By John Surico  and  Nick Underwood , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The waters surrounding New York allowed it to grow into an economic powerhouse. But what has been a blessing is increasingly a threat, as flooding becomes one of the city’s greatest challenges. Projections that model future flooding in the city show that it will only get worse. By 2080, many areas will face an increased risk of  tidal flooding  because of rising sea levels. At the same time, more neighborhoods will become vulnerable to  extreme rainfall . And wide swaths of the city face increasing peril in the event of  storm surge  from a hurricane. By 2080, nearly 30 percent of the city’s land mass could be  at risk of significant flooding . Some 1.4 million New Yorkers currently live in these areas — 17 percent of the city’s population. New York’s adaptation is a matter of survival. Climate experts have recommended several strategies. The city could increase its ability t...

By Benjamin L. Rice , et al.  Editor’s summary: The increasing prevalence of extreme weather events creates severe disruptions to public health, as well as to the environment. In the wake of two successive cyclones hitting Madagascar in 2022 and 2023, Rice  et al . examined the effect of these extreme weather events in a high-malaria region. In the aftermath, infection rates by the mosquito-vectored parasite increased to 10% for school-aged children within 3 months as mosquito and malaria control activities were interrupted. Modeling showed that the recently available vaccines supply prolonged protection (up to 10 months) against repeat malaria infections and offer a sustainable instrument for health resilience in the wake of climate change. —Caroline Ash.  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5365 . 

By Connor Letourneau , San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: “When people fight the ocean,” [Pacifica, City Council member Christine] Boles said, “the ocean always wins.” ...Pacifica, a picturesque surf town of roughly 35,000 just south of San Francisco, has become an important case study for the increasingly urgent questions  climate change  raises for many coastal communities. Should residents stay to defend their homes from rising tides that grow fiercer by the year? Or, should they admit defeat and cede the land back to nature? ...“Managed retreat” — a term coined by geologists to describe the process of removing people, homes and businesses from at-risk areas — is at the root of the debate. ...“We can’t build seawalls high enough to protect us forever,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “So, in the long run, it’s either going to be managed retreat or unmanaged retreat. It’s up to each community to decide.”...  Full...

By James Dinneen , New Scientist.  Excerpt: A common sunscreen ingredient, zinc nanoparticles, may help protect rice from heat-related stress, an increasingly common problem under climate change. ...Researchers have explored such nanoparticles as a way to deliver more nutrients to plants, helping maintain crop yields while reducing environmental  damage from using too much fertiliser . Now  Xiangang Hu  at Nankai University in China and his colleagues have tested how zinc oxide nanoparticles affect crop performance under heatwave conditions....  Full article at https://www.newscientist.com/article/2454728-spraying-rice-with-sunscreen-particles-during-heatwaves-boosts-growth/ . 

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Consistently implementing zoning, permitting, and building regulations, all commonplace municipal tools, helped most New Jersey towns avoid floodplain development. New Jersey is one of the most flood-prone U.S. states, and climate change is increasing the hazard by raising sea levels and supercharging severe storms like Hurricane Sandy. The state also faces pressure to develop new housing and infrastructure, often in low-lying inland and coastal areas that are the most vulnerable to flooding. Despite this pressure, a recent analysis of new floodplain development found that 85% of New Jersey towns built relatively little in floodplains over the past 2 decades. Towns achieved this by applying routine land use management tools consistently over time, a slow but steady approach to climate adaptation. ...The most effective way to avoid  flood  damage to homes and infrastructure is to avoid building in a floodplain. ...Instead,...

By Christopher Flavelle , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The Federal Emergency Management Agency will take new steps to ensure that the structures it funds — including schools, hospitals, police stations, libraries, sewage treatment plants and bridges — are protected from flooding. The agency said Wednesday that projects constructed with FEMA money must be built in a way that prevents flood damage, whether by elevating them above the expected height of a flood or, if that’s not feasible, by building in a safer location. The rule also makes it clear that building decisions must reflect risks now and also in the future, as climate change makes flooding more frequent and severe....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/climate/fema-flooding-construction-rules.html . 

By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: An app that helps people find relief from the heat. A tiny insurance policy that pays working women when temperatures soar. Local laws that help outdoor workers get water and shade on sweltering days. As dangerous heat becomes impossible to ignore, an array of practical innovations are emerging around the world to protect people most vulnerable to its hazards. ...The World Meteorological Organization has said that heat now kills more people than any other extreme-weather hazard.... ...Iphigenia Keramitsoglou is an atmospheric physicist who ...led a team that built a cellphone app to give users real-time information about how to stay cool. Put your location into Extrema Global and it will show the outside temperature, air quality and color-coded levels of heat risk. It will populate a map with places to cool down: parks, pools, fountains and air-conditioned public buildings like libraries. Tell the app where you want to go — say, fr...

By John King , San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: Throughout its 125-year history, there have been times when the formidable elegance of  San Francisco’s Ferry Building  was shadowed by uncertainties — from fears early on that it wouldn’t survive a major earthquake to the question, after the opening of the Bay Bridge, of whether it should be torn down. ...The most ominous element, though, is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ desire to elevate the huge structure by at least 3½ feet as part of a larger multi-decade effort  to protect the bay shoreline  from floods and sea level rise....  Full article at https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/ferry-building-business-pandemic-19462543.php . 

By Richard Luscombe , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Climate predictions in Florida, for the most part, make pretty grim reading. Rising oceans threaten to  submerge most of the state  by the end of the century, and  soaring temperatures  could make it too hot to live here anyway. But  new research  by a coalition of prominent universities paints a more upbeat picture of Florida’s future as a thriving state for humans and wildlife, with natural resources harnessed to mitigate the worst effects of the climate emergency generally, as well as extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods. Such a prosperous tomorrow, the authors say, can only follow essential preparatory work today. One key element, an 18m-acre swath of protected land called the  Florida wildlife corridor , is already mostly in place, and will spearhead Florida’s climate resilience if properly managed and allowed to evolve, the researchers believe....  Full article at https://www...

https://www.wired.com/story/los-angeles-just-proved-how-spongy-a-city-can-be/ By MATT SIMON , Wired.  Excerpt: ...A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped  9 inches of rain on the city  over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms. The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “ sponge city ,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth. With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. ...Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in f...

https://grist.org/extreme-weather/marshall-islands-national-adaptation-plan-sea-level-rise-cop28/ By Jake Bittle , Grist.  Excerpt: The Marshall Islands extend across a wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean, with dozens of coral atolls sitting just a few feet above sea level. ...Over the past two years, government officials have fanned out across the country, visiting remote towns and villages as well as urban centers like its capital of Majuro to examine how Marshallese communities are experiencing and coping with climate change. They found that a combination of rapid sea-level rise and drought has already made life untenable for many of the country’s 42,000 residents, especially on outlying atolls where communities rely on rainwater and vanishing land for subsistence. The survey was part of a groundbreaking, five-year effort by the Marshall Islands to craft a sweeping adaptation strategy that charts the country’s response to the threat of climate change. The plan, shared wi...

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi4123 By XIAO WU et al, Science.  Excerpt: The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in both scientific and policy venues. Using a synthetic control approach to analyze 20 years of satellite-based fire activity data across 124,186 square kilometers of forests in California, we provide evidence that low-intensity fires substantially reduce the risk of future high-intensity fires. ...These findings support a policy transition from fire suppression to restoration, through increased use of prescribed fire, cultural burning, and managed wildfire, of a presuppression and precolonial fire regime in California.... 

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk7118 By JUDSON BOOMHOWER , Science.  Excerpt: Wildfire-threatened communities are on the front lines of climate change. From 2013 to 2022, the share of global disaster losses caused by wildfires more than doubled compared with losses in previous decades ( 1 ). ...Radeloff  et al.  ( 2 ) draw on a 30-year time series of housing counts and vegetation to show how housing expansion, area burned, and vegetative fuels contribute to wildfire losses and the increasing number of homes at risk in the United States. With tens of millions of US homes now confronting a growing risk of destruction by wildfires, adaptation is an urgent policy and research challenge. Success will require scaling up cost-effective investments in physical protection to reduce wildfire losses, ensuring well-functioning insurance markets to absorb risk that cannot be cost-effectively mitigated away, and addressing disparities in protection and postfire reco...

https://eos.org/articles/how-llama-poop-is-helping-an-andean-community-adapt-to-melting-glaciers By Sofia Moutinho , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Ecologist  Anaïs Zimmer  was walking in the Peruvian Andes one day, explaining to community members how hard it is for vegetation and soil to establish itself in deglacierized areas, or areas where glacier ice is retreating. That was when locals suggested an unconventional solution: bringing in llamas to fertilize the soil with their poop. Zimmer, then at the University of Texas at Austin, had been studying the consequences of  glacier loss in the Andes  for the past decade. Peru, which is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, has lost  more than half of them in the past 50 years because of climate change , according to the country’s ministry of agriculture. When the ice disappears, it uncovers metallic, rocky soil that had been covered for millennia. ...But an ancient practice might offer a solution to these proble...

https://www.science.org/content/article/gardens-blooming-endangered-plants-could-prove-boon-conservation By GRETCHEN VOGEL , Science. Excerpt: ...For years, conservationists have heralded the benefits of growing native species in yards and gardens. But the potential for gardeners to help slow biodiversity loss by planting threatened species has received less attention, says Ingmar Staude, a botanist at the University of Leipzig. He and his colleagues now report in Scientific Reports that if more gardeners opted for conservation-relevant species, the overall threat level for plants—defined as the ratio of at-risk plant species to all species—could fall by 25% across Germany. They suggest other countries could see similar benefits.....

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/27/world/canada/canada-wildfires-kelowna-british-columbia.html By Ian Austen , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The fire advanced on the city of Kelowna [Canada] for 19 days — consuming 976 hectares, or about 2,400 acres — of forest. But at the suburban fringes, it encountered a fire prevention zone and sputtered, burning just a single house. The fire prevention zone — an area carefully cleared to remove fuel and minimize the spread of flames — was created by a logging company owned by a local Indigenous community. And as a new wildfire has stalked the suburb of West Kelowna this month, its history with the previous one — the Mount Law fire, in 2021 — offers a valuable lesson: A well-placed and well-constructed fire prevention zone can, under the right conditions, save homes and lives. It’s a lesson not only for Kelowna but also for a growing number of places in Canada and elsewhere threatened by  increased wildfire  amid climate change.......

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/20/us/trees-heat-wave-new-haven-ct.html By Colbi Edmonds , The New York Times.  Excerpt: As the United States sweats through another unbearable  summer of record-breaking heat , planting more trees has emerged as a practical solution to cooling cities,  especially areas known as “heat islands”  where concrete and congestion magnify already brutal temperatures. Yet filling a neighborhood with trees is not as simple as it seems. Funding and maintenance are issues for cities grappling with  crime  and  housing . And not everyone, it turns out, wants a tree. ...Mr. Rodriguez, who volunteers with the Urban Resources Initiative, a nonprofit partnered with Yale University, spends much of his time persuading his neighbors that trees are worth the trouble. Because the trees are planted by a volunteer organization, residents have to take some responsibility for making sure the trees survive and thrive. The city of New Haven pays f...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/16/climate/climate-geodesic-dome-house.html By  Christopher Flavelle , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Jon duSaint, a retired software engineer, recently bought property near Bishop, Calif., in a rugged valley east of the Sierra Nevada. The area is at risk for wildfires, severe daytime heat and high winds — and also heavy winter snowfall. But Mr. duSaint isn’t worried. He’s planning to live in a dome. The 29-foot structure will be coated with aluminum shingles that reflect heat, and are also fire-resistant. Because the dome has less surface area than a rectangular house, it’s easier to insulate against heat or cold. And it can withstand high winds and heavy snowpack. ...As weather grows more extreme, geodesic domes and other resilient home designs are gaining new attention from more climate-conscious home buyers, and the architects and builders who cater to them.... 

https://eos.org/articles/humans-adapted-to-diverse-habitats-as-climate-and-landscapes-changed By Deepa Padmanaban , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Our genus,  Homo , evolved over 3 million years by adapting to increasingly diverse environments. Now, a  new study  published in  Science  deeply explores how six species of  Homo ( H. ergaster ,  H. habilis ,  H. erectus ,  H. heidelbergensis ,  H. neanderthalensis,  and early  H. sapiens ) adapted to habitats across Africa and Eurasia. In its analysis, the team of scientists from South Korea and Italy used data from more than 3,000 human fossil specimens and archaeological sites. They then combined those data with climate and vegetation models of the past 3 million years. ...during the early to middle Pleistocene (about 2.6 million years ago to 0.5 million years ago), massive changes in Earth’s climate played a role in the distribution of vegetation, as well as the evolutionary developme...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/20/climate/rice-farming-climate-change.html By  Somini Sengupta , reporting from Arkansas and Bangladesh, and  Tran Le Thuy , from Vietnam, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Rice is in trouble as the Earth heats up, threatening the food and livelihood of billions of people. Sometimes there’s not enough rain when seedlings need water, or too much when the plants need to keep their heads above water. As the sea intrudes, salt ruins the crop. As nights warm, yields go down. These hazards are forcing the world to find new ways to grow one of its most important crops. Rice farmers are shifting their planting calendars. Plant breeders are working on seeds to withstand high temperatures or salty soils. Hardy heirloom varieties are being resurrected....