CH2M Hill

Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $11.75 million in grant funding for midsize and large drinking water systems to help protect them from cybersecurity threats and improve resiliency against extreme weather events. This funding, through the Midsize and Large Drinking Water System Infrastructure Resilience and Sustainability grant program, will support ten projects and affirms EPA’s commitment to ensuring all Americans have access to clean and safe drinking water.

After two weeks of negotiations on how to tackle land degradation, desertification and drought, the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP17) concluded today in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. 

Water Mission, a Christian engineering nonprofit, is sending a Disaster Assistance Response Team to Nepal in response to catastrophic flash flooding and mudslides in the Nepal-China border region. Initial reports indicate that more than 500 people have been killed and more than 1,500 remain missing, though these figures are preliminary and the full scale of the disaster is not yet known. With communities cut off and widespread damage to roads, homes, and other critical infrastructure, the number of people killed, missing, displaced, and otherwise impacted could be significantly greater. The tragic scale of the need is expected to become more apparent in the coming days as access improves and assessments continue. 

Today, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin sent a joint letter to the EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG), requesting a comprehensive, independent investigation into the Biden-Harris Administration's response to the February 3, 2023, Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

Federal water infrastructure funding in the United States is set to fall roughly 63% between fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2027, dropping from US$23.4 billion to an estimated US$8.6 billion. But according to new analysis from Bluefield Research, a leading provider of global water market data and insights, the story behind this anticipated decline is more nuanced than the headline suggests.

For decades, environmental scientists have struggled to predict where emerging contaminants end up in rivers—whether they linger in sediments or remain mobile in the water. That uncertainty has made risk assessment difficult and management decisions unreliable.