Maire Lenihan coaxes organic Keuka Gold potatoes into a washing machine at Goranson Farm in Dresden on Wednesday, April 20, 2022. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Maine farmer Ryan Guerrette irrigated his 1,200 acres of potatoes in Caribou more often in the past few years, when more severe rain or drought conditions threatened the state’s premier food crop.

Guerrette Farms is in the heart of Aroostook County in the northernmost part of Maine, which has the largest concentration of potato farms in the state. Farmers there produce most of the 56,000 of acres harvested in the state worth a total of $540 million in sales and employing 6,100 people.

Most still dry farm without supplemental irrigation, putting them at risk of a drought such as the one in 2020 that decimated 30 percent of the state’s potato crop. Irrigating is expensive, Guerrette said, costing $5 per gallon for up to 3,000 gallons of fuel per day on his farm on top of the irrigation equipment. But more growers are looking at it as an option, with about 25 percent of the potato acreage being irrigated, according to the Maine Potato Board.

So far, climate change has brought mixed news for farmers like Guerrette. It is linked to warmer temperatures and drought, but also brings more frequent and intense rainfall that can damage crops with rot or soil erosion.

Clockwise from left: Climate change means Rob Johanson’s field is often either too wet or too dry; An old truck door advertises Goranson Farm in Dresden on Wednesday, April, 20, 2022; Organic Adirondak Blue potatoes glisten in a wooden bin after being washed at Goranson Farm; Johanson stands next to an intake hose he uses to pump water from the Eastern River for crop irrigation on his farm. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

As temperatures have risen, the annual number of potato plant growing degree days in Aroostook County has increased by more than 20 percent since 1970, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group. Growing degree days, which estimate the development of plants and insects during the growing season, indicate to farmers how fast heat accumulates and how their crops will grow.

That extra warmth has helped add an extra week to the end of the typically short Maine potato growing season. But it comes with a suite of challenges, including heat stress, unpredictable rainfall, pest pressure and warmer nights that don’t let potato plants cool off.

“There is a decent financial margin if everything works right,” said Guerrette, who is president at the Caribou farm. “Now if the weather starts playing games with us, well, you can only do so much.”

Getting an extra week on a 1,000-acre farm is tremendous, said Daniel Corey of Daniel H. Corey Farms in the Aroostook County town of Monticello. He was able to plant up to 20 percent more potatoes last year during a bountiful Maine season in which growers shipped their products by train to western states experiencing a drought. Maine ranks fifth in its area of potatoes planted and harvested, with Idaho ranking first and Washington state second.

One of Bartlett Farms' potato fields located by Littleton's Foxcroft road. The long drought period in Aroostook County in 2020 made the soil dry and reduced overall potato production. Credit: Alexander MacDougall / Houlton Pioneer Times

Nighttime temperatures have warmed about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in Maine’s potato growing region since 1970, slightly less than in central Washington, which ranks second in U.S. potato production. Across the potato-growing areas of top producer Idaho, nights are warming between 3 and 6 degrees.

Warmer weather also means higher energy costs to store harvested potatoes and keep them cool so they don’t spoil. The longer season puts the crop at risk of an early frost during the harvest in October.

Potatoes are hardy and do well in Maine, where summer days of 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit and cool nights of 50-60 degrees suit them. They grow well with one inch of rain per week, but heavier rains that soak the ground for long periods can cause rot and promote disease.

“There’s not much you can do to pump water out of the field,” said Rob Johanson, co-owner of Goranson Farm, an organic farm in midcoast Dresden that grows a little over five acres of potatoes on its diversified 80-acre farm.

During one heavy rain event eight years ago, Johanson said he lost about 100 feet of the 975-foot-long rows of potatoes he had planted. With climate change, the extremes of extended wet and dry periods happen more often, so he also finds himself irrigating more and sooner than he had in the past.

“How much of the potato production is impacted depends on the magnitude of these changes and on how variable and inconsistent they are,” Gregory Porter, professor of crop ecology and management at the University of Maine in Orono, said.

In this photo provided Jay LaJoie, russet potatoes produced by Maine growers are packaged to be loaded on a rail car headed for Washington State, at a warehouse owned by LaJoie Growers LLC, in Van Buren, Maine, Jan. 17, 2022. Maine is shipping potatoes all the way to the West Coast over the winter of 2021-2022, thanks to a banner harvest in Maine and a drought for growers in the West. Credit: Jay LaJoie via AP

Porter and his colleagues have been developing new varieties of potatoes such as drought-resistant varieties that Corey and other farmers are testing in their fields.

Potatoes are a cool-season crop. When it gets too warm, they breathe more and use more sugar, decreasing their productivity. Under higher nighttime temperatures, they also get more stress-related defects and the soil remains warmer, affecting quality, Porter said.

He said that heat stress can lower the starchiness needed for fries and chips, for which most of Maine’s potatoes are destined. It can cause an uneven sugar distribution, creating unwanted dark spots when the potato is fried.

The potatoes, which give off heat, are also harder to cool down when harvested to avoid rotting. He said growers are adapting with better storage technologies, new potato varieties and longer crop rotations.

Although Maine farmers can have a more productive year when there are more growing degree days, “we must temper that optimism,” Porter said.

“There is still a lot of variability and uncertainty that growers have to be very concerned about,” he said.

Corey said other downsides to the changing climate include northern Maine not experiencing the deep spring freezes anymore. Potatoes left in the field from the fall harvest are not being killed off, more insects are overwintering and he is seeing more soil-borne diseases.

“I haven’t seen this many transient aphids since we’ve had this warm spell,” he said. “We have potatoes coming up into our grain fields and russets coming into my red potatoes, which we can’t have.”

Years with more growing degree days can create an insect boom, said Rachel Schattman, a professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Maine in Orono. Warmer weather can allow insects to live longer and reproduce more often, just in time for crops to become hospitable hosts.

Guerrette Farms has run large industrial plastic tubing under its potato pile at the former Loring Airforce Base to help simulate some of the ventilation and climate control the farmers would have in a normal potato house. Credit: Hannah Catlin / Aroostook Republican

At the end of the season the “increase in growing degree days and wetter conditions is also prime time for plant diseases,” she said, creating a situation where fungal and bacterial diseases can wipe out entire crops.

Erosion control also is a problem, said Bill Sheehan, director of the northern office of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection. The intensity of storms has increased for at least the past 10 years, causing erosion events and small tornadoes. Culverts put in 120 years ago are failing and other erosion-control methods need to be updated.

Unpredictable rainfall will make water management crucial in the coming years, Schattman said. Farmers will need to make important decisions on when to turn the water on and off.

“We’re seeing this need for farmers to be able to be really nimble,” she said.

To survive, farmers need consistent yields from year to year, and that is difficult with the changing climate, Johanson of Goranson Farm said.

“The vagaries of the weather these days makes it very difficult,” he said.

Porter said farmers already are adopting new technologies, including new and hardier potato varieties, supplemental irrigation, longer crop rotations and better storage technology to try to maintain the crop quality through the changing environment.

“We’re likely to remain a very strong and productive potato-producing area into the future even with these climate change scenarios,” Porter said.
 

Read the Climate Central report, Future Flood Risk: Historic Sites in NJ.

The Garden State’s history is starting to wash away.

New Jersey as it exists today was built up over hundreds of years from the arrival of Europeans, and thousands of years of Lenape settlement before that. Reminders of the past are scattered everywhere — the state has more than 100,000 historic properties, one in nearly every city and town.

“This is part of our cultural consciousness,” said Barton Ross, a past president of the advocacy group Preservation New Jersey. “To experience the historic neighborhoods and what they bring.”

But as climate change pushes water up along New Jersey’s coast, the risks of flooding and destruction during storms are rising for the state’s waterfront heritage.

“That’s what we’re trying to save for future generations,” Ross said. “To preserve it so they can understand what their heritage is, and how special a state like New Jersey is.”

Sea levels rise as heat trapped by pollution in the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, causing the water to expand. Warming temperatures also melt glaciers and ice sheets.

An attempt by the state to slow the rapid erosion of East Point Lighthouse's shoreline with a sand-filler “geotube” quickly proved to be inadequate against the rising water. Credit: Andrew S. Lewis

New Jersey’s coastline is experiencing some of the highest rates of rising seas in the nation, in part because the mid-Atlantic region is plagued by land subsidence, or sinking land. Depending on pollution levels, a state climate report this week cautioned that sea levels could rise an additional 4 to 6 feet or more this century. That poses a major threat to the tangible remnants of the state’s past. There are roughly 2,500 historic sites in the state that can flood when nearby waters reach just 2 feet above the average high tide, according to a report from the New Jersey Climate Change Resource Center published in January. Push that surging water to 7 feet above the average high tide, and that number balloons to more than 20,000.

The effects are already apparent. Each year, Ross’s group publishes a list of the 10 most endangered historic sites in New Jersey. Flood risks, both from sea level rise and heavy rainstorms, have steadily become a more important factor in the criteria.

“We really have a couple (of sites) each year that fall under this category of needing some kind of flood mitigation or some other type of preservation,” Ross said.

The change, detailed in this reporting collaboration between NJ Spotlight News and Climate Central, is forcing advocates and authorities that use limited resources to preserve historic and cultural places to grapple with an emerging question: How do you prioritize the parts of history to be saved?

Ellis Island under threat

Ellis Island represented the gateway to America from 1892 to 1954.

“For me, it’s such an important site because it questions our current values,” Wolfram Hoefer said. “What do we think about immigration these days?”

A landscape architect and professor at Rutgers University, Hoefer immigrated to the U.S. from North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany in 2006. “It is so important for America,” he said of Ellis Island.

More than 12 million immigrants, almost all from Europe, were processed by federal customs officials at the small piece of land now split by New Jersey and New York in New York Harbor. Today, families across the U.S. trace their roots back to Ellis Island.

Nowadays, the biggest threat to Ellis Island isn’t a lack of investment or public attention: It’s the water that surrounds it. The island is already plagued with regular floods. By mid-century, floodwaters could reach the site’s structures multiple times per year, and by the end of the century they could cover the entire island multiple times a year, a Climate Central analysis shows.

Climbing temperatures driven by fossil fuel pollution are threatening heritage sites like this across New Jersey, with everything from emblematic landmarks like Ellis Island to century-old lighthouses starting to crumble beneath the impacts of climate change.

‘Everything that keeps the park running and operating safely, and gets visitors here, was underwater or destroyed.’

“Historic sites allow us to relate to our own past and where we come from, but also question our current actions and our current values according to what happened in the past and how we are dealing with the present and the future,” Hoefer said.

The federal government stopped using Ellis Island as an immigration center in 1954, and the facility fell into disrepair until it was added to the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965. It reopened to the public in 1990. The Great Hall was restored as a museum, attracting around 4 million visitors each year before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Critical to our collective history’

“Ellis Island is critical to our collective story,” said Erin Dempsey, who leads the National Park Service’s cultural preservation efforts at the island. “To so many people, Ellis Island lives large in their minds, in their family history and it looms large in our cultural identity as American people. So impacts to Ellis Island, I think, really have wide-ranging effects on so many people.”

Superstorm Sandy revealed the extent of Ellis Island’s exposure when it slammed through the region nearly 10 years ago. Surging water rose out of the harbor and inundated the island. The old ferry building had its doors and windows blown out, and basements around the site filled with water.

Damage on Ellis Island in late 2012, following Superstorm Sandy. It took a year of recovery following Sandy before Ellis Island reopened to visitors. Credit: Courtesy of the National Park Service

“Everything that keeps the park running and operating safely, and gets visitors here, was underwater or destroyed,” Dempsey said.

The Great Hall sits just high enough that it avoided first-floor flooding. Historic artifacts in the building had been stored upstairs, which kept them safe in the short term. But Sandy knocked out Ellis Island’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, leaving those artifacts exposed to uncontrolled temperatures and humidity.

After the storm, a National Park Service team of museum specialists packed up the island’s artifacts and shipped them to a storage facility in Maryland.

It took a year for Ellis Island to reopen to the public after Sandy, and nearly three years for all the artifacts to be returned.

To protect against the next Sandy, the National Park Service has rolled out a $50 million plan to make Ellis Island more resilient. That includes elevating critical infrastructure like HVAC systems and generators, all of which need to be running to protect the artifacts stored at the park.

“The main thing we had to do was make sure that some of those critical systems like electrical, mechanical systems, the HVAC system, [were] raised up out of the flood plain. So that was our biggest response,” Dempsey said. “We needed to get all of that critical infrastructure so that it wouldn’t be affected by storm surge in the future.”

The park service is also tackling the island’s well-worn sea wall — a project that posed a conundrum for  NPS leadership. They had to decide whether to raise the height of the wall, which would better guard against flooding but change the historic nature of the park that the service is tasked with protecting. Dempsey said that visitor experience, especially the evocative feeling that many tourists get as they sail into the island and the views they enjoy once there, were critical considerations.

“What’s difficult here, for us, is that one of our main goals is to protect our historical resources as they are,” Dempsey said. “We need to maintain their integrity.”

Ultimately, the NPS decided to restore the sea wall at its original height — preserving the island’s historic presence but leaving the harbor waters just feet below the edge during regular high tides. “We’re doing this rehabilitation work, making sure the masonry is in good shape, making sure it can stay as it is for another one hundred and fifty years, instead of altering its character, which could lead to a slew of other issues, potentially,” Dempsey said.

Grappling with how far to go to protect a single site is one thing. A pair of lighthouses in South Jersey poses a related question: What makes one site more worthy of money and resources for protection than another?

“That’s why historic preservation is so important,” said Hoefer of Rutgers University. “It asks current questions about decisions we did in the past. And what do we do presently?”

A tale of two lighthouses: Barnegat and East Point

On a recent morning, a pair of bald eagles perched on the upper branches of an Eastern red cedar near the edge of the Delaware Bay shoreline. Behind them was the 163-year-old East Point Lighthouse, its fresh coat of red and white paint gleaming in the sunshine.

“It’s just gorgeous,” said Nancy Patterson, president of the local historical society that manages the wedge of semi-dry land where the lighthouse sits. “This is an important thing for the community; it’s a historic site that deserves to be protected, especially because of where it is.”

Like the bald eagle, the fight to keep East Point Lighthouse in Cumberland County from disappearing has been a long, difficult struggle — and one that is likely to get harder. It joins Barnegat Lighthouse, a popular tourism spot at the northern tip of Long Beach Island, on the Atlantic coast, in being threatened by unrelenting sea level rise. The two historic lighthouses offer a vivid look at the tough choices New Jersey is willing to make when it comes to prioritizing historic structures.

Since the Maurice River Township Historical Society took charge of East Point’s upkeep 50 years ago, volunteers like Patterson have waged a battle for recognition with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which owns the lighthouse and its grounds.

In that time, compared with other historic lighthouses in the state, the department has done little to protect East Point from erosion made severe by the combination of naturally subsiding land and unnaturally accelerating sea level rise.

Lack of support for East Point

The effects of that lack of support were particularly striking this spring. For much of last year, Patterson was locked in a standoff with the department over the terms of a new management agreement that would have allowed the state to terminate its partnership with the society with little notice, as well as be entitled to revenues from its museum and gift shop, which in part sells work by local artists.

Because of the standoff, Patterson felt she had to shelve plans for a berm project that she believes is necessary to save East Point from not just the next Superstorm Sandy, which flooded the lighthouse, but regular nuisance flooding. Local municipalities had offered to provide topsoil and sand fill for free, and the society had cobbled together enough donations to pay for labor. Meanwhile, in March, the DEP announced that it would begin a $1.3 million restoration of Barnegat Lighthouse, paid for by the state’s corporate business tax.

Barnegat and East Point are two of the oldest lighthouses in the state that are still in operation. East Point was first lit in 1849 and Barnegat in 1859. Both structures were originally built hundreds of feet back from the water’s edge, but natural erosion and sea level rise have reduced those buffers to stone throws from the waves.

In March, the Department of Environmental Protection announced that it would begin a $1.3 million restoration of Barnegat Lighthouse, paid for by the state’s corporate business tax. Credit: Andrew S. Lewis

That is where many of the similarities between the two lighthouses end. In 1957, the land around Barnegat was made a state park, and in 1971 the lighthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Since the late 1980s, Barnegat and the surrounding land have been restored and rebuilt with millions of state and federal dollars to save it from the results of age and the encroaching sea, including an Army Corps of Engineers-built rock seawall.

Barnegat is facing at least a 1% chance of flooding each year already. That chance increases to at least 10% each year by 2040, and by 2060, the lighthouse will face a chronic annual flood risk, the Climate Central analysis found.

Already at risk of chronic flooding

Down in Cumberland County, however, the historic, but less heralded, East Point Lighthouse is already at risk of chronic flooding, with a 99% chance of at least one annual flood.

Rapidly rising waters spell trouble not just for these landmarks, but for historic sites across the country. A 2014 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists identified intensifying flood, coastal erosion and wildfire threats to historical sites and infrastructure across the nation, as well as state and local parks.

Cornell University professor Sara Bronin says that a whole range of natural hazards increasingly threaten historic sites. “You can see that in sea level rise in coastal areas, wildfires in the West, and even increased precipitation leading to more erosion, mudslides and moisture that ends up being retained in the buildings, structures and sites that we’ve tried to protect by designating them historic,” she said.

‘If East Point got anywhere near even a small fraction of the support and infrastructure over the years that they’ve seen at Barnegat, or Cape May, or any of the other lighthouses, it would be a really nice tourist place.’

Bronin has worked in local planning and zoning as a lawyer, architect and policymaker, and is the current nominee to serve as chair of the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Her 2020 paper identifies how federal law makes it difficult and costly for climate-related adaptations to historic properties, and finds that the legal standards typically applied to physical changes to preservation sites inadequately address climate change.

“Currently the way that we protect historic properties is something of a patchwork with local, state and federal officials each looking at the issue from a different angle and not necessarily coordinating,” Bronin said.

Inequitable preservation efforts

This can lead to inequitable preservation efforts in the face of worsening climate change. The same year that Barnegat became a federally recognized historic place, 83 miles to the south, on the Delaware bayshore, East Point was nearly destroyed by fire. By that point, the lighthouse had been abandoned for decades — the fire inspired the Maurice River Historical Society to push for the structure’s renovation.

It wasn’t until 1995 that East Point was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and not until 1998 that an exterior restoration was completed by a volunteer effort led by the Maurice River Historical Society. In 2019, the state attempted to address East Point’s dire erosion problem with a sand-filled synthetic “geotube” berm along the shoreline. The project was meant to be a temporary solution, but almost immediately, storm surges were breaching the berm, rendering the lighthouse property “a big bowl of water with no place to go,” as Patterson described it last year.

Instead of a park, much of the land around East Point is state-owned preserved open space and wildlife management areas, meaning it is to remain essentially untouched rather than built up with hard infrastructure to defend against sea level rise.

“If East Point got anywhere near even a small fraction of the support and infrastructure over the years that they’ve seen at Barnegat, or Cape May, or any of the other lighthouses, it would be a really nice tourist place,” Patterson said. “But [the department’s] mission is to, basically, gather up as much land as possible and let it go back to nature. Protecting history is completely against what they’re trying to do here.”

After being abandoned for decades and nearly destroyed by a fire in 1971, East Point Lighthouse was rescued and restored by volunteers of the Maurice River Historical Society, and its lantern was reactivated in 1980. Credit: Andrew S. Lewis

In a statement, New Jersey’s Chief Resilience Officer, Nick Angarone said: “The DEP evaluates historic assets and structures against climate change, including sea-level rise, looking at issues such as risks to a structure, benefits and public access. The Barnegat Light Lighthouse and East Point Lighthouse are both vulnerable to sea-level rise and face different threats from climate change. The Department recognizes the value of both historic structures as well as the importance they have to their communities and visitors. With that in mind, we assess the needs of each lighthouse and account for all available resources, including federal funding, to ensure that both lighthouses continue to stand as New Jersey beacons for future generations.”

It’s not that Patterson isn’t happy to see the state investing in Barnegat Light, she said. It’s just that it seems unfair to prioritize one over the other. “I want to see Barnegat get the attention it’s getting,” she said. “I don’t want money taken from them to give to us — I want it given to them and us.”

It’s a race against time, and limited resources. A professor and chair of the department of historic preservation at the University of Kentucky, Douglas Appler says the lack of funding for historic preservation, and reliance on philanthropies and individuals for investment, means officials don’t have much leeway with deciding where the money goes. “There are limits to what local government and state government can do in a system where everything is basically privately driven,” he said.

Appler says this is particularly true in smaller towns and municipalities — like the unincorporated community of 227 people living in Heislerville, where East Point is found. “They don’t have a ton of levers to pull.”

‘They don’t get away with treating Barnegat the same way they get away with treating the southern bayshore.’

Patterson worries that, because East Point is a “money pit,” in terms of upkeep, the state is only interested in seeing the structure and the property disappear. And while Barnegat is also expensive to maintain, it is central to the tourism economy of Long Beach Island, home to some of the Jersey Shore’s most expensive real estate.

“They don’t get away with treating Barnegat the same way they get away with treating the southern bayshore,” Patterson said. “We’re treated like the neglected stepchild — there’s not enough of us to add up to enough votes, and we don’t have enough millionaires to add up to enough contributions to their campaigns.”

If the state would only invest…

The bayshore municipalities of Cumberland County are among some of the poorest in New Jersey. If the state would only invest in the property, Patterson insisted, it could become a tourist attraction that would help prop up Maurice River Township and surrounding economically depressed municipalities.

“Maurice River Township would look different,” Patterson said. “Restaurants could survive, and businesses could make it, because they would have people coming in.”

Already, Patterson hosts Christmas and Easter events on the historical society’s shoestring budget. But she envisions restoring the old drainage ditch behind the lighthouse by removing the invasive phragmites, which have taken over, with native plants like bayberry, beach plum and goldenrod. Tourists and schoolchildren could learn about what a native coastal New Jersey landscape looks like — one that isn’t relentlessly inundated by saltwater, that is. Just something more than a rutted dirt road to the property would be nice, Patterson said.

There was some good news recently. Though the state would only issue the historical society a license agreement instead of a lease — preventing the group from doing their own renovation work — they did change the terms so that revenues from the museum and gift shop can’t be taken by the state. And the berm project is being allowed by the DEP to move forward. If the final approval processes go well, Patterson is hoping topsoil and sand will be rolling in within the next few weeks.

Patterson thinks stopgap solutions are better than nothing, but she plans to continue to fight for more substantial fixes to preserve the landmark as seas continue to rise and storms continue to intensify.

“Nothing would make me happier than to hear, twenty years from now, somebody say, ‘I just care so much about the place because we always had such a good time there,” Patterson said. “Because it’s a part of my history.’”

Breanne Sharp and Kelly Van Baalen (Climate Central) contributed data reporting.

Kerri Johannsen was less than a week from giving birth to her second child when a derecho wielding winds up to 100 mph swept through Iowa. Johannsen’s power went out for four days. “It was hot,” she said. “We were just trying to manage.”

The Des Moines household was among 480,000 in Iowa that lost power during the 2020 wind storm. Propelling severe rain and tornadoes through the Midwest, the storm caused $11 billion in damage, lashing infrastructure, homes and farms from Nebraska to Wisconsin. 

While neighbors remained powerless, Johannsen was able to run the refrigerator, fans and lights thanks to a novel solution. Instead of a diesel generator, she connected a power inverter to a Nissan Leaf and funneled electricity from it into her house.

Kerri Johannsen/Randy Schumacher (NBC WHO 12 Des Moines)

Power outages are occurring more frequently for more American communities as fires, storms and other climate disasters intensify with rising temperatures. Scientists are still investigating the relationships between derechos and climate change.

“The derecho hit our neighborhood pretty hard,” said Johannsen, whose work as the Energy Program Director with the Iowa Environmental Council helped her recognize the value of electric cars. 

She drives one of only 1,889 registered electric vehicles in Polk County. “We were able to get the critical things that we needed during that time because we had all of this backup power sitting in our garage,” she said. 

While Johannsen is embracing the benefits of going electric, the approach remains unusual across Iowa, where 8,370 electric and hybrid vehicles are on the roads — representing one in 500 vehicles. In California, which leads the rest of the country in market adoption, nearly one in 20 of all registered vehicles are hybrids or electric. 

Iowa leads the U.S. in production of wind energy, generating the most wind energy per square mile. Yet many state legislators oppose the electric vehicle movement — pushing ethanol over electrified transport. This is saddling electric vehicle makers and proponents with legislative barriers and fees that discourage investment. 

Source: Climate Central

Transportation is the largest national source of heat-trapping pollution each year, and three-quarters of those emissions come from combustion engines in cars, trains, trucks and buses. The health consequences of tailpipe pollution include respiratory and cardiovascular conditions like reduced lung function and asthma. 

Rising temperatures are fueling storms, droughts and flooding through Iowa. In a state where one in five work in the agricultural industry, crop production is threatened. A 2021 Columbia University study indicated rising temperatures and drying conditions could cost some counties in western Iowa up to $90 million in annual revenues from declining corn and soy production during the second half of the century. 

Some officials and organizations in Des Moines and across the state are working to boost electric vehicle adoption. What they want is to get fossil-fuel burning engines off the roads — reducing Iowa’s carbon footprint, boosting local economies and ridding the air of traffic pollution, which disproportionately harms frontline communities. 

Cleaning the air of combustion engine pollution could avoid about 500 premature deaths and save $1 billion in healthcare costs in Iowa under a national push to achieve 'net zero' climate emissions by 2050, according to Princeton University modeling. 

“Gasoline in our engines or burning diesel in our engines absolutely contributes to a dangerous mix of air pollution,” said Laura Kate Bender, national assistant vice president of healthy air at the American Lung Association. “Someone in every family is at increased risk of harm.” 

Frontline communities living near freeways and industrial facilities endure the gravest risks. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 72 million people live within 200 meters of freight truck routes. Most are people of color with lower incomes. 

“It is very clear that racist policies like redlining have left a legacy of people of color living with a higher burden of air pollution from sources nearby,” Bender said. “Driving a nationwide transition to zero-emission vehicles is absolutely key if we're going to protect public health.” 

IOWA SLOW TO EMBRACE ELECTRIC VEHICLES  

While other states like California, Washington and New York are expanding charging infrastructure, passing electric vehicle mandates and offering incentives to electric fleets, a strong biofuel-growing sector has slowed any rush in Iowa toward gasoline-free vehicles.

Iowa is consistently ranked among the worst U.S. states to own or buy electric vehicles. It is also one of the states with the lowest number of electric vehicles registered and electric charging stations added during the past four years. 

Iowa’s electrification roadblocks have been erected by its Republican-controlled state legislature. Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) has repeatedly criticized electric vehicles; last year, Reynolds called the Biden administration’s goal to have electric vehicles make up 50% of new car sales by 2030 ‘short-sighted.’ 

“The Biden administration has focused all its efforts on electric vehicles and is actively attempting to eliminate gas-powered cars,” Reynolds said in her 2022 Condition of the State Address in January. “That’s a mistake, especially as China works to lock up the precious metals that make EV batteries.” 

China currently dominates the electric vehicle supply chain, with Chinese battery-maker CATL controlling one-third of the global electric vehicle battery market. 

Source: Climate Central

Electric vehicle owners avoid gas taxes, and Iowa charges them higher registration fees than gasoline engine owners — a cost that has increased steadily each year since 2020 to $130 per vehicle today. In 2021, Iowa’s legislature passed a law that prohibits direct sale of electric vehicles by manufacturers. 

Several Iowa legislators remain opposed to investing in electrifying transportation because of what electrification of vehicles across the U.S. would mean for sales of ethanol, which gas companies blend into their product to comply with federal law. Last year, five Iowa representatives wrote a letter to President Biden criticizing his push for electric vehicles and lack of investments in biofuel.  

In 2021, Iowa produced 4.4 billion gallons of ethanol, which increases overall emissions of heat-trapping pollution from the transportation sector. Iowa is the country’s leading ethanol producer, accounting for nearly 30 percent of national production. 

According to Yale University economics professor Kenneth Gillingham, the lack of electric vehicle adoption momentum in a state where wind turbines generate 60% of the state’s electricity is a missed opportunity to run vehicles in the state on a clean energy source. 

Electric vehicles also create in-state economic activity and offer fuel savings for consumers. According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy, an electric vehicle driver's lifetime fuel costs in Iowa are an average $7,860 cheaper than combustion engine vehicles. 

“There’s a very real local economic impact from switching from gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles,” said Gillingham, whose ​​research has focused on alternative energy adoption in transportation. “More money is in consumers' pockets, and that money is more often spent in local communities in your own state than if you're spending the money in gasoline stations where the bulk of the profits go elsewhere.” 

Kerri Johannsen's husband and the couple's Nissan Leaf/Randy Schumacher (NBC WHO 13 Des Moines)

A 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative report found that the battery and fuel production for electric motors are more emissions-intensive than combustion engines. These production and recycling challenges can diminish the climate and environmental friendliness of an electric engine. 

Gillingham co-authored a 2021 study that considered carbon pricing, life cycle assessments, and energy systems modeling when analyzing electric vehicle supply chains. The paper concluded that the total indirect emissions from electric vehicles will be far lower than indirect emissions from fossil fuel-powered vehicles. 

While electric grids and batteries need to be substantially cleaned up before electric vehicles can be emissions-free, Gillingham said his research shows electric vehicles are already better for the environment than fossil-fueled cars.  

“In just a few years, we're going to be finding that electric vehicles not only are better from the direct (tailpipe) emissions perspective but also indirect emissions,” Gillingham said.

IOWA’S ELECTRIC VEHICLE PROMISE 

Des Moines city councilperson Josh Mandelbaum sees the small number of electric vehicles registered in Iowa’s capital as an opportunity for growth. Last year, Des Moines was the first American city to announce a goal of reaching 24/7 carbon-free electricity by 2035. Under this ambitious climate goal, consumption of electricity by the city will be matched by the production of clean energy at all times. 

Mandelbaum deems transportation emissions ‘the next big challenge.’

“We've started transitioning our vehicle fleet,” said Mandelbaum. “Another piece that we've done is we've started adding electric vehicle charging to city parking lots in city facilities.” 

A 2020 pilot program operated by the Des Moines Regional Transit in partnership with MidAmerican launched the state’s first battery-electric bus. Since its launch, the number of electric vehicles in the city fleet has increased to 18 in a fleet of 150 buses. 

“I've had an electric vehicle for three years now,” Mandelbaum said. “And I pretty much only charge my vehicle during city council meetings, because there's an EV charging [station] at the city parking lot.” 

Des Moines currently has 28 total public charging ports — about 10 percent of the total across the state. Mandelbaum says there's an opportunity to be ‘doing more’. The federal administration is encouraging expansion of charging infrastructure — in February, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced Iowa will receive more than $51 million to deploy electric charging stations.  

Industry innovation means it will also be increasingly simple to use electric vehicles as batteries. General Motors and California utility Pacific Gas & Electric recently announced plans for a pilot program to test home-powering by way of electric motors, which follows the release of Ford’s new 2022 electric pickup truck that automatically powers a household: ‘if the lights go out.’ 

Source: Climate Central

Working for the Iowa Environmental Council to try to transition Iowa from fossil fuels to 100% clean energy, Johannsen, who used her car to power appliances after the 2020 derecho, says a lack of incentives and disproportionate taxes on electric vehicles is slowing their adoption in Iowa. 

“Unfortunately, there are some Iowa laws that are not quite equitable in terms of how EVs are taxed and the fees that are paid by EV owners,” she said. 

Johannsen says her family invested in the inverter they hooked up to their electric vehicle to power their home in the wake of Des Moines's flash flood, which left more than 1,500 properties damaged and nearly 20,000 households without power. The flooding killed one person and impacted thousands of others in Des Moines. 

“Fortunately or unfortunately, our preparations were informed by the summer flooding of 2018 when we lost power and almost lost everything in our basement,” Johannsen said. “Our neighbors did lose a lot. A lot of people in Des Moines did in that flood, and so we have prepared.” 

This story was produced through a partnership between NBC WHO 13 Des Moines and Climate Central, a non-advocacy science and news group.

A skier jumps into the air in front of a large snow-making machine at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Modern advances in snow-making technology are helping Maine ski areas stay open despite the warming climate. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

BRIDGTON, Maine — Billy Dolliver’s blue eyes twinkled at the mountain snow. Mid-20 temperatures kept the ski trail from getting slushy. The sun was warm enough so he did not freeze on the lift.

The 72-year-old has skied the Shawnee Peak slopes since age 12, when his boatbuilder father made his first pair of skis out of barrel staves. He has noticed that winters have been getting warmer with less snow, but skiing is better than ever because of modern grooming and snowmaking.

“It’s really amazing that I can sit here and tell you that the ski quality is better now than it was 40 years ago with the temperatures rising,” he said.

Billy Dolliver, 72, shushes through a turn at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Dolliver has been skiing the mountain since he was 12 and said, despite climate change, conditions are better than ever, thanks to modern snow-making techniques. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Poor snow conditions have pressured smaller ski slopes across the country. Unable to face the costs of adapting to warmer winters, many in New England have become less competitive or closed. To stay in business, ski resorts have had to make more snow while investing millions of dollars in energy-efficient equipment to minimize their environmental impact. That balance will decide the fate of the industry.

“Climate change certainly is the largest, most detrimental issue facing the winter outdoor business,” Nick Sargent, president of the national trade association Snowsports Industries America, said.

Temperatures are rising globally as pollution traps more heat, which is affecting the amount of snow falling at ski fields and resorts nationally. Although climate change generally means less snow overall, parts of inland Maine have been among the regions seeing increases recently as storms draw more moisture from the warming Atlantic Ocean.

But winter rain has become more common since the mid-1970s, eroding snowpacks. The average minimum temperature in the Shawnee Peak region during winter has risen nearly 6 degrees since 1975, while average snowfall rates have declined in the spring, according to weather station data from nearby North Conway, New Hampshire.

Unreliable snow conditions are affecting ski resorts and activities globally. Man-made snow use for the Winter Olympics games has increased since the 1980s, with this year’s Beijing games being held in an arid climate that required it to be the first to use all man-made snow to assure uniform competition conditions.  

A skier carves a turn at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Modern advances in snow-making technology are helping Maine ski areas stay open despite the warming climate. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

At Shawnee Peak and other Maine ski areas, one big challenge is freeze-thaw events, where snowfall is followed quickly by rain and then a cold spell that turns slush to ice. Those events have become more frequent over the last 15 years, so more aggressive snowmaking is a necessity, Ralph Lewis, general manager of Shawnee Peak, said. The resort spends half its budget on snowmaking.

“We’ll see an increase in precipitation going forward, and more of it is going to fall as rain,” Ryan Gordon, a hydrogeologist at the Maine Geological Survey, said. “But I think places like Shawnee Peak and other big mountains that have invested in snowmaking technology are going to do OK.”

So far, Shawnee Peak and other major ski resorts in Maine have been able to keep up with the snowmaking necessary for business to thrive. Skiing and related hotel and restaurant activities for the state’s 18 alpine ski resorts contribute $1 billion and 5,000 jobs to Maine’s economy, Dirk Gouwens, executive director of the Ski Maine Association, said. Nationwide, snowboarders, skiers and snowmobilers contribute tens of billions of dollars to the economy each year, a University of New Hampshire analysis found.

“As the efficiencies of the equipment have increased, we’ve been able to make more snow to make up for any deficiencies that we may have in the weather,” Gouwens said. “The ski industry in Maine has been remarkably consistent and has seen more demand over the years.”

Shawnee Peak, the oldest major alpine ski area in the state that opened in 1937, ranks third among the most-visited ski slopes in the state with 40 trails. It was the premier place to ski in Maine until the 1980s, when it fell behind other ski resorts because it lacked snowmaking equipment.

A skier zooms between two large snow-making machines at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Modern advances in snow-making technology are helping Maine ski areas stay open despite the warming climate. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

The ski resort installed its first snowmaking system in 1981, but the mountain was revived in earnest in 1997, when a new owner invested $1.2 million to upgrade the resort, including chairlifts. Since then, millions of dollars have gone into more efficient snowmaking and snow-grooming machines. The resort regularly spends $600,000 a year on new equipment, with the priority on snowmaking machines.

The inability to make big investments has thinned out ski areas and resulted in consolidation over the past several decades in Maine and across the nation. Nationally, 462 resorts operated during the 2020 to 2021 winter season, down 15 percent compared to nearly 30 years before, according to the National Ski Areas Association.

Maine has lost 79 ski areas in its history, most of them mom-and-pop slopes where skiers were introduced to the sport, according to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project. That compares with 525 across the other five New England states. Not all closures were because of the inability to make snow. High liability insurance premiums were factors, Gouwens said.

Man-made snow is formed just below the freezing point, when the weather is 28 degrees Fahrenheit or colder. Water is pumped to the snow machine and then forced at high speed through a nozzle by pressurized air. The snow machine ejects a fine mist of water, some of which evaporates and cools the remaining droplets, which fall to the ground as snow.

A skier zooms between two large snow-making machines at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Modern advances in snow-making technology are helping Maine ski areas stay open despite the warming climate. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

That process, called “evaporative cooling,” is similar to the way evaporating sweat cools down a person. Evaporation is a natural process, so snow machines do not require energy to freeze water. The pumps and the air compressors use the most electricity at the ski resort, along with lifts. New snow machines use less compressed air, which is one way to reduce the amount of electricity required. Using less air has cut energy costs for Shawnee Peak by a third or more.

The resort uses between 35 million and 50 million gallons of water per season to make snow, which melts into nearby lakes and streams in the spring. Lewis said the new snow machines can be turned on and off more quickly than the older equipment, which allows him to make snow quicker and use less power to do so.

The man-made snow is denser than natural snow and melts slower, so Shawnee Peak only makes snow for about 30 days for a four-month ski season. Because of warming temperatures, it is making snow toward the end of November or early December, two weeks later than five years ago.

“We have shorter windows of cold temperatures to make snow so we have to get up and running quickly and shut down quickly,” Lewis said.

Two people pass a solar array at Shawnee Peak in Bridgton on Wednesday, Feb. 16, 2022. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Adapting to climate change is a major strategy for its new owner, Boyne Resorts, which bought Shawnee Peak in October. Boyne also owns two other major Maine ski resorts, Sunday River and Sugarloaf.

Shawnee Peak has installed solar panels on two buildings and is experimenting with newer LED lights to reduce energy consumption, early steps toward more climate-friendly operations, with Boyne aiming to release net zero emissions across its 10 ski areas in North America by 2030.

“I don’t think there’s anybody in the industry that would tell you they’re not aware of the climate and the changes we’ve seen,” Lewis said. “It’s certainly on the forefront of our minds.”

This story was produced through a partnership with Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group. Jen Brady and Kaitlyn Weber of Climate Central contributed data reporting.

Rain, wet snow, and shallow snow are all expected to increase at former Olympic venues over the coming decades, according to a new study led by researchers from the University of Waterloo. It projects that nearly all prior host cities for the Olympics will see weather conditions that make it difficult to hold outdoor winter sports competitions. The culprit is greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting climate change.

By the 2050s—eight Games from now—that change will hit many European host cities famous for these winter sports, like Chamonix, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Grenoble, Innsbruck, St. Moritz, and Turin. That prediction remains even if emissions targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement are met.

The study surveyed hundreds of coaches and athletes to determine optimal conditions for the Olympic Games. 

Continued at Quartz (subsciption required)

Grass fires have threatened the meadows and homes near Chatridge Court and U.S. 85 three times in five years, and firefighters work hard to keep flames from moving over the hill into thousands of homes in Highlands Ranch. These photos are from the 2016 Chatridge fire. (South Metro Fire Rescue file photos)

DOUGLAS COUNTY — The future of climate change and suburban firefighting in Colorado is here, in a dull brown meadow at the corner of Chatridge Court and U.S. 85. 

They know the future will arrive on this spot, because the kind of raging grass fires near thousands of suburban homes that keep emergency planners awake at night has already been here three times in five years.  

The Chatridge 3 grass fire on Dec. 14, just before Boulder County’s horrific Marshall fire, swept east up the hill from U.S. 85 toward an isolated mansion and threatened 100,000 people in Highlands Ranch, a few miles away. 

Ruth lives in that mansion at the top of the hill, with her husband, where they’ve seen all three Chatridge grass fires. In December, it was just another beautiful day to enjoy the stunning 360-degree views from her upstairs windows, until the police knocked. Again. 

“We didn’t know why they were here until we looked down to our yard, and the firefighters were already there,” said Ruth, who asked that her last name not be used. A rancher usually brings cattle to keep the grass down between their house and the highway, but the animals hadn’t arrived yet to do their job. The pasture was flaming. Scorched roots of scraped-up yucca plants dot the ground.

“They evacuated us. When we came back, we didn’t know if we’d have a house left or not,” Ruth said. “But we did.”

Grass fires have threatened the meadows and homes near Chatridge Court and U.S. 85 three times in five years, and firefighters work hard to keep flames from moving over the hill into thousands of homes in Highlands Ranch. These photos are from the 2020 Chatridge 2 fire. (South Metro Fire Rescue file photos)

The weather that day was dry, warm and windy — fire weather, the increasingly familiar conditions that can blow small fires quickly into infernos. South Metro Fire Rescue knew soil there was historically dry – a worry confirmed by detailed new satellite data from a Boulder firm that wants to reach out to Front Range firefighters. Just 16 days later and 45 miles away, fire weather would stoke the Marshall fire.

As heat-trapping pollution pushes up temperatures, the region that’s home to the state’s largest cities has seen one of the nation’s sharpest increases in the frequency of fire weather. Climate and fire experts say they must now do even more to layer new sensor technology atop decades of firefighting experience to prevent fires like the one that devastated Louisville and Superior.

New data resources for prevention

An analysis of weather data shows the region, known as Colorado’s Platte Drainage Basin, is experiencing fire weather nearly 40 days a year on average now, up from fewer than 20 days annually in the 1970s. The increase is steepest during the winter months.

“When I look at that climatology change, it lines up exactly with the amount of large historical fires that South Metro has specifically had. We saw an uptick in the size and intensity of wildland urban interface fires,” department spokesman Eric Hurst said. 

“The fires tend to be more intense and grow faster than they used to.”

Firefighters were overwhelmed by the speed and intensity of the Marshall fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes in just a few hours. 

Grass fires have threatened the meadows and homes near Chatridge Court and U.S. 85 three times in five years, and firefighters work hard to keep flames from moving over the hill into thousands of homes in Highlands Ranch. These photos are from the 2020 Chatridge 2 fire. (South Metro Fire Rescue file photos)

Landscaping including bushes and lawns growing alongside houses and roadways were parched by the dry and windy weather and by the shortage of snow and rain in the months beforehand. That provided an abundance of kindling for the flames, which were carried swiftly from one block to another by the fierce seasonal gusts. 

But the inferno’s rapid spread didn’t surprise planners in departments from Larimer County to Colorado Springs. They are watching fall snow disappear, and open space soils grow desiccated. They see extreme heat season expanding. 

And they are trying to prepare. 

How firefighting can adapt

South Metro dreams of acquiring its own road graders to supplement those owned by Douglas County. A satellite data company executive whose own home was ruined by smoke from the Marshall fire pictures fleets of suburban brushcutters ready to trim fire breaks on red flag days. Colorado Springs scrambles to warn a constant turnover of new homeowners in its military-transient community of new urban interface fire dangers.

While some years still bring good snow cover as a fire deterrent in November and December, said Colorado State University climatologist Peter Goble, “the dry years hurt more with warmer conditions.” While much of the western half of Colorado is in a 20-year drought, average statewide temperatures in the last six months of 2021 were the hottest ever recorded. Denver set a record in 2021 for the number of days between the last spring and the first winter snowfall.

Not only are suburban grass fires threatening in mid-winter, but recent years have brought grass fires on the Eastern Plains before plants there have the chance to green up, Goble said. 

Front Range fire planners and civic leaders have to now contend with far more fire danger days under climate change than in past decades, with chances for damaging events like the Marshall fire ever more present in the suburbs. (Climate Central)

“It’s made me wonder if maybe we’ve been a little bit lucky that we haven’t had more of these brush fire incidents closer to urban centers before,” he said. 

Dazed by the fury of the flames in their neighborhoods on the border between open space and town centers, homeowners and elected leaders on the Front Range are reassessing their disaster priorities. 

David Gross spent 30 years planting shrubs and trees to slowly transform his Louisville home south of Harper Lake into his version of paradise, just across McCaslin Boulevard from the city’s Davidson Mesa open space. He was away on vacation at the end of December when the Marshall fire torched his house and his illusions of relative security.

 “Never in a million years,” would he have imagined a foothills wildfire arriving at his doorstep, Gross said. “We were certainly far away enough that I never would have imagined this. Let alone on Dec. 30.” 

Remains of burnt yucca plants near U.S. 85 and Chatridge Court. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun)

Homes at U.S. 85 and Chatfield Court on Jan. 20, about a month after a wildland fire. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun)

Louisville Mayor Ashley Stolzmann said city firefighters keep bringing up the fact that the fire jumped a six-lane highway next to a two-lane concrete road — “that’s a pretty big fire break,” she said. “This just jumped right over, like nothing.”

Until now, Stolzmann said, Louisville has worried much more about flooding from the seasonally expansive creeks that shoot down the canyons from the high country. Grassland fire, she said, is “certainly something we’ll be thinking about now.”

“The reality is, when we do have a wildfire event, each individual home is not going to have a fire truck sitting in its driveway,” said Ashley Whitworth, wildfire mitigation administrator for the Colorado Springs Fire Department. What planners keep researching, Whitworth said, is “anything that a homeowner can do on the front end to help firefighters help their home give it that chance of survivability.”

David Gross, who lived in a neighborhood south of Harper Lake in Louisville for 30 years, surveys the damage to his home on Jan. 1, after the Marshall fire. (Steve Peterson, Special to The Colorado Sun)

Doubling down on looking ahead

The fire departments, government agencies and homeowner associations bent on defending against suburban  grass fires are now doubling down on the kind of climate change analysis they’d begun before a December fire exploded into the most destructive in Colorado history. 

Urban development is increasing fire risks while climate change is boosting droughts by sucking moisture from plants and soils, which is causing Western forests and grasslands to burn more frequently and intensely. The rising temperatures are also increasing the frequency with which fire weather strikes. (Changes in how forests and other lands are managed are also affecting fires; so, too, is the spread of invasive plants and tree damage caused by beetles.)

Climate Central analyzed data from federal weather stations operating since the early 1970s to investigate fire weather trends. Climate Central based its definition of fire weather on criteria developed by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center for elevated fire weather forecasts. To count as fire weather, thresholds set by the federal government must be met for a certain number of hours each day for temperature, relative humidity and wind speeds, with thresholds varying from one region to another.

Front Range fire planners and civic leaders have to now contend with far more fire danger days under climate change than in past decades, with chances for damaging events like the Marshall fire ever more present in the suburbs. (Climate Central)

The analysis revealed sharp increases across the Western U.S. of occurrences of fire weather, with modest increases in temperature playing outsized effects on dryness. When the Chatridge 3 and Marshall fires broke out, the region’s powerful yet natural winds were strong enough locally to satisfy the conditions for fire weather. So, too, were relative humidity and temperature.

During the Marshall fire, the winds were “particularly violent, but they were where and when you’d expect them to appear,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist based in Boulder whose affiliations include UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Swain advised Climate Central on its fire weather analysis.

There was no official red flag warning banning open burns the day of the Marshall fire, though other burn bans were in place. The National Weather Service’s Boulder office is now reviewing whether its standards should change for issuing red flag warnings, which may carry more weight with the public than other no-burn notices. 

That the winds blew embers through suburban vegetation that was parched and dry just one day before the region’s first major snowfall of the fall or winter might just have been “bad luck,” Swain said.

The effects of those winds in spreading the Marshall fire, however, highlighted that the same climate change influences that are worsening forest fire risks can also lead to suburban wildfires igniting scrub vegetation first, then taller grass, and then moving on to ignite fences, rooftops and then entire homes and blocks. 

“While the Marshall fire wasn’t really a traditional wildfire, in the sense that much of what it burned were highly populated suburbs rather than just vegetation, it turns out the climate conditions leading up to the event were still important,” Swain said.

More “fire weather” days

An analysis of fire weather trends from the region including Denver and Boulder from December through February shows fire weather remains far rarer then than during summer months, but the frequency is increasing at a faster pace — roughly five days per winter now on average, up from an average of about one in the early 1970s.

Kevin Petty watched Front Range soils dry out in November and December in his work as a vice president at Spire Global, which uses data collected from low-orbit satellites to understand the impacts of extreme weather. In January, he has been trying to figure out how to get more of his company’s weather and climate data to civic leaders, while he tallies near-total smoke damage to his Louisville home from the Marshall fire.

Satellite collection of sensor data shows how dry soils have been on the Front Range in recent years, including in November and December when suburban grassland fires have grown more dangerous. (Spire)

The day Petty talked to The Sun about Spire’s identification of historic levels of soil dryness in late 2021, he was also fielding phone calls from his daughter looking for a smoke-free dress for an honor society induction. He had never before had to think of his family as a victim of natural disasters, Petty said. 

“Now, allowing people to make better decisions about what to do in these situations is even more near and dear to me,” he said. “We want to live in a great state, and we want to see the natural beauty. But when you have a population that’s growing, and houses being built close together, you have to take certain mitigation actions.”

Similar to NASA soil moisture missions, Spire satellites indicate surface moisture levels falling steeply below the historic mean in November and December. From the foothills of Larimer, Boulder, Jefferson and El Paso counties and heading east, soil moisture in late 2021 flares an angry, subnormal red on Spire generated maps. 

Spire’s hourly forecasts on Dec. 30 also had Petty on the edge of his seat. “I was actually praying for the sun to go down, because I knew our forecasts were showing a decrease in wind speeds at sunset, and that was going to help these firefighters fight the fire.”

The company is reaching out to local weather and fire agencies to offer partnership in information, Petty said. Satellites have useful environmental data, but researchers haven’t perfected conveying those risks to civic planners or the public. 

“To take the appropriate actions at the right time – that’s something in the scientific community that we haven’t necessarily focused on quite as much,” Petty said.

High winds grounded any aerial firefighting or prevention that day, Petty noted. But with more advanced data on local climate conditions, like dry soil or potential fuels, planners could do more in grassland areas previously thought safer than forests. They could mow ultra-dry grass and weeds in more open space buffers during droughts, or have more cutters and bulldozers available for making firebreaks “in real time.” 

A meadow at Chatridge Court and U.S. 85 has burned three times in five years, threatening hilltop mansions and thousands of homes over a ridge in Highlands Ranch. Photos of firefighting efforts were taken on Dec. 14. (South Metro Fire Rescue files)

Other civic agencies already do this, drawing on information from Spire and other data companies, he said. An airport or highway department looks at precise weather reports to schedule snowplow drivers and other crews for maximum impact. 

“You can figure out the same in terms of fighting and mitigating fire hazards,” he said. 

South Metro Fire, whose map straddles C-470 and takes in thousands of acres where grassland and suburbs meet, from the foothills to the prairie east of Parker, is trying to think ahead in that way. 

South Metro looks at long-range historical data showing the Front Range climate in their service area to be warmer and wetter to the east of Interstate 25, but warmer and drier than normal in the southwest metro area, Hurst said. That trend fits “exactly” with the uptick in grass and brush fires the department has fought since the massive Hayman fire in 2002 first alerted southwest metro counties that they were in a new era, Hurst said. 

The department watches National Weather Service red flag warnings carefully, he said, but also adds in other criteria they find relevant in its suburban territory. South Metro’s planning “recipe,” Hurst said, adds in a burn index, fuel moisture levels and “energy-release components” – “things that are a bit more into the weeds of the weeds, so to speak.” 

On a normal day in a relatively wet year, Hurst said, when a 911 caller reports vegetation fire of less than an acre, one wildland fire engine, one structural fire engine and a chief officer and safety officer are dispatched. That team is about 10 people. 

“On a day that South Metro has identified as high risk, we triple that response of firefighters, immediately,” he said. “It’s a conversation that happens around 6:30 every morning.” 

Douglas County and Highlands Ranch, among others, work with South Metro to identify high-risk grassy areas and keep as much mowed during high risk times as possible. When flame height or length reaches 4 feet from waist- or chest-high grass, firefighters can no longer attack it directly, Hurst noted. 

But firefighters wishing all grass was an inch high doesn’t match up with what the public wants, Hurst said. “We know that’s unlikely.”

Ground zero at Chatridge Court

The Dec. 14 fire at Chatridge in South Metro was 24 acres. The previous fires on the same spot were 461 acres and 205 acres, both of them breaking out when fire weather was detected by nearby weather stations, and the 2020 edition prompted evacuation of 1,000 homes in Highlands Ranch. Just to the south, the Cherokee Ranch fire in 2003 burned 1,000 acres. South Metro now develops detailed maps of such wildland high-risk spots, with bird’s eye views of terrain and structures. The terrain is graded to show what fire behavior and movement is likely, and access points and structure evacuations are marked. 

The firefighters’ ideal of a home in such areas is “standalone,” like the mansion that sits on Chatridge Court in the middle of a thrice-burned pasture. The homeowners had cut grass and avoided any tall shrubs around their property, Hurst said. But of course Highlands Ranch and other more dense neighborhoods will never be like that. 

Residences at U.S. 85 and Chatridge Court photographed on Jan 20. The Chatridge 3 grass fire on Dec. 14 swept east up the hill from U.S. 85, potentially threatening 100,000 people near Highlands Ranch before being contained. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun)

What department outreach staff tell homeowner associations in vulnerable areas is to defend themselves with simple tasks, like cleaning leaves and pine needles out of their gutters and off their decks. Avoid landscaping with 12-foot-tall plume grass that grows to the eaves and dries to a crisp in September. 

“We try to describe to them what an ember shower is going to look like,” Hurst said. Websites like Firewise describe safe landscaping down to the leaf type.

What South Metro firefighters wish for is more road graders and bulldozers. Douglas and Arapahoe County offer access to their road equipment and skilled operators, Hurst said, “but not all fires are created equally, and being able to get those in the right spot at the right time is a challenge.” 

California towns keep more aerial and road building equipment on site, and local Colorado departments will likely seek those kinds of resources, he said. 

What keeps Colorado Springs awake

Similar interface areas have been an intensive focus of Colorado Springs fire planners for years now, since their own terrifying events. 

The wildland urban interface for sprawling Colorado Springs stretches from the Air Force Academy on the north to Cheyenne Mountain on the south, running through densely populated neighborhoods near Garden of the Gods and the Mountain Shadows area, burned by the Waldo Canyon fire, said Whitworth, the mitigation expert for the city. The steep firefighting terrain of Cheyenne Mountain State Park runs right down into the forested homes around the Broadmoor. 

“It all keeps me up, to be honest with you,” Whitworth said. 

Whitworth takes daily state fire danger bulletins and adds local emphasis on cloud cover, relative humidity, expected temperatures and fuel moisture. The longer-term work, such as homeowner education and building-code changes, is meant to make incident commanders’ jobs easier. 

The Waldo Canyon fire burned 347 homes in 2012, the most notorious loss in Colorado until the Marshall fire knocked it down the list. Before Waldo Canyon, the fire department worked with 63 neighborhoods on education and preparation. Today, it works with 142 neighborhoods. 

The help includes an offer of a free walkaround for homeowners with a city mitigation specialist. Homeowners on designated days can clear and stack brush from scrub oak and junipers, and the city chips and hauls it away for free. 

Post-Waldo Canyon, firefighters went to city council and sought codes requiring rebuilding or new building in interface areas with ignition-resistant material, like stucco or cement fiberboard. Decking must be composite, instead of wood. Hazardous vegetation needs to be at least 15 feet from the home.

The educators don’t take winters off. 

“People think, oh, December, January, nothing is going to happen. But some of the most deadly fires in Colorado have happened in winter months,” Whitworth said. “So we are constantly educating. Twelve months of the year.”

El Paso County’s large military presence – the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, Peterson and Schriever Air Force bases and other facilities – increases the need for round-the-calendar education. “We get a lot of turnover in homeownership and renters,” she said. 

Spark to ember to flaming, flying chunks

Independent wildfire investigators are sifting through damage in Louisville and Superior to deepen their research and spread the results as far as possible. The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, a nonprofit trade group, combines notes from its field researchers with results from a lab where it can subject home materials and landscape to embers blown on 100 mile per hour winds, and other threats.

Burning particles of grass at the front edge of a fire usually travel only 60 or 70 feet before they cool off, the IBHS Marshall fire investigators said. But those grasses in Boulder County were being driven much farther by the hurricane-force winds that day. And the grasses were within a few feet of many structures.

Once smaller grass embers hit wood fences, chunky landscape mulch, and the houses themselves, then bigger embers start flying and igniting the next structure, said IBHS engineer Faraz Hedayati. 

Once an entire house is on fire amid furious winds, larger and larger embers can skip hundreds of feet across roads and other perceived firebreaks. At the Marshall site, the investigators found downwind homes burned with all the other structures around them still intact, a sign of those flaming chunks hopscotching large distances. 

Under those conditions, said IBHS investigator Daniel Gorham, an engineer and former firefighter, federal designations of which neighborhood is in a wildland interface and which isn’t suddenly disappear. As does the perceived security of sitting on the east side of a six-lane concrete highway.

“It’s oftentimes not a clear line in the sand,” Gorham said. 

Individual homeowners increasingly worried about the vulnerability of their neighborhoods can consider practical steps, the investigators said. Those include adding noncombustible siding, keeping wooden fences detached from the home itself, using double-pane windows, and keeping volatile landscaping 5 feet from the house. Yard sheds often burn first, and may contain accelerants like lawnmower gas or sawdust, they noted. 

As a group, neighbors can help out homeowners who haven’t been able to take basic steps like clearing gutters or cutting back landscape plants, they said. Neighbors should look at the Marshall fire and realize the source of their potential fire might be coming from a roof burning next door. 

At the community level, the insurance investigators said, solutions to climate change layered on top of suburban realities are less clear. 

“Maybe it’s fuel modification,” Gorham said. “Maybe it’s not mowing all the grass but maybe strategically mowing it, such that if there’s a fire that spreads into there, the intensity is reduced.”

Fire investigators will continue digging into the Marshall and other fires at the urban interface for messages they can send to communities and emergency planners. Much like the Marshall fire victims who are rethinking their ideal landscape, though, Colorado’s Front Range communities will have to reconsider their sense of place. 

“The balancing of wanting to live in a place that you want to live, and have it look the way you want it to look, with the reality of the potential for wildfire . . . “ Gorham said. “I don’t have the answer for that.” 

High atop Chatridge Court near Highlands Ranch, Ruth and her family don’t attribute their frequency of fire to climate change. They’re used to it being bone dry in December, and people make mistakes and start fire, she said. They keep the brush cleared outside their fence, as firefighters have advised, welcome the hungry cows, and know it can happen again. 

She thinks neighbors atop the hill, also in big houses, across wide stretches of former pasture, also try hard to build their own versions of a firebreak.

“I think everybody’s doing as good a job as you can expect, living in a rural area,” she said, waving again at the view plans north to Highlands Ranch and west to the Rampart Range. 

“This is why we love it out here,” she said. “Rural. But close to everything.” 

It’s a wet heat . . . or a dry snow . . .

Weather, climate and fire watcher Peter Goble has a complicated phrase he thinks Coloradans might want to learn: Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index. 

But there’s a simpler way to think of it: Rain + Snow – Water lost to heat = Danger level. 

While Coloradans keep hearing about historic drought and temperature levels, Goble, who watches the climate from the Colorado State University climatology center, said we actually aren’t doing that badly lately on rain and snowfall. He offers this chart of precipitation in recent years – at a glance, green years are good, brown years are bad: 

Watching fire danger means not just counting snowfall, but also account for how fast hotter climate change temperatures burn up the moisture. This graphic shows how precipitation has seen fairly normal fluctuation in recent years. The next chart shows how fast it has dried up in recent drought years. (Peter Goble, Colorado State University)

“And it’s remained just highly variable over time,” Goble said. 

Now, add in the higher temperatures from global warming, which is impacting the western United States and Colorado in particular at a faster rate than the rest of the nation. The wetter years don’t help nearly as much if scorching hot days are sucking all the moisture out of the grown and out of river watersheds. Here’s what that more ominous evapotransipiration chart looks like for Colorado:

Watching fire danger means not just counting snowfall, but also account for how fast hotter climate change temperatures burn up the moisture. This graphic shows how precipitation has dried up quickly in recent drought years. (Peter Goble, Colorado State University)

The last 20 years have been awful, frankly. And that’s one major contributor to the high fire danger in both mountainous areas and in the grassy, wildland urban interface areas that burned so disastrously at the Marshall fire and other Front Range locations. 

“It shows how even if you don’t have a trend in precipitation, if you take into account the changes in temperature when looking at our overall water story, it makes a big difference,” Goble said.

ATLANTIC CITY — Like many of the 21,735 casino workers in New Jersey, Mike Luko’s ability to get to and from work can be affected by the direction of the moon, the phase of the moon and what storms are nearby, all of which affect coastal flooding.

“Sometimes it’s a hassle, they end up detouring you at Route 9, or they close the road,” said Luko, of Egg Harbor City. Luko takes the White Horse Pike to get to his job as a carpenter for Bally’s Atlantic City, unless the spilled over bays get in the way.

On average, it’ll happen two dozen times a year. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, that’s how many times the tide gauge at Steel Pier in Atlantic City detects tidal flooding, roughly six times more annually than in the 1950s and 1960s.

It’s not just commuters who contend with the tidal flooding on the roads. Tens of millions of tourists travel to Atlantic City each year.

“We’re a driving market, we’re a large driving destination,” said Michael Chait, president of the Greater Atlantic City Chamber. “It’s two factors, it’s getting home and working.”

Chait described the Black Horse Pike as a “perfect example” of an important road where operations are disrupted by floodwaters.

“When you look at roadways and the infrastructures that currently exist, there are enormous issues. … That also carries into our tourism,” Chait said.

While the roads in and around Atlantic City have been affected by tidal flooding throughout the city’s history, the frequency of flooding is on the rise because of the 1.5 feet of local sea level rise that has occurred since 1911, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Exacerbating the flooding is the sinking of land, or subsidence, along the mid-Atlantic coastline.

Those who frequent the city accept the flooding as a way of life. But for each foot in sea level rise, it will cost exponentially more to deal with it.

The impacts from sea level rise affect almost every facet of life here, from the economy to the culture and physical landscape. To better understand how the sea continues to shape the resort, The Press of Atlantic City and Climate Central are examining the challenges, strategies and opportunities as the city deals with increasing flood risks.

Schools and local restaurants are being forced to cope with increasingly frequent flooding, forcing workers and parents to trod through floodwaters and in some cases miss shifts. Homeowners, particularly those in the back bay neighborhoods, face heavy financial burdens from flooding, whether it’s repairing them after storms or paying more for flood insurance.

For emergency managers, it’s the flooding of roadways that poses “huge problems,” said Kimberly McKenna of the Stockton University Coastal Research Center, which researches and works with local governments and state agencies to monitor and manage intensifying flooding.

“For emergency safety and stuff, it’s probably number one on the list,” McKenna said.

AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center’s Mainland and City campuses work with local emergency managers and responders to “ensure safe transportation of patients” during flooding from severe weather, official James Kilmer Jr. said.

Other businesses in Atlantic City catering to tourists also suffer.

Frank Becktel is a jitney driver, part of Atlantic City’s minibus service that has moved people around the city since 1915. He lives in what he describes as the lowest point in Atlantic City, near Gardner’s Basin. It floods so often on his street, the bottom of the fire hydrant near him is rusted from years of saltwater intrusion.

A Jitney drives through flooded streets during major coastal flooding Feb. 1.

It’s also part of Becktel’s livelihood to help his riders navigate floods.

“We’re owner-operators, we don’t have the luxury of stopping when the water’s too high. We only get paid by the people that we pick up. If they’re standing in the flood waters, we have to get them,” he said.

Becktel said his riders often go to great lengths not to miss work or an appointment.

“They try to walk to places where it’s drier, they stand on high points on the road. If they catch a jitney, they know how to get to the high points, they wear boots and get on the jitney as quickly as possible,” he said.

Both the jitney drivers and the passengers who need to move around the city are in tune with the weather and flooding conditions.

“What time it’s going to flood, what time it’s receding, etc. … We all always discuss this,” Becktel said.

From 1993 to 2017, sea levels in New Jersey rose an average of 1.9 inches per decade, according to a Rutgers University Science and Technology panel. Of that 1.9-inch growth, nine-tenths of an inch comes from natural processes, such as sinking land. A warming world, driven by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, accounts for 0.87 inches, while 0.2 inches of the rise is due to unknown factors. The rate of sea-level rise is increasing globally, and it will continue to affect Atlantic City at a quickening pace.

By 2050, there is a 50% confidence level of sea levels rising 1.4 feet above the 2010 average, regardless of emissions outcome, according to the most recent Rutgers Science and Technical Advisory Panel.

Robert Noland, a professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers, worked with a Rutgers colleague and Climate Central’s sea level scientists to investigate how rising seas could affect workers in Atlantic and Cape May counties.

The research combined localized sea level projections with information about road networks to identify where travel would be blocked by coastal flooding, and how many workers that would cut off from their jobs. This information was combined with a “gravity model,” a planning tool that provides a measure of access based on travel time to job locations.

The paper, published two years ago, warned that increasing sea levels will have “large impacts on people and the economy, and large populations will have access to employment disrupted well before their own properties or places of employment may begin to flood.”

While most climate impacts are felt far more acutely by low-income communities than wealthy ones, Noland said that “in this case, because there are a lot of wealthy households along the shore, they were getting hit hard” as well in the research findings.

And while coastal flooding is widely perceived to be a coastal issue, Noland warned that inland roads also flood throughout the area and that the research showed these closures would increasingly affect workers.

A “big limitation” of the research was that it approximated where residents’ jobs were located, Noland said, but it helps to demonstrate the skyrocketing impacts as seas continue to rise. The researchers developed a measure of job accessibility and looked at how it would be reduced throughout the two-county area as water levels continue to rise.

In Gardner’s Basin, job accessibility falls by more than four-fifths with one foot of sea level rise, according to Noland’s research. In Atlantic City’s Chelsea Heights neighborhood, job accessibility falls more than three-fifths. Six feet of sea-level rise, which is theoretically possible this century, would virtually eliminate job accessibility in the area.

Percent reduction in the accessibility index by block-group for different levels of water height for Atlantic and Cape May counties. Atlantic City would see a 63, 64, 67, and 99 percent drop for one, two, three and six feet of sea level rise, respectfully. 

Noland’s projections assume that roadways and other infrastructure remain unchanged through the coming decades. Efforts to protect them from flooding will reduce the impacts, and the state and local governments have myriad projects planned or underway to protect traffic from worsening hazards.

Like other state agencies, the New Jersey Department of Transportation has assembled a working group to help plan for extreme weather. The group is “developing recommendations that will be incorporated in our project designs and infrastructure maintenance practices” to protect the state’s roadways from effects of climate change, spokesperson Jim Barry said.

Some 4,175 casino employees live in mainland communities where Route 30 offers the most direct access to Atlantic City. More frequent flooding would mean they would have to pay a toll and ride the Atlantic City Expressway, something commuters such as Luko would rather not do.

For him and for Becktel, who has grown accustomed to his rusting fire hydrant, solutions to sea level rise — both long- and short-term — can’t come soon enough.

Noland

Massive bee hives can be found on the grounds of Mount St. Scholastica, a 158-year-old Benedictine monastery in Atchison, Kansas. Image Credit: Stephanie Sandoval/ Newsy

ATCHISON, KAN. — Nearly 100 sisters make up Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery in a city of 10,000 in northwestern Kansas, where acres of rolling fields surround a chapel. Inside, sisters teach about the moral and spiritual call to live sustainably. 

“Over the years, we really have been trying to reduce our carbon footprint, how we can be less dependent on fossil fuels,” said Elizabeth Carillo, a Benedictine sister at the monastery working towards a graduate degree in religion and ecology. 

At Mount St. Scholastica, some like Carillo not only make the faith-based case for action in the face of worsening climate change, they live by what they advocate. A 150-kilowatt solar system helps power the site. The sisters reduce water usage, capture and use rainwater, and sow native plants to preserve biodiversity and feed pollinators. 

The Benedictine sisters at Mount St. Scholastica are among the Catholic communities in the rural Midwest preaching and living by the principles of sustainability in the face of the climate crisis. 

Faith-based institutions like these across the world are increasingly vocal in making religious cases for climate action by promoting environmental sustainability, deploying their own clean energy solutions and even advocating for climate-friendly legislation. 

Theological ethicist and Kansas’ Saint Paul School of Theology associate professor Joshua Bartholomew says local faith leaders' mobilizing for climate-friendly policies could bring about regional political and social change. “I can tell that religion is a huge part of the culture here,” said Bartholomew, who is new to the Midwest. 

(Newsy)

According to the Christian ethicist, religious groups in rural areas advocating for better climate policy and living sustainably, like the Benedictine sisters in Atchison, are “great examples” of the ways faith-based institutions can engage their communities with climate change. 

“It would be a dream for this [to] become sort of a center in this area for sustainable living,” Carillo said, describing how she aims for the monastery to attract community members looking to learn how to live more sustainably. 

Judith Sutera is another sister at Mount St. Scholastica thinking about combating climate change and the faith-based role in environmental action. 

“I think water and drought is becoming much more of an issue in this part of the country,” said Sutera, explaining the ways people living in the Midwest are experiencing the effects of the climate crisis.

Rising temperatures, drier soils and increasing water scarcity are weighty consequences of the warming climate in a state where 40% of the economy is associated with agricultural production. 

Climate change is starting to drive ranges of plants, insects and other animals northward and to higher altitudes, worsening risks of crop failures and yield declines.

The combination of increasing heat and humidity caused by pollution was recently projected by scientists at Columbia University to reduce yields of major crops by 5 percent globally during the second half of this century, with Kansas and adjacent states identified as global hotspots for impacts. Kansas corn and soybean yields could decline by 20% to 30% this century, an economic analysis of the projections shows, potentially costing some Midwestern counties more than $50 million annually.

Mount St. Scholastica’s grounds house a garden for organic vegetables, and a small apiary where some of the sisters act as beekeepers. The European insects are a crucial tool in agriculture; pollinating crops, increasing the amount harvested, and serving as the foundation of the $9 billion honey industry. 

Climate change is among the threats to pollination by native species — a 2021 United States Department of Agriculture study found that warming temperatures and increased rain and snow are among some of the biggest contributors to the decline of wild bees. 

To Sutera, the impacts of worsening climate change in the Midwest are clear, and the case for action is a spiritual responsibility to protect and preserve the world around us. 

“If there is no planet, there will be no other right to life issues,” Sutera said. “I mean, that's pretty basic.”

Greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels and other industrial activities has driven temperatures up more than 2.1°F (1.1°C) globally so far, worsening storms, heat waves, wildfires, droughts and flooding. Scientists warn unchecked emissions are on track to drive global temperatures beyond the international goal of 2.7°F (1.5℃) within two decades. 

Unless fossil fueled energy systems are urgently swapped out for renewables, temperature projections for 2100 show some of the strongest warming in the nation will be in the Midwest, heightening deluges, flooding, heat streaks and crop failures.

In Atchison, the sisters at the monastery have turned to pursuing better global, federal and local climate policies to try to ward off these threats. They're members of the Benedictine Coalition for Responsible Investment, a coalition that invests in public companies to drive changes by exercising shareholder rights.

Involvement in climate advocacy by faith-based communities could have powerful implications for curbing carbon emissions, according to Nadia Ahmad, an associate law professor at Barry University in Florida and visiting associate professor at Yale. 

“We’ve seen historically that faith leaders have been at the forefront of social justice issues, whether it's immigrant justice, climate justice or even looking at racial equality,” Ahmad said. 

In rural parts of Kansas, where a state legislature has historically avoided acknowledging human-induced climate change, let alone acting on it, and some policymakers continue to be misleadingly skeptical of the accuracy of climate science, the political sway of local religious leaders could have far-reaching ramifications.

Sister Carillo believes all religious people have a responsibility for “caring for creation,” or environmental stewardship as a means of “respecting God.” 

“These are dire circumstances and so much of it is an emphasis on upholding the dignity of human life,” said Carillo. “It’s like, when the planet’s dying, how much more of a life issue is there?”

Sister Elaine Fisher maintains the hives at Mount St. Scholastica, which is part of the Midwestern monastery's efforts to live a life of sustainability. Image Credit: Stephanie Sandoval/ Newsy    

The ethical component of the faith-based case for climate action is critical when considering who is most affected by rapidly warming temperatures and rising seas. Across the U.S., those that suffer the most from climate change’s impacts belong to Black, Indigenous and Latinx lower-income communities. In Kansas, more than a hundred thousand people of color live below the federal poverty line. 

“Most of the individuals and nations that feel the disproportionate effect of climate change are the least responsible for this sort of social issue,” said Saint Paul’s Bartholomew. Bartholomew’s research focuses on the relationship between economic justice and racial equality, and he spends much of his time working with Black churches. 

More than a quarter of Kansas’ population makeup frontline communities, living in polluted neighborhoods where collective wealth is low. These are the communities that are facing the greatest repercussions of the climate emergency. 

A 2019 Climate Accountability Institute dataset identified 20 fossil fuel companies as predominant contributors to more than one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — a problem exacerbated by carbon-emitting corporations in industries like agriculture and construction. 

Bartholomew says that exploitation can be explained by connections between white supremacy and environmental degradation. 

“It’s the same enemy,” he said. “The enemy in the system of racism and white supremacy is the same enemy of environmental degradation. And that's basically human beings' domination of one another, and nature.” 

As climate change’s fallout is being felt across every industry, every place and every walk of life, frontline communities are also being forced to rebuild in the wake of costly disasters, which have surged in frequency during the past forty years. Research investigating links between rising wealth inequality and rising disaster costs has found that these populations are left with little to no federal resources and financial support in the aftermath of increasingly frequent extreme weather events. 

For Sister Carillo of the Benedictine monastery, living sustainably and advocating for climate action are important steps faith-based communities can take to help mitigate the severity of such impacts, while aiding the most vulnerable.  

“It really is a moral imperative,” said Carillo. “That care for the Earth was integrally connected with uplifting the marginalized, and helping those who have not had access to power and resources, find their strength and regain that opportunity.” 

Just two hours north of New York City is the Chuang Yen Monastery, a serene site of Buddhist worship sheltered by more than 200 acres of dense woodland. Image Credit: Andrew Shafer/ Newsy

NEW YORK — Bhikkhu Bodhi has lived in a monastery in New York's lower Hudson River Valley for the past 14 years, where he’s witnessed firsthand the compounding effects of climate change. Intensifying storms particularly concern him. 

“People are always responsive to the words of spiritual leaders,” said Bodhi, an American Theravada Buddhist and president of the Buddhist Association of the United States. “If we speak up more explicitly, directly, clearly about the climate crisis and about the impact that it's going to have on humanity, it really calls for a very determined, full-scale response.”

The monk, who has spent decades engaging the Buddhist community on climate change, is one of many religious leaders along the East Coast making the moral case for climate action. 

Spanning many traditions and miles, these leaders and faith groups are advocating for local, federal and global policies advancing an equitable clean energy transition — putting forth spiritual arguments for mitigating climate change. 

Conscious of his carbon footprint, Bodhi is a vegetarian who encourages others to consider cutting meat consumption to reduce personal emissions. He’s also the founder of Buddhist Global Relief, a charity that fights hunger by teaching communities how to create sustainable food sources. 

Buddhist Global Relief helps address a large contributor to carbon emissions — agriculture. The food system produces over a third of global emissions. In the U.S., agriculture is responsible for about 10% of emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. 

“What we found is one of the ways to both support farmers to emerge from poverty and to increase the yields of crops, while at the same time fighting climate change, is to support organic or ecologically sustainable types of agriculture,” said Bodhi. 

(Newsy)

The Buddhist tradition focuses on the theory of causality, or the idea that there are actions behind every consequence. Bodhi blames unchecked carbon emissions on humanity’s prioritization of economic growth. “There’s a whole lattice, a whole network of environmental impacts due to reckless and unrestrained human activity.” 

That harmful human activity was a key focus as world leaders, organizations and activists gathered in Glasgow in the fall for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP 26. Among the faith leaders addressing COP 26 members, the Dalai Lama shared a message calling for cooperative and immediate action to confront ‘the urgent reality’ of climate change. He gave his first speech on climate change in 1990. 

Preceding the COP summit in 2015, the Dalai Lama, Bhikkhu Bodhi and other Buddhist activists signed a statement on behalf of ‘over a billion Buddhists worldwide’, asking global leaders to prioritize mitigating climate change by aggressively curbing fossil fuel production, in the hopes of protecting those most impacted by the warming climate. ‘The Time to Act is Now: A Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change’ joined a consensus of religious calls to action, including the Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis, the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Hindu Declaration on Climate Change. 

At the Chuang Yen Monastery, American Theravada monk Bhikkhu Bodhi explains the Buddhist philosophy of causality and how that connects to human-induced climate change. Image Credit: Andrew Shafer/ Newsy

‘Religions have their problems, and their promise’ 

All traditional forms of religion share a common calling: a moral and ethical obligation to help those in need. Human rights to life, health, food and beyond are irrevocably threatened by climate change, which is why some say religious intervention is required. 

“This is an ethical issue of the future, of the planet, of very vulnerable people,” said Yale University senior lecturer and researcher Mary Evelyn Tucker. “How could it not be moral?” 

Tucker co-directs the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, a project which aims to mobilize climate action in all places of worship. She also authored and edited several books on the relationship between faith and environmental stewardship, with a focus on Confucian and Taoism. 

“All of these [Eastern] religions have a very profound sense of the interdependence of life. All of this is one flow; from the heavens, to Earth, and to humans,” said Tucker. “So humans are co-creators, with the universe and Earth, as caring for these great systems of life.” 

Faith leaders across all denominational boundaries have been increasingly coming together to do climate activism. While the trend is blossoming today, the seed was planted decades ago; religious authorities spoke out about the warming climate even before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988. Ten years later, the nonprofit Interfaith Power and Light was established in the U.S. as a coalition of churches pursuing renewable energy, creating a model that would be adopted across 40 states.

Over the past decade, the number of global, national and local faith groups joining the climate movement has grown to include a robust range of religions calling for policy solutions to address climate change. They’re not just spreading awareness, either. A 2021 Nature article identified that one-third of the institutions that have pledged to divest almost $40 trillion from fossil fuel companies are faith-based organizations.

There’s still a long way to go, especially in the U.S., where religious attitudes towards science are more politicized and antagonistic than in other countries. Examples of this modern faith-fueled mistrust of climate science include groups like The Cornwall Alliance, a Tennessee-based evangelical nonprofit opposed to religious environmentalism and action against climate change.   

“Religions have their problems, and their promise,” Tucker said, explaining that a lack of education about climate change, as well as who belongs to a parish, can sometimes stop local faith leaders from addressing climate change on the pulpit. Local faith leaders may also shy away from talking about climate change because of American political polarization.

People flock from all over the world to see the monastery’s centerpiece: a 37-foot marble statue of Buddha, the largest indoor Buddha statue in the Western Hemisphere. Image Credit: Andrew Shafer/ Newsy

“It's not always easy for these ministers to do it, because sometimes the interests of their congregation could be with a fossil fuel company,” Tucker said. “So, unfortunately, for some people in the pews, it may not be as clear.” 

Who is sitting in American halls of worship is changing, too. Less than half of 10,000 young adults in the U.S. surveyed in a 2021 report think that faith communities are concerned with climate change. Nearly half of those respondents also said they don’t turn to faith communities due to a ‘lack of trust’ in the people, beliefs and systems of organized religion. 

The number of U.S. adults overall who no longer consider themselves to be part of any religious denomination or tradition has also risen in recent decades. A 2014 Pew Research study found 23 percent of the adult population didn’t identify with a religion, up from 16 percent in 2007. Another 2018 Pew survey found a steady decline in the number of American adults under the age of 40 who say they believe in God or a universal spirit.  

A lecturer at Tufts University and former Harvard Law Visiting Fellow of The Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World, Erum Sattar says this disconnect is because organized religions are failing to reach younger generations. 

“They're not growing, and the pews are empty, people don't come, or maybe people are feeling disconnected from what this tradition has to tell them about the world they inhabit,” Sattar said. 

Sattar sees faith communities engaging in climate action as a bridge to repair that divide. “I think it could be a real way to also revive and reinvigorate these traditions that, in a formal way, are losing sort of practical resonance.”

‘A risk we were willing to take’ 

Along the East Coast, climate change is hammering communities with intensified storms, higher tides and worsening heat. Compared to the first half of the 20th century, the Northeast has been seeing 50 percent more rainfall during its most severe storms. 

In September, Hurricane Ida triggered extreme flooding across the Northeast, killing 46 people in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Many of the victims lived in illegal basement apartments in cities with high living costs. It was the region’s worst storm since 2012’s Sandy, which claimed 43 lives in New York City alone. 

As the walls of Ida’s water subsided and grieving families buried their loved ones, what emerged from the wreckage were urgent calls for adaptation; as residents joined officials in rallying for preservation of infrastructure that wasn't built to withstand storms supercharged by climate change.

Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster thinks a key piece to that fortification lies in reducing emissions. The human rights activist and faith leader was one of three rabbis arrested in October for blocking the entrance of BlackRock, New York City’s largest financial firm, in a demonstration organized by the Jewish Youth Climate Movement. The protest aimed to pressure the firm to divest in companies that fund the fossil fuel industry. 

She was there as a rabbi, but also as a mother, concerned for her children as they inherit a volatile future. “We knew that we were risking arrest by blocking the entrance to the building,” said Kahn-Troster. “That was a risk we were willing to take to get the message across.” 

Kahn-Troster serves as the Executive Vice President of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) — a faith-based organization that lobbies major U.S. companies to reduce their contributions to emissions.  

Her father was a Jewish climate change activist, so Kahn-Troster grew up learning about a fundamental religious obligation: caring for others and the world in which they live. 

“We are caretaking the world as our obligation to other people. We know we only have one planet, and we all live on it,” said Kahn-Troster. “And we should all have the right to enjoy living here, sustainably. I think that message is very clear to me from my tradition.”

To the rabbi, that obligation extends beyond responsibility for environmental preservation and sustainable living, but also includes advocating for curbing emissions, expanding clean energy solutions and investing in sustainable agriculture, among other climate solutions. 

“As faith communities, we have something to say to structures of power, right?,” said Kahn-Troster. “Especially in the United States, faith is part of a political conversation.”

If it takes getting arrested for companies to stop exploiting the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves, the rabbi is willing to make that sacrifice. She isn’t just preaching to one congregation, but protesting on behalf of all of them. 

“Our political leaders are motivated when they hear from faith leaders,” she said. “That's an important piece of our role.”

{related}

By Ayurella Horn-Muller (Climate Central). With news segment by Amber Strong (Newsy)

St. Paul’s Episcopal Key West, which is trying to spur climate action among its congregation. (Photo by Ayurella Horn-Muller)

KEY WEST, FLA—Grounds cloaked in greenery weave around a towering ivory chapel in the heart of downtown Key West, Fla. Founded in 1832, St. Paul’s Episcopal Key West is not only the oldest Christian congregation in the area, but one of the oldest congregations of any religious tradition south of St. Augustine. 

The church is on its fourth building, the first three lost to fires and a hurricane. After nearly two hundred years of its congregation working to keep it standing, Reverend Donna Mote, the newest rector at St. Paul’s, is now worried about a more subtle risk: rising seas. 

“It would be a shame to preserve all these buildings, and then have people scuba diving in them in 100 years,” Mote said.

St. Paul’s is located on one of the highest points of Key West; one of the 1,700 islands that make up the Florida Keys, where 90% of the land mass sits only five feet above the Atlantic Ocean. While scuba divers won’t be visiting the church in the coming century, with seas rising and storms intensifying, the eight-square-mile island city is facing more frequent and chronic flooding. 

Local officials and organizations are working to hold back the seawater climbing higher, threatening to plunge the area underwater by the turn of the century. But billion-dollar resilience projects in the pipeline—intended to raise roadways and floodproof infrastructure to combat flood risk—will depend on community buy-in. 

Just five months into her role at St. Paul’s, Mote intends to roll out a renewable energy audit of the church site to see how they can use cleaner energy. She also tries to set a sustainable example for her parishioners: she’s on a plant-based diet and encourages them to bike instead of drive, when possible.

While St. Paul Episcopal Key West sits on land high enough to protect it from all but the worst storm surges, a Climate Central analysis found that by 2080, rising seas will introduce a 1% annual chance of coastal flooding to the church’s property. That creates a one-in-four chance of a flood impacting the site every 30 years—a hazard so severe only 3% of the U.S. population currently lives in areas subject to this kind of risk. 

Mote belongs to one of several faith-based communities in Florida turning their attention to climate action, making religious cases for environmental preservation, clean energy and emissions reductions. At St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, parish members lead beach clean-ups. The First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee donates to the city’s sustainability carbon fund as they seek to reduce their carbon footprint to net zero. The First Baptist Church of Orlando has been recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for reducing pollution through energy efficiency. 

Experts and faith leaders say provincial places of worship have a leading role to play in facilitating that support, and helping people engage in local environmental and justice issues. “We can either preach now to help people realize this,” said Ryan Gladwin, Palm Beach Atlantic University associate professor of ministry and theology. “Or we’re just going to have to be mourning with them, in the future, what we’ve lost.” 

(Newsy)

Key West is home to more than 24,000 permanent residents and attracts millions of tourists each year. Cobblestone walkways line tourist-saturated storefronts, adjacent to a sprawling, weathered dock overlooking the ocean. It’s picturesque until it starts to pour. Many locals are quick to name two converging streets downtown—Front and Greene—as frequent flood zones. In the lowest-lying parts of the longest island in the archipelago, heavy rainfall and high tides cause streets to flood, damage homes, and submerge vehicles. Monroe County expects another 17-inches of sea level rise by 2040. 

“The flooding has definitely been more than I’ve ever seen,” said Stephanie Piraino, manager at the Key West Key Lime Company, just a two-minute walk from the waterfront. Piraino said heavy rains can be brutal on the older properties and high tides often mean she’s taking her shoes off before wading through ankle-deep water in the parking lot. 

Hurricane Irma swept through in 2017, the force of the Category 4 storm surge strong enough to flip the store’s giant hundred-pound freezers upside-down. “We had everything covered. We put tarps in front of everything, did the sandbags with wood next to the door, but there’s really no way around it,” she said. Up to a foot of seawater came in. 

After Irma made landfall, Piraino remembers how a handful of local churches supplied donations to those in need. “Bug spray and charcoal saved the week for me and my kids,” she said. 

She used to live in a trailer in the nearby community of Stock Island, where dealing with chronic flooding was just a part of life. “Every time there was a high tide, the water would flood so much that it would come all the way to my front porch,” she said. She’d often struggle with electrical outages because of seawater submerging parts of her mobile home. 

With an average housing market value of just over $700,000, Key West is one of the most expensive cities to live in Florida. Workers need to earn $33 an hour to afford rental rates, according to the Florida Housing Data Clearinghouse. Although more than 11.6% of the population falls below the national poverty threshold, the city only has 390 properties set aside as affordable housing stock for those that can’t manage steep rental costs. Black, Indigenous and Latinx people make up the highest proportions of extremely low-income renters. In Key West, where 37% of the population are Black or Hispanic, more than 43% of those residents live in poverty.

It’s those residents who feel the consequences of climate change more intensely. Post-disaster government assistance programs are structured in ways that disadvantage them. “The least expensive, or the most affordable housing, also tends to be the most unsafe,” said Tom Callahan, executive director of Monroe County’s Star of the Sea SOS Foundation, run by the local Catholic church, which distributes two million pounds of food every year to nearly 10,000 residents in the Keys.

Nonprofits and places of worship are critical resources for those community members reeling from a hurricane or flood. Churches are often a place of solace for residents seeking help, offering everything from food to housing repairs to counseling. 

Many also serve as staging areas during a storm, or places to stay for emergency response volunteers. A 2020 FEMA assessment of faith-based responses to disasters found that after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit Louisiana, “local churches and community organizations often served disenfranchised groups missed by formal response efforts.” 

The Star of the Sea Foundation lost its roof during Hurricane Irma; it took six months to rebuild. Restoration funding came partially from the Archdiocese of Miami, which is made up of 118 Catholic parishes and missions spread across South Florida. Archbishop Thomas Wenski oversees all of those coastal congregations, where he says people are reminded of climate change every time there’s a hurricane or high tides. 

But as oceans rise, so do social divides. Climate gentrification is threatening affordable housing in Miami and across the region, as developers pour investment into premium elevation areas, pricing out existing residents. 

Faced with employment instability, rising rent and increasing floods, Callahan said a similar story is unfolding in Key West, as many moved north to find affordable housing options and work. Four percent of the Keys population left following the 2017 hurricane because of a lack of affordable housing options. Three years later, the coronavirus pandemic meant the islands were sealed off for months. Since then, many businesses have rebounded, but the recent, record-breaking surge of the COVID-19 delta variant in Florida has exacerbated the problems.

In June, Monroe County moved forward with a $1.8 billion plan to raise 150 miles of roads over the next 25 years. But that elevation solution will only apply to unincorporated roads in Monroe County, or non-governed areas outside of city limits.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a storm risk management study for the Keys that proposed investing almost $3 billion into floodproofing infrastructure and elevating nearly 4,700 homes, 43% of which are located in Key West, costing the city about $1.2 billion. The federal government will cover 65% if it is approved by Congress. The proposal is being formally submitted soon, according to Monroe County Chief Resilience Officer Rhonda Haag.

“We have a list of infrastructure projects and we’re ready to move forward, but the biggest problem is the funding,” Haag said. Increased taxes will be likely. “We’re going to need the residents and businesses to work with us.” 

Houses of worship could wield considerable influence on a small island. “Stories move people, right? And we know that pastors are very, very effective public speakers,” said Erum Sattar, a lecturer at Tufts University and a former Harvard Law Visiting Fellow of The Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. “They can get to your heart and they can motivate action.”

(Photo by Ayurella Horn-Muller)

But after working for the city for nine years and living in Key West for more than two decades, city of Key West sustainability coordinator Alison Higgins can only think of one local church that has been vocal about climate change. 

That doesn’t mean it isn’t on their minds, though. “There’s no concern about flooding at this site, not at 11 feet above sea level,” said Reverend John Baker about the Basilica St. Mary Star of the Sea, one of the largest and oldest places of worship in Key West. “But if there’s a storm surge, it doesn’t matter if you’re 11, or 20, feet above sea level, you don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

A Climate Central analysis found that by 2070, about half the Basilica site will become subject to occasional flood risk. By 2080, the whole area will face at least a 1% annual chance of flooding. By century’s end, the likelihood of flooding for the more than 200-year-old church property will increase 10-fold.

Baker’s led the only Catholic church on the island for 14 years. He’s less worried about flood risk at the church, and more about the consequences of climate change for the region. Although he’s quick to cite Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, a landmark document credited with driving faith-based environmental action, Baker doesn’t believe it’s his role to engage his congregation on the need for climate action. 

“I talk about Jesus Christ. And that’s why people come here. To discuss something that’s a controversial issue, you’re not bringing people together,” Baker said. “It’s best to not touch it because of that divisiveness,” he added. 

Downtown Key West. (Photo by Ayurella Horn-Muller)

A new study published in Environmental Research Letters found that over the last five years, a majority of U.S. Catholic bishops have been “nearly silent and sometimes even misleading,” in their official messaging to parishioners about climate change and the pope’s encyclical.

But a member of the Basilica St. Mary Star of the Sea’s congregation, Callahan, from the food bank, doesn’t think local government is doing enough to prepare for climate change, especially for the groups that need it most. 

“Climate change is the 800-pound gorilla that the county is trying to ignore,” Callahan said. “But they have finally, most recently, at least, started looking at it.”

The city’s preparing an adaptation plan for vulnerable infrastructure, like the low-lying roads and historic buildings already enduring flooding, which they expect to be ready by 2023. They’re also collaborating with the U.S. Navy to map flood patterns by tracking high tide as it moves through the island. 

“I think it’s kind of a good thing that we have been getting our feet wet once in a while,” said city sustainability coordinator Higgins. “You’re learning to live with that water because that’s what you’re going to have to do if this community is going to survive.”

Higgins hopes more religious sanctuaries will get involved with their adaptation and mitigation plans. “They’re an incredibly trusted messenger,” she said. She sees those collaborations as opportunities for local places of worship to help amplify support for such initiatives; including everything from urging their congregations to get involved with ongoing projects to planning events that promote them. 

“They can call me anytime to come and talk to them about how we can work together.” 

In the meantime, some faith leaders like Mote, from St. Paul’s Episcopal, are taking the moral call to environmental action more urgently. Mote has a background in disaster chaplaincy, or providing on-the-ground spiritual guidance to those affected by a crisis, such as a hurricane, and has trained other members of the clergy to be effective first responders. 

“We are called to be on the ground in the wake of a disaster,” Mote said. “What about our role in addressing the factors that are leading to the increase of these disasters?”

The Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center recently raised its air conditioning units 18 inches to protect them from floods. Like many in the historically Black Lincolnville neighborhood in St. Augustine, the museum is coping with more frequent and intense flooding as seas rise and hotter temperatures drive heavier storms. 

“When we do get high tide or a lot of rain, the streets tend to flood,” museum Executive Director Regina Gayle Phillips says. “There are certain areas that are worse than others.”

The Lincolnville Museum & Cultural Center, housed in the former Excelsior School building constructed in 1925 for black students during segregation. Credit: The Jaxson

About 150 years ago, newly freed slaves established what’s now the Lincolnville Historic District in the marshes bounding Maria Sanchez Creek. A hotbed for racial justice activism, in 1964 the neighborhood was the site of a Martin Luther King Jr. sit-in that helped lead to Congress’ passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Already, parts of Lincolnville are experiencing occasional or frequent flooding, particularly on the east and south sides of the neighborhood. The impacts are amplified by the neighborhood’s paved surfaces and lack of green spaces, which can absorb runoff. Within 30 years, a Climate Central analysis shows more than a dozen locations through the neighborhood will be at risk of chronic flooding unless steps are taken to protect them.

Phillips says the city put in some flooding controls in recent years, but they aren’t enough. Rising water’s threat to the cooling system of the museum is dwarfed by the threat to the community that it was built to chronicle and celebrate. “Sure, you can build back,” she said. “But you know, it doesn’t get built back the way that it was before.”

An 1885 map of St. Augustine showing the location of Lincolnville. Credit: State Archives of Florida

Lincolnville is one of the historic areas in the nation’s oldest continuously occupied European settlement that are threatened by rising seas caused by temperature increases from fossil fuel pollution. Everything, from millennia-old indigenous artifacts to centuries-old Spanish architecture and modern Black history, is at risk.  

And so is the local economy. Millions of annual “heritage tourists” spend more than $1.6 million a day.

“St. Augustine lives on its heritage tourism,” said Steven Roberts, the chief of interpretation, education and visitor service at the Castillo de San Marcos fort, the city’s biggest attraction. “It is the bread and butter of the St. Augustine economy.” 

Local, state and federal agencies, officials and conservators are working together through a cobbled-together historic preservation and resiliency system to hold back the water. There are financial limits to what they can do.

Similar scenes are playing out across the country. A historic downtown that helps draw 2 million visitors a year to Annapolis, Maryland, floods regularly; officials there are scrambling to fortify hundreds of buildings as the city prepares for flooding 350 days each year by 2040. In Charleston, South Carolina, 3,500 historic buildings are in low-lying areas that are inundated by frequent floods. And historic structures in New Orleans were destroyed by hurricanes Ida and Katrina. 

Though it faces a similar flood risk to nearby historic monuments like the Castillo de San Marcos, Lincolnville doesn’t rank as high in the city’s assessment of archaeological value, nor does it contribute as much to the local economy. 

An aerial view of the Castillo de San Marcos. Credit: Google Earth

Around 800,000 people visit the Castillo every year — with ticket revenue helping fund its preservation — while the Lincolnville Museum doesn’t see more than 2,500 visitors.

“We don’t get the tour trains coming through here,” said Phillips. “They have given us a lot of different excuses why they can’t come through here.”

St. Augustine Chief Resilience Officer Jessica Beach says the city has spent $10 million on flood projects in Lincolnville. As a national monument, the Castillo is federally owned, and Florida owns and operates a seawall that protects it.

“Overall, this challenge is faced by the entire city,” Beach said. The city has applied for grant funding to update its stormwater master plan to incorporate protecting historic resources; it relies on different revenue sources to help pay for flood protections. “We don’t have all of the answers yet,” she says.  

Andrew Rumbach, an associate professor at Texas A&M and member of the Colorado Cultural and Historic Resources Task Force, says the costs of protecting cultural sites from climate change far exceed local government resources. 

St. Augustine will eventually have to make “impossible choices” on what sites should be sacrificed, Rumbach says. “This is going to create very real inequalities.”

The Castillo de San Marcos in historic Downtown St. Augustine. Credit: The National Park Service

SPANISH ARCHITECTURE UNDER THREAT

A 1668 pirate attack on St. Augustine left dozens dead and prompted its Spanish occupiers to build the Castillo de San Marcos to protect against hostile ships. Now, it’s the water itself that threatens the national monument, which is the city’s oldest building and the oldest masonry fortification in the continental U.S. 

Built using coquina, a local limestone through which water can easily pass, the fort is increasingly affected by flooding associated with sea level rise. Floodwaters could reach the structure multiple times per year by mid-century, up from today’s average of less than once a year, the Climate Central analysis shows.

When driving and wading through floodwaters is required, fewer visitors come, according to Roberts. The parking lot and surrounding area floods on an almost monthly basis, with seas continuing to rise at a quickening pace.

Flooding at the Castillo de San Marcos’ parking lot. Credit: The National Park Service

For the Castillo, “managed retreat,” or relocating to an area of lower risk, is out of the question. “This is a large fort with more than 300,000 blocks of coquina stone,” Roberts said.

In addition to fortifying sea walls to protect the fort, a virtual adaptation strategy is also underway. University of South Florida Digital Heritage & Humanities Center Director Lori Collins is working with the National Park Service to digitally document it, using drone surveys and handheld laser scanning tools to photograph and record every inch.

While state and federal conservators are collaborating to fortify some historic sites, the onus largely falls on local officials to ensure their city’s cultural resources — and sources of economy — can be saved.  

“I think having the historical resources within our city, that’s all the more reason for us to be aggressive with this and do what we can to help protect these critical assets,” says Beach. 

This year, Florida passed legislation that earmarks $100 million annually for local government resilience planning and infrastructure. But these programs, along with federal funding opportunities like FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance program, are “really competitive,” she says, and don’t cover the full cost. 

How cities source funding to protect cultural heritage from sea-level rise differs. 

Beyond federal and state backing, the city of Annapolis is suing 26 oil and gas companies to try to hold them liable for climate change, while Charleston has been loosening design guidelines to reduce homeowners’ costs of elevating historic buildings. Both of these cities also have budgets that dwarf St. Augustine’s $60 million; Annapolis plans to spend $152 million this year, and Charleston $234 million.

“For a small municipality like ours, if we’re talking about a $30 million project, that’s over half of the entire city’s budget,” said Beach. “It’s just not possible for us to be able to do a large project without some type of supplemental funding.”

The Tolomato River laps at the base of a centuries old well at Shell Bluff Landing. Credit: The Florida Public Archaeology Network

INDIGENOUS HISTORY SLIPPING AWAY

Elsewhere in St. Johns County, Shell Bluff Landing is a 6,000-year-old site in Ponte Vedra Beach with a coquina well and a shell mound associated with indigenous groups like the St. Johns, the Timucua and the Guale. Archaeologists are working there to map the shoreline before the ancient site is swept away. 

It’s one among many low-lying historic and prehistoric zones in the Southeast at risk of destruction by sea level rise. 

“It’s a huge concern,” says Texas A&M Associate Professor Rumbach. “There’s not nearly enough of the kinds of resources we need to protect them to go around.” 

Rumbach says policymakers tend to prioritize protecting historic main streets and commercial properties that generate revenue, so the economic value of a site can outweigh cultural or historical significance. “So they can definitely become casualties of a changing climate,” he said.

Shell Bluff is one of more than 16,000 archaeological sites at risk from sea level rise statewide, tracing back to Indigenous origins in Florida almost 15,000 years ago. By the close of the century, nearly half of those sites could be inundated.

Unlike the Lincolnville Historic District and the Castillo de San Marcos, there are no solutions being explored to protect the rapidly eroding shore rife with indigenous heritage. Archaeologist Emily Jane Murray says the state’s strategy revolves around monitoring and mapping. It won’t be long before the site is underwater. 

“If this is what’s happening to the places where people used to live now, what’s coming for the places where we live?” Murray said. “These impacts are just kind of gonna snowball.”

“We pulled into the driveway and it was love at first sight,” she said. “Once inside, it was obvious just how well built the house was.”

Since then, they’ve sealed up the original wavy glass windows, fixed walls, installed insulation and new plumbing and wiring, and raised the entire waterfront property to protect against regular flooding. And as they’ve rehabilitated what McGuirk called a “gem,” they’ve watched the coastal landscape around it change as well.

“The point that we can see when we look out there is called Crab Point, and when we bought the place in 2010 there were 80 trees on that point,” McGuirk said. “Now there’s one. They’ve fallen and gone.”

The Chesapeake has become a global hotspot for the emergence of ghost forests—stands of dead and leafless trees before they topple into piles of logs. Within the Chesapeake, Dorchester County may be the greatest hotspot of all.

Throughout the rural and forested land that surrounds their house, Susan points out “acres and acres” of dead trees. “There’s a little church called Emmanuel Episcopal Church, and it is surrounded by all those dead trees.”

The culprit of arboreal mortality tends to be environmental change. In Colorado, ghost forests are being created by beetles attacking pines at higher altitudes as temperatures warm. In California, forest overcrowding from a century of wildfire suppression followed by severe drought left more than 100 million trees dead.

Here, the key culprit is salt, which can kill a tree outright or make it more susceptible to attacks by pests.

Global sea rise caused by heat-trapping pollution and a gradual sinking of the land around the Chesapeake have combined to create some of the world’s fastest local rates of sea rise. That’s been pushing saltwater higher up shorelines, where it’s seeping into sweeping stretches of intact forest and killing them off.

The McGuirks’ home in Wingate, Md. (Jay Fleming)

McGuirk hasn’t been able to figure out the exact age of the house, but she said local oral history suggests it was built well over a century ago. Data gathered by scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) indicate the property would have been dry back then, most likely covered with forest or farmland.

Now, the house is surrounded by lawn, mud and marsh, and the land is regularly covered by water spilling up from an estuary. “When everything is aligned—a full moon, easterly winds, high tide—it gets pretty dicey,” McGuirk said.

The appearance of these assemblages of towering deadwood along the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf coasts have captured the fascination of national media outlets, which point to them in photo essays as flamboyant evidence of the grim reality of climate change.

The natural sinking of the land following the prehistoric retreat of glaciers from North America is also driving up water levels throughout the region, compounding the briny impacts of climate change. And as the forests die back, their roots decompose, lowering the ground further still.

As coastal woodlands die, birds and other wildlife that had depended upon them for food and habitat are forced inland. The changes are also affecting parcels of land that in some instances have been owned by the same families for hundreds of years.

“As we start to lose forests, these landowners are losing their identity—they’re losing how they can use the land,” said Matthew Hurd, a forester with the Maryland Forest Service.
 “For me there’s a huge mental shift between someone who owns a forest and manages it versus someone who has marsh.”

Coastal timberlands and farmlands are losing value as salt continues its upward march. Rising sea levels can have corrosive effects on the fertility of coastal lands, with knockout punches often delivered by storm surges that leave large doses of salt behind as they subside.

Coastal ecologists point out that the ghost forests of the Chesapeake don’t represent local ecological carnage, so much as a transformation from one ecosystem to another. Beneath the desiccating branches of dead trees, marshland is seizing the soggy land from forests that can’t abide the soil’s new chemistry.

To survive as seas rise, marshes can grow vertically—though only up to a point before they get swamped. They can also migrate inland, conquering areas that formerly harbored forests, farms, and yards. Experts point to ghost forests as visually arresting indicators of marsh migration.

Marshes provide critical habitat for fish and ducks. They also offer powerful natural protections for coastal communities and infrastructure from flooding during storms. More than half of wetlands nationwide are estimated to have been destroyed by development and other forces, though they remain widespread in relatively undeveloped places like Dorchester County.

With few roads or buildings blocking their migration, research by Climate Central’s sea level scientists has indicated marshes could expand their territory in Dorchester County by more than a third from 2000 to 2050. Other Eastern Shore counties are projected to see even bigger expansions of marshland.

The new marshes aren’t perfect replicas of the old ones. An invasive variety of Phragmites (aka reeds) tends to beat native marshland species into new areas as trees start to die back and the forest canopy opens up. 

The reeds’ feathery plumes can tower on rigid stems over a dozen feet. Native wildlife struggle to use the Phragmites for nesting and foraging, compared with native plants. 

Remains of trees show the damage from saltwater intrusion (Jay Fleming)

“We’re seeing a real expansion of that species as the forest retreats,” said Keryn Gedan, a biologist at George Washington University. “We think it just does better in the shady conditions than the native grass marshes. It’s the first one to take advantage of the increasing light availability.”

Matt Kirwan, a marsh scientist at VIMS, began investigating the emergence of ghost forests in 2000 as an undergraduate student. His research has found that 80,000 acres of forestland and 20,000 acres of farmland have transformed to marshland since the 1850s across the Chesapeake Bay.

“We’re right at the edge of a live forest and a dead forest,” he said on a hot late morning in early June as he bushwhacked through dying coastal forest near the Moneystump Swamp in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, about 20 miles north of McGuirk’s vacation home.

Kirwan was there leading a team of scientists from his lab on a weeklong fieldwork campaign as they gathered data from sites from Virginia to Delaware. The fieldwork was part of a multiyear effort to monitor physical and chemical changes as coastal forestland succumbs to marshland.

Research by Kirwan’s and other labs is helping to predict the emergence of ghost forests. This could help avoid costly efforts to protect and restore forests that are doomed to die.

“This was our transition zone plot, which was supposed to have 50 percent living and 50 percent dead trees,” he said, pointing around at an abundance of dead snags. “We established it last year and I would say there’s nowhere close to 50 percent living trees right now.”

A few hundred feet further inland, while talking in the cool shade of a large pine, Kirwan said the tree overhead might look healthy, but that it was already destined to be killed by the rising concentrations of salt in the soil beneath it.

“The little stuff dies before the big stuff,” Kirwan said. “You’ll see lots of healthy-looking pine trees but then you look below you and there’s nothing in the understory to take their place. So the forest, even though it looks healthy, it’s already effectively dead. Whenever those large trees die, it’ll only be marsh.”

The Dixie fire ranked as the second-largest California wildfire on record - surpassed only by the million-acre-plus August Complex fire of 2020. Photograph: David Swanson/Reuters

On late summer and autumn days, when the hot, howling winds sting the skin and chap the lips, Holly Fisher starts to feel a bit unsettled. So do many of her neighbors in the town of Paradise, a name that evokes bitter irony in northern California.

“It feels eerie,” she said. Three years ago, this arid, blustery weather portended the Camp fire. It consumed the town, killed more than 80 people, and burned down Fisher’s home. As the region reeled in the aftermath, the same potent convergence of weather conditions – known as “fire weather” – helped fuel the North Complex fire in 2019, and the Caldor and Dixie fires this year.

Across the Sierra Nevada foothills, fire weather is increasingly becoming a distressing reality of life. Over the last half-century, global heating has dramatically increased the number of annual fire-weather days in the region, a Climate Central analysis of federal weather station data shows.

The Climate Central research reveals that the number of annual fire-weather days in what the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) defines as the Sacramento Drainage climate division climbed from an average of seven days in the early 1970s to 22 in 2020. This year there were 25.

The number of fire weather days has jumped from seven in the early 1970s to 25 in 2021.
 

Analysis of weather station and fire data also indicates that after the Dixie fire erupted in mid-July this year, nine of the ten days in which it grew the most explosively were characterized by fire weather conditions. The blaze tore through 1m acres of forest and razed much of the city of Greenville.

The new analysis found that a similar trend is bearing out across much of the US west. From the Pacific coast to the Great Plains, the number of fire-weather days is increasing. In some regions, fire weather has come to characterize nearly a quarter of the year.

The findings are consistent with a growing body of research suggesting that California is entering an unprecedented new era of fire. Climate scientists have found that in parts of the state, fall fire-weather days are expected to double by the end of the century. California’s fire season, which has historically peaked in the late summer and autumn, has been expanding.

“Stringing together many extreme fire-weather days in a row allows fire sizes to quickly escalate,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate and fire scientist at the University of California, Merced, who advised the Climate Central analysis and co-authored the research regarding fall fire weather.

“We used to have a lot more regional fire hotspots and now those hotspots are growing. It’s a contagion and that is certainly compromising our ability to manage fire,” said Abatzoglou, adding that the changes are creating “synchronous” fire risks across the region– and the world – making it more difficult for governments and agencies to backstop one another with firefighters and equipment.

Characterization of fire weather by Climate Central.

On days with fire weather, a small spark could ignite a megafire in a landscape that has been primed to burn by decades of prolonged drought.

The combination of rising temperatures and low humidity also sucks moisture out of the soil, further allowing flames to zip across forests and towns, uninhibited by moisture.

“Everything is so dry that as soon as you blow one of those embers out of the existing fire perimeter, things just catch like that,” said Karen McKinnon, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies climate breakdown and destructive weather.

Global heating and build-up of flammable vegetation have contributed to the increase in wildfires.

McKinnon’s research has examined the role of climate change in driving dryer conditions that are leading to the increase in the recent fire weather, but she pointed out that “it’s not just related to climate”.

In northern California, fires like the Dixie fire have been further fueled by massive build-ups of vegetation – which has accumulated on the landscape during a century of aggressive fire suppression.

“I’m always feeling like a sitting duck,” said Trina Cunningham, the executive director of the Maidu Summit Consortium, who saw a tribal health center, the homes of several members, and a 2,325-acre expanse of culturally important land burn up in the Dixie fire. “The velocity of the fire was just mind-boggling,” said Cunningham. “I couldn’t even comprehend it.”

Her two sons, who work for local fire crews, narrowly escaped the blaze as it bore down on the town of Greenville and surrounding areas where many Maidu tribal members lived. As she watched the wind pick up, her eldest reported that he was safe – but the crew’s truck and equipment were destroyed.

As drought and fire weather simultaneously overtake regions across California and the west, fire crews have been strained and short-staffed.

By then, Cunningham had begun frantically making calls, appealing to local fire chiefs and the Bureau of Indian Affairs to send more firefighters to the region. “I kept asking – we need help, we need support,” she said. Eventually, a small crew did arrive – but thousands of acres had already burned.

“It’s been really frustrating to have to sit there and watch year after year of neglect take its toll,” she said. “We need to start tending to our landscape as we tend to our gardens.”

For Cunningham, the comment is more than metaphor. For centuries before European colonization, California Indians kept forest fuel loads under control by using what foresters now call “prescribed burns”. Today many critics say the practice is underutilized. To reduce the fire risks wrought by the increase in fire weather, experts have for years been calling on western states and the federal government to radically boost the use of prescribed fire to clear would-be fuel from forests.

With extreme fire weather in the mix, firefighters can no longer expect cooler, more humid night conditions to help them tamp down big blazes. As drought and fire weather simultaneously overtake regions across California and the west, fire crews have been strained and short-staffed.

“A lot of us here had come to dread summers, because we know that there’s always a potential for a crazy fire season,” Cunningham said. In the aftermath, “there’s been so much fear, anger, trauma – and just sheer exhaustion”.

Californians have had to cope with a seemingly nonstop cycle of disasters in recent years. But the expanding season and growing intensity of wildfires creates a new level of anxiety, according to David Baron, a neuropsychiatrist at the Western University of Health Sciences in Southern California.

“In California you learn, ‘Yeah, earthquakes can come, the big one might come,’ but you almost tend to deny it to some degree,” said Baron. “Fire is a different story because every fire season they’re getting worse and worse.”

Climate Central’s analysis shows that nearly the entire state appears to have been affected by more frequent fire weather, though no data is available for a narrow band of the state’s north-eastern corner. Other states are also seeing stark changes. In parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oregon and Washington, fire weather is at least twice as prevalent as it was 50 years ago.

To combat the increase in fire weather, there’s scientific consensus that the global economy must be flipped from reliance on polluting fossil fuels to 21st-century technologies. For example, local electrical grids powered by solar and wind energy, augmented by battery storage, produce negligible carbon pollution, and they reduce threats from long-distance transmission lines, which have sparked some of California’s deadliest and most destructive fires.

“I don’t think that these big wildfires are going to stop until something really gives,” said Fisher. Paradise is unlikely to burn again in the near future – there’s not much left to burn. “But I worry for other communities, about who’s going to be next.”

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and during the ensuing economic slowdown, Jacksonville virtually shut down. Businesses shuttered their doors and most who were able to started working from home. That meant far fewer internal combustion engine vehicles were being driven, leading to massive reductions in air pollution and noticeably cleaner air.

“There was definitely less traffic,” said Veronica Glover, a lifelong resident of Jacksonville’s Urban Core and the executive director of the Sister Hermana Foundation, a non-profit that helps families fighting cancer. The only time Glover noticed any serious traffic was during the food giveaway events that she helped organize or at COVID-19 testing sites across the city.

Veronica Glover, left, and her mother Carolyn Myers, right. Credit: Veronica Glover

What Glover witnessed was happening all across the globe, but as people and industries returned to their routine use of cars and trucks, air quality worsened again. That’s because the largest contributor to carbon emissions in the U.S. is transportation — contributing to 29% of national emissions. And 76% of emissions in the transportation sector come from the fossil fuel-burning engines in our cars, trains, trucks and buses. 

Electric vehicles present a solution for reducing this substantial share of harmful pollutants. Experts say electrification of trucks and cars would be an essential step toward canceling out America’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Often called “net zero,” such an elimination of heat-trapping emissions would also require deep investments in solar and wind generation and battery storage, possibly nuclear power, and an overhaul of transmission lines nationally.

Princeton University’s Net Zero America program has been researching scenarios that could see the U.S. reach net zero by 2050. Under a scenario with an aggressive approach to electrifying vehicles, one that would see sales of electric vehicles outnumber sales of gas guzzlers within a decade, they estimate Florida could avoid nearly 10,000 premature deaths by 2050 caused by diseases from tailpipe pollution. 

The benefits wouldn’t just be felt in frontline communities like Glover’s. Air quality across the entire state would improve if internal combustion engines were replaced with electric vehicles.

Putting all those electric vehicles on the roads would mean more than just building and buying them, though. A raft of infrastructure overhauls would be required, including scaling up installation of chargers and changes to utilities’ electrical transmission strategies.

Florida officials last year prepared a roadmap that could help the state achieve such a daunting task. The plan included everything from adapting transportation infrastructure to advancing electrified mobility and electrifying disaster preparedness. 

The Republican-controlled legislature passed its first piece of climate legislation in 2020. With the next legislative session beginning in January, Advanced Energy Economy policy lead and Clermont City Councilman Ebo Entsuah is paying close attention to what policymakers bring forward. 

“Especially in a state where we do see a number of natural disasters, it’ll be important for our legislators to get together and put out some of these recommendations from the floor, from the electric vehicle roadmap,” Entsuah said. 

Traffic heading towards downtown Jacksonville. Credit: Sharkshock, Shutterstock

Multi-billion-dollar boost

Florida has the third-highest number of new EV charging stations added between 2017 and 2021, behind California and New York. At 58,160, Florida also has the second highest number of registered EVs in the country.

Dory Larsen, the Electric Transportation Program Manager for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, says thanks to booming EV sales, utility investment and charging deployment, Florida is poised to lead the EV market across the Southeast. To meet that demand, an additional economic boost could come from EV manufacturing in the state, she says. 

“We found that in Florida, if all of the cars, trucks, and buses were electric today, Florida would have an extra $12.5 billion circulating through the state’s economy, annually,” said Larsen. A SACE report found that in 2019, the state and consumers spent $27.6 billion on gas and diesel, while fully electric transportation would have cost only $17.2 billion. 

The time it takes to move from combustion engines to electric motors will have a significant effect on curbing overall greenhouse gas emissions. EVs would need to dominate American auto sales by the end of this decade for the U.S. to successfully decarbonize by 2050, helping it meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and avoid the most catastrophic potential levels of climate change.

The federal administration is taking steps toward net zero planning as President Biden has called for 50% of passenger vehicle and light truck sales in 2030 to be zero-emission vehicles. On Thursday, the federal administration released the newest framework of their $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan, which it is trying to push through Congress. 

The new framework includes a $555 billion commitment to curbing carbon emissions, with a focus on making clean energy cheaper through tax credits. The legislation also specifies electrifying transit systems to improve air quality, reducing consumer costs of EVs manufactured in the U.S. and directing clean energy jobs towards lower-income communities. 

An electric vehicle at a charging station. Credit: Bill Bortzfield, WJCT News

Electric vehicles in the River City

Convincing drivers to switch technologies for the sake of air quality could be a tough proposition. Fleet purchasers wield a lot more consumer influence, and the rental car industry will play a critical role in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Tesla’s new $4.2 billion deal with Hertz signals a shift in the way the rental car industry is responding to consumers’ growing sustainability demands.   

For individual consumers, fuel savings can be a draw, helping to start to replace some of the internal combustion engines on the roads with cleaner-running electric vehicles. 

Electric vehicle fueling costs per household can be 50% to 75% lower than for gasoline-fueled vehicles. A 2020 U.S. Department of Energy study found that in Florida, an EV driver’s lifetime fuel costs are an average $7,000 cheaper than for drivers of fossil-fueled vehicles. 

That cost-effectiveness is what won Jacksonville resident Erik Gonzalez over. “After having done some research into EVs, and Tesla in particular, I was really just impressed by not just the performance aspect, but the reliability and the cost of maintenance,” he said. 

Gonzalez just invested in his first Tesla. He gets about 285 miles out of a full charge and has driven about 6,000 miles. “That equates to a cost savings of about $1,100 so far, just in fuel savings,” he said. Gonzalez also recently signed up for a new incentive program for EV owners that JEA launched in October. 

The rebate can shave nearly $100 a year off the electric bill and offset some of the cost of installing an electric charger.  

“This is a win-win for the utility and for the EV owners that get approximately 2,000 miles of free driving every year they enroll in the program,” said Dave McKee, JEA’s program manager of electrification.

Gonzalez is one of hundreds who have signed up for the rebate, which is part of JEA’s larger Drive Electric program. JEA and the federal government also offer incentives for individuals and companies that want to install electric vehicle charging stations, on top of up to a $7,500 federal tax credit for buying new electric and hybrid vehicles.

Many Jacksonville residents considering EVs may also be concerned about what their city utility’s energy mix means for their personal carbon footprint. JEA is still very dependent on fossil fuels. Last year the utility got just 1% of its energy from renewable sources and this year is expected to be very similar. 

JEA, however, has a stated goal of getting 30% of its energy from carbon-neutral sources by the end of this decade. It’s working through the logistics of how to get there. 

JEA’s downtown Jacksonville headquarters. Credit: Bill Bortzfield, WJCT News

“We are going to know more, probably, in a year and half to say what our forward plan is, and we’ll have a much better understanding of how renewables play into our mix,” said Vicki Nichols, JEA director of customer solutions, market and development. 

Jacksonville is not unique. Electric vehicles still only make up 1% of passenger cars worldwide, but many of the world’s biggest automakers are investing in manufacturing EVs, from Ford to Toyota to Volkswagen, in a range of price points and styles. 

JEA is also working with Jacksonville car dealers on educating shoppers about the benefits of electric vehicles, including at Tom Bush Volkswagen in Arlington.

“Volkswagen’s really getting into electric vehicles in a big way. They’re developing a whole fleet of charging stations across the country, and they just launched the ID.4 this last spring, and it’s selling so well. We’re really excited about this vehicle,” said Megan Del Pizzo, vice president of Tom Bush Volkswagen.

In addition to price, one of the most common concerns Del Pizzo and her colleagues hear from customers interested in EVs has to do with finding charging stations. According to Del Pizzo, that’s pretty much a non-issue in the River City.

“The amount of chargers we have in Jacksonville now, you really don’t need the range anxiety that a lot of people have when they’re driving an electric car, because there are chargers everywhere: at dealerships, workplaces, at the (St. Johns) Town Center,” she said.

Duval’s high ratio of charging stations per driver is due, in part, to a relatively low number of EV vehicles on Jacksonville’s roads. 

“We benefited from entities like Town Center mall coming out with large charging banks… but less than 1% of our market right now is EVs,” said Nichols with JEA. “But a year from now, who knows? We may be behind. So we’re committed to keeping up with the market.” 

As EVs grow in popularity, gas stations throughout Jacksonville and elsewhere could install charging stations to benefit from the transition to a majority electric transportation sector. But a new Florida law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in June, prohibits local officials from requiring gas stations to install electric vehicle chargers. 

“It really is taking the power out of the hands of the municipalities and the counties and preventing them from hitting those 100% clean energy goals,” said Ebo Entsuah, the state policy lead at AEE. State legislators’ shying away from clean-energy legislation and gas industries’ lobbying against local sustainable policies doesn’t help. “It definitely can stall a bit,” Entsuah said.

Trachea transplant recipient Sonia Sein talks with the lead surgeon of her procedure, Dr. Eric Genden, left, during a checkup visit. Credit: Marshall Ritzel, AP Photo

‘A triple burden’

Exposure to air pollution increases the chance that people will end up in the hospital, and if they have respiratory or cardiovascular diseases like COPD, stroke, lung cancer or asthma, it lowers their chance of surviving them. That means where you live within Jacksonville can actually be a matter of life and death.  

“In low and middle income areas of cities, where historically, highways and roads tend to have been built in… in those areas where there’s a lot more car traffic and transportation traffic, we see a higher increased risk or higher increased prevalence of these diseases,” said Scott Helgeson, a pulmonologist at Jacksonville’s Mayo Clinic.  

Air pollution disproportionately affects those living near busy freeways and congested roadways, in neighborhoods that typically have larger portions of Black and Latinx residents, partly because of racist historical housing practices such as redlining. These frontline communities also tend to live close to power plants or other industrial facilities, which compounds the poor air quality.  

“There’s a triple burden,” said Marianne Hatzopoulou, a professor in engineering at the University of Toronto and head of the school’s transportation and air quality research group. “Not only are disadvantaged populations experiencing the highest levels of air pollution, but they are also the ones that are generating the least amount of emissions from transportation in a day,” she said. 

Hatzopoulou says a growing body of evidence linking air pollution exposure to social disadvantage should be taken into account when local and state governments evaluate transportation decisions. 

“What we want is the benefits of these policies to actually accrue to the people who are exposed to the highest level of air pollution,” Hatzopoulou said.

For nearly two years, researchers tracked air quality disparities between low-income neighborhoods of color and high-income white neighborhoods in Jacksonville and more than 50 other U.S. cities. The recently published study, co-authored by University of Virginia atmospheric chemist Sally Pusede, focused on levels of NO2, or nitrogen dioxide — an air pollutant released from fossil fuels that can cause and exacerbate chronic health problems like asthma. 

In Jacksonville, people of color living in low-income neighborhoods breathe air containing nearly a quarter more NO2 than non-Hispanic whites living in high-income areas. 

That same study also compared diesel NO2 emissions on weekends with weekdays, finding that a drop in heavy trucking on weekends led to pollution cuts of more than 60% on average, with frontline communities benefiting the most.

“This is another piece of evidence that says to policymakers that these trucks are really important, to control the emissions of diesel trucks,” said Pusede. “People should be paying attention to the equity dimensions of these vehicles. That is the most important part.” 

Throughout her life, Jacksonville resident Veronica Glover has had to watch her friends and family suffer through terrible illnesses. Her mother has COPD and is a breast cancer survivor, her husband died from colon cancer and her grandmother died from lung cancer. Glover, who herself is a breast cancer survivor, worries that pollution from vehicles and industrial sources is contributing to the prevalence of these diseases in her neighborhood just northeast of Downtown.

“Inhaling that same type of toxin over and over and over again is definitely not good for our community,” she said. While Glover tries to help residents deal with the effects of pollution, she hopes city leaders and other policymakers start pursuing electrification strategies that will help communities like hers breathe cleaner air. 

“It would definitely impact and increase our numbers, in saving lives,” she said.

Today’s climate and energy choices shape tomorrow’s shorelines

New Climate Central research shows that under the current emissions pathway leading toward 3°C global warming, about 50 major cities around the world will need to mount globally unprecedented defenses or lose most of their populated areas to unremitting sea level rise lasting hundreds of years but set in motion by pollution this century and earlier.

We have the opportunity now to change this future. Meeting the most ambitious goals of the Paris Climate Agreement will likely reduce exposure by roughly half, allowing nations to avoid building untested defenses or abandoning many coastal megacities.

Related Resources Visualization Library Maps Summary Brief Spanish Summary Brief Scientific Paper Media Alert

Climate Central’s scientists examined where populations are most vulnerable within the next 200 to 2000 years and under different scenarios of warming. The results are alarming:

• The high tide line could encroach above land occupied by roughly 10% of the current global population (over 800 million people) after 3°C of warming (5.4°F).
• Many small island nations are threatened with near-total loss.
• Parts of Asia face the greatest overall exposure, both this century and later. Asian countries make up eight of the top ten most at-risk large nations (with at least 600 million people exposed at 3°C).
• In China, after 3°C of warming, roughly 43 million people now live on land expected to be below high tide levels at the end of this century, and 200 million on land at risk over the longer term.
• China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia are all in the top five countries most at risk from long-term rise—countries that have added the most new coal-burning capacity from 2015-2019.

Written in collaboration with researchers at Princeton University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, Climate Central’s peer-reviewed research paper focuses on the contrast between 4°C and 2°C warming scenarios, and appears in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters. This summary report instead focuses on the contrast between 3°C and 1.5°C scenarios, which correspond to continuing the current trajectory vs. making deep and immediate cuts to climate pollution, dropping to roughly half of today’s annual emissions by 2030.

Picturing Our Future

The peer-reviewed research has enabled Climate Central to develop a number of powerful visual tools to communicate the future risks of warming and to show what we can save.

Figure 1. Sapporo, Japan: Projected Future Sea Levels

Utilizing Google Earth images, Climate Central developed realistic renderings of coastal locations under different future warming scenarios. Through the Picturing Our Future interface, users can select from among hundreds of images of at-risk sites around the world, including financial centers, stadiums, museums, temples and churches, and other historically or culturally significant buildings. Each image allows toggling between a number of scenarios. Users can look at current conditions and compare where water levels could end up after 1.5°C of warming (if we implement measures to sharply cut carbon pollution) up to 4°C (if we allow unchecked carbon pollution).

Figure 2. Bangkok, Thailand: Coastal Risk Screening Tool

Climate Central’s updated mapping tool allows users to compare sea level projections after different temperature increases, highlighting the areas that could be saved by reducing our carbon pollution and limiting global warming. Users can enter nearly any global coastal address or location to see where land is projected to be below the high tide line. Sliders allow users to see the projected effects set by different amounts of global warming, from 1.0°C to 4.0°C and can choose between roadmap and satellite settings.

Figure 3. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Projected Future Sea Levels

Climate Central worked with visual artist Nickolay Lamm to create photorealistic illustrations of the multi-century sea level rise consequences of 1.5°C and 3°C of warming at a number of iconic locations identified as vulnerable in the research.

Figure 4. Glasgow, United Kingdom: Projected Future Sea Levels

We have created fly-over videos contrasting the projected future sea levels after 1.5°C vs. 3°C of global warming in many coastal cities around the world where 3-D building data is currently available in Google Earth.

Key concepts: 

• Full differences in sea level rise caused by higher vs. lower emissions pathways will take centuries to unfold—but these consequences will be determined by humanity’s actions in the coming few decades. Higher levels of warming will require globally unprecedented defenses against flooding or force abandonment in scores of major coastal cities worldwide. If we limit the warming to 1.5°C through strong compliance with the Paris Agreement, these consequences may be limited to a handful of locations.
   
• Cumulative carbon emissions from human activities in the 20th and 21st centuries are projected to sustain global temperatures for thousands of years. There are a number of reasons for this, including that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and because of possible feedback loops such as thawing permafrost. The carbon already in our atmosphere is warming the planet 1.1°C—enough for global mean sea level to rise about 1.9 meters (6.2 feet) over the coming centuries, even with no net global emissions after 2020.
   
• Roughly 5% of the world’s population currently live on land below where the high tide level is expected to rise (1.9 meters) in coming centuries based on carbon dioxide that human activity has already added to the atmosphere. If carbon emissions are lowered to the proposed limit of the Paris Climate Agreement and warming is kept to 1.5°C, this would lead to a median 2.9 meters (9.5 feet) of multi-century sea level rise, affecting land inhabited by 510 million people today. But if the planet experiences 3°C of warming, the high tide line could encroach above land occupied by as much as 10% of the current global population (over 800 million people).
   
• Threats are global but concentrated in Asia, where megacity futures hang in the balance, and four of the top five global nations building the most new coal capacity are also the most endangered. In absolute terms, China has the most to gain from limiting warming, with roughly 50 million people on land that multi-century sea level rise threatens after 3°C warming, but which is not threatened if warming is limited to 1.5°C.  
   
• Many smaller nations, particularly islands, have much higher percentages of their population at risk of exposure. Under a 3°C warming scenario, the Cocos Islands, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Cayman Islands, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and the Bahamas each face a future with land home to more than 90% of their current populations below the median projected multi-century high tide line. With 1.5°C warming, the threat still exceeds 60% for each.

Methodology

As detailed in the newly published peer-reviewed research, these findings are based on localized long-term sea level projections published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Strauss et al. 2015), overlain against the AI-based coastal elevation dataset CoastalDEM version 1.1 (Kulp and Strauss 2018) and 100-meter-resolution global population density data from WorldPop. Exposure estimates were aggregated to city level using urban agglomeration boundary data from Natural Earth, and aggregated to national level using administrative boundary data from GADM 2.0.

ATLANTIC CITY — Paula Rudolph Stryker drives her grandson to the Brighton Avenue School almost every day. While the drive involves the usual bouts of slowdowns with traffic lights and rush-hour congestion, one thing has slowed her more often in recent years.

Flooding.

“I’ve found more problems with the flooding. ... There have been a couple of times when we’ve had a delayed opening because of the flooding,” said Stryker, 63.

As seas rise at a quickening pace, the water continues to creep closer to where the city’s students spend most of their days — in its 11 public schools.

Warming trends are aggravating threats to student health and threatening reliable access to classrooms nationwide, with the resort a poster child for flood impacts. As the effects of generations of federal underspending on infrastructure and schools trigger complaints and debate from Route 40 to Washington, D.C., experts warn that few American classrooms are ready for climate change.

“Long before this pandemic, our schools were all in dire need of repair,” U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross, D-1st, said in a statement in January after introducing a bill that would provide $130 billion for schools, targeted at those most in need. While that stalled as a standalone bill, House Democrats’ Build Back Better Act includes $82 billion for repairing and modernizing public school infrastructure.

Here, the impacts from worsening flooding occur around the school properties. And in a district of just 4 square miles where only the high school has busing, the city’s youth and their caretakers are increasingly forced to wade through and drive around floodwaters as part of their routines.

The impacts from sea level rise affect almost every facet of life here, from the economy to culture and physical landscape. To better understand how the sea continues to shape the resort, The Press of Atlantic City and Climate Central have spent much of 2021 examining the challenges, strategies and opportunities as the city deals with increasing flood risks.

Miriam Spellman, of Atlantic City, discusses the risk of flooding to the Pennsylvania Avenue School while picking up her great grandchildren William, 3, and Asa, 8. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer, Press of Atlantic City.

A.C. schools at risk

From 1993 to 2017, sea levels rose 1.9 inches per decade along the Jersey Shore, according to the Rutgers University Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel. The same study forecasts an 83% chance of an additional 11 inches of sea level rise by 2050.

Three of the city’s schools are in locations that make them prone to experiencing coastal flooding at least once a year on average, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and journalists in Princeton, Mercer County.

Another four have annual flooding somewhere on the school grounds, such as a parking lot or sports field. By 2050, that number will increase to 10 unless infrastructure is built to protect them from tidal flooding. The only exception is Atlantic City High School, which is a little less than a mile north of Absecon Island, on Great Island, due to its higher elevation. However, the sports fields on the western edge of the school property will face annual flood risk by then.

The Brighton Avenue School, where Stryker drops off her grandson, is one of the few that does not face an annual flood risk. However, by 2030, the lowest-lying parts of the school are expected to flood at least once a year and, by 2050, water will reach the steps at the entrances at the corners of Morris and Arctic avenues at least once a year on average. Reaching the school at those times will be a challenge, with those streets also covered by briny floodwaters.

The effects of heat-trapping pollution also are hitting American students particularly hard in their schools, many of which require upgrades or repairs. New Jersey has been the fastest warming state in the nation in the past 20 years when compared to the 20th century, according to FilterKing, which used data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Americans underspend on school maintenance and repairs by $46 billion a year, according to the 2016 “State of Our Schools” report co-produced by the 21st Century School Fund, the National Council on School Facilities and the U.S. Green Building Council.

“Schools are vulnerable to a lot of the climate impacts that we expect, particularly those in coastal zones,” said Perry Sheffield, a pediatrician and researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She said those impacts are associated with “a longstanding neglect of environmental health” on school grounds.

The Press contacted principals of the most severely affected Atlantic City schools, but none returned requests for comment. Barry Caldwell, superintendent of the Atlantic City School District, in a text reply said preparing schools for future flooding challenges is on the district’s radar and that a meeting has been set with city officials for Thursday to discuss the issue.

Hurricanes and rainstorms are intensifying and seas are rising, bringing risks of mold alongside flood damage. Sheffield said flooding and fear of climate change can also affect the mental health of students.

Rising temperatures are worsening hazards for student athletes and can make it more difficult to concentrate and learn.

“There’s going to be an emerging literature — there’s some, but not a lot yet — on things like learning impacts and test scores, which affect graduation rates, which we know are directly related to overall life earning and well-being,” Sheffield said.

Some congressional Democrats have been pushing for an infusion of spending on America’s public schools following the upheaval wrought by COVID-19, which illuminated and exacerbated impacts of entrenched economic inequality. The average school building in the United States is more than 50 years old, with federal figures showing half of them require repairs.

‘It floods really badly’

On a recent cloudy, breezy Friday afternoon, students who attend the Pennsylvania Avenue School hung out on the playground. As kids giggled and yelled, parents patiently waited outside the school. The parents agreed they would take the clouds and breeze over the chance of coastal flooding any day.

“I don’t drive, and where I live, it floods really badly,” said Evelyn Coulbourne, 24, whose 9-year-old son, Anthony, attends the school. She said she has to pack extra shoes for Anthony if they walk to school during a flood. “I try to get a ride when it floods, but that’s not possible because everyone else works.”

Evelyn Coulbourne, 24, says flooding occasionally makes it difficult for her to get her son Anthony, 9, to the Pennsylvania Avenue School. “I try to get a ride when it floods but that's not possible because everyone else works,” Coulbourne said. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer, Press of Atlantic City

The Pennsylvania Avenue School is one of the newest public schools in Atlantic City, finished in 2012, when the concerns for increasing tidal flooding were well known. Still, most points on the property are at risk of at least one flood a year, with the entrance near Virginia Avenue facing potential flooding as many as eight times in a typical year. By 2050, some parts of the school property will likely flood more than 10 times a year, the analysis showed.

Councilman Jesse Kurtz, whose 6th Ward covers the Richmond Avenue School, Chelsea Heights School and Atlantic City High School, said schools have to be built with the possibility of coastal flooding in mind.

“I’d like to see the ‘get it done right the first time’ mentality. ... If you’re near water, that type of infrastructure should fit into the initial infrastructure,” Kurtz said.

Both of these fields are at risk

Scientists have found that climate change will strain the global food supply as drought and heat waves collide more often in the future. That concerning finding comes from a new study published in Nature Food that analyzed historical data to project how drier heat waves will affect corn and soy fields around the world.

Corn and soybean yields may fall 5% globally between 2050 and 2100 because of the combination of a drier and hotter climate. That’s on top of losses due to hotter temperatures alone. The figures were determined by analyzing historical patterns in agriculture and weather along with a suite of climate model projections.

Yield is the portion of a crop that can be harvested and sold.

How corn and soy yields will be affected by climate change around the world

According to the study, North America, Europe, and Africa will experience the harsher effects brought on from the combination of drought and heat.

Adapting to climate change with sustainable farming practices

It’s going to be harder to irrigate farms in the future. Water will be more scarce and evaporate more quickly. Drier heat waves “put pressure on surface water resources, and could also slow the recharge of aquifers that farmers depend on for irrigation in many places,” said Lesk. “This all adds to the challenge of adaptation.”

Conserving and improving soil conditions will be important for crops to grow well in drier climates. Farmers will need to adapt to ensure their soil retains water, carbon, nutrients, and microbes. That includes minimizing tilling, continuously covering soils with plants or mulches to prevent erosion, and crop diversification.

Growing different types of crops in the same field can keep soil conditions stable and farmers on a better economic footing. If one type of crop fails the loss will be less than the entire farm failing. “It doesn’t necessarily always need to be conventional crops,” said Fenton Beed, an administrator at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

But if farmers want to stick to corn and soybeans, they can still diversify within those types of crops. “There are options of different crop varieties and combinations that may be better adapted to the local, changing conditions,” said Beed.

Breeders are trying to develop crop varieties that can survive in the new combination of stresses brought by climate change. For mass-grown crops like soy and corn, there are only a few suppliers who dominate the market. Consolidation in the industry further provokes the worry that there is not enough competition in the market to drive the innovation needed to confront the changing climate.

This story was produced through a collaboration with Climate Central, a non-advocacy science and news group.

IOWA — Jean Eells dug into the earth on her farm after the fall harvest and discovered a problem. It was 2016 and the farmer that rented her land had just left. When she pulled her spade from the ground she noticed the soil was hard and compact, with layers looking  like “thinly stacked dinner plates.”

Healthy soil soaks up and stores more water, helping farmers grow healthy, nutritious and productive crops. But warming temperatures are threatening the productivity of croplands through the Midwest, with new data showing how drought makes corn and soybean crops much more sensitive to heat. 

“I want to make sure that my soils are in good shape, so that I will have a farmer that can make money,” says Eells. “And if my soil is degraded and doesn’t handle the drought, doesn’t handle wet conditions, I’m concerned about that.”

Good soil also helps crops withstand the types of weather extremes that are becoming more common as pollution traps heat. Heat waves, drought and floods will continue to become more intense as temperatures continue to rise. Like Iowans saw this summer, heat waves and drought will collide more often.

Eells said she decided to take a more active role in managing her land before a new tenant farmer took over. She switched to no-till practices and started to plant cover crops, like oat and rapeseed, because they help keep moisture in the soil before the upcoming growing season. 

The U.S. just faced the warmest summer on record, tied with 1936 during the Dust Bowl. And a summer-long drought hit parts of Iowa and other Midwestern states. As drought and extreme heat hit the region more often and with greater intensity, its productive soils are at risk. 

“We can’t till our way out of this,” says Eells. 

The fall after she planted cover crops, Eells noticed her land looked healthier. One sign of this was the earthworms burrowing throughout the soil, which was now loose enough that they had space to move. 

The new research on warming temperatures and drought warns that drier heat waves will reduce harvests, threatening to further narrow farmers’ profit margins. 

Experts say that paying closer attention to soils and improving farming practices like Eells has done on her land in Webster County, will help crops and those that farm them handle the additional stress.

Drier heat waves

In a global study published Monday, scientists at Columbia University showed where drier heat waves will damage major types of crops as temperatures continue to increase. 

The Midwest stood out as an international hotspot, where damage to corn and soybean yields may be upwards of 10 to 20 percent after 2050. Iowa and its economy will experience impacts, given its a top producer of corn and soybeans across the U.S. 

Midwest farmers will likely see conditions that look a lot like Texas currently, says Corey Lesk, a climate scientist at Columbia University and lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Nature Food on Monday. 

Some counties in the western part of Iowa may suffer financial losses nearing $60 million per year in corn and $30 million per year in soybeans later in the century, according to an analysis of Lesk’s and economic data. 

The timing of these hot droughts will matter. “It’s better to have a drought form early in the season versus the middle of the growing season,” said Justin Glisan, Iowa’s state climatologist. 

Even though Iowa is getting wetter, much of that rainfall is coming in heavy downpours, causing extreme flooding. And intense rainfall in the middle of a drought doesn’t always provide relief. “That rainfall runs off faster than it soaks and so drought acts almost as a concrete barrier,” Glisan said.

And there has been a reduction in rainfall in July, right when it’s getting hotter and corn is maturing, says Glisan.

Less rainfall in July is “a worst-case scenario because corn needs its water in the middle of the growing season,” said Dennis Todey, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Midwest Climate Hub, which helps agricultural managers make climate-informed decisions.

If a drought strikes earlier in the summer, as was the case this year, by contrast, it can help with agricultural production by prompting corn and soybean crops to root more deeply in search of moisture. Roots can get up to six feet deep in Iowa, says Todey. Deep roots allow the plant to have more access to water beneath the soil surface, which is better for yields during stressful conditions. 

While Iowa farmers saw some recent relief from rain, much of Iowa is still in a drought and in need of a soil water recharge going into winter. 

There are also considerations when it comes to how crops are bred, says Lesk. It usually takes decades to develop crops. Crops are now being bred for combinations of climate stresses that rarely occurred in previous climates.

Looking to soil as a solution

“Soils are the first line of defense dealing with these issues,” Todey said. Healthy soils can hold a lot more water than unhealthy soils, meaning more productive crops.

Status quo farming won’t work anymore, says Eells. But “farmers are fabulous problem solvers.”

One of the best things that farmers can do to protect their crops is to care for their soils. 

Eells described visual tests that farmers like her use to check the health of their soils. If the soil is healthy it will look like coarse breadcrumbs, while she said unhealthy soil looks like cocoa powder. The coarse grains in healthy soil are filled with carbon and microbes that help “glue” the soil particles together.

Eells started using no-till practices when she noticed her soils were hard and compact. No-till leaves plant material left in the field after harvesting on top of the soil, creating a barrier that helps prevent water loss. 

Tilling also breaks up healthy, coarse soil, releasing the carbon that growing plants put into the soil and killing some of the microbes. When this happens, the soil struggles to hold onto water and crops have less access to water on hot, dry days. 

Eels also began planting oat and rapeseed as cover crops and continues to work on finding the best crops that work for the farm. Cover crops extend living roots out into the soil that help glue the soil particles back together, opening up space for water and air to move. They also keep the microbes alive.

“Cover crops and no-till practices are like insurance for topsoil,” says Eells.

No-till is the most common conservation practice used by farmers in Iowa and its usage is increasing, though 2017 research from Iowa State University showed it was only used on 27 percent of the state’s farmland. Cover crops are only used on 4 percent of the land, the researchers found, while one in five farmers here said they’d be willing to pay a portion of the cost of cover crops on leased land.

Adding another crop to the rotation, especially one that grows early, can change the kinds of microbes living in the soil. New and different crops give them an assorted menu. 

“We have climate change upon us,” she said. “We can’t wait.” 

Investing in the future

Eells teaches conservation practices to fellow women farmers and landowners because she wants to make what? accessible. 

“So often we perpetuate the same style of outreach in conservation and we find that by simply shifting that outreach it makes it accessible and lets women thrive as learners.”

Women are an invisible group in agriculture, she says. Although, in Iowa, women own or co-own nearly 50 percent of all farmland. 

“If we do conservation without them, we are doing it with one arm tied behind our back,” she says. 

She works with organizations like the Women Food and Agriculture Network, or WFAN and participates in a lot of peer-to-peer mentoring circles.

Women are stewardship partners, they don’t just sit back and collect a check, said Eells. When women leave a mentoring circle, the vast majority take action.

“Once they know there is a problem and that other women have solved those problems, they do it,” she said. “They take action.

(FOX 46 CHARLOTTE) – On sweltering summer days, the Roof Above homeless shelter in Charlotte doubles as a cooling station. Air conditioning in the building, and more recently fans and misting units on the porch, provide respite from dangerous conditions outside.

“Heat is really tough on those folks that we serve,” says Randall Hitt, Roof Above’s vice president of engagement. “If you’re somebody who doesn’t have a place to call home, like you and I might have, it’s really hard spending hours outside when you’re talking about 90-degree-plus temperatures and a lot of humidity.”

An analysis of weather station data showed Charlotte was on average 2°F warmer last summer than it was in the summer of 1970, with 11 more days when the temperature reached 95°F.

As heat-trapping pollution continues to build in the atmosphere, cities and rural areas are getting hotter. Like most cities, Charlotte has been warming more quickly than surrounding areas because buildings, paved roads and parking lots trap heat during the day and release it more slowly overnight, compared with areas that have lots of trees and other plants.

This urban heat island effect pushes local temperatures on average 6 degrees higher than its surrounding rural areas, according to a recent analysis from Climate Central.

“If it’s already hot outside and then you get extra heat in the city, that’s where you start running into human health issues and heat stress and deaths,” said Dr. Matthew Eastin, an urban meteorology expert at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He has published research showing the urban heat island had nearly doubled in intensity between 1975 and 2014 in Charlotte.

High temperatures can harm health, particularly that of the elderly, children, pregnant women, individuals with heart and chest illnesses, outdoor workers and those experiencing homelessness.

From exhaustion, discomfort and nausea to excessive sweating, palpitations, and seizures, elevated temperatures, especially when stretched over several days, can cause health complications, says Liz Cary, a registered nurse who is on the advisory board of North Carolina Clinicians for Climate Action. Heat-trapping air pollution can worsen these health impacts by raising temperatures even further in cities.

Since 2010, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has recorded 2,813 to 5,057 heat-related emergency room visits every summer across the state. Hotter summers led to more hospitalizations.

However, the impact of heat is likely to be much larger than is shown in the data, as only a fraction of people seek emergency care for heat-related illnesses. At the Roof Above shelter, for instance, a part-time nurse looks for signs of tiredness and dehydration during health checkups in the summer months.

The impacts of these warming trends are being felt unequally across Charlotte, and across the world.

Research shows neighborhoods that are home to low-income residents and communities of color are disproportionately hotter than those with predominantly white homeowners. Jeremy Hoffman, a climate scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, led research that showed temperature differences can be as large as 20 degrees at the same time in different parts of the same city.

That’s because these hotter areas tend to be historically marginalized and underfunded neighborhoods in areas that were formerly redlined under racist federal urban policies. They contain more paved surfaces including asphalt lots, warehouses and industries, and fewer parks and trees that can cool the air.

“One of the first things cities can do is plan for reinviting nature into the city,” Hoffman said.

The city of Charlotte currently has 45 percent of its land covered by trees and the city aims to add another 5 percent to reach its 50 percent goal. Acknowledging that the existing tree canopy is not equally distributed, the city’s latest Tree Canopy Action Plan aims to “equitably and proactively expand the quality and quantity of the tree canopy for the benefit of all citizens of Charlotte.”

With increased daytime temperatures and reduced nighttime cooling when heat islands form, access to cool indoor spaces becomes important to protect those at risk.

For low-income communities who already live in warmer neighborhoods, air conditioning is often unaffordable. Day cooling centers like the Roof Above help, but people are unlikely to find relief late into the evening and night.

As the Queen City continues to grow rapidly, new developments bring opportunities to retain and incorporate green spaces through urban planning. Such natural cooling features would help protect future residents from increasingly extreme heat.

“It’s not something we can lackadaisically approach,” Dr. Eastin says. “We do need to take it seriously soon.”

A man crosses the street in downtown Biddeford on a scorching Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

BIDDEFORD, Maine — Duane Dennison knows more than most about the effects of hotter summers and heat lingering into the night: He lives near the Saco River in a tent community of about 20 people experiencing homelessness.

As temperatures soared into the mid-90s Aug. 12, the 61-year-old painter sought relief at the Seeds of Hope Neighborhood Center, which offers air conditioning, snacks and a place to socialize for up to 30 people at a time. His options to cool off in the summer are the cooling shelter, swimming in the river or hanging out at the local supermarket’s meat department.

“It’s harder in summer than the winter,” Dennison said of trying to stay comfortable outside.

Duane Dennison, 61, gets out of the summer heat at the Seeds of Hope Center in Biddeford on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Dennison, a painter by trade, is currently living in a tent and said he’s grateful for the air conditioning at the center. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Like many other Maine cities, Biddeford is regularly experiencing temperatures far higher than surrounding suburban and rural areas. On average, it is a little over 6 degrees warmer than its surroundings, about the same difference as in nearby Portland, according to an analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit science and journalism organization.

That is because low tree cover and heat-absorbing infrastructure like roofs, buildings, pavement and parking lots trap more heat and release it slowly, creating a so-called urban heat island effect. But unlike other similar-sized cities, Biddeford is strategizing about how to minimize heat in the future by preserving and adding green spaces and using more porous surfaces.

Elevated temperatures can pose a threat to public health, especially older people, children and outdoor workers, contributing to their general discomfort and exhaustion, poor sleep and respiratory and heart problems. This urban heat and its health impacts are further aggravated by rising temperatures caused by heat-trapping pollution.

“[Climate change] is essentially raising that thermostat in the background,” Jeremy Hoffman, a climate scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, said. “On top of that, you’re adding the urban heat island effect.”

A sign on the door at the Seeds of Hope Center in Biddeford on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021 announces extended hours on days with heat advisories. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Biddeford, Maine’s sixth-largest city with more than 21,000 residents, is located about 25 miles southwest of Portland in York County in the southern part of the state. The former textile mill city has undergone major redevelopment in the past decade to add upscale housing and retail stores. Mostly low-rise buildings and river breezes mitigate some of the heat, but the buildings have flat, dark roofs that trap the warmth.

The city has advanced climate and heat plans relatively quickly. In the fall of 2020 the city had already adopted a Climate Emergency Declaration Resolution, one of a handful of Maine municipalities to do so. It also formed the Biddeford Climate Task Force in January, charging it with creating a plan with adaptation, mitigation and sustainability strategies.

As that group looks at how climate change is affecting the city, it also is starting to look at ways to curtail heat buildup. Biddeford must consider current and future development carefully and preserve green spaces where carbon is sequestered, Steven Reiter, the task force’s chair, said.

The task force will consider adaptation strategies to mitigate the heat island effect, including rain gardens, tree planting and more porous surfaces for infrastructure, he said. It also is trying to educate the public.

Reiter said while taxpayers aren’t willing to shoulder many of the costs to invest in new or upgraded infrastructure, those costs will rise if mitigation efforts are delayed too long.

“If we do nothing, we’re in for a deep hurt,” Reiter said.

Andrew Russell, 45, eats breakfast near an air conditioner at the Seeds of Hope Center in Biddeford on a hot Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Russell shares a non-air conditioned, two-bedroom apartment with his wife, their daughter and a roommate. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Increased daytime temperatures and reduced nighttime cooling can trigger exhaustion, stress and even heart attacks, especially among the elderly who don’t adjust well to sudden temperature changes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For Maine, which is the oldest state in the nation by median age, heat presents elevated risks. Some 36 percent of heat-related deaths in the United States are people over age 65.

Additionally, low-income groups that live in far more areas with concrete and marginal green spaces within cities face severe health threats, according to a joint investigation by NPR and the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

“Their neighborhood is already warmer,” Hoffman said. “In order to adapt, installing and using air conditioning units is a huge investment for people with less means.”

So far this summer, York County hospitals saw 33 heat-related emergency cases, with almost half of them occurring during the heatwave at the end of June, according to Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention data.

As cities in Maine continue to grow and face higher temperatures, intense heat waves and stronger urban heat islands, heat-related health issues are likely to become more pressing going forward. Preparing for extreme heat events and protecting the most vulnerable will be key.

A young couple share a phone while sitting under the disused black bridge over the Saco River in Biddeford on Thursday, Aug. 12, 2021. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

The city needs to step up its efforts following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report last week warning of widespread and intensifying climate change effects, said Mayor Alan Casavant, a lifelong Biddeford resident who recently read about the urban heat island effect in Portland and said his city must address the problem.

“Delay is not an option,” he said. “We have to come up with some plan of action for the community and hope that other communities are doing the same thing.”

That could provide more comfort for residents like Dennison, who is at the whim of the weather.

“When you’re hot, you’re hot,” he said.

This story was produced through a partnership with Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group.

Click here for city data and graphics

Climate change is making extreme heat events worse and more frequent, with summer temperatures stretching into the shoulder seasons of spring and fall. Heat events adversely affect health and quality of life—and this is especially acute in urban communities. Higher cooling demand strains the electric grid and raises electric bills. And heat-related impacts fall unequally, with historically underserved populations facing greater health threats.

This report will look at the factors that contribute to the heat island effect, and our analysis will show how they vary in places across the United States. We’ll discuss some of the impacts of higher temperatures on human health and the built environment. We’ll also take a look at how communities are adapting to these new normals and consider solutions for lessening some of the intensity of the urban heat island.

FULL REPORT

A sign marks the height of the flooding inside Atlantic City's Vagabond Kitchen + Tap House during 2012's Superstorm Sandy. Vagabon and many restaurants on the Atlantic City coastline are facing increasing flooding risks. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer

ATLANTIC CITY — Whether it’s a nor’easter, tropical system or even a full moon with an east wind, restaurant manager Elvis Cadavid will survey the kitchen at Vagabond Kitchen + Tap House and brace himself.

“(Here) you’re in the worst possible flood zone,” Cadavid said.

About 1½ feet below the seating area inside, his refrigerators, prep tables, fryers and any other kitchen equipment are put on wheels and elevated a few inches off the ground. Nearly every part of the land beneath the popular brewpub and late-night venue on North Trenton Avenue faces a chronic risk of flooding, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonadvocacy science and news group. There’s one exception: the patio on the Trenton Avenue side — that only faces a 10% chance of a flood each year, although by 2050, the patio also will become part of a frequent flood zone, the analysis found.

“I spend thousands of dollars a year pumping out the crawlspace,” said Cadavid. “Some future work calls for adding a couple of sump pumps so you don’t have to pay to drain it out each year.”

When the flooding is in moderate or major stage, which means a crest higher than 6.9 feet above the average low tide mark, the restaurant can lose a lunch or dinner shift, and with it, revenue and worker wages. On occasion, the flooding is so bad everything shuts down.

Since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, Cadavid has filed three flood insurance claims for loss, including damaged refrigerator units. While the insurance covers the loss, it means higher premiums for the next flooding event.

The impacts from sea level rise affect almost every facet of life in the resort city, from its economy to its culture and physical landscape. To better understand how the sea continues to shape the resort, The Press and Climate Central are spending this year looking at the challenges, coping strategies and opportunities facing the city as it deals with increasing flooding risks.

Climate Central analyzed the impact on 26 non-casino based restaurants and found that 10 would experience frequent or chronic coastal flood risks on their properties by 2050. Some, such as Vagabond, are already feeling the impact, while others have yet to see severe flooding.

Long-term plans call for raising West End Avenue. But in the meantine, Vagabon Kitchen + Tap House owner Elivs Cadavid stays alert when storms or flooding is expected. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer

From 1993 to 2017, sea levels in New Jersey have risen an average of 1.9 inches per decade, according to a Rutgers University Science and Technology panel. Of that 1.9-inch growth, nine-tenths of an inch comes from natural processes, such as sinking land. A warming world, driven by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, accounts for 0.87 inches, while 0.2 inches of the rise is due to unknown factors. The rate of sea-level rise is increasing globally, and it will continue to affect Atlantic City at a quickening pace.

Another challenge to a struggling industry

The scars of each storm are etched on popular restaurants and bars like Vagabond.

“I got markers all around my property,” Cadavid said of the high water marks staining the outside of the building that sits on North Trenton Avenue along West End Avenue in the city’s Chelsea Heights neighborhood. The flooding inside his restaurant during Sandy reached 20 inches. Outside, it rendered West End Avenue, a major artery between the city and neighboring Ventnor, impassable.

Aaron Levine, founder and CEO of LG Insurance based in Long Branch, Monmouth County, has been monitoring federal policy related to flood insurance restrictions and what it could mean for private residences and business properties in New Jersey. FEMA’s new rules go into effect by October.

Flood insurance rates will go up as a result of the rule changes.

“It’s going to affect everybody,” he said, “but it’s going to be a bigger opportunity to spread the risk and allow lower-risk properties to take on a little more of the cost to offset the expense of the higher-risk properties.”

He added that climate-related threats won’t cease, and any business should remain prepared.

“Significant storm activity is happening on a consistent and regular basis throughout the world,” said Levine. “From a professional agent’s perspective, we have to look at the global risks.”

Levine’s advice: Get ahead of the game and mitigate risks. He suggests not waiting for a disaster to make building upgrades, for example. He also notes that insurance options are widely available through both federal programs and private companies.

“For business owners, especially in hospitality, read the insurance policies, understand what the coverage is and do a cost-risk analysis to understand exactly what’s going on so there are no surprises later,” he said.

Loss of revenue, higher insurance costs and increased threats of flooding are the last things the hospitality industry needs. Adjusted for seasonal workers, 35,000 people work in the hospitality industry in the Atlantic City-Hammonton region, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which tracks economic and labor data for the region.

Pre-pandemic, in April 2019, 44,100 people were working the industry, according to the Federal Reserve data.

Flooding can affect an employee’s ability to get to work. Cadavid said most of his team lives in flood-prone areas. Getting to the road on a day with coastal flooding may mean walking on crates from the front door of their home to a dry part of the street where their car is parked and then trying to find the route with the least amount of car-corrosive salt water. For some, it means making sure their legs don’t get wet as the jitney pulls in.

“I am very close to the water, so we do experience some flooding and it does make it a little difficult to get to work ... because you have to detour,” said Sania Alikoarti, a hostess at Vagabond, who moved here from Albany, New York, three years ago.

Cadavid says another Vagabond employee who lives in adjacent Ventnor Heights makes a plan for getting to work whenever coastal flooding is expected. If it’s significant, she’ll stay at another person’s house.

As Atlantic City continues to grapple with high unemployment rates — with one in three people out of a job — sea level rise and flooding threaten long-term prospects for steady income for hospitality workers.

Sea levels are projected to rise an additional 0.3 to 0.9 feet by 2030, according to the Rutgers study, regardless of how much more greenhouse gas pollution is released in the coming years. By 2050, it’s somewhere between 0.7 and 1.9 feet.

A familiar problem with an elusive solution

Some local entrepreneurs have resigned themselves to the fact that flooding is a way of life.

“It’s annoying, but I don’t feel like it necessarily hurts us,” said Mike Barham, owner of Gilchrist Restaurant, located on Rhode Island Avenue in an out-of-the-way, tourist-friendly spot known as Gardner’s Basin.

The Gilchrist Restaurant in Gardner's Basin does not normally flood but will by 2050, according to a review by Climate Central. Edward Lea, Staff Photographer 

Across the parking lot sits another popular spot, Back Bay Ale House, where diners go for drinks, a meal or to watch the sun set from the open porches and picnic tables at its outside bar.

While the Gilchrist does not normally flood now, like Back Bay Ale House, it will by 2050, according Climate Central’s review.

One thing is clear, at least to City Councilman Jesse Kurtz, whose 6th Ward includes Vagabond: Atlantic City means too much to the state, investors and locals to be abandoned.

Kurtz said residents quickly identify flooding as a major problem, but seem resigned to it.

Solutions to the flooding exist, but action is needed, he said.

“In working through the issue ... there is a solution and fundamentally, we have to decide if we’re going to shore up infrastructure and make things livable for people that are here or are we going to abandon the islands,” Kurtz said.

Cadavid says he is working closely with Kurtz on the issue, including plans to raise the roads around his restaurant.

“One of the challenges here is that it’s the intersection of local, county and state roads,” Kurtz said of the intersections of West End and Trenton avenues and the adjacent Black Horse Pike.

Another issue: The nearby bay and marshland means the state Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could require permitting.

Kurtz said a short-term fix is in the works as the state plans to elevate the off-ramp of the southbound pike lanes onto West End Avenue. That will happen in a matter of months.

This will address the flooding issues, but only modestly.

Kurtz said the long-term plan to remove flooding from West End Avenue, which turns into Wellington Avenue in Ventnor, is to lift the entire road, similar to what was done for the pike in parts of Egg Harbor Township’s West Atlantic City neighborhood. The next phase calls for raising the pike from Naples Avenue to Bayport Drive by 2.5 feet at a cost of $27.5 million. That phase will happen in the next one to four years.

Meanwhile, the state is asking the private sector — businesses and homeowners alike — to absorb some of the costs by building higher.

In April, the state released a New Jersey Climate Change Resilience Strategy, which touted a plan to mitigate the effects of climate change. One of its recommendations was that all new construction in coastal zones be able to withstand roughly 5 feet of sea level rise by 2100. Some local governments and stakeholders have objected to the higher building requirements needed to meet that threshold, saying the state is forcing a response based on a threat that has only a 17% likelihood of happening.

In the meantime, Cadavid will continue to keep a careful eye on his restaurant, and will look out for flood warnings. His spot fared well during the pandemic, closing only briefly after a positive COVID-19 case on staff.

Still, Vagabond and many other restaurants on the Atlantic City coastline lost revenue last year, shifted staff and now likely face higher flood insurance costs due to sea level rise.

A return of indoor dining means more customers — and neither Cadavid nor Barnham of Gilchrist need another obstacle to filling their tables.

“When it’s the perfect storm at high tide and the full moon, the roads ... can be bad,” Barnham said. “It can almost be impossible to get to us.”

(Data analysis by Allison Kopicki of Climate Central.)

Cadavid, Edward Lea, Staff Photographer

The city of Bath, nestled on the western banks of the Kennebec River, is especially endangered by climate change and rising sea levels. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

BATH, Maine — Peter Gerard had never seen so much water.

A torrential rain storm in late September 2015 coinciding with high tide waters and leaves clogging drains sent him racing to a low-lying Central Maine Power Co. substation near the Kennebec River to check equipment. The water was already 2 feet deep, so he could not get too close.

Gerard, an electromechanical worker and 33-year veteran of the electric utility, called the substation’s operations director, who decided to shut off power to the utility’s 4,000 customers in and around the midcoast city.

That included Bath Iron Works, a shipyard across the street that is one of Maine’s largest private employers and that the U.S. Navy designates as “strategic infrastructure.” The waters did not reach the shipyard, but the power outage forced it to send home first-shift workers and to cancel the second shift. A worker inside a shipyard assembly building was briefly stranded in a crane box because the structure’s electronic doors couldn’t be opened for the fire department’s ladder truck.

Bath, the 8,500-resident “City of Ships,” is among the places in Maine facing the greatest risks from increased coastal flooding because so much of it is low-lying. The rising sea level in Bath threatens businesses along Commercial and Washington streets and other parts of the downtown, according to an analysis by Climate Central, a nonprofit science and journalism organization.

Water levels reached their highest in the city during a record-breaking storm in 1978 at a little more than 4 feet over pre-2000 average high tides, and Climate Central’s sea level team found there’s a 1-in-4 chance of a 5-foot flood within 30 years. That level could submerge homes and three miles of road, cutting off communities that live on peninsulas, and inundate sites that manage wastewater and hazardous waste along with several museums.

“That event gives us a picture of what the future of some of these low-lying areas might look like,” Peter Slovinsky, a state marine geologist, said of the 2015 storm. “On top of almost a king tide, plus a bit of storm surge, you ended up with a pretty significant impact.”

A workman walks by an electrical substation in Bath that flooded in 2015, causing a major power outage. The substation is now undergoing work to make it less prone to flooding. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

Flooding is nothing new in Bath, nor around the brackish Kennebec or along Maine’s southern coast, where homes hug the ocean. Crucial tourism and working waterfront areas, including part of Bath’s downtown, sit on land that was once underwater and was filled. But as seas rise and the warming atmosphere fuels more intense storms, the threats that flooding poses to Bath are growing more severe.

Rising sea levels have already diminished property values across New England. Bath has already seen the highest property value losses in Maine caused by rising sea levels between 2005 and 2017, according to the First Street Foundation, a national group focused on flood risk. In all, $69.9 million was lost in Maine among $403 million across the region. Some 17 percent of Bath properties were at risk in 2019, and that could rise 9 percent in 30 years, with more than 8,000 residential properties at substantial risk statewide.

Residents and businesses are noticing increased flooding prompted by more frequent and severe weather events. Local officials are doing much of what they can to brace infrastructure and adapt the city. Solutions can be expensive and hard to fund, such as a levee that would cost millions of dollars and scenic views, leaving Bath at the vanguard of coastal cities in an uphill and ongoing fight to protect remaining land and their economies.

Perhaps nobody knows the threat better than Kristi Nygaard, who has owned the Kennebec Tavern Restaurant & Marina, one of the closest structures to the river, for 25 years. The eatery’s parking lot floods frequently, especially when strong southeast winds and rain come during a full-moon tide.

In 2009, Nygaard built a $1 million seawall. But it is not high enough to fully protect her business because of regulations that prevent it from impeding the river. Flood waters got inside only once, during a June 2012 windstorm that brought 8 inches of rain to Bath over a weekend, she said. No solution, including a concrete pad that elevates the building about 3 feet or scuppers to drain away water, is perfect.

Kristi Nygaard stands on a dock in the marina in front of her restaurant on the Bath waterfront on Wednesday June 24, 2021. The Kennebec Tavern is occasionally affected by rising floodwaters but Nygaard has adapted with a robust seawall and a special drainage system. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN

“If we had been able to put the seawall up higher, the water might not come in, but then again, the storm drains on Commercial Street still would flood,” she said. “Nature tries to take back what it had.”

Maine has had catastrophic floods before, including in April 1987, when a storm combined with snowmelt created record flooding in central and southwestern Maine and led to disaster declarations in 14 of Maine’s 16 counties, causing $175 million in damage when adjusted for inflation.

But the likelihood of these types of floods is rising with temperatures. The average annual temperature in Maine has risen 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 124 years, with the six warmest days on record occurring since 1998, according to a 2020 update to a climate report from University of Maine. Gulf of Maine waters are warming faster than almost every other ocean in the world, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As the gulf waters absorb heat, they expand.

An atmospheric change over the last 20 years is contributing to more frequent heavy downpours, Sean Birkel, Maine state climatologist, said.

“With the warming climate, the oceans are warming and fueling more intense storms, and there is more moisture in the atmosphere overall,” Birkel said.

Seas at a federal tide gauge in nearby Portland have risen by about 8 inches during the past century, and several more feet of sea-level rise is likely this century along Maine’s coast. The Maine Climate Council  has recommended that communities and state agencies commit to manage 1.5 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and nearly 4 feet by 2100.

It would come at a high cost. State estimates warn the damage from 3.9 feet of sea level rise by 2100 would cost the state well over $1 billion, almost evenly divided between building and gross domestic product losses.

Road closures that prevent access to homes and businesses cause some of the biggest economic hits from storm flooding, Jeremy Porter, the head of research and development at the First Street Foundation, said. Most cars are unable to be driven in 6 inches or more of water. That level could damage floors, carpets, drywall and insulated appliances and pollute groundwater. Rushing flood waters threaten wastewater treatment plants at the waterfront, potentially dumping raw sewage into the ocean or estuary, and can create safety hazards like a non-secured propane tank becoming a projectile in the water.

Floods also expose critical infrastructure. A new Climate Central analysis showed roughly a quarter of the Bath Iron Works site currently faces frequent flood risks, and those risks are projected to spread to affect two-thirds of the site by 2050. The shipyard is Maine’s fourth-largest private employer and one of two U.S. contractors that build Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for the Navy.

An atmospheric change over the last 20 years is contributing to more frequent heavy downpours, Sean Birkel, Maine state climatologist, said.

“With the warming climate, the oceans are warming and fueling more intense storms, and there is more moisture in the atmosphere overall,” Birkel said.

Seas at a federal tide gauge in nearby Portland have risen by about 8 inches during the past century, and several more feet of sea-level rise is likely this century along Maine’s coast. The Maine Climate Council has recommended that communities and state agencies commit to manage 1.5 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and nearly 4 feet by 2100.

It would come at a high cost. State estimates warn the damage from 3.9 feet of sea level rise by 2100 would cost the state well over $1 billion, almost evenly divided between building and gross domestic product losses.

Road closures that prevent access to homes and businesses cause some of the biggest economic hits from storm flooding, Jeremy Porter, the head of research and development at the First Street Foundation, said. Most cars are unable to be driven in 6 inches or more of water. That level could damage floors, carpets, drywall and insulated appliances and pollute groundwater. Rushing flood waters threaten wastewater treatment plants at the waterfront, potentially dumping raw sewage into the ocean or estuary, and can create safety hazards like a non-secured propane tank becoming a projectile in the water.

Floods also expose critical infrastructure. A new Climate Central analysis showed roughly a quarter of the Bath Iron Works site currently faces frequent flood risks, and those risks are projected to spread to affect two-thirds of the site by 2050. The shipyard is Maine’s fourth-largest private employer and one of two U.S. contractors that build Arleigh Burke-class destroyers for the Navy.

The Navy and other parts of the Defense Department have taken notice. Its inspector general’s office plans to conduct an audit this year to determine how the Navy should address environmental threats to shipyards. BIW spokesperson David Hench said the shipyard does not publicly discuss potential impacts to its facility or disclose long-range plans. The Navy did not respond to a request for comment.

Maine’s state, county and municipal governments are ahead of many other states in planning for climate change effects, according to Samantha Montano, an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy who lives in Portland, who said “other states aren’t even having those conversations.”

In December, the state released a four-year climate plan prepared by the Maine Climate Council. Gov. Janet Mills in June signed a law that would require key departments to mobilize a community resilience strategy and ask cities and towns to add climate strategies to their comprehensive plans.

Slovinsky, the marine geologist, said there are four strategies for adapting to climate change: avoiding building in flood-prone areas, adapting by building a seawall or raising structures on posts, retreating to a less risky area and fortifying critical infrastructure. Understanding vulnerabilities and developing resiliency strategies are good starting points to respond to ongoing sea level rise, he said.

Sagadahoc County is updating its 2016 hazard mitigation plan for the 10 towns and one unorganized territory it covers, including Bath, to include more climate change strategies. The revised plan should be submitted to and approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in December, and then reviewed by local authorities next year, Grainne Shaw, deputy director of the agency, said. The updated plan will identify new mitigation projects for each town, including pump station upgrades and flood-proofing buildings.

For Central Maine Power, the 2015 flood accelerated plans to upgrade the Bath substation, Kevin Therriault, director of substation operations, said. The utility plans to complete a $14.4 million investment this fall that includes elevating the control house containing the substation battery and protective relays by 18 inches and removing underground feeder cables and raising them overhead. The energized conductors and equipment will be 8 feet higher off the surface of the substation.

At the city level, Bath is more fully addressing climate change in its comprehensive plan update due to be completed this fall. It has established a nascent climate action commission to help the city achieve the plan’s recommendations. City planners also collaborated with American Institute of Architects’ experts on a study to use green infrastructure to make downtown Bath more resilient.

The city already is acting on recommendations from the institute’s Design & Resiliency Team study, Benjamin Averill, Bath’s city planner, said. It plans to add a walkway on the northern waterfront, initially envisioned for economic development, that will create a buffer to help avoid business flooding. The city plans to break ground in the next year. More green infrastructure is being examined for where the police station now stands. It has flooded in the past and could do so again, Averill said.

Bath will be one of the communities involved in an emergency drill later this year that will simulate a severe storm as part of an effort from a variety of groups that Eileen Johnson, an environmental studies lecturer at Bowdoin College, is helping to coordinate to prepare for worsening flooding.

“Bath is an important part of the midcoast community,” Johnson said. “It’s within this larger region of coastal towns with long peninsulas that, when access is cut off, it can have implications for the health and well-being of communities.”

Derek Gruis didn’t miss a day of work because of shutdowns during the pandemic, nor has he feared for his financial future amid the economic tumult it has unleashed. The 29-year-old lead technician at the Beaver Creek Wind Farm manages a team of 15 other wind energy technicians tasked with keeping 170 turbines spinning.

“We’re essentially a power plant so we were considered essential,” said Gruis, who described extensive protocols designed to protect the workers from COVID. He commutes about 45 minutes north from his home just south of Des Moines. “There’s always work needed to get done, so that kind of attests to what the job security is here.”

Despite strong demand for the workers, community colleges in Iowa and in other states without the kind of established energy industries found in Texas are having trouble recruiting enough students to fill the vacancies.

Wind technicians are members of one of the fastest-growing professional fields in the U.S. So, too, are solar installers, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects demand for both to grow at least another 50 percent this decade. While solar and wind installers help construct a project then move onto building a new one, technicians work throughout the life of a wind farm to service and maintain the turbines and sometimes the automated control systems.

As the wind and solar sectors expand, they’re improving air quality and slowing warming caused by pollution from gas and coal power plants. As more electric vehicles drive down streets and highways, the solar and wind energy that provides charges for these vehicles will reduce emissions from cars, buses and trucks. In recent years, transportation has become America’s leading source of heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution.

Of the nearly 500,000 Americans working in jobs that support the generation of renewable energy, including wind and solar, roughly 1,100 work in the cities of Des Moines and West Des Moines, according to the 2021 Clean Jobs, Better Jobs report from E2, a national group of clean energy industry companies and leaders. That represents about a fifth of such jobs across all of Iowa.

“We’ve seen coal plant retirements across the state and wind is picking up the slack,” said Jordan Oster of the Iowa Environment Council, a coalition of groups and individuals within the state focused on environmental quality. “We’re replacing polluting sources of energy with clean, renewable, emissions-free power.”

The Midwest is a hotspot for wind farming, and Iowa is among the states leading in this clean energy boom. Wind industry figures show nearly 6,000 turbines are currently operating across the state. According to an analysis of data gathered by Climate Central’s WeatherPower tool since the start of October, those turbines have been generating more than twice as much power as Iowa’s households alone consumed.

Brian Selinger, a state economic development official who works on energy projects, said Iowa has lots of wind blowing through it and plenty of space on farms for turbines. And he said the state has worked aggressively to support the growth of the wind energy sector, such as through grants and loans to support innovative projects.

“We actively promote and market our wind strengths,” Selinger said, noting that the growing abundance of clean energy is helping convince large tech corporations with ambitious clean energy goals to set up operations in Iowa. “It’s one of our greatest resources and one of our strongest economic development assets. It has a rippling effect across our state.”

President Joe Biden and others have been pushing for an effort to overhaul the nation’s electrical and transportation infrastructure to achieve ‘net-zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. If that’s successful, Princeton University Net-Zero America project analyses suggest the Hawkeye state could see roughly 70,000 workers directly and indirectly employed by the wind sector within a generation from now.

Such a national effort to reign in heat-trapping pollution would also protect Iowa and its farmers from rising temperatures and worsening floods and droughts.

With a two-year degree from a community college like Gruis attended, he says wind technicians could look forward to eventually earning “upwards of $70,000 to even close to six figures if they just jump into it with both feet and immerse themselves.” The E2 research indicates the average wage throughout the wind energy industry is $26 per hour.

The growth in wind farming in Iowa is providing economic opportunities beyond direct jobs. Farmers receive lease payments from wind farm operators, and those operators also pay local taxes. Wind energy manufacturers have opened new operations in the state, positioning themselves close to customers that purchase what are often heavy and difficult-to-transport components.

“The Midwest is really wind central and Iowa is a good demonstration of the significant direct and induced benefits that come from having a strong wind industry already in place,” said Katie Siegner, a researcher at RMI who co-authored the energy research group’s ‘Seeds of Opportunity’ report, which describes wind and solar energy as ‘new cash crops’ capable of providing more than $200 billion in direct economic benefits across the U.S. this decade. “It’s not just electricity and jobs they’re generating, they’re pumping a substantial amount of revenues into local rural economies.”

For students considering future careers as wind technicians, and for others mulling transitions into the field, Gruis said working at great heights is “going to be a factor” but “you become immune to it very quickly,” in part because of all the safety precautions put in place.

Gruis said an ideal candidate for the field would be “a well-motivated person that likes to work through solutions and work through problems, kind of free thinking and not afraid to get down and break a sweat and work with their hands.”

Demand for graduates of the two-year program for wind technicians at the Des Moines Area Community College, where Gruis did his training after finishing high school, is overwhelmingly strong. Still, instructor James Fitzpatrick says he struggles to fill his classrooms. This year, just nine of 20 available spots were filled by applicants.

“Most of them will be hired well before their graduation,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s way too many jobs and not enough qualified technicians.”

Towering wind turbines already speckle seas across Europe and Asia and a boom in construction is expected to bring an economic bonanza to the US East Coast. But even this climate-friendly technology could soon evolve into something bigger and better. Almost all the offshore wind turbines operating right now stand atop towers driven into sea beds. As the industry looks to push its turbines into deeper waters, technology is being developed so that wind farming can float.

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Why do we need floating wind farms?

Floating turbines could be deployed in deeper waters further offshore. There, winds are stronger and more consistent. “You get more energy output when you have these higher wind speeds,” said Stephanie McClellan, an industry consultant and founder of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a Delaware-based project designed to spur offshore wind energy development. Fewer species of birds can be harmed by the spinning blades. The infrastructure would create fewer conflicts with fishermen and other users of the oceans. They can be out of sight from the shore.

Three types of floating wind turbine designs

Currently, there are three types of floating wind energy structures that serve as a basis for how farms could be built.

SPAR BUOY

Already being commercially used off the coast of Scotland, the Spar Buoy is the most commonly thought of structure for a floating wind turbine. It is anchored by a ballast underneath that keeps the turbine afloat. However the ballast is huge, heavy, and hard to test in water shallower than 100 m. This is because the mooring lines act as shock absorbers against waves, the longer the mooring lines, the better they keep the turbine upright.

TENSION LEG PLATFORM

This structure uses taut mooring lines connected to piles in the seafloor. It creates a very stable platform for the turbine. Though, if one leg loses tension, the whole structure will tip over. Adding additional legs or lines to the design may lower this risk.

SEMI-SUBMERSIBLE

This structure uses the area near the surface to achieve stability. The drawback is it takes up more sea area. Its modular design allows it to be more easily transported from ports in shallower waters.

Combining features from different floating wind platforms

Experiments for future turbines combine these types into hybrid structures that could be manufactured remotely and installed in fewer parts. For instance, could a Tension Leg Platform be easier to install if it was combined with a Semi-Submersible? A leader in this endeavor is Henrik Stiesdal the former CTO of Siemens. He used tubular steel components to create a kind of Semi-Submersible Spar Buoy. The modular layout allows for most of the turbine to be built off-site and then towed out to sea.

Offshore wind design and technology is still emerging with new kinds of structures. “I think this is going to be more common as we go forward,” said Walter Musial, a principal engineer that leads the offshore wind research platform at NREL. “It’s like a Transformer. You tow it out to the station and then you can drop a ballast weight down and it’s deployed in a stable position at site. But all the assembly and commissioning has already taken place in the harbor.”

Where would floating wind turbines be installed?

Floating turbines would be needed to harvest offshore wind energy from the US West Coast, where the Pacific Ocean drops quickly to a depth that makes fixed-tower turbine technology unfeasible. Same goes for other locations in the nation including Hawaii and the Gulf of Maine.

When will floating wind farms become widespread?

The only floating wind farm generating meaningful amounts of electricity is Hywind Scotland, developed by Equinor in 2017. The nascent state of the technology means a variety of different construction styles are still being investigated. California and the federal government are soon to offer leases for wind farms at two Pacific Ocean sites where floating turbines would be needed. “We have to get started,” McClellan said “That’s what’s really promising about what’s happening in California. As we start to get these deployed, then we start to learn a lot more.”

To address global warming the White House has stated that president Biden’s green energy plan aims to set the US on a course toward achieving “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. If achieved, it would mean the country that currently ranks as the world’s worst historical climate polluter would stop adding new climate pollution to the atmosphere. All of the pathways for achieving this goal imagined under Princeton University’s Net Zero America project show enormous ramp-ups of electricity generated from wind turbines during the coming 30 years.

Where is offshore wind green energy expected to be located in the US?

The turbines would be clustered on wind farms off the coasts and embedded among agricultural operations. They’ll be far enough from cities to protect urban residents from noise and strobe-like flickering caused by blades’ shadows, but close enough for the power to be economically delivered through electrical transmission lines. A Climate Central analysis of the Net Zero America data suggests that if the net zero goal is achieved, wind farms in Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois could each have more capacity installed by 2050 than the 118 gigawatts of wind capacity currently operational in the US.

A fresh push by developers, newfound federal support for offshore wind energy under president Biden, and long-running efforts by states to drive up green energy production mean the US’s East Coast is poised for a rush of approvals of sweeping arrays of turbines fixed to towers driven into the Atlantic’s floor. Future booms are also possible along the Gulf of Mexico, in the Great Lakes, and off the West Coast. Turbines operating in deep Pacific and Gulf of Maine waters would need to be installed on floating platforms. Some of that technology is being adapted from gas and oil drilling operations, but so far floating deployments have been very limited worldwide.

The green energy jobs created by building offshore wind farms

A boom in offshore wind development has the potential to rejuvenate working waterfronts and ports with green energy jobs. Shipbuilding yards will be needed to manufacture vessels able to install and service the turbines and associated coastal facilities.

Building and maintaining all of the solar farms, wind farms, transmission lines and, other infrastructure needed to reach net zero emissions nationally by 2050 will require a lot of workers, helping to put former employees from fossil fuel and, other fading sectors to work. The Net Zero America data show a continued rise in employment in the solar energy sector. They forecasted the greatest growth of wind energy jobs, however, to begin a decade from now.

Then there are all the maritime jobs, and those needed to operate a sea port.

Maritime workers like vessel operators are necessary to transport crews for turbine and transmission cable repairs.

“Offshore wind is a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity to build a new industry,” said Ross Gould, the supply chain development vice president at the Business Network for Offshore Wind, a group that’s working to identify and help meet the future workforce and supply needs of offshore wind projects in the US. “Currently we’re seeing a boom in project management and project development jobs up and down the East Coast as the projects are beginning to move further along in their studying and assessment work.”

When wind energy generation rose to more than 8% of America’s utility-scale electricity production in 2020, it was more than 50 times higher than production in 2000, US Energy Information Administration data show. Almost all of this development was in rural areas, with much of the power being delivered through transmission lines into nearby metro areas.

Wind farms benefit farmers, governments, and job seekers.

The growth is providing new lease and tax revenues for farmers and local governments. It is also bringing job training for a growing army of maintenance workers known as wind energy technicians. The skills are being taught by hundreds of community colleges and other training institutions nationwide. “Our placement is incredible,” said Andrew Swapp, director of the wind energy technology course at Mesalands Community College in New Mexico. “If a person really wants to go to work, they’re going to get a job.”

Offshore wind farming has been booming in Europe for decades and more recently across parts of Asia. The US has been falling behind when it comes to generating wind power at sea. There is just one small offshore wind farm operating on US waters. It’s off the coast of Rhode Island. Industry insiders blame a reluctance by Americans to act on climate change and lack of federal leadership in permitting and pushing for more offshore wind projects.

“We’re a late-comer,” said Chris Wissemann, chief executive of wind energy developer Diamond Offshore Wind, who said the reason has been “literally climate denial.” But oceans are reliably blustery places. Calculations by the nonprofit Environment America indicate that offshore wind farms could provide almost all of the power Americans need by 2050. That means keeping the lights, heaters, and air conditioners on and fueling a nation’s worth of electrified cars, trucks, and transit systems, all from coastal wind farms.

Three years later, some survivors of Hurricane Florence still aren’t home, but the damage was not evenly distributed. Flooding highlighted disparities, and today the most vulnerable of us continue to be at the highest risk of rising seas that increasingly threaten North Carolina’s coastal region.

—–

Maristine Davis, a resident of the Beaufort area, can still see the damage outside her window. She and her husband have been unable to live in their home since Florence hit in September of 2018.

“My heart was overflooded,” Davis said. “I was like, Lord, what am I going to do? The Lord spoke to me and He said, ‘Don’t stress, you will be blessed.’”

For many low-income coastal residents, Florence was a long-term disaster they are still recovering from. For seniors—especially the 13 percent in North Carolina who are also low-income—the impact of flooding is even more challenging, as age adds issues of mobility and security to the hazards from storm.

And experts say these problems are getting worse as hurricanes grow stronger and sea level rises.

Florence tracked from east to west, making landfall just north of Wilmington. It drenched the state over three days with more than 30 inches of rain. The slow speed of the storm exacerbated the flooding and spread it all over the region, turning roads into rivers.

Florence was the wettest tropical storm ever recorded in the Carolinas. 

Davis recalls the impact of the flooding after a 13-foot storm surge wiped away homes. The night of the hurricane, she had to stay overnight at the hospital where she works, and reached her husband by telephone.

“I asked him, ‘Did we get any damage? He said, ‘I’ve got to go to the house and check everything out when everything calms down,’” she recalled. “Sure enough, he called and he said, ‘Yep, I think we got it this time.’”

The storm left behind more than $16 billion dollars of damage across North Carolina. Forty-two people died, more than 5,000 were rescued from flood waters, and 74,000 structures were flooded. 
Davis, who has lived in Beaufort since the 1970s, said the water had never come so high.

“This was the very first time that we got water, that much water in our house,” she said. “It got in my cabinets, my kitchen cabinets, my bathroom cabinets, everything just was flooded.”

The house has not been habitable since.

Experts say hurricanes hit low-income residents hard because they often lack insurance or financial resources for quick recovery, and because their homes may be less resilient to storms. In North Carolina, being older adds to the vulnerability.

Terri Lewis Lawrence came home after Florence to find six to eight inches of water in the house where she had lived since childhood. Over a long life in North Carolina, it was the first time water had ever come so high.

“It would threaten to almost come in the house a few times, but it never came in, since the house has been built,” she said. “Almost 70 years it had never come in the house.”

Hurricane Florence hit her home hard.

“The floors were just destroyed,” Lawrence said. “When you pulled the carpet up, the hardwood floors under it were buckled. Everything had to be ripped out at that point.”

Climate change has worsened hurricane flooding two ways. Warming ocean waters are spawning more severe storms, and the water itself has risen along North Carolina’s shores—about 9 inches since 1953 in Beaufort, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Climate Central projects it will rise another foot in Wilmington by 2050.

To prevent future flooding, Lawrence and Davis have both added 10 feet of elevation to their homes. That’s a common response to hurricanes and sea-level rise on the Carolina coast, as homeowners lift their foundations above potential waves. But this solution can be difficult for seniors, both because of the cost—around $70,000 for Lawrence’s home—and because the extra stairs make it difficult for elders to get to their front doors.

Lawrence has trouble with her knees and back and couldn’t manage the additional steps after her house was raised. The cost of adding a lift: an additional $10,000 to $30,000.

 Beaufort Mayor Rett Newton said Florence recovery remains a major issue more than two years later, especially for older residents like Lawrence. 

“We know we have a very senior population but when they get affected by a storm they may not have the capacity to recover,” Newton said. “They’ve got very limited resources, they’ve got very limited mobility.”

Newton said Florence inflicted disproportionate hardship on the poor and seniors—disparities that may have gone unnoticed before the disaster.

“That divide got exposed by Hurricane Florence, it got widened by Hurricane Dorian, and it’s been deepened by the pandemic,” Newton said.

Today, tarps still flap in the breeze, with nearly 500 families still displaced in Cartaret County alone. But while recovery lags for some, advocates also call for plans to keep sea level rise from creating more storm refugees in the future.

Rev. Robbie Phillips, a Presbyterian minister, helps lead the Carterat Long-Term Recovery Alliance, a group was born out of Florence devastation that is still working on disaster relief. She said it may be time for people to move out of threatened areas.

“There’s going to be some people that are going to be mad that I’m going to make this comment, but I’m going to be honest with you. None of these homes in this area should have ever been built here,” Phillips said. “Stop building in these areas, let’s build workforce housing that is in a good safe place.”

Phillips has seen unequal devastation from Florence and wants vulnerable populations protected next time.

“The poor are disproportionately impacted, the elderly, disabled, lower income families, families with children in the homes are going to be more impacted by this than people on the barrier islands,” she said.

The financial threat of climate change and sea level rise can challenge homeowners even when storm winds are not blowing. Rising waters have forced the Federal Emergency Management Agency to revise flood zone maps to account for wetter hurricanes and higher seas, accounting for several feet of higher water. That drives up flood insurance—with reports in North Carolina of premiums doubling, tripling or even quadrupling.

For low-income residents—including seniors—flood-prone land is expensive to insure, but cheap to buy. The low cost lures residents back, but without insurance. For seniors who may own relatively valuable old family homes but do not owe money on mortgages, all of their assets may be tied up in a house that is both at risk and uninsured.

Water is the most severe threat from coastal storms, according to Dr. Rich Luettich, a coastal oceanographer at the University of North Carolina, and one of the nation’s top storm surge experts.

“Water does three things: it causes the most damage, it kills the most people, and it takes the longest to recover from, and yet it’s often times what we ignore,” Luettich said. 

And the threat is getting worse, not better.

“There’s no doubt that the last 50 years and the next 50 years will be very different, and climate change is the primary driver of that,” Luettich said. “Water starts to come up inch by inch and feet over decades, then all of a sudden you lost your safety zone, you lost your starting point, so the water is at your doorstep much more quickly.”

In North Carolina, flat, coastal lands allow rising seas to bring storm surges far inland. Eventually, those coastal areas may become too dangerous for homes. Local officials are beginning to take that into account.

“I do not want to have to retreat, but if we don’t reverse the effects of climate change, that’s going to be the option,” Mayor Newton said.

Slashing carbon emissions would slow warming and the rise of the seas, though so much pollution has already built up in the atmosphere that they’re bound to continue to rise. In the meantime, North Carolina residents are adapting to rising sea levels, even as they recover from intensifying storms.

Davis got help with her home and new furniture, steps that are bringing coastal communities a sense of hope.

“I’m ready to get in my house,” she said. “I always say there’s no place like home.”

Asthmatics hit hard as pollen growing seasons get longer.

COLUMBIA - When Sherry Miller moved to Columbia from New Jersey, the heavy pollen in the air here triggered her asthma and sent her to the emergency room three times in a matter of months. In the 14 years since, she says the allergy issues she battles have gotten worse.

“It's one of those things you just wish you could get rid of,” she said. Her once seasonal allergies are now affecting her year-round, and they’ve been intensifying — she’s always on antihistamines now, and has started having more frequent sinus infections, even during the winter.

Miller says pollen is “everywhere.”

“I find that it has become like a layer, that you can scrub all you want,” Miller said. “And as soon as you're done, it's still there.”

High concentrations of pollen can make life miserable for anyone and they're particularly dangerous for the one in eleven residents here who suffer from asthma. An analysis of temperature data by Climate Central shows central Missouri’s plant growing season has increased by a week since 1970 — meaning an additional week every year that pollen is in the air.

Local allergist Laurie Fowler says over the last decade the amount of pollen coating Columbia’s landscapes has noticeably increased, coupled with a growing intensity of seasonal allergy symptoms experienced by her patients.

“I used to tell patients, ‘Oh my gosh, surely next year won't be as bad as this year,’” Fowler said. “I've got to where now I’m saying, ‘It's gonna be worse.’ Because every year, it seems like it's getting worse.”

RISING POLLEN AND RISING TEMPERATURES

A mix of plants, weather and geography affects an area’s pollen count. This matters in a state like Missouri, where you can find many trees and weeds not found in other parts of the country, coupled with long pollen seasons and increased humidity — which promotes plant growth — from the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

Land use also plays a big role, according to Jennifer Albertine, an environmental studies lecturer at Mount Holyoke College. Albertine led research that found pollen counts from grasses alone could double in the next couple of decades, unless emissions of greenhouse gas pollution are aggressively cut.

“We tend to see higher ragweed pollen loads near agricultural lands, where it is a noxious weed for farmers,” Albertine said. “Ragweed, which is the number one most allergenic plant in the USA, is a great colonizer of disturbed land.”

In a state where farms cover nearly two-thirds of the land, with one of the largest number of farms in the nation, ragweed pollen can run rampant.

In addition to lengthening pollen seasons by warming temperatures, research suggests carbon dioxide pollution is contributing to what Columbia University plant physiologist Lewis Ziska called an increased “allergenicity” of pollen.

With warming temperatures, “We think that there's a good case to be made that the season will be longer, the amount of pollen that you'll be exposed to will be greater, and the allergenicity of that pollen may also increase,” Ziska said.

Ziska was one of the scientists behind a new study that found rising temperatures from human-induced climate change to be the main contributor to recent changes in the timing and increasing length of the pollen season across North America.

AN UNEQUAL BURDEN

Because asthma is more likely to affect residents belonging to low-income, minority communities, allergies caused by pollen are also unequally distributed. Understanding how environmental factors underlie health disparities like these is what Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai professor Rosalind Wright specializes in.

Wright stresses the dangerous impact of climate change on childhood asthma and respiratory health. “It's a very costly disease,” she said. “It's the most common chronic disease of childhood. So the healthcare expenditures that are going to be associated with that are astronomical.”

According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, more than $18 billion is spent managing allergies every year in the U.S. alone, while the medical cost of asthma is an estimated $3,200 per person, every year. The high costs of treatment mean many patients take less medicine than is needed to keep them healthy.

“The fact that people have to ration their inhaler use is so ridiculous to me,” said Margee Louisias, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the director of diversity and inclusion in the division of allergy and immunology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

She says a longer allergy season and higher pollen concentrations will continue to put heavier burdens on the most vulnerable populations, including lower-income and minority communities.

Louisias compares the national asthma prevalence in adults and children of about 10% with asthma rates from 25% to 30% among Black and Latinx populations. That disparity is linked to higher levels of air pollution in those communities from sources like highways, power plants and other industrial facilities.

“We’re seeing a constant, higher concentration of exposure to pollution,” Louisias said. “We're seeing more concentration of exposure to toxins, particularly in these areas that have higher concentrations of Black and Latinx communities.”

The burden of allergies extends beyond the cost of managing them. Local allergist Laurie Fowler says allergies can disrupt everyday life in expensive ways. “They get an ear infection, or bronchitis or pneumonia, or they're sick, or they're missing work, or they're missing school,” she said.

As someone accustomed to suffering from allergic asthma, Sherry Miller misses what it was like over a decade ago, living in New Jersey, when she didn’t have such intense reactions to the pollen in the air around her. But she’s grateful she has the resources to lessen her symptoms.

“I feel badly for people that don't have any medical care,” she said. “They have to end up using the emergency room for their medical [needs], but they're not there to put you on a long term path to getting better.”

To read the complete report, including flood risk analyses for all identified sites, please click here for a downloadable PDF.

A new study shows many of Maryland’s most significant sites from Harriet Tubman’s life are in jeopardy of chronic flooding as sea level rise threatens the Eastern Shore. The News4 I-Team’s Jodie Fleischer reports on the impact as archaeologists rush to unearth more of Tubman’s story before it’s washed away.

As a tour guide on the Eastern Shore’s Harriet Tubman Byway, Alex Green has an up-close view of historic landmarks associated with the iconic abolitionist.

Such as Long Wharf, now a park on the water’s edge of Cambridge, which once served as a hub for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Stewart’s Canal, a seven-mile logging waterway dug by enslaved and free Black people. And the Bucktown General Store, where a young Tubman sustained a brutal head injury during her first act of defiance against an enslaver. 

“This is African American heritage and history in this area,” said Green, who calls this part of the world “Tubman Country.” “I’ve done tours where people just cry.”

But Green, who has lived in the region for decades, has noticed something changing on those historic sites as the years have passed. The water, he said, “is coming closer and closer.”

Green is well aware that rising seas are affecting communities like his. The seas are rising faster along the mid-Atlantic than in most parts of the world, with the sinking of land from natural forces conspiring with sea level rise from climate-changing pollution to push coastlines inland. 

That's not just threatening communities, roadways and buildings. In this section of coast, it’s threatening historical Tubman treasures.

The science and news group Climate Central used its coastal database to pinpoint risks from rising seas to some of this area’s most precious Tubman landmarks. The group published its findings on Tuesday, showing many of the most significant sites along Maryland's portion of the Tubman Byway are already experiencing or are in jeopardy of chronic flooding from sea level rise. 

Climate Central analyzed 45 sites along the byway, which stretches from Maryland to Delaware, and found 16 of the sites will experience significant flood risk by 2050; 25 of them face such threats by century's end. The report singles out 10 significant places around Dorchester County as likely to face occasional, frequent or chronic risk of flooding this century.

“It's entirely possible that some of the sites are going to be so badly flooded that they really won't be very accessible to the public anymore,” said Karen Florini, the non-profit's vice president for programs, adding: “The main message is that climate change is real, it is serious, there is scientific consensus and there are things to be done.” 

Though about a quarter of Long Wharf Park is already at chronic risk of flooding, the report projects 80 percent of the area will be at chronic risk by 2050.  

The marshes at Stewart’s Canal are already experiencing chronic flooding, too. But it's going to get worse. Climate Central found much of the land around the canal will fall below the high tide line before 2050 and the road leading to it could be at chronic flood risk by the end of this century. 

The study also warns the historic Malone’s Methodist Episcopal Church — founded by free and enslaved Black people in the 1860s — and its nearby cemetery could see almost monthly flooding by 2050. The I-Team observed standing water underneath the church, even on a sunny day. 

“I'm hoping that when we talk about it and people hear us talk about it, they start to realize this is for real,” said Herschel Johnson, a local Tubman historian, of the risk of rising seas to the byway. 

Johnson said it’s not just a crucial part of American history at stake, but a key part of the local economy. He said Tubman, the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, helps fuel Dorchester County tourism as people seek to learn more about her history. 

“When people come here just to visit because of Harriet Tubman, they spend money at the restaurants, at the hotels,” he continued. “She's very important.”

The rising water is already posing challenges for archaeologists searching to uncover more of Tubman’s history. 

A team of archaeologists from the Maryland Department of Transportation have been searching federal wetlands since last fall for evidence of her father’s cabin. They’re also digging on nearby private land for the site they believe could be Tubman’s birthplace.

This area “was never very dry, but it has never been as wet as it has today,” said Julie Schablitsky, the chief archaeologist for MDOT’s State Highway Administration. “Because of that, we're in a bit of a race against time to try and rescue these sites.”

Schablitsky, whose team just finished a two week stint digging in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, showed the I-Team a collection of nails, fasteners and brick indicative of an old home site — clues that the scientists could be getting closer to confirming the location of Ben Ross’s homestead. 

“Out of a thousand holes we've excavated, this location seems to be the most likely place for Ben Ross's cabin” Schablitsky said. 

Her team spent weeks sifting through the brackish muck to locate tiny bits of plates, cups, bowls and other housewares, which the scientists will now analyze in their laboratory. 

But rising water, she said, can complicate pinpointing the age of these items. 

“As we dig deeper, things usually get older,” she said. “So it's important that we don't have water coming up into our site because, once that happens, it literally muddies the picture.”

Schablitzsky said rising seas don’t just make it harder to identify artifacts, but harder to access the sites themselves. The current sites are located off of long dirt and gravel roads in flooded woodlands.

“We are in a bit of a rush against time because, even certain times of the year when I'm out here, I can't always access the site,” Schablitsky said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acquired the property last fall — part of an effort to preserve the land as well as its potential Tubman history, said Matt Whitbeck, supervisory wildlife biologist for the Chesapeake Marshlands National Wildlife Refuge Complex.

“We knew that there was a lot of potential for this area to have a high value for the Harriet Tubman story, and that added to the value of this property, in particular,” Whitbeck said. 

But he warned this area will eventually become an island as the seas rise. Data from the longest-operating tide gauge in the area, located on the opposite side of the Chesapeake, shows tides are already pushing roughly a foot higher than they did 80 years ago. 

“Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge is a bit of a poster child for the impacts of sea level rise and climate change,” Whitbeck told the News4 I-Team, adding the area has already seen over 5,000 acres of tidal marsh convert to open water.

As evidence of the change, he said visitors who travel the refuge’s Wildlife Drive can look to the south and see a vast area of open water. 

“It's beautiful. But if you understand that, in the ‘30s, when the refuge was established, that was all tidal marsh habitat that's been lost to sea level rise and subsidence,” he told the I-Team. “It's shocking.”

The encroaching saltwater kills the trees in this area where Tubman led people on their journey to freedom, turning lush landscapes into “ghost forests” of brittle, hollowed out trees.  

Green, the tour guide, said people sometimes notice the skeletal trees dotting much of southern Dorchester County. He said he explains saltwater intrusion to them and how it has worsened over the past few decades. 

The trees help tell a greater story about what is at risk because of climate change, he said — a conversation he hopes will fuel more efforts to slow the damage and save what’s possible. 

“There's so much information that has been left out of history that we should try to preserve what we have here now,” Green said. 

In East Boston, affordable housing units are at risk of flooding as the sea level rises.

Roxanne De Jesus remembers seeing the waves spill out of the harbor in East Boston. A nor'easter — that grew in force so suddenly it was dubbed a “bomb cyclone” — pushed tides as high as Boston has seen in nearly a century.

“For the first time, we saw the water come out of the harbor,” she said. 

It was early in 2018 and the storm drove the highest tide she’s seen in 22 years from her home at East Boston’s Shore Plaza East apartments. The building is one of many affordable housing units at growing risk of coastal flooding. De Jesus lives on the second floor and a lack of information about climate change has left her dreading that it could one day flood. She says she can't afford insurance.

“We would start from zero with nothing,” she said. 

Residents of affordable housing units, like De Jesus, face greater risks from rising seas and worsening coastal hazards. That’s because older residential buildings in lower-income communities that provide affordable housing opportunities are usually not fortified against storms or coastal flooding. 

The threats to these buildings are growing, too, as heat trapped by fossil fuel pollution intensifies storms and raises sea levels. An analysis by Climate Central's scientists found that Massachusetts has the third highest number of affordable housing units under threat of coastal flooding in the nation.

As low pressure systems form off the coast, nor’easters can develop with explosive speed when ocean temperatures are high enough. With the waters of the Atlantic warming because of the effects of greenhouse gas pollution, such bomb cyclones pose growing threats.

Defined by the federal government as costing 30% or less of an average local household's income, affordable housing is an already scarce resource, leading to rising rates of homelessness locally and nationwide. It’s one that’s only projected to get worse, as coastal flooding and intensifying storms continue to threaten coastal homes and neighborhoods.

A little more than 1,500 of the state’s affordable housing units are at risk of flood waters reaching their buildings once a year on average, the analysis showed — a figure projected to triple to a little under 5,000 units within 30 years unless steps are taken to protect them. Boston, Quincy and Cambridge have the highest numbers of affordable housing units at risk within Massachusetts, the analysis shows. In thirty years, Boston alone could have more than 3,000 units at risk. 

It’s not just the number of homes at risk from coastal flooding that matters — it’s how often flooding takes place. During the next thirty years, increasingly frequent flooding is expected in coastal cities, creating public safety and maintenance challenges for those living in affordable units. By 2050, more than a quarter of Massachusetts’ affordable housing stock could experience flood events at least four times each year on average.

While residents of coastal cities from Texas to the Carolinas face the gravest flood risks from  tropical systems,  the most damaging storm systems in New England are nor'easters. Holding true to their name, strong winds during these storms buffet the coastline from the northeast. With open water, the surf builds and surges slam into the coast.

Flood events disproportionately impact people of color. Extremely low-income renters are more likely to be Black, Native American, and Latinx residents. Affordable housing is more vulnerable to flooding, as it’s usually built in lower cost neighborhoods with an abundance of paving but few trees and fewer protections from floods, such as seawalls and restored wetland.

When seeking solutions to worsening climate change impacts facing those most vulnerable to them, Carolyn Kousky — executive director at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center — suggests looking to the environmental justice movement. The majority of those living in America’s most polluted environments are people of color. 

“We've seen communities of color and low income communities in the past have been saddled with excess risk from pollution, and things like that, and not gotten the safety measures they need,” she said. “We can't let that happen again with climate impact.”

Kousky says part of the solution lies in passing laws that require greater management of risks and preparations for disasters by business owners, requiring insurers and property owners to improve buildings, create evacuation plans and mandate insurance. “These need to be explicitly designed to help low and middle income families afford the disaster insurance and afford the mitigation measures that need to be taken,” she said.

Without these initiatives in place, the most vulnerable people living in the most vulnerable places end up bearing the heaviest consequences from a slew of flood risks — including storm surge, nuisance flooding during high tides and floods from heavy rain. All as the seas get higher.

Dominick Dusseau, a research assistant at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, says that climate change is playing a critical role in the increasing flood risks.

“The eastern part of the United States is going to face a significant amount of sea level rise,” said Dusseau. “By 2050, you're looking at about a foot of sea level rise. In 2100, you're gonna see about three to four feet of sea level rise.” 

In Boston, research shows these higher sea levels mean some low-lying parts of the city could experience at least 43 flood events within the next decade. These cyclones have pummeled Boston at a higher frequency and intensity in recent years, with three striking New England over the course of 10 days in 2018. 

“The real question here is ‘Has climate change created the conditions for those events to happen with greater likelihood?,’ Dusseau said. “And the answer is yes.'”

The Northeastern region appears to be moving into a stormy period, with a nor'easter building that's likely to affect Boston during the first couple days of February. Atmospheric conditions expected resemble those that have brought major flooding in the past, including in early 2018. 

Magdalena Ayed works in East Boston making sure locals know what they’re up against. Ayed is the founder of the Harborkeepers — an organization committed to creating awareness about the climate issues facing the predominantly Latinx communities living in East Boston. 

With almost 60% of the area's residents being nonnative English speakers, language can be the biggest barrier to city-led efforts to share information about climate change. 

De Jesus and her family moved to Boston from Puerto Rico when she was a child. They are among those in the area who feel under-prepared to deal with the consequences of climate change.

“We don’t know what's being done or what kinda help is gonna be available to the community — we don’t know,” she said. “We have to move…We have to start planning, that’s something that we have to start, but we don’t know.” 

It’s this confusion that Ayed and her team work to fix, as they partner with other local organizations to try and engage the community on climate issues. She's also been documenting high tides for the past few years. 

Ayed says the last few years have seen significant change, and it’s causing concern in the area’s waterfront communities. 

“I’ve been working with a lot of the communities in East Boston and a lot of them are vulnerable,” she said. “You see the water encroaching more and more, intense rains and flooding areas that perhaps weren’t normally flooded, and you know it is creating an infrastructure issue.” 

Early last year, Boston’s mayor committed to investing $30 million annually into the city’s climate resiliency in the face of rising sea levels and the growing threat of coastal flood risk. Across the city, streets are being raised, portable metal barriers have been installed around new high-rises, and berms — raised barriers made up of pebbles or sand meant to prevent high-tide flooding — are being built. 

As for those depending on affordable housing, the city’s inclusionary development policy mandates that 13% to 18% of new units qualify as 'affordable.' But there’s no requirement that existing, older units be fortified against climate risks. The diminishing availability of affordable housing in the area is also a factor — during the pandemic and the recession it has caused, Boston’s affordable housing wait lists have been getting longer. 

Ayed thinks the city is increasingly prioritizing strengthening Boston’s ability to withstand flooding and expand affordable housing stock — but that there’s more to be done. 

“When you think about evacuation and helping people adapt or mitigate the impacts in a storm event, that’s a big worry for the people here,” she said. “I’m not so sure that the city is catching up.”