Talking about health and water can feel heavy, especially when words like “carcinogen” or “cancer” come up. Realising our water might carry health risks can leave us feeling vulnerable and anxious for our family’s well-being. But here’s the good news: knowledge is our best filter. 

This World Water Day, March 22nd, we aren’t just sharing a “scary” study; we’re sharing the science of prevention. When we know the real numbers, we can demand the real solutions. While industrial meat and dairy production is expanding, a massive scientific alarm is sounding from Denmark to New Zealand. It’s called Nitrate (NO₃). But, what is it?

Nitrate is a colourless, odourless, and tasteless chemical compound. In industrial farming, it comes from the gross overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and the staggering volume of manure and urine from intensive meat and dairy farms. When plants can’t absorb it all, it leaches deep into the earth and into the groundwater, the source of many people’s drinking water.

While Big Ag executives hide behind the claim that they are ‘feeding the world,’ their own run-off is poisoning the very communities they claim to serve. Here are the 5 facts about Nitrate (NO₃) that show our current water laws need an upgrade.

1. The current nitrate limit is a 1950s relic

First, breathe. The global health standard of 50 mg/L of drinking water nitrate isn’t a “danger cliff” you fall off, it’s just a “hopelessly out of date” limit from 1958. Science has simply gotten better at seeing the small details since then. It was set then to prevent “Blue Baby Syndrome” (acute oxygen deprivation in infants), this limit was never designed to protect you from the chronic exposure risks we can now measure in 2026.

Think of it like car safety: in 1958, we didn’t have mandatory seatbelts or airbags. We aren’t in a crisis because the water changed overnight; we’re in a moment of clarity because our scientific “microscopes” got sharper. We’ve traded rotary phones for smartphones; it’s time we traded “1950s basic safety” for modern medical precision.

2. 3.87 mg/L is an “early warning,” a scientific benchmark for precaution

The landmark study from Denmark tracking 2.7 million people over 23 years found that long-term exposure to drinking water nitrate levels above 3.87 mg/L is where we should start paying attention to bowel cancer risks. That is 12 times lower than the current “safe” limit.

Think of this number as a smoke detector for our water. It doesn’t mean there is a fire in every glass; it means we have the ability to detect risk much earlier than we did in the 1950s. By identifying this “Early Warning” level, we can push for source water protection before it does more harm to our communities.

3. Our bodies are natural filters (up to a point)

Your body is an incredible biological system, but even the best filter has a limit. While we naturally process small amounts of nitrate from food, drinking water with high concentrations from industrial runoff can overwhelm our bodies. In the acidic environment of the stomach, this excess is converted into harmful N-nitroso compounds, which are linked to increased cancer risks.

We shouldn’t be forced to be the “unpaid filters” for corporate waste. The latest science shows this biological overload has a real cost. A growing body of scientific evidence is showing health risks from exposure to nitrate at much lower levels than the current legal limits in most countries.

High nitrate levels can also act as an “Oxygen Thief,” making it harder for the blood to carry the vital oxygen a developing baby needs. A massive study of 1.2 million births even linked nitrate-contaminated water above 22.5mg/L NO₃ to a 47% higher risk of preterm birth. We aren’t “falling off a cliff” at the current limit, but we are being “soaked” by a standard that was never designed to take account of long-term health risks. 

4. We already have the map to fix it

The best part about modern science? It gives us a GPS for protection. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), Spain and Denmark, organisations have mapped where nitrate levels are highest. This is incredible news because it means we don’t have to guess. We can start by protecting the “Red Zones”, the specific areas where communities rely on groundwater the most.

Is your tap in a “Red Zone”? Knowledge is your first filter. You can explore the data for your region right now. Explore the Greenpeace Aotearoa: Know Your Nitrate Map Explore the Greenpeace Spain: Nitrate Water Pollution Map Explore the Greenpeace Denmark: Know your Nitrate Map

5. Transitioning is smarter than cleaning

The most encouraging part? We already know how to fix this. In 2024, Danish researchers reviewed the data and concluded that the societal cost of nitrate-linked illness is estimated at $317 million USD annually in Denmark. A similar study in Aotearoa New Zealand calculated health costs of $43 million a year, in New Zealand.

Denmark’s solution wasn’t to panic, but to pivot. The Government commissioned an expert working group to recommend a health-based standard. Their advice? Introduce a 6 mg/L limit on nitrate and convert high-risk farmland back into nature or organic buffer zones. 

The World Water Day goal: A health-based standard

We don’t want you to be afraid of your tap; we want you to be proud of it. 

Imagine a world where “perfectly legal” actually means “perfectly safe.” Where the water flowing into your home isn’t a source of “what-ifs,” but a testament to a food system that respects the Earth and the families it feeds. By calling for a new, science-led assessment of our water standards, we aren’t just moving a number on a page. We are drawing a line in the sand and demanding a precautionary approach that prioritises families over factory farms. We are forcing a long-overdue look at the outdated limits in high-livestock “red zones” to ensure that the water in our taps is truly safe for a lifetime. It is time to force Big Ag to clean up its act so that our communities, and our health, are never the cost of their corporate profit again.

History shows us that the law is often the last thing to change, long after the science has sounded the alarm. We saw it with leaden paint, where children’s health was traded for industrial convenience for decades. We saw it with asbestos, where vested interests spent millions to bury the truth while workers paid with their lives.

In both cases, the science was clear, but the policy only shifted when people power finally overcame corporate profit. Today, we are at that same crossroads with our water. The 50 mg/L limit is a more than 60-year-old relic of an era that didn’t foresee the true cost of industrial runoff. This World Water Day, let’s choose evidence over anxiety. Let’s demand a standard that reflects the best of modern science, not the worst of Big Ag’s industrial habits.

The science is clear. The roadmap is ready. Now, we just need the political will.

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Amanda Larsson is the Food and Agriculture Global Campaign Lead at Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Unless you’re studying for a high school science exam, lithium, nickel, copper, and cobalt probably won’t carry much meaning beyond being elements on the periodic table. But if there is a time to pull out those dusty science books, it would be now.

Across various sectors, these minerals are of increasing importance, including – perhaps most prominently – renewable energy generation and storage, and electric vehicles; but also other large and growing sectors such as military and AI (e.g., for datacenters). And around the world, many governments and companies are competing to control who can dig them up.

The global minerals rush

These raw Earth materials are often called “critical minerals” by governments and the mining industry, typically a reflection of national political priorities rather than essential societal or energy transition needs. This risks turning these minerals into the focus of a new neo-colonial resource grab, with powerful countries and corporations racing to control them, and wasting their potential to power a fair and green transition.

Globally – from Chile, Argentina, DRC, Indonesia, Sweden to the deep sea – the extractivist rush for minerals puts vital ecosystems, peoples’ rights and the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and local communities at risk. The geopolitical scramble over minerals has also been linked to the current US government’s aggressive annexation threats to Greenland.

Minerals have different uses, and there are no guarantees that the minerals mined “in the name of energy transition” are used for wind turbines or energy storage. For example, big tech companies are consuming more and more of these minerals to expand AI infrastructure (such as datacenters). In addition to driving up energy demand and emissions, the vision of ‘progress’ advocated by big tech oligarchs also threatens to worsen extractive pressures on people and nature, and divert minerals away from energy transition. Moreover, mineral use in the expansion of AI-driven warfare systems has been found as a particularly concerning development.  

In light of this, it is more important than ever to demand coordinated action to ensure that minerals are used where they matter most: principally, for a fast fair fossil fuel phase out and a transition to clean, affordable renewable energy and sustainable transport systems. 

So how do we protect people and nature in the energy transition?

Reduce, recycle, restrict for a safeguarded energy transition

In a report commissioned by Greenpeace International, and authored by academics at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) in Australia, we’ve found that an ambitious energy transition can be achieved without mining in vital ecosystems – whether on land or at sea. With visionary leadership, sound policies, and innovative technologies, we can keep global warming within 1.5°C, safeguard vital ecosystems and reduce extractive pressures on people and nature.

Here’s five ways how:

1. Reduce mineral demand with improved public transport, car-sharing, and smaller, more efficient vehicles

Accessibility, efficiency, and reliability in how cities are governed make them great places to live in. Having improved public transport systems is one of the most effective ways to reduce the need for mineral-intensive electric vehicles and the batteries that power them. In addition to expanding high-quality public transport, employing car-sharing schemes, and investing in active mobility (e.g. walking and cycling infrastructure) would significantly decrease reliance on individual car ownership. 

As an added bonus improving our public transport systems is essential not just for climate, but for connecting people to opportunities. Mobility justice is climate justice.

2. Incentivise and substitute battery technology towards alternatives requiring less lithium, cobalt, or nickel

Think about how many items you use that require batteries? Without it, our personal gadgets would be useless; we wouldn’t have advancement in items like electric cars or bikes; and batteries can also help store and use more eco-friendly sources of energy, such as solar and wind. But the production of large batteries is highly mineral-intensive. 

Luckily, over the last decade, technological innovation has transformed the market. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, now widely commercialised, eliminate the need for cobalt and nickel, reducing pressure on these supply chains. At the same time, sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries are advancing rapidly, and offer a pathway to significantly reduce mineral demand for lithium, according to the report. It shows that, using innovative battery technologies and energy storage systems that do not require these key minerals would significantly reduce supply gaps for key minerals and ease potential development pressures for new mines targeting them.

3. Design for circularity and scale up recycling 

We all know the drill by now – reduce, reuse, recycle. When it comes to transition minerals, this maxim is of key importance. 

By maximising collection and the recovery of transition minerals from end-of-life transition technologies, recycling can significantly reduce the need for new extraction. Investing in advanced recycling technologies and collection systems, alongside policy incentives that reward high recycled mineral content in new products, ensures that transition minerals re-enter the supply chain. 

Additional circularity measures like extending technologies’ lifespans, improving repairability, incentivising reuse, designing and standardising components for easy disassembly to help with repair and recycling, and enforcing extended producer responsibility (EPR), could also contribute to reducing overall mineral demands. 

4. Prioritise mineral use for essential energy transition needs

Minerals are finite resources, and the practice of mining carries significant social, labour, and environmental risks. Therefore, the use of mineral resources should be prioritised where they matter most – in renewable energy and its storage and in electric mobility to enable a fast fair fossil fuel phase out. 

Governments and industries must prioritise mineral use towards a fast, fair, and just energy transition. Coupled with supply chain transparency, prioritising minerals for energy transition ensures finite minerals are used to advance climate goals that benefit all people and the planet.   

5. Protect key ‘Restricted Areas’ from mining development

Protecting human rights and ecological integrity is a non-negotiable foundation of a just and green transition. Restricted Areas have high environmental, ecological, and natural values, and may include Indigenous Peoples and local community territories. Defining and protecting these Restricted Areas is a crucial step to ensuring that mining of transition minerals respects the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to their territories, and does not destroy biodiversity, critical natural ecosystems, natural carbon storage, freshwater systems and oceans. 

After all, what is “critical” here is not a minerals scramble largely driven by geopolitical rivalry. Neither the AI race, nor the power and profit chased by States and corporations.

Critical are the ecosystems that all living beings on the planet depend on. 

Critical are the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. 

Critical is meeting peoples’ needs and ensuring that current and future generations can live in a safe climate. 

For this, it’s essential for our world leaders to take courageous and coordinated action to protect people and the planet, and ensure our Earth’s minerals help create a green and just future, rather than being exploited for short-term profit. 

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Elsa Lee is the Co-Head of Biodiversity at Greenpeace International

The geopolitical tremor in the Strait of Hormuz has sent fertiliser prices into the stratosphere. But amid the devastating loss of life and destruction already unfolding, farmers and families are also being forced to worry about the cost of the next harvest, a different kind of machinery is whirring into motion in Washington and Brussels: the lobbying machine. Now is the time to break free from their playbook and implement just solutions that feed people, not corporate pockets.

History shows that for big agribusiness, a global crisis is less of a disaster and more of a strategic opportunity. We are about to witness a masterclass in how to parlay “food security” fears into corporate welfare and the gutting of environmental protections.

But we know their playbook!

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1. Weaponising “food security” 

Expect the term “food security” to be hollowed out and weaponised. Large-scale industrial players are already positioning themselves as the only thing standing between the public and empty shelves. In truth, it is this highly consolidated, chemical-dependent model of industrial farming that is making our global food system so fragile in the first place.

Their narrative is calculated: The world is in chaos, so the government must stop “burdening” agribusiness with regulations. They will attempt to use a temporary supply chain shock to permanently dismantle hard-won environmental standards.

2. The demand for deregulation

Their immediate targets are always environmental and community safeguards. Under the guise of “unleashing production,” lobbyists are likely to push for:

• Suspending rules to allow the spreading of animal manure, sacrificing groundwater safety and community health. 
• Stalling pesticide reduction laws with false claims that they threaten food security, despite scientists proving that long-term security is impossible without healthy soil and pollinators. 
• Forcing legal bypasses to destroy millions of hectares of land previously set aside for bees, birds and soil recovery. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this script. During the 2022 supply chain shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the same type of lobbyists leveraged geopolitical instability to wrangle these concessions out of the European Commission. History is repeating itself as the European farmers’ lobby (Copa-Cogeca) is seizing this crisis to demand even more environmental rollbacks.

We’re also seeing lobbyists coming out in force in the UK and the US where, in a letter to President Donald Trump, the American Farm Bureau Federation took a predictable “emergency” stance, stating:

“The current volatility requires an immediate suspension of regulatory hurdles… We cannot prioritise administrative red tape over the ability of American farmers to feed a world in crisis.”

What this statement obscures is how farming has shifted from locally-owned, resilient family businesses to massive industrial “factory” operations run by some of the world’s wealthiest corporations. The factory farming model is inherently fragile – as soon as one gear in the global supply chain snaps, the entire machine breaks down.

3. The great public-to-private wealth transfer

While big business demands less “interference” from the state in the form of rules, they are simultaneously demanding more “interference” in the form of cash. Agribusiness is archetypal of a system that socialises the risk and privatises the profit. 

When prices are low, they dominate the market; when input prices spike, they demand “bridge payments” to keep their fragile model afloat.

Meanwhile the rest of us pay the price. The cost of cleaning up polluted drinking water, for example, generally isn’t paid by Big Ag. It’s paid by everyday families, through taxes and rates.

The predictable outcome?

• Taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for emergency fertiliser subsidies, effectively bailing out the super rich Big Ag executives.
• Farmers remain trapped in a cycle of chemical addiction, lining the pockets of fertiliser giants like Nutrien and The Mosaic Company. During the 2022 crisis, these two companies saw their profits reach staggering record highs while farmers struggled to break even.
• Agribusinesses announce record windfall profits, fuelled by the very volatility they claimed would ruin them. In 2022, Cargill reportedly raked in a record US $165 billion in revenue – a 23% increase, during a global food crisis.
  

Real food security comes from your local farmer

If we want true independence, we have to stop propping up chemical-addicted industrial farming. Local, ecological farming is the only real path to food sovereignty. By working with nature to fix nutrients in the soil naturally, farmers can break the cycle of dependence.

This does four amazing things at once:

• Saves money: Farmers slash their costs, protecting your food prices.
• Cleans our water: It stops toxic chemical run-off from polluting our rivers and drinking water.
• Protects wildlife: It restores space for bees, birds, and biodiversity.
• Fights climate change: It cuts the massive emissions of the industrial food system.

Real food security isn’t something we can buy from a chemical factory in another country. It doesn’t come from trading off clean drinking water for more polluting production. And it certainly doesn’t come from handing over more cash to the already-wealthy.

Here’s what should happen instead

Short Term: Stop bailing out the corporate middleman. If emergency funds are deployed, they should go directly to regular people to offset food costs, rather than into the bank accounts of chemical suppliers and millionaire shareholders.

Long Term: Fund the transition, not the status quo. Food security is grown from the ground up through healthy soil and local resilience.

We cannot allow the greed of the agribusiness lobby to use this crisis as a mandate for deregulation. It is time to fund a model that serves our communities and our planet, not just the billionaires at the top of the food chain.

Stop Big Meat and Dairy

It’s time to cut through corporate lies, cut agriculture emissions and shift towards sustainable agroecology.

Sign now!

Amanda Larsson is the Food and Agriculture Global Campaign Lead at Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Brussels – Activists have projected a golden facade and the words “TRUMP TOWER” onto the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, mimicking one of President Trump’s skyscrapers, with a Greenpeace message urging EU leaders meeting today to stop capitulating to his demands. The Greenpeace Belgium activists are protesting the EU’s continued dependence on the US for oil and gas imports, the removal of protections for the environment, public health and privacy, and the lack of resistance to the US’s breaches of international law.

Greenpeace EU political campaigner Ariadna Rodrigo said: “Trump wants to dominate Europe, and so far most European politicians seem to let him have his way, so we’re helping them redecorate. Trump flouts international law, and instead of resisting him EU leaders are ripping up protections for our health and environment, and hooking Europe to US oil and gas, to please him and his billionaire friends. 

“When EU politicians say they want to ‘simplify rules for competitiveness’, what they mean is letting companies use more toxic chemicals in our clothes and food, or letting tech bros invade our privacy. Moving to 100% renewable energy and ecological agriculture would break our fossil fuel dependence, and Trump’s stranglehold, while shielding people’s bills from geopolitical turmoil. The EU must resist Trump’s agenda of chaos and cruelty, and start defending ordinary people instead of corporations and the super rich.”

The EU’s 27 heads of government are meeting to discuss Europe’s reaction to the US and Israeli attacks on Iran and the related increase in energy prices, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the next EU budget, as well as their own efforts to deregulate the EU’s protections for the environment, public health and digital privacy.

The US government and its corporate lobbyists have been putting pressure on the EU to dismantle some of its environmental and social protections, such as the EU’s anti-deforestation law, the methane regulation, and the digital tax.

EU leaders have mostly been hesitant to condemn, or been openly supportive of, President Trump’s recent threats and attacks on Venezuela, Cuba and Iran, despite concerns that these breach international law. Greenpeace is calling for all governments to uphold international law and to protect civilians, and for the EU to push for an immediate end to military hostilities and blockades of humanitarian aid.

As part of a proposed EU-US trade deal to lower tariffs on the trade of goods between the EU and US, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pledged that the EU would import $750 billion of US energy by the end of 2028, mostly oil and gas. By 2025, the US already provided 27% of EU gas imports, which could grow to 40% by 2030.

The European Parliament’s trade committee is scheduled to vote on the deal’s approval, which would then send it to the whole Parliament for a vote in its plenary session, possibly on 25-26 March. Greenpeace is warning that the EU’s dependence on fossil fuel imports, as well as accelerating the climate crisis, gives leverage to authoritarian governments over the EU, and puts European households at risk of volatile prices. Greenpeace is calling on Members of the European Parliament to reject the EU-US trade deal. 

ENDS

Photos and video from the activity available via to download the Greenpeace Media Library

Notes:

[1] Greenpeace EU media briefing on US pressure to deregulate EU rules protecting people and nature

Contacts:

Ariadna Rodrigo, Greenpeace EU political campaigner: +32 (0)479 99 69 22, ariadna.rodrigo@greenpeace.org 

Greenpeace EU press desk: +32 (0)2 274 1911, pressdesk.eu@greenpeace.org