By Lisa Sorg

RALEIGH, N.C.—The Southern Environmental Law Center is petitioning the Environmental Protection Agency to take over the state’s water permitting authority, an unprecedented move for North Carolina.

By Bing Lin

Miles to Go: The third in an ongoing series Inside Climate News fellow Bing Lin is reporting from the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California. Over the course of a 500-mile-hike, the series is exploring the impacts of climate change on the trail and what outdoor recreation can teach society about sustainability, adaptation and coexistence in a warming world.

By Georgina Gustin

As much of the world heads into the fall harvest season and agriculture once again enters international policy conversations, humanitarian groups are calling for fundamental changes to the global food system—not only to feed the world’s hungry but also to enlist more farmers in solving the climate crisis.

By Bob Berwyn

Last year was already one for the climate record books, but a new report from the American Meteorological Society is adding to that already substantial list.

By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue

PARKER, Arizona—South of Headgate Rock Dam, beyond riverbanks lined with willow and mesquite, the broad floodplain of the Colorado River spreads across emerald fields and sun-bleached earth.

By Jake Bolster

The Never Summer Mountains tower almost 13,000 feet above sea level on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, the regal headwaters of the Colorado River. Snowmelt and rainfall trickle southwest from the peaks through jumbles of scree and colorful deposits of silicic rock, formed some 27 to 29 million years ago, then plunge into Gore Canyon. There, the river gallops downstream, absorbing other tributaries from Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming on its way to California. More than 40 million people from seven states and Mexico depend on water from the Colorado River Basin to drink, irrigate crops, generate electricity and recreate, a demand that is greater than the river system can bear. 

By Yuriko Schumacher, Emily Foxhall, Alejandra Martinez, Martha Pskowski, Dylan Baddour

This story is a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Inside Climate News. Schumacher, Foxhall and Martinez reported for the Tribune, and Pskowski and Baddour reported for ICN. 

By Amy Green, Lisa Sorg

Tropical Storm Debby, a plodding, waterlogged system that has already saturated four southeastern states, bears many characteristics of a warming planet, climate scientists say. It’s reminiscent of other catastrophic tropical cyclones that have battered the United States over the past eight years.

By Lisa Sorg

The North Carolina Chamber of Commerce has privately leaned on the state’s powerful Environmental Management Commission to delay critical PFAS rules, emails obtained under state public records law show, including providing members with the résumé of a scientist who has downplayed the toxicity of the compounds.

By Aman Azhar

A severe algae bloom clogged equipment at one of the treatment facilities providing drinking water in the Washington region, forcing officials to declare a boil-water advisory on the night of July 3—as thousands of visitors arrived to celebrate Independence Day.