As devastating wildfires continue to burn across the western U.S. and Canada this summer, they’re taking a serious toll on the electrical grid. Every year, wildfires, some sparked by birds or even high winds, cause significant damage to grid infrastructure.

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This story was co-published with RE:PUBLIC Lands Media, an independent, non-profit news organization covering public lands.​

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New York City has more than 500 miles of coastline. The city’s coastal zone is home to around 1 million people as well as billions of dollars of residential and commercial property, and no two miles of the waterfront are quite the same. The marshy areas of southern Queens, the housing projects in waterfront Brooklyn, and the towers of Manhattan’s Financial District are all vulnerable during high tides and major storm events, and each of these areas is vulnerable in a different way.

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Can a city’s seawall stand up to a blockbuster storm? Will a region’s power grid hold against record-breaking heat? And can a town’s fire-fighting resources contain a major wildfire? 

To answer these questions, communities will first need to know how such extreme events could unfold. How far is a wildfire likely to spread? How much of a region might a storm impact? How long could a heat wave last? 

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In the span of a week in August 2026, powerful storms and deadly flooding knocked out power to a half-million people across the Midwest; Tropical Storm Lala cut power to thousands more in Hawaii amid 

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Over the past two years, Georgia’s agriculture community has battled hurricanes, wildfires and drought. 

Agriculture is the state’s No. 1 industry, adding $70 billion annually to Georgia’s economy, according to the Agriculture Department. But natural disasters are a real threat to the economic output and survival of Georgia’s farms. 

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When a hurricane roars toward land, forecasters try to predict how high sea levels will rise to help coastal communities prepare for the worst impacts.

But storm surge peak isn’t always the biggest problem. How fast water rises, how long it remains elevated, and how quickly it recedes all influence coastal erosion, infrastructure damage, emergency response, and recovery — and these factors can vary dramatically from storm to storm.

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When torrential rain doused the Texas Hill Country last month, Paul Welch stayed up past his bedtime checking radar and rain gauges on RiverHub, the Upper Guadalupe River Authority’s new tracking website. At midnight, comforted by what he saw, he went to bed. 

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency has issued new grant guidelines that threaten to withhold counterterrorism funds from states that do not comply with President Donald Trump’s election security directives.

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Twenty-six states accuse the Trump administration in a new lawsuit of illegally threatening to withhold billions in counterterrorism and emergency preparedness funds from states that don’t adopt sweeping election changes or cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

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A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides a comprehensive assessment of the current capabilities of extreme event attribution (EEA) — a scientific field that analyzes whether and to what extent human-caused climate change influenced an individual ex

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