Almost 15 years after federal law put free water on school menus, states still struggle with how to guarantee access
Christina Hecht remembers how water made its way into school lunch law because the process was unusually easy. Back in the mid-2000s, a researcher toured school cafeterias in California and wondered, “What are these kids to do if they want a drink of water?” said Hecht, a policy adviser at the University of California’s Nutrition Policy Institute.
At the time, 40% of the state’s schools failed to offer free water in their cafeterias. That fact eventually reached the then governor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, who moved to pass SB 1413 requiring schools to offer free, fresh water during mealtimes. Advocates then used California’s example to convince US senators working on 2010’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) – a federal package setting nutrition standards and food funding for public schools and childcare centers – to add drinking water to that legislation, too.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
06/27/2024 - 09:00
06/27/2024 - 05:00
More than a third of Americans endure summers at least 1.5C hotter than the 1895 average, analysis shows
An onslaught of record-breaking heat across much of the US has provided yet another indicator of a longer-term issue – summers are progressively getting hotter for Americans in all corners of the country.
The US climate scientist Brian Brettschneider has analysed almost 130 years of federal data and it shows that from New York to Los Angeles there are hotspots where summers have got significantly hotter in that time compared with the average levels of warming brought about by the burning of fossil fuels.
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06/27/2024 - 01:00
Walking a 100-mile stretch of coastline reveals how a pioneering project is transforming the seascape, rivers and land
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On a blustery morning in May on Shoreham-by-Sea’s west beach, Eric Smith and George Short are pointing out treasures the waves have left on the tideline. Cuttlefish bones and balls of whelk eggs, they say, are evidence of recovering marine habitats.
“Just give nature a bit of space and it will come back,” says Smith, 76, a former lorry driver by trade, freediver by choice. He first started diving off the Sussex coast at the age of 11, and still recalls the underwater “garden of Eden” of his childhood, a kelp forest teeming with bream, lobsters and cuttlefish that stretched for 25 miles (40km) between Shoreham and Selsey Bill. It vanished after years of intensive trawling, a destructive form of fishing involving dragging heavy nets along the seabed.
Whelk eggs and seaweed. Photograph: Urszula Sołtys/the Guardian
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06/27/2024 - 00:00
About 230 cases filed against corporations and trade associations around world since 2015
The number of climate lawsuits filed against companies around the world is rising swiftly, a report has found, and a majority of cases that have concluded have been successful.
About 230 climate-aligned lawsuits have been filed against corporations and trade associations since 2015, two-thirds of which have been initiated since 2020, according to the analysis published on Thursday by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
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06/26/2024 - 23:00
State not acting fast enough to build desalination stations to deal with dwindling rainfall and resulting drought, say critics
On 8 June, anger over months of water rationing spilled over in the drought-stricken central Algerian town of Tiaret, where balaclava-wearing demonstrators barricaded roads and burned tyres.
Rationing had been introduced to deal with a drought in parts of Algeria and neighbouring Morocco where the amount of rainfall that had historically replenished critical reservoirs was much reduced. Taps had been running dry for months, forcing people in the region – a semi-arid, high-desert plateau increasingly plagued by extreme heat – to queue to access water.
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06/26/2024 - 14:21
Researchers have projected future marine heatwaves will cause coral reefs to be at severe risk of bleaching for longer periods than previously seen.
06/26/2024 - 14:20
Researchers have found a chemical clue in Italian limestone that explains a mass extinction of marine life in the Early Jurassic period, 183 million years ago. Volcanic activity pumped out CO2, warming oceans and lowering their oxygen levels. The findings may foretell the impact climate change and oxygen depletion might have on today's oceans.
06/26/2024 - 12:21
Days of flooding have submerged homes and farmland across South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota
At least two people have died as a result of devastating floods in the US midwest. Flood warnings remain in place across South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota as more rainfall and storms are expected to hit the region this week.
More than 3 million people have been affected by days of flooding that washed away homes and submerged vast swaths of farmland. On Sunday, a railroad bridge connecting Iowa and South Dakota collapsed from flooding.
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06/26/2024 - 12:09
North Herefordshire candidate and chef also call for water industry overhaul and more support for farmers
The Green party and the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are calling for a “protection zone” to be placed around one of the UK’s most beautiful but threatened rivers and have demanded “drastic” nationwide changes to the water industry’s management and regulation.
At a wild-swimming event on the River Wye on Wednesday, Fearnley-Whittingstall and the Green party’s candidate for North Herefordshire, Ellie Chowns, both took dips, but only after measuring the level of pollution in the water.
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06/26/2024 - 10:00
Paper outlines different legal theories that could help governments pursue accountability for harms
Companies have spent decades obstructing efforts to take on the plastics crisis and may have breached a host of US laws, a new report argues.
The research from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) details the widespread burdens that plastic pollution places on US cities and states, and argues that plastic producers may be breaking public-nuisance, product-liability and consumer-protection laws.
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