Department of Natural and Environmental Resources

Three vacant seats and months without meetings have stalled the panel, despite its legal duty to oversee the implementation of the Climate Change Mitigation, Adaptation and Resilience Plan.

The Department of Natural and Environmental Resources discovered the fishing of this animal by chance and banned it, but did not carry out the investigations recommended by experts on this important marine species, despite having federal funds available to do so.

Puerto Rico's Center for Investigative Journalism has had to go to court three times in the past five years for the DRNA to hand over public documents.

The noncompliance of existing plans, court orders and laws in southwestern coastal areas in Buyé, Joyuda, and La Parguera, shows how complex the implementation of the Climate Change Adaptation Plan would be.

The case of several properties on the Arecibo coast is an example of what is happening in other areas of Puerto Rico, but neither the Municipality nor the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA, in Spanish) act, while construction is allowed in the area affected by erosion.

The experience of communities in Isabela and Vega Baja shows that the government of Puerto Rico acts against the recommendations of experts and its own public policy, which is supposed to protect coastal natural resources.

The US Army Corps of Engineers clings to the canalization alternative because it is the least expensive way to address the problem.

The tour through the mountains offers Puerto Rico’s most emblematic natural views, while reflecting government abandonment, the slow pace of post-Hurricane María reconstruction, and the urgency of funds for a new management plan.

Dozens of municipalities have privatized their public nuisances management programs and let companies handle public nuisances’ determinations, appraisals, legal representation in courts of the expropriation processes, and even seeing through the sales of expropriated properties.

Clogged irrigation channels and the increase in mangrove deforestation in recent years were factors that worsened the effects of the up to 25 inches of rain that Hurricane Fiona dropped on Salinas this Sunday and caused the evacuation of more than 426 people.

The procedure for community aqueducts to legalize their franchises and maintain their operation is so complicated, bureaucratic, and devoid of technical support that it discourages communities from formalizing the systems that carries water to their homes because of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority’s inability to provide the service.

Fourteen of the 42 monitors that the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DRNA, in Spanish) used to measure air pollutants harmful to health throughout Puerto Rico are out of service, some for as long as five years, a Center for Investigative Journalism investigation found.

On Alfonso XII Street in the Punta Santiago, a coastal neighborhood in Humacao, 62-year-old Bermuda Vázquez points toward the beach that is blanketed with brown seaweed, known as sargassum. Although it was a day off in midsummer to commemorate the emancipation of slavery in the United States, beachgoers were nowhere to be seen. “The thing […]