Many community leaders now consider trees to be critical infrastructure, along with a growing recognition that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color often have far less tree cover — and suffer increased vulnerability to extreme heat as a result. Read more»

Dozens of legislatures are considering bills to crack down on the use of PFAS - “forever chemicals” that don’t break down naturally and are shown to cause myriad health issues - including legislation to strengthen product disclosure laws and increase liability for polluters. Read more»

Prompted in part by the high price of supermarket eggs, city councils from Arizona to Florida to Oklahoma have approved ordinances allowing people to welcome hens into their yards - but aspiring chicken owners who are motivated solely by egg prices are in for a reality check. Read more»

As communities prepare for a massive influx of federal funding to support urban forestry, their leaders say the tree canopy that grows to maturity 50 years from now will need to be painted with a different palette than the one that exists today. Read more»

The Inflation Reduction Act includes $1.5 billion for the Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry Program - funding that could potentially help Tucson purchase saplings, hire labor and expand its youth program as part of the city's Million Trees initiative. Read more»

Medical experts say climate change will affect nearly every aspect of public health - and many of those impacts are already being felt - but little to no climate funding has reached the budgets of many public health departments. Read more»

As housing prices skyrocket in neighborhoods across the country, some state lawmakers and local officials are turning to a decades-old model for keeping homes affordable: community land trusts. Read more»

Critics fear that Florida’s move to assume authority over wetland management could open the floodgates for more states to claim Section 404 authority - but the hurdles that have mostly stymied such efforts for decades remain significant. Read more»

Automakers are planning to put nearly 1 million new electric vehicles on American roads in 2022 as sales in the United States doubled in 2021 compared with 2020, and lawmakers are trying to make sure their states are ready. Read more»

The Build Back Better plan being debated in Congress would provide $2.5 billion to improve and maintain urban tree canopy - unshaded areas suffer from a heat island effect and trees help filter air pollution and absorb stormwater runoff - with focus on underserved communities. Read more»

In a rare move, federal labor officials have threatened to take over Arizona, South Carolina and Utah’s workplace safety programs because they failed to adopt emergency COVID-19 rules to protect health care workers. Read more»

The nation’s five fastest-growing states are all in the Southwest or Mountain West, and communities are facing difficult questions about water scarcity and what it means for future growth— because climate change is expected to make such droughts more frequent and intense. Read more»

President Joe Biden announced this week that his administration’s efforts to address extreme heat will include new rules from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers from dangerous conditions. Read more»

Before Pres. Biden’s announcement requiring millions of workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested weekly, 18 states and the District of Columbia already had told public sector workers to get their jabs or risk losing their jobs. Read more»

Federal safety regulators have issued no standards to protect workers from heat-related hazards - even as climate change increases the risk of deadly heat waves and extreme weather conditions - prompting some states to begin enacting regulations on their own. Read more»