Carey L. Biron

Kirk Watson leads a city in Texas, but these days he feels like he's stepping into a role vacated by Washington officials.

Weeks out from November's global U.N. COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, Watson and other U.S. mayors say they want to use the summit to reaffirm their growing climate work – and to seek ideas and support.

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has significantly ramped up efforts to halt the federal focus on climate change, with Trump himself dismissing climate change as a "con job" to the United Nations General Assembly last month.

Yet local governments have significant powers to reduce global-warming emissions, regardless of what happens in Washington.

After Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico, Katia Aviles-Vazquez recalls the first problem was simply getting out of her house where the doors were jammed shut by debris.

Her neighbors faced the same problem, she said, if they even had doors after the September 2017 storm that caused some 3,000 deaths and more than $115 billion in damages.

The path to Minnesota's groundbreaking, new anti-pollution law began at a metal-shredding facility in Minneapolis before spreading its "toxic soup" along the banks of the Mississippi.

The factory, now shut, was once recognised as a source of lead, chromium and other pollution by state regulators - as well as by concerned locals such as Roxxanne O'Brien.

Biking into work across the Potomac River in Washington always provides a crisp, breezy entry into the city.

A few days after President Donald Trump declared a "crime emergency" in the District of Columbia and ordered a security crackdown, I saw an aluminium stepladder bouncing in the traffic on the bridge.

As President Donald Trump aims the might of the U.S. government at boosting data centre development, communities in the crosshairs are organising to have control over its local impact.

Trump unveiled an AI strategy last month aimed at achieving U.S. dominance by cutting regulation, speeding up permitting and making land available for proposed data centres and infrastructure.

As the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, more than 180 current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staffers warn cuts and leadership failures at the agency could lead to another calamitous disaster response.

In August 2005, Katrina killed nearly 1,400 people and caused an inflation-adjusted $205 billion in damages to become the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history.

Surrounded by warm lights and deep-green crops growing in stacked, rotating carousels reaching towards the ceiling, Oren Falkowitz sets out a vision of the future of urban farming.

It is one of localized food production, using vacant buildings – strip malls, industrial buildings, even gas stations – to grow food near people instead of shipping it from afar.

When Kawika Riley surveys the beaches and forested hills of the Hawaiian islands, his eyes are drawn to a dangerous interloper: flammable invasive grasses.

Two years ago, such grasses fed devastating wildfires that tore through the island of Maui, killing more than 100 people and causing $5.5 billion in damage.

President Donald Trump has yet to announce a homelessness policy, but comments he made during the election about forcibly removing the homeless and relocating them to "tent cities" have advocates worried, especially amid reports of key funding cuts.

Trump's new administration takes over following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that made it easier for local officials to crack down on homelessness, even while dozens of cities have since moved in the opposite direction and sought to create new protections for the homeless.