Petrochemical plants in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, part of an industrial corridor known as “Cancer Alley.” The Trump administration has exempted several plants in the region from new regulations on hazardous air pollutants.

In 2024, the Biden administration enacted wide-ranging regulations to protect communities near petrochemical plants from air toxics. The Trump administration has since granted exemptions to scores of polluting facilities and is working to rewrite the long-awaited rule.

By Beth Gardiner

  • E360 FILM CONTEST WINNER

    Filipino Cacao Growers Learn to Live With a Hotter Climate

    In “Chocolates Melting Away” — the First-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Breech Asher Harani explores how cacao growers in the Philippines are developing new techniques to protect their crops from increasingly turbulent weather. 

  • E360 FILM CONTEST

    A Bicycle Journey Across Brazil to Find a Vanishing Savanna

    In “Here There Was Cerrado” — the Second-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Natascha Otoya shows how industrial farms are plowing up the Brazilian savanna, changing the flow of water, and skewing human memory of the landscape.

  • OPINION

    For America’s Rarest Wildlife, Survival May Hinge on a Single Word

    For 50 years, the Endangered Species Act has defined "harm" as not just injury to individuals but to the habitat on which they depend. By narrowing that definition, the Trump administration is leaving hundreds of species at risk of extinction.

    By Ted Williams

E360 Film Contest

Who Gets to Decide the Fate of a Pristine Alaskan Rainforest?

In "Land Less" — the Third-Place Winner of the 2026 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — filmmaker Alexi Liotti follows the activists fighting a bill that would transfer thousands of acres of Alaskan rainforest to five Native corporations, opening the land to logging.

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Dogondoutchi, Niger, is heavily reliant on groundwater, which is growing more abundant across the African Sahel.

Climate

After Decades of Drought, Water Is Rising in the African Sahel

Warming has brought extreme rain to the parched Sahel, which is seeing aquifers refill as monsoons grow stronger. But heavier downpours alone cannot explain the groundwater revival, say hydrologists, who believe efforts to harvest rainfall may also be paying dividends.

By Fred Pearce

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