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Louisiana's affordable housing supply is the eighth most vulnerable in the United States to coastal flooding. Currently, 214 units are exposed, a number projected to rise to 685 by 2050, representing a 220% increase compared to 2000. The document highlights that affordable housing is particularly susceptible due to its age, poor quality, and lack of resilience features. Specific cities like Slidell, Luling, and Franklin are expected to see significant increases in exposed units by 2050.

The document details the 'externalities' of fossil fuels—costs not reflected in market prices—across climate, environmental, and health dimensions. It highlights significant U.S. impacts, including $606.9 billion in extreme weather costs (2016-2020) and 350,000 premature deaths in 2018. It also emphasizes the disproportionate burden on communities of color and low-income areas, such as 'Cancer Alley' in Louisiana. Proposed policy solutions include eliminating subsidies, increasing the social cost of carbon, implementing a federal clean electricity standard, and establishing carbon pricing.

The document details a series of record-breaking climate events in 2020, including an unprecedented number of billion-dollar disasters in the US, extreme wildfires in California and Colorado, and devastating tropical cyclones in the Philippines and the Bay of Bengal. It highlights that 2020 was on pace to be the second-hottest year on record and notes the acceleration of Arctic sea ice retreat. Experts cited in the text emphasize that these events are driven by human-caused climate change and call for urgent climate action and funding for affected poor populations.

The author argues that environmental racism and a decline in federal funding since the 1970s have created severe disparities in water access for Latino, Black, and Indigenous communities in the US. The text highlights the vulnerability of these populations to climate-driven disasters, such as hurricanes and wildfires, and calls for Congress to implement water affordability protections, prohibit shutoffs, and invest in green infrastructure and wastewater system repairs, prioritizing areas like the San Joaquin Valley, Puerto Rico, and the Navajo Nation.

The document highlights the financial losses and legal challenges facing The Blackstone Group due to its extensive fossil fuel portfolio, noting bankruptcies of held companies and significant value drops in its private equity portfolio in early 2020. Despite these risks and community opposition, Blackstone continued to expand its energy holdings in April 2020 through the acquisition of Tallgrass Energy and a stake in Energy Transfer Partners. The text also details environmental violations linked to Blackstone's investments, including a major crude oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and permit violations involving the Rover Pipeline.

The report outlines 30 federal policy recommendations to improve coastal resilience in the United States, emphasizing community-led planning, nature-based solutions, and equitable financing. It argues that federal policies must shift from relying on past climate data to anticipating future conditions, particularly for infrastructure and land use. Key priorities include integrating climate justice, supporting tribal sovereignty in adaptation planning, and reforming benefit-cost analysis tools to better value social and environmental outcomes. The document also advocates for the creation of a national 'green bank' and a federal climate heritage coordination office to manage the intersection of cultural preservation and climate change.

The report details Blackstone's extensive portfolio of oil, gas, and coal assets, highlighting a pattern of environmental violations and community opposition. It contrasts Blackstone's strategy with a broader trend of declining investor appetite for fossil fuels and notes the firm's political contributions to the Trump administration, which rolled back environmental regulations.

The report analyzes the link between synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use in the Midwest and the formation of a hypoxic 'dead zone' in the Gulf of Mexico. It estimates that agricultural nitrogen losses have caused between $552 million and $2.4 billion in annual damages to Gulf fisheries and marine habitat ecosystem services since 1980. The authors argue that shifting to sustainable agricultural practices—such as cover cropping and conservation tillage—can reduce these losses, providing a significant return on investment by restoring marine productivity and improving soil resilience for farmers.

The report argues that rate-regulated utilities use 'self-commitment' to bypass market merit order, running coal plants that are objectively uneconomic and passing the resulting losses to captive customers through state fuel-cost-recovery processes. Using PLEXOS modeling for the MISO region in 2018, the authors find that this practice cost customers $350 million and suppressed regional market clearing prices by 2.4%. The report identifies Cleco and DTE Energy as significant contributors to these distortions and recommends that state regulators disallow the recovery of imprudent, above-market costs to incentivize efficient dispatch.

The document asserts that low-income and minority communities disproportionately suffer from negative environmental impacts and that the transition to a decarbonized economy must embed environmental justice to ensure no one is left behind. It highlights the importance of centering the lived experiences of impacted residents, citing the Green Door Initiative's efforts to provide workforce training for brownfield cleanup in Detroit and the LA SAFE program's community-centered resilience work in coastal Louisiana.

The Union of Concerned Scientists projects that without reductions in carbon emissions, US military installations will face a significant increase in days with a heat index above 100°F by midcentury, potentially increasing the rate of heat-related illnesses (HRIs). The report highlights that basic training recruits are particularly vulnerable and that installations in Florida are projected to be among the most affected. To address these risks, the memo recommends increased funding for HRI research, the establishment of an expert working group, improved training on acclimatization, and a transition toward renewable energy to limit future warming.

The document is a transcript of a congressional briefing on West Coast coastal resilience. Experts from the USGS, California coastal agencies, and the Puget Sound region discuss the physical drivers of sea level rise, the vulnerability of critical infrastructure, and various adaptation strategies. Key discussions include the 'coastal squeeze' effect on beaches, the use of nature-based 'soft shore' stabilization in Washington, and the implementation of regional planning and environmental justice policies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The document highlights the social disruption caused by relocation under LA SAFE, noting that 40% of surveyed individuals know friends or neighbors who have left and 25% know family who have left. It argues that government-led planning often lacks inclusiveness, with communities frequently asked to comment on plans they did not create.

The document outlines a resilience planning framework in Louisiana that utilizes extensive community engagement to identify challenges and develop project portfolios. Through 71 community meetings and the participation of 2,835 individuals in 2017, the process identified key strategies such as improved drainage, coastal restoration, and affordable housing. The 'LA SAFE' approach combined community-rated strategies with flood risk data to create draft projects across six parishes, focusing on high-ground growth corridors and supply chain planning.

The document details the LA Safe program, which combined state-led data from the Coastal Master Plan with grassroots engagement to develop land-use strategies and fund resilience projects in coastal Louisiana. It emphasizes the importance of building trust through leadership programs like 'Lead the Coast' and the necessity of integrating long-term adaptation planning into state agency operations to address the 'existential emergency' of land loss.

The report argues that a negative feedback loop exists in the United States where restrictive voting laws and partisan gerrymandering insulate legislators from accountability, leading to the adoption of policies that exacerbate public health disparities. Using data from America's Health Rankings and the Cost of Voting Index, the author finds that states with greater partisan bias and higher barriers to voting are associated with lower life expectancy and more severe health declines between 2010 and 2017. Specifically, the report links extreme gerrymandering to higher increases in opioid deaths among African Americans in high-poverty states and higher infant mortality for non-Hispanic black communities. To break this cycle, the document recommends reforms to reduce the costs of eligibility (such as automatic voter registration), reduce the costs of casting a vote (such as early in-person voting), and protect the equal value of votes through independent redistricting commissions and public campaign financing.

The report argues that the Trump administration has systematically undermined science-based decision-making, which exacerbates existing environmental and health inequities for marginalized communities. It documents rollbacks in air and water pollution enforcement, the suppression of scientific data, and the dismantling of social safety nets and community participation programs. The document provides specific examples of these failures, such as the refusal to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos and the suppression of PFAS contamination data, while highlighting state and local victories where communities have successfully pushed back against these trends.

The study finds that the extreme two-day rainfall during Tropical Storm Imelda in September 2019 was made more likely and more intense by anthropogenic climate change. Observational data suggests the probability of such an event has increased by a factor of 2.6 since 1900, while climate model synthesis indicates a probability increase of 1.5 to 3.1 times and an intensity increase of 9% to 21%. The report also notes that rapid urban expansion and loss of impervious cover in Southeast Texas have exacerbated flooding risks for approximately 6.6 million people in the impacted counties.

The document argues for the denial of the Tacoma LNG project, claiming it locks Washington into 40 years of fossil fuel dependence and poses significant safety and health risks. It asserts that the project's purpose has shifted from peak-shaving for utility customers to primarily serving as a marine and trucking fuel source, necessitating a new environmental review. The authors contend that the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency (PSCAA) has underestimated greenhouse gas emissions by relying on flawed assumptions regarding methane leakage and the 'no-action' alternative. Additionally, the document highlights failures in the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) to address recent LNG disasters, cumulative toxic air emissions in a densely populated urban area, and environmental justice impacts on the South Sound community and the Puyallup Tribe.

The document examines the marginalization of traditional knowledge and the Kwéyòl language in Saint Lucia's public policy, often driven by a bias toward modernization and Eurocentric development models. It highlights the role of the Folk Research Centre (FRC) in documenting and promoting these cultural assets through initiatives like Jounen Kwéyòl and the development of Creole orthography. The author contends that while some progress has been made, such as the use of Kwéyòl in parliament, the language is still excluded from formal education and business. The paper concludes by advocating for the official recognition of Kwéyòl and the mainstreaming of cultural analysis in policy, similar to gender and climate change, to achieve more sustainable lifestyles.