Every four years, thousands of Olympic athletes representing more than 200 countries push the limits of the human body. Close to 4 billion people — more than half the world’s population — have tuned in for each Olympic Games since 2004. But the Olympics can highlight or exacerbate social and environmental challenges plaguing their host […]
Tag: cities
Floods, power outages, no running water: Jails during Hurricane Ida
Sadadra Davis spends hundreds of dollars every month to talk to her fiancé, Johnion Davis, on the phone. They’re inseparable, she says, even though he has spent the last few months incarcerated at Nelson Coleman Correctional Center in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, and each call runs about $5. But then Hurricane Ida made landfall on […]
California seeks to make its low-carbon living more affordable
Moving to a city is one of the best ways to shrink your carbon emissions: Apartments are more energy efficient than single-family homes, and public transportation works better in urban areas. But many of the most environmentally friendly cities in America have closed their doors to newcomers with regulations that make new housing expensive, and […]
A Florida city wanted to move away from fossil fuels. The state just made sure it couldn’t.
This reporting by Grist and ADAPT is a collaboration in partnership with Floodlight. In January, Tampa was set to become the 12th city in Florida to set a climate goal to transition to 100 percent clean energy. But that was before the natural gas industry and Republican state lawmakers got involved. Tampa City Councilman Joseph […]
Be very careful where you build that seawall
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Think back to being a kid at the beach, building walls around your sandcastles. If you engineered those fortifications properly, the tide would come in and flow around your kingdom, before the walls eventually eroded away. By […]
Your city is more segregated than it was in 1990, new study shows
Picture this: two babies born on the same day, maybe even within the same hour, at the Harlem Hospital Center in New York City. One baby, born to a Black mother, goes home to her family down the street in East Harlem. The second is taken home just a few blocks south to the Upper […]
Decades after Watts revolted, the Black neighborhood is being ‘revitalized’ — but the cost is steep
Los Angeles’ future is haunted by its past in the South L.A. neighborhood of Watts. A community that has experienced social, economic, and environmental neglect for decades is now the center of the city’s ambitious plans to make housing and transportation more accessible across the increasingly expensive metropolis. After Watts erupted in massive street protests […]
Why California is building new houses in the path of wildfires
The West Coast housing market is metaphorically on fire — with rotting shacks selling for millions. Decades of policies to restrict housing in desirable neighborhoods has pushed prices up — and it has also pushed houses out into more rural, forested areas. As a result, West Coast housing is periodically on fire in the literal […]
Asia is home to 99 of world’s 100 most vulnerable cities
Indonesia’s capital Jakarta – plagued by pollution, flooding and heatwaves – tops risk assessment ranking Of the 100 cities worldwide most vulnerable to environmental hazards all but one are in Asia, and 80% are in India or China, according to a risk assessment. More than 400 large cities with a total population of 1.5 billion […]
One in four cities cannot afford climate crisis protection measures – study
Survey of 800 cities around world finds almost 43% do not even have plan to adapt to impacts of global heating One in four cities around the world lack the money to protect themselves against the ravages of climate breakdown, even though more than 90% are facing serious risks, according to research. Cities are facing […]