Regional

Growing crops in the desert

Considering culverts

Laura Sager is the Executive Director of the Soil and Water Conservation District in Columbia County, New York. Among a range of important topics that occupy her days, Sager spends an increasing amount of time on a topic that many people consider mundane: she’s thinking about culverts.

Climate stressors and impacts

Importing seafood is big business

Fishermen across Central America and in the Caribbean—a region known as Mesoamerica—ply the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific to make a living and provide food to eat and sell. The United States is a lucrative trading partner for these fishermen—we import 90 percent of the seafood we consume, about half of which comes from aquaculture.

Stressors and impacts

At Grand Isle, Louisiana, rising seas and sinking land add up to one of the highest rates of relative sea level rise in the world. As global sea level goes up and regional geologic processes cause the ground to go down, the Gulf of Mexico claims hundreds of acres of land per year. As a result, inland cities are increasingly vulnerable to flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes. Lying directly south of the densely populated city of New Orleans, Grand Isle represents Louisiana's first line of defense from coastal flooding.