Latest news with #TheNatureConservancy
Miami Herald
2 hours ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
Trump administration revokes $156M grant to help Floridians afford solar panels
The federal government has revoked a $156 million grant received by three Florida nonprofits to help lower-income residents afford solar panels. More than 800 Floridians had already applied for these funds, at least a quarter of which had been pre-qualified, said Duanne Andrade, executive director of the Solar and Energy Loan Fund, one of the nonprofits. Eligible applicants would have been able to get grants, subsidies or low-cost financing to help pay for solar panels. The organizations had delayed approving applications until they received clarity on the future of the program. This cancellation is removing one more tool for households that can least afford rising electricity costs, Andrade said, not to mention how added jobs would've benefitted the state economy. 'These funds are being taken away from Floridians,' she said. 'If you're not a low-income household, maybe you're invested in solar companies. Or maybe you have people that need to work and you're going to put people to work in Florida. This [was] an investment in Florida.' In addition to the Solar and Energy Loan Fund, the two other Florida nonprofits that received the grant were Solar United Neighbors, a solar organizing group, and The Nature Conservancy in Florida, an environmental group. They jointly applied for the federal money after learning Florida was one of the few state governments that didn't apply. The cancellation is part of a national rollback of the Solar For All program, which included similar grants throughout the country. The termination letter from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which the Florida groups received Thursday night and shared with the Tampa Bay Times, cites the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 'Congress has made its intent clear ... that the SFA [Solar for All] program is no longer to operate,' it reads. That law also moved up the expiration date of the 30% tax credit for homeowners who install rooftop solar panels to the end of this year. That's created a rush of people trying to buy panels before the program ends, local business owners have said. This is a breaking story. Check back for updates.
Axios
a day ago
- Climate
- Axios
7 storm solutions other cities and states are testing out
New Orleans isn't the only city adapting to worsening storms and flooding. Why it matters: Nearly half the world's population lives near coasts, according to The Nature Conservancy, making flooding and erosion a growing threat to millions. Here's a look at what other communities are doing. 🌊 Tampa: Tampa General Hospital deploys an AquaFence flood wall before storms to block rising water. See it in action. Ohio State University also uses one, according to the flood wall manufacturer. The Massachusetts Port Authority in Boston has one for storm surge, too. 🚧 Florida: Babcock Ranch is a planned community in southwest Florida designed to withstand storms — underground utilities, higher elevation, solar systems and an extensive drainage infrastructure, according to Time. When their neighboring communities lost power and flooded during Category 4 Hurricane Ian, they didn't, the story says. 🦪 New York: The Billion Oyster Project is building oyster reefs in New York Harbor to protect the shoreline from storm surge and erosion. 🔌 Baltimore: City leaders started their resilience hub in 2014 and the concept spread to other cities, including New Orleans, Miami and San Francisco, Pew says. These neighborhood centers coordinate multilingual disaster response and double as temporary shelters and cooling spaces. 🌾 New Jersey: The Nature Conservancy is studying how restored marshes, oyster reefs and living shorelines can help coastal communities after Superstorm Sandy.
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Climate
- Boston Globe
Washington state braces for ‘inevitable' megafire
'It used to be that it really wasn't until mid-August that fuels dried out in western Washington,' said Derek Churchill, a forest health scientist at the Washington Department of Natural Resources. 'Now it's July or earlier.' Last month, human activity started a wildfire in the Olympic National Forest. As of Tuesday, it had grown to more than 5,100 acres, and some campgrounds were under evacuation orders. Fire in western Washington is not a natural part of the ecosystem's annual rhythm, as it is for drier grasslands and pine forests in the eastern part of the state. Instead, every few hundred years, a megafire strikes, burning hundreds of thousands of acres, replacing whole forests with slopes of charred spindles. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But global warming is changing fire patterns in the state. Washington's summers are growing longer, hotter, and drier, resulting in an extended fire season with more desiccated fuel available. Paired with swelling populations throughout Puget Sound, it's a recipe for more frequent annual fires. Advertisement More frequent fires in turn increase the odds, slightly but surely, that a megafire will occur. The only question is timing. As a result, forest managers and firefighters are keeping a wary eye on smaller fires like the Bear Gulch fire burning in the Olympics. The last megafire destroyed western Washington in the early 20th century. More recent fires have been smaller, but concerning. In 1978, more than 1,000 acres burned in the Hoh Rainforest, which can receive as much annual precipitation as the wettest reaches of the Amazon Rainforest. In 2015, more than 2,000 acres of the Olympic rainforest caught fire along the Queets River before fall rains extinguished it. Advertisement The recent fires in wet forests were 'a wake-up call,' said Kyle Smith, the Washington state director of forest conservation at The Nature Conservancy, which manages several forest sites around the state. 'It was alarming to see fire burning in the Queets valley.' A 2022 fire in the Cascades raised alarm bells, too. It burned along a highway some 60 miles from Seattle, in a popular spot for hiking. State forest managers are now figuring out how to respond to two problems simultaneously: a changing fire season with increased odds of smaller, more frequent fires, and the threat of the next megafire in its rainforests. While there are time-tested strategies to fight fires in dry eastern Washington — with its grasslands and stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine — wet, rugged western Washington is a different beast altogether. 'Folks think the recipe for the east will work in the west, and it does not,' said George Geissler, the top forester for Washington state. 'It's way more complicated.' Fires in the west grow slowly but steadily, smoldering as they feed on feet-thick layers of crispy moss and decaying cedar. Steep terrain and thick vegetation limit what firefighters can do on the ground; a dense canopy can block water and fire retardant from being delivered by air. Advertisement The job is so much tougher in the west that a firefighting team needs about four times as many people for a fire of the same size in eastern Washington, said Tim Sampson, a deputy division manager for wildland fire for Washington state. Fire breaks, or strips of cleared-out vegetation, can help keep a fire from spreading. In arid eastern Washington, a fire break might be good for decades. But in the wet half of the state, digging through all the dead vegetation on the forest floor is excruciating and slow work. Vegetation grows back so quickly that the break would likely disappear in a year or two. 'Out here, I could put a stick in the ground and it would grow,' Geissler said. One big risk to overall forest health in Washington is drought, Churchill said. Restoring streams and removing invasive species can reduce competition among trees for water, making them less vulnerable to drought — and therefore less likely to dry out and burn. Getting community support to manage forests can be difficult, especially in places where living with fire is relatively new, Smith said. Some residents see tree thinning and forest clearing as environmentally damaging. Pairing thinning with ecosystem restoration, which also benefits salmon and other species, can be an easier sell. But planning for megafires requires an entirely different approach from fighting annual fires. 'The big fires that have occurred in the past are fires we can't fight,' Geissler said. Firefighters can't put out a wildfire that covers 100,000 acres of steep, inaccessible mountains. Instead, much of their planning is focused on identifying high-risk places to protect, like communities, and spots where fire breaks should be created in the event of a big fire. Advertisement Emergency planners have found that wildfire risk awareness among western Washington residents is mixed, as is their receptiveness to hearing about the dangers. Trying to improve public awareness, then, is an important part of the state's planning around both increased annual fire risk and the potential for a megafire. The state is trying to finalize its plans for dealing with its new wildfire reality at the same time, there has been an uptick in fire incidents in western Washington. That stretches firefighting resources and requires officials to try to stay one step ahead of fires, putting teams and gear in place in the highest-risk spots. 'The biggest challenge we have is folks believing 'it could never happen here,'' Geissler said. 'The hardest thing to do is to get people to realize they're part of it.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
28-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Experts warn drastic action may be necessary in communities along US East Coast: 'We're dealing with something completely unprecedented'
Experts warn drastic action may be necessary in communities along US East Coast: 'We're dealing with something completely unprecedented' A climate adaptation scientist is warning that drastic changes may be necessary along the American East Coast. What's happening? According to EcoRI, Emma Gildesgame, a climate adaptation scientist for The Nature Conservancy, believes that it's time to start talking about managed retreat as a response to climate-induced coastal change. Managed retreat is when coastal buildings and towns pull back from their original locations, relocating further inland in an attempt to avoid being submerged by the rising oceans as our planet gets warmer. The practice is often seen as a last-ditch attempt to salvage areas that are most impacted by rising oceans as our coastlines shrink. However, per EcoRI, Gildesgame says the time is coming sooner than we think and that the goal right now is to "work with nature to keep people safer from climate change." Why is managed retreat important? For the United States, sea levels are expected to rise by a foot by 2050 if we continue along our current path, according to the Earth Information Center. That means that as time goes on, more and more coastal towns and cities are going to find themselves threatened by the same seas that they've relied on to thrive for decades or longer. On top of that, with sea levels rising, issues like flooding become more commonplace, with storms needing to be less and less severe to cause widespread flooding and damage. Managed retreat is a way to stave off those problems and keep towns safe from our changing climate. While extreme weather events have always existed, experts have found that human activities like burning dirty fuels have caused our planet to heat up, supercharging weather events and creating the need for proactive safety measures as temperatures rise. What's being done about managed retreat and rising ocean levels? Gildesgame said she's been having conversations for years about starting the process of managed retreat from coastal towns in New England. "I think it was like 2022 that I started having these conversations," she told EcoRI. "People were like, 'Oh, we can't talk about that. It's too complicated.' Governments don't want to be in the business of telling people where they can and can't live. There's deep, deep, deep trauma around government relocation in a lot of communities." However, she noted that people are realizing the severity of the situation. Do you think our power grid needs to be upgraded? Definitely Only in some states Not really I'm not sure Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. "We're tough New Englanders. We'll be fine. We'll just build stronger," Gildesgame said. "But we're dealing with something completely unprecedented." The hope is that by moving communities away from the shore, it will reduce the strain on the natural ecosystem in the area, restoring natural beaches, salt marshes, and sand dunes to mitigate the spread of flooding. As for the wider issue of coastal erosion and rising oceans, our best course of action is to continue prioritizing the reduction of carbon pollution, in the hopes of slowing our changing climate down. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet. Solve the daily Crossword
Axios
28-07-2025
- Axios
Tennessee governor bets big on state parks
Welcome to the first installment of Tennessee Trailheads: This week, each edition of Axios Nashville will explore a different aspect of the parks where we picnic and play. Tennessee state parks are in the midst of a historic growth spurt, with Gov. Bill Lee set to add a record 14 new locations to the roster before leaving office. Why it matters: Outdoor recreation has quietly emerged as one of the Lee administration's signature issues. Since becoming governor in 2019, Lee has launched a bevy of new projects aimed at elevating and expanding the park system. What he's saying: In an exclusive Axios interview earlier this year, Lee said he felt a duty to preserve Tennessee's lush natural landscape, including parks, rivers and farmland. "When you serve in this role, you think about what you hope lasts," he said. "We do have a duty to generations that will come. We have a duty to provide them with the same remarkable environment that we inherited. In fact, I believe we have a duty to improve that." Between the lines: He draws inspiration from his childhood visits to Fall Creek Falls and canoe rides down the Hiwassee River. The big picture: Lee wants to establish the most accessible park system in the country. "It's about making sure that regardless of your ZIP code, your physical ability, your demographics, that you have access to these parks," he said. The intrigue: The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the matter: Visitors flocked to Tennessee parks and campgrounds in record numbers. Catch up quick: In 2021, Lee announced the Bill Dance Signature Lakes initiative, named after the famed fisherman, that will put millions toward improving 18 lakes across the state. The BlueWaysTN program is focused on the state's recreational waterways. Last year, Lee created the Office of Outdoor Recreation as a conservation hub. Earlier this month, the office dolled out $22 million in grants to support local park projects. Reality check: Environmental activists have blasted a series of government moves that they say chip away at environmental protections, including a 2025 state law that reduces oversight for wetland development. Yes, but: The state has poured millions of dollars into conservation projects during Lee's time in office. The latest state budget included $52 million to create five new state parks. Lee also pushed a plan to slow the development of Tennessee farmland, putting $25 million toward grants for farmers who preserve their land. Zoom in: Lee proposed $125 million this year to protect the Duck River, one of the nation's most endangered waterways. Lawmakers cut $35 million of that funding before passing the budget. Zoom out: Former Sen. Bill Frist, the global chair of The Nature Conservancy, recently praised Lee's focus on conservation, saying "investments in nature make a profound difference in the health and wellbeing of generations to come." The bottom line:"The more urban centers we have, and the more growth we have in the state, the more important it is that there is an opportunity for people to ... have access to wildlife and to waters and to forests," Lee said.
