In the wake of heat waves, global warming, forest fires, storms, droughts and a rising number of hurricanes, the U.N. weather agency warned Tuesday that the number of people who need international humanitarian help could rise 50% by 2030 compared to the 108 million who needed it worldwide in 2018.
The industry that operates America’s hydroelectric dams and several environmental groups announced an unusual agreement Tuesday to work together to get more clean energy from hydropower while reducing the environmental harm from dams, in a sign that the threat of climate change is spurring both sides to rethink their decades-long battle over a large but contentious source of renewable power.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a $108 million Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) loan to the Stockton Public Financing Authority to help modernize the city’s wastewater treatment facility and reduce nitrogen discharges to the San Joaquin River. With this loan, EPA is supporting a regionally significant project that will improve water quality and support public health and the economies of the California Delta.
A high-stakes Supreme Court confirmation and COVID-19 negotiations may be the focus on Capitol Hill, but a sprawling water infrastructure bill is still advancing quickly behind the scenes.
A subset of so-called forever chemicals, used to make thousands of industrial and consumer products, can’t be deemed “low-concern” despite chemical manufacturers’ arguments, a group of international scientists said in a paper released Tuesday.
After a brief interlude of mild temperatures Saturday, a warm-up is forecast to begin Sunday as upper-level high pressure builds into California, the National Weather Service said. High temperatures will climb by several degrees on Sunday.
A few weeks after the devastating 2017 Tubbs Fire raged through parts of northern California, Gerald and Serene Buhrz returned to their Santa Rosa home, turned on the kitchen sink faucet, and were hit with a stinging smell.
A new experiment is looking into how drought conditions, like we’re currently in, can affect water traveling downstream the Colorado River. The pilot project involved shepherding water from a high mountain reservoir to the Colorado-Utah state line. The project is a partnership between Colorado Springs Utilities, Aurora Water and Pueblo Board of Water Works.
California American Water and Marina city officials are in the process of setting up talks on the company’s desalination project after exchanging letters over the past several weeks. In a Sept. 25 letter, Cal Am president Rich Svindland reached out to Marina officials, proposing talks aimed at resolving differences over the company’s paused desalination project and suggested a series of “possible options that could be mutually beneficial for the city, Cal Am, and the region as a whole.”
Protecting intact peatlands and restoring degraded ones are crucial steps if the world is to counter climate change, European researchers said Friday. In a study, they said peat bogs, wetlands that contain large amounts of carbon in the form of decaying vegetation that has built up over centuries, could help the world achieve climate goals like the limit of 2 degrees Celsius of postindustrial warming that is part of the 2015 Paris agreement.
