The bill has finally wound its way through the legislature, backed by tremendous support in both chambers. It now heads to Republican Governor Phil Scott for his signature, which he has suggested he will not provide. But with two-thirds of the House of Representatives and 26 of 30 Senators supporting the law, the Vermont General Assembly could achieve an easy override should the governor choose to exercise his right to veto. Once the bill takes effect, Vermont will be the first state to make Big Oil pay for the impacts of climate disasters.
“The sad truth is we have had multiple devastating climate events in the past year leading up to the legislative session that really drove home the need for this kind of action with Vermont legislators,” said Ben Edgerly Walsh, who helped champion the bill as the climate and energy program director at the nonprofit Vermont Public Interest Research Group. Politicians of every description received the message of the moment, giving the bill strong support across the state’s Democratic, Republican, and Progressive parties.
The law, which faces an almost certain legal challenge, builds on the polluter-pays principle that guides existing hazardous waste remediation laws, and it will mandate that the largest extractors and refiners of fossil fuels contribute — with amounts relative to the emissions they expelled between 1995 and 2025 — to a fund established by the state treasurer. This Climate Superfund will have a two-fold goal: recoup the costs incurred in responding to and recovering from climate-amplified disasters, and dedicate revenues toward resilient infrastructure better equipped to withstand the storms to come.
Once the bill becomes law, a lot of work remains before Vermont sees even a cent. The biggest task falls on the scientists and government officials who will have to determine what big oil companies must pay into the fund and how much they owe. Attribution science provides the backbone for these calculations and for the Climate Superfund Act as a whole by building quantitative links between extreme weather and the emissions of major polluters. By running models that compare scenarios with and without human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, scientists can determine the degree to which climate change shaped a given bout of extreme weather. This method provides a robust basis for calculating the so-called social cost of carbon, and the financial responsibility of major emitters.
“Obviously, this is about these companies paying their fair share, not more than that,” said Edgerly Walsh. “We know that in any world, Vermonters are going to wind up paying significantly for the climate crisis, but these companies should pay their fair proportional share of these costs.”
The Environmental Protection Agency currently places the social cost of carbon at $51 per ton, a rate that Vermont’s treasurer can use to calculate how much fossil fuel companies owe the state based on what they’ve emitted. The money is certainly needed. A 2021 report projected that flooding alone could cost Vermont $5.2 billion over the course of the century. Already, the state has spent more per capita on climate disasters than all but four other states, according to the Vermont Atlas of Disaster.
To determine which businesses to levy the costs upon, the bill outlines a “nexus” of association with Vermont. Any fossil fuel company that has conducted business — such as marketing or selling their gas or coal products — in the Green Mountain State can be subject to the law. But the bill sets a high threshold for inclusion by targeting companies responsible for 1 billion metric tons or more of greenhouse gas emissions. This selective approach ensures that accountability falls on the worst offenders, those who have pumped excessive emissions in the atmosphere since the first United Nations climate conference in 1995. But trying to get the biggest fish on the hook in this way also comes with the greatest risk, and this bill will doubtless face legal pushback.
“The Vermont legislature has understood from the get-go that the fossil fuel industry would very likely use all the tools at its disposal to shirk accountability,” said Anthony Iarrapino, a lawyer who was consulted on the legal framework of the bill. The precedent set by other superfund laws and the expertise behind the scientific testimony have, according to Iarrapino, made the legislation robust enough to withstand challenge in the courts. “They have been very thorough in their analysis,” he said. The attribution method outlined within the bill is also understood to be quite conservative and will almost certainly underestimate how much Big Oil owes, which should further defend the law from claims of excessive burden.
Should the bill survive the legal challenges as expected, Vermont will be the first state in the nation to force Big Oil to pay for the climate disasters caused by its products, succeeding where New York, Maryland, and Massachusetts haven’t. Each has introduced similar legislation, but their efforts have stalled or failed. Last month, however, California joined the mix, introducing its own superfund bill that is currently maneuvering through committees. Such bills demonstrate how states and the nation can conjure creative solutions to the challenges ahead — including the ever-salient question: how to make polluters pay.
The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of climate change in the United States. Major carriers like State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California, dropping thousands of homeowners from their books, and dozens of small insurance companies have collapsed or fled from Florida and Louisiana following recent large hurricanes.
The problem is fast becoming a crisis that stretches far beyond the nation’s coastal states. That’s owing to another, less-talked-about kind of disaster that has wreaked havoc on states in the Midwest and the Great Plains, causing billions of dollars in damage. In response, insurers have raised premiums higher than ever and dropped customers even in inland states such as Iowa.
These so-called “severe-convective storms” are large and powerful thunderstorms that form and disappear within a few hours or days, often spinning off hail storms and tornadoes as they shoot across the flat expanses of the central United States. The insurance industry refers to these storms as “secondary perils”—the other term of art is “kitty cats,” a reference to their being smaller than big natural catastrophes or “nat cats.”
But the damage from these secondary perils has begun to add up. Losses from severe convective storms increased by about 9 percent every year between 1989 and 2022, according to the insurance firm Aon. Last year these storms caused more than $50 billion in insured losses combined—about as much as 2022’s massive Hurricane Ian. No single storm event caused more than a few billion dollars of damage, but together they were more expensive than most big disasters. The scale of loss sent the insurance industry reeling.
“As insurers, our job is to predict risk,” said Matt Junge, who oversees property coverage in the United States for the global insurance giant Swiss Re. “What we’ve missed is that it wasn’t a big event that had a big impact, it was a bunch of small surprise events that just added up. There’s this kind of this reset where we’re saying, ‘Okay, we really have to get a handle on this.’”
Part of the reason for this steady accumulation is that more people are moving to areas that are vulnerable to convective storms, which raises the damage profile of each new tornado or hailstorm. The cost of rebuilding a home has increased due to inflation and supply-chain shortages, which drives up prices. But climate change may also be playing a role: Convective storms tend to form in hot, moist, and unstable weather conditions.
“We have such a dearth of observations about hailstorms and tornadoes, so the trend analysis is tricky,” said Kelly Mahoney, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who studies severe convective storms. “But you are taking storms that are fueled by heat and moisture, and you are watching them develop in a world that is hotter and moister than ever. It’s a tired analogy these days, but it’s still true here, of loaded dice or a stacked deck.”
Climate attribution is much harder for these ephemeral storms than it is for hurricanes and heat waves, Mahoney said, but it stands to reason that climate change will have some influence on how and where they develop. Warming has already caused the geographic range of “Tornado Alley” to extend farther south and east than it once did, delivering more twisters to states like Alabama and Mississippi.
Whatever the cause, this loss trend is making business much harder for many insurance companies. Most vulnerable are the small regional insurers with large clusters of customers in one state or metropolitan area. When a significant storm strikes, these companies have to pay claims to huge portions of their risk pool, which can drain their reserves and push them toward insolvency.
“The local mutuals, you have a couple storms, you have a bad year, and they’re in trouble, because all their business is here and that risk isn’t spread out,” said Glen Mulready, the insurance commissioner of Oklahoma. The state has some of the highest insurance premiums in the country, and Mulready said many insurers are now refusing to write new policies for homes with old roofs that are vulnerable to collapse during tornadoes and hailstorms.
Even large “reinsurers,” which sell insurance to insurance companies around the world, are feeling the sting from these storms. Global reinsurance firms such as Swiss Re take in premium revenue from all over the globe, insuring earthquakes in Japan as well as hurricanes in Florida, so they aren’t vulnerable to collapse during local disasters, even major ones. But the increasing trend of “attritional” losses from repeated convective storms does threaten to cut into their profit margins.
“We have less of a concern about the tail on these types of events,” said Junge of Swiss Re, using the industry term for the costliest disasters. “The concern for us is just the impact on earnings.”
Ed Bolt, the mayor of Shawnee, Oklahoma, has seen this impact up close. A tornado raged down his town’s main boulevard last year and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings, knocking the roof off Bolt’s own house. His insurance company paid to replace the roof, but it mailed him a letter a few months ago with a notice that his annual premium was going to increase by 50 percent, reaching around $3,600 a year.
“The cost used to tick up and tick up a little bit, but last year we knew we would get a big hit because of the tornado,” Bolt told Grist. “I’m sure that would be a pretty consistent experience across town.”
Most states require insurers to get permission from regulators before they raise rates, which presents governments with a tough dilemma. If they raise rates, they make it harder for homeowners to keep up with their insurance payments, and they also risk dampening property values. If they keep rates down, insurers might react by ceasing to write new policies or pulling out of the state. Mulready, the Oklahoma commissioner, says he had one national insurer leave his market earlier this year.
Still, the Midwest has yet to encounter a large-scale exodus, and industry representatives say it’s unlikely that they will pull out of the region the way they have from California. But it’s a safe bet that insurers will keep raising premiums as high as states will let them. Insurers may also raise deductibles, setting a higher minimum amount of damage before insurance kicks in. The upshot is a bigger financial burden for homeowners in fast-growing metro areas like Denver, where insurers’ storm exposure has skyrocketed in recent years.
Perhaps the worst part of the problem is that most states have made little progress in preparing for these storm events. Florida imposed a strict building code after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and most newer homes in the state can withstand high winds. The housing stock in the central United States is far less resilient to tornado winds and hail, and just a few cities have forced builders to fortify homes against those hazards.
Erin Collins, the lead policy advocate at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the nation’s largest consumer trade group, said carriers might have to keep raising rates until the nation’s housing stock becomes more resilient to severe storms.
“It’s going to take community-scale hardening to bend that loss curve down,” she told Grist.
That won’t be easy. Insurers need to convince large home builders that they should build with more expensive, storm-resistant materials, and they also need to nudge millions of people in existing homes to upgrade their roofs and windows, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Because severe convective storms can strike such a wide geography, it will take a long time for this mitigation work to “bend the loss curve down.”
The good news is that we know how to build storm-resistant homes, and there’s proof that building better makes a big difference, says Ian Giacomelli, a senior meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger building standards.
Giacomelli points to the city of Moore, Oklahoma, which rolled out some of the strictest storm-resilience standards in the country after it suffered three devastating tornadoes in two decades. Now almost the city’s entire housing stock has roofs that can bounce off large hail storms and strong joints that prevent roofs from flying off during tornado events. Giacomelli says the nation’s current insurance crisis would likely ease up if more cities followed Moore’s lead.
“I think the solutions are coming into focus,” he told Grist. “It’s more about can we get the will to do them.”
Severe flooding in Afghanistan over the weekend has killed more than 300 people and destroyed thousands of homes in rural villages. The flash floods — prompted by heavy rainfall — came on the heels of an extreme drought in one of the nations that is most vulnerable to the climate emergency, yet has done little to contribute to it. “They’re not net emitters of carbon,” Timothy Anderson…
In early April of last year, a white capsule the size of a small school bus detached from the International Space Station and splashed down off the coast of Tampa, Florida. On board were 4,300 pounds of supplies and scientific experiments, including samples of dwarf tomatoes grown in space; crystals that could be used to make semiconductors; and medical data on the astronauts working in the space station. Tucked away among these contents was a much smaller and lighter cargo: more than a million tiny orange seeds.
Half a world away in Seibersdorf, Austria, a town about 22 miles outside the capital of Vienna, Pooja Mathur waited eagerly for the seeds — from a plant called arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family — to arrive. Mathur, a plant geneticist, leads the Plant Breeding & Genetics Laboratory for the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture, a collaboration between two United Nations agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
For over 60 years, the laboratory has studied whether nuclear technologies can be used to breed new and more resilient varieties of crops, and the seeds from the space capsule were its newest venture. They had spent nearly five months in low earth orbit, exposed to cosmic radiation, extreme temperatures, and low gravity, which altered their DNA in unpredictable but potentially beneficial ways. Scientists like Mathur hope that a few of these seeds might sprout into plants that can survive changing conditions here on Earth, such varieties more resistant to drought or heat.
An expert at the Plant Breeding and Genetics Laboratory holds the sorghum seeds that spent five months at the International Space Station.
Katy Laffan / IAEA
“It was a great opportunity to receive them,” Mathur told Grist over a video call from her office in Austria. “But there was also a nervousness — there are always these questions when you embark on something unknown.”
The “cosmic crops” project is the United Nations’ first foray into space breeding, part of a global effort to address rising risks of food insecurity stemming from shifting land use patterns, population growth, and climate change-driven extreme weather. Heat waves, droughts, floods, erratic rainfall, and worsening pest and disease outbreaks all threaten agricultural production around the world, and the effects are already being felt in many countries. Massive flooding destroyed at least 4 million acres of farmland in Pakistan in 2022, triggering a food crisis for more than 8 million people; in East Africa, extreme drought has pushed millions of people to the brink of famine in the past three years. In the United States, natural disasters, many made worse by climate change, caused $21.5 billion in agricultural losses in 2022 alone.
While space breeding seeds was first attempted in the 1960s, the scientific endeavor is currently experiencing a golden age as space travel and research becomes more accessible for nations outside the U.S., Russia, and Europe. Chinese researchers have been at the forefront of this experimentation, developing more than 200 varieties of space-mutated plants since 1987. Other countries that have developed space programs in recent years, like India and the United Arab Emirates, are also among the most vulnerable to climate change, and have expressed interest in the technology.
But the joint FAO/IAEA center’s project, known officially as Seeds in Space, is the first such effort on an international level, which will help make the results of these experiments available even to nations that can’t afford to build rockets or extensive plant genetics laboratories. And it will help answer essential questions about what makes space mutations different from those done here on earth, and where scientists should direct their efforts in order to adapt to climate change.
“[If] we can understand how plants mitigate stress [in a space environment], we can use that knowledge in our approach to global warming on earth,” said Tapan Mohanta, a former agricultural researcher at the University of Nizwa in Oman who has studied the potential of space breeding for developing new crop varieties and was not involved in the FAO/IAEA mission.
The joint FAO/IAEA center was founded in 1964 amidst a post-war push to use atomic energy for peaceful means. Researchers at the time found that exposing plant material to radiation encourages mutations at a much faster rate than conventional breeding, a painstaking procedure that requires multiple generations to show changes in the plants’ phenotype, or outward characteristics. Mutations occur naturally as cells multiply by making copies of their genetic code; what starts as a random error in one strand of DNA can be replicated over and over again until the organism either repairs the damage or allows it to spread to all of its cells.
Scientist Shoba Sivasankar, right, receives a package of seeds that journeyed from the International Space Station to the FAO/IAEA Plant Breeding and Genetics Laboratory in Seibersdorf, Austria, in 2023.
Katy Laffan / IAEA
Hitting seeds with gamma rays, the most powerful form of radiation, speeds up this process, known as “mutagenesis,” by as much as 1 million times. Irradiated seeds which survive the high doses of radiation can grow into plants that show much clearer phenotype variations than their conventionally-bred counterparts; scientists can then test these new specimens to see whether they can withstand difficult conditions or produce a higher crop yield than currently existing varieties. This process does not make the seeds themselves radioactive, and the resulting crops are safe to eat, Mathur said.
By selecting and then further breeding the most promising candidates, researchers have produced over 3,400 new varieties of more than 210 plant species, according to the IAEA’s Mutant Variety Database. Farmers in more than 70 countries are already growing the resulting plants; the seeds are often crossbred with widely used “elite” varieties to better suit local conditions. Other mutations can be induced using chemicals, bypassing nuclear technology altogether.
Cosmic rays, which are emitted by distant space objects like the sun, other stars, and even black holes, offer a different way to trigger mutagenesis, Mathur said. One of the goals of the “cosmic crops” project is to determine whether radiation from space, which is lower intensity but applied over a longer period of time than in the lab, can create different results than experiments with gamma rays on earth. Previous experiments by Chinese researchers have found that space radiation induces “useful” mutations more often than gamma radiation applied in a lab, according to the BBC.
“Mutagenesis is a very slow process on a day-to-day basis,” Mathur said. Space breeding “can accelerate the process to harness the power of natural changes at a much faster scale, considering that there is a dire need to have solutions in food and agriculture.”
Two types of seeds were picked for the experiment: arabidopsis, a weed that, while usually not edible, is a “model species” with a well-studied genome that researchers can quickly examine for the most obvious genetic changes and useful traits, and sorghum, a dryland crop that’s consumed by 500 million people around the world and is therefore useful from a food security standpoint, Mathur said. Half were kept outside the International Space Station, where they were exposed to the full range of cosmic radiation along with the extreme cold and zero-gravity environment of outer space; the other half stayed inside the station, under microgravity conditions but shielded from most radiation, to provide a point of comparison.
Because the mutations that occurred in space were random, scientists are taking two approaches to figure out what they look like: Since receiving the seeds in June of last year, Mathur’s lab has planted them and will now begin using DNA sequencing technology to study the arabidopsis seedlings and determine what changes took place at the genetic level. They plan to have results by summer or early fall. After that, researchers will screen the ones that seem to display positive genetic changes to determine whether they can actually better withstand harsh conditions like drought, salinity, and pest infestations. They’ll follow up by testing the sorghum, which takes longer to sprout and grow to maturity.
Crops take root in a beaker at the IAEA Plant Breeding Unit in Seibersdorf, Austria.
Adriana Vargas Terrones / IAEA
Mathur’s lab is sharing its results with countries that want to learn which techniques — encompassing everything from the length of time the seeds are in space to the way they’re grown once they return — produce the most resilient crop varieties. One such “coordinated research project,” which would compare mutations induced by cosmic rays with those applied in the lab, has attracted researchers from Australia, Burkina Faso, China, France, Ghana, India, Kenya, Niger, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.
“The molecular variations in plants induced by space mutagenesis are largely unknown,” said Hongchun Xiong, an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences who is working on the coordinated research project. Although Xiong’s previous research using space-exposed seeds has identified mutant varieties of wheat that are more tolerant to saline soil, which can prove useful as saltwater encroaches on agricultural fields thanks to rising sea levels, she hopes to identify others that are resistant to dry conditions or use nitrogen more efficiently.
“We believe this is important for [the] development of new wheat varieties for food security and climate-change adaptation,” Xiong said.
Previous experiments with space breeding have already yielded results. China registered a new variety of wheat called Yannong 5158, which was developed using space mutagenesis, in 2007. Smaller than conventional wheat, with dark green leaves, this version proved more resistant to bacterial diseases and stem rust, a type of fungal infection, while also producing a higher yield. This variety has since been planted in several villages in the Fuyang prefecture in eastern China. The country also harvested its first batch of rice that had traveled to deep space — nicknamed “rice from heaven” by state media — in 2021, though it has not yet announced whether the resulting plants were more resilient in any way than their earth-bred counterparts.
Experiments like these carry risks, Mohanta pointed out. Mutant DNA could potentially escape and contaminate wild species or other crops through cross-pollination, which could pose a threat to biodiversity or human health if the mutations are harmful in any way — a small possibility, but one that plant breeders developing genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, also face. One genetically modified variety of corn, for example, was suspected of unintentionally introducing allergens into the U.S. food supply in the early 2000s and later had to be recalled, although officials could not prove that the GMO corn actually caused allergic reactions. And although contamination incidents are common, with nearly 400 recorded by Greenpeace between 1997 and 2014, researchers have found no definitive links between GMO foods and negative health effects.
While space-bred varieties are not GMOs, because the mutations that occur are random and not controlled by humans, the joint FAO/IAEA center still follows protocols to keep cross-contamination from occurring. But it can’t control what member states do once they have access to the technology and mutated seeds.
“Although developing plant varieties that thrive in microgravity and resist cosmic radiation may be an important goal for the scientific community, an undesirable mutation in the genome could have deleterious effects on other crop varieties,” Mohanta wrote in a 2021 paper in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science. “Therefore, the conduct of such research should be subject to strict international regulations to avoid the possibility of unexpected results.”
Mathur emphasized, though, that despite the unknowns, space breeding has enormous potential, which scientists are only just beginning to unpack. She pointed to previous studies that found peppers exposed to cosmic radiation had a higher nutritional content, a promising feature given widespread deficiencies of iron, zinc, vitamin A, and other nutrients around the world. And although space experiments are still a very small component of plant breeding, the results of the “cosmic crops” project will help researchers decide whether to invest more into this technology in the future.
Mutation breeding “has been the cornerstone of agriculture for a long, long time,” Mathur said. “Agriculture is all about harnessing mutations … and mutation is very much a part of our evolutionary process.”
Vitor Martinez, a 25-year-old musician and community organizer, lives in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul — the southernmost state in Brazil. Martinez’s neighborhood borders Guaíba Lake, around which Porto Alegre’s main attractions are clustered. On a sunny, 80-degree Fahrenheit day in late March, people biked, ran, and strolled along the promenade that surrounds the lake. Shoppers flocked to a mall on the bottom floor of a brand new Hilton DoubleTree hotel in the middle of the neighborhood. More than 23,000 people from all over the world gathered a few miles away at a conference center near the city’s historic downtown to talk about the future of technology and business in South America. That version of Porto Alegre — manicured and prosperous — is a distant memory now, Martinez said.
“There’s no precedent in Brazil for the crisis we are experiencing at the state level,” Jonatas Rubert, another resident of Porto Alegre, said Thursday evening. “The apprehension about what will happen in the next few days is immense.”
Martinez has been sheltering in his small apartment with his mother and grandparents, who were forced to evacuate their homes as the floodwaters advanced. The apartment, situated on elevated ground, was spared the worst of the flooding. In Porto Alegre and other parts of the state, people who lost their homes to the floodwaters are surviving on limited food supplies and dwindling sources of clean water. “Because the water is so high, we don’t know yet how many people have died,” Martinez said.
The flooding in Rio Grande do Sul is shaping up to be one of the worst environmental disasters in Brazil’s history. On Thursday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a 50 billion reais ($9.7 billion) relief and redevelopment package to be deployed in southern Brazil right away — a historic investment that represents the “first” round of aid, he said.
Aerial view of the flooded Beira-Rio stadium of the Brazilian football team Internacional in Porto Alegre.Anselmo Cunha / AFP via Getty Images
Aerial view of a bridge partially destroyed by floods in Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil on Sunday.Gustavo Ghisleni / AFP via Getty Images
Many factors helped produce a catastrophe of this scale. Experts have named climate change and the El Niño, the natural weather phenomenon that periodically changes oceanic and atmospheric conditions, as chief culprits for the intensity and rapid onset of the flooding. But a series of decisions by the local, state, and federal government in Brazil over the past decade have also contributed to the devastating effect the flooding has had on communities in Rio Grande do Sul, shaped the inadequate humanitarian response to the ongoing suffering there, and limited Brazil’s broader capacity to adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change.
Experts told Grist that the astronomic scale and cost of the floods may mark an inflection point in the way Brazilians think about environmental policies and climate change, particularly climate change adaptation — systemic adjustments that can safeguard against future impacts.
“This is going to shake the mindsets of voters,” said Carlos R. S. Milani, senior fellow at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a think tank, and the Brazilian Scientific Development Council, a government organization. Whether the disaster affects decisions made by their elected representatives is still an open question.
Soldiers from the Brazilian Air Force prepare donations to be sent to flood victims in Rio Grande do Sul at Brasilia Air Base, Brazil on May 10, 2024.
Evaristo Sa / AFP via Getty Images
“I have no doubt that climate change has to do with it,” said Raissa Ferreira, campaign director for Greenpeace Brazil, referring to these recent events. “The greenhouse gas effect is getting more potent.”
A ferry boat stranded due to drought in Manaus, a city in the Brazilian Amazon, last year. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images
The climate impacts of the past 12 months should not have caught Brazil’s government by surprise. In 2014, the administration of the president at the time, Dilma Rousseff, commissioned a strategy document titled “Brazil 2040: Scenarios and alternatives for adapting to climate change.” The report was prescient, if overly conservative: Many of the climate impacts it projected, including extreme flooding, have come to pass more than 15 years ahead of schedule. The center-left Rousseff administration ultimately buried the report, and subsequent governments have failed to take up the mantle. The result is that Brazil, the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and an emerging global power, has a climate adaptation strategy in name only. “Climate adaptation needs to be implemented,” Ferreira said, “but we see very negative signs in Brazil that that is a political priority.”
Rio Grande do Sul, a state that is highly dependent on agricultural production, especially of rice and soybeans, twice voted for former Brazilian president and ardent climate denier Jair Bolsonaro by a substantial margin. Porto Alegre’s mayor and Rio Grande do Sul’s governor, both right-wing politicians, have stripped the local and state budgets of environmental and civil defense funding.
“The word on the street is that the governor left 50,000 reais for the possibility of a catastrophe like this,” said Giordano Gio, a 31-year-old filmmaker in Porto Alegre. “This is, like, the cost of a Honda Civic.” In a poll this week, 70 percent of Brazilians said infrastructure investments could have lessened the risks of the recent flooding.
Aerial view of floods in Eldorado do Sul, a city in Rio Grande do Sul.
Carlos Fabal / AFP via Getty Images
The floods raise a number of questions about what happens next in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil in general. Before the floods hit, Lula’s government was trying to rebalance the federal budget, reduce the national deficit, and reinvest in Brazil’s middle class. The crisis may scramble those efforts. The floods, said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist and professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, are “going to have a serious impact in terms of inflation, in terms of food prices in Brazil. It’s very bad news to the Lula government in a moment when the president already has many challenges on his plate.” One of those challenges, and a priority for Lula, is reducing the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Rainforest deforestation, much of it in service of exposing more arable land for agricultural production, is responsible for half of Brazil’s carbon emissions.
The influx of federal funding to Rio Grande do Sul will help rebuild the state, but experts Grist spoke to and people on the ground in Porto Alegre wonder what happens next from a climate preparedness perspective. “Lula was elected in a big coalition that has a lot of right-wing people in it,” said Gio, the filmmaker. Left-wing parties control only a quarter of the seats in Brazil’s House and Senate, which hinders Lula’s ability to pass climate change legislation. “There’s a lot of things going on politically that might affect” potential climate policy, Gio said.
More environmental disasters will affect Brazil in the coming months. High temperatures this year are expected to produce even more severe drought in the Amazon, for example, and the states that surround the rainforest are among the poorest in the country. Rio Grande do Sul, one of the wealthiest states in Brazil, is better positioned to recover from an event of this magnitude than most other regions of the country. “If this could happen in a richer area of the country, what if it happens next in a very poor one?” asked Milani. “The capacity to adapt, to respond, is much less.”
That question — what happens now? — will linger long after the floodwaters have receded. “I would have the intuition as a political scientist that climate and environment will very much be at the heart of debate in many municipal elections all over the country this year because of this event in Rio Grande do Sul,” Santoro said. “This is a political struggle more than anything else right now.”
In Porto Alegre, Martinez has been manning his local soup kitchen and working with his fellow community organizers to develop systems to handle the influx of relief aid they have been receiving from people all over the world. For him, watching people in his community help each other has been a small silver lining in the midst of the ongoing horror. “Local governments have abandoned us,” he said. “We will not watch our neighborhoods get destroyed and do nothing.”
As a series of monster rainstorms lashed southeast Texas last week, thousands of homes flooded in low-lying neighborhoods around Houston. The storms dropped multiple months’ worth of rainfall on Houston in the span of a few days, overtopping rivers and creeks that wind through the city and forcing officials to divert millions of gallons of water from reservoirs. Elsewhere in the state, the rain and winds killed at least three people, including a 4-year-old boy who was swept away by flooding water.
Much of the deepest flooding happened in the San Jacinto River, a serpentine waterway that winds along Houston’s eastern edge and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. This area happens to be the site of perhaps the country’s longest-running experiment in the adaptation policy known as “managed retreat,” which involves moving homeowners away from neighborhoods that will become increasingly vulnerable to disaster as climate change worsens. Harris County has spent millions of dollars buying out and demolishing at-risk homes along the river over the past decade. But the past week’s flooding has demonstrated that even this nation-leading program hasn’t been able to keep pace with escalating disaster.
“This is basically the largest and the deepest river within the county, and the floodplain is so deep that really we can’t do projects to fix these areas,” said James Wade, who leads the home buyouts for the Harris County Flood Control District. “We’re trying to get contiguous ownership in these areas so that we can basically convert it back to nature.”
It’s been slow going: Wade says the county has purchased about 600 flood-prone homes along the waterway over the past 30 years, almost all of which would have flooded during the recent storm if they hadn’t been bought out and demolished. There are still more than 1,600 vulnerable homes that the county is trying to purchase, but it has struggled to secure the necessary funds and get property owners on board.
Harris County was one of the first local governments in the United States to buy out flood-prone homes with money provided by FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. The county has acquired more than 4,000 homes in dozens of subdivisions around Houston since the turn of the century, creating what are essentially miniature ghost towns around the city and its suburbs. Many of these neighborhoods, including the ones around San Jacinto, were so prone to flooding that the county couldn’t protect them with channels and retention ponds, which secure other residential areas.
The county doubled down on this strategy around the San Jacinto after Hurricane Harvey flooded hundreds of homes along the river in 2017, confirming that many residences were “hopelessly deep” in the floodplain, in the county’s words. Not only is the land around the river low-lying and marshy, but it also sits downstream of a reservoir that needs to release water during flood events so it does not overflow.
The county used federal funds to purchase and demolish an entire subdivision called Forest Cove, converting the open space into a “greenway” park with walking and bike trails. Elsewhere, it bought out homeowners who had already elevated their riverside homes as high as 14 feet in the air but had still seen flooding during Hurricane Harvey. These buyouts were voluntary, but after years of advocacy the county managed to persuade most homeowners to leave.
A separate county agency pursued a mandatory buyout in a few subdivisions where residents had been flooded several times, including one large community along the San Jacinto. This mandatory initiative has drawn criticism from residents who accuse the county of uprooting established communities, but the county saw it as a necessary measure to control flood risk in places where no other flood control strategies would work. More than six years after Harvey, officials are still working to close on the last of those homes.
Yet this aggressive program has still left many vulnerable neighborhoods untouched. The county gets most of its buyout funding from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which tend to dole out grants only after big disasters. It has also floated a $2.5 billion bond to finance flood protection and buyouts, but that sum has proven too little. There are far more flood-prone homes even along the San Jacinto than the county can afford to buy, to say nothing of the rest of the Houston metropolitan area, one of the country’s most populous urban centers.
“Money is obviously the biggest constraint,” said Alex Greer, an associate professor of emergency management at the University at Albany who has studied buyout programs. “They often have far more interested homeowners than they have funds, and the funding comes way too late.” Wade isn’t sure yet whether the flood caused enough damage to meet the criteria for a presidential disaster declaration, which would unlock significant FEMA aid and likely help the county fund more buyouts along the San Jacinto.
Furthermore, buyouts can take years to execute. In most cases, the county has to convince individual homeowners to enroll in a buyout program, then complete months of paperwork to purchase their homes, then wait for the homeowners to move. If there are holdouts who don’t want to leave, the buyouts end up happening in a “checkerboard” pattern, and the government can’t let water retake the land. Some neighborhoods, like those in the more upscale Kingwood area, are fighting for alternate solutions like new upstream reservoirs or dredging projects that could reduce flooding without homeowners needing to leave.
Even though residents along the beleaguered river have been dealing with floods for decades, Wade says he hopes this most recent flood will convince more of them to join the buyout program, allowing the county to return more land along the river back to nature. Without more money, though, he won’t be able to take advantage of what Greer calls the “window to woo.”
“Right after a flood event, that’s when people are most like, ‘I don’t want to do this again,’” he said. “But then there’s that lag of time between them coming forward and us being able to secure the funds, and they could change their minds.”
We are just beginning to see how expensive adapting to a new climate will be. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has awarded $25 million for three communities working on their move to higher ground. In addition to Taholah, on the Quinault Indian Nation, there are two villages in Alaska, Newtok Village and the Native Village of Napakiak, on the agency’s list. The BIA will spend another $12.7…
As Nour feeds another half-finished pair of pants through her sewing machine, her arms begin to shake. Amid the whir of fans, her T-shirt sticks to her like skin. She fights to focus, knowing full well her target of up to 100 pieces an hour isn’t going to hit itself.
“I am completely soaked in sweat,” the 38-year-old says of her work shifts. “The heat makes me exhausted.”
Nour, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal from her employer, works at Yakjin, a South Korean-owned garment factory in Cambodia. More than 2,500 employees here stitch apparel for major U.S. giants like Walmart and Gap. Workers at Yakjin say the heat often leads to near-fainting episodes, fatigue, and dehydration. With no windows, the air feels stifling but their requests for fans are at times ignored.
Workers at three other factories in Phnom Penh, the country’s capital, producing clothes for brands like Primark, H&M, and Old Navy (owned by Gap Inc.), told similar stories of worsening heat.
Around the world, fashion’s mostly female labor force is grappling with working conditions made increasingly unbearable and unhealthy by climate change. Women picking cotton in India’s sun-baked fields are toiling in temperatures of roughly 113 degrees Fahrenheit, while workers in Ghana’s Kantamanto — one of the world’s largest second-hand markets where clothing discarded by Western consumers is resold — are losing vital wages when flooding prevents trade. Nour is just one of nearly 1 million garment workers in Cambodia, a country that has experienced roughly 1.4 degrees F degrees of warming per decade since the 1960s.
Employees work at a garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2021.
Ouyang Kaiyu/China News Service via Getty Images
Fashion has had a devastating impact on the planet, producing more greenhouse gas emissions than aviation and shipping combined. So far, labor experts say, the more than $2.5 trillion industry has mostly focused its climate change efforts on mitigation, such as using more recycled fabrics, while largely ignoring how it impacts workers.
“[Labor] violations in factories are so gross, as in so widespread, and so awful… that that’s where the attention has been,” said Liz Parker, an associate member of Clean Clothes Campaign, an Amsterdam-based alliance of labor unions and nongovernmental organizations. “But workers are suffering from heat stress, from flooding, from water pollution…and we need to protect [them] from that as well.”
To expose how climate change is impacting workers throughout fashion’s supply chain, The Fuller Project tracked products from several brands — including Walmart, Primark, H&M, Gap, and Old Navy — across several countries. At each stage, women play a vital role in the global business of fashion yet their livelihoods — and lives — are being increasingly threatened by extreme weather.
Cotton fields appear outside the car window an hour into the drive from Ahmedabad, capital of Gujarat state on India’s western coast. In every field, a woman in a sari is scooping cotton blossoms into a bag, spots of bright color that punctuate green fields topped with white fluff.
Roshan Osmanbhai arrives at 7 a.m. daily and ties a strip of cloth around her head to protect it from the sun. By midday, the temperature will hit more than 80 degrees F. The last week of January is supposed to be the height of winter in Gujarat, with average temperatures hovering around 68 degrees F. She hasn’t felt that traditional winter for years.
India is the world’s biggest grower of cotton after China. Six million farmers make a living from the sector, most of them women, according to Better Cotton, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable production. Cotton’s global supply chain is complex and lacks transparency, but Primark and H&M both confirmed they source from India. Walmart, Gap, and Old Navy didn’t respond to The Fuller Project’s requests for comment, but nonprofits monitoring supply chains said they likely do as well.
“If you’re in the apparel business…you have to come here,” said Ashis Mondal, former director of Action for Social Advancement, an Indian nonprofit supporting small farmers. “You have no other option.”
Across the region, the farms might be run by women, but few of them own the land they cultivate. The precarious nature of their work is exacerbated further by the changing climate, with summers arriving earlier and monsoon rains delayed or declining, damaging crops. India recorded extreme weather events on nearly 90 percent of the days in the first nine months of 2023, according to The Centre of Science and Environment, a research organization based in New Delhi, killing nearly 3,000 people and ruining almost 5 million acres of crop area.
A woman picks cotton in Maharashtra, India in 2022.
Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In Gujarat last year, summer rolled in before March, say the women. The temperature shot up to roughly 113 degrees F before anybody knew what to do. Women farmers complained the heat was making it hard to carry on. “The heat makes our skin itch,” said Jessuben Jhapra, a 49-year-old farmer. “Heat rash can erupt all over the body. Our eyes are under enormous strain.”
The weather patterns have invited new and unfamiliar pests, requiring pesticides that have created further health problems for the women. Most own protective gear — gloves, boots, goggles — but don’t always use them when it’s hot. Two years ago, Alayben Zilriya, a 55-year-old farmer with sharp cheekbones and thin-rimmed spectacles, sprayed pesticides on the plants using her bare hands. She got such a severe reaction that she had to visit the doctor for treatment. Today, the skin on her hands is still shriveled, her nails grayish.
Excessive temperatures can do serious harm to humans. Heat exhaustion sets in when too much water and salt is lost, usually due to excessive sweating. Symptoms include nausea, dizziness, thirst, and palpitations. It can be hard to think clearly — hot weather is linked to reduced cognitive function, judgement errors, and higher risk of occupational injury.
For Nour, this sounds familiar. Even though drinking water is available at her factory, she feels dehydrated and has little energy to work. When it’s hot she takes more toilet breaks but misses her hourly targets and says her supervisors at Yakjin become verbally abusive.
“They curse or insult us,” she explained. “They blame us.”
Workers at Yakjin interviewed by The Fuller Project said they often feel ill or faint. Ry, 38, who has been employed at the factory for over a decade, thinks the heat is getting worse. Climate change is part of the problem, he says, but also fans aren’t maintained or replaced. While the building has fans that blow mist to keep workers cool, they do not reach all employees. For over two years, Ry has asked the factory for more, but says his requests have fallen on deaf ears.
Only a small handful of Cambodia’s roughly 1,300 garment factories have air conditioning, according to Seang Yot from The Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers’ Democratic Union, or C-CAWDU.
At lunchtime, Yakjin employees hang cloth above their heads in the outdoor canteen for extra shade. In heavy rains during the wet season, the area floods, as does the factory, workers tell The Fuller Project. Cambodia is already highly vulnerable to flooding, including flash flooding, but projected climate change trends indicate this is only set to get worse — affecting tens of thousands more people each year by 2030. Workers are concerned about electric shocks as flood water comes in contact with the factory’s electrical systems, said Nour, though no one has been hurt yet.
“Anything involving money is always a problem,” explained Ry, who also asked to use a pseudonym. “The factory managers don’t care about how heat impacts us, only that we speed up and work faster.”
In an email, Yakjin Cambodia’s management said the factory maintains “a comfortable indoor temperature with cooling and ventilation systems,” including fans and air conditioners, but said there was no AC in the sewing line.
They said there have been no reported cases of fainting in the past two years, and that exhaustion could have many causes including inadequate healthcare, exercise, and lack of sleep, as well as heat.
There are grievance mechanisms in place for workers and no one had reported supervisors becoming verbally abusive when production targets were missed. Yakjin said the factory does not flood during the rainy season and there was no risk of electric shock.
Walmart, which sources from Yakjin, said it “does not tolerate unsafe working conditions” and is looking into the matter.
While Cambodia has always been hot, extreme heat now presents a major threat to human health. The country’s garment sector is particularly vulnerable to climate change because it emerged largely ad hoc with little oversight, according to a 2022 report led by Laurie Parsons, senior lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Workers wade through floodwaters trying to salvage clothes from a factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh in October 2020.
Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP via Getty Images
Many of the factories, for example, are technically warehouses. “They’re not built for humans,” said Parsons. Most are also privately rented, which means factory owners have little power — or incentive — to implement changes, added Yot.
Cambodia’s labor law sets no limit on workplace temperatures, saying only they must be “reasonable for employees.” In neighboring Thailand, with a similar-sized garment industry, the maximum is 93 degrees F wet bulb temperature (a way of measuring heat stress that takes into account factors like temperature and humidity, among others).
Over two days, The Fuller Project asked a garment worker to measure temperatures using a digital thermometer in the sewing section of Jade Sun Garment, a factory producing for brands like Primark, Old Navy, and George, a British clothing line sold widely in Walmart. Recordings taken by a garment worker in February, one of the cooler months, hit 97.7 degrees F.
During the hottest months, from April to May, the country’s daytime outdoor temperatures can soar above 104 degrees F. Leakhena, a soft-spoken sewer who’s worked at Jade Sun for several years, often feels “nearly unconscious” during this period. “We need more oxygen,” she explained. “I cannot breathe properly.”
The water provided by the factory isn’t clean either, she said. “It smells a lot. When we drink water from that tap it gives us a sore throat.”
In response to inquiries from The Fuller Project about workers’ claims, Gap Inc. said it is opening investigations into Yakjin and Jade Sun Garment and will take appropriate action to remediate any breach of its policies. Primark is aware of the issues raised in connection with Jade Sun Garment and is in the process of “supporting remediation” with its management, adding the safety of workers in their supply chain is “extremely important” to the company. Jade Sun Garment and George did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
In an email, Heng Sour, Cambodia’s Minister of Labour and Vocational Training, said the government is “deeply concerned” about worker welfare. He said The Fuller Project’s temperature recording at Jade Sun Garment offered a “limited view” because it used a single thermometer but pointed to the need for a “more detailed analysis to accurately assess and respond to temperature conditions.” The government is also in the process of “potentially” establishing maximum workplace temperatures and since being contacted has accelerated the deployment of additional cooling systems to factories.
Once their shift is over, women return home — yet there is no reprieve from the soaring temperatures. Many live in privately rented dormitories, often single-bedroom dwellings with low, metal roofs and little protection against extreme weather. Several workers described them as virtually unlivable in the heat.
“I want to see change,” said Leakhena, who also asked to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisals. “The heat is making us more exhausted every day. We don’t know what impact it will have on our health after five or 10 years. And by that point, it’s already too late.”
Inside Accra’s bustling central business district lies Kantamanto. A sprawling complex packed with vendors who sell what’s known locally as obroni wawu or “dead white man’s clothes.”
Ghana was the largest importer of used clothing in 2021, with $214 million worth of garments passing across its borders. When consumers in the United States or United Kingdom donate their old T-shirts, only 10 to 30 percent are resold in stores. The rest disappears into a vast network, often ending up here, West Africa’s hub for used garments from the West. In Kantamanto, stalls sell clothing from Primark, H&M, Walmart, GAP, and Old Navy.
Young women and teenage girls move through the market balancing 120-pound bales of clothing on their heads. Known as kayayei, they transport bales from importers to stalls, storage, and disposal sites, earning 30 cents to $1 per trip. The market’s narrow aisles don’t allow for motorized modes of transport, so the women play a crucial link in the second-hand supply chain. Their work frequently causes neck and spine injuries, said Liz Ricketts, co-founder of The Or Foundation, a Ghana and U.S.-based nonprofit. They also face sexual violence, including rape, and are at high risk of unplanned pregnancies, according to the United Nations.
Many are here because climate change has made farming in their villages unviable, but the cities have proven to be no refuge either. Ghana is experiencing more intense and frequent flooding and storms as global temperatures tick up. In Kantamanto, clothing waste clogs the gutters, which exacerbates the flooding, says Ricketts, and leads to an increased risk of cholera and malaria.
Women sort through secondhand clothes at the Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana in 2023.
Nipah Dennis / AFP via Getty Images
The market is open every day but Sunday. When clouds gather, 18-year-old Mariam Karim starts to worry. She earns roughly $14 a week carting bales of second-hand clothes from trucks, which covers her basic needs such as rent and food. During the rainy season, fewer customers show up and the market shuts roughly twice a month from flooding, according to Ricketts, often leaving women without pay.
A downpour can also mean no sleep. “Flooding at my home is common,” said Karim, who lives near the market in a wooden, makeshift dwelling. “I will usually scoop the water out of my room until it subsides. It is scary because colleagues have even lost their lives and properties.”
West Africa is a climate change hotspot and Accra’s low elevation makes it particularly vulnerable. After more than three decades working at Kantamanto, it’s something Daniel Ampadu, vice chairman of the Kantamanto Used Clothing Association, has seen with his own eyes.
“I am old enough so I can tell you that these days, so much rain comes…and many places, especially our market, gets flooded,” he said. “This wasn’t the case 30 years ago.”
Of the five brands examined across India, Cambodia and Ghana, only Primark and H&M provided details in response to queries about what they are doing to protect workers in their global supply chain from climate change. Primark said it knows it must “act to mitigate” the causes and effects of climate change and support their supply chain partners in similar efforts, such as educating farmers in their Sustainable Cotton Programme, a training scheme. H&M said it is aware of the impact that climate change has on the people in its supply chains and “constantly review and adapt” the scope of its climate-related risks.
For decades, the fashion industry’s exploitation of workers in low-income countries has been well documented. But a new challenge now presents itself: Who will protect them from a climate crisis that the very same industry helped bring about?
Better Factories Cambodia, a partnership between the International Labour Organisation, the UN’s labor agency, and the International Finance Corporation, has repeatedly recorded what it says are unacceptable workplace temperatures during inspections. Although some factories have invested in improved lighting and better ventilation, most need to do more, it says. More recently, fashion brands involved in Action, Collaboration, Transformation, or ACT, a global agreement aimed at transforming the garment industry, have begun to discuss ways to solve the heat problem for its workers, said Yot. Unless extreme heat and flooding are addressed, countries vital for fashion production, including Cambodia, risk losing $65 billion in export earnings and 1 million potential jobs by 2030, according to research by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.
“The buck stops always with the brands,” said Parsons. “[But] it’s kind of like pushing an open door… They’re like, yes, we should think about this but they haven’t yet.”
For Nour, she’d simply like to feel cool air on her face. Or the freedom to catch her breath. After work, she showers, washing away the sweat. For a brief moment, she feels alive, before being engulfed by the factory’s heat once more.
Additional reporting by Sineat Yon
The Fuller Project is a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the coverage of women’s issues around the world. Sign up for the Fuller Project’s newsletter, and follow the organization on X or LinkedIn.
When U.S. homeowners buy subsidized flood insurance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, they make a commitment to build back better after flood disasters, even if it costs them. FEMA’s notorious 50 percent rule stipulates that if a home in a flood zone suffers damages worth more than half its value, it must be torn down and rebuilt so it’s elevated above flood level. This can cost homeowners hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it prevents the American public from footing the bill for the repeated destruction of vulnerable homes — at least in theory.
Enforcement of the 50 percent rule largely falls to local officials in flood-damaged regions, who are charged with ensuring that their constituents aren’t rebuilding in flood zones. In exchange for this diligence, the federal government subsidizes low-cost flood insurance for homes in communities that certify their compliance with the rule, goosing red hot real estate markets in Florida and other scenic but climate-threatened regions.
As Florida continues rebuilding from 2022’s devastating Hurricane Ian, however, the Biden administration may be signaling that this era of easy money is over. Late last month, FEMA sent an explosive letter to local officials in Lee County, Florida, where over 750,000 people live near some of South Florida’s most prized coastal land. FEMA claimed that almost 600 homeowners in the city of Cape Coral and other nearby towns had rebuilt vulnerable homes in the flood zone over the 18 months since Hurricane Ian, violating the 50 percent rule as well as local construction laws.
The agency had long given the county and its cities a 25 percent discount on flood insurance in recognition of the county’s efforts to control flood risk, which saved residents millions of dollars a year. The letter threatened to yank away that discount, arguing that the county’s lax approach to the Hurricane Ian rebuild had negated those earlier efforts. The message was clear: After decades of risky construction in floodplains, the feds were putting their foot down.
This new effort to penalize floodplain construction is yet another sign that the long-hidden costs of climate change and development are starting to catch up with homeowners in coastal states — and at the very same time that housing costs more broadly are increasing for many Americans. FEMA has already raised flood insurance premiums across the country in recent years to keep up with mounting risk, and private home insurance companies have also hiked premiums for wind insurance in several states along the Gulf Coast.
The crackdown in Lee County represents an attempt by FEMA to shift the cost burden of climate risk away from the federal government (and the public that funds it) and onto local homeowners. This will test the strength of the area’s white-hot real estate market, potentially forcing many homeowners to walk away from their waterfront properties. As the federal government and private insurers both try to reduce their exposure to climate change, Lee County and its cities could be canaries in the coal mine for a housing market disfigured by mounting flood risk.
The reaction from these canaries has been swift and furious. Elected leaders from the county and the city blasted FEMA as “villains” and accused the agency of hampering Florida’s hurricane recovery at the behest of President Joe Biden. Lee County’s board of commissioners mulled suing the agency at a tense meeting a few days after the announcement. Local TV stations ran dozens of stories about the impact FEMA’s decision would have on homeowners, who are already dealing with a steep rise in both flood insurance and traditional property insurance, which covers wind damage.
“It’s almost like revenge politics,” said Cecil Pendergrass, a Lee County commissioner, during the county meeting after the announcement. “Our citizens, our taxpayers are being held hostage here.”
FEMA soon put its decision on pause, giving the county an extra 30 days to prove it hadn’t let homeowners break the 50 percent rule or build in the floodplain. It is unclear whether Lee County or cities like Cape Coral will be able to do that. Federal and local officials declined to provide Grist with details about the post-Ian violations, citing privacy concerns, but if homeowners have already rebuilt their destroyed properties, the county won’t be able to fix that within a month.
The bigger question for communities around the country is whether FEMA is changing how it enforces the 50 percent rule in an effort to force homeowners out of flood-prone areas.
“The floodplain management community is tracking this very closely,” said Susanna Pho, the founder of a flood risk firm called Forerunner, which helps flood-prone communities with FEMA compliance.
Lee County has long been a poster child for risky waterfront development. The city of Cape Coral sits on artificial filled land in what used to be a swampy section of Florida shoreline, with no barrier between the city’s urban landscape and the Gulf of Mexico. When hurricanes strike, as Ian did in 2022, they can push as much as 15 feet of storm surge through the city, inundating thousands of homes. Nearby cities such as Bonita Springs, which also caught a penalty from FEMA, aren’t much safer.
The 50 percent rule is supposed to reduce this risk over time by ensuring that flood-prone homeowners don’t rebuild the same vulnerable properties over and over. If a county determines that a home has suffered what FEMA calls “substantial damage,” it must force the homeowner to tear it down and elevate a new home above flood level, often on concrete pilings. If a county doesn’t comply, FEMA can kick it out of the federal flood insurance program, rendering homes more or less uninsurable, or downgrade its discounts as it did with Lee County. This rule acts as a de facto tax on risky property: Flood insurance payouts max out at $250,000 per home, which means homeowners are often on the hook for tearing down their houses and building new ones.
The problem is that determining what counts as “substantial damage” is a complicated process. Local officials conduct basic “windshield assessments” in the first few weeks after a storm, logging damage information that they can see from the street as they clear debris. They only do detailed examinations for the 50 percent rule when homeowners request permits to rebuild. But many homeowners never request permits from their city or county. Instead, they come back and patch up homes that they should be tearing down and rebuilding at higher elevations, and the local government either never catches them or looks the other way.
President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to Fort Myers, Florida, after 2022’s Hurricane Ian. The Biden administration is seeking to penalize Lee County and its cities for rebuilding in flood-prone areas after the storm.
Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images
This mandate puts local governments in a tough political situation: They have FEMA on one side, urging them to enforce strict flood rules, and displaced homeowners on the other side, trying to get back in their homes without going broke. It’s unclear how much Lee County and its cities knew about the hundreds of rebuilt homes that FEMA alleges were noncompliant after Ian, but attempts to flout the 50 percent rule have been a scourge for the agency going back decades.
Albert Slap, a coastal planning consultant in Florida, said he understood why Lee County or cities like Cape Coral might have allowed homeowners to repair their homes without elevating.
“It’s pretty clear that the motivation is voters,” he said. “The people who got damaged are voters, and they’re going, ‘If you make me build back better, I’m not gonna be able to do it, and I’m leaving. I voted you guys into office and you’re screwing me.’”
Lee County says it followed normal protocol after Hurricane Ian, conducting basic damage assessments in the immediate aftermath of the storm and inspecting homes only later on when homeowners requested permits. Flood and disaster experts who spoke to Grist said this protocol is more or less standard across Florida and other hurricane-prone states, which raises the question of whether FEMA is changing the way it enforces the 50 percent rule and cracking down harder on rogue rebuilds.
FEMA didn’t answer questions about its enforcement strategy. In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson said the agency is “committed to helping communities take appropriate remediation actions” to fix the rebuild violations. A spokesperson for Lee County said the county “will work with its partners at FEMA during a 30-day extension period.”
Adam Botana, a Republican state representative whose district encompasses much of Lee County, said he had faith that Lee County and other local governments would address the violations that FEMA identified and take action against homeowners who rebuilt without following FEMA regulations.
“Nobody likes the 50 percent rule, but I understand there have to be rules,” he told Grist. “Some municipalities may be a little more lax than others, but we have to keep everybody in line.” He added that he thinks the county will be able to prove many of the alleged violations didn’t take place.
Even if Lee County manages to contest the decision, homeowners in Southwest Florida are almost guaranteed to suffer more financial pain as a result of this enforcement effort. If FEMA stays the course and removes the discount, it will raise flood insurance costs for homeowners in unincorporated parts of the county between $14 and $17 million per year, equating to a $300 annual hit for each flood insurance customer in the area. But if Lee County cracks down on the 50 percent rule and FEMA restores the discount, homeowners who rebuilt in flood zones may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elevate their homes.
This new penalty comes on top of a much larger rate hike that FEMA has rolled out over the past few years as part of an effort to fix issues with the flood insurance program. This new system, called Risk Rating 2.0, will triple insurance costs in Lee County by the time it takes full effect, raising the average annual premium from around $1,300 to almost $4,000, with some of the most extreme bills ballooning well over $10,000 per year. Florida’s private insurance market for wind damage is also in a tailspin: More than 30 private carriers have pulled back from the state over the past two years, thanks in part to mounting hurricane risk. Those that have stuck around have doubled or tripled their prices.
Lisa Miller, a veteran Florida political consultant and former state insurance regulator, said the burden of rising costs shouldn’t trump the need to ensure that Lee County homes are resilient to future disasters.
“When I hear someone tell me they don’t want to pay $12,000 a year, I remind them, ‘we live in Florida,’” she said. “Our catastrophe risk is higher than almost anywhere in the world. What matters is, the homes that were repaired when they should have been torn down and rebuilt — will they withstand the next storm? That’s the question.”
Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a world record for heat. As I’m writing this, March still has a couple of days to go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record.
As wildfires and hurricanes wreak havoc on American communities year after year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has quietly become a central part of the federal government’s response to climate change. The agency has spent billions of dollars over the past decade on long-term recovery projects that supplement emergency aid provided by FEMA, which tends to pull back from disaster areas after a few months. States have used HUD money to rebuild fire stations and hospitals, construct new flood defenses, and buy out vulnerable homes.
When Hurricane Florence spiraled over eastern North Carolina in September 2018, it damaged or destroyed more than 11,000 homes in the space of a few hours. In the aftermath of the storm, the state channeled millions of HUD dollars toward an ambitious effort to build affordable apartments in the areas that had lost big chunks of their housing stock. Restoring this low-income housing is one of the most difficult and expensive parts of disaster recovery, and the HUD money was meant to help ensure displaced renters didn’t have to scatter far and wide to find homes they could afford.
One of the first test sites for the effort was the shoreline city of New Bern, the birthplace of Pepsi. Florence damaged or destroyed almost 2,500 homes and apartments in the city and surrounding Craven County, which were too remote to attract much new investment from private builders. After the storm, the state used HUD money to build a 60-unit apartment complex called Palatine Meadows that is reserved for locals making below the area median income.
But the development may well be arriving too late to make a difference: It only opened last month, more than five years after Florence struck, thanks to a mountain of federal paperwork. Documents obtained by Grist through a public records request show that it took two years to set up a program to spend the money, another year to select a site, almost two years to complete a mountain of environmental review paperwork, and another year to build the complex. This timeline was so long that it undermined the initial purpose of the project, which was to provide a timely and affordable option for residents who suddenly find themselves with nowhere to live.
Jeffrey Odham, the mayor of New Bern, says he doubts the new apartment complex will help any of the city’s storm victims.
“There’s people that will take advantage of those units, but someone who was displaced from Hurricane Florence now moving into one of these houses — I don’t think you can make that correlation, because it’s been too long,” he said in an interview with Grist. Odham didn’t know the project was part of North Carolina’s Florence recovery program until Grist informed him. It is the only subsidized apartment project in New Bern that has been built with FEMA or HUD money.
But just as concerning is what happened for the state when everything went according to plan. Even a well-financed housing project built by a trusted developer took more than half a decade to complete.
The sluggish timeline on the New Bern development is symbolic of a much larger problem with HUD’s disaster recovery program, according to Carlos Martín, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies who has followed the agency’s relief efforts. By the time states can develop new housing with HUD money, he said, it’s often too late.
“I’ve heard this story before,” Martín told Grist. “They were doing everything right, and it still took forever.”
The problem starts with Congress: FEMA doesn’t need to get a green light from Congress before it starts sending money for disaster relief, but HUD does. That’s because lawmakers have never passed legislation that authorizes the agency’s disaster program on a permanent basis. Instead they pass standalone funding bills that give the agency authorization to spend on specific disasters, and a community’s recovery depends on whether it can elbow its way onto the agenda of the the House of Representatives and the Senate.
North Carolina was luckier than many places, because Congress passed such a bill mere weeks after Hurricane Florence, giving the state more than $336 million for storm recovery. Lawmakers added another $206 million the following year. By congressional standards, this was a fast turnaround: Other hard-hit areas such as Lake Charles, Louisiana, have had to wait more than a year after disasters for lawmakers to allocate funding.
The half-billion-dollar grant from HUD was far more than North Carolina could have hoped to raise on its own, but it took ages for the money to reach the state. Because Congress passes each HUD disaster allocation as a separate bill, HUD has to create new rules for how it spends each new infusion of money, then solicit public feedback on those rules in order to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act. The feds must then review and edit “action plans” from each state that receives money, making detailed decisions about what projects to fund.
North Carolina aimed high with its post-Florence action plan. Housing was the biggest need after the storm, and officials wanted to go beyond traditional FEMA programs that reimburse storm victims who relocate to hotels and existing apartments.
“These [reimbursement] programs are beneficial to renters, but may not be best suited to meet the renter recovery need of such a vast geography,” state officials wrote in a 2021 report, adding that a better approach would be “to create new housing stock in a way that is more responsive to the needs of the recovering community.”
The private market was never going to build back low-income housing on its own in eastern North Carolina. Almost all new affordable housing — whether in disaster-struck areas or anywhere else — relies on government subsidies, most notably the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which allows developers to claim tax breaks for the expenses of building new units at below-market rates. But even that credit wasn’t generous enough to bring developers to the impoverished towns that had been destroyed by Florence; it would take the extra inducement of HUD money to get developers to build new low-income apartments in places like New Bern.
Three people survey the flooding at the Trent Court public housing project in New Bern, North Carolina, after Hurricane Florence in 2018. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
In 2021, after the state completed months of paperwork to set up its action plan, it sought out builders who were interested in taking advantage of the HUD money. One of the bids was from an established affordable housing developer called Woda Cooper, which owns dozens of apartment complexes across the country. Woda had found an empty lot off a major thoroughfare in western New Bern, just down the road from a high school and well inland from the coast. The lot had been vacant for decades, and it wasn’t exactly a moneymaker, but by stacking HUD money on top of other federal tax credits, Woda could make the project pencil out.
Finding the developer was only the start of the process, because the HUD funding was subject to dozens of laws and regulations that restrict how the federal government spends money. These regulations have piled up over the decades to protect wetlands, endangered species, drainage systems, historic assets, and people who live near construction sites. Together they created a set of additional hurdles that Woda and Rebuild NC had to clear before the development could break ground.
“We stress repeatedly to everyone that we’re partnering with, ‘don’t disturb any ground, don’t spend any money, don’t do anything until we clear the environmental review process and have permission from HUD,’” said Tracy Colores, the community development director at Rebuild NC, who managed the housing program.
That review process took most of 2022. In order to comply with endangered species laws, the state engaged in a monthslong back-and-forth with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out whether cutting down trees on the site might threaten migration stops for the northern long-eared bat. (It didn’t.) In order to ensure the complex didn’t violate any historic preservation laws, officials sought comment from two Native American tribes, who didn’t express any concerns. There was a Superfund site at a defunct power plant almost a mile away from the lot, so the state had to check in with another state agency about the potential risk of groundwater contamination, which was nonexistent. Rebuild NC had to contact a separate department to check whether there were any underground fuel storage tanks in the area, which there weren’t, or aboveground fuel tanks that could explode, which there also weren’t.
Furthermore, a small corner of the parcel sat within a FEMA-designated flood zone. Even though the developers weren’t going to build in that corner, they did plan to cut down a few trees, which triggered another review under an executive order issued in the 1970s, which regulates flood zone construction. The state liaised with the local floodplain administrator, completed an exhaustive report on flood risks, redid site plans to add a retention pond, and ran a public notice about the proposed tree-cutting in a local newspaper — all to mitigate “temporary impacts to .01 acres” of floodplain, an area roughly the size of a two-car garage.
The state had to undertake yet another review process when they realized that a ditch on the property counted as a federally designated wetland because it contained stagnant water. The developer needed to replace two concrete culverts that drained into the ditch, expanding the 15-inch pipes to 18 inches, but under federal law this action counted as new wetland development under the Clean Water Act, which meant the developer had to seek a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Meanwhile, the developer and the state spent months waiting for HUD approval to sell a portion of the lot that contained a cell phone tower, which conflicted with land use regulations governing the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit.
HUD handed down final permission to use federal money for the project in November, more than four years after Florence made landfall, at which point Woda Cooper closed the deal to buy the land and started preparing the site for construction. They cleared the lot during the first half of 2023, and by the time the fifth anniversary of Florence came around, they were about halfway done building the apartments themselves. The construction timeline stretched on for a few extra months due to a supply-chain snag with the building’s electrical system, but otherwise things went according to plan. The first tenants are expected to arrive later this month.
The other developments in the state’s housing program aren’t much further along. Out of the 16 apartment projects that the state chose to fund with HUD money, 13 were in various stages of construction as of late January, including the completed Palatine Meadows. Two projects had received their authorization from HUD but haven’t yet broken ground, and one project had fallen through after the state couldn’t find a suitable developer. Meanwhile, a separate effort to rebuild one of New Bern’s largest public housing projects with money from FEMA has yet to get off the ground.
A rendering of the 60-unit Palatine Meadows apartment complex in New Bern, North Carolina, which will open later this spring, more than five years after Hurricane Florence. Woda Cooper Companies
On one hand, these new low-income units would likely never have been built at all were it not for the infusion of money from HUD. Other federal programs helped Florence victims find new housing throughout the state, but the HUD money built new housing in the same places that lost it. Denis Blackburne, the senior vice president of Woda Cooper, told Grist that “without this [HUD] funding source, this development [Palatine Meadows] would not have been feasible” and that the federal money didn’t delay the building process.
On the other hand, Palatine Meadows may be arriving too late to change the trajectory of New Bern’s rebuild. Odham, the city’s mayor, says that most New Bern homeowners who suffered damage during the storm have returned and rebuilt their houses with money from insurance and federal grants. Renters, on the other hand, have almost all moved away: The city didn’t have any available apartments in the years after the storm, so renters who lost their homes had no choice but to look elsewhere for replacement housing.
“The question of whether people came back would come down to whether it was owner-occupied, or whether it’s rental property,” he said. “For rental property, I would say that most of those folks have probably turned over. They left to go find somewhere else to live.”
Martín, the Harvard researcher, says that other states like Louisiana and New York have also seen long delays when they try to develop new housing with HUD money.
“Affordable housing projects tend to take the longest for all grantees,” he said. “It certainly helps to have more housing, but if we’re looking at the people who lost their housing back in the disaster, I’m pretty sure it does very little for them.” HUD’s own inspector general found in a December report that the agency has taken longer and longer to deliver disaster funds: The average time between the passage of a disaster bill and the disbursement of funds to states tripled from around 200 days to around 600 days between 2000 and 2022.
In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for HUD said that the agency is working on a plan to streamline the funding process for its disaster program — and that it has asked Congress to authorize the program on a permanent basis.
Martín says Congress should also add exemptions to the environmental review process that would allow states to move through reviews faster if they’re working on affordable housing projects that are below a certain size, or projects in urban areas that are already developed. The state of California has added such exemptions to its own environmental laws as part of an effort to build more low-income housing, and a recent executive order Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass has streamlined permitting reviews for new infill housing, leading to thousands of new units. For a project like Palatine Meadows, which brought just 60 units to an existing neighborhood, such exemptions might have sped up the timeline by a year or more.
Colores, of Rebuild NC, told Grist that the housing development project was worth doing even on a prolonged timeline. She added that new apartment complexes like Palatine Meadows will ease local housing shortages and provide new housing stock that will be strong enough to withstand future storm events.
“To the extent that we can leverage these HUD dollars, we can make a significant difference in the quality and quantity of affordable housing in a lot of communities that are frequently hit by storms,” she said. However, she acknowledged that for many victims of Hurricane Florence, the ribbon-cutting on Palatine Meadows will be too late to make much of a difference.
“I wish that we could move more quickly,” she said.
When Bucks County, Pennsylvania, filed a lawsuit last week against major oil and gas companies for climate damages, Commissioner Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia pointed to “unprecedented weather events here in Bucks County that have repeatedly put residents and first responders in harm’s way, damaged public and private property and placed undue strain on our infrastructure.” The county argues oil…
Flood and flash flood warnings and alerts are also in place, including a warning for all flash flood-prone areas, small streams and low-lying areas of Vanua Levu and western Viti Levu, and an alert for all flash flood-prone areas, small streams and low-lying areas in the rest of Fiji.
All schools in the Northern, and Western education divisions, including Ovalau, are closed today due to adverse weather that has affected these areas.
Last night, Education Secretary Selina Kuruleca said some schools were being used as evacuation centres.
“And most of the schools are deemed to be inaccessible due to broken Irish crossings [and] flooded waters, and flood-prone areas are still flooded even though the low tide [Sunday] afternoon, we had hoped for some relief,” she said.
“There are also reports of power outages, water cuts, and disruption to public transportation.
“Heads of schools in the mentioned education divisions and district are to closely work with school management committees to assess the status of your schools.”
12 evacuation centres open
National Disaster Management Office Director Vasiti Soko said as of midday yesterday, about 12 evacuation centres were open in the west, sheltering about 230 people.
“Some of the evacuation centres that were opened [Saturday] night have closed early [Sunday] morning as families have safely returned home once floodwaters receded.”
Also in her statement on Sunday, she said there had not been any reported cases of injury or casualty.
Fiji police said officers were on standby to assist, and people could reach out to the Divisional Command Centers if they needed help.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
As firefighters contained the largest wildfire in Texas history last week, the electricity provider for the state’s panhandle region, Xcel Energy, announced some bad news: The wildfire, which burned more than a million acres of land and killed at least two people, seemed to have been caused by one of the utility’s electrical poles.
“Based on currently available information, Xcel Energy acknowledges that its facilities appear to have been involved in an ignition of the Smokehouse Creek fire,” the statement read, referring to the largest of several fires raging in the area. An investigation from the state’s forest management agency found that the fire began when a decayed wooden pole splintered and fell, sending sparks onto nearby grass. Photos obtained by Bloomberg News appear to show that the pole had been marked unsafe before the fire.
Seizing on this evidence, multiplelandowners in the area have already filed lawsuits against the company — as have family members of the fire’s victims, seeking millions of dollars in damages. Xcel has denied that it was to blame for the historic fire: In the same statement, the utility said it “disputes claims that it acted negligently in maintaining and operating its infrastructure.”
The lawsuits are just the latest in a string of high-profile wildfire cases against major electrical utilities, whose flammable power lines are among the most common culprits for major fire events. California companies such as Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison have paid out billions of dollars to fire victims and insurance companies over the past decade. Earlier this month, a jury delivered a verdict against the Oregon utility Pacificorp, which could owe victims billions of dollars. Xcel itself is fighting hundreds of lawsuits in Colorado over its similar role in the 2021 Marshall Fire near the city of Boulder. These lawsuits have hit utilities with huge charges that they have passed onto customers in the form of rate increases.
The emergence of the trend in Texas, a state that has avoided massive fire losses over recent years, underscores that wildfires are now a national threat to utilities, according to Karl Rábago, a former Texas utility regulator and expert on utility law.
“They’re not pivoting to the world in which we live,” he told Grist. “When we face these situations, we do have a legal system that will likely dole out a measure of pain. The shitty thing is, after paying out a certain amount of money, the problem will become so ubiquitous, and so oft-repeating, that we will treat it as business as usual.”
As in many previous lawsuits, the question in Texas is what counts as negligence on the part of a utility. If the fact that Xcel knew the pole needed repairs but hadn’t yet repaired it is sufficient evidence of neglect, the company will likely be on the hook for a large share of the fire damages, which could amount to hundreds of millions. The state utility regulator requires companies to plan for emergencies, and Xcel has told the state in the past that it conducts rotating inspections of old poles. However, most experts agree that utilities need to do more, burying power lines or adding technology that allows for rapid and precise power shut-offs during fire weather.
“There is a recognizable negligence, at least, in the failure to ensure that the systems are not extremely vulnerable,” said Rábago. “If your pole was 40 years old, it’s probably gotten to be so weak that it’ll get knocked over in severe winds.” Other fires that broke out in the Texas Panhandle at the same time as the Smokehouse Creek Fire have also burned thousands of acres, but investigators haven’t yet determined the cause of those events.
Xcel declined to comment for this story.
Xcel’s subsidiary in the Texas Panhandle delivers power to around 400,000 customers over a vast and sparsely populated service area of around 50,000 square miles. Pacific Gas & Electric in California, by comparison, provides power to 16 million people across a service territory that isn’t much larger. On the other hand, the fire mostly burned open rangeland, destroying far fewer homes than the Marshall Fire or other urban blazes. That could keep the potential damages relatively low.
The Smokehouse Creek Fire and its companion blazes are the most devastating in Texas history, but there is some precedent for holding Lone Star State utilities accountable. Dozens of victims and insurance companies sued the much smaller Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative near Austin for failing to remove dead trees ahead of a 34,000-acre fire. The company and its tree-trimming contractor settled those cases over the following years, with the contractor paying $5 million as recently as 2020. The fire was the most destructive ever in Texas at the time, but the panhandle complex is many times larger.
“The consequences of utility ignitions are larger than they used to be, and there’s an increasingly clear set of practices that utilities can take, which some do, to avoid these kinds of ignitions,” said Michael Wara, a senior research scholar at Stanford Law School and an expert on how climate change affects utilities. “This is creating a situation where juries are more likely to hold utilities liable when they cause these catastrophic fires, if they haven’t taken appropriate steps.”
Wara said the most cost-effective steps include installing more accurate weather stations and shutting off the power proactively during extreme weather events.
These lawsuits may become more common as climate change ratchets up the potential for massive fires in many parts of the country. The Texas Panhandle has always seen rangeland fires, but studies show that the state’s high plains now see an additional month of “fire weather” each year compared to the mid-twentieth century. The combination of high temperatures and high winds that started the Smokehouse Creek fire will only get more common as the earth continues to warm, which could mean more costly fires and more litigation.
Utilities in other states have responded to fire lawsuits by raising rates on customers and using the money to pay out settlements or upgrade their infrastructure. Most Texans purchase power through a controversial wholesale market that has come under criticism for jacking up prices during extreme weather, but Xcel’s system in the panhandle isn’t part of that market, so the utility’s customers could see a direct rate increase depending on how the lawsuit shakes out.
The growing trend of utility lawsuits has started to make markets nervous. Warren Buffett, whose company Berkshire Hathaway owns the Oregon utility Pacificorp, said in his annual letter to shareholders last month that “the regulatory climate in a few states has raised the specter of zero profitability or even bankruptcy … in what was once regarded as among the most stable industries in America.” The legendary investor referred to his failure to foresee this trouble as “a costly mistake.”
In an interesting twist, Buffett then speculated that this threat to utility profits may someday lead more areas to adopt public power models, where governments rather than corporations control electrical infrastructure.
“Eventually, voters, taxpayers, and users will decide which model they prefer,” he said.
Climate experts are warning that the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas panhandle — now the largest in the state’s history with over over 1 million acres burned and counting — provides a horrifying look into a future of runaway temperatures that result in extreme destruction. The fire is currently only 15% contained, but firefighters said Sunday they are hoping an approaching cold front will help…
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days — over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years L.A. has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, L.A. has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, L.A. is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There’s going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers — porous subterranean materials that can hold water — which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea.
As the American West and other regions dry out, they’re searching for ways to produce more water themselves, instead of importing it by aqueduct. (That strategy includes, by the way, recycling toilet water into drinking water so cities reduce water usage in the first place.) At the same time, climate change is supercharging rainstorms, counterintuitively enough: For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the atmosphere can hold 6 to 7 percent more water, meaning there’s often more moisture available for a storm to dump as rain. Indeed, studies have found that the West Coast’s atmospheric rivers, like the one that just hit L.A., are getting wetter.
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it’s a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect — the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”
LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface — sidewalks, parking lots, etc. — they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense — it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. L.A., of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.
The past half century has seen remarkable improvements in air quality in many parts of the world, thanks largely to legislation like the U.S. Clean Air Act. Efforts like these took aim at pollutants like the group of chemicals known as aerosols, which include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and other compounds that are harmful to human health.
Like greenhouse gasses, aerosols are produced by cars, factories, and power plants — but unlike greenhouse gasses, they make the earth cooler rather than warmer. This is because aerosols reflect the sun’s rays, rather than trapping its heat like carbon. Some studies estimate that, without aerosol pollution, the world might have already warmed by another half a degree Celsius.
This creates a tricky paradox, which renowned climate scientist James Hansen has called a “Faustian bargain.” If you remove aerosols from the air, you reduce the health impacts of pollution, saving thousands of people from lung and heart disease, but you might also make global warming worse. This powerful relationship has been on display over the past few years in the maritime shipping industry: As freight ships have stopped using dirty bunker fuel since 2020, they’ve also stopped emitting trails of sulfur dioxide, which has caused world temperatures to jump by an additional .05 degrees Celsius.
Now, new research shows that the interaction between aerosols and greenhouse gasses also has implications for flooding, which is one of the costliest climate disasters. A peer-reviewed paper published this week in Nature Communications finds that the presence of toxic aerosols in the atmosphere over the United States helped suppress the impacts of climate change on rainfall for decades, postponing a surge in rainfall and flood risk driven by climate change. The passage of clean air laws, which removed these aerosols from the atmosphere, ironically unleashed a trend of worsening floods.
The paper’s results help solve what had been something of a mystery in climate science: Even though warmer air holds more moisture, rainfall in the United States hasn’t been increasing in the way scientists expect as temperatures rise.
“This paper highlights that the counteraction between aerosols and greenhouse gasses has likely masked a lot of climate hazards over the last few decades,” said Geeta Persad, an assistant professor of earth sciences at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on aerosols. (Persad wasn’t involved in the study.)
“If aerosol emissions drop drastically over the next few decades and greenhouse gasses don’t, a lot of those unanticipated climate hazards could be revealed,” added Persad.
The paper uses data from thousands of rain gauges to tease out how aerosols and greenhouse gasses have influenced rainfall averages and the frequency of extreme rain events. The use of rain gauges allowed researchers to trace how the two types of human-caused pollution balance each other out in different regions of the country.
Greenhouse gasses have been stacking up in the atmosphere for more than a century, and they have a pretty simple impact on rainfall. The more carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets; the hotter it gets, the more moisture the atmosphere can hold. Aerosols are more complicated: They react differently with different types of clouds, and as a result their impact on rainfall varies from region to region and from season to season. In most of the U.S., they made things drier.
The passage of the landmark Clean Air Act in 1970 caused a rapid decline in aerosol pollution as factories installed “scrubber” devices to clean up their smokestacks and automakers updated their cars to comply with emission limits. The disappearance of these aerosols left greenhouse gasses to dominate in the atmosphere, which started to ratchet up rainfall totals. If those aerosols hadn’t been there, the paper argues, rainfall and flooding might have started worsening in the United States several decades earlier.
Separating out the effect of these aerosols also allows the researchers to make predictions about how flood risk will change over the next decade. It’s not good news: Now that there’s nothing to offset the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide and methane, much of the country is about to get a lot wetter and see a lot more monster storms.
“This somewhat rapid intensification of rainfall extremes is the new normal, at least for the next five years,” said Mark Risser, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and one of the paper’s lead authors.
The effect is most pronounced in the southeastern United States, where a slew of hurricanes and rainstorms have caused billions of dollars of flood damage in recent years. The authors find that aerosol pollution tamped down summer and fall precipitation until the late twentieth century, when the effect of greenhouse gasses started to dominate in the region. That led to both an increase in annual rainfall totals and an increase in the frequency of big rainstorms. (Previous research has shown that aerosols can also suppress the emergence of tropical storms by disrupting cloud formation.)
The paper’s findings could have big implications for the next few decades of environmental regulation. President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency is racing to finalize strict regulations on industrial pollution that could slash emissions of key aerosol pollutants such as sulfur dioxide. If these regulations take effect, they would apply to numerous facilities in the Southeast, including the petrochemical facilities in the Louisiana region known as “Cancer Alley.”
These regulations would protect residents who live near industrial facilities from asthma, heart disease, and cancer, but a further decline in aerosols could also make hurricane season worse by allowing big storms to hold moisture — meaning more events like Hurricane Harvey, which struck in 2017 and stunned climate scientists by dropping more than 50 inches of rain over Houston, Texas.
Persad, the aerosols expert, says the paper offers a grim warning about future climate risk. If air pollution declines in the United States over the next few decades, many more Americans in regions such as the Southeast could see stronger storms and more severe flooding.
“We’re looking at a situation where over the next 30 years, you could either keep masking, or you could reveal 50 percent more warming,” she said. “Up until now, there has not been very much recognition of how much the evolution of this aerosol signal, over the lifetime of a mortgage of a house that somebody buys today, is going to affect the climate hazards they’re exposed to.”
Though it is internationally known for its catastrophic wildfires and earthquakes, California is no stranger to floods — particularly during the heavy rains that accompany its winters. In fact, 7 million Californians live in flood-prone areas. Despite this, just one in four Golden State homes sitting in what the federal government considers a flood hazard zone are covered by flood insurance. That gap spells trouble for thousands of homeowners in Southern California, which has been battered by a series of storms over the last week.
The torrential rain and wind are the result of what’s called an atmospheric river, a channel of moisture that can be up to 375 miles wide and carry the equivalent of two Amazon Rivers’ worth of water. Downed trees and mudslides that resulted from the downpour killed nine people, and half a million homes and businesses went without power across the state in recent weeks.
San Diego and Los Angeles, where the river stalled out and dumped more than 10 inches of rain, were hit the hardest. Thousands of homeowners trying to repair the water damage are now in for a rude surprise when they discover that their standard-issue home insurance doesn’t cover floods. The lack of protection stems not only from misperceptions about the likelihood of flooding in sunny California and common misunderstandings of what basic home insurance covers, but also regulatory shortcomings by the federal government, which is supposed to ensure that all the country’s high-risk homes are insured in the event of floods. As climate change intensifies the state’s atmospheric river storms, the problem is only poised to grow.
“[Flood insurance] uptake in California is half the national average,” said Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and a senior fellow at the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California. “We’re really bad when it comes to that.”
In the eight Southern California counties where the governor has declared an emergency, roughly 52,000 homes and businesses are covered by flood insurance. That’s less than 1 percent of the total number of homes in the region. One reason is cost: A yearly flood policy can cost between $500 and $1,000. In a state with a housing crunch and high cost of living, purchasing flood insurance may be out of reach for many residents who already struggle with the required cost of homeownership, including standard home insurance. Mount added that severe flooding events are quickly forgotten even by those who have lived through them, especially in a state where so many other ecological crises are constantly in the headlines.
“Disaster fatigue is a real thing,” said Mount. “People wear out hearing they’re going to die from earthquakes, fires, and floods, and they get numb, and they don’t take actions to protect themselves.”
Such concerns are only likely to increase in a warming world. A warmer atmosphere and ocean mean an atmospheric river can pick up more water as it crosses the ocean before dumping water on land. The presence of a strong El Niño, a weather pattern that is characterized by warmer Pacific Ocean temperatures, also supercharged the atmospheric river that hit California this month.
“The combination of a warming atmosphere and co-occurrence of the El Niño event both conspired to generate the conditions we’ve seen now along with a healthy dose of random luck,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Although attribution studies have not yet been conducted on the atmospheric river that has doused California in the last week, Swain estimated that absent climate change, precipitation levels would have been 5 to 15 percent lower.
“That’s not a small number,” said Swain. “We’re talking about a couple extra inches of rain, and two inches of rain in Los Angeles would be a pretty big storm in its own right in a typical year.”
Flood coverage is mandatory for those obtaining a federally-backed mortgage in a part of the state that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has deemed a “special hazard flood area.” The policy is supposed to protect both homeowners taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and the federal government, which ultimately bears the risk when a borrower defaults. However, FEMA, which runs the national flood insurance program, does not keep track of compliance with the rule. Neither do lenders. As a result, a homeowner may purchase a flood policy when they secure a mortgage but fail to renew it in subsequent years. A 2006 FEMA study found that compliance with the requirement ranged between 43 percent in the midwest and 88 percent in western states.
California, however, may be the exception in this latter region. Mount, the water policy expert, found that just a quarter of homes in parts of the state with high flood risk comply with the federal rule.
“Nobody’s policing it,” said Mount. “There’s no mechanism to go in and threaten people and say, ‘If you don’t get flood insurance, we’re going to take your mortgage away from you.’”
Mount added that the floods California has seen in the past month are “not floods of the affluent.” People with low economic resilience are often hit hardest by flooding because they tend not to be able to afford insurance and have limited resources to get back on their feet. For instance, in San Diego, which experienced its rainiest day since 1850 last month, low-income communities and communities of color were among the worst affected by flooding.
“This is a social justice issue,” said Mount. “The people who can least afford it are the ones that usually get whacked, and those same communities can’t come up with the money to try and fix their infrastructure.”
The first month of 2024 was the hottest January on record, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts announced Thursday. That makes January the eighth month in a row to see its average surface air temperature surpass historic temperatures for that month and the 12th month in a row to see it rise past 1.5°C above the 1850-1900…
A super-hurricane is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean in the opening pages of The Displacements, a novel by Bruce Holsinger published in 2022. “This is the one the climatologists have been warning us about for twenty years,” one character declares. Forty pages in, so-called Hurricane Luna makes a surprise turn for Miami and ends up demolishing Southern Florida with a wall of water, buckling skyscrapers, leveling wastewater plants, and filling the Everglades with contaminated silt. With 215-mile-per-hour winds, faster than a severe tornado, the fictional Luna is the world’s first Category 6 hurricane.
In the real world, Category 5 is synonymous with the biggest and baddest storms. But some U.S. scientists are making the case that it no longer captures the intensity of recent hurricanes. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a framework for extending the current hurricane-rating system, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a new category for storms that have winds topping 192 miles per hour. According to the study, the world has already seen storms that would qualify as Category 6s.
“We expected that climate change was going to make the winds of the most intense storms stronger,” said Michael Wehner, a coauthor of the paper and an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “What we’ve demonstrated here is that, yeah, it’s already happening. We tried to put numbers on how much worse it’ll get.”
There’s a reason that books like The Displacements invoke Category 6: It grabs your attention, warning of a threat that’s like nothing you’ve never encountered. The concept could help the public grapple with the dangers that climate change is bringing, like more intense storms. But some experts aren’t convinced it would be helpful to work “Category 6” into our hurricane vocabularies.
What storms would count as a Category 6?
The idea of adding a Category 6 hassurfacedseveraltimes in the last few decades, as storms like Hurricane Dorian in 2019 delivered some of the highest wind speeds on record (185 miles per hour) and flattened whole towns in the Bahamas. The current Category 5 designation refers to any tropical cyclone with wind speeds higher than 157 miles per hour.
The new threshold of 192 miles per hour for a Category 6 would have captured some of the strongest storms ever observed. Wehner and his coauthor James Kossin, a scientist at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, found that at least five storms have already reached this tier, and that all of them occurred in the last decade, a signal that a warming world is creating more monster storms. The most powerful of these gales, Hurricane Patricia, slammed into Mexico’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds that peaked at 215 miles per hour. By a stroke of good fortune, the storm hit a relatively unpopulated region, causing only six deaths. When another one of the most powerful storms, Typhoon Haiyan, struck the Philippines in 2013 with winds of 195 miles per hour, it killed more than 6,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
The Gulf of Mexico hasn’t seen a storm with such high winds in the modern era, but the authors found that conditions in the region are already ripe for a Category 6. That’s because climate change is making the ocean and atmosphere warmer, providing fuel for more intense hurricanes. By undertaking an analysis of atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic, Wehner and Kossin found that there have been several occasions when the Gulf has been hot enough to support a storm with winds of more than 190 miles per hour — it’s just dumb luck that one hasn’t happened yet. As the world gets hotter, the odds that we’ll see such a storm get higher: The authors find that 2 degrees Celsius of warming would triple the risk of a Category 6 storm forming in the Atlantic in any given year.
The pitfalls of adding a new category
It’s becoming clear that flooding is the deadliest aspect of a hurricane. Storm surges account for roughly half of deaths from hurricanes in the United States, and flooding from heavy rain is responsible for more than a quarter, according to the study. By contrast, high winds are behind just 8 percent of deaths. Since the Saffir-Simpson scale is based solely on the speed of their winds, it doesn’t communicate the risks that people should be most concerned about, yet it’s the main thing people usually know about an oncoming storm.
“The point is, adding a Category 6 just amplifies the miscommunication of the greatest hurricane risks,” said Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia.
Floodwaters isolate homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in 2018 in Lumberton, North Carolina.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
The public is already confused by the jargon in hurricane forecasts, like the “cone of uncertainty” that shows a storm’s projected path, or the difference between a “watch” and a “warning.” Shepherd thinks adding a new category could make that worse.
“You know, people are creatures of habit,” he said. “They have been conditioned to believe that Cat 5 is the strongest hurricane. ‘OK, now, well, what are the categories?’ To me, it creates a lot more communication inconsistencies and confusion for the public.”
People often base their evacuation decisions on a storm’s Saffir-Simpson category, according to Jennifer Collins, a professor of geoscience at the University of South Florida. When Hurricane Florence was downgraded from a Category 4 to Category 1 before its landfall in the Carolinas in 2018, people who had evacuated actually turned around and came back, encountering severe flooding as a result, Collins said.
“When they hear Category 5, I think people will react to it,” Collins said. “It’s really when we use those lower categories that people are not reacting when they should.” National Hurricane Center experts have said in the past that adding a new category wouldn’t do much good, since a Category 5 is already considered catastrophic. Since the National Hurricane Center is in charge of the Saffir-Simpson scale, Category 6 won’t happen unless those experts are convinced it’s needed.
The authors of the new paper don’t think that extending the category system would fix these hurricane-communication problems. “We’re not trying to address these other inadequacies,” Wehner said. “We’re trying to raise awareness that climate change is increasing the risk of intense storms, and not just Category 6, but also category 4 and 5.”
While it’s difficult to predict exactly how people would respond to a Category 6 storm, Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, thinks the designation would be helpful. “It would send a clear signal to coastal residents that your past experience with storms is not a good measure of future impacts,” Marlon said in an email. “Storms are no longer ‘all natural,’ and they’re getting stronger.”
A better way to communicate hurricane risks?
These days, when a hurricane is headed toward the coast, Shepherd doesn’t talk much about its category at all. Instead, he focuses on explaining threats from storm surge and flooding, sharing visuals that show the risks.
Over the last decade, the National Hurricane Center has been experimenting with new storm surge maps that highlight the risk of inland flooding rather than the wind speed of a storm. In the lead-up to hurricanes like Ian in 2022, for instance, the agency published new mapsevery few hours that showed how many feet of flooding will hit each segment of the coast. These maps are simple and easy to understand, and they’ve become a more central part of the NHC’s attempts to communicate storm risk in recent years.
A map shows the peak storm surge forecast ahead of Hurricane Ian’s landfall in 2022. NOAA / National Weather Service
“We likely have entered a new generation of hurricanes, in terms of intensity and rapid intensification,” Shepherd said. “I don’t want to downplay or underplay that, because that’s critical. So instead of worrying about characterizing a new category, my broader message is, ‘OK, what are we going to do, from an adaptation and a resiliency standpoint, to this new generation of hurricanes?’”
As thousands waited on federal government assistance after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans residents came up with their own nickname for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The four letters of the agency’s acronym, they said, stood for “Fix Everything, My Ass.” As climate-related disasters have intensified in the ensuing decades, the agency has been similarly tarred by politicians and disaster survivors from Hawai’i to Vermont.
There are many points of criticism: FEMA seldom provides immediate cash aid to people who lose their homes, instead requiring them to complete onerous housing applications that can take weeks to process. It requires many survivors to apply for and be denied a loan from the Small Business Administration, a separate government agency, before they can get housing aid. It denies them aid if they already have home insurance or if their homes had been damaged before a disaster, and it imposes a mountain of paperwork on people who need to appeal aid decisions or who miss application deadlines.
Now, after decades of inaction, FEMA is addressing those criticisms all at once. The agency announced on Friday that it will fundamentally overhaul the way it delivers aid to survivors, launching new programs to provide quick cash payments to those in need and eliminating much of the bureaucracy that hampers aid access.
“This is really a transformational, deeply impactful, meaningful, and historic change in our provision of individual assistance to survivors of natural disasters,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA. “For too long, in the face of too many natural disasters and extreme weather events, survivors have had to overcome many barriers to access to federal assistance.”
The new rules, which FEMA said are the most significant changes to its aid process in 20 years, will take effect in late March. They don’t require approval from Congress, and will have a minimal impact on federal taxpayers, according to a FEMA official: The reforms will cost about $679 million a year, less than 5 percent of what the agency spent on disasters last year.
The centerpieces of the reform are two new programs that target the chaotic first few days after a disaster strikes. Until now, most agency assistance has come down to victims in the weeks and months following a disaster, after states submit a request for specific types of aid. Once they evacuate the danger zone, victims must apply for assistance with specific costs such as hotel lodging and home repairs.
The first new policy will provide a rapid cash payment of $750 to all victims of federally declared disasters, by direct deposit or check, without states needing to request the money first. The second will give victims flexible up-front funding to cover about two weeks of housing, indexed to housing costs in the region, rather than making them submit long-term housing plans before FEMA will cover their expenses. A FEMA official said the information in those previously required housing plans was “not particularly informative,” suggesting that the upshot of the reform will be a faster deployment of funds.
The reform package will also eliminate some of FEMA’s most notorious red tape. For instance, the agency is doing away with the Small Business Administration loan application requirement, which forced victims who wanted help replacing destroyed personal property to fill out an application they knew would be denied and then present that denial to FEMA. It is also relaxing a rule that prevented residents who had home insurance from getting aid, even if their insurance didn’t cover the full cost of a rebuild. And finally, the agency is eliminating a “pre-existing conditions” provision that prevented residents from receiving aid for housing defects that existed before a disaster, such as leaky pipes or sagging walls.
It will take years for local officials and experts to gauge how these reforms affect the way the United States recovers from disasters, but experts hailed the rule changes, saying they would ease financial and emotional pain for many flood and fire victims.
“These changes put into effect long-standing recommendations to cut red tape and help disaster survivors by implementing quick payments to homeowners,” said Shana Udvardy, a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, adding that the reforms “will offer disaster survivors a smoother road to recovery.”
In a press call with reporters, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said her administration had been developing the changes for multiple years, and that they are a direct response to previous criticism from survivors, government officials, and the media.
“This has been the result of just listening, listening to all of the concerns that survivors have had, our state and local emergency managers have had, and frankly, all of you,” she said.
After a hurricane, flood, wildfire, or other disaster strikes, a great tallying commences: the number of people injured and killed; buildings damaged and destroyed; acres of land burned, inundated, or contaminated. Every death is recorded, every insured home assessed, the damage to every road and bridge calculated in dollars lost. When the emergency recedes, the insurance companies settle their claims, and the federal government doles out its grants, communities are expected to rebuild. But the accounting misses a crucial piece of the aftermath: Worsening disasters are leaving invisible mental health crises in their wake.
A handful of studies have sought to quantify the scope and scale of the mental health consequences of disasters that have occurred in the recent past, such as 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, and 2017’s Hurricane Irma. The results point to an alarming trend: The stress and trauma of losing a loved one, seeing a home destroyed, or watching a beloved community splinter has resounding mental health repercussions that stretch on for months, even years, after the disaster makes its first impact. Anxiety, depression, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress, and sometimes suicidal ideation and suicide follow disasters.
Children and adolescents — who are still learning to regulate their emotions, rely on routine and a sense of safety more than most adults do, and get social and mental stimulation from interacting with peers — are among the demographics most vulnerable to the chaos and isolation brought on by extreme weather events.
A study published in mid-January in the Journal of Traumatic Stress analyzed survey data from more than 90,000 public school students across Puerto Rico in the months following Hurricane Maria’s landfall in September 2017. Maria, a Category 5 storm that caused widespread destruction in the northern Caribbean, killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and caused mass blackouts that left huge portions of the island without electricity and drinking water for months — a reflection of decades of disinvestment in and mismanagement of the island’s infrastructure.
Some 30 percent of the students surveyed five to nine months after the hurricane made landfall said they felt their lives were threatened by the storm, 46 percent said their homes were significantly damaged, and 17 percent said they were injured or a family member was injured.
A woman stands on her property two weeks after Hurricane Maria swept through Puerto Rico in October 2017.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Roughly 7 percent of the young people surveyed — about 6,300 students — developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after the storm. For this subset, the psychological consequences of living through Maria and its aftermath were extreme.
Prior research has shown that young people are more likely to turn to alcohol as a coping mechanism after experiencing traumatic stress, a precursor to PTSD. A study published in 2021 hypothesized that children living in Louisiana who were exposed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 would have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and alcohol use as teenagers than the general population in southeastern Louisiana. The researchers found a connection: the more severe the traumatic stress during and after the disaster, the more likely the individual was to report substance use.
“There is an initial link that has been found in other research,” said Alejandro L. Vázquez, the lead author of the Puerto Rico study and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. But a huge question remains. “The mechanism for why kids are using substances in this situation is less clear,” he said. Vázquez wanted to figure out which specific symptoms of traumatic stress were linked to alcohol and substance abuse in the students who suffered PTSD symptoms after Hurricane Maria. He found that angry outbursts and irritable behavior, two of the core symptoms of PTSD, were strongly correlated to self-reported substance use.
Robbie Parks, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, called the study a “fantastic synthesis of how the hidden burden of climate-related disasters such as Hurricane Maria can have long-lasting, non-obvious impacts on the way that our health and well-being is maintained.” Parks was not involved in the research.
Mother Isamar holds baby Saniel at their makeshift home, under reconstruction, after being mostly destroyed by Hurricane Maria, in December 2017 in San Isidro, Puerto Rico. Mario Tama / Getty Images
The ultimate purpose of the research, Vázquez told Grist, is to arm counselors, teachers, and mental health professionals with information that can help them identify PTSD as it forms in young people post-disaster and intervene before it prompts them to develop unhealthy habits. “When we think about trajectories, if you get into the habit of using these maladaptive coping strategies, you can build biological dependence on substances,” Vázquez said. “One storm can have this life-changing effect for a child.”
The upshot is that isolating the behaviors that may eventually lead to alcohol and drug dependence is a first step toward protecting children from some of the more visceral consequences of surviving a disaster like a hurricane. The study found that children who had a supportive caregiver, friend, or teacher were less likely to turn to harmful coping devices. “This is consistent with the idea that the disintegration of social structures — be it climate change or otherwise — will impact the way people behave after a traumatic event,” Parks said. “It speaks to the particular vulnerability of youth in a resource-scarce area.”
More research is needed to figure out exactly how to help youth survive the mental repercussions of hurricanes and other extreme weather events, Vázquez said, especially as climate change becomes more severe. “There’s going to continue to be intense storms with more devastation in low-lying areas like Puerto Rico that are more vulnerable,” he said.
Freeport — On a grassy bank of the Brazos River, Don Green’s children repeat the same numbers over and over in hushed tones: Core body temperature of 110 degrees. Eighty-six years old. One hour. His stepson points out the shore where he fished. His daughter clutches a box of his ashes. About three dozen friends, family members and neighbors quietly shuffle into a loose circle and wait for his…
Freeport — On a grassy bank of the Brazos River, Don Green’s children repeat the same numbers over and over in hushed tones: Core body temperature of 110 degrees. Eighty-six years old. One hour. His stepson points out the shore where he fished. His daughter clutches a box of his ashes. About three dozen friends, family members and neighbors quietly shuffle into a loose circle and wait for his…
As sea levels rise by multiple feet in the coming decades, communities along the coastal United States will face increasingly frequent flooding from high tides and tropical storms. Thousands of homes will become uninhabitable or disappear underwater altogether. For many in these communities, these risks are poised to drive migration away from places like New Orleans, Louisiana, and Miami, Florida — and toward inland areas that face less danger from flooding.
This migration won’t happen in a uniform manner, because migration never does. In large part this is because young adults move around much more than elderly people, since the former have better job prospects. It’s likely that this time-tested trend will hold true as Americans migrate away from climate disasters: The phenomenon has already been observed in places like New Orleans, where elderly residents were less likely to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and in Puerto Rico, where the median age has jumped since 2017’s Hurricane Maria, as young people leave the U.S. territory for the mainland states.
A new paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a glimpse at the shape and scale of this demographic shift as climate change accelerates. Using sea-level rise models and migration data gleaned from the latest U.S. Census, the paper projects that outmigration from coastal areas could increase the median age in those places by as much as 10 years over the course of this century. That’s almost as much as the difference between the median age in the United States and the median age in Japan, which is among the world’s most elderly countries.
Climate-driven migration promises a generational realignment of U.S. states, as coastal parts of Florida and Georgia grow older and receiving states such as Texas and Tennessee see an influx of young people. It could also create a vicious cycle of decline in coastal communities, as investors and laborers relocate from vulnerable coasts to inland areas — and in doing so incentivize more and more working-age adults to follow in their footsteps.
“When we’re thinking about the effect of climate migration on population change, we have to think beyond just the migrants themselves and start thinking about the second order effects,” said Mathew Hauer, a professor of geography at Florida State University and the lead author of the paper.
In his previousresearch, Hauer has produced some of the only nationwide climate migration projections for the United States. His previous papers have modeled a slow shift away from coastlines and toward inland southern cities such as Atlanta, Georgia, and Dallas, Texas. Millions of people could end up joining this migratory movement by 2100. The new paper attempts to add a novel dimension to that demographic analysis.
“It’s a really large amount of aging in these extremely vulnerable areas,” said Hauer. “The people who are left behind are much older than we would expect them to be, and conversely, the areas that gain a lot of people, they get younger.”
The knock-on effects of this kind of demographic shift raise thorny problems for aging communities. A lower share of working-age adults in a given city means fewer people giving birth, which can sap future growth. It also means fewer construction workers, fewer doctors, fewer waiters, and a weaker labor force overall. Property values and tax revenue often decline as growth stalls, leading to an erosion of public services. All these factors in turn push more people to leave the coast — even those who aren’t themselves affected by flooding from sea-level rise.
“If Miami starts losing people, and there’s fewer people in Miami, then there’s a lower demand for every occupation, and the likelihood that somebody moves into Miami as opposed to moving to another location goes down as well,” said Hauer. “Maybe like a retiree from Syracuse, New York … who before might have thought about retiring in Miami, now they decide they’re going to retire in Asheville.”
This vicious cycle, which Hauer and his co-authors call “demographic amplification,” could supercharge climate migration patterns. The authors project that around 1.5 million people will move away from coastal areas under a future scenario with around 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, but when they account for the domino effect of the age transition, that estimate jumps to 15 million. Hauer said that even he was surprised by the scale of the change.
The most-affected state will be Florida, which has long been one of the nation’s premier retirement destinations, as well as the coastlines of Georgia and South Carolina. Millions of people in these areas face significant risk from sea-level rise over the rest of the century, and even parts of fast-growing Florida will start to shrink as the population ages. Charleston County, South Carolina, alone could lose as many as 250,000 people by 2100, according to Hauer and his co-authors.
The biggest winners under this age-based model, meanwhile, are inland cities such as Nashville and Orlando, which aren’t too far from vulnerable coastal regions but face far less danger from flooding. The county that includes Austin, Texas, could gain more than half a million people, equivalent to a population increase of almost 50 percent. Many of these places have already boomed in recent years. Austin, for instance, saw an influx of young newcomers from California during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new study offers welcome insight into the demographic consequences of climate migration, according to Jola Ajibade, an associate professor of environmental science at Emory University who was not involved in the new research. But she cautioned that there are other factors that might determine who leaves a coastal area, most notably how much money that area spends to adapt to sea-level rise and flooding.
“I give [the researchers] kudos for even leading us in this direction, for trying to bring demographic differentiation into the question of who might move, and where,” said Ajibade. “But exposure is not the only thing you have to model, you also have to model vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and those things were not necessarily modeled. That could change the result.”
The authors note that they can’t account for these adaptation investments, and neither can they track migrants who might move within one county rather than from one county to another. Even so, Hauer says, the paper offers a clear signal that the future scale of climate migration is a lot larger than just the people who are displaced from their homes by flooding. Both coastal and inland areas, he said, need to be prepared for much larger demographic changes than they might be expecting.
European scientists officially confirmed Tuesday that 2023 was the hottest year on record, surpassing 2016 by a huge margin as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels continue to drive global temperatures to terrifying new highs. The conclusion from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service was hardly unexpected given the unparalleled heatwaves that gripped large swaths of the…
When a small Arizona community called Rio Verde Foothills lost its water supply one year ago, forcing locals to skip showers and eat off paper plates, it became a poster child for unwise desert development. The rural neighborhood of about 2,000 people north of Phoenix had relied on trucked-in water deliveries from the nearby city of Scottsdale, but the city elected to stop deliveries to conserve its own water amid a climate-fueled drought on the Colorado River.
Last month, after months of public debate over how to resolve the crisis in Rio Verde Foothills, the state government approved a deal that will restore permanent water access to the beleaguered community, albeit with much higher bills than residents are used to. But when the new legislative session begins next week, the Republican-led chamber may actually weaken the standards that govern new development, rather than tightening them, clearing the way for thousands more homes to pop up on water-insecure outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson.
“The broader solutions are tougher, and people may not be ready to contemplate what really fixing the problem would require,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who represents part of Tucson.
When Arizona developers build six or more homes on a tract of land, they have to demonstrate that they can supply water to those homes for at least a hundred years. This rule exists to protect home buyers from the kind of land fraud that was notorious in the state for decades, but over time some landowners have found a way around it. The developers of so-called “wildcat” subdivisions split large parcels of land into smaller chunks and sell hundreds of those chunks off one by one, skirting the requirement to ensure a long-term water supply.
Rio Verde Foothills is one such subdivision. Some residents of the neighborhood have residential wells that pump water from underground. But because there isn’t much water in the area’s aquifers, most rely on trucks that deliver water from the city of Scottsdale, which has rights to water from the Colorado River. When Scottsdale shut off the water last year, Rio Verde had nowhere to turn for substitute supplies: There was no spare groundwater, and all the water from the Colorado River was spoken for. Home values plummeted, and locals who found alternate water haulers had to pay monthly bills that were larger than their mortgage payments.
As the media frenzy around Rio Verde Foothills reached a fever pitch last summer, the state legislature passed a bill that forced Scottsdale to provide water to the neighborhood through 2025. A few months later, a state regulator approved a long-term agreement between the community and a large utility called Epcor, which agreed to build a new water standpipe in the neighborhood and import a new water supply from elsewhere in Phoenix. Rio Verde Foothills residents will pay for the $12 million project through water bills that could be double or triple current rates. The deal also limits future growth in the neighborhood, allowing for just 150 additional homes to access the standpipe.
“It’s been an exhausting, exhausting fight for this community, and people are not happy with how much it costs,” said John Hornewer, a Rio Verde resident who runs the neighborhood’s largest water hauling company.
But the state legislature’s fix doesn’t address the larger problems presented by wildcat subdivisions. While Democrats and some Republicans in the legislature sought to add language that would have limited when and how developers can exploit the wildcat loophole, they couldn’t get enough support to send it to the governor’s desk. Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs initially held out for a fix to the loophole — she vetoed an initial bill in May that didn’t tackle the wildcat issue — but she ultimately signed a Rio Verde-focused bill that reached her desk the following month, acknowledging that the neighborhood needed immediate help.
“The bill did not do anything to fix the underlying problem,” said Sundareshan, the state senator from Tucson. “We could find ourselves with many more communities … in the same situation.”
John Hornewer delivers water from his truck to a residential water tank in Rio Verde Foothills, Arizona. The neighborhood lost its water access last year as the Colorado River drought worsened.
Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images
Hobbs has continued to push for broader reform on the wildcat issue. Last year she created a “water policy council” made up of experts and industry leaders and tasked it with alleviating the state’s water woes, including the wildcat loophole. The council released its final recommendations in December, calling on the legislature to clamp down on these subdivisions and give local governments more power to regulate them. It isn’t clear how many such subdivisions exist, but they have been popping up outside Phoenix and Tucson for at leasttwo decades.
Democratic lawmakers will make another push once the state’s legislative session starts next week, but Hobbs’s proposed reforms still face stiff opposition. Many members of the state legislature oppose more government involvement in water regulations, and the state’s home building lobby has fought against previous efforts to clamp down on the kind of lot-splitting that enables wildcat development.
“There’s an appetite for [reform], but I think that will be lost in the shuffle,” said John Kavanagh, a Republican state senator who represents the Rio Verde Foothills area. “The home builders will be aggressively lobbying against a lot-split bill, and you’ve got some members with a more libertarian slant who believe in the right to property being almost unlimited.”
Indeed, home builders are now pushing the legislature to move in the other direction, arguing that the 100-year water supply standard is holding back the state’s economic growth. Back in June, Hobbs’s administration paused new water supply approvals in the Phoenix area, declaring that the city’s aquifers didn’t have enough water to support future development over the next century. This has left several major development projects in limbo, with builders unable to move forward on tens of thousands of homes.
Hobbs’s administration has since moved to loosen the moratorium in response to protest from the real estate industry, and regulators may soon allow builders in fast-growing suburbs like Buckeye to resume construction on stalled projects. But the state’s builders are seeking more comprehensive changes to the 100-year water supply standard: They argue that lawmakers should create an incentive for replacing water-intensive crop fields with residential neighborhoods, which require far less water than large-scale agriculture. The builders also argue that lawmakers should tweak the state’s model for calculating groundwater shortages, which they say is too pessimistic.
“If the legislature and the governor’s office don’t agree to the necessary changes to resolve this issue this year, that would be very devastating to our housing affordability, our housing supply, and our economy,” said Spencer Kamps, the vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona.
The future of the 100-year requirement is likely to take center stage this year, along with a parallel debate over how to regulate the kind of intensive groundwater pumping that has dried up wells and caused land to sink in rural areas such as Cochise County. That issue became so contentious last year that two members of Hobbs’s water policy council with ties to the agriculture industry, which is responsible for some of the most aggressive pumping, resigned before the council even finished its recommendation.
Until the legislature reforms the wildcat subdivision statute, though, there’s nothing to stop developers from creating more vulnerable neighborhoods in the middle of the desert. Hornewer, the Rio Verde Foothills water hauler, said he’s sure his neighborhood’s crisis will play out again somewhere else.
Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The U.S. alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023 — more than any other year.
Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies.
As we enter a new year, we asked Grist reporters what big stories they’re watching on their beats, 24 predictions for 2024. Their forecasts depict a world on the cusp of change in regard to climate — both good and bad, and often in tandem. Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on, from hard-won international financial commitments, to battles over mining in-demand minerals like lithium, to the expansion of renewable energy.
Protesters hold placards during a climate march in New York City last September.
Photo by Ryan Rahman/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Politics & Policy
A new climate corps will turn young people’s anxiety into action
The American Climate Corps will officially kick off in the summer of 2024, sending 20,000 18- to 26-year-olds across the country to install solar projects, mitigate wildfire risk, and make homes more energy-efficient. President Biden’s New Deal-inspired program is modeled after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Climate Conservation Corps and attracted 100,000 applicants. As it rolls out, the climate corps will continue to draw criticism from the left for low wages and ageism, and from the right for being a “made-up government work program … for young liberal activists.” Yet the program will remain popular with the public, bolstering towns’ resilience to weather disasters and training thousands of young people to help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers needed for decarbonization.
Kate Yoder
Staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability
Despite rising temperatures, climate change takes a backseat during the 2024 election
Although more than a decade of surveys and polls show that a growing proportion of Americans are concerned about climate change, it has never been a defining issue in a general election — and will likely remain that way in 2024, at least on the main stage. Put simply, there are too many immediate concerns that will dominate the campaign trail as President Joe Biden faces off against the Republican nominee — most likely former President Donald Trump: Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, Israel’s war against Hamas, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fight for abortion rights, new charges against Biden’s son, Hunter, and, of course, the numerous criminal charges against Trump. Biden may herald his signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, in his own messaging, but climate change is unlikely to cross party lines.
Zoya Teirstein
Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
A climate reparations fund gets off the ground
During COP28, the U.N. climate conference that took place in Dubai last year, countries agreed to set up a climate reparations fund on an interim basis at the World Bank. The fund was a longtime priority of developing countries and climate justice advocates who argued that nations that had contributed negligibly to a warming planet were facing the consequences. This year, the World Bank is expected to set up the fund and begin disbursing money to poor nations. Board members will be selected, an executive director will be appointed, decisions about how countries can access the money will be made, and money will begin flowing to those in need. During COP28, wealthy countries chipped in more than $650 million to the fund. More money will also fill the coffers this year.
Naveena Sadasivam
Senior staff writer covering environmental justice and accountability
‘Greenhushing’ spreads as companies seek to dodge lawsuits
Just a few years ago, splashy corporate climate promises were everywhere. Even oil companies promised to cut their emissions. But there won’t be as many misleading advertisements touting companies’ climate progress in 2024. Amid new regulations against false environmental marketing and a pileup of greenwashing lawsuits, more corporations will join in hiding their climate commitments to avoid scrutiny. This trend of “greenhushing” ramped up in 2023, when 1 in 5 companies declined to publicly release their sustainability targets, a threefold increase from the prior year. While this makes it harder to see what companies are doing, California’s new “anti-greenwashing” law, which went into effect on January 1, will tackle the transparency problem by requiring companies to disclose their carbon emissions.
Kate Yoder
Staff writer examining the intersections of climate, language, history, culture, and accountability
A global treaty to end plastic pollution faces delays
Delegates from around the world have been working to finalize a U.N. treaty by the end of 2024 that will “end plastic pollution.” They’ve had three negotiating sessions so far, and two more are scheduled for later this year. Despite signs of progress, petrochemical industry interests have resisted the most ambitious proposals to limit plastic production — they’d prefer a treaty focused on cleaning up plastic litter and improving plastic recycling rates. After countries failed to make significant headway at the most recent round of talks, it’s now possible that an extended deadline will be needed to deliver the final treaty. To some involved in the talks, that’s OK if it’ll mean a stronger agreement. But the pressure is still on, as every year without a treaty means more unchecked plastic pollution.
Joseph Winters
Staff writer covering plastics, pollution, and the circular economy
Employees of NY State Solar, a residential and commercial photovoltaic-systems company, install solar panels on a roof in Massapequa, New York, in 2022. AP Photo/John Minchillo
Energy
Expect a deluge of new household electrification and efficiency rebates
When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, some decarbonization incentives were quickly accessible — such as tax credits for solar and heat pump installation — but others have taken longer to kick in. The wait, however, is almost over, and 2024 is set to see a slew of new, or expanded, opportunities come online. The Inflation Reduction Act earmarked $8.8 billion for residential electrification and energy-use reduction, especially in low-income households.Think things like induction cooktops and energy-efficient clothes dryers, which don’t currently have federally funded rebates. The Department of Energy is in the process of allocating funding to participating states, which will be in charge of getting the money into Americans’ pockets.
Tik Root
Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
A push for public power takes root in communities nationwide
Across the country, close to a dozen communities are exploring ways to replace their investor-owned electric utilities with publicly owned ones. Advocates say they want to lower electricity costs, improve reliability, and speed up a clean energy transition. While a referendum in Maine to create a statewide publicly owned utility failed this past November, supporters elsewhere are just getting started. Next year, a group in San Diego could succeed in getting a vote for a municipal utility on the ballot. Decorah, Iowa, is contemplating a similar vote, and ongoing efforts could gain traction in San Francisco, the South San Joaquin Irrigation District in California, New Mexico, and Rochester, New York.
Akielly Hu
News and politics reporting fellow
Puerto Rico becomes be a U.S. leader in residential-solar energy adoption
While the nationwide rate of residential-solar installations is expected to shrink by more than 10 percent next year, due to interest rates and changes in California’s net-metering rules, installations show no sign of slowing down in Puerto Rico. The archipelago of 1.2 million households already installs 3,400 residential rooftop solar and battery-storage systems per month. In spring 2024, the Energy Department will begin deploying $440 million in residential-solar funding, which they say will be enough for about 30,000 homes. Analysts predict that by 2030, one-quarter of Puerto Rico households will have photovoltaic systems, though that depends in part on whether Puerto Rico passes a pending bill that would protect net metering until then.
Gabriela Aoun Angueira
Climate solutions reporter who helms The Beacon, Grist’s solutions-oriented newsletter
Workers walk the assembly line of Model Y electric vehicles at Tesla’s factory in Berlin in 2022. Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images
Business & Technology
Changes to the federal tax credit will improve EV access for lower-income drivers
As of January 1, consumers can redeem the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-vehicle tax credit directly at car dealerships. Last year, the $7,500 incentive for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for previously owned ones were only available as a credit, meaning that car buyers had to wait until they filed their taxes to get any benefit. The point-of-sale rebate will make getting a clean vehicle more accessible to buyers who can’t afford a hefty down payment, or whose income is too low to owe taxes. But their model options will also shrink — the Treasury Department just proposed rules disqualifying cars with battery components or minerals that come from countries deemed hostile to the U.S.
Gabriela Aoun Angueira
Climate solutions reporter who helms The Beacon, Grist’s solutions-oriented newsletter
Carbon-capture tech will continue to boom (and be controversial)
In some ways, it was a mixed year for carbon capture. While the world’s largest carbon-capture plant broke ground in Texas, the builders of a major carbon dioxide pipeline — which would be used to transport captive emissions to their final destination underground — canceled the project in the face of regulatory pushback. Climate activists have also long been skeptical of carbon capture as an industry ruse to keep burning fossil fuels. Overall, though, the carbon-capture market is surging on the tailwinds of largely favorable government policies in recent years. The use of the technology is also spreading beyond traditional sectors, such as natural gas facilities, into other industrial arenas, including cement, steel, and iron manufacturing. Next year will bring some continued hiccups but, overwhelmingly, continued growth.
Tik Root
Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
Republicans ramp up their war on “woke” ESG investing
An ongoing Republican crusade against ESG investing — shorthand for the environmental, social, and governance criteria investors use to evaluate companies — could end up costing retirees and insurers millions in lost returns next year. GOP lawmakers claim that considering climate risks while making investments imposes “woke” values and limits investment returns. Yet anti-ESG laws passed in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas last year were estimated to have cost taxpayers up to hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s partly because most Wall Street banks and businesses still employ ESG strategies. The backlash could continue through next year’s election — presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have both taken strong anti-ESG positions.
Akielly Hu
News and politics reporting fellow
Unions expand their fight for electric vehicle worker protections
United Auto Workers recently won provisions for electric vehicle employees after a sweeping strike at Detroit’s Big Three carmakers — Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors. Now, the union has launched organizing campaigns at 13 non-union shops, including at EV leaders like Tesla and at other companies just getting into the EV space, such as Volkswagen and Hyundai. Next year, these campaigns will begin to go public, with resulting walkouts, negotiations, and expected union-busting tactics. Such efforts have failed in the past, and some companies have announced wage increases to entice workers away from a potential union drive, but UAW has already announced thousands of new member sign-ups and filed labor grievances against several companies, signaling a hard-headed approach that may win new contracts to protect workers as the auto industry increasingly shifts toward EVs.
Katie Myers
Climate solutions reporting fellow
A ConocoPhillips refinery abuts a residential area in the Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2022. Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Environmental Justice
The EPA will back away from using civil rights law to protect residents
In 2020, a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to start investigating the complaints it receives under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin in any program that gets funding from the federal government. Since then, communities around the country have attempted to use the law to achieve environmental justice in their backyards. But after the agency dropped its highest profile civil rights case in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” following a lawsuit from the state attorney general, advocates worry that the legal avenue won’t fulfill its promise. In 2024, it’s likely that the EPA will pursue Title VI complaints in states with cooperative environment agencies, but shy away from pressuring industry-friendly states like Louisiana and Texas to make big changes based on the law.
Lylla Younes
Senior staff writer covering chemical pollution, regulation, and frontline communities
Additional testing will reveal the true scope of “forever chemical” pollution
Major chemical manufacturers like 3M, DuPont, and Chemours were forced to strike multibillion-dollar settlements last year with coalitions of states, cities, and townships over PFAS — the deadly “forever chemicals” these companies knowingly spewed into the environment for decades. 2024 will be a big year for determining just how pervasive this problem is in U.S. water supplies. New hotspots are likely to emerge as the EPA conducts additional testing across the country, particularly in areas where little data on the chemicals currently exists. New fights over forever chemicals will also unfold in places like Minnesota, where lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require 3M and other large chemical corporations to pay for medical testing for PFAS-exposed communities, and in North Carolina, where the United Nations just declared PFAS pollution a human rights violation.
Zoya Teirstein
Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
A booming liquefied natural gas industry goes bust … maybe
The liquefied natural gas industry is booming on the U.S. Gulf Coast as companies export huge amounts of fracked gas to Europe and Asia, but the buildout of liquefaction facilities in the South has stumbled in recent months. A federal court revoked one facility’s permit in Texas, and the federal Department of Energy denied another company seeking an extension to build a facility in Louisiana. The coming year will be a big test for the nascent business: If courts and regulators delay more of these expensive projects, the companies behind them may abandon them and instead try building smaller, cheaper terminals elsewhere in the United States or even offshore.
Jake Bittle
Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation
Polluting countries could be legally liable to vulnerable ones
At COP28, negotiators from small island states sought to hold larger countries financially accountable for their outsize role in fueling carbon emissions. In 2024, that issue could be decided in international courts: As soon as March, the International Court of Justice will weigh arguments regarding countries’ obligations under international law to protect current and future generations from the harmful effects of climate change. The case brought by Vanuatu raises the question of how much big polluters owe island nations, with Vanuatu and other Pacific island communities particularly affected by rising sea levels and worsening storms.
Anita Hofschneider
Senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs
An aerial view of Thacker Pass in northern Nevada. A proposed lithium mine on the site has drawn impassioned protest from the local Indigenous population, ranchers, and environmentalists. Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Land Use
Mining for rare earths takes off, as new discoveries and investments are made
Discoveries of major new deposits of rare earth minerals will continue to explode in the western and southeastern U.S. — places like the Salton Sea in California and a lithium belt in North Carolina — as well as in Alaska. These developments, alongside incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, will bolster domestic mining and renewable energy industries in 2024. Many of these discoveries are being made in coalfields and oil fields by fossil fuel companies looking to diversify their portfolios. In response, expect a boom in the efforts to reform laws around the poorly regulated mining industry as well as community-driven activism against places like the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada.
Katie Myers
Climate solutions reporting fellow
Congress doles out funds for unproven “climate-smart” agriculture
2024 could be the biggest year yet for “climate-smart” agriculture. Billions of dollars that Congress earmarked a year and a half ago in the Inflation Reduction Act are starting to flow to farmers planting trees and cover crops that sequester carbon. Lawmakers will have the chance to carve out even more funds in the farm bill, the sprawling legislative package that will be up for renewal next year. But climate advocates won’t be satisfied with all of the results: The fight over what counts as “climate smart” will heat up as subsidies go to tools like methane digesters, which some advocates blame for propping up big polluters.
Max Graham
Food and agriculture reporting fellow
More renewable energy comes to public lands
The Bureau of Land Management controls a tenth of the land base in the U.S. — some 245 millions acres. The Biden administration has been trying to utilize that public land for renewable energy projects and infrastructure, with the Department of Interior recently announcing 15 such initiatives. The department is also aiming to reduce fees to promote solar and wind development. These efforts have run into roadblocks in the past, including from Indigenous nations. For example, the Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe challenged a transmission line in southern Arizona because of its potential to harm cultural sites. But with the goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on BLM land by 2025, expect the federal government to continue pushing its buildout next year.
Tik Root
Senior staff writer focusing on the clean energy transition
Residents in Houston look out at flooding from Hurricane Harvey in August 2017. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Climate Impacts
El Niño peaks, bringing a preview of life in the 2030s
Last year brought the onset of the latest cycle of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that spurs the formation of a band of warm water in the Pacific Ocean and fuels above-average temperatures globally. In fact, the cycle has already nudged the world over 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming for the first time.
Because these systems tend to peak from December to April, the worst impacts will likely hit in the first half of 2024. Scientists predict the world will experience its hottest summer on record, giving us a preview of what life will look like in the 2030s. El Niño has already spurred an onslaught of knock-on effects, including heat waves in South America, flooding in East Africa, and infectious disease outbreaks in the Americas and the Caribbean. This year, researchers expect El Niño will lead to an unusually strong hurricane season in the Pacific, impact agricultural production and food security, lead to more explosions of vector-borne diseases, and depress the global economy. In some places, this is already happening.
Zoya Teirstein
Staff writer covering politics and the intersection between climate change and health
To migrate or not: Pacific islanders weigh their options
Last year, a proposed treaty between Australia and Tuvalu made international headlines for a unique provision: migration rights for climate refugees from the Pacific island country, which is at particular risk of rising seas. Now, Tuvalu’s general election, set for later this month, may serve as a de facto referendum on the agreement. But the country’s voters aren’t the only ones weighing their options as their islands slowly sink. The coming year will bring more attention to the plight of Pacific Islanders who are confronting a future of forced migration and grappling with the question of where their communities will go, what rights they’ll have, and how their sovereignty will persist.
Anita Hofschneider
Senior staff writer focusing on Indigenous affairs
Insurers flee more disaster-prone states
California. Louisiana. Florida. Who’s next? The insurance markets in these hurricane- and fire-prone states have descended into turmoil over the past few years as private companies drop policyholders and flee local markets after expensive disasters. State regulators are stepping in to stop this downward spiral, but stable insurance markets will mean higher prices for homeowners, especially in places like low-lying Miami, where the average insurance premium is already around $300 a month. The next year will see the same kind of insurance crisis pop up in other states such as Hawaiʻi, Oregon, and South Carolina, as private carriers try to stem their climate-induced losses.
Jake Bittle
Staff writer focusing on climate impacts and adaptation
Despite barriers, workplace heat standards make slow progress
Earlier this year, Miami-Dade County in Florida — where the region’s humidity makes outdoor workers especially vulnerable to extreme heat — was poised to pass one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful workplace heat standards in the country. Instead, county commissioners bowed to pressure from industry groups, and the vote was deferred. On the national level, OSHA, the agency responsible for workplace safety, has been in the process of creating a federal heat standard for over two years. That work is far from over, and it seems unlikely that the agency will announce a finalized rule next year, despite record-breaking heat. That leaves states and municipalities to lead the way in 2024 for worker-heat protections, but as was the case in Miami-Dade, local officials will likely face obstacles from powerful industry groups as they do so.
Siri Chilukuri
Environmental justice reporting fellow
“Heatflation” comes for desserts
Heatflation came for condiments like olive oil and sriracha in 2023. This year, it’ll strike desserts. Unusually dry weather and a poor sugar cane harvest in India and Thailand — two of the world’s biggest producers — have driven global sugar prices to their highest level in more than a decade. Heavy rainfall in West Africa has led to widespread rot on the region’s prolific cocoa farms, causing chocolate prices to soar and snack companies like Mondelēz, which makes Oreos, to warn of more expensive products in 2024. And an extra-hot year fueled by a strong El Niño could be a rough one for wheat growers and flour prices. So now’s the time to indulge in chocolate cake — before it’s too late.
You may not remember the tornado that swept through western Mississippi on the night of Friday, March 24, but Eldridge Walker does.
Walker, who is both the mayor and the funeral director of the town of Rolling Fork, said it’s still hard to fathom the destruction it caused in his town. The twister killed 17 people and injured another 165. It destroyed dozens of houses as well as City Hall, the fire and police stations, post office, elementary school, high school, and hospital — not to mention Walker’s home and business. The damages exceeded $100 million, and the cost of the storm that spun off the cyclone approached $2 billion.
Nine months later, the recovery remains a work in progress.
“It’s still going on, and it’s going to be going on as long as I’m mayor,” he told Grist this week. The tornado drew a flurry of national attention and a spot on Good Morning America, but aid was slower to arrive. Just a handful of the more than 700 people who lost their homes have managed to rebuild, and dozens still live in hotels, waiting on the federal government to find them temporary housing.
“They’ve got a lot going on to facilitate what they do for cities and municipalities after storms,” Walker said of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which had to respond to a string of disasters in the months after Rolling Fork’s devastation. “I’m just pleased with the fact that I’ve had communication with them.”
While Walker waits, the destruction of Rolling Fork has vanished beneath headlines about wildfires, floods, and heat waves elsewhere. Millions of people have come to feel his pain: A November poll found that three-quarters of Americans experienced some kind of extreme weather in 2023.
By some metrics, this year was among the worst for climate disasters. The U.S. saw more weather events that caused at least a billion dollars in damage than at any other time on record. The emergence of an El Niño weather pattern pushed global temperatures higher than ever before in recorded history and caused a spate of deadly heat waves as well as catastrophic floods.
By other metrics, it was no more than an average year for a world that has warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius. No large hurricanes made landfall in big cities, and the western continental United States stayed free of megafires thanks to a wet winter. The year’s extreme weather has so far caused a cumulative death toll of around 373 people, much lower than last year’s tally of 474. Recent years, such as 2017, which saw multiple major hurricanes including Harvey and Maria, were many times deadlier and more expensive.
Even though media coverage of disasters tends to focus on superlatives such as “largest,” “deadliest,” and “most,” it’s not always helpful to compare one year to another, said Samantha Montano, a professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and an expert on disaster response policy.
“I don’t know that there’s a ton of value in comparing one year to the next,” she said. “The way that disasters unfold, and the way that climate change unfolds, is in averages — we’re looking at how things evolve over time. When you start taking snapshots year to year, you know, that’s less useful.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has maintained a tally of billion-dollar disasters since 1980, providing some of the most comprehensive data about the economic impact of extreme weather. This year saw 25 such disasters, the most on record, and NOAA’s map shows they left almost no corner of the country untouched. Maui saw the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history in August, the South baked beneath a monthslong drought, and Vermont experienced weeks of summer flooding. These catastrophes caused more than $80 billion in damages combined.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks as he visits an area devastated by the West Maui wildfires — the deadliest in modern U.S. history — in August. Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images
The number of billion-dollar disasters is increasing even when NOAA adjusts for inflation: There have been an average of eight-and-a-half such events annually since the agency started maintaining records in 1980, but the last three years have seen an average of 18 cross the billion-dollar threshold each year.
There are a few key reasons for this, says Adam Smith, the researcher at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information who leads the agency’s work on such disasters. The first and most obvious is that climate change is making such catastrophes more severe.
“A large majority of our country was built and designed during the 20th century, but now exists in a 21st-century climate,” he said.
At the same time, said Smith, more people have moved into areas that are vulnerable to fires and flooding, raising the overall risk profile of the country and ensuring higher damages.
“You also have increasing vulnerability,” he said. “Where we build, how we build, and even more importantly, how we rebuild is increasingly important.”
Perhaps the most notable development from this year is the rising number of “severe convective storm” events in the South and the Midwest. These thunderstorms often spew hail and spin off tornadoes as they rip across open land. There were at least a dozen such storms that caused a billion dollars or more in damages this year, many of them in the spring and early summer, accounting for around half of the 10-figure disasters recorded in the last 12 months.
In a report that surveyed disasters in the first half of 2023, the insurance group Aon listed the emergence of these storms as one of the most surprising developments.
“As opposed to large, catastrophic events, which occasionally drive extreme losses from primary perils,” these storms are “characterized by higher (and increasing) frequency of smaller and medium-sized events.” Research suggests that convective storms tend to form more often and do more damage as the climate warms, since hotter air can hold more moisture.
In most years, the costliest disaster is a hurricane or a wildfire, but this year it was a drought in the central and southern United States: The dry spell stretched from Illinois to Louisiana, causing more than $10 billion in damages as it killed staple crops and forced farmers to sell livestock that had become too expensive to feed. It also lowered water levels on the Mississippi River, making river freight costlier. The fact that a drought claimed the top spot highlighted how much worse the year could have been, said Smith.
Even so, numbers don’t tell the whole story. Many of the most dramatic and harmful disasters of the year aren’t on NOAA’s roster at all, because the damage they caused is difficult to quantify. The most obvious example is the string of heat waves that baked cities from Chicago to Phoenix, which endured a month of consecutive 110-degree days. Searing temperatures sent hundreds of people to the hospital and killed dozens, but didn’t do as much damage to property and crops as a storm.
The wildfire smoke that blanketed eastern cities as it drifted in from Canada is another example. Even brief exposure to all those particulates can cause serious health effects for the elderly and people with lung disease, but such impacts are almost impossible to quantify.
Beyond the immediate financial impact for people who lose their homes, the knock-on effects can be harder to see. A big wildfire or storm can cause financial turmoil for insurance companies, which may raise prices or flee dangerous markets, as has happened in Florida and California. A widespread crop failure can raise domestic and international food prices. And the destruction of school buildings can cause learning loss for students, as happened in the rural communities outside Oklahoma City after a tornado outbreak in April.
“This is a solid, conservative estimate, using the best public- and private-sector data, but we’re not able to measure everything,” said Smith. “So the losses are actually higher than what we’re able to quantify.”
Even so, the news from 2023 isn’t all bad. The annual toll of climate disasters continues to rise, but the U.S. is spending more money than ever on climate adaptation. FEMA handed out more than $2 billion this year to help communities protect against coastal flooding and armor homes against wildfires, and these payments will continue in coming years under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill. FEMA had to pause these projects over the summer as its all-important disaster fund ran low due to congressional inaction, but they’ve resumed.
A person sits in a stalled truck along a flooded street in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in April. Nearly 26 inches of rain fell on the city over a single day.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
An unexpected disaster can often come with a kind of silver lining, since it encourages local officials to rethink how they build and prepare for future losses. A big flood can expose hidden risk in a neighborhood or a certain kind of infrastructure. New York state invested in larger sea walls after 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, for instance, and Colorado’s legislature has recently tried to curb sprawl development after the 2021 Marshall Fire.
This was the case in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which saw historic flooding in April when a sudden storm dropped more than 25 inches of rain on the city in a single day, submerging the airport and inundating several neighborhoods.
“I think everybody was taken off guard,” said Jennifer Jurado, the chief resilience officer for Broward County, which encompasses Fort Lauderdale. “Whether it was the county or the city, I don’t think that anyone could have fathomed what was about to take place.”
The city’s main thoroughfare went underwater, as did many commercial boulevards, and the on-ramps leading to the main interstate highway flooded too, which meant no one could move. The county had already been trying to raise money to upgrade its stormwater system in residential communities, but now officials knew they also had to invest in more pumps and drains for key highway entrances and commercial districts.
“Had we had an evacuation order, nobody could have left,” said Jurado. “That’s a startling circumstance to think that under the right conditions, you can’t evacuate.”
The April storm offered Fort Lauderdale a glimpse of what’s to come. In an eerie coincidence, the county’s resilience committee held a previously scheduled meeting hours before the flood. Jurado happened to unveil new computer models that showed what municipal flooding could look like in a world with three feet of sea-level rise, a large hurricane storm surge, and a big high tide. They predicted a flood that largely resembled the one that was about to happen right outside the county offices. Later, when Jurado tried to drive to the airport, she almost lost her car in the water.
Montano says the federal government needs a similar wake-up call. Congress has long punted on reforming FEMA and the nation’s disaster relief policy, but it’s only a matter of time before there’s a disaster bad enough that legislators feel pressure to act. That catastrophe didn’t arrive this year, but it is surely coming.
The Marshall Islands extend across a wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean, with dozens of coral atolls sitting just a few feet above sea level. The smallest of the islands are just a few hundred feet wide, barely large enough for a road or a row of houses. The country’s total landmass makes up an area smaller than the city of Baltimore, but it occupies an ocean territory almost the size of Mexico.
Over the past two years, government officials have fanned out across the country, visiting remote towns and villages as well as urban centers like its capital of Majuro to examine how Marshallese communities are experiencing and coping with climate change. They found that a combination of rapid sea-level rise and drought has already made life untenable for many of the country’s 42,000 residents, especially on outlying atolls where communities rely on rainwater and vanishing land for subsistence.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
The survey was part of a groundbreaking, five-year effort by the Marshall Islands to craft a sweeping adaptation strategy that charts the country’s response to the threat of climate change. The plan, shared with Grist ahead of its release at COP28 in Dubai, calls for tens of billions of dollars of new spending to fortify low-lying islands and secure water supplies. Representatives from the Marshall Islands say the plan shows that their country can remain livable well into the next century — but only if developed countries are willing to help. Even with aid, the plan concedes many Marshallese will likely need to migrate away from their home islands, or even leave the country altogether for the United States, as climate impacts worsen.
“We call it our national adaptation plan, but it is really our survival plan,” said John Silk, the foreign minister of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, during a closed-doors panel conversation at the Clinton Global Initiative summit in New York in September.
An aerial photo of Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands, showing land that has slipped below the water line. The country faces almost two feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century. Rob Griffith / AP Photo
Other vulnerable countries have submitted adaptation plans to the United Nations before, and some have even planned large-scale relocations to escape sea-level rise, but the Marshall Islands plan is different, and not only because of the existential nature of climate risk in the country. As they developed the plan, government officials interviewed more than 3 percent of the country’s population — some 1,362 people — during 123 days of site visits on two dozen islands and atolls. The only other national adaptation plan that has involved any community participation was that of the island nation of St. Lucia, in the Caribbean. In that case, officials interviewed only 100 people.
“We’re about to make a huge change to our islands, and we can’t do that if we just make that decision unilaterally as government representatives,” said Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, a poet and activist who serves as the Marshall Islands’ climate envoy, in an exclusive interview with Grist ahead of the plan’s release. “It has to come from the community themselves too, because they’re the ones getting impacted.”
Experts who reviewed the plan described it as among the most comprehensive attempts by any country to plan for long-term climate impacts.
“This is one of the most thoughtful and meticulous long-term adaptation plans I’ve seen,” said Michael Gerrard, a law professor at Columbia University who has studied climate adaptation policy, including the Marshall Islands. “The plan doesn’t just wring hands; it sets forth a systematic decision-making process.”
Climate change activist Milan Loeak, left, walks along the shore of Majuro Atoll with poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, who serves as the Marshall Islands’ climate envoy. Rob Griffith / AP Photo
Almost half of the Marshall Island residents interviewed for the plan said they’d witnessed sea-level rise in their communities, and nearly a quarter said they’d experienced a water shortage. More than 1 in 5 said climate change had threatened food security for their households.
The rural, northern island of Wotho, for example, has long served as a “food basket” for the rest of the Marshall Islands. But officials found that a slew of disasters has jeopardized life there. Houses flood with every high tide, the airstrip goes underwater during big storms, household wells pull up salty water, salt-scourged breadfruit trees produce rotten fruit, and fish have abandoned bleached coral reefs.
Science predicts it will only get worse. Even under the most optimistic projections, which assume immediate action to limit global warming, the Marshall Islands will experience almost two feet of sea-level rise before the end of the century. That’s enough to expose thousands more Marshallese citizens to constant flooding and extreme food and water insecurity, rendering some of the country’s islands all but unlivable. Under the worst projections, which predict more than six feet of sea-level rise by 2150, many islands and atolls would disappear underwater entirely.
Even so, the community engagement process revealed that migrating away from their home islands is anathema to almost all Marshallese. More than 99 percent of interviewed residents rejected the idea of migration — as one respondent put it to an interviewer, “We will die here.”
Grist / Clayton Aldern
The plan arrives as climate negotiators at COP28 debate major new funding commitments to help developing countries adapt to climate change and deal with climate losses. Leaders from the Marshall Islands say their plan highlights the urgent need for billions of dollars of new adaptation funding from developed nations. In other parts of the world, adaptation means the difference between bad impacts and worse impacts. In the Marshall Islands, successful adaptation means the difference between survival and extinction.
“My hope for my own home is that it remains here long enough for me to give back to the land,” said Jobod Silk, a youth climate representative from the Marshall Islands who conducted community interviews for the plan. “I hope that we remain on our land, that we remain sovereign, and that we’re never labeled as climate change refugees.”
Climate change is not the first time residents of the Marshall Islands have dealt with environmental devastation. After the United States defeated Japan in World War II, it took control of the country through a trust backed by the United Nations. Over the course of a decade, the U.S. dropped more than 60 nuclear bombs on Bikini Atoll and other islands as part of a secretive weapons testing program. The fallout from these tests poisoned the water on nearby islands and caused higher rates of cancer and birth defects for many Marshallese. Fish near the U.S. military base on Kwajalein Island have been found to contain dangerous levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
A mushroom cloud rises over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands as part of a nuclear weapons test conducted by the United States in 1946. The U.S. dropped dozens of nuclear bombs on the Marshall Islands over the span of a decade. Pictures from History / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Now, a generation later, sea-level rise and drought are again disrupting life for many Marshallese, threatening the homes and health of families that fled nuclear fallout just a few decades ago. Even before the development of the new adaptation plan, many residents of vulnerable villages had already started to alter their behaviors to cope with the new reality of climate change. During site visits to outlying atolls, Marshallese officials witnessed residents of one island constructing makeshift seawalls out of trash. They found that fishermen on another island had started to fish as a collective in waters where reefs have degraded and fish stocks have plummeted, combining their efforts so that they catch enough food for their entire community.
In the short term, the new plan proposes to support these community-led adaptation efforts with billions of dollars of new money from other countries. U.N.-backed programs have already helped deliver rainwater-harvesting devices to outlying islands and build vertical vegetable gardens on others. With more money, the Marshallese government says it could expand air and sea shipments to these small islands to ensure a supply of substitute food, or provide canoes to every household as alternate transportation when roads are flooded. The plan defers to residents of outlying atolls by emphasizing what it calls “low-technology community initiatives and nature-based solutions” over engineered interventions like seawalls and dikes.
An excavator moves rocks and sand to aid in the construction of seawalls around the airport on Majuro Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Rob Griffith / AP Photo
“This document is a self-determined document,” said Broderick Menke, an official at the Marshall Islands climate change directorate who served as the technical expert on the plan. “It’s not just the government making points, and it’s not just a consultant making decisions and providing answers. The roots of all of this is us coming together as the community and talking.”
In order to pursue these adaptation measures, the government will need to contemplate changes to the system of land ownership in the Marshall Islands. The country has almost no public land, and families pass down their properties along matrilineal lines, so the government can’t unilaterally build seawalls or set aside coastal areas for conservation, and disrupting this land tenure system would involve difficult conversations with traditional island leaders. The country also needs to update its environmental regulations and building codes in order to implement its short-term adaptation push.
A man sits on the window sill of his flooded house during a king tide event on Kili Atoll. Towns and cities in the Marshall Islands now experience routine flooding during high tide. Jack Niedenthal / AP Photo
Marshallese leaders say they can overcome these obstacles, and they stress that a fully funded portfolio of solutions would protect even the country’s most vulnerable islands for decades to come. But the plan also contains a grim warning that these adaptation efforts will not be able to protect the entire country indefinitely against future sea-level rise.
“The adaptation pathway for sparsely populated neighboring atolls and other islands comes down to buying time until sea level rise and other climate change impacts render the islands uninhabitable,” the plan says.
In addition to identifying adaptation strategies for droughts and flooding, the authors of the plan also had to create a procedure for deciding when and how to give up on protecting vulnerable areas. To that end, the plan lays out a phased “pathway” for adaptation, with “decision points” arriving over the next century as climate impacts worsen. This framework focuses attention and funding on short-term triage for vulnerable outlying islands like Wotho, and defers big decisions about the country’s future until later decades.
The first phase of the plan calls for the government to do everything possible over the next 20 years to protect vulnerable islands, leading up to a “decision point” some time between 2040 and 2050. When that point arrives, if it seems like climate change is going to overwhelm these islands despite adaptation efforts, officials must make a “decision regarding which atolls to protect and consolidate social services.” This wouldn’t involve moving any people or even buildings, but it might mean reducing government investment in education and health services.
A few decades later, in 2070, the plan calls for an even more difficult decision — officials must “decide which pieces of land are to be protected for the long term” and “build the protection infrastructure … to accommodate relocated populations.” In a sign of the dire outlook for future sea-level rise, the plan suggests choosing as few as four pieces of land for future investment, out of the 24 inhabited islands and atolls in the country right now.
Ebeye in Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, is one of the most densely populated islands in the Pacific. Brandi Mueller / Getty Images
Adaptation experts said the Marshall Islands is one of the first countries to develop a long-term plan for relocating whole segments of its population.
“This is a noteworthy step in adaptation planning,” said Rachel Harrington-Abrams, a researcher at King’s College of London who studies relocation in vulnerable island states. She said the plan is the first from an atoll country like the Marshall Islands that “support[s] in situ adaptation while also enabling long-term planned relocation.” Harrington-Abrams added that island states such as Fiji and Vanuatu have planned to move vulnerable populations to higher ground, but these states have far more solid land than the Marshall Islands does.
The most likely candidates for long-term protection are Majuro and Ebeye, the country’s two main urban hubs. Together, these cities are already home to more than 70 percent of the Marshall Islands’ population, making them some of the most densely populated places in the Pacific. The plan predicts that further migration from rural islands to these cities is “very likely.”
But these urban hubs, too, are extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise: Even two feet would flood around one-third of Ebeye’s atoll and almost half of Majuro’s. If the government decides to stop protecting rural islands and retrench on the urban ones, it must also fortify these cities so that they can withstand future flooding. The country would begin by investing billions of dollars into new seawalls, dikes, drainage systems, and home elevations, as well as desalination machines and water treatment facilities to cope with saltwater intrusion. A new water treatment plant was installed on Ebeye in 2020 with support from the Australian government and the Asian Development Bank, giving residents of the city reliable access to clean running water for the first time.
People help clean up debris after a 2021 high-tide flood event in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. The flood event pushed sand and debris over the only road that leads to the Majuro airport. Chewy Lin / AFP via Getty Images
Full protection against six feet of sea-level rise would require a much more radical adaptation strategy. The plan calls for the government to raise entire segments of land on Majuro and Ebeye by as much as 12½ feet, high enough to escape not only rising tides but also groundwater penetration. In addition to raising the existing cities, the country would also need to construct new reclaimed land by dredging the ocean floor. The plan projects that a new landmass to accommodate 10,000 people would need to be about 1.4 square miles, or a little larger than New York’s Central Park.
This type of land construction project has already been undertaken in the Maldives, which built an artificial island called Hulhumalé in the early 2000s to prepare for sea-level rise. That island is now home to more than 50,000 people. But the remoteness of the Marshall Islands, and the “technical feasibility” of land construction there, would likely drive the cost of such a construction project into the billions.
The last and most painful decision point, Marshallese officials found, will arrive at the year 2100. By that point, without massive investment in adaptation, many parts of the country will likely have become uninhabitable. The plan calls for leaders to make a profound choice about the future existence of the Marshall Islands itself.
“If by 2100, no decision can be made to protect areas of atolls to the [six-foot] sea level rise level, or if there is no funding for it, then the decision must be to help all population to migrate away from RMI,” or the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the plan says.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
The most likely destination for these departing residents would be the United States: The Marshall Islands declared independence from the U.S. in 1979 but later signed a “compact of free association” with the country, allowing Marshallese residents unrestricted migration to the United States. In exchange, the U.S. exerts significant control over Marshallese waters and airspace, giving it a strategic military foothold in the Pacific.
The country’s population has already fallen by around 20 percent over the past decade as many citizens leave seeking jobs and education in the U.S. The majority of these migrants have settled in Oregon, Washington, and Arkansas. More than 12,000 have settled in the city of Springdale, Arkansas, alone. The city now holds annual Marshallese festivals and cultural events.
The creators of the plan emphasize that international migration is an absolute last resort, and one that the overwhelming majority of Marshallese residents oppose. During the government’s hundred-plus community meetings, fewer than 1 percent of interviewed citizens expressed support for migration as a climate adaptation strategy, indicating an almost total rejection of relocation policies. The plan doesn’t go into detail about how to implement such policies, or about how the Marshall Islands’ government could provide support or restitution for residents who have to move.
The losses that will accompany this migration are impossible to quantify, said John Silk, the foreign minister, at the panel in September. A large-scale relocation would make it impossible for many Marshallese to be buried on their home islands, a key part of Marshallese culture, and it would further erase Indigenous navigation methods that Marshallese sailors have used for millennia.
“Loss to us is not just a financial loss or an economic loss; it’s a cultural loss if people have to migrate from their own home island to another place,” Silk said at the panel. “Even if you go to another part of the Marshall Islands, and you build a seawall, and we bring our people there, they will never feel at home, because they’re not.”
Photos of people decorate gravestones at a cemetery in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Despite the pain that would accompany such a large migratory movement, the creators of the adaptation plan view the plan as an optimistic document. If the Marshall Islands’ government can raise the money it needs for adaptation, it could also address some other challenges the country is already facing. It could bolster social services and health outcomes on rural outlying islands, reversing the trend of population loss and the rapid growth of Majuro and Ebeye. Such an investment in infrastructure and social resilience might even help stem the tide of out-migration to the United States.
“I think you can go even a step further, to bringing back the migrants that are going out of the Marshall Islands,” said Menke, the technical expert on the plan. “Marshallese go out there [to the United States] for education and for all these other services, but you know, they just have a … feeling of being away from home.”
The cost of achieving that future could run to an astonishing $35 billion, according to the plan, equivalent to around $800,000 for every current resident of the Marshall Islands. And the country needs to raise that money sooner rather than later, since the cost of adaptation will only increase as time goes on and climate impacts worsen.
Marshall Islands president David Kabua addresses the United Nations General Assembly in September of 2023. The country has become a leading advocate for international climate aid from developed countries. Frank Franklin II / AP Photo
Much of this money would need to come in the form of direct aid from rich countries like the United States, but the Marshall Islands could pull down some of it through international adaptation funds like the Green Climate Fund, or through multilateral development institutions such as the World Bank. If these aren’t enough, leaders may also need to pursue alternative financing mechanisms like an international tax on maritime shipping emissions, which the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands proposed in 2021.
Even so, rich countries aren’t currently providing anywhere near enough adaptation finance to fund the entire plan, said Rebecca Carter, the lead adaptation researcher at the World Resources Institute, an environmental research nonprofit.
“If it was just the Republic of Marshall Islands, maybe there would be enough, but when we start multiplying their numbers by how many other places are facing similar threats, that’s when it becomes really untenable,” she told Grist.
Leaders from the Marshall Islands hope their plan helps sway the international negotiations underway in Dubai. Negotiators are currently debating how much money developed countries should send poorer countries for climate adaptation, as well as how to measure the success of adaptation projects. The Marshall Islands’ in-depth adaptation plan shows both the urgent need for new funding, as well as the need to develop adaptation solutions in concert with affected communities, Jetn̄il-Kijiner says.
“I hope that it sheds light on the importance of adaptation and what communities like ours are being forced to plan for,” she said. “We’re trying to set a standard for how to engage with your own community and how to plan for these types of impacts.”
As the consequences of climate change in the Pacific grow more severe, the Marshall Islands and other small island states have become a leading force in international climate negotiations. The late Tony de Brum, a long-serving minister for the Republic, was a key architect of the Paris Agreement, and subsequent Marshallese leaders have pushed for even more ambitious mitigation targets, as well as big funding commitments for adaptation and climate reparations. (The country accounts for around .00001 percent of historical greenhouse gas emissions.)
Now Jetn̄il-Kijiner says the country’s adaptation plan could provide a blueprint for other countries facing down the threat of climate change. Instead of just assessing future risk or selecting infrastructure projects, leaders in the Marshall Islands used the planning process as an opportunity to deepen the bonds between the government and its citizens. They say the plan shows that it’s possible to pursue adaptation from the bottom up, rather than the top down.
“It’s a lot of responsibility to have to hold the hand of our community and say, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, but this is something that we have to face, but it’s OK, we’re going to face it together,’” Jetn̄il-Kijiner told Grist. “I think that’s something that takes a lot of delicacy.”
