"After recovering from Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain them, Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes are disappearing as a regional drought enters its fourth year and upstream dams cut off water flows. Marsh Arabs, resident for millennia, are leaving, and biodiversity is collapsing."
"The amount of excess heat buried in the planet’s oceans, a strong marker of climate change, reached a record high in 2022, reflecting more stored heat energy than in any year since reliable measurements were available in the late 1950s, a group of scientists reported Wednesday."
"The Biden administration is using a new opening at a powerful offshore energy agency to elevate a critic of fossil fuels who previously was blocked from a top Interior Department job because of opposition from oil industry allies in the Senate."
"The latest in a series of intense winter storms continued to lash Northern California on Tuesday, bringing thunderstorms, heavy rain, wind and hail to the waterlogged region as the death toll from the extreme weather climbs."
If you’re looking to engage key constituencies for your journalism — whether editors, sources, students or people who have been marginalized — a new set of short videos from award-winning journalists (like KESQ's Angela Chen, at left) can serve as a helpful resource. Inside Story has a roadmap of how to make smart use of these video nuggets to, for instance, convince newsroom powerbrokers to give you more time and support for ambitious stories.
Water has always been a precious commodity in the western states. Now, with rapid population growth and a drying climate, the way this resource is shared and distributed is becoming more contentious across the region. Freelance journalist Jennifer Oldham talks about the tensions between supply and demand and how to drill down into water rights laws and policies.
"A draft update of the state’s $50 billion coastal master plan predicts that 61 new projects to build or protect land, a dozen new levees, and new efforts to elevate, flood-proof or relocate flood-prone homes will reduce annual hurricane storm surge damages by at least $11 billion per year by 2073."
"Salt marshes, excellent reservoirs of carbon, are living ecosystems with vegetation and microscopic organisms that live, breathe, poop and die in the marsh mud."
"The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that it has reached an agreement with a pipeline operator to clean up a spill that dumped 14,000 bathtubs’ worth of crude oil into a rural Kansas creek."
"Without dramatic cuts to water consumption, Utah’s Great Salt Lake is on track to disappear within five years, a dire new report warns, imperiling ecosystems and exposing millions of people to toxic dust from the drying lake bed."
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