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Reason Foundation Issues Commentary: New Mexico Shouldn't Abandon Its 2020 Cost-of-Living Adjustment Reform
LOS ANGELES, California, July 21 -- The Reason Foundation issued the following commentary by financial policy analyst Brayden Myers:
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New Mexico shouldn't abandon its 2020 cost-of-living adjustment reform
New Mexico's retirees deserve retirement stability and a legislature that will finish the job rather than walk back meaningful reforms under pressure.
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Before 2020, New Mexico's retirees received a guaranteed 2 percent annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). Public employees have long relied on the Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA) for retirement security, a security that
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LOS ANGELES, California, July 21 -- The Reason Foundation issued the following commentary by financial policy analyst Brayden Myers:
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New Mexico shouldn't abandon its 2020 cost-of-living adjustment reform
New Mexico's retirees deserve retirement stability and a legislature that will finish the job rather than walk back meaningful reforms under pressure.
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Before 2020, New Mexico's retirees received a guaranteed 2 percent annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). Public employees have long relied on the Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA) for retirement security, a security thathas been undermined by the fund's increasing unfunded liability. In 2020, the state addressed the pension solvency crisis by passing Senate Bill 72 (SB 72), which replaced the guaranteed cost-of-living adjustment with a variable, profit-sharing model tied to investment returns and pension fund health. Now, efforts to reverse that reform are resurfacing.
Recently, the New Mexico Senate voted 42-0 to pass Senate Memorial 31, sponsored by Sen. Liz Stefanics and four colleagues, directing a nine-member working group to "consider improvements to restore compounding annual adjustments" and "consider options to restore cost-of-living adjustments [COLA] for retirees that are tied more closely to actual cost-of-living changes." The memorial is non-binding and calls for no expenditure, but the movement behind it is real, and the debate over what the working group should recommend is just beginning.
The mandate reflects organized political pressure. NM Public Retirees, an advocacy group representing the state's public-sector retirees, argues that state law prior to 2020 "promised us 2% COLAs," and that the legislature must restore these adjustments. Acting on either push would be a mistake. By treating COLA restoration as a simple fix, New Mexico would set itself on a path to repeat the failures that made the 2020 reform necessary in the first place. The promise worth keeping to retirees isn't a specific number on a formula, but the promise of a solvent pension fund.
When SB 72 replaced the guarantee of a specific COLA figure with a variable profit-sharing model, retirees felt the difference. Inflation and rising living costs have eaten away at pension benefits, prompting retirees to pressure lawmakers to bring back expensive guaranteed COLA benefits. Since 2020, pension benefits have grown roughly 1.6 percent, while the cost of living has risen by 26 percent. There is clearly cause for frustration, but the policy response under discussion would make the underlying problem worse, not better.
PERA carries an unfunded liability standing at over $9 billion. The fund holds $17.3 billion in assets against $26.5 billion in promised benefits, leaving it only 65.4 percent funded. This ranks 42nd in the nation, according to Reason Foundation's annual pension solvency rankings. PERA's executive director, Greg Trujillo, has put the cost of restoring the pre-SB 72 COLA structures at approximately $2 billion. No one has yet specified where that money comes from without weakening a major state trust fund that retirees depend on and taxpayers are legally committed to backing.
PERA already has a COLA
Rather than eliminating the COLA entirely, SB 72 tied it to investment returns and the fund's overall health. The fund's actuaries determined this was necessary because the old, guaranteed structure was unsustainable. As the reformed benefit now stands, low COLAs are the signal that the fund is not healthy enough to sustain higher payouts.
The fund currently pays approximately $1.5 billion in retirement benefits each year while taking in just over $1 billion in contributions. That gap is covered entirely by investment returns. As demonstrated by net pension fund declines in 2020 and 2022, by $800 million and $1.4 billion, respectively, these returns cannot be counted on in any given year. This is why the years that produced 0.5 and 0.63 percent COLAs were not anomalies to be corrected. The fund has little margin for errors when markets underperform, and the profit-sharing model protects the fund's asset base during periods of below-target returns.
Campaign promises make bad pension policy
A guaranteed COLA adds a permanent compounding liability. Every retiree who receives a guaranteed 2 or 3 percent annual increase carries that increment forward permanently, and that higher base earns another increase the following year. On a fund already $9.2 billion short on its promises, with $26 billion in total obligations, even a 1 percent difference in the annual COLA rate compounds into billions in additional unfunded liabilities. Layering a permanent obligation onto PERA is the same actuarial optimism trap that drove the fund to decades of underfunding in the first place.
Because of the looming risk of insolvency, the 2020 reforms were met with broad support. AFSCME Council 18, the Communications Workers of America, the New Mexico Professional Firefighters Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, and the National Association of Police Officers all endorsed the bill. These representatives of the interests of retirees signed off on a profit-sharing model because they understood the math and saw that their retirees were reliant on a fund racing towards insolvency.
SB 72 passed 25 to 15 in a Democratic-controlled Senate, championed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who called the reforms necessary to ensure "New Mexico can keep its promises to current and future retirees" and the fund remains solvent. NM Public Retirees' framing of SB 72 as a broken promise rewrites the history of a bill that was based on a broad consensus on how best to protect the fund that so many New Mexicans rely on.
Pressure to restore the COLA has also reached the gubernatorial race. Republican candidate Gregg Hull has said he wants to make long-term solvency a priority and has advocated for being honest with current workers and retirees about the full picture. That instinct is right, and he should hold on to it. Democrat Deb Haaland has pledged "to ensure we adjust for the reality that the cost of living across every sector has risen" and promised to "work with the Legislature and our unions" on the issue. That statement is non-specific, and on a question with a $2 billion price tag, a pledge to "adjust" without identifying a funding source or actuarial cost isn't a plan.
The same test should apply to any proposal. Any efforts to increase retiree benefits should identify the actuarial cost, the funding source, and the effect on the fund's health. Whatever form that takes, any change must not negatively impact the fund's solvency.
The profit-sharing model already grants higher COLAs as the funded ratio improves. The path to improving COLAs already exists through improving the funding of PERA. New Mexico's retirees deserve retirement stability and a legislature that will finish the job rather than walk back meaningful reforms under pressure. The promise worth keeping to retirees is a solvent fund to protect future retirees and taxpayers.
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Brayden Myers is a financial policy analyst at Reason Foundation.
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Original text here: https://reason.org/commentary/new-mexico-shouldnt-abandon-its-2020-cost-of-living-adjustment-reform/
Foundation for Economic Education Posts Commentary: Brazil's Fiscal Reckoning Has Arrived
DETROIT, Michigan, July 21 -- The Foundation for Economic Education posted the following commentary by political theorist Jake Scott:
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Brazil's Fiscal Reckoning Has Arrived
The government's postponement of budget reforms has left future budget targets impossible to achieve.
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At the end of June 2026, Brazil's National Treasury published a document forecasting the nation's fiscal future, though it read more like a confession of failure than anything else. The eighth edition of the Fiscal Projections Report, first issued just over three years ago, was phrased in the usually dry government
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DETROIT, Michigan, July 21 -- The Foundation for Economic Education posted the following commentary by political theorist Jake Scott:
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Brazil's Fiscal Reckoning Has Arrived
The government's postponement of budget reforms has left future budget targets impossible to achieve.
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At the end of June 2026, Brazil's National Treasury published a document forecasting the nation's fiscal future, though it read more like a confession of failure than anything else. The eighth edition of the Fiscal Projections Report, first issued just over three years ago, was phrased in the usually dry governmentstatements of routine transparency: reference scenarios for fiscal projections, sensitivity exercises on macroeconomic parameters like interest rates and inflation, a box on how oil prices are predicted to hit federal revenue, and so on.
The headline fact, however, was clear: the government's own fiscal targets are unreachable beginning in 2028. The government's arithmetic shows that it is no longer able to reach these goals, and what makes matters worse is that there is no permissible measure capable of closing the fiscal gap that yawns beneath the target.
Brasilia's targets rise from a surplus of 0.5% of GDP next year (2027) to 1% in 2028, 1.25% in 2029, and 1.5% in 2030. These are good goals to set, yet against those numbers, the Treasury projects a scenario that already assumes that the state freezes everything that it possibly can: contingency blocks of 66.6 billion reais ($13 billion) in 2028, and 68.4 billion reais ($13.37 billion) in 2029.
Even after that fiscal restraint, the projections miss the target entirely, and the shortfall widens dramatically from 10 billion reais in 2028 ($1.95 billion) to 80.6 billion reais in 2029 ($15.75 billion), and yet even further to 136.4 billion reais in 2030 ($26.65 billion). At a certain point, cutting expenditure only goes so far, and when the knife scrapes the bone, the strategy might need to change.
The near term flatters the framework, and is somewhat misleading: the Treasury expects to stay inside the tolerance band through 2027, with a deficit of 0.4% of GDP in 2026, and only 0.1% in 2027 (though this is still missing the target). Thereafter, the picture changes dramatically.
This is, the cynic would suggest, by design, as the period of realistically achievable targets ends in 2028, at the same time the current presidential term ends. Fiscal consolidation has been scheduled for a presidential term and a mandate that no one in the present cabinet is guaranteed to serve. In some ways, the fiscal rules buy three good years--and mortgage the rest.
Established in 2023 by Fernando Haddad during his tenure as finance minister (he has announced his intention to step down and run for governor in the Sao Paulo elections this year), the fiscal rule caps real spending growth at 2.5% and tethers outlays to a proportion of revenue growth. Originally sold as fiscal discipline, it binds only the discretionary portion of the budget, and does nothing to address structural fiscal spending, making it a "discipline" in name only. The Treasury's own numbers state the scale of the coming collision: mandatory spending that goes untouched by the cap (pensions, continuous benefit, unemployment insurance, floors for health and education that are constitutional requirements) grows at 2.7% a year in real terms, forcing discretionary spending to contract by 3.2% a year. Since only the latter (i.e., discretionary spending) can be cut in the constitutional allowance, only the latter is.
One rejoinder to the shortfall projections is that this may be born of pessimism, and takes an unnecessarily unfavorable view of the economy. Not so: Marcos Mendes of Insper observes that the projections presuppose favorable conditions, including growth above 2.5%, inflation converging to target, and real interest rates falling to a third of their current levels of 9%. Even under a scenario as favorable as this, the gap still yawns.
This is not, however, a consequence of incompetence or mismanagement; it is a choice. The government adopted these rules for a political purpose, and one that it has fulfilled quite well: it reassured the markets without disturbing the coalition, committing Brazil to surpluses while shielding the transfers upon which President Lula's support rests. Yet the price for doing so is legible in the price of Brazilian debt: 10-year yields sit above 14%; the Selic rate (Brazil's benchmark interest rate) is at 14.25% and ranks among the steepest real rates in the world. It is a verdict from the market on the fiscal rule's shelf life, and a damning one at that.
Brazil's economic outlook goes from bad to worse when the gross general government debt is taken into account: reaching 83.5% this year, and climbing to 87.9% by 2029, this is a debt that is climbing even before the current fiscal rules are projected to become unsustainable. Reviewing Brazil's economic positions in May, the IMF put it plainly: meaningful reforms are needed to place debt on a firm downward path, and spending rigidities must be addressed.
If Brazil wishes to look elsewhere for what might happen if these reforms are not pursued, it should see Europe. The post-war social contracts, generous in their indexation and humane in their intent, drove governments into the grim arithmetic of austerity, both in the 1970s and in the 2010s. When Italy dismantled the scala mobile in the 1980s, it took the better part of a decade and a currency crisis to be finalized. Indexation is easy to legislate, and brutal to unwind.
There is some good news for Brazil, however: political choices are not permanent. Brutal though the unwinding may be, the promise of democracy, the reality of political action, is that if the people are sufficiently in favor of changing a binding rule, it can be unbound. A rule only binds as far as the coalition prepared to enforce it--and when that enforcement turns against the constituents of the coalition, the coalition quickly collapses. The Treasury's June warning is honest precisely because it is written by officials with no seat to defend (such are the benefits of independent institutions, which we forget at our peril). Brazil will need new measures, but that is not the hard part: the hard part is the admission beneath the need to generate these new measures in the first place. It is the admission that the fiscal rule was never a true constraint on spending, but merely a deferral of the decision over where that constraint should really lie. The can that was kicked down the road only has so much further it can go.
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Dr Jake Scott is a political theorist specialising in populism and its relationship to political constitutionality. He has taught at multiple British universities and produced research reports for several think tanks.
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Original text here: https://fee.org/articles/brazils-fiscal-reckoning-has-arrived/
AHF Expands to Kyiv With Its Second HIV Clinic in Ukraine
LOS ANGELES, California, July 21 -- The AIDS Healthcare Foundation issued the following news:
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AHF Expands to Kyiv With Its Second HIV Clinic in Ukraine
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AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) Ukraine has opened the first Test & Treat Clinic for HIV in Kyiv, marking another milestone in the organization's continued expansion of free HIV services amid an ongoing war.
"The opening of the Test & Treat Clinic in Kyiv marks another important step toward ensuring that HIV services are fast, accessible, and free from stigma," said Dr. Yaroslava Lopatina, Country Program Director for AHF Ukraine.
... Show Full Article
LOS ANGELES, California, July 21 -- The AIDS Healthcare Foundation issued the following news:
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AHF Expands to Kyiv With Its Second HIV Clinic in Ukraine
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AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) Ukraine has opened the first Test & Treat Clinic for HIV in Kyiv, marking another milestone in the organization's continued expansion of free HIV services amid an ongoing war.
"The opening of the Test & Treat Clinic in Kyiv marks another important step toward ensuring that HIV services are fast, accessible, and free from stigma," said Dr. Yaroslava Lopatina, Country Program Director for AHF Ukraine."We're bringing testing, treatment, and ongoing care together under one roof so that patients do not lose valuable time between diagnosis and starting therapy. This is especially important now, as Ukraine's healthcare system continues to operate under extraordinary pressure."
The clinic is the first of its kind in Kyiv and AHF Ukraine's second standalone facility after the opening of its Test & Treat Clinic in Odesa in 2017. Apart from AHF's Test & Treat sites, the program has operated in Ukraine since 2009, largely through partnerships with government healthcare facilities. AHF Ukraine now serves more than 98,000 clients nationwide.
The Kyiv clinic is part of AHF Ukraine's broader strategy to expand access to care, treatment, testing, and prevention of HIV, viral hepatitis, and STIs. To accomplish this, AHF is growing its Test & Treat and Wellness Center clinics, scaling up mobile and community-based diagnostic services, and deepening collaboration with government, civil society, and international partners to ensure a coordinated national HIV response.
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Original text here: https://www.aidshealth.org/2026/07/ahf-expands-to-kyiv-with-its-second-hiv-clinic-in-ukraine/
TPPF Releases New Research on Schools of Education
AUSTIN, Texas, July 20 (TNSrep) -- The Texas Public Policy Foundation issued the following news release:
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TPPF Releases New Research on Schools of Education
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AUSTIN -Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation released new research revealing that America's schools of education are falling short in preparing future teachers. The report points to low admission standards, weak GRE scores, and widespread grade inflation as signs that many education programs are failing to equip teachers for success in the classroom. It also demonstrates that too many schools have emphasized political ideology
... Show Full Article
AUSTIN, Texas, July 20 (TNSrep) -- The Texas Public Policy Foundation issued the following news release:
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TPPF Releases New Research on Schools of Education
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AUSTIN -Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation released new research revealing that America's schools of education are falling short in preparing future teachers. The report points to low admission standards, weak GRE scores, and widespread grade inflation as signs that many education programs are failing to equip teachers for success in the classroom. It also demonstrates that too many schools have emphasized political ideologyover subject mastery and research-based instructional practices, with little evidence of improved student achievement.
The report recommends replacing the current certification model with teacher preparation programs centered on deep subject knowledge, rigorous academic standards, and meaningful classroom apprenticeships. It also calls on schools of education to return to their original purpose: cultivating a love of truth, goodness, and beauty through the liberal arts while preparing thoughtful citizens capable of self-government in a free republic.
"Our current teacher preparation system isn't serving teachers or students as well as it should," said Kate Bierly, Campaign Director for Next Generation Texas at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "Texas has a real opportunity to lead the country by raising expectations for teacher preparation and putting the focus back on subject expertise, rigorous training, and hands-on classroom experience. If we want better outcomes for students, we have to begin by preparing excellent teachers."
Read the full research paper here (https://www.texaspolicy.com/education-schools-low-standards-high-indoctrination-zero-results/).
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Original text here: https://www.texaspolicy.com/press/tppf-releases-new-research-on-schools-of-education
Court Orders EPA to Implement National Soot Standard
BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 20 -- Conservation Law Foundation issued the following news release:
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Court Orders EPA to Implement National Soot Standard
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Soot, made up of tiny toxic particles that lodge deep in the lungs, causes severe health harms including cancer, asthma, and premature deaths. Photo: Unsplash
July 20, 2026 (Boston, MA) - The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must follow the law and implement the strengthened 2024 national standard for particulate matter air pollution, commonly known
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BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 20 -- Conservation Law Foundation issued the following news release:
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Court Orders EPA to Implement National Soot Standard
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Soot, made up of tiny toxic particles that lodge deep in the lungs, causes severe health harms including cancer, asthma, and premature deaths. Photo: Unsplash
July 20, 2026 (Boston, MA) - The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must follow the law and implement the strengthened 2024 national standard for particulate matter air pollution, commonly knownas soot.
Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), as part of a coalition of 17 health, community, and environmental groups, and alongside 10 states, the District of Columbia, Harris County, Texas, and the City of New York, filed a lawsuit against the EPA for failing to implement the standard.
"You can push back a deadline, but you cannot give families back the days they spent breathing unhealthy air," said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at CLF. "Every day Trump's EPA delays these protections is another day polluters avoid stronger clean air rules and another day families are left exposed to dangerous soot. Those are days communities can never get back."
The court rejected EPA's arguments for slow-walking implementation of the standard and ordered that EPA officially identify the areas that violate the 2024 standard by Feb. 6, 2027. This decision follows last month's ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upholding the 2024 soot standard after the Trump administration's EPA requested that the court strike it down.
The Clean Air Act requires EPA to designate areas that violate the strengthened 2024 soot standard. Those designations are what put communities with unhealthy levels of soot pollution on a path to cleaner air, but EPA missed its legal deadline earlier this year.
"This is a huge victory for public health," said Sage Lincoln, associate attorney at Earthjustice. "The science is clear that the strengthened soot standard will help reduce dangerous air pollution and prevent thousands of premature deaths and illnesses. The court's order compelling EPA to follow the law and implement the standard puts people's health where it belongs: first. As a result, millions of people, especially children, older adults and communities that bear that greatest pollution burdens, will breathe cleaner air."
"As Judge Gilliam's order makes clear, EPA's failure to promulgate designations for the updated soot standard is unlawful, and the agency must expeditiously move forward with designations for the entire country," said Hayden Hashimoto, attorney at Clean Air Task Force. "The science speaks for itself-soot leads to negative health outcomes, including heart attacks, asthma attacks, and premature death. EPA has an obligation under the Clean Air Act to protect public health, and it must now allocate the staff and resources required to publish designations in the Federal Register by the court-ordered deadline of Feb. 6, 2027."
"EPA's own scientists found that implementing the soot standard would save 4,500 lives each year while also preventing hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks and emergency room visits - as well as cases of lung cancer, heart disease, and dementia," said Environmental Defense Fund Attorney Richard Yates. "The court just set a firm deadline for EPA to designate which communities are breathing unsafe air, which is the first step toward cleaning it up. At a time when enormous swaths of the country are sheltering inside under red-alert levels of air pollution, this court order is especially welcome."
"The court's decision to ensure EPA implements the health-protective soot standard in a timely manner is critical to protecting the health of people across the country who are exposed to dangerous particulate pollution," said Katie Huffling, executive director of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments. "The science shows stronger limits to reduce deadly soot pollution provide significant health benefits for Americans, especially for those most vulnerable and those exposed to higher levels of pollution. EPA must adhere to their mission of protecting health and the environment. We urge EPA to follow the law, designate the areas that violate the standards, and work with those locations to clean up dirty air."
"We're pleased the court confirmed that EPA cannot simply refuse to comply with its legal obligation to identify communities that are suffering from exposure to unhealthy levels of soot pollution," said Caroline Cress, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. "Issuing designations is a critical first step toward reducing one of the country's deadliest forms of air pollution. At a time when many communities across the South continue to breathe unhealthy air, EPA must now move quickly to begin delivering the public health protections the Clean Air Act requires."
"Over recent days millions of Americans felt, with every breath, the damage soot can do to our lungs. Climate change is creating a new normal, worsening wildfire smoke and making it unsafe to breathe outside," said Dr. Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist at NRDC. "In this new reality, science-based safeguards like the strengthened soot standard aren't bureaucratic paperwork, they're one of the most effective tools we have to prevent heart attacks, asthma attacks, and premature deaths. The court was right to insist the agency stop stalling and start protecting the people it's supposed to serve."
"We commend the Court for ensuring that EPA fulfills its legal duty to protect the public from a dangerous pollutant that causes thousands of premature deaths each year, contributes to cardiovascular disease and dementia, and condemns children to a lifetime of asthma and other health injuries," said Annie Fox, a staff attorney with Clean Air Council. "In addition to improving public health, enforcing this scientifically supported soot standard will strengthen the economy by reducing missed days of school and work from pollution-induced illnesses and will help restore the public's faith in our government."
"The court's decision to hold EPA accountable for meeting its statutory requirement to identify areas of the country that are not meeting the 2024 standards for particulate matter is a victory for public health," said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, chief executive officer of the American Public Health Association. "Particulate matter pollution can cause asthma attacks, COPD exacerbations, heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and premature death. This decision will especially benefit the health of low-income and minority communities who often live near polluting sources, putting their health at the greatest risk."
"The court affirmed what we've long known to be true: the EPA has a responsibility to protect people from dangerous soot pollution, and communities have every right to hold the agency accountable when it falls short," said Marqus Cole, organizing director with Georgia Interfaith Power & Light (GIPL). "For the thousands of Georgians living in the eight counties that currently violate the federal standard, this ruling moves us closer to the cleaner, healthier air they deserve."
"Fortunately, Trump's EPA can't stop losing when it tries to undermine these life-saving soot standards," said Ryan Maher, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. "This ruling is the only just result when the agency blatantly disregards clean air law and sacrifices lives and public health in favor of corporate polluters."
Background
Soot, made up of tiny toxic particles that lodge deep in the lungs, causes severe health harms including cancer, asthma, and premature deaths. NAAQS are baseline national air quality standards for six common, harmful pollutants, including soot. In February, the EPA missed a key deadline for designating areas with soot pollution levels in violation of the 2024 standard. These designations are the first step toward bringing dangerous soot pollution levels down to safer levels and making sure areas across the U.S. comply with that health-based standard. EPA projected that implementation of the 2024 standard will save 4,500 lives in 2032 alone. A December 2025 Earthjustice analysis of EPA data revealed that 75 million people-22% of the U.S. population-were living in counties whose air violated the standard under the then-most current data.
The coalition members in the case that was decided on Friday are Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, American Thoracic Society, Center for Biological Diversity, Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, Clean Air Council, CleanAIRE NC, Conservation Law Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, Georgia Interfaith Power & Light, Michigan Environmental Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northeast Ohio Community Resilience Centre, Rio Grande International Study Center, Savannah Riverkeeper, and Sierra Club. Clean Air Task Force, Earthjustice and Southern Environmental Law Center served as legal counsel representing many of these organizations.
Experts are available for further comment.
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Original text here: https://www.clf.org/newsroom/court-orders-epa-to-implement-national-soot-standard/
Communities, Nature Must Be at Center of Boston's Flood Protection Plan
BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 20 -- Conservation Law Foundation issued the following news release:
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Communities, Nature Must Be at Center of Boston's Flood Protection Plan
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An estimated 40 percent of Bostonians are projected to face coastal or river flooding from a 100-year storm before the end of this century. Photo: Anxhela Mile
Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) is urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to strengthen its draft plan outlining flood risk and protection strategies in Boston. The plan must better reflect years of community planning and prioritize nature-based solutions
... Show Full Article
BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 20 -- Conservation Law Foundation issued the following news release:
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Communities, Nature Must Be at Center of Boston's Flood Protection Plan
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An estimated 40 percent of Bostonians are projected to face coastal or river flooding from a 100-year storm before the end of this century. Photo: Anxhela Mile
Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) is urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to strengthen its draft plan outlining flood risk and protection strategies in Boston. The plan must better reflect years of community planning and prioritize nature-based solutionsto protect the city from climate-driven flooding.
The draft plan could make Boston eligible for billions of dollars in federal funding for coastal resilience projects, helping the city address an estimated $54 billion in future flood damage. With an estimated 40 percent of Bostonians projected to face coastal or river flooding from a 100-year storm before the end of this century, securing federal funding is a crucial step.
The city is collaborating with the Army Corps to develop a comprehensive plan to protect Boston's coastline and those that live, work, and play along it. The Army Corps' plan was meant to build on city and neighborhood coastal resilience plans developed over nearly a decade. Those plans were shaped by thousands of residents, local leaders, and technical experts and prioritize solutions that reduce flood risk while expanding public access to the waterfront, restoring natural systems, and creating healthier, more resilient neighborhoods. However, the draft plan falls short of that vision.
"Climate change is raising the stakes with stronger storms, rising seas, and worsening floods," said Julia Carlton MacKay, director of community resilience at CLF. "Our response should match the scale of that challenge with solutions that protect people, work with nature, and create a waterfront that's stronger and more resilient for generations to come. Boston deserves a plan that meets that reality head-on by embracing the innovative, nature-based solutions our communities have already helped design."
Members of the public can provide feedback on the draft plan starting July 24 and through September 18.
CLF experts are available for further comment.
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Original text here: https://www.clf.org/newsroom/communities-nature-must-be-at-center-of-bostons-flood-protection-plan/
2026 National Scleroderma Conference: A Celebration of the Beacons of Hope
DANVERS, Massachusetts, July 20 -- The National Scleroderma Foundation posted the following news:
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2026 National Scleroderma Conference: A Celebration of the Beacons of Hope
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The National Scleroderma Foundation community shined bright during the 2026 National Scleroderma Conference and Baltimore, Maryland.
The conference celebrated the community's Beacons of Hope and the sense of optimism about advances in scleroderma research.
"It truly feels different this year," Mary Wheatley, CEO of the National Scleroderma Foundation, said during the conference's opening session. "I think we
... Show Full Article
DANVERS, Massachusetts, July 20 -- The National Scleroderma Foundation posted the following news:
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2026 National Scleroderma Conference: A Celebration of the Beacons of Hope
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The National Scleroderma Foundation community shined bright during the 2026 National Scleroderma Conference and Baltimore, Maryland.
The conference celebrated the community's Beacons of Hope and the sense of optimism about advances in scleroderma research.
"It truly feels different this year," Mary Wheatley, CEO of the National Scleroderma Foundation, said during the conference's opening session. "I think weall can sense that our time has arrived and we are making huge progress in improving the lives of people affected by scleroderma.
The annual conference brings together hundreds of people living with scleroderma, their care partners, healthcare providers and researchers for a weekend of learning and community building.
"It was an incredible weekend of learning and celebration," Dionna Bartos, director of education, said. "There is power in sharing a space with people who truly understand your journey."
Select recordings will be made available in the coming weeks on the Foundation's YouTube Channel.
During the closing keynote session, the community set its sights on the future. Dr. Kim Lakin and Dr. Jessica Gordon discussed the importance of the newly expanded AMP AIM project and what it means for the future of scleroderma research.
The conference closed with the announcement of the 2027 National Scleroderma Conference location, Cleveland, Ohio. The Lower Great Lakes Chapter will help host the conference July 16-18, 2027.
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Original text here: https://scleroderma.org/2026-national-scleroderma-conference-a-celebration-of-the-beacons-of-hope/
