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"After years of wait, veterans who had been exposed to contaminated drinking water while assigned to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina may now be able to receive a portion of government disability benefits totaling more than $2 billion."
The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com will create a Louisiana Coastal Reporting Team in early 2017, made possible in part through a major grant from SEJ's Fund for Environmental Journalism. The new team will be co-led by longtime SEJ member and award-winning environment reporter Mark Schleifstein. A national search is under way for two additional environmental journalists to work full-time on the Team.
"Louisiana is losing its coast at a rapid rate because of rising sea levels, development and sinking marshland. Officials are trying to rebuild those marshes and the wetlands, but much of the coast can't be saved."
"The head of the Department of Environmental Quality will stay at the agency, despite an incoming Democratic administration."
"A top state environmental regulator who has urged Trump to rein in the EPA and has been criticized for his lenient treatment of polluters, stepped down over the holidays - giving himself a staff position that will be protected under the new North Carolina administration.
"Five people died Monday when violent storms barreled through the South, causing power outages, flooding and downed power lines."
"The Louisiana coast loses a football field’s worth of land every 38 minutes. This staggering rate of land loss has been brought on by climate change and coastal erosion accelerated by human activities, including water diversion projects and damage done by the oil and gas industry."
"Like many Louisiana coastal residents, the Native Americans of Grand Bayou village have seen the landscape surrounding their community collapse over the past 50 years. The lush, freshwater wetlands and high ground that sustained them for centuries is now a ragged patchwork of crumbling salt marshes and expanding lagoons."
Even if the incoming Trump Administration retreats from climate action, as many fear, state and local governments may fill the gap on climate policy. Our latest Issue Backgrounder takes a closer look, and offers sources and resources to help you cover the more localized climate stories that may result.
"Residents of Princeville, N.C., are considering the prospect of leaving their town after enduring a 100-year flood for the second time in 17 years."
"The federal government on Wednesday banned mountaintop coal mining from more than 500 miles of ridges in East Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains, handing a victory to the state and to conservationists who have long sought to protect the region’s forests and streams."
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