Water & Oceans

"It’s the kind of choice that climate change will be forcing over and over."

"With utility industry groups pressuring the EPA to change regulations on coal ash facility maintenance and cleanup, environmental activists in the Southeast worry that companies won’t be required to take responsibility for long-term monitoring of coal ash ponds and landfills."

"California’s largest lake is drying up. The Salton Sea has been shrinking for years, and fish and birds have been dying. The dry lakebed already spews toxic dust into the air, threatening a region with hundreds of thousands of people. And the crisis is about to get much worse."

"UNITED NATIONS — The 193 U.N. member nations issued an urgent call for action Friday to reverse the decline in the health and productivity of the world’s oceans — with the United States backing the action plan but rejecting its support for the Paris agreement to tackle climate change."

"UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that by 2050 global demand for fresh water is projected to grow by more than 40 percent and at least a quarter of the world's population will live in countries with a 'chronic or recurrent' lack of clean water."

"Ships arriving in Chesapeake Bay ports bring more than just cargo — in 2013 they also inadvertently released an estimated 10 billion live zooplankton from other parts of the world, a finding that surprised the researchers who recently reported the results."

"The Mexican government, tycoon Carlos Slim and U.S. actor Leonardo DiCaprio on Wednesday unveiled a joint plan to protect a tiny porpoise in the Gulf of California that has become a potent symbol of critically endangered animal species."

"Cities lining the U.S. coasts should brace for a lot more flooding — from 'nuisance' floods that shut down streets during high tides to deluges that take lives and wipe out infrastructure."

"TRAVERSE CITY, MI -- Native American tribes with treaty rights to natural resources north of Grand Rapids are quietly coordinating with Michigan officials who are deciding whether to let Nestle Waters North America extract more spring water from trout stream headwaters where the tribes have inland fishing rights."

"An agreement reached last year between the U.S. and Canada may force state and federal officials to impose new limits on the amount of fertilizer that can be applied by farmers in parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. The two countries are seeking to halve the amount of nutrients, mostly from farms, that wash into Lake Erie. High levels of nutrients can cause algae blooms that contaminate the lake, an important drinking water source."