Decades of inadequate investment in water infrastructure has exacerbated the economic challenges faced by water and wastewater utilities in the era of COVID-19, according to a new report released Aug. 26 by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the U.S. Water Alliance’s Value of Water Campaign.
More than 140 cities and counties in California intend to update their long-term plans over the next two years to include environmental justice, meaning air pollution, water quality, and other factors affecting disadvantaged communities would get a closer look.
Local governments across the country typically have general plans that spell out long-term visions for land use, open space, housing, safety, and other planning factors. Some local governments haven’t updated their overall general plans since the 1970s, said Erik de Kok, a program manager in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research.
Using tax dollars to move whole communities out of flood zones, an idea long dismissed as radical, is swiftly becoming policy, marking a new and more disruptive phase of climate change.
A recent UCLA study says that in the next 40 years, California could likely see a flood massive enough to cause nearly $1 trillion of damage, force millions of people to evacuate, and leave houses in California’s Central Valley 30 to 40 feet underwater. And the state is ill-prepared when it comes to infrastructure like dams that could prevent flooding.
California was caught flat-footed by the climate-driven challenges it has faced last week: extreme temperatures, unseasonable lightning strikes, diminishing water supplies and red flag fire conditions. As a result, CalFire was short on firefighters to battle the blazes and the electric utilities had too little power to serve all of their customers at the same time.
Urgent action on water security is essential to better prepare societies for future global health crises, say experts at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and Northwestern University in the U.S.
Millions of people rely on real estate websites when they’re hoping to buy or rent a home. Major sites such as Zillow, Redfin, Trulia and Realtor.com feature kitchens, bathrooms, mortgage estimates and even school ratings. But those sites don’t show buyers whether the house is likely to flood while they’re living there. Now, Realtor.com has become the first site to disclose information about a home’s flood risk and how climate change could increase that risk in the coming decades, potentially signaling a major shift in consumers’ access to information about climate threats.
The Colorado River millennial mega-drought continues, despite robust snowpack last winter. Above-average temperatures in spring resulted in a paltry 57% runoff, nowhere near enough water to refill the reservoirs that remain half-empty. Based on these conditions, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently determined that 2021 will be a “tier zero” year under the Lower Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plan, with reduced water deliveries for Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.
When blackouts rolled across California on August 14 and 15, briefly cutting off power to several hundred thousand households and their air conditioners, fridges, and medical devices during a pandemic and a record-breaking heat wave, some critics blamed the state’s heavy reliance on solar and wind energy. As the state pursues its ambitious renewable energy goals, they asked, will electric power become unreliable?
An international team of researchers has found that dam building in the 20th century offset some of the factors that would have led to a higher rise in sea levels. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their study of the factors that have led to a rise in global sea levels and what they learned.
