Jim Morrison

An exhaustively reported story outlining the need to begin discussing managed retreat from threatened areas including the coasts and inland floodplains.

The city doesn’t use that politically explosive term, the Voldemort of climate adaptation. Planners here and elsewhere refer to it as the “r-word.” They’re happy to talk about the other r-word — resilience, which includes projects like sea walls, retention ponds, rebuilding wetlands and improved storm-water capacity. Retreat signals surrender, while resilience screams reassurance: Don’t worry. Stay. We’ll protect you. That medicine goes down easier. It has been embraced by dozens of cities an...

"There is no other place on Earth like this," Angie Carl says. Her voice carries across the swamp of North Carolina's Black River as we sit floating in kayaks at the knees of our elders, an ancient stand of bald cypress trees.
Following markers of neon-pink ribbons tied to branches, we've paddled to this remote stand to recreate a journey that Carl took eight years ago guiding David W. Stahle, a University of Arkansas scientist. Carl is the fire and coastal restoration manager for The Nature ...

For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon.
At the ceremony’s conclusion, single salmon are ferried by bo...

The high-altitude tree is vital to its ecosystem, but it’s being decimated by a fungus. Its admirers are fusing old and new methods to bring it back.
Melissa Jenkins usually doesn't take pictures on hikes in Montana's Whitefish Range. Here, the whitebark pine that she works to restore has been so decimated by a fungus that gray skeletal ghost forests reign, haunting symbols of a once widespread species. But last summer, she paused to snap a shot of survivors flanking the trail, ragged but def...

Lack of a current, national rainfall database means some states use 60-year-old statistics as they design roads, bridges, and dams that are supposed to last 50 years.

Hugo, Iris and a growing complement of public and private sentries orbiting overhead and scheduled for launch have opened a new era of fighting the climate crisis by tracking methane leaks from landfills, pipelines and mines. The new generation of satellites will allow better measurements of such leaks over time and help the public hold countries and corporations accountable to their promises to reduce greenhouse gases.

Hampton Roads Ventures, created by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, is headquartered in this office building in Norfolk. (Jim Morrison/ For the Virginia Mercury)
NORFOLK — When they posed for a picture in an empty field 18 years ago, Robert K. Jenkins and other Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority officials were confident that a new subsidiary would bring a much-needed shopping center to Norfolk’s Berkley neighborhood by pioneering the use of a fledgling federal tax cre...

The skeletal documents obtained through records requests raise a number of questions.
Why would NRHA with a lawyer expert in tax credits deals not maximize the fees earned by HRV?
Why for years did NRHA employees, including the executive director, get paid separately to work for HRV while also drawing housing authority paychecks?
Summaries of Hampton Roads Ventures finances, show that HRV has paid nearly twice as much in the last decade — $2.5 million for “labor/administration” — than it has funneled to NRHA. That’s a departure from other community development entities.

Hampton Roads Ventures, a subsidiary of the Norfolk housing authority, has been under a microscope over out-of-state projects
After months of scrutiny of the out-of-state deals financed by Hampton Roads Ventures, Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Alexander said the city will draft a resolution requiring the housing authority’s subsidiary to focus on Norfolk.
The comments by Alexander came after a meeting with representatives of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority and Hampton Roads Ventures du...

Sunny-Day Flooding Is About to Become More Than a Nuisance
Sea level rise will soon combine with a host of other environmental factors to produce dozens of floods each fall in US coastal cities.

Change
A century ago, a biologist counted California's desert animals. Now researchers are retracing his steps—and the results are surprising.

For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call "ghost forests." Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.
Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.
“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologis...

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, biodigesters on livestock farms total 255, up from 24 in 2000, driven by the market for renewable gas, a desire by farmers to diversify and federal tax credits as well as government subsidies in states such as California, which has awarded nearly $320 million in grants and matching funds since 2015.

Why the investment? Poop is a pervasive problem, and a source of methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.

A six-day journey on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in words and pictures.