Environment & Climate

As the Salton Sea slowly dries up, an environmental health disaster is brewing. In response, the Desert Sun found new ways to report on the rising health threat to local communities.

Breakneck construction in Philadelphia has unearthed a toxic legacy, coating playgrounds and backyards with dangerous levels of lead dust.

If heat is the enemy, Marcela Herrera thought she was ready for battle last summer at her family’s north Los Angeles apartment.

The Bay Area air district is currently weighing a proposed cap on greenhouse gases and pollutants coming from the five Bay Area refineries. The cap would in effect freeze local refineries at their current levels of production.

For reporter Giles Bruce, it wasn't until he jettisoned all his preconceived notions about what was driving Indiana's high infant death rate that he found his real story.

For an ambitious project on lead in Chicago, City Bureau started with the question: "How do we as journalists meet people where they are?" The answer included a text-message service that responds with lead test data for the user's community.

New research on lead's negative effects on IQ and class makes a brutal irony even clearer — lead is a lifelong disaster, particularly for poor children already facing serious disadvantages.

In California’s Merced County, residents are more likely to be exposed to tobacco, suffer from poor air quality, or die of heart disease. At the same time, the region faces a long-running shortage of doctors.

The shortage of doctors in California’s San Joaquin Valley has long impacted Central Californians in a very real way. Will efforts to combat the shortage make a difference?

Record temperatures aren’t just threatening cracks in distant polar ice — they’re raising questions about how well California’s most vulnerable city dwellers are coping with urban heat impacts.