On December 11, 2019, Mr. Mark Gaffigan of GAO offered a testimony regarding climate resilience and federal investment strategies. Following are excerpts. “Planning for federal investments in climate resilience projects to limit fiscal exposure is no longer a hypothetical issue. The Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018 provides one potential source of funding for climate…

The New York Times recently published an opinion essay by Eugene Linden titled How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong. The author described how climate scientists consistently underestimated the impacts of climate change. He cites reports of the National Academy of Sciences, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and United Nations. As a result of these…

On October 15, 2019, the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation (RNRF) conducted a congressional forum on the impacts of recent administrative and regulatory changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hosted the meeting on Capitol Hill. Speakers were Chris Zarba, formerly with EPA, and Gretchen…

David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative, spoke at a meeting of the RNRF Washington Round Table on Public Policy on September 11, 2019. The meeting was hosted by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). The goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement is to keep global heating under 2 degrees…

Warming conditions mean more evaporation, which leads to more water vapor in the air. When rain-triggering conditions are favorable, more saturated air leads to heavier precipitation. This has been the story across most of the United States in the past century. Extreme precipitation events have grown more frequent since the start of the twentieth century,…

The Union of Concerned Scientists released a report entitled “Killer Heat in the United States: Climate Choices and the Future of Dangerously Hot Days.” The report, funded in part by the MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations, sought to estimate the frequency of days in which the heat index would rise above 90°F, 100°F or 105°F in…

The presence of microplastic in oceans has become a growing problem over the past decade. Microplastics, defined as plastic particles less than 5 mm in size, have typically been studied in the context of urban environments, yet it is apparent that microplastics have permeated the world’s most remote waterways. In late 2018, the National Oceanic…

The British newspaper The Guardian took a major step a few weeks ago that has been heralded throughout the globe as one that has been long overdue—it announced that it is changing the language it uses when reporting on the environment. Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor, proclaimed that “The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce…

More people are demanding that businesses take stock of how climate change could impact their bottom lines. A recent analysis by CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) shows that many companies are listening. According to CDP’s assessment, many of the world’s largest companies reported climate change could significantly impact their businesses within the next five…

On June 13, 2019, the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation (RNRF) presented a meeting titled “Planning for Coastal Inland Resilience: Keeping Toxic Substances Out of the Water and Avoiding Unwise Development,” hosted by the American Society of Civil Engineers at its Capitol Hill office in D.C. Speakers included Pete Harrison with Earthjustice and Jeff Peterson formerly…