President Biden signed an executive order Friday aimed at ensuring federal decisions consider "environmental justice," which addresses higher pollution burdens often faced by communities of color and people living in poverty.
Driving the news: The new executive order directs agencies to identify and address data and science gaps to help better understand cumulative environmental impacts.
Xprize, a nonprofit that holds international contests to stimulate technological innovation, unveiled an $11-million dollar competition on Friday to transform how the world detects and fights wildfires.
Why it matters: With global warming and land-use change projected to make wildfires more frequent, intense, and possibly more destructive, wildfire agencies around the world may have to the adopt novel technologies and techniques to control future blazes.
A new, first-of-its-kind federal census of older trees on federal lands may presage a battle over whether and how to expand forest protections, specifically as a climate policy.
Driving the news: The United States contains more than 100 million acres of old-growth and mature forests on government lands, according to the tree census conducted by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management and released Thursday.
