Harvest time has come, but ongoing droughts have left farmers with nowhere to send their grain. The Mississippi River, which carries 60 percent of the country’s grain exports, has reached historically low water levels. This week, the Mississippi reached minus-10.75 feet in Memphis, Tennessee, a level never before seen. “It’s never been this bad in […]
Every year for the past seven years, the medical journal the Lancet has published a report summarizing the previous year’s research on how climate change is affecting human health around the globe. In 2020, the journal drew an exceedingly grim conclusion: that climate change threatens to unravel 50 years of public health gains. This year’s […]
This story is part of the Grist series Parched, an in-depth look at how climate change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems. For Anje Duckels, Florida was home. Duckels, 41, was born in the Sunshine State; her family had lived there for generations. But housing prices in Fort Myers just kept rising, so she and […]
Over the past several months, Britain has seen the death of a monarch, the proclamation of a new one, the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the election of his replacement, Liz Truss, who almost immediately sent the British economy into freefall. Now, Britain is getting its third prime minister in just as many […]
Nearly 200 countries pledged to cut carbon emissions from commercial aviation on Friday, marking the global community’s most ambitious pledge to regulate international air travel’s contributions to climate change. The International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency known by the abbreviation ICAO that represents 193 member states, announced the new goal at the conclusion […]
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Extreme heat contributed to as many as 450 deaths in the Phoenix area this summer, in what could be the deadliest year on record for the desert city in Arizona. The medical examiner for Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, has so […]
In the last century, only nine hurricanes with winds topping 150 miles per hour have made landfall in the United States. Hurricane Ian became the tenth on Wednesday afternoon, striking the coast of southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm. Ian submerged entire barrier islands, ripped houses apart, and pushed a huge wall of water […]
Brazilian voters head to the polls this weekend to pick their next head of state, with a choice between right-wing incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, a former union leader from the country’s left-wing Workers’ Party and past president of Brazil. After a tumultuous first term, Bolsonaro, commonly referred […]
The Biden administration announced a new environmental justice initiative over the weekend, with $3 billion in block grants to go to communities and neighborhoods hard hit by pollution. Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights will have a prominent role in the […]
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. More than 14,000 miles of new oil pipelines are under development around the world, a distance equivalent to almost twice the Earth’s diameter, a report has revealed. The projects, led by the U.S., Russia, China, and India, are “dramatically at odds […]