climate change

Fire ecologists have made a surprisingly unintuitive discovery after analyzing 30 years of wildfire data, especially as the West grapples with profound drought and hotter weather.

A stretch of Interstate 10 at the Arizona-New Mexico border has claimed more than 50 lives over the last 40 years due to dust storms. While state and federal agencies have taken notice, the burden of emergency response has fallen on rural communities with limited resources.

It's not clear yet how the money would be distributed among several states in a river basin where political fights and an impasse over how to share water long term have persisted even during historic drought.

Widespread drought and fears of a power crisis is forcing the Interior Department to start sending billions of gallons of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir downstream to prop up Lake Powell.

Cody Moser with the federal Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said in a monthly briefing Tuesday that just 1.4 million acre feet of Colorado River water is expected to reach Lake Powell through July. That's less than a quarter of what's considered normal.

A recently published scientific study has found that common wildfire reduction strategies in the Southwest – like tree thinning and prescribed burning – are detrimental for some declining bird populations.

A small clutch of Democratic legislators once again sinks a plan to dramatically reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Leaders of environmental groups are issuing fresh warnings this week about the impacts the ongoing gridlock could have in the river basin.

An annual bipartisan poll addressing conservation issues across the American West released its findings on Wednesday – highlighting serious concerns among voters across both sides of the political aisle.

On the eve of the high-stakes summit, negotiators from both the upper and lower river basins are not sounding confident they can reach an agreement with less than three weeks to go before a Feb. 14 deadline.