Right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella holds a razor-thin lead in Colombia’s preliminary presidential vote count, positioning the Donald Trump ally to clear the way for expanded fossil fuel extraction, including controversial fracking projects. A de la Espriella presidency would mark a sharp reversal for one of the world’s most ambitious experiments in fossil fuel […]

This story was produced in partnership with the Texas Newsroom, the state’s network of public radio stations. Something moved John Byrum. He believed he could succeed where others had not. The executive director of the Nueces River Authority (NRA)—a small, rural agency based 200 miles from the coast—decided to take up the banner, in 2024, […]

Environmental and Indigenous rights defenders remained among the world’s most targeted human rights advocates in 2025, despite landmark rulings by international courts affirming governments’ obligations to protect both the environment and those who defend it. At least 358 human rights defenders were killed last year, according to a report released last week by Front Line […]

A lawsuit filed by Greenpeace International against the U.S.-based fossil fuel company Energy Transfer in the Netherlands is moving forward after a Dutch court recently ruled in favor of the environmental organization in rejecting the company’s bid to toss out the case. The suit is connected to the ongoing litigation in the U.S. between Energy […]

Residents of the small north Alabama community of Belle Mina are breathing easier after reaching a settlement with a limestone quarry they say was disrupting their homes and places of worship. Three Belle Mina residents and four churches located near the quarry filed a lawsuit against the operators of the Stoned LLC limestone quarry in […]

The United States did not send a federal government delegation to the latest round of high-level global climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, but the current administration’s foreign and economic policy nevertheless partly shaped the talks, stirring both fear and hope. The U.S. attack on Iran and its ripple effects across energy markets fueled concerns that […]

Mamadou Sarr remembers when an artisanal fisherman in Dakar only had to helm his wooden pirogue a single kilometer offshore to find a rich bounty of sardines and cuttlefish. For generations, Senegal’s near shore was the staging ground for a noble trade passed down from father to son. Today, as a result of industrial overfishing […]

Inmates have been moved out of Alligator Alcatraz, the Everglades migrant detention site, the Trump administration confirmed Wednesday to Inside Climate News. “As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft-sided facility,” according to a statement provided by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman. “For […]

Colombia this month enacted a landmark law designed to stop deforestation connected to cattle ranching, a move that environmental groups say could provide a model for the wider Amazon region, where livestock production is a leading driver of tree loss in the world’s largest and most climate-critical rainforest. The law will require that cattle are […]

This story was published by the Border Belt Independent in collaboration with Inside Climate News. Viv Tolson Wayne rang the large dinner bell on her front porch along Britt Road in St. Pauls, North Carolina. The crowd on her front lawn hushed their conversations and turned toward the 75-year-old, who wore a red T-shirt and […]

An exotic animal exhibitor whose sloth-encounters business was shuttered by New York courts is attempting to relaunch his operations in Florida, right as the state grapples with the fallout from sloth deaths at a different tourist attraction. Government inspectors repeatedly found problems at Larry Wallach’s earlier businesses, including unsafe and unsanitary conditions for his sloths, […]

GRAND STAIRCASE-ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT, Utah—When Autumn Gillard first visited this national monument in southern Utah’s red rock country, she hiked to the top of a plateau. Her heart was broken there. For her people, the southern Paiute, the bighorn sheep is sacred. Ancient petroglyphs depicting the species that still calls Grand Staircase-Escalante home covered the […]

In the five months after jet fuel started leaking from Joint Base Andrews into Piscataway Creek, no agency tested the water or sediment some 20 miles downstream, where the creek empties into the Potomac River and the shoreline community and anglers gather to fish and boat along the riverbank. The leak was detected on Dec. […]

“Pull! Pull!” shouts Scott Dexter, chanting the cadence for eight men gripping a rope. “Pull!” With each pull, a 172-pound male loggerhead sea turtle is hoisted higher into the air. It takes several hoists to lift the turtle about 35 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, where Dexter and others are able to lift the […]

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood with botanist and author Beronda Montgomery. When plant biologist Beronda Montgomery sat down to write what became a personal memoir mixed with a botanical history of African Americans, she found her research as a Ph.D. lab scientist […]

A federal judge in South Carolina ruled this week that the Trump administration’s termination of environmental justice grants was “illegal.” The decision dealt a setback to efforts to dismantle a Biden-era program that funded projects addressing environmental and public health challenges in underserved communities across the country. In the ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel […]

GRANDFALLS, Texas—An old oil well sprang back to life under the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Grandfalls in April. Over the next eight days, more than 1.5 million gallons of toxic wastewater flowed out of the earth, according to state records. The state regulator, the Railroad Commission, spent $1.49 million plugging the […]

HAYNEVILLE, Ala.—When Alabamians marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 to demand voting rights for African Americans, Highway 80 became their path toward freedom. Two weeks after state troopers had violently attacked nonviolent demonstrators on that highway’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabamians took back to the street. Led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., thousands of […]

DURHAM, N.C.—Acetone and ethanol, 1,4-dioxane and “mucilaginous goo.” For decades, state regulatory documents show, a chemical repackaging and distribution company in Durham has discharged high levels of toxic chemicals, as well as other unknown substances, into a neighborhood creek that flows behind an elementary school, through a public park in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and […]

The Resistance, Part 2: Three Gulf Coast environmentalists confront Formosa Plastics Corp. at its shareholders meeting. YUNLIN COUNTY, Taiwan—In many ways, at nearly 80 years old, Diane Wilson would have rather stayed home. A retired shrimper with a high school education, she agreed to come here without thinking too much, as usual. That’s how she […]

While the Trump administration systematically unravels marine protections at home, it appears to be enforcing far higher conservation standards abroad. The State Department imposed visa restrictions on 26 foreign nationals engaged in illegal fishing last month. Among those restricted is a former Argentine official allegedly involved in an illegal Patagonian toothfish harvesting scandal and a […]

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the world’s largest ongoing infrastructure program, has a substantial climate impact. More than half its emissions stem from steel, the majority of which was produced in China. Cutting the emissions will require stronger environmental policies and major investment in cleaner manufacturing technologies, two new studies concluded. More than 130 million […]

The upcoming loss of a deep-ocean monitoring system is triggering deep anxiety in Alaska, the nation’s top fish-producing state, where temperatures are warming twice as quickly as the global average. The National Science Foundation announced plans in May to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of scientific instruments that tracks ocean […]

Wildfires have worsened ozone levels across the United States so much over the last decade that they have reversed around four years of progress, a new study has found. Surface ozone levels, or smog concentrations, steadily increased from 2015 to 2024, deteriorating air quality across the Midwest and Western U.S., researchers at the University of […]

BROOKHAVEN, N.Y.—The crowd grew restless at Brookhaven Town Hall on Long Island as residents voiced their concerns about groundwater contamination from a nearby landfill that has spread beneath parts of their community. At the meeting in late March, speakers criticizing the landfill’s operations were met with applause and shouts of support from the audience. Monique […]

When pathologists cut open dead sloths from a planned Florida tourist attraction, they found a plethora of pathogens. Parasites, bacteria and viruses were all lurking in animals weakened by grueling international transport and stressful conditions at the warehouse that received them, according to necropsy records and a state inspection report obtained by Inside Climate News […]

If you knew a major storm or fire was heading toward your home, what would you save? Maybe your pet? A box of letters? The blanket that your grandma knitted for you as a baby? A pop-up exhibit led by the Climate Action Campaign and curated by Sam Hartman, an artist and survivor of Hurricane […]

The worldwide fallout from the U.S. war in Iran isn’t limited to gas prices. The largely blocked Strait of Hormuz has become “a critical failure point for global food security,” Máximo Torero Cullen, chief economist of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, warned this week. Approximately a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade […]

Four years after the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire burned 341,471 acres in northern New Mexico, the massive burn scar from the most destructive blaze in state history still holds vast stretches of leafless, barren and charred trees. It’s one of many scorched landscapes across the state—the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD) […]

California regulators passed a rule in January 2024 that they said would protect communities from one of the state’s most popular, and dangerous, pesticides. For decades, they knew that 1,3-dichloropropane, or 1,3-D, causes tumors in multiple organs in laboratory animals, which led the state to flag it as a carcinogen in 1989. Yet regulators allowed […]