Floodlight

04/12/2025

🌽 America's favorite crop has a climate problem 🌽

Corn covers an area the size of Montana and ends up in everything from animal feed to the fuel in our cars.

But the way we grow it comes with a hidden cost.

Heavy fertilizer use releases a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO₂, and it’s contaminating drinking water across the Midwest.

Our new investigation shows how federal policy and industry lobbying built this system — and why it’s been so hard to shift.

Corn dominates U.S. farmland and fuels the ethanol industry. But the fertilizer it relies on drives emissions and fouls drinking water.

03/12/2025

We’re thrilled to announce that Floodlight has chosen Brad Racino as our next editor-in-chief! 🎉 This follows a highly competitive national search that drew 240 candidates.

Brad brings deep experience leading mission-driven newsrooms. Before joining Floodlight, he served as managing editor at New York Focus, where he helped strengthen statewide coverage of power and policy. He also previously led New York Cannabis Insider, building it into the state’s leading source of industry reporting.

Earlier in his career, Brad spent nearly a decade at inewsource in San Diego as an investigative reporter and editor, helping grow the newsroom while producing cross-platform work with partners.

Please join us in welcoming Brad!

Floodlight has chosen Brad Racino as our next editor-in-chief after a highly competitive national search that drew 240 candidates.

02/12/2025

This , we’re asking for your support.

Floodlight is the only U.S. newsroom with a singular mission: to hold climate polluters accountable. Our reporters spend months uncovering how powerful industries influence policy, undermine protections and shape the lives of communities across the country. It’s work that few newsrooms have the time or freedom to take on.

What many people don’t realize is how small our donor community is. We don’t have a large membership program — just 50 paying subscribers who believe this work should exist. That means your gift today, in any amount, makes a real difference in what we’re able to investigate next.

If Floodlight’s reporting matters to you, we hope you’ll consider supporting us this Giving Tuesday. Your contribution helps keep this work independent, accessible and free for every newsroom that wants to republish it:

https://floodlightnews.org/ #/portal/support

26/11/2025

The recent 43-day government shutdown cut off SNAP benefits for 1.8 million people in New York City.

City Harvest, NYC’s largest food rescue organization, stepped up fast. It expanded distributions, purchased shelf-stable foods people normally buy with SNAP, and rescued surplus food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

That matters for more than hunger relief. Food waste is responsible for 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions — far more than the aviation sector.

Now, even with the shutdown over, new federal cuts to SNAP are already in force, representing the largest reduction in the program’s history. That means demand for emergency food will keep rising.

Our new story with Sentient looks at how City Harvest is trying to close that gap and why food rescue has become one of the most practical, immediate tools for both fighting hunger and cutting climate pollution.

City Harvest’s food rescue efforts are a win for both climate and food insecurity

20/11/2025

What does it look like when a neighborhood waits 13 years for flood protection?

In Edgemere, a Queens community devastated by Hurricane Sandy, residents say the same vulnerabilities that filled their homes with more than five feet of water still remain today.

Floodlight went to hear their stories — of daily high-tide flooding and a shoreline project that was promised, funded, and then dropped. Our new video shows what it means to live with climate risk long after the headlines fade: “We’re the forgotten. We are the forgotten here.”

The working class community of Edgemere is among New York City's most flood prone neighborhoods but a decade after officials promised to cut flood risks in t...

18/11/2025

Edgemere is a coastal neighborhood in Queens, at the far end of the Rockaway peninsula. It sits between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, making it one of the most flood-prone parts of New York City.

When Superstorm Sandy hit, water rushed in from both sides and filled homes with more than five feet of water. Residents like Baba Ndanani remember swimming to safety and returning to a house so destroyed he slept on an overturned refrigerator for weeks.

People in Edgemere do not forget that night. And they have not forgotten what the city promised afterward.

In our latest Floodlight investigation, one theme came up again and again: We are forgotten. City officials pledged to fortify Edgemere after Sandy, but the major protection — raising the bayside shoreline — was dropped. Millions of dollars earmarked for flood mitigation were reallocated elsewhere.

Meanwhile, other parts of New York are getting seawalls, floodgates and billions in resilience funding. As one resident told us: “They’re fortifying Manhattan. So where’s the investment for Edgemere?”

Edgemere’s story reflects a larger pattern across the country: working class coastal neighborhoods caught between rising seas and rising housing pressures, waiting for protections that never seem to arrive.

Watch the short video and read the full investigation:

A decade after city officials promised to cut flood risks in the Edgemere neighborhood, critics say it remains just as vulnerable.

04/11/2025

When storms, floods, and droughts become constant, home itself can become unlivable.

⚪ In Guatemala, Gricelda spent years trying to stop stormwater from seeping through her mud walls.

⚪ In Bangladesh, Hossain lost his crops and savings after a decade of floods destroyed his fields.

⚪ In Senegal, Mohamed watched his family fracture under the stress of drought and downpours.

Each made the same painful choice: to leave everything behind, cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and start over in New York City — a place that has become a refuge for people displaced by a warming world.

And they’re not alone. A year-long investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations and Documented, republished today by Floodlight, found higher-than-average migration growth to the U.S. from regions in Guatemala, Bangladesh, and Senegal repeatedly hit by climate disasters.

Globally, scientists warn that by 2050, climate change could force up to 143 million people from their homes across Latin America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Here are their stories:

Data analysis found higher than average migration growth to the US from areas in Guatemala, Bangladesh and Senegal hit by repeated climate disasters.

30/10/2025

Every year, the United States throws away more than a third of its food supply, and with it, a huge opportunity to slow climate change.

Food waste might sound small compared to oil drilling or power plants, but it’s responsible for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions — about five times the emissions from the entire aviation industry. And most of that pollution happens before the food is even tossed: from clearing land to grow crops, to raising livestock, to transporting and refrigerating everything we buy.

Experts say cutting food waste could deliver fast, tangible climate benefits using tools we already have: clearer date labels, stronger food donation programs, and better consumer education. Yet despite rare bipartisan support, progress has stalled. Most food still ends up in landfills, where it decays and releases methane, a gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

As one researcher told us: “If we’re going to eat beef and dairy, make sure not to waste it.”

Read our new collaboration with Sentient Media, exploring how preventing food waste could be one of America’s simplest, most ignored climate solutions:

Cutting food waste is a huge potential climate win. Why are we ignoring it?

28/10/2025

Residents of the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast are bracing for their latest environmental setback: A two-year exemption loosening emissions standards at some petrochemical plants.

The change could add more than 5 million tons of air pollution each year, according to the Center for International Environmental Law.

“Our lives don't matter,” says Tish Taylor, a community activist and lifelong resident of the corridor in southeast Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley,” where she says residents are routinely subjected to chemical smells and “fog” from the high concentration of polluting facilities.

“Nothing that Trump does says that he cares about people. Everything about his actions shows his disdain for poor and Black people specifically, but poor in general.”

Expansions at five petrochemical plants in Texas and Louisiana could add the equivalent of more than 1 million cars’ worth of pollution, advocates say

14/10/2025

Across the U.S. armed forces, climate change is already reshaping how troops can do their jobs.

Training grinds to a halt on days when extreme heat makes it unsafe to work. Hurricanes have wiped out billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. And in recent years, the number of service members suffering from heat exhaustion has jumped 52%.

For decades, the U.S. military recognized these threats for what they were: national security risks. It hardened bases against flooding, built solar arrays to provide backup power and even developed hybrid combat vehicles to reduce deadly fuel convoys.

But that’s now changing.

In Floodlight and The Guardian, investigative reporter Ames Alexander looks into how the Pentagon is retreating from its own climate preparedness plans — and what that means for the people on the front lines.

Read more:

For decades, the military treated climate change as a threat. Now it’s backing away from plans to protect people and bases from extreme weather.

03/10/2025

“Let me put it to you this way: They went ahead and built houses. But they forgot they were building homes.”

Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles became the first federally-funded climate relocation in the U.S. Floodlight went to hear how the new community is already failing its residents:

Louisiana's Isle de Jean Charles is so vulnerable to sea level rise the island became the focus of the first federally funded climate driven relocation proje...

26/09/2025

Three years ago, Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles became the site of the first federally funded climate relocation in the United States. The move was supposed to be a model for the millions of Americans who may one day be forced to leave their homes because of rising seas.

Instead, residents say they’ve been left with broken homes — and broken promises.

Floodlight’s new investigation and short video revisit the community’s story, showing how a project once hailed as a national model has become a cautionary tale.

👉 Read and watch here:

Three years after a federally funded move, Indigenous residents of Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles report broken homes — and promises