A new World Trade Organization agreement to limit global overfishing may yield important stories for environmental journalists, as billions of people around the world rely on already heavily exploited fish stocks as their main source of protein. This Backgrounder offers details on the pact and how it tries to address the problem, while providing resources for your reporting.
Qatar — the world’s highest carbon emitter on a per capita basis — made big promises in its winning bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. But will they deliver? Doha-based journalism professor Craig LaMay writes that while sports megaevent hosts face increasing pressure to address environmental concerns, critical coverage of their follow-through is challenging, especially in countries with no free press or public right to government information.
"The U.S. Postal Service pledged Wednesday to electrify at least 40 percent of its new delivery fleet, an increase that climate activists hailed as a major step toward reducing the government’s environmental footprint."
"This week, another heat wave is scorching parts of the South and the southern Plains. Across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom is bracing for dangerously high temperatures as a crippling heat sweeps across Europe. Drought and wildfires have again battered parts of the West, even as much of the summer lies ahead."
As Brazil’s wetlands burned and as the country illegally shipped wood from the Amazon and scaled back environmental enforcement amid the pandemic, award-winning journalist Jake Spring of Reuters was there, telling tough, sometimes dangerous stories. Spring shares insights into his “just the facts” reporting, including the surprises and the lessons, and offers some practical advice in this Inside Story Q&A.
"Across the country, local governments are accelerating their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, in some cases bridging partisan divides. Their role will become increasingly important."
In 2006, a local government council in Pennsylvania concerned about sewage sludge dumping enacted the Western legal system’s first formal “rights of nature” instrument. Today, numerous countries have laws recognizing specific rights or even legal personhood for nature. As legal expert Alice Bleby explains, this new perspective arises from a wide range of contexts and plays out in many different ways.
The Freedom of Information Act offers critical access to journalists — that is, when it’s working well. The latest WatchDog Opinion digs into the latest reports from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to see how well it lives up to its FOIA requirements and finds that despite progress, the agency continues to fall short on important measures. Plus, insight into how to work the system.
"The U.S. Forest Service made critical mistakes that caused a planned burn to reduce the threat of wildfires to explode into the largest blaze in New Mexico's recorded history, the agency said Tuesday. A new report found that employees made multiple miscalculations, used inaccurate models and underestimated how dry conditions were in the Southwest before lighting the flames."
"The Biden administration has reached a historic agreement to give five Native American tribes more say over the day-to-day management of a national monument in Utah, marking a new chapter in the federal government’s often-fraught relationship with tribes."
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