as evidence for the case for renewables. Or they can turn to short-termism on energy, however dirty. How to convince governments that renewables are the way to go, even if there is short-term cost?

I think the answer is one word – resilience. The idea that we are dependent on imported gas either from Russia, or now the US, for producing simple goods we need in our daily life is something that should spur memories of what happened during Covid: we were all suddenly incredibly dependent on a couple of economic actors in a way which did not allow us to think long term. In corporate thinking, to put some resilience in is key to what is going to happen now.

Many global ESG efforts were made through the 2010s, in particular in Europe and the US. There has been progress in China, too, in building regulations around this. But in a world that is, perhaps, “deglobalising”, connections across nations are fraying. Do you think the principles of your “new nature of business” can endure, and also translate to countries of the Global South?

I think the rebuilding of national boundaries is very much intended to split the problem in several places. But what we try to talk about is to do it together. The splitting up of big blocs into small constituent parties, of course, is in the interests of autocrats. A couple of weeks ago I was in Washington DC, and the people I talked to in government were telling us very openly, “I’m sorry, we don’t want the European project to succeed, so we’re going to make sure we can do everything we can to break up the European Union because it will be too strong a bloc.” The new nature of business is about purposeful industry which helps us to create prosperity in a sustainable way. It’s not going to happen if we just pitch each other against each other.

Around us, there is constant conflict – Sudan, Gaza, Iran. War has no ESG strategy, and it is successfully balkanising interests. What is the environmental case to stop conflict?

There’s a school of thought, which I really don’t like, that says it must get worse before it gets better. I would prefer us to be more proactive than this. The risk that comes with international relationships, is how are we ever going to stop war if we cannot define it? War is no longer pitching two armies together. It is something that happens constantly. Russian robots trying to do something; disruptions in payment systems between Singapore and China. These things are happening all the time. We see in Europe the extent to which two economies are focussed on this – I mean, 40% of Russia’s GDP is on armament; Ukraine, probably more. If we were to think in ESG criteria, if you talk about social capital, we are going to need different incentives, because the incentive now is just destroying the neighbour, and that cannot be the right way to look forward. But I cannot at the moment see an international code that would settle the impact that war has on countries. The big wars of the moment have been done against every legal consideration. So this is not looking good.

You now lead Davos. There are COPs for climate, biodiversity and more – collections of stakeholders trying to come together to think of solutions. But what do agreements mean when multilateralism is weakening? When Donald Trump can, one fine day, say we are pulling out of the Paris agreement?

Our theme this year at Davos was “the spirit of dialogue.” We want to talk about growth because of the debt issue. We want to talk about livelihoods and the world of work. We want to talk about innovation, and we have to talk about geopolitics. We’re trying to put all this into the context of planetary boundaries. Right now, we are spending more than the planet can give us, and that is a road to nowhere. The idea of having that dialogue on the table in Davos becomes even more important. How do you lead Davos? Clearly the agenda we’ve discussed since the beginning – this idea of saying we need to act collectively – is in danger. How can you trust the government who bombs the people they’re negotiating peace with? How can you trust a government which does this with every international treaty? How can you trust a world order where might is right?

Since your book was released, there has been a lot of scrutiny on artificial intelligence and its potential environmental and social impacts. Many have fears about its impact on employment and work too. Do you see AI as an industry that can still fit within your vision of a new nature of business?

First, we need to measure the impact that AI can have on the system. The US stock exchange is at a historical high on the back of six or seven AI-adjacent companies. Half the countries on the planet are in some sort of conflict, and the US stock exchange is at a historical high. There is a disconnect there which we are going to have to deal with. I mean, the likelihood of a big financial crisis in the next three to six years strikes me as not impossible at all.

The idea of using AI to make more sense of the flood of data we are generating every day could be fantastically useful. But at the same time, there are consequences of its systemic use. It could be very dangerous for jobs, but for all sorts of other things. Education – what’s the point of going to school if you have everything at your fingertips anyway? How do you create an education system which allows people to use information in the right way rather than just acquiring it?

The new nature of business means doing something for sustainable prosperity, and if we want to do that in a way that really benefits the system, we should not refrain from using any tools. AI seems to be a tool just as good as another. We should not throw it away, but it has to be controlled and regulated.

There is a lot of concern about environmental impacts. Do you think that is central enough in discussions that you see at Davos and other multilateral forums?

“Well, the last one I attended, we had a senior member of the US administration addressing us and saying we need to provide more, and we need to burn more, fossil fuels. This is pretty terrifying stuff. You can see the pressure under which he probably is. But that’s no excuse. It’s the example of the bathtub [for fossil fuel use]. You go into a bathroom and the tub is overflowing. What do you do? Do you turn off the tap or mop up the floor? What they are telling us in the US now is that you turn the tap on a bit more, because then you’ll be much better at mopping up the floor.”

You talk in the book of your family’s pharmaceutical company, Roche, having a purpose to “do now what the patient needs next”. If we take nature, climate and the environment as our patient, what is the most vital action to take now?

We are not talking about the environment and nature because we love it, or because it’s beautiful. What should drive us here is humanity. The best way to do that is to include the cost of nature in the balance sheet. If we realise that nature is not limitless and that it has a price, I think we are going to get on in a better way. If you look at a tree and put value on it, a tree is worth its weight in wood. But it’s so much more than that because it’s alive. It’s connected to the rest of the forest. It’s part of an ecosystem. At the moment, all our economy is purely extractive. But if nature could stand its ground and be recognised as of value, we would be in a very different place.

This is all taking place in an information battle over environment and climate. How do you win this? How do you convince people that environmental change is around them now, particularly when fossil fuel lobbies are pouring money into disinformation?

We need to find something that is understood by all. The idea of going deeper and deeper into the science has not helped us. We need to make it more accessible. Maybe there is something we can learn from the populist movement – this notion of “what’s in it for me?” How can I translate the environmental crisis to my own person? That might be a way of getting there.

If I talk about nature in a boardroom, people say “oh, he just likes birds or trees”. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about sustainable prosperity, which means a circular economy, which means reuse, which means sufficiency. The communication battle will be won if you can convince your reader – our readers, collectively – that it is not something that concerns somebody else, but it is our concern, and we can do something at an individual level as well.

Dipankar Ghose

Dipankar Ghose is editor-in-chief at Dialogue Earth. He joined in 2026 and is based in London. Before this, Dipankar spent over a decade as an editor and correspondent in India, most recently as the deputy national editor of the Hindustan Times. His work has ranged across conflict, environment, policy and politics, and has been recognised with multiple honours. Dipankar holds a masters of science in modern South Asian studies from the University of Oxford. At Dialogue Earth, he leads a global editorial vision and strategy, with a focus on expanding storytelling from the Global South. He is passionate about journalism that brings the big picture and the everyday together, in the belief that global stories are most powerful when anchored in human experience.

Patrick Moore

Patrick Moore is Dialogue Earth’s industry transition editor, based in London. He was Latin America editor until 2025. Prior to joining the organisation in 2021, he worked as an editor and journalist for publications in China and the UK. He has an MSc in environment and development from King’s College London, during which he focused on global environmental governance and EU green policy. His areas of interest include the steel industry and its decarbonisation, and Chinese overseas investment and development initiatives.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

An important environmental story from China, synthesised from local and international media, May 8, 2026 

China’s CATL, the world’s largest electric vehicle battery maker, and energy storage company HyperStrong signed a three-year 60 gigawatt hour sodium-ion battery storage agreement on 27 April, making it the largest-scale deployment of the sodium-ion battery yet, according to a company press release.

With the price of lithium rising significantly since the end of 2025, some commentators predict large-scale commercialisation in the sodium-ion battery industry will take place in 2026.

Sodium-ion batteries are generally regarded as a more environmentally friendly and sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries. Most chemical components used in sodium-ion batteries are non-toxic and renewable, while lithium-ion batteries contain components that when improperly disposed of cause environmental pollution. Sodium is also nearly 1,200 times more abundant than lithium.

However, development of sodium-ion batteries faces setbacks such as low energy density and high cost due to the lack of economies of scale. At present, the cost of sodium-ion battery cells is CNY 0.5-0.7 per watt hour (USD 0.074–0.1), higher than that of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, which cost CNY 0.3-0.5 per watt hour, HiNa Battery Technology’s Li Shujun told Sina Finance.

CATL has significantly improved the energy density of its sodium-ion batteries, with those developed for passenger vehicles reaching 175 watt hour per kilogram, according to Beijing Daily. This energy density remains lower than the 200-350 range of lithium-ion batteries, however, limiting their use in high-end passenger vehicles and long-range commercial vehicles, the outlet noted.

But performance of sodium-ion batteries could gradually approach that of LFP batteries over the next three to five years, Chen Renjie, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the outlet. Against the backdrop of China’s policy support for new energy storage development, alongside rising lithium prices and continued energy supply shocks stemming from the Gulf conflict, momentum for advancing sodium-ion batteries seems likely to remain strong.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)