Plant-based biofuels can help cut the use of fossil fuels in cars, planes and other equipment - and lower climate-changing emissions.

But they can have other costs, such as tropical forests cleared to grow oil-yielding palm and soy, or labour abuses on sugarcane plantations.

Our reporter Fabio Teixeira spent time in the sugarcane fields of Brazil, the world's second-biggest producer of ethanol, a biofuel that can be mixed with gasoline to reduce emissions from vehicles.

What he found is low-paid workers carrying out backbreaking labour in conditions becoming dangerously hotter as the planet warms, with some dying on the job. Despite the problems, some of the ethanol is making its way to Europe and the United States.

"My whole body would cramp," said Jose Cicero Lemos, a former sugarcane worker in the northeastern state of Alagoas who suffered from a condition known as "kangaroo". "You are conscious, but you lose control of your body, and you vomit all over yourself."

In Pakistan's cities, residents are facing a different kind of risk: choking air, with Lahore this month declared the most air-polluted city in the world.

But with most of the smog this time of year coming from vehicles and things like crop-stubble burning, a new reduction in taxes on electric vehicles could help reduce the deadly pollution - and carbon emissions.

While Pakistan's electric-vehicle charging infrastructure still needs work and the poor will struggle to afford the switch, the tax exemptions "make the price point competitive" for more people, said Malik Amin Aslam, who advises the prime minister on climate change.

The need for a "just transition" to a climate-smart future - with benefits reaching through society and those in vanishing industries aided to reskill - is becoming clearer, and got new prominence at the COP26 climate talks as India pushed back against a faster phase-out of coal, which it fears could hurt jobs and energy buyers.

Workers "need to have hope that there will be jobs for themselves and their children, that they'll be able to put food on the table," Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, told a conference run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation last week.

Need some good news? Community-led efforts to save people from fiercer floods are taking off in northeast India, while in Indonesia, harvesting a little-known nut is helping keep forests standing.

In Uganda, bamboo "fences" planted along waterways are holding back river floods, and in London, the mayor's office is finding ways to push greener homes and cleaner air despite limited powers.

See you next week! 

Laurie

EXCLUSIVE-Boom in sugar-based biofuel leaves Brazil's workers with a bitter taste
Brazil is the world's second biggest producer of the biofuel ethanol - but it has a heavy human cost in the country's sugarcane fields

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