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U.S. federal agencies and sovereign tribal agencies often work together on shared goals like managing wildfire, improving wildlife habitat and other issues. A new repository collects a number of these co-stewardship - or sovereign-to-sovereign - agreements in an effort to help tribes and others better understand their possible uses.
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A new paper finds that current wildfire suppression policies can increase fire severity as much as decades of fuel accumulation and climate change. Using fire models, the area burned annually grew much faster under current suppression policy when compared to a policy of allowing low- and moderate-intensity blazes to burn.
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The National Firefighter Registry is perhaps the most ambitious effort to better understand the link between firefighting and cancer.
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Methane is a strong climate-warming pollutant. And a new study shows oil and gas operations in the Mountain West and beyond are leaking a lot more of it than the government thinks.
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In 2020, Congress passed the Not Invisible Act to help address the Missing and Murdered Persons Crisis. The bill formed a federal commission made up of tribal leaders, federal agencies, families, and survivors, who were tasked with developing recommendations on how best to address the crisis. The Department of the Interior and the Department of Justice responded to these recommendations in early March.
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According to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, there were just five reported abortions in the state in 2023. A sharp decline from previous years, that number does not appear to reflect the reality of abortion access in the state since strict abortion bans went into effect.
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In the U.S., transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A new report ranks which cities are doing the best job at driving down those emissions.
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A new study brings clarity to a long-running debate over whether mountains produce carbon dioxide or remove it from the atmosphere.
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Prescribed fires and mechanical thinning efforts are increasingly common land management tools intended to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. But research into their long term effectiveness is somewhat limited. A recent study looked at the effects of such interventions over more than 20 years on a dry, low-elevation research forest in Montana, and found that the combination of thinning and burning was the most likely to reduce fire risk.
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A recent paper explored the challenges exacerbated by climate change faced by Latino farmworkers in Idaho, which are comparable to the issues faced by such workers across the West.