"Reuters traveled the bayous of hard-hit Terrebonne, Lafourche, Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes in recent days, speaking with more than 40 residents. All said they felt abandoned by state and federal officials. A few said they had not received any type of support from any level of government."
It sometimes feels like journalists lurch from one catastrophe (or hurricane, flood, wildfire, heat wave) to the next. But that can mean missing the bigger story: Disasters, increasingly linked to climate extremes, are often interlocking events, in which one system failure causes the next and the next. The latest Backgrounder explores three case studies, and how news media can focus attention on steps toward resilience.
"Bangladesh is one of the world's largest exporters of labour, but thousands have been left without work as the pandemic slows economies around the world".
As heat, rising seas and drought render swaths of the planet uninhabitable, millions, if not billions of people may eventually have to relocate to terrain in the latitudes best suited to survival. The toughest challenge that lies before us isn’t reducing emissions, it’s relocating people. Neither the IPCC nor any other agency is currently empowered to address this fundamental question of human geography."
"More than a month after Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm, battered Louisiana's coast, Roy and Annie Parfait still can't go home. The Native couple, elders of the Houma tribe, are staying with family while they wait to see if federal money comes through to help them repair their roof in Dulac."
"The tribe has survived for more than a thousand years in the arid mesas. The megadrought gripping the Southwest is testing that resilience."
"The swell of Haitian migrants attempting to come to the U.S. shows the country needs a plan to help environmental refugees, advocates say, while warning that the swift deportation of those camped in Texas is indicative of how climate migrants could be treated in the years to come."
"Young people around the world spilled into streets, city squares and local parks on Friday, following the call of Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, for the first big, in-person, coordinated climate protests since the start of the coronavirus pandemic."
"People born today will suffer many times more extreme heatwaves and other climate disasters over their lifetimes than their grandparents, research has shown. The study is the first to assess the contrasting experience of climate extremes by different age groups and starkly highlights the intergenerational injustice posed by the climate crisis."
Two outstanding features — one on air pollution from a local coke plant in Pennsylvania, another on deaths from a shellfish toxin in Alaska, and both focused on public health, neglected communities and environmental justice — are the subject of the new Inside Story Q&A. Society of Environmental Journalists’ award-winners Nancy Averett and Zoya Teirstein share their reporting insights and advice.
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