Carey L. Biron

With a snappy title and a laudable goal, "30 by 30" was a landmark plan hatched to help save at least 30% of the planet's land and oceans by 2030.    

Alongside this multinational push, the United States had its own trailblazing version of 30x30 and Americans came to see conservation as an effective - and fairly straightforward - way of helping win wider climate pledges.

U.S. President Donald Trump's second term in office has seen unprecedented rollbacks of federal funding for and focus on climate change, but critics say a new proposed change could now be the most sweeping yet.

The administration is seeking to rescind a 2009 regulatory ruling known as the endangerment finding, the government's view that climate change is a danger to human health and wellbeing.

When Rebecca Lindsey received a layoff notice from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in February, it felt like an attack on the federal government's online science portal that she had helped run for a decade and a half.

The site, called Climate.gov, was a vast repository of research about climate change.

As President Donald Trump slows the federal government's support for clean energy, U.S. cities are pushing back with a few moves of their own.

Many cities are still boosting building efficiency, electrifying vehicles and neighbourhoods, training workers for new energy jobs and designing for the future, mayors say.

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.