"The white sandy beaches along a swath of Florida’s Gulf Coast were battered by three hurricanes last year, leading to a multimillion-dollar effort to repair a coastline that is the region’s economic engine."

"Countries in the Sahel region of Africa have made little progress on the “Great Green Wall,” a 5,000-mile-long band of trees planned for the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Even where communities are planting new trees, few seedlings actually survive, new research shows."

"Locals face a perfect storm — they can’t afford insurance and climate change threatens their livelihood."

"Corn monocropping emits higher levels of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas which traps heat in the atmosphere more than 300 times as effectively as carbon dioxide. Simple interventions could drastically reduce emissions, experts say."

"The chair of stalled UN plastics treaty talks, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, is preparing to step down, after accounts of behind-the-scenes pressure from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep)." "In August, global talks at the UN headquarters in Geneva to agree on a treaty to deal with accelerating plastic pollution collapsed after three years of negotiations. There is currently no deal and the future of the agreement is unclear."

"The European Commission on Friday announced restrictions on the use of so-called "forever chemicals" in firefighting foams."

"An illegal gold rush has cleared 140,000 hectares of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon and is accelerating as foreign, armed groups move into the region to profit from record gold prices, according to a report."

"The White House is offering “concierge, white glove service” to oil, coal and other fossil fuel companies that are seeking to gain fast approval for their projects, according to an energy official, while simultaneously slowing down or blocking solar and wind projects."

"The Senate has voted to confirm President Trump’s pick to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as part of a group of nominees confirmed en masse."

"A Navajo tribe-owned company bid $186,000 to lease 167 million tons of coal on federal lands in southeastern Montana on Monday in the biggest U.S. coal sale in more than a decade. The offer from the Navajo Transitional Energy Co. (NTEC) equates to one-tenth of a penny per ton, underscoring coal’s diminished value even as President Donald Trump pushes to mine and burn more of the heavily polluting fuel."