"Sweden has discovered what is billed as Europe’s biggest deposit of rare earth minerals — a crucial component of electronics and clean energy technology — giving a significant boost to the continent’s hunt for trade security."
"Bison once numbered in the tens of millions in the United States. Now, a nonprofit is working to restore the shortgrass prairie, where the American icons and their ecosystem can thrive again."
"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."
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 top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee blasted a provision in the proposed House rules package that would make it easier to transfer public lands, calling it an indication the new GOP majority intends to pursue a broadly pro-industry agenda."
"Earth’s protective ozone layer is slowly but noticeably healing at a pace that would fully mend the hole over Antarctica in about 43 years, a new United Nations report says."
"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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