This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.

Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.

In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.

Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.

But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.

Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.

Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.

Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.

Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.

Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.

Over the years, legislators have declined to pass at least three bills that would create siren or alert systems, tools experts say can be especially helpful in rural communities that lack reliable internet and cell service. A 2019 state-commissioned report estimated flood prevention needs at over $30 billion. Since then, lawmakers have allocated just $1.4 billion. And they ignored the key recommendations from the state’s 2024 flood plan that are meant to help rural areas like Kerr County, which is dubbed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its geography.

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, did not answer questions about why the plan’s recommendations were overlooked but defended the Legislature’s investment in flood mitigation as significant. They pointed to millions more spent on other prevention efforts, including flood control dam construction and maintenance, regional flood projects, and increased floodplain disclosures and drainage requirements for border counties. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to questions.

This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”

But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.

“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we've continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”

One recommendation from the 2024 flood plan would have cost the state nothing to enact. It called for granting counties the authority to levy drainage fees, including in unincorporated areas, that could fund local flood projects. Only about 150 of 1,450 Texas cities and counties have dedicated drainage fees, according to a study cited in the state assessment.

Kerr, a conservative county of 53,000 people, has struggled to gain support for projects that would raise taxes. About a week after the flooding, some residents protested when county commissioners discussed a property tax increase to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

The inability to raise such fees is one of the biggest impediments for local governments seeking to fund flood mitigation projects, said Robert R. Puente, a Democrat and former state representative who once chaired the state committee responsible for water issues. Lawmakers’ resistance to such efforts is rooted in fiscal conservatism, said Puente, who now heads the San Antonio Water System.

“It’s mostly because of a philosophy that the leadership in Austin has right now, that under no circumstances are we going to raise taxes, and under most circumstances we’re not even going to allow local governments to have control over how they raise taxes or implement fees,” he said.

Another one of the flood plan’s recommendations called for lawmakers to allocate money for a technical assistance program to help underresourced and rural governments better manage flood prone areas, which requires implementing a slew of standards to ensure safe development in those hazardous zones. Doing this work requires local officials to collect accurate mapping that shows the risk of flooding. Passing this measure could have helped counties like Kerr with that kind of data collection, which the plan recognized is especially challenging for rural and economically disadvantaged communities.

Insufficient information impacts Texas’s ability to fully understand flood risks statewide. The water board’s plan, for example, includes roughly 600 infrastructure projects across Texas in need of completion. But its report acknowledged that antiquated or missing data meant another 3,100 assessments would be required to know whether additional projects are needed.

In the Guadalupe River region, which includes Kerr County, 65% of areas lacked adequate flood mapping. Kerrville, the county seat, was listed among the areas identified as having the “greatest known flood risks and mitigation needs.” Yet of the 19 flood needs specific to the city and county, only three were included in the state plan’s list of 600. They included requests to install backup generators in critical facilities and repair low-water crossings, which are shallow points in streets where rainwater can pool to dangerous levels.

At least 16 other priorities, including the county’s desire for an early warning flood system and potential dam or drainage system repairs, required a follow-up evaluation, according to the state plan. County officials tried to obtain grants for the early warning systems for years, to no avail.

Gonzales County, an agriculture-rich area of 20,000 people along the Guadalupe River, is among the rural communities struggling to obtain funding, said emergency management director Jimmy Harless, who is also the county’s fire marshal. The county is in desperate need of a siren system and additional gauges to measure the river’s potentially dangerous flood levels, Harless said, but doesn’t have the resources, personnel or expertise to apply for the “burdensome” state grant process.

“It is extremely frustrating for me to know that there’s money there and there’s people that care, but our state agency has become so bureaucratic that it’s just not feasible for us,” Harless said. “Our folks’ lives are more important than what some bureaucrat wants us to do.”

For years, Texas leaders have focused more on cleaning up after disasters than on preparing for them, said Jim Blackburn, a professor at Rice University specializing in environmental law and flooding issues.

“It’s no secret that the Guadalupe is prone to flash flooding. That’s been known for decades,” Blackburn said. “The state has been very negligent about kind of preparing us for, frankly, the worst storms of the future that we are seeing today because of climate change, and what’s changing is that the risks are just greater today and will be even greater tomorrow, because our storms are getting worse and worse.”

At a news conference this month, Abbott said state committees would investigate “ways to address this,” though he declined to offer specifics. When pressed by a reporter about where the blame for the lack of preparedness should fall, Abbott responded that it was “the word choice of losers.”

It shouldn’t have taken the Hill Country flooding for a special session addressing emergency systems and funding needs, said Usman Mahmood, a policy analyst at Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for flood protection measures.

“The worst part pretty much already happened, which is the flooding and the loss of life,” he said. “Now it’s a reaction to that.”

Misty Harris contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Decades of scientific research has proven that human-caused climate change is making some disasters more dangerous and more frequent. The burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal releases carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it traps heat, warms the planet, and alters the conditions in which extreme weather forms. These changes are happening more rapidly than at any time in the last 800,000 years, according to climate records. 

Below, we break down what experts know — and what they don’t — about the connections between climate change and flooding. 

Flooding is one of the most common natural disasters that can devastate a community. Between 2000 and 2019, nearly 1.6 billion people globally were impacted by floods, according to a study published in Nature. 

In the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been criticized for outdated and incomplete maps that severely underestimate the number of people living in areas with a high risk of flooding. In 2018, a study estimated 41 million Americans live within a 100-year flood zone, or a region with a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year — over three times FEMA’s estimate of 13 million. 

In 2023, for example, thousands of homes in Vermont flooded during a historic storm, and some that weren’t officially listed on any floodplain maps were inundated with 5 feet of water. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 flooded some 200,000 homes or businesses, including tens of thousands of structures not classified as being in the flood zone.  

This undercount results in fewer people holding flood insurance policies than are actually at risk, leaving homeowners without financial support when disaster hits (regular home insurance does not cover floodwater). And because there are no federal requirements for a seller to disclose previous floods, potential home buyers might not even know they should have a policy. 

Floods can happen almost anywhere — not just next to bodies of water. Heavy rain can cause rivers and even small creeks to overflow. Strong winds can create storm surges, causing ocean water to inundate coastal communities. In urban and suburban areas, flash flooding takes place when heavy rain can’t drain through paved, concrete surfaces; it pools in streets and overwhelms sewer systems. 

Climate change is creating more extreme rainstorms, as warmer air can hold more moisture that will eventually come down as rain. Put another way: Earth “sweats” more as warmer air causes more water to evaporate and then condense and fall as rain. Models suggest that these storms can also stall for an extended period of time, deluging an area with more water than it can handle. Making matters worse, these storms can hit after extreme droughts and heat waves, a climate trend known as “weather whiplash.” When soil becomes hard and dry, it acts more like concrete, unable to soak up the excess water as effectively as it would in normal conditions. 

The warming oceans are also affecting rainfall: The Gulf of Mexico’s waters supercharged Hurricane Helene, for example, which made landfall in Florida before quickly moving inland and dumping 40 trillion gallons of water across the Southeast and into Appalachia. 

As rainfall becomes more extreme, experts have warned that existing flood control infrastructure won’t be adequate to protect communities in the future and is struggling under current conditions. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual infrastructure report card rates the nation’s dams, levees, and stormwater systems. This year, none of these categories received a grade above a D. These systems are in need of billions of dollars of repair and upgrades already, on top of the added stresses of climate change. In 2025, the Trump administration pulled funding for these types of projects as it reversed course from the previous administration’s climate goals, so many planned improvements are tied up in legal battles. Meanwhile, other projects being studied and planned aren’t factoring in the risks posed by climate change. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is worsening flooding and heavy rainfall on Jul 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Amal Ahmed.

Earlier this year, elected officials from 18 towns and counties devastated by Hurricane Helene gathered outside the Madison County courthouse in Marshall, North Carolina. Standing in a street still stained with the mud left behind when the French River overran its banks, they called for swifter state and federal help rebuilding their communities.

Everyone stood in the chill of a late January day because the first floor of the courthouse, built in 1907, remains empty, everything inside having been washed away in the flood. The county’s judicial affairs are conducted in temporary offices as local leaders wrangle state and federal funding to rebuild. Local officials hope to restore the historic downtown, and its most critical public buildings, without changing too much about it. They, like most of the people impacted by Hurricane Helene’s rampage in September, don’t doubt another flood is coming. But they are also hesitant to move out of its way.

“When you talk about what was flooded and moving it, it would be everything, and that’s just not realistic,” said Forrest Gillium, the town administrator. “We’re not going to give up on our town.”

They may not have to. FEMA is no longer enforcing rules, first adopted during the Obama administration, that required many federally funded construction projects to adopt strict siting and building standards to reduce the risk of future flooding. The rules were withdrawn by the first Trump administration and then re-implemented by executive order under Biden. Now, they’ve been withdrawn by Trump for the second time.

The change eases regulations dictating things like the elevation and floodproofing of water systems, fire stations, and other critical buildings and infrastructure  built with federal dollars. Ultimately, the rules were intended to save taxpayers money in the long run. Many other federal, state, and local guidelines still apply to the programs that help homeowners and businesses rebuild. Still, FEMA said rolling back the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will speed up recovery.

“Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,” the agency said in a statement released March 25.

President Trump rescinded the standard through an executive order on Jan 20. It required federal agencies to evaluate the impact of climate change on future flood risk and weather patterns to determine whether 500- and 100-year floodplains could shift and, if so, consider that before committing taxpayer money to rebuilding. The guideline required building critical facilities like fire stations and hospitals 3 feet above the floodplain elevation, and all other projects receiving federal funding at least 2 feet above it, said Chad Berginnis, who leads the Association of State Floodplain Managers. The idea was to locate these projects so they were beyond areas vulnerable to flooding or design them to withstand it if they could not be moved.

Easing the standard comes even as communities across the United States experience unprecedented, and often repeated, flooding. Homeowners and businesses in Florida, along the  Mississippi River, and throughout central Appalachia have endured the exhausting cycle of losing everything and rebuilding it, only to see it wash away again. The Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was meant to break that cycle and ensure everything rebuilt with taxpayer money isn’t destroyed when the next inundation hits.

“Why on Earth would the federal government want it to be rebuilt to a lower standard and waste our money so that when the flood hits if it gets destroyed again, we’re spending yet more money to rebuild it?” Berginnis said.

Last fall, federal climate scientists found that climate change increases the likelihood of extreme and dangerous rainfall of the sort Helene brought to the southeast. Such events will be as much as 15 to 25 percent more likely if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. With more extreme rainfall come challenges for infrastructure that was designed for a less extreme climate.

“You’re going to have storm sewers overwhelmed. You’re going to have basins that were designed to hold a certain kind of flood that don’t do it anymore,” Berginnis said. “You’re going to have bridges that no longer can pass through that water like it used to. You have all of this infrastructure that’s designed for an older event.”

The National Resources Defense Council said the Obama-era  standard was developed “because it is no longer safe or adequate to build for the flood risks of the past” and with the rollback, “the federal government is setting up public infrastructure to be damaged by flooding and wasting taxpayer dollars.”

Officials across western North Carolina have expressed frustration with the pace of rebuilding while acknowledging that they don’t want to endure the same problems over and over again.

Canton, North Carolina continues recovering from its third major flood in 20 years. “Everything that flooded in 2004, flooded in ’21. Everything that flooded in ‘21, flooded in 2024,” Mayor Zeb Smathers said. Stategies like new river gauges and emergency warning systems, coupled with land buyouts, have helped mitigate the threat. However, mitigation brings its own risk. The town has seen its tax base dwindle as people who lost their homes  moved on after accepting buyouts or deciding that rebuilding was too much effort. When it comes to public buildings, Smathers struggles with the idea of moving something like the school, which has seen its football field flooded in each storm. He feels it is more cost-effective to rebuild than to move, and saves energy and hassle, too.

“I don’t think it’s a one size fits all situation,” he said. “But in the mountains, we’re limited on land and where we can go.” 

Much of downtown Canton lies in a floodplain next to the Pigeon River. Smathers wants more flexibility from FEMA and greater trust in local decisions rather than more rules about where and how to build. 

Though local governments fronted some of the cost of rebuilding according to FFRMS standards, much of that required work has been federally subsidized.

Josh Harrold, the town manager of Black Mountain, said the Obama-era rules weren’t onerous. Helene decimated the town’s water system, municipal building, and numerous buildings and homes. “We know this is going to happen again,” he said. “No one knows what that’s going to be like, but we are taking the approach of, we just don’t want to build it back exactly like it was. We want to build it back differently.” 

Harrold and other officials said they don’t yet know how Trump’s order rescinding the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard will impact reconstruction. And it comes as some municipalities adopt and refine stricter floodplain rebuilding rules of their own. In January, Asheville adopted city ordinance amendments to comply with the rebuilding requirements set forth by the National Flood Insurance Program. It is not clear what Trump’s order might mean for that. City officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Berginnis said communities may not see immediate results from this change – but the effects will be felt in the future if leaders bypass the added protection it required: “Everything that gets rebuilt using federal funds will be less safe when the next flood comes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump axed a rule designed to spare taxpayers the burden of future flooding on Apr 9, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

A remote Filipino school in Bicol province assisted by a small New Zealand voluntary NGO has been seriously damaged by floodwaters in the wake of Typhoon Kristine (Trami) that left at least 82 people dead across the Philippines last week.

Mangcayo Elementary School, which was submerged by Typhoon Usman fringe storms six years ago, is the impacted school. It was a school that had been assisted by the Lingap Kapwa (“Caring for People”) project.

Now the school has been flooded again in the latest disaster. The school, near Vinzons in Bicol province, is reached by a narrow causeway that is prone to flooding by the Mangcayo Creek.

• READ MORE: Thousands evacuated as storm batters Philippines
• A special report on the 2019 Typhoon Usman flooding in Mangcayo

ABS-CBN News reports that foreign governments and humanitarian organisations have been scaling up assistance in the Philippines to aid hundreds of thousands affected by the typhoon, which struck several regions over the past week.

On Saturday, a C-130 cargo aircraft from the Singapore Air Force and a Eurocopter EC725 transport helicopter from the Royal Malaysian Air Force arrived at Colonel Jesus Villamor Air Base in Pasay City.

The aircraft will provide airlift support to help bolster the Philippine Air Force’s operations in delivering humanitarian aid supplies to typhoon-hit communities.

“During this challenging time, Singapore stands with our friends in the Philippines. This response underscores our warm defence ties and close Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) cooperation, as well as the enduring friendship between Singapore and the Philippines,” the Singapore Embassy in Manila said in a statement.

Chest-deep floodwaters
Philippine rescuers waded through chest-deep floodwaters to reach residents trapped by the typhoon, reports Al Jazeera.

Torrential rain had turned streets into rivers, submerged entire villages and buried some vehicles in volcanic sediment set loose by the tropical storm.

At least 32,000 people had fled their homes in the northern Philippines, police said.

In the Bicol region, about 400km southeast of the capital Manila, “unexpectedly high” flooding was complicating rescue efforts.

“We sent police rescue teams, but they struggled to enter some areas because the flooding was high and the current was so strong,” regional police spokesperson Luisa Calubaquib said.

At an emergency meeting of government agencies last Wednesday, President Ferdinand Marcos said that “the worst is yet to come”.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Coastal towns and cities in Florida were devastated when the Category 4 hurricane made landfall, but communities inland bore a similar brunt as the storm carved a path through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.

“Turn around, don’t drown,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper urged drivers in a press conference. 

At least 42 people have died from the storm. As of Friday, Florida reported seven deaths. Georgia, meanwhile, reported 15, and South Carolina, 17. In both of the latter states, most of the known fatalities were from falling trees and debris. North Carolina reported two deaths, including a car crash that killed a 4-year-old girl after a road flooded. 

Atlanta received 11.12 inches of rain in 48 hours, breaking its previous record of 9.59 inches in the same time period from 1886, according to Bill Murphey, Georgia’s state climatologist. More than 1 million Georgia residents also lost power in the storm, particularly in southern and eastern parts of the state. 

In western North Carolina, officials sounded alarms and went door-to-door evacuating residents south of the Lake Lure Dam in Rutherford County after the National Weather Service warned that a dam failure was “imminent.” Emergency crews also conducted more than 50 swift water rescues across the region, with one sheriff’s department warning it could not respond to all of the 911 calls due to flooded roads. The North Carolina Department of Transportation warned on social media that “all roads in Western NC should be considered closed” due to flooding from Helene.

In Tennessee, more than 50 people were stranded on the roof of a hospital due to heavy flooding and had to be rescued by helicopter. Residents of Cocke County in Tennessee were also asked to evacuate after reports that a separate dam could fail, although officials later said the dam failure had been a false alarm. In South Carolina, the National Weather Service said the storm was “one of the most significant weather events… in the modern era.”

The hurricane’s widespread flooding was worsened by climate change, scientists told Grist. Hurricane Helene was an unusually large storm with an expansive reach. After forming in the Caribbean, it traveled over extremely warm ocean waters in the Gulf of Mexico that enabled the storm to intensify more quickly than it may have otherwise. In fact, Helene went from a relatively weak tropical storm to a Category 4 in just two days. Warmer air also holds more moisture, supercharging the storm’s water content and leading to more rapid rainfall and intense flooding. 

“When that enhanced moisture comes up and hits terrain like the Appalachian Mountains,” said University of Hawaiʻi meteorology professor Steve Businger, “it results in very, very high rainfall rates, exceptionally high rainfall rates and that unfortunately results in a lot of flash flooding.”

Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at the scientific group Climate Central, said research has shown that the Gulf’s current extra-warm ocean temperatures were ​​made up to 500 times more likely with climate change. “One of the things that we’re seeing with these big storms, especially as they seem to become more frequent, is that they’re no longer natural disasters, but that they’re unnatural disasters,” Winkley said. “It’s not just a normal weather system anymore.” 

Hurricanes are naturally occuring, of course, but the conditions that led to Helene’s severity — its rapid intensification and heavy rainfall — were partially driven by warmer ocean and atmospheric temperatures from the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a fingerprint of climate change in that process,” Winkley said. 

“This summer was record warm globally and there was a record amount of water vapor in the global atmosphere,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. Both factors contributed to what the Southeastern U.S. experienced this week. “This is one of the more significant flood events in the U.S. in recent memory.”  

Initial estimates for the storm’s damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure range between $15 billion and $26 billion, the New York Times reported. Businger said he expects the enormous loss to fuel more conversations about the precarity of the existing property insurance system. “The cost to society is becoming extravagant,” he said.

Scientists noted that the fact that the storm’s winds increased by 55 miles per hour in the 24 hours before it made landfall also made it deadlier.

“It was so strong and moving so fast it just didn’t have time to weaken very much before it made it far inland,” Swain said. Rapid intensification is particularly dangerous, he said, because people often make decisions on how to prepare for storms and whether or not to evacuate based on how bad they appear to be initially. 

“It was one of the faster intensifying storms on record,” Swain said. “This is not a fluke. We should expect to see more rapidly intensifying hurricanes in a warming climate.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After battering coastal towns, Hurricane Helene causes deadly flooding across five states on Sep 27, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

A new tropical storm slammed Vietnam on Thursday, prompting the evacuation of about 1,000 people as authorities warned of more landslides and floods a week after the biggest typhoon of the year swept through Southeast Asia. 

Typhoon Soulik made landfall in Vietnam’s central provinces with heavy rainfall and wind speeds of 74 kilometers per hour (45 mph). 

It follows on the heels of Typhoon Yagi, which arrived on Vietnam’s north coast on Sept. 7. By Wednesday, flooding and landslides from that storm had left at least 329 people dead or missing and had caused an estimated 50,000 billion dong (US$2 billion) economic damage.

On Thursday, 350 communes across 10 provinces and cities in the middle of the country were thought to be at risk of landslides from Typhoon Soulik, according to the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting. 

The 1,000 people were moved from dangerous areas in the hours before the new storm landed, the Quang Binh Provincial Command for Natural Disaster Prevention and Search and Rescue said.

Other preparations included the military mobilization of more than 260,000 people and putting some 4,000 vehicles – including 10 helicopters – on standby for rescue and supply operations, according to state media. 

Homes swept away

In northern Laos, 2,700 people in Luang Namtha province have been using the provincial administrative hall and other government buildings as temporary shelters after flash floods from Typhoon Yagi’s rains damaged or swept away their homes, authorities said.

“Most of them staying here didn’t bring anything from their houses – only taking one set of clothes when the flood came,” said Brig. Gen. Inkeo Phommachanh, a member of the province’s disaster management committee. 

Food and drinking water have been sent to people in villages and at the temporary shelters, he said.

About 50 schools in the province have been affected by floods, with some classrooms still under water and others left unusable by muddy remnants. Desks, chairs and books have also been damaged, an education official told Radio Free Asia.

Some 5,600 students will have to wait until classrooms have been cleared of mud and restocked with desks, she said, adding that the school year began just two weeks ago.

In Myanmar’s Bago region, floodwaters from Typhoon Yagi have prompted the evacuations of around 80,000 people in Taungoo district, according to aid and relief groups.

Rescue workers told RFA on Tuesday that at least 10 people were swept away by flooding in Taungoo township.

Translated by Anna Vu, Phouvong and Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Matt Reed.

RFA Lao and RFA Burmese contributed to this report.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

Images from northern Laos and central Myanmar show the extent of flooding from torrential rains brought by Typhoon Yagi.

Asia's biggest storm of the year has left scores of people dead or missing in several countries in Southeast Asia since roaring across northern Vietnam, northern Laos and Thailand last week, causing landslides and flooding, and destroying homes, bridges and roads.

Since Sept. 10, high water levels in Laos’ Luang Namtha province have forced residents in affected villages up to the second floors of their flooded homes as they wait for help. 

Others have sought temporary shelter inside a provincial administration hall, a badminton court hall and Buddhist temples. 

The waterlogged areas include 35 villages, according to a Sept. 11 provincial administration report submitted to Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone’s office.

Authorities are busy rescuing people from the roofs of their homes, taking them to temporary shelter, and providing food and drinking water from donations by businesses and the wealthy, said a local official who declined to be identified so he could speak freely. 

Heavy rains from the storm caused spillover from the Namtha 3 Dam that flowed down the Namtha River, a tributary of the Mekong and the largest river in the province, and contributed to the flooding of province's Luang Namtha district.

Lake level rises 6 meters

In Myanmar, flooding from heavy rains has displaced more than 20,000 people from over 170 villages since Sept. 11 in the vicinity of Inle Lake, and residents urgently need aid, locals and volunteer aid workers said.

The flooding caused power outages and forced schools to close in communities near the freshwater lake in southern Shan state.

“We have never experienced such a severe flood before,” said a resident of Ma Gyi Seik village. 

The water level of the lake has risen more than six meters (20 feet) above normal because of heavy rainfall and water washing down from the mountains, inundating roughly 2,000 nearby homes.  

A resident of affected He Yar village said only a few of some 800 single-story houses were not inundated with water, and that villagers must rely on food delivered by boat.

Rescue workers have evacuated the elderly to Buddhist monasteries, though they need water and medicine, while other families are staying with friends and relatives, said a volunteer rescue worker.

As of Sept. 16, Myanmar state media said 226 people had died and 77 were still missing, according to the AFP news agency.

The death toll is double the previous figure of 113 reported on Sunday, with nearly 260,000 hectares (640,000 acres) of crops destroyed by floods.

Translated by Phouvong for RFA Lao and by Aung Naing for RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

Updates Myanmar death toll to 226.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Lao and RFA Burmese.

Heavy rains in Tibetan areas of central China’s Qinghai province have triggered severe flooding, destroying infrastructure and killing at least nine people and hundreds of livestock, three Tibetans from inside Tibet said.

The rains have drenched the area since Sept. 2, flooding roads, damaging bridges and causing landslides, they said. Chinese state media reported that heavy rains have  inundated houses and swept away vehicles.

Tibet is experiencing heavier annual rainfalls and flooding than in the past, which some Tibetan rights groups say is due to climate change.

Six people died in Trelnag township of Serchen (Gonghe in Chinese) County in Tsolho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, the sources said, insisting on not being identified to avoid reprisals from authorities.

Five of them died while traveling in a vehicle when a bridge collapsed, one source said.

Three others died due to a landslide in Honaguk village in Minhe county of Tsoshar (Haidong in Chinese) prefecture. 

Some areas experienced severe hailstorms, which shattered windows and glass panes in the homes of nomads, the sources said.

Livestock dies

The flooding killed livestock as well. Nearly 400 cattle and sheep died In Tsekhok (Zekog) county in the Malho (Huangnan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. 

Residents there needed help pulling dead cattle from the water and mud.

RELATED STORIES

Why do places in Tibet have both Tibetan and Chinese names?

Sudden flooding, landslides damage homes and roads in remote Tibetan county

Hail, torrential rain leave at least 31 dead in Tibetan-populated areas of China

Severe rain damages significant monastery in Tibet (VIDEO)

In Minhe district, houses were damaged, and highways and bridges were washed over, while grasslands were covered by mud.

As of Sept. 4, the Chinese government elevated the weather-damage alert for Qinghai from level 4 to level 3. 

Chinese state media reported a level-one flood warning has been issued for Siling (Xining) city as well as Tathang, Kumbum and Tongkor counties. As a result, officials suspended bus transportation from Siling to these areas.

Roads and bridges connecting Tongkor and Siling have been severely damaged by the flooding, the sources said.

Additionally, roads leading from Dashi (Haiyan) and Kangtsa (Gangcha) counties of Tsojang (Haibei) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and Themchen (Tianjun) county of Tsonub (Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture) to Siling (Xining) city have been cut off, making travel in and out of these areas impossible.

The areas have been hit by flooding before.

In 2022, five people died and over 2,000 head of livestock died due to flooding in parts of Qinghai province, including Mangra (Guinan), Serkog and Rebgong counties, as well as Labrang town in Sanchu (Xiahe) County of Kanlho (Gannan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Gansu province.

Additional reporting and translation by Tashi Wangchuk and Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chakmo Tso and Dickey Kundol for RFA Tibetan.

The rain-swollen Ayeyarwady River in the Magway region flowed over its banks , destroying 20,000 acres of green beans, peanuts and sesame in the key agricultural region, where most households farm as a  primary means of income, one resident of Kamma township said. 

“Flooding this year is very bad,” said the resident, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals due to the military regime’s crackdown on independent media. “Most of the bean fields are flooded and that’s the primary crop in this area.”

About 20 schools have been closed, he said, adding that five more townships in Magway are also experiencing rainy-season flooding.

Since the beginning of July, flooding has displaced tens of thousands in the region, washed away homes and killed several people, residents and relief workers said.

RFA telephoned Magway region’s junta spokesperson, Myo Myint, for comment but he did not respond by the time of publication.

RELATED STORIES

Myanmar floods displace thousands, destroy hundreds of homes
Floods in Myanmar force 10,000 from their homes, many trapped
Collapse at notorious Myanmar rare earth mine kills 15 people

The rainy season is not due to end until late October but for now, the worst may be over.

The junta’s Department of Meteorology and Hydrology reported early on Wednesday that water levels had receded below the danger level in Mandalay’s Nyaung-U township, to the north of Magway, and in areas to the south, near the river’s delta including in the towns of Seik Thar, Hinthada and Zalun.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Heated (6/27/24): “Most mainstream outlets continue to write about these lethal, record-breaking events as if they were merely acts of God.”

This month brought yet another record-breaking spate of flash floods and deadly heatwaves across the US. Yet, as a new study by Heated (6/27/24) reveals, despite ample reporting on these events, a majority of news outlets still did not link these events to their cause: climate change.

Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, writers for the climate-focused, Substack-based outlet, analyzed 133 digital breaking news articles from national, international and regional outlets reporting on this month’s extreme weather. Just 44% mentioned the climate crisis or global warming. Broken down by weather event: 52% of stories that covered heatwaves, and only 25% of stories that covered extreme rainfall, mentioned climate change.

As Atkin and Samuelson write, by now we know that climate change is the main cause of both extreme heat and extreme flooding. And we know the biggest contributor of climate-disrupting greenhouse gasses: fossil fuels, which account for about 75% of global emissions annually.

Still, the study’s authors found, only 11% of the articles they studied mentioned fossil fuels. Only one piece (BBC, 6/24/24) mentioned deforestation, which scientists say contributes about 20% of annual greenhouse gas emissions. None mentioned animal agriculture, which the FAO estimates contributes about 12% of global emissions.

Stark omissions 

This New York Post story (6/21/24) had no mention of climate change, but it did have Fox Weather meteorologist Stephen McCloud’s reassurance that “it’s not record-breaking heat.”

The omissions were laughably stark: A New York Post piece (6/21/24) ended with a New Yorker and former Marine who said he’d been in “way hotter conditions”—in Kuwait and Iraq. An AP article (6/4/24) quoted the “explanation” offered by a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management: “It does seem like Mother Nature is turning up the heat on us a little sooner than usual.”

Heated recognized some outlets that consistently mentioned climate change in their breaking coverage of heat and floods this month. That list included NPR, Vox, Axios, BBC and Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Then there were the outlets whose breaking coverage never mentioned it: ABC News, USA Today, The Hill, the New York Post and Fox Weather. When questioned, many of these outlets pointed the study’s authors to other climate coverage they had done, but this study’s focus on breaking news stories  was deliberate:

Our analysis focused only on breaking stories because climate change is not a follow-up story; it is the story of the lethal and economically devastating extreme weather playing out across the country. To not mention climate change in a breaking news story about record heat in June 2024 is like not mentioning Covid-19 in a breaking news article about record hospitalizations in March 2020. It’s an abdication of journalistic responsibility to inform.

Explaining isn’t hard

The Washington Post (6/13/24) noted that two recent extreme rains in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, “bear the fingerprint of human-caused climate change, which is increasing the intensity and severity of top-tier rain events.”

A crucial takeaway for journalists and editors in this piece is that explaining the cause of these weather events isn’t hard. It’s often a matter of adding a sentence at most, Atkin and Samuelson write. They provide examples of stories that successfully made this connection, as with BBC (6/24/24):

Scientists say extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense as a result of human-caused climate change, fueled by activities like burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests.

Or the Guardian (6/23/24):

Heatwaves are becoming more severe and prolonged due to the global climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

Notably, the Guardian piece was a reprint of an AP article that did not originally include that sentence; Heated confirmed that it was added by a Guardian editor.

AP, however, was sometimes able to provide appropriate context, as in a June 21 piece:

This month’s sizzling daytime temperatures were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees F hotter (1.4 degrees C) because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas—in other words, human-caused climate change.

More denial than acknowledgment 

FAIR (7/18/23): “By disconnecting climate change causes and consequences, media outlets shield the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who aid and abet them.”

During last summer’s apocalyptic orange haze on the East Coast, caused by record Canadian wildfires, I conducted a similar study (FAIR.org, 7/18/23) on US TV news’s coverage. Out of 115 segments, only 38% mentioned climate change’s role. Of those 115, 10 mentioned it in passing, 10 engaged in climate denial and 12 gave a brief explanation without alluding to the reality that climate change is human-caused. Only five segments acknowledged that climate change was human caused, and just seven fully fleshed out the fact that the  main cause of the climate crisis is fossil fuels.

When there are more segments denying climate change than acknowledging fossil fuels’ role in it, you know there’s a problem.

This year, I noticed coverage of worldwide coral bleaching that did make the appropriate connections (FAIR.org, 5/17/24). As Atkin and Samuelson emphasized, the difference between careless and responsible reporting on this issue is often just a few words.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.

However, local sources told Radio Free Asia that there are likely many more people missing in mountainous Nyagchu county.

The flooding and landslides last weekend took many people by surprise, one source told RFA.

Roads were covered with mud, and some cars and trucks were tossed into the debris as the flooding rushed through towns and villages.

Nyagchu county – referred to as Yajiang in Mandarin Chinese – is in Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the traditional Kham region. 

Tibetans made up the majority of Nyagchu county’s total population of over 51,000, according to 2020 census data. 

Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Tibetan.

In that regard, an excellent new series by The Washington Post d/d April 29th, 2024, “Must Reads” is an eye-opening view into the impact of global warming in real time with real people and real images. For example, it’s a quick fix for anybody who doubts human-caused climate change influence on sea level rise. It’s real; it’s happening now; it should be required reading for America’s Congressional climate deniers.

And required reading for 50 million Americans who do not believe in climate change/global warming, according to a new University of Michigan study. Meanwhile a diametrically opposing viewpoint: “Planet is headed for at least 2.5C of heating with disastrous results for humanity, poll of hundreds of scientists finds.” (Source: “World’s Top Climate Scientists Expect Global Heating to Blast Past 1.5C Target”, The Guardian, May 8, 2024.)

As a prelude to the 2024 elections, it should be noted: “When former President Donald Trump exited the Oval Office in January 2021, he left behind a record of environmental roll backs unrivaled in U.S. History.” Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook will do more: “MAGA Republicans Have a 920-Page Plan to Make Climate Change Worse”, Heatmap News, February 15, 2024.

Here’s the opening tickler for the thought-provoking “Must Reads” series: “This past week, The Post published the first two pieces in a new series showcasing an alarming phenomenon confronting tens of millions of Americans from Texas to North Carolina: The ocean is rising across the South faster than almost anywhere. In some communities, roads increasingly are falling below the highest tides, leaving drivers stuck in repeated delays or forcing them to slog through salt water to reach homes, schools, work, and places of worship. Researchers and public officials fear that in certain places, rising waters could periodically cut off residents from essential services such as medical aid.”

A 2023 Scientific American article: “U.S. Seas Are Rising at Triple the Global Average” conforms to the inescapable conclusion of a need for sirens and flashing red lights to signal the dangers imbedded in Must Reads: “Sea levels have surged along the coastlines of the southeastern United States, new research finds — hitting some of their highest rates in more than a century… the effect on communities near the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean already are being observed.”

Alarmingly, sea-level rise of the Southeast and the Gulf already exceed scientific models projected for the next 30 years, prompting a mad scramble by scientists looking for answers to why sea levels are 30 years ahead of schedule. Nobody is braced for this happening so fast.

“The recent Journal of Climate study suggested that the increase may be driven by changes in a warm-water current passing through the Gulf of Mexico. And these changes may in turn be fueled by a recent slowdown in a major Atlantic Ocean current, driven by human-caused climate change.” (Ibid.)

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -NOAA– high-tide flooding along the Gulf and East coasts has increased considerably: High-tide flooding days are up 400% in the Southeast and 1,100% in the Gulf since 2000. It’s no wonder that property insurance premiums are spiking, and shorelines are slipping. It’s real; it’s happening now.

Solutions: Adapt to Sea Levels and Mitigate CO2 to Avoid Worst-Case

What to do: According to Sönke Dangendorf, an expert in coastal engineering at Tulane University and lead author of the new study: “We need to prepare for that: we need to adapt.” (Ibid.)

A new study authored by Lily Roberts at State of the Planet, Columbia Climate School, “Increase in West Antarctica Ice Sheet Melting Inevitable in 21st Century” d/d January 26, 2024, emphasizes the necessity for adaptation measures to combat sea level rise: “The new findings paint a grave picture for the state of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. We may now have limited capacity to stop ice-shelf collapse in the region and prevent meters of global sea-level rise. Experts are warning that policymakers should consider adaptation to sea-level rise a primary concern, as the window to safeguard the ice sheet from irreversible damage has probably now passed…. This new research paints a more realistic picture for the fate of Antarctic ice shelves and highlights the necessity for continued mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid the worst-case ocean warming scenario, as well as the urgent need for prioritization of adaptation to global sea-level rise.”

Adapting to rising sea levels entails moving physical structures away from coastal areas exposed to loss of shorelines and building massive sea walls, begging the all-important question of whether it’s already too late to stop, full stop, greenhouse gas CO2 emissions produced by oil and gas companies, which, in turn, causes global warming and sea level rise. What to do and how soon to do it is a nagging issue that requires immediate attention at the highest levels. Unless, of course, people simply don’t give a damn and let the chips fall where they may, aka: “avoidance coping.”

Furthermore, compounding the issue for the US, it’s not only the Southeastern and Gulf coasts, but also happening in Maine: “What were once distant projections on TV and in newspapers have now made it to the doorsteps of thousands of coastal residents in Maine: sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, with some areas in the state experiencing water levels eight inches higher than what they were in 1950. Estimates show that sea level rise will only continue to accelerate in coming decades.” (Source: “Manomet Awarded New Funding To Study Sea Level Rise Impacts On Maine’s Coastal Communities”, The Manomet Team, January 25, 2023).

Humanity is smack dab in the early stages of a man-made climate crisis that’s just now starting to strut its stuff in open public The question remains whether a self-induced climate crisis can be self-reduced, but in all honesty and by all appearances, world leadership prefers to continue playing Russian roulette with a single round of fossil fuels. CO2 emissions are 76% of greenhouse gases that cause overheating of the planet, and CO2’s primary source is oil and gas production, which clearly presents the dilemma of all dilemmas.

What to do? And when is it too late? And is it possible to live without oil and gas production?

Humanity did live without oil and gas production for thousands of years pre-Colonel Drake’s heralded discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 (world population 1.2 billion at the time) that set the stage for a new oil economy. Going forward, can an overcrowding 8.1 billion world civilization exist without oil and gas production, and more importantly, can 8.1B survive with it?

It’s notable that climate scientists say halting CO2 emissions will slow the rate of increase of planetary heat. Thus, things can be done to alleviate the impact of global warming so that it’s not as horribly bad as it is without any mitigation whatsoever. Less horrible is good.

Meanwhile… HOUSTON — “Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing, and policymakers should abandon the ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.” (Source: “Saudi Aramco CEO Says Energy Transition is Failing, World Should Abandon ‘Fantasy’ of Phasing Out Oil”, CNBC News, March 18, 2024).

Really? Seriously? Amin who?

Because international oil and gas interests plan on increasing production, by a lot, which is accepted by world leaders with open arms, there’s no stopping a sure-fire rapid rate of sea level never witnessed before. The Global Oil and Gas Tracker claims: “Fourfold Increase in New Oil and Gas Fields to Push Climate Further From 1.5°C Pathway”.

Assuming all-above plays out as described, meaning oil and gas producers pump full-blast like psychopaths with a death wish, the only option left is building massive sea walls, re-introducing medieval fortifications throughout the world, a throwback to the 5th-14th centuries when horse-drawn four-wheeled carts and walking were the modes of transportation, thereby establishing Net Zero once and for all.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Last Friday, after a week of unrelenting rain dumped inches of water on southern Brazil, Guaíba Lake — technically a river that receives runoff from five other tributaries — breached its banks and burst into Porto Alegre. The floodwaters submerged vast swaths of the city, including its historic downtown and airport, and caused unspeakable damage across the rest of Rio Grande do Sul. As of Thursday, 1.45 million people in 417 of the 497 cities in the state had been affected by flooding and landslides. Nearly 100,000 homes have been damaged or wrecked, 155,000 people are displaced or homeless, and the death toll stands at 113, with more than 140 people still missing. Guaíba Lake had just started to recede when more rain started to fall on Friday. 

“There’s no precedent in Brazil for the crisis we are experiencing at the state level,” Jonatas Rubert, another resident of Porto Alegre, said Thursday evening. “The apprehension about what will happen in the next few days is immense.” 

Martinez has been sheltering in his small apartment with his mother and grandparents, who were forced to evacuate their homes as the floodwaters advanced. The apartment, situated on elevated ground, was spared the worst of the flooding. In Porto Alegre and other parts of the state, people who lost their homes to the floodwaters are surviving on limited food supplies and dwindling sources of clean water. “Because the water is so high, we don’t know yet how many people have died,” Martinez said. 

The flooding in Rio Grande do Sul is shaping up to be one of the worst environmental disasters in Brazil’s history. On Thursday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a 50 billion reais ($9.7 billion) relief and redevelopment package to be deployed in southern Brazil right away — a historic investment that represents the “first” round of aid, he said. 

Many factors helped produce a catastrophe of this scale. Experts have named climate change and the El Niño, the natural weather phenomenon that periodically changes oceanic and atmospheric conditions, as chief culprits for the intensity and rapid onset of the flooding. But a series of decisions by the local, state, and federal government in Brazil over the past decade have also contributed to the devastating effect the flooding has had on communities in Rio Grande do Sul, shaped the inadequate humanitarian response to the ongoing suffering there, and limited Brazil’s broader capacity to adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change. 

Experts told Grist that the astronomic scale and cost of the floods may mark an inflection point in the way Brazilians think about environmental policies and climate change, particularly climate change adaptation — systemic adjustments that can safeguard against future impacts. 

“This is going to shake the mindsets of voters,” said Carlos R. S. Milani, senior fellow at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a think tank, and the Brazilian Scientific Development Council, a government organization. Whether the disaster affects decisions made by their elected representatives is still an open question. 

Rio Grande do Sul has been besieged by recurrent large flooding events this year, one of the climate change impacts that climate scientists have predicted for Brazil and South America in general. But flooding is just one of the extreme weather events Brazilians have experienced in the past 12 months. In late 2023, rivers in the Amazon rainforest reached historic lows as temperatures in Brazil hit a record-breaking 138 degrees F — one of nine heatwaves that gripped the country last year. A 23-year-old woman died of cardiac arrest after standing in line for a Taylor Swift concert in the record-breaking temperatures for hours. In March, Rio de Janeiro registered a new heat index record: 144 degrees F. 

“I have no doubt that climate change has to do with it,” said Raissa Ferreira, campaign director for Greenpeace Brazil, referring to these recent events. “The greenhouse gas effect is getting more potent.” 

The El Niño that formed last year and is extending into this year has exacerbated severe climate impacts across Brazil, including the drought in the Amazon and increased rainfall in the southern parts of the country. Scientists are investigating whether the intensity of the El Niño — which may be the strongest in seven decades — is also a symptom of worsening climate change. 

The climate impacts of the past 12 months should not have caught Brazil’s government by surprise. In 2014, the administration of the president at the time, Dilma Rousseff, commissioned a strategy document titled “Brazil 2040: Scenarios and alternatives for adapting to climate change.” The report was prescient, if overly conservative: Many of the climate impacts it projected, including extreme flooding, have come to pass more than 15 years ahead of schedule. The center-left Rousseff administration ultimately buried the report, and subsequent governments have failed to take up the mantle. The result is that Brazil, the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and an emerging global power, has a climate adaptation strategy in name only. “Climate adaptation needs to be implemented,” Ferreira said, “but we see very negative signs in Brazil that that is a political priority.”  

Meanwhile, far-right political parties in Brazil have spent years dismantling environmental protections, eschewing established climate science, and promoting the interests of the country’s booming agribusiness sector at the expense of Brazil’s vulnerable natural resources. The strategy, fiercely opposed by the country’s left-wing and Indigenous factions, has garnered consistent support from the public. 

Rio Grande do Sul, a state that is highly dependent on agricultural production, especially of rice and soybeans, twice voted for former Brazilian president and ardent climate denier Jair Bolsonaro by a substantial margin. Porto Alegre’s mayor and Rio Grande do Sul’s governor, both right-wing politicians, have stripped the local and state budgets of environmental and civil defense funding. 

The city’s mayor, Sebastião Melo, did not spend a penny on improving the city’s flood systems in 2023, and made substantial cuts to the municipal flood prevention program in 2021 and 2022. Porto Alegre could have planted mangroves and grasses to help absorb flood water, established early warning systems for at-risk neighborhoods, and built walls and other infrastructure to keep river water out of the city. None of those precautions were taken. Meanwhile, Rio Grande do Sul Governor Eduardo Leite’s 2024 budget allocated less than 50,000 reais — less than $10,000 — to emergency preparedness, evacuations, recovery, and other aspects of civil defense. 

“The word on the street is that the governor left 50,000 reais for the possibility of a catastrophe like this,” said Giordano Gio, a 31-year-old filmmaker in Porto Alegre. “This is, like, the cost of a Honda Civic.” In a poll this week, 70 percent of Brazilians said infrastructure investments could have lessened the risks of the recent flooding.

The floods raise a number of questions about what happens next in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil in general. Before the floods hit, Lula’s government was trying to rebalance the federal budget, reduce the national deficit, and reinvest in Brazil’s middle class. The crisis may scramble those efforts. The floods, said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist and professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, are “going to have a serious impact in terms of inflation, in terms of food prices in Brazil. It’s very bad news to the Lula government in a moment when the president already has many challenges on his plate.” One of those challenges, and a priority for Lula, is reducing the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Rainforest deforestation, much of it in service of exposing more arable land for agricultural production, is responsible for half of Brazil’s carbon emissions.

The influx of federal funding to Rio Grande do Sul will help rebuild the state, but experts Grist spoke to and people on the ground in Porto Alegre wonder what happens next from a climate preparedness perspective. “Lula was elected in a big coalition that has a lot of right-wing people in it,” said Gio, the filmmaker. Left-wing parties control only a quarter of the seats in Brazil’s House and Senate, which hinders Lula’s ability to pass climate change legislation. “There’s a lot of things going on politically that might affect” potential climate policy, Gio said.

More environmental disasters will affect Brazil in the coming months. High temperatures this year are expected to produce even more severe drought in the Amazon, for example, and the states that surround the rainforest are among the poorest in the country. Rio Grande do Sul, one of the wealthiest states in Brazil, is better positioned to recover from an event of this magnitude than most other regions of the country. “If this could happen in a richer area of the country, what if it happens next in a very poor one?” asked Milani. “The capacity to adapt, to respond, is much less.” 

That question — what happens now? — will linger long after the floodwaters have receded. “I would have the intuition as a political scientist that climate and environment will very much be at the heart of debate in many municipal elections all over the country this year because of this event in Rio Grande do Sul,” Santoro said. “This is a political struggle more than anything else right now.” 

In Porto Alegre, Martinez has been manning his local soup kitchen and working with his fellow community organizers to develop systems to handle the influx of relief aid they have been receiving from people all over the world. For him, watching people in his community help each other has been a small silver lining in the midst of the ongoing horror. “Local governments have abandoned us,” he said. “We will not watch our neighborhoods get destroyed and do nothing.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Brazil, unprecedented flooding may force a political reckoning on May 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Much of the deepest flooding happened in the San Jacinto River, a serpentine waterway that winds along Houston’s eastern edge and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. This area happens to be the site of perhaps the country’s longest-running experiment in the adaptation policy known as “managed retreat,” which involves moving homeowners away from neighborhoods that will become increasingly vulnerable to disaster as climate change worsens. Harris County has spent millions of dollars buying out and demolishing at-risk homes along the river over the past decade. But the past week’s flooding has demonstrated that even this nation-leading program hasn’t been able to keep pace with escalating disaster.

“This is basically the largest and the deepest river within the county, and the floodplain is so deep that really we can’t do projects to fix these areas,” said James Wade, who leads the home buyouts for the Harris County Flood Control District. “We’re trying to get contiguous ownership in these areas so that we can basically convert it back to nature.”

It’s been slow going: Wade says the county has purchased about 600 flood-prone homes along the waterway over the past 30 years, almost all of which would have flooded during the recent storm if they hadn’t been bought out and demolished. There are still more than 1,600 vulnerable homes that the county is trying to purchase, but it has struggled to secure the necessary funds and get property owners on board.

Harris County was one of the first local governments in the United States to buy out flood-prone homes with money provided by FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. The county has acquired more than 4,000 homes in dozens of subdivisions around Houston since the turn of the century, creating what are essentially miniature ghost towns around the city and its suburbs. Many of these neighborhoods, including the ones around San Jacinto, were so prone to flooding that the county couldn’t protect them with channels and retention ponds, which secure other residential areas.  

The county doubled down on this strategy around the San Jacinto after Hurricane Harvey flooded hundreds of homes along the river in 2017, confirming that many residences were “hopelessly deep” in the floodplain, in the county’s words. Not only is the land around the river low-lying and marshy, but it also sits downstream of a reservoir that needs to release water during flood events so it does not overflow. 

The county used federal funds to purchase and demolish an entire subdivision called Forest Cove, converting the open space into a “greenway” park with walking and bike trails. Elsewhere, it bought out homeowners who had already elevated their riverside homes as high as 14 feet in the air but had still seen flooding during Hurricane Harvey. These buyouts were voluntary, but after years of advocacy the county managed to persuade most homeowners to leave.

A separate county agency pursued a mandatory buyout in a few subdivisions where residents had been flooded several times, including one large community along the San Jacinto. This mandatory initiative has drawn criticism from residents who accuse the county of uprooting established communities, but the county saw it as a necessary measure to control flood risk in places where no other flood control strategies would work. More than six years after Harvey, officials are still working to close on the last of those homes. 

Yet this aggressive program has still left many vulnerable neighborhoods untouched. The county gets most of its buyout funding from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which tend to dole out grants only after big disasters. It has also floated a $2.5 billion bond to finance flood protection and buyouts, but that sum has proven too little. There are far more flood-prone homes even along the San Jacinto than the county can afford to buy, to say nothing of the rest of the Houston metropolitan area, one of the country’s most populous urban centers. 

“Money is obviously the biggest constraint,” said Alex Greer, an associate professor of emergency management at the University at Albany who has studied buyout programs. “They often have far more interested homeowners than they have funds, and the funding comes way too late.” Wade isn’t sure yet whether the flood caused enough damage to meet the criteria for a presidential disaster declaration, which would unlock significant FEMA aid and likely help the county fund more buyouts along the San Jacinto. 

Furthermore, buyouts can take years to execute. In most cases, the county has to convince individual homeowners to enroll in a buyout program, then complete months of paperwork to purchase their homes, then wait for the homeowners to move. If there are holdouts who don’t want to leave, the buyouts end up happening in a “checkerboard” pattern, and the government can’t let water retake the land. Some neighborhoods, like those in the more upscale Kingwood area, are fighting for alternate solutions like new upstream reservoirs or dredging projects that could reduce flooding without homeowners needing to leave.

Even though residents along the beleaguered river have been dealing with floods for decades, Wade says he hopes this most recent flood will convince more of them to join the buyout program, allowing the county to return more land along the river back to nature. Without more money, though, he won’t be able to take advantage of what Greer calls the “window to woo.”

“Right after a flood event, that’s when people are most like, ‘I don’t want to do this again,’” he said. “But then there’s that lag of time between them coming forward and us being able to secure the funds, and they could change their minds.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Texas flooding brings new urgency to Houston home buyout program on May 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is an excerpt from the book “On The Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America,” about climate migration in the U.S. For more, see abrahm.com.

Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray.

A couple of miles west of downtown Slidell, Louisiana, and just upstream from the broad expanse of Lake Pontchartrain — the 40-by-24-mile-wide brackish estuary separating what is now the mainland from New Orleans — a five-room shotgun house sits on a plot of marshy lawn near the edge of Liberty Bayou. Colette Pichon Battle’s mother had been born in that house. Colette, bright-eyed and ambitious, devoutly Catholic, a force on the volleyball court, was raised in the house until the day she left for college. The family’s very identity had grown from the waters of the marsh around it. From a humble rectangle of wood, framed onto brick stanchions that kept it hovering several feet above the ground, shaded by the long beards of Spanish moss hanging from the limbs of towering oaks and a hardy pine, a family was born. Its Creole heritage near the acre of low-lying land goes deeper than the trees, deeper than the United States as a nation, to around 1770. Those roots withstood the tests of centuries: slavery, war and more than their share of storms.

Then, Hurricane Katrina arrived. Colette was in her law office in Washington, D.C., in 2005 when she saw a graphic weather forecast on the television screen: a swirling monster of a Category 5 storm, broader than anything she’d ever seen before, was headed straight for her family home. She rushed into a conference room and called her mother.

On the bayou, people don’t run from storms. They cope with a familiar nuisance the way Minnesotans cope with the snow. For all Colette’s life, the hurricanes that routinely swept Louisiana were more cause for bonding than for fear — families would gather in one place, bringing the food that had to be eaten before the power went down, and they’d barbecue it and talk and share stories while the storm passed overhead. That the water would sometimes come wasn’t a surprise; it was why the home was elevated. But time and warming and the erosion of a protective coastline had already changed the nature of the storms. And Katrina looked different. “I need you to get out of there,” Colette told her mom.

Mary Pichon Battle, a vibrant 60-year-old schoolteacher, had raised her children to travel the world. She was a living tie to Liberty Bayou’s rich history, one of the last remaining people there still fluent in the Creole language. And she’d clung to that home, even with the boot of Louisiana on her back, throughout the Civil Rights era, all while raising Colette, teaching her French and Creole, and then sending her off to Kenyon College in Ohio, and to law school at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Liberty Bayou wasn’t just an asset. It was her history, her identity. She saw no reason to leave. Colette, though, acting on instinct more than habit, was insistent. Mary would drive to her brother’s house in Breaux Bridge, just a few hours away. It would only be for a couple of days. Then she’d be back.

All around, people were taking flight. The displaced from New Orleans and the coastlines headed north toward higher ground, gathering the people of Slidell along with them. When the storm hit, it pushed a surge of waters across the lake onto its north shore. The shotgun house filled steadily, the water pushing Mary’s cherished paintings of Jesus off their hooks and setting them afloat, along with the contents of boxes of family photographs — prints of Colette and her twin brother as babies; photos of her grandmother, a beauty, before she used a wheelchair. All were carried toward the rafters, and lost, as the peak of the house’s tin roof disappeared. Slidell was inundated by tidal surges more than 20 feet deep. The water washed through buildings downtown at head height, transforming the entirety of the flat, low-lying landscape into a sea pocked only by occasional trees and obstacles jutting from the water. By the time those surging waters sloshed back into the lake, flowing south again to overcome the levees around New Orleans, the community of Liberty Bayou, for the most part, had already been destroyed. Mary Pichon Battle, who’d packed just three days’ worth of clothes and left a lifetime’s worth of belongings, had little to come home to. The house was unlivable. “It was in the water, in the ocean,” Colette recounted. “The tidal surge took it.” And much of Slidell had gone with it.

As tens of thousands of people continued to leave the wreckage of Louisiana in the weeks and months following the storm — and Mary remained a refugee — Colette moved back home. Fifteen generations on the bayou, a legacy in jeopardy, exerted a gravitational pull she could not resist. The devastation spoke to her. The rebuilding beckoned. She thought about the survivors.

“There are these trees here,” she says, describing the deeply rooted, majestic oaks that dot the landscape of southern Louisiana and the Mississippi coast. The tidal surge snapped the pines like Pixy Stix. The briny ocean water turned grasses brown and dead, killing animals and fish both, along with flowers and shrubs. “Not everything made it,” she said, “but these trees, these oaks, they made it. And they stood.”

Colette knew that her home might never be rebuilt. She knew her mother might never come back. But she tells the story, grasping for an explanation for why she herself returned, trying to find words that could describe the role she felt suddenly compelled to fulfill. “And I feel more like that, right?” she says, comparing herself to the aged oaks. “I feel like that. I’m watching other trees go down, I’m watching changes, but I’ve got the roots that are strong enough to hold.”

And so Colette became the resistance, pushing back against all the forces arrayed against her: the storm after the storm. She thought, at the time, she’d join a great healing, the rebuilding that would bring her mother home and the restoration of all the ties that gave life there meaning. She would bring the whole Bayou home. She began to talk about the risks in terms that the bayou communities around her could not recognize. She warned that if they failed to rebuild, to be resilient, the only option would be to migrate away from Louisiana’s southern coast — that while the recovery from the storm looked bleak, the alternative could be far worse. “People thought we were crazy,” she says, “but that’s how it begins.”

People have always moved as their environment has changed. But today, the climate is warming faster, and the population is larger, than at any point in history.

As the U.S. gets hotter, its coastal waters rise higher, its wildfires burn larger and its droughts last longer, the notion that humankind can triumph over nature is fading, and with it, slowly, goes the belief that self-determination and personal preference can be the driving factors in choosing where to live. Scientific modeling of these pressures suggest a sweeping change is coming in the shape and location of communities across America, a change that promises to transform the country’s politics, culture and economy.

It has already begun. More Americans are displaced by catastrophic climate-change-driven storms and floods and fires every year. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the global nongovernmental organization researchers rely on to measure the number of people forcibly cast out of their homes by natural disasters, counted very few displaced Americans in 2009, 2010 and 2011, years in which few natural disasters struck the United States. But by 2016 the numbers had begun to surge, with between 1 million and 1.7 million newly displaced people annually. The disasters and heat waves each year have become legion. But the statistics show the human side of what has appeared to be a turning point in both the severity and frequency of wildfires and hurricanes. As the number of displaced people continues to grow, an ever-larger portion of those affected will make their moves permanent, migrating to safer ground or supportive communities. They will do so either because a singular disaster like the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California — or Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts — is so destructive it forces them to, or because the subtler “slow onset” change in their surroundings gradually grows so intolerable, uncomfortable or inconvenient that they make the decision to leave, proactively, by choice. In a 2021 study published in the journal Climatic Change, researchers found that 57% of the Americans they surveyed believed that changes in their climate would push them to consider a move sometime in the next decade.

Also in 2021, the national real estate firm Redfin conducted a similar nationwide survey, finding that nearly half of Americans who planned to move that year said that climate risks were already driving their decisions. Some 52% of people moving from the West said that rising and extreme heat was a factor, and 48% of respondents moving from the Northeast pointed to sea level rise as their predominant threat. Roughly one in four Americans surveyed told Redfin they would no longer consider a move to a region facing extreme heat, no matter how much more affordable that location was. And nearly one-third of people said that “there was no price at which” they would consider buying a home in a coastal region affected by rising seas. When Redfin broadened its survey to include more than a thousand people who had not yet decided to move, a whopping 75% of them said that they would think twice before buying a home in a place facing rising heat or other climate risks.

Global migration experts say that what is happening in Louisiana is a textbook case of how climate-driven migration begins: First, people resist their new reality. Second, they make modest, incremental adjustments to where they live. Slidell, after all, is still within commuting distance of friends and jobs in St. Bernard Parish to the south. Third, they climb the ladder toward a safer place, rest on a rung for a while, and then continue on, only to be replaced by others worse off than they are, climbing up behind them.

What Colette hoped to avoid was the situation unfolding to her south, in the small Indigenous community of Isle de Jean Charles. There, Biloxi, Chitimacha and Choctaw people were clinging to an exposed tendril of Louisiana’s subsiding land. The Choctaw people had escaped to the south in the first half of the 19th century, finding refuge in the rural wild marshes of the uninhabited coast as white Americans pursued a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that drove the rest of the tribe — and tens of thousands of others — west on the Trail of Tears. Nearly 200 years later, the descendants of those exiles described a land where horses and cattle roamed across solid earth and their grandfathers slung freshwater bass and catfish out of Lake Tambour. The area now referred to as the Isle covered 22,000 acres.

But then the waters began to rise. Levees built along the Mississippi blocked the natural flow of sediment to replenish the marsh soils, while the oil companies dug thousands of miles of canals. The canals allowed salt water to overcome freshwater marshes, choking off plant life that also nourished the delicate ecosystem. It killed the wetlands and led the land to subside and erode. All the while, the climate got hotter, and the water levels of the Gulf of Mexico rose, doubling the effect of the change. Lake Tambour became a map label in an open sea of salt water. Today, 98% of the Isle’s land is gone.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to build a 72-mile system of levees, dams and locks to protect the southern Louisiana coast in the early 2000s, it decided it was too expensive to include Isle de Jean Charles, and so it cut the small Indigenous community of around 325 people out of the protection zone. Isle de Jean Charles was forsaken as irredeemable, counted among the first sacrifices of sovereign land that the U.S. government would make to climate change. And ever since the Corps’ decision, the people living there have been forced to consider where they’ll go when they lose their land entirely. By the time of Katrina, they had started to negotiate a way out — a total and complete retreat. It seemed likely that a community that had held together for hundreds of years would be scattered on the wind. Their hope was that if they fled all at once, they could move together. Perhaps the fabric of community and spiritual support, and the legacy of culture and heritage, could be preserved. It just might have to be moved somewhere else, though.

Colette Pichon Battle watched that painful progression to her south and wanted nothing of it. Her heart ached at the injustice she observed there, where an Indigenous tribal community could not rally the same protections from their representatives in the towering capitol buildings in Baton Rouge and Washington as the wealthier, white towns around them, and where they were left to fend for themselves against the consequences of an upheaval they did not cause.

In her town, the rebuilding process unfolded slowly. The displaced, she said, returned on weekends, driving determinedly from Atlanta or Dallas to swing hammers and cart off debris. Mary Pichon Battle, who had moved to join family in Dallas, visited once in a while, too. But when she came, little was familiar. St. Genevieve’s, the Catholic church with its small cupola sitting on an idyllic grassy shoreline on the edge of the bayou, had collapsed into a heap of broken red brick. Never mind that right up until the storm the congregants sat segregated, with Slidell’s white residents on one side and its Creole parishioners on the other. To Mary it represented home and God, so she joined makeshift prayer sessions on the heavily damaged church grounds, gathering in the shade of a majestic oak tree. Colette and her mother both thought only about the day the homecoming could be permanent.

But a tree on uneven ground under the hot Louisiana sun was no match for Mary’s ever-more frail and tired body — even if it did offer a reunion of brothers and neighbors. The discomfort began to overshadow the joy. In town, the visits grew demoralizing and progress less and less visible. Abandonment began to happen quietly. “At first, after the storm, it’s volunteers pulling out trash,” says Colette, about all the work the community did in the months after the disaster. “Then, it’s not destruction, but the aftermath of destruction.” Streets and yards get cleaned up, but homes are not yet rebuilt and people still do not live there.

The faces in the grocery store remain unfamiliar, the fence-line conversations with neighbors infrequent, the fence lines themselves overgrown with vines because there is no one there to tend them. This stage, the reconstruction stage, demands that people dig deep into their pockets and savings — often savings they do not have. Each visit back to Slidell becomes a reminder of the burden and the stress. Eventually, the space between the trips got longer, and more painful. The fights with the government and insurers for payment became more desperate, and less successful and more exhausting. The applications for federal and state aid more futile, and less fair.

The years passed, and suddenly it was a decade since the storm. Eventually, people gave up. So began another stage of migration, not the stage in which people flee, but the one in which they decide never to come home. In Slidell, the periodic visits were saved for special occasions, crawfish boils, communions and funerals. Then, even those slowed. “You realize they got their voting card in a different city … or it just became easier to go to church at your kids’ home in Atlanta or wherever,” Colette says. “Your community is now dispersed across the U.S., and the thing that kept us together was proximity and seeing each other all the time. And so eventually, you lose the culture.” Her mother, Mary, was never to return home. Slidell’s Creole existence — the language — slipped away with her. She had graduated from “climate displaced” to “climate migrant.”

That is not to say that Slidell, though, shriveled up and died, the way Isle de Jean Charles was dying. Viewed through the lens of climate migration, Slidell, and all of St. Tammany Parish around it, was a confounding place. Because even as those who were displaced found it unlivable, others found it irresistibly inviting. The dramatic change facing southern Louisiana was relative — better for some than where they began, worse for others for the fragility it brought. Though Slidell’s loss was devastating for Colette and the long-standing community she’d been raised in, the small city seemed like refuge to people coming from farther south. And so it became a stopping point for climate evacuees fleeing from other, even more vulnerable places. Even today in Slidell, people can’t decide if they are coming or going. The small city is strangely booming.

There are some 60 miles still between Slidell and the actual coast of the state of Louisiana. In late 2022, I drove east on State Route 90 north of Houma, then south along vanishing branches of land until I reached what felt like the end of the earth. Billboards advertised Hurricaneaid.com, and in places huge trees lay lodged against the broken walls they’d fallen on during Ida a year earlier. The roofs of many houses still had gaping holes, all signs that people here were unable to recover from one storm before the next one hit.

Soon enough, though, it’s not the dilapidation, but the water that commands my attention. It is suddenly everywhere. Just as when you’re standing on a broad, flat beach while the tide comes in, you almost don’t notice the loss of land until it is already gone. Lawns fade into water, which looks swollen and rises right to the joists of the bridges that connect each driveway to the main road. The farther south I go, the closer the water comes to the pavement, until it is but an inch or two shy and in places spills out over it. More and more homes here, entering the towns of Montegut and then Pointe-aux-Chenes, sit destroyed from earlier storms, and there are fewer signs of rebuilding, more indications of surrender. Boats sit dry and askew on their hulls in driveways. I pass what looks like a small orange spaceship — a flying saucer of metal with sealed portal windows like a submarine. It is an escape pod, likely washed ashore from one of the large oil platforms in the Gulf. And there is a sense that here, too, people will one day need it.

Then the road ends. It had to end. I bumped up over a levee and passed through an enormous steel floodgate, 15 feet high, at least 5 feet thick, built in 2017 as a part of the larger coastal hurricane protection system that is the state’s last defense. On the other side, the expansive, sunny sky drops straight to the water, which, though calm and at low tide, now brims over the top of the road and into a parking lot. On this day, the lot is full of pickup trucks and boat trailers belonging to people who drove here, to the end of the road, for a day of fishing. In the distance, the scraggly skeletons of tall, once-majestic trees reach up out of the cordgrass, a reminder that not long ago this wasn’t marshland at all. To the right, across a canal and outside the protection zone of the levee, I can see Isle de Jean Charles. A sign on the side of the marina building with half its roof torn off reads, “Bayou Living. Kick back and relax.”

In the 18 years since Katrina, Louisiana’s southernmost territories had started to hollow out, steadily accelerating their quiet migration northward as Louisianans fled their coast. It is, indeed, the next great migration already well underway. In St. Bernard Parish, the thin escarpment of delicate soil still extending east from downtown New Orleans and the levees of the Mississippi River, the population has decreased by 39%. The houses that remain tower above the land, having been raised on to stilts 10 feet — even 25 feet — into the sky. They indicate that the people who remain are committed to live on land they know is disappearing, and that they will stay there, for a while longer anyway, content to treat their homes like islands.

In Orleans Parish, just a few miles south of Slidell across the Interstate 10 bridge, there are 17% fewer residents today than in 2005. In New Orleans itself, where more than two-thirds of the city’s residents left during Hurricane Katrina, the population still hasn’t recovered. Katrina, it turns out, wasn’t a singular anomalous crisis. It was the beginning of a new era in which the reality of the storms and coastal surges was plain to see and looked nothing like the past. People began to realize that adaptation was less of an option than it used to be. Many simply had to leave. Almost every parish closest to the coast — parishes that have been protected by seawalls and levees, or whose residents have taken advantage of decades of subsidized coastal insurance and federal flood insurance programs incentivizing people to stay and rebuild — has been fast losing population despite those efforts. In those places all the legal mechanisms and incentives that for decades blinded society to the real costs of climate change are beginning to crumble as the true scale of change looms on the horizon.

And yet the population of St. Tammany Parish, where Slidell and Liberty Bayou are, has grown by 40%. People flee. And others arrive. Slidell has become the odd epicenter of America’s new era of climate migration. In 2012, a new seawall was built around the inner core of Slidell, and thousands of new homes were erected across bulldozed spits of marshland infill. Families leaving the parishes farther south stopped here. The price of homes has skyrocketed, driving gentrification that makes it even more difficult for poorer, long-standing residents to rebuild or to find a new home. Traffic is a growing concern; when a single dry causeway is all that connects islands, a car accident can grind life to a standstill. And state and local officials here have adopted language used by migration experts around the world, calling Slidell a “receiver community,” as refugees from the land south of it take new homes.

It all goes to show that there will be no clear-cut boundaries or perfect tipping points for climate and migration. Change, here, means two steps forward and one back, as a mélange of competing and conflicting interests all swirl in cycles of short-term opportunities that may later recede to reveal the persistence of long-term trends. A place can grow even as its core shrivels. A climate migration event, as it begins, comes into focus not as a sharply defined arrow pointing north, but as a hodgepodge of conflicting signals. It suggests that even as the nation’s population shifts north — which on balance it inevitably will — and receiving communities must prepare for mass migration, a part of this evolution will be the story of those who remain in place. And it billboards the fact that new policies and leadership will be demanded by these circumstances, not just to help growing places plan for their future, but to soften the landing of the people left behind.

It’s a strange phenomenon to see residents from Louisiana’s southern coast taking refuge in Slidell, because Slidell isn’t exactly high ground. Much of the city is merely 13 feet above sea level. Parts of it, including the bayou where Colette’s family home is, are significantly lower. So when the people in St. Tammany Parish compete for access to this place and approve building permits for a thousand homes on spits of land with only gabion walls — structures of wire filled with stone — to protect them against the waves of Lake Pontchartrain, what they are really fighting for are the slivers of slightly higher ground, the marginal leftovers, so to speak, between New Orleans to the south and Baton Rouge to the west. Here, the lenders will still lend and the insurers will still engage.

But for how long? Eventually, the lands encircling Slidell are going to be worse off than they are today, and the people moving there may well have no choice but to move on again. In 50 years, according to St. Tammany Parish’s own planning documents, the region encircling Slidell could often be under 6 to 15 feet of water, except for the core protected by a levee. And yet they build anyway.

Several years after Katrina, Colette sat in a community auditorium to hear a team of professors describe the coming sea level changes to the people who lived in the parish. The professors showed a series of time-lapse satellite images of a receding and flooded shoreline. It was something already well-known to researchers, but this was the first time Colette recalls it being shown to the people living in the places that were to be affected. “You see your community is going, and they tell you that this is going to happen no matter what,” Colette said. “So even if we are successful in what we do next, we will lose those places. I couldn’t believe what I saw, that this place I hold so dear and that I have such a long memory of, all of those stories are going to go. Who I am and what I am describing is going to be lost. It’s surreal. That land for me and the right to be there was tied to our freedom. It was the difference between being enslaved and not. And to lose that was to lose everything.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Abrahm Lustgarten.

Papua New Guinea’s Defence Minister and minister responsible for the National Disaster Centre Dr Billy Joseph confirmed today that the government — with coordinated support from all stakeholder agencies and development partners — was responding appropriately to the natural disasters that has hit many parts of the country.

The National Disaster Center (NDC) is the national coordinating agency and is working with provincial governments and district development authorities (DDAs) as well as the Department of Works and Highways, PNG Defence Force and other stakeholders to coordinate and respond promptly.

The East Sepik provincial earthquake on Sunday left at least three dead and more than 1000 homes collapsed.

• READ MORE: Three people reported dead, 1000 homes destroyed by PNG earthquake

The US Geological Survey said it was magnitude 6.9 and just over 40 km deep.

King tides and heavy flooding
The minister confirmed that about 10 provinces are getting the necessary assistance from the National Disaster Center, including Goroka/EHP which was not included in the initial report provided to his office.

PNG Defence Force troops are working closely with the Simbu Provincial Government and Gumine DDA and their respective leaderships as Simbu was one of the worst affected provinces.

7 people missing off the coast of New Ireland Province
Nine people boarded a banana boat at Kavieng for Emirau Island but did not make it due to heavy weather conditions when the boat capsized.

Two of the young men swam to the island to look for help while seven others made a makeshift raft and floated awaiting assistance.

“As of today, seven people are still missing and our search is still active — if we don’t find them after 72 hours, we will declare them lost and the search will be discontinued,” Minister Joseph said.

The Australian Defence Force has provided a C27 aircraft to conduct low aerial surveillance of the subject areas.

A PNGDF Navy Patrol Boat has also been deployed to the area but no sightings have been reported.

The Search and Rescue operations are being coordinated by the National Maritime Safety Authority with oversight provided by the PNG Defence Force.

East Sepik Province earthquake
NDC is working very closely with the leaders of East Sepik, including the provincial government, to ensure much needed help reach the people that need it.

An emergency allocation of K200,000 (about NZ$90,000) has been made available for food, water, shelter and medicines etc as seen appropriate by the Provincial Disaster Committee.

It is at their disposal. A commercial helicopter is now in Wewak to assist in the relief operations and the PNDF military helicopter will join shortly.

“We are also mobilising support from our bilateral partners to assist but the challenge is now for the Provincial Disaster Center to provide reports to NDC so we define and coordinate what kind of emergency assistance is required,” Minister Joseph said.

Minister Joseph further warned Papua New Guineans to take precautions and not take risks, especially at sea, as the country’s emergency services are stretched and rescue efforts may not happen in time.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Food rationing is underway in remote areas in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands following torrential rain and flash flooding.

More than 20 people have been reported dead in Chimbu Province.

In nearby Enga Province, the centre of last month’s massacre, a 15-year-old boy has been swept away in flooding.

• READ MORE: Renewal of strong winds and rough seas expected for coastal waters
• Young woman found dead with face skinned in Enga in spite of ceasefire

Wapenamanda community leader Aquila Kunzie told RNZ Pacific his village alone was housing almost 100 displaced women and children from the tribal warfare.

As bad weather hampers food production, the need for aid is critical, Kunzie said.

“The massacre has claimed any lives. As the days go by . . . the government is taking the initiative to call for peace negotiations that are ongoing at the moment,” he said.

“The situation is [that] we are feeling the impact of short supply and food rations in the village.

“We are being neglected due to probably bad politics,” Kunzie said.

Kunzie spoke to RNZ Pacific from Mambisanda village mission station where he said the mighty Timin River was only 15m walking distance.

“Constant continuous rainfall in Wapenamanda district has caused rivers to flood,” Kunzie said, adding “food gardens have been washed away”.

A grade eight student has was reportedly washed away, Kunzie said.

“We couldn’t find him due to the heavy flood. The boy is about 15-years-old,” he said.

Woman mutilated
On top of flooding, The National is reporting a woman has been found dead in Wapenamanda despite a ceasefire being agreed to by warring factions.

“It has also been reported maybe the rascals people must have raped her and wounded her and threw her helpless on the road and she was found in the morning,” Kunzie said.

While the woman was found on the road in another village to where Kunzie is, his village is housing “almost 100” victims of tribal warfare.

But with so many mouths to feed and food crops damaged by heavy rains food rationing is in place.

“Only one meal per day, we can’t afford breakfast and lunch with all of them.”

“We say drink only water and stay and have one meal and go to bed and wait for the next day.”

The bad weather has hampered the growth of food and that is becoming a “very critical issue”, Kunzie said.

He said calls for help have fallen on deaf ears.

“We have no way to call out for help,” he said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Free-floating ice floats jammed into the Ilulissat Icefjord during unseasonably warm weather on July 30, 2019 near Ilulissat, Greenland. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Facing Future.tv recently conducted an interview about spooky new developments in Greenland. The ice sheet is cascading/gushing at unheard of rates never dreamed possible at this stage of global warming, or at any stage for that matter.

The video opens with a statement by Peter Wadhams, professor emeritus Ocean Physics, Cambridge University, a leading authority on Arctic sea ice (A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic, Oxford University Press, 256 pgs):

Greenland’s rate of melt in summer was something that we knew about, and it was gradually increasing, then suddenly it’s multiplied itself by about 8 times; this is 30,000,000 tons an hour. When I was last up there it was more like 30,000,000 tons per day. That’s just something unheard of and so we’re really worried about what’s going on with Greenland.

As it happens, Dr. Wadhams’ expression “worried about what’s going on with Greenland” is a very strong candidate for ‘understatement of the year’ or maybe of the century. The rate of melt he discussed is 720,000,000 tons per day versus previous analyses of 30,000,000 tons per day.

The Facing Future.tv 25:33-min video is entitled: “Greenland: Ice Loss Accelerating, 30 Million Tonnes an Hour with Paul Beckwith and Peter Wadhams“, Hosted by Dale Walkonen March 3, 2024.

Question by the host: How serious is the situation in Greenland?

Answer (Wadhams):

Well, it’s very serious because it’s unprecedented that the rate of melt… Suddenly its multiplied itself by about seven or eight; it’s 30 million tons an hour, but when I was last up there it was 30 million tons per day… now gone to an hourly rate which used to be daily rate… when you’re up on the ice sheet you see big changes. There are always large meltwater streams, holes filling up with water. It’s a very dynamic scene but it’s not nearly as dynamic as it is now because everything is speeding up by a factor of about eight. It’s something unheard of… it’s not figured into the climate models used by the IPCC.

According to Paul Beckwith, climate system scientist, University of Ottawa, the High Arctic has been warming 5-8 times the global average for some time now as many scientists and newspaper reports erroneously claimed it was only two-three times, not 5-8 times. The High Arctic directly influences Greenland, and he claims there’s good data on Greenland and Antarctica via gravity anomaly satellites; e.g., NASA’s GRACE, CyroSat, and Copernicus Sentinel-3, that show melt rates doubling every decade for both regions.

Regarding the new data:

People are going to be very surprised at the accelerated growth of sea level rise in the next decade, or two, let alone if all of Greenland melted, it would be 25 feet of sea level rise. (Beckwith)

According to Beckwith: James Hansen (Earth Institute/Columbia University) some time ago said he would not be surprised if we had 5 meters (16 feet) of sea level rise by 2100. He said that years ago when the IPCC expected about one-half a meter by 2100.

It should be noted that current IPCC sea level rise statistics assume 1-4 feet this century, depending upon various input data.

Beckwith: We’re seeing huge acceleration in global warming, in ocean warming, estimates of sea level rise are going to be going up, up, up a lot, continually revised upwards. He believes Hansen’s 5 meters is an underestimate. If perchance that happens, what’ll it be by 2030 or 2040 or 2050? After all, Greenland’s melt rate is not static; it’s already off the charts at a baffling 30M tons per hour, formerly 30M tons by the day. Seemingly, that’s comparable to breaking the sound barrier at Mach 1.

Wadhams on Hansen:

I think Hansen is right in expecting a higher rate than models give; he always has a healthy contempt for models which I think is correct because nearly always, models are inadequate, especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC models.

As queried by the host, since most people listen to what the IPCC says, for example, setting nation/state policies, where can people go for accurate information?

Beckwith’s response to ‘the dilemma of where to go for accurate information’: Scientists are individually willing to discuss their own research but reluctant to talk about research by other scientists and only make projections based upon computer models, but computer models are based upon history, often stale information by the time used.

Not included in climate modeling, major wildfires in Canada and Russia last year spewed massive amounts of ash onto Arctic ice which accelerated melting beyond expectations as dark background absorbs solar radiation rather than reflecting it to outer space.

Another new factor impacting Greenland’s ice melt that’s downright spooky is Hansen’s recent statement about Earth’s energy imbalance, which is completely out of whack with more energy than ever before coming into the planet as absorbed sunlight rather than going out as heat radiated to outer space. This imbalance has doubled within only one decade, according to a study by NASA and the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration  This may be, probably is, the biggest ‘bad news of the year’.

Earth’s energy imbalance or “sunlight in” versus “sunlight out” is currently running at a frightful rate @ 1.36 W/m² (watts per square meter) as of the current 2020s decade, which is double the 2005-2015 rate @ 0.71 W/m^2.  (James Hansen).

Beckwith highlighted another major concern for Greenland as the change in jet streams at 20-40,000 feet altitude is altered, as a result of loss of Arctic sea ice, into vast wavey troughs that trap heat over Greenland. This never happened in the past. Another new dynamic, according to Beckwith, is a lot of rain in the Arctic instead of snow, thanks to global warming. And atmospheric rivers, like those that drenched the West Coast, hitting Greenland, accelerating the melt process.

It’s an understatement to conclude that Greenland is in trouble and conventional views of sea level rise are way too conservative.  Unfortunately, by extension of these new facts, coastal cities are more vulnerable to flooding than ever before.

According to Climate Central, widespread areas are likely to see storm surges on top of sea level rise reaching at least 4 feet above high tide by 2030, and 5 feet by 2050. Nearly 5 million U.S. residents currently live on land less than 4 feet above high tide, and more than 6 million on land less than 5 feet above. Portland’s high tide broke all-time records, reaching 14 feet at the same time as record-breaking floods hit the US East Coast, January 14th, 2024. NOAA expects sea levels along US coasts to rise as much over the next 10 years as they did over past 100 years.

But the Climate Central study doesn’t include calculations for Greenland’s 30M tons per hour or Antarctica suddenly losing sea ice extent at a record-setting pace 2022, 2023, 2024 in succession. Once again, Earth’s climate system outmaneuvers climate science research, leaving scientists bent over at the knees, coughing in its dust. It’s too fast for scientists to keep up.

Bottom line, it’s nice to assume everything will be okay, “we’ll get through it, there’s still time to fix it,” blah-blah-blah, but several new earth-shattering indicators, especially at both poles, are not waiting for that illusive fixit.

Frankly, nobody knows how bad, how soon this worldwide melt-off develops as both poles, the Arctic and Antarctica, experience unbelievably rapid change in concert with land-based melt-offs in the Alps, Patagonia, Andes, Himalayas, Caucasus, and all other mountain ranges worldwide. Meanwhile many of Europe’s famous ski resorts closed in February, even snow cannons stopped working due to high temperatures.

For the record, here’s the James Hansen sea level projection, as mentioned by Paul Beckwith:

In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels. The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields—concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, brings new importance to a feedback loop in the ocean near Antarctica that results in cooler freshwater from melting glaciers forcing warmer, saltier water underneath the ice sheets, speeding up the melting rate. Hansen, who is known for being alarmist and also right, acknowledges that his study implies change far beyond previous consensus estimates. In a conference call with reporters, he said he hoped the new findings would be “substantially more persuasive than anything previously published.” I certainly find them to be. (“Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning“, Slate, July 20, 2015.)

Nine years later, increasingly it looks like Hansen will be right once again.

If he’s right about “at least 10 feet” within 50 years, which would be by 2065, then what will it be in 2050, 2040, or 2030? In rough numbers, sometime between 2030-40 it would surpass the IPCC highest estimate for 2100. That’s a big-time headache for every coastal city, right around the corner. Hopefully, a magic potion drops into Earth’s atmosphere and makes this go away like a bad dream.

And as long as the magic potion is around, why not use it to strip the world’s teeny-weeny percentage of the world’s population billionaires of some of their riches to buy renewable energy for the world marketplace and finance science projects to help combat Hot House Earth. It’s coming.

For the faint of heart, cheer up, there are plenty of respected climate scientists that disagree with the expectations stated in this article.  Still, over time, somebody will be right; maybe it’ll be them but maybe don’t count on that, wondering what they’d say about Greenland’s turbo-charged 30 Million/Tons/Hour.

Nevertheless, one solution that can help solve global warming is “kill Citizens United” that allows corporate interests to spend unlimited funds to influence elections, politicians, and policy (they’ve made the worst possible choices) … before it’s too late to do anything, or is it?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

“The changes to the sea-ice indicate that in the coming decades coastal cities will need to be reconfigured because of sea level rise,” according to Craig Stevens, Auckland, Professor of Physical Oceanography. (“Signs Found of Worryingly Fast Antarctic Ice Melt – New Zealand Expedition”, RNZ, March 3, 2024.)

Sea level rise for coastal cities, the world’s worst nightmare, is coming within indeterminate decades but probably sooner than expected because that’s how science works these days. It’s always late to the party and not properly dressed for the occasion. But don’t blame the scientists, as soon as they complete research, the fast-moving climate system has outdistanced them. This is the new normal. Science is too slow for climate change.

Moreover, reader commentary/feedback about articles such as this recognizes a distinct trend in the world’s climate system that’s starting to come apart at the seams much earlier than expected. That observation is true. But what can be done and why aren’t world leaders holding emergency meetings to challenge civilization’s biggest challenge is puzzling, to say the least. It’s only too obvious because of lack of expedient policies to halt greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and consequent sea level rise are not taken seriously enough.

In that regard, it must be noted that the world’s rich/wealthy elite that buy/own politicians, buy/own Supreme Court justices could have stopped global warming dead in its tracks decades ago when Dr James Hansen  (Earth Institute/Columbia University) warned the US Senate in 1988 of global warming when he was head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies but instead chose to go along with a fossil fuel-poisoned world where the money resides.

Since that time, the world has become a function of neoliberal capitalism, as dictated by Reagan/Thatcher almost 50 years ago. Therefore, the question must be asked: Has that socio-economic system that has made only a few filthy rich on the back of 99.75% of the world’s population been a good caretaker of the planet? Answer: No, it has not. Then, why should that warped socio-economic system be allowed to continue as absentee careless caretaker of the planet? Neoliberal capitalism hasn’t done one positive thing for the planet, not one, but has drained resources and enriched a teeny-teeny-weeny minority of people. Bravo! But what’s the ecological legacy?

Meanwhile, a team of New Zealand scientists Antarctic Science Platform and a research team from the Italian Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide aboard the 262-foot ice-breaker research vessel Laura Bassi just returned from two months in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. They got a first-hand look at sea ice retreat and came away with deep concern. Things are happening much faster than anybody thought possible. High noon for the world’s coastal cities is closer than they expected.

Craig Stevens, Professor of Physical Oceanography, Auckland led the expedition. The three lowest sea ice extents since modern records have been kept. 2022, 2023, and 2024 are the lowest in the 46-year record of Antarctic sea ice. It’s gone fast and faster. Furthermore, the configuration of deeper parts of the ocean are changing via content of salty and oxygenated water. According to Dr. Stevens: “With a climate emergency underway, the work they were doing was urgent.”

It was only a couple of months ago when the following headline caught attention: “Antarctic Sea-Ice at ‘Mind-Blowing Low Alarms Experts“, RNZ, September 17, 2023.  “It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” according to Walter Meier, who monitors sea-ice with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“It’s so far outside anything we’ve seen, it’s almost mind-blowing,” is language that’s as strong as climate scientists ever use. That one sentence about Antarctica should ring throughout the land a clarion call to take immediate action, but, so far, it hasn’t moved the needle.

Similar to Antarctica’s cousin Arctic sea ice up north, down south huge ice expanse regulates the planet’s temperature, steadily throughout a 10,000-yr episode of human history known as the Holocene Era, not too hot, not too cold. Its white surface spectacularly reflects 80-90% of solar radiation back into space, and it importantly cools the water beneath and near it. Without its cooling ice influence: “Antarctica could transform from Earth’s refrigerator to a radiator.” (Ibid.)

By all appearances, it is starting to transform into a radiator for the first time in human history. The real depth of the problem, moreover, is even deeper yet as both poles react in the same manner, almost regardless of the season, rapid ice melt, big losses of the all-important albedo effect reflecting 80-90% of solar radiation back to space, whilst a rapidly expanding dark ocean background absorbs considerably more heat than the surrounding ice can withstand. It’s a vicious melt-off circular that gooses the climate system into absolute nonsensical patterns turning normal jet streams (20-40,000 feet) abnormally whacky, rocking the hemisphere with massive doses of scorching heat that stays put, atmospheric rivers, massive flooding, and wildfires galore. It’s all massive scale. There is no more normal.

Ultimately, the bruised climate system is aiming for a surprise coastal flooding of major cities that carelessly will not be prepared because, based upon many, many climate conferences, and gobs of warnings by thousands of climate scientists over many years, the risk still has not sunk into policies of major nation/states that global warming’s favored course is destructive coastal flooding and ecosystem degradation. If they truly believed, they’d do everything possible to convert fossil fuel subsidies, which the IMF says surged to a record $7 trillion, and build seawalls, very tall seawalls. This then would complete the circle of moats surrounding countries in an ongoing left-right socio-politico battle over whether revival of the Middle Ages (500 – 1400 A.D.) comes to pass. Burning at the stake could be right around the corner.

Not that many years ago, scientists never thought Antarctica would awaken from its frozen past and succumb to global warming.  Well, it’s finally awakened, and it is succumbing. “It’s potentially a really alarming sign of Antarctic climate change that hasn’t been there for the last 40 years. And it’s only just emerging now.” (Ibid.)

It was only three decades ago when Martin Siegert, glaciologist, University of Exeter started studying Antarctica. Today he says: “Awakening this monster of the south threatens an absolute disaster for the world.” (Ibid.)

Refreshingly, scientists studying Antarctica are not holding back statements of fact. According to Anna Hogg, Earth scientist at University of Leeds: There are signs that what is already happening to Antarctica’s ice sheets is in “the worst-case scenario range of what was predicted.” (Ibid.)

The worst-case scenario is too unnerving to reiterate.

What about solutions? For starters, here’s a quote from Dr. James Hansen at a special event in Utah hosted by The Nature Conservancy: “We’ve got political parties on both sides taking money from special interests. And unless we solve this problem with our democracy, we really can’t change the climate change problem. And the public knows this.”

Answer: kill Citizens United as soon as possible

Citizens United – In 2010. the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Americans cannot prevent corporations from spending unlimited money to control elections, politicians, and policy based upon interpretation of the First Amendment.

The Supremes put the United States of America up for sale to the highest bidders.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Powerful waves, driven by offshore storm surges, hit an important United States military installation in the Marshall Islands on Saturday night, causing damage and resulting in the evacuation of all “non-mission personnel” from the island.

Flooding caused by the waves also hit two airports at Ailinglaplap Atoll, leaving rocks, coral and debris in their wake, keeping those airports closed for weeks.

Other islands reported flooding and moderate damage.

The US Army in a statement yesterdy afternoon that at approximately 9pm on January 20, “a series of weather-induced waves hit Roi-Namur which caused significant flooding in the northern portions of the island”.

A video circulating from Roi-Namur, an island at the northern end of Kwajalein Atoll, shows an approximately one-metre wave hitting the Army’s dining hall, breaking down doors, knocking people down and washing them from outside into the facility.

Roi-Namur houses the US Army’s most sophisticated space-tracking equipment as part of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Test Site.

A second follow-up wave, caught on video, was higher, possibly as high as one-and-a-half metres, washing through the dining hall.

No deaths reported
No deaths were reported at Roi-Namur, but one person was being treated for injuries at the clinic on Kwajalein Island, the base headquarters.

“One individual sustained injuries to lower extremities and is currently being seen at the Kwaj Clinic,” said Army public affairs officer Mike Brantley. “He is in stable condition.”

Tomorrow the new RMI administration gets sworn in and they are inheriting multiple problems just over this past weekend alone: 30+ hours of power outages here in Majuro, water distribution problems, and king tide floodings in Ailinlaplap and Roi Namur pic.twitter.com/wCgFVyF1MM

— Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (@kathykijiner) January 21, 2024

The Army said in a statement on Sunday that US Army Garrison-Kwajalein Atoll and mission partners had established an Emergency Operations Cell to oversee and coordinate all recovery efforts.

“We have accountability of all employees (US and Marshall Islands) and evacuated all non-mission essential personnel to Kwajalein.”

Kwajalein Island is the missile testing range headquarters and is located about 64 km to the south at the other end of the atoll.

“All Roi residents will remain on Kwajalein until basic services can be restored on Roi,” the Army said. “Recovery efforts will be our top priority.”

On Sunday, the Marshall Islands National Weather Service issued a mass text message alert saying: “Northern swells may cause inundation in northern atolls and north-facing shores. Hazardous conditions for swimming and sailing in small crafts due to crashing waves and stronger than usual currents due to swells.”

Damage assessment
An aerial damage assessment conducted by the Army on Sunday morning showed “how water inundation washed over the northwest side of the island (Roi-Namur), flooding at least one-third of it”, the Army said in a brief update Sunday morning.

“There is standing water on both sides of the north end of the runway and the first floors of all but two bachelors’ quarters.”

There was flooding in multiple buildings, including the Tradewinds Theater, the Army store, “and all of the automotive warehouse area”.

Remarkably, the small island of Santo, located 5 km away from Roi-Namur, which houses a Marshallese community of 1000, appeared to be unaffected by flooding, said Kwajalein Member of Parliament David Paul Sunday.

He said the Kwajalein Atoll local government had initiated a survey of all inhabited islands in Kwajalein to determine damage.

Kwajalein is the world’s largest atoll and has Marshallese communities on more than 10 islands.

Wave swells also seriously flooded islands in Ailinglaplap Atoll, tossing debris onto airfields at Woja and Jeh islands.

It likely will take weeks to clear the runways for air service to return. Kili Island, home of the displaced Bikini Islanders, also experienced flooding Saturday-Sunday.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The land of the Central Valley works hard. Here in the heart of California, in the most productive farming region in the United States, almost every square inch of land has been razed, planted, and shaped to support large-scale agriculture. The valley produces almonds, walnuts, pistachios, olives, cherries, beans, eggs, milk, beef, melons, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and garlic. 

This economic mandate is clear to the naked eye: Trucks laden with fertilizer or diesel trundle down arrow-straight roads past square field after square field, each one dense with tomato shrubs or nut trees. Canals slice between orchards and acres of silage, pushing all-important irrigation water through a network of laterals from farm to farm. Cows jostle for space beneath metal awnings on crowded patches of dirt, emitting a stench that wafts over nearby towns.

There is one exception to this law of productivity. In the midst of the valley, at the confluence of two rivers that have been dammed and diverted almost to the point of disappearance, there is a wilderness. The ground is covered in water that seeps slowly across what used to be walnut orchards, the surface buzzing with mosquitoes and songbirds. Trees climb over each other above thick knots of reedy grass, consuming what used to be levees and culverts. Beavers, quail, and deer, which haven’t been seen in the area in decades, tiptoe through swampy ponds early in the morning, while migratory birds alight overnight on knolls before flying south. 

Austin Stevenot, who is in charge of maintaining this restored jungle of water and wild vegetation, says this is how the Central Valley is supposed to look. Indeed, it’s how the land did look for thousands of years until white settlers arrived in the 19th century and remade it for industrial-scale agriculture. In the era before colonization, Stevenot’s ancestors in the California Miwok tribe used the region’s native plants for cooking, basket weaving, and making herbal medicines. Now those plants have returned.

“I could walk around this landscape and go, ‘I can use that, I can use this to do that, I can eat that, I can eat that, I can do this with that,’” he told me as we drove through the flooded land in his pickup truck. “I have a different way of looking at the ground.” 

You wouldn’t know it without Stevenot there to point out the signs, but this untamed floodplain used to be a workhorse parcel, just like the land around it. The fertile site at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers once hosted a dairy operation and a cluster of crop fields owned by one of the county’s most prominent farmers. Around a decade ago, a conservation nonprofit worked out a deal to buy the 2,100-acre tract from the farmer, rip up the fields, and restore the ancient vegetation that once existed there. The conservationists’ goal with this $40 million project was not just to restore a natural habitat, but also to pilot a solution to the massive water management crisis that has bedeviled California and the West for decades.

Like many other parts of the West, the Central Valley always seems to have either too little water or too much. During dry years, when mountain reservoirs dry up, farmers mine groundwater from aquifers, draining them so fast that the land around them starts to sink. During wet years, when the reservoirs fill up, water comes streaming down rivers and bursts through aging levees, flooding farmland and inundating valley towns. 

The restored floodplain solves both problems at once. During wet years like this one, it absorbs excess water from the San Joaquin River, slowing down the waterway before it can rush downstream toward large cities like Stockton. As the water moves through the site, it seeps into the ground, recharging groundwater aquifers that farmers and dairy owners have drained over the past century. In addition to these two functions, the restored swamp also sequesters an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produced by thousands of gas-powered vehicles. It also provides a haven for migratory birds and other species that have faced the threat of extinction.

“It’s been amazing just getting to see nature take it back over,” Stevenot said. “When you go out to a commercially farmed orchard or field, and you stand there and listen, it’s sterile. You don’t hear anything. But you come out here on that same day, you hear insects, songbirds. It’s that lower part of the ecosystem starting up.” 

Water flows through part of Dos Rios Ranch Preserve. The former farmland now acts as a storage area for floodwaters during wet years. Cameron Nielsen / Grist

Austin Stevenot walks through Dos Rios Ranch Preserve. Stevenot manages the restored floodplain site. Cameron Nielsen / Grist. The floodplain, which is off limits for hunting, fishing, or dumping, absorbs excess water from the San Joaquin and Tuolumne Rivers. Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo

Stevenot’s own career path mirrors that of the land he now tends. Before he worked for River Partners, the small conservation nonprofit that developed the site, he spent eight years working at a packing plant that processed cherries and onions for export across the country. He was a lifelong resident of the San Joaquin Valley, but had never been able to use the traditions he’d learned from his Miwok family until he started working routine maintenance at the floodplain project. Now he presides over the whole ecosystem. 

This year, after a deluge of winter rain and snow, water rolled down the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers, filling up the site for the first time since it had been restored. As Stevenot guided me across the landscape, he showed me all the ways that land and water were working together. In one area, water had spread like a sheet across three former fields, erasing the divisions that had once separated acres on the property. Elsewhere, birds had scattered seeds throughout what was once an orderly orchard, so that new trees soon obscured the old furrows.

The advent of the restoration project, known as Dos Rios, has worked wonders for this small section of the San Joaquin Valley, putting an end to frequent flooding in the area and altering long-held attitudes about environmental conservation. Even so, it represents just a chink in the armor of the Central Valley, where agricultural interests still control almost all the land and water. As climate change makes California’s weather whiplash more extreme, creating a cycle of drought and flooding, flood experts say replicating this work has become more urgent than ever. 

But building another Dos Rios isn’t just about finding money to buy and reforest thousands of acres of land. To create a network of restored floodplains will also require reaching an accord with a powerful industry that has historically clashed with environmentalists — and that produces fruit and nuts for much of the country. Making good on the promise of Dos Rios will mean convincing the state’s farmers to occupy less land, irrigate with less water, and produce less food.

Cannon Michael, a sixth-generation farmer who runs Bowles Farming Company in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, says such a shift is possible, but it won’t be easy.

“There’s a limited resource, there’s a warming climate, there’s a lot of constraints, and a lot of people are aging out, not always coming back to the farm,” Michael said. “There’s a lot of transition that’s happening anyway, and I think people are starting to understand that life is gonna change. And I think those of us who want to still be around the valley want to figure out how to make the outcome something we can live with.”

You can think of the last century of environmental manipulation in the Central Valley as one long attempt to create stability. Alfalfa fields and citrus orchards guzzle a lot of water, and nut trees have to be watered consistently for years to reach maturity, so farmers seeking to grow these crops can’t just rely on water to fall from the sky.

In the early 19th century, as white settlers first claimed land in the Central Valley, they found a turbulent ecosystem. The valley functioned as a drain for the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, sluicing trillions of gallons of water out to the ocean every spring. During the worst flood years, the valley would turn into what one 19th-century observer called an “inland sea.” It took a while, but the federal government and the powerful farmers who took over the valley got this water under control. They built dozens of dams in the Sierra Nevada, allowing them to store melting snow until they wanted to use it for irrigation, as well as hundreds of miles of levees that stopped rivers from flooding.

But by restricting the flow of the valley’s rivers, the government and the farmers also desiccated much of the valley’s land, depriving it of floodwaters that had nourished it for centuries. 

“In the old days, all that floodwater would spread out over the riverbanks into adjacent areas and sit there for weeks,” said Helen Dahlke, a hydrologist at the University of California, Davis, who studies floodplain management. “That’s what fed the sediment, and how we replenish our groundwater reserves. The floodwater really needs to go on land, and the problem is that now the land is mainly used for other purposes.”

The development of the valley also allowed for the prosperity of families like that of Bill Lyons, the rancher who used to own the land that became Dos Rios. Lyons is a third-generation family farmer, the heir to a farming dynasty that began when his great-uncle E.T. Mape came over from Ireland. With his shock of gray hair and his standard uniform of starched dress shirt and jeans, Lyons is the image of the modern California farmer, and indeed he once served as the state’s secretary of agriculture. 

Lyons has expanded his family’s farming operation over the past several decades, stretching his nut orchards and dairy farms out across thousands of acres on the west side of the valley. But his territory straddles the San Joaquin River, and there was one farm property that always seemed to go underwater during wet years.

“It was an extremely productive ranch, and that was one of the reasons it attracted us,” said Lyons. But while the land’s low-elevation river frontage made its soil fertile, that same geography put its harvests at risk of flooding. “Over the 20 years that we owned it, I believe we got flooded out two or three times,” Lyons added.

In 2006, as he was repairing the farm after a flood, Lyons met a biologist named Julie Rentner, who had just joined River Partners. The conservation nonprofit’s mission was to restore natural ecosystems in river valleys across California, and it had completed a few humble projects over the previous decade, most of them on small chunks of not-too-valuable land in the north of the state. As Rentner examined the overdeveloped land of the San Joaquin Valley, she came to the conclusion that it was ready for a much larger restoration project than River Partners had ever attempted. And she thought Lyons’ land was the perfect place to start.

Most farmers would have bristled at such a proposition, especially those with deep roots in a region that depends on agriculture. But unlike many of his peers, Lyons already had some experience with conservation work: He had partnered with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s on a project that set aside some land for the Aleutian goose, an endangered species that just so happened to love roosting on his property. As Lyons started talking with Rentner, he found her practical and detail-oriented. Within a year, he and his family had made a handshake deal to sell her the flood-prone land. If she could find the money to buy the land and turn it into a floodplain, it was hers.

For Rentner, the process wasn’t anywhere near so easy. Finding the $26 million she needed to buy the land from Lyons — and the additional $14 million she needed to restore it — required scraping together money from a rogues’ gallery of funders including three federal agencies, three state agencies, a local utility commission, a nonprofit foundation, the electric utility Pacific Gas & Electric, and the beer company New Belgium Brewing.

“I remember taking so many tours out there,” said Rentner, “and all the public funding agency partners would go, ‘OK, so you have a million dollars in hand, and you still need how many? How are you going to get there?’”

“I don’t know,” Rentner told them in response. “We’re just gonna keep writing proposals, I guess.”

Even once River Partners bought the land in 2012, Rentner found herself in a permitting nightmare: Each grant came with a separate set of conditions for what River Partners could and couldn’t do with the money, the deed to Lyons’ tract came with its own restrictions, and the government required the project to undergo several environmental reviews to ensure it wouldn’t harm sensitive species or other land. River Partners also had to hold dozens of listening sessions and community meetings to quell the fears and skepticism of nearby farmers and residents who worried about shutting down a farm to flood it on purpose.

It took more than a decade for River Partners to complete the project, but now that it’s done, it’s clear that all those fears were unfounded. The restored floodplain absorbed a deluge from the huge “atmospheric river” storms that drenched California last winter, trapping all the excess water without flooding any private land. The removal of a few thousand acres of farmland hasn’t put anyone out of work in nearby towns, nor has it hurt local government budgets. Indeed, the groundwater recharge from the project may soon help restore the unhealthy aquifers below nearby Grayson, where a community of around 1,300 Latino agricultural workers has long avoided drinking well water contaminated with nitrates.

As new plants take root, the floodplain has become a self-sustaining ecosystem: It will survive and regenerate even through future droughts, with a full hierarchy of pollinators and base flora and predators like bobcats. Except for Stevenot’s routine cleanup and road repair, River Partners doesn’t have to do anything to keep it working in perpetuity. Come next year, the organization will hand the site over to the state, which will keep it open as California’s first new state park in more than a decade and let visitors wander on new trails.

“After three years of intensive cultivation, we walk away,” said Rentner. “We literally stopped doing any restoration work. The vegetation figures itself out, and what we’ve seen is, it’s resilient. You get a big deep flood like we have this year, and after the floodwaters recede what comes back is the native stuff.”

Dos Rios has managed to change the ecology of one small corner of the Central Valley, but the region’s water problems are gargantuan in scale. A recent NASA study found that water users in the valley are over-tapping aquifers by about 7 million acre-feet every year, sucking half a Colorado River’s worth of water out of the ground without putting any back. This overdraft has created zones of extreme land subsidence all over the valley, causing highways to crack and buildings to sink dozens of feet into the ground. 

At the same time, floods are also getting harder to manage. The “atmospheric river” storms that drench California every few years are becoming more intense as the earth warms, pushing more water through the valley’s twisting rivers. The region escaped a catastrophic flood this year only thanks to a slow spring melt, but the future risks were clear. Two levees burst in the eastern valley town of Wilton, along the Cosumnes River, killing three people, and the historically Black town of Allensworth flooded as the once-dry Tulare Lake reappeared for the first time since 1997.

Read Next

Flood. Retreat. Repeat.

Grist staff

Fixing the state’s distorted water system for an era of climate change will be the work of many decades. In order to comply with California’s landmark law for regulating groundwater, which will take full effect by 2040, farmers will have to retire as much as a million acres of productive farmland, wiping out billions of dollars of revenue. Protecting the region’s cities from flooding, meanwhile, will require spending billions more dollars to bolster aging dirt levees and channels.

In theory, this dual mandate would make floodplain restoration an ideal way to deal with the state’s water problems. But the scale of the need is enormous, equivalent to dozens of projects on the same scale as Dos Rios. 

“Dos Rios is good, but we need 50 more of it,” said Jane Dolan, the chair of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency that regulates flood control in the region. “Do I think that will happen in my lifetime? No, but we have to keep working toward it.” Fifty more projects of the same size as Dos Rios would span more than 150 square miles, an area larger than the city of Detroit, Michigan. It would cost billions of dollars to purchase that much valuable farmland, saw away old levees, and plant new vegetation. 

As successful as Rentner was in finding the money for Dos Rios, the nonprofit’s piecemeal approach could never fund restoration work at this scale. The only viable sources for that much funding are the state and federal governments. Neither has ever devoted significant public dollars to floodplain restoration, in large part because farmers in the Central Valley haven’t supported it. But that has started to change. Earlier this year, state lawmakers set aside $40 million to fund new restoration projects. Governor Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget crunch, tried to slash the funding at the start of the year, but reinserted it after furious protests from local officials along the San Joaquin. Most of this new money went straight to River Partners, and the organization has already started to clear the land on a site next to Dos Rios. It’s also in the process of closing on another 500-acre site nearby.

But even if nonprofits like River Partners get billions more dollars to buy agricultural land, creating the ribbon of natural floodplains that Dolan describes will still be difficult. That’s because river land in the Central Valley is also some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, and the people who own it have no incentive to forgo future profits by selling.

“Maybe we could do it some time down the road, but we’re farming in a pretty water-secure area,” said Cannon Michael, the sixth-generation farmer from Bowles Farm whose land sits on the upper San Joaquin River. The aquifers beneath his property are substantial, fed by seepage from the river, and he also has the rights to use water from the state’s canal system. “It’s a hard calculation because we’re employing a lot of people, and we’re doing stuff with the land, we’re producing.”

Even farmers who are running out of groundwater may not need to sell off their land in order to restore their aquifers. Don Cameron, who grows grapes in the eastern valley near the Kings River, has pioneered a technique that involves the intentional flooding of crop fields to recharge groundwater. Earlier this year, when a torrent of melting snow came roaring along the Kings, he used a series of pumps to pull it off the river and onto his vineyards. The water sank into the ground, where it refilled Cameron’s underground water bank, and the grapes survived just fine.

This kind of recharge project allows farmers to keep their land, so it’s much more palatable to big agricultural interests. The California Farm Bureau supports taking agricultural land out of commission only as a last resort, but it has thrown its weight behind recharge projects like Cameron’s, since they allow farmers to keep farming. The state government has also been trying to subsidize this kind of water capture, and other farmers have bought in: According to a state estimate, valley landowners may have caught and stored almost 4 million acre-feet of water this year.

“I’m familiar with Dos Rios, and I think it has a very good purpose when you’re trying to provide benefits to the river, but ours is more farm-centric,” said Cameron. 

But Joshua Viers, a watershed scientist at the University of California, Merced, says these on-farm recharge projects may cannibalize demand for projects like Dos Rios. Not only does a project like Cameron’s not provide any flood control or ecological benefit, but it also provides a much narrower benefit to the aquifer, focusing water in a small square of land rather than allowing it to seep across a wide area.

“If you can build this string of beads down the river, with all these restored floodplains, where you can slow the water down and let it stay in for long periods of time, you’re getting recharge that otherwise wouldn’t happen,” he said. 

Read Next

The Cochise County Groundwater Wars

Jake Bittle

As long as landowners see floodwater as a tool to support their farms rather than a force that needs to be respected, it will be difficult to replicate the success of Dos Rios. It’s this entrenched philosophy about the natural world, rather than financial constraints, that will be River Partners’ biggest barrier in the coming decades. In order to create Viers’ “string of beads,” Rentner and her colleagues would have to convert farmland all across the state. 

It’s one thing to do that in a northern area like Sacramento, where officials designed flood bypasses on agricultural land a century ago. It’s quite another to do it farther south in the Tulare Basin, where the powerful farm company J.G. Boswell has been accused of channeling floodwater toward nearby towns in an effort to save its own tomato crops. River Partners is funneling some of the new state money toward restoration projects in this area, but these are small conservation efforts, and they don’t alter the landscape of the valley like Dos Rios does.

To export the Dos Rios model, River Partners will have to convince hundreds of farmers that it’s worth it to give up some of their land for the sake of other farmers, flood-prone cities, climate resilience, and endangered species. Rentner was able to build that consensus at Dos Rios through patience and open dialogue, but the path toward restoration in the rest of the state will likely be more painful. California farmers will need to retire thousands of acres of productive land over the coming decades as they respond to rising costs and water restrictions, and more acres will face the constant threat of flooding as storms intensify in a warming world and levees break. As landowners sell their parcels to solar companies or let fallow fields turn to dust, Rentner is hoping that she can catch some of them as they head for the exits. 

“It’s going to be a challenge,” said Rentner. “We’re hopeful that some will think twice and say, ‘Wait, maybe we should take the time to sit down with the people in the conservation community and think about our legacy, think about what we’re leaving behind when we make this transaction.’ And maybe it’s not as simple as just the highest bidder.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How can California solve its water woes? By flooding its best farmland. on Dec 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

A study published last week shows Bangladesh’s intensifying monsoons come with a staggering death toll, both in the immediate aftermath of the flooding itself, and, more significantly, in the months that follow. The true scale of the toll has not been fully captured by local officials, aid organizations, or the international research community. 

The same is likely true for other parts of the world that experience recurrent climate disasters. “In the climate and health field, we often evaluate the health effects of specific acute events because it’s easier to account for all the other potential factors that could be confounding the association,” said Lara Schwarz, an epidemiologist at University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. But a focus on the short-term obscures the larger picture. “Most climate events don’t occur only once and are likely to harm vulnerable populations over and over, through years, decades, and generations,” she said. 

In the new study, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and San Francisco, found that flooding contributed to the deaths of 152,753 infants — defined as children 11 months old and younger — in Bangladesh in the three decades between 1988 and 2017. The researchers used health surveys conducted by the United States Agency for International Development to collect data on more than 150,000 births over the course of the 30 years. They compared that data against high-resolution maps of major floods over that time span and found a stark difference in mortality risk: There were 5.3 more infant deaths per 1,000 births in flood-prone areas than in non-flood-prone areas. The authors extrapolated from this finding to estimate how many infant deaths, overall, were attributable to flooding in Bangladesh over the time period they studied. 

Infants are an especially vulnerable subset of the population, and changes in infant health can reflect the prevalence of health issues in the wider population. “Death is the most severe health outcome,” said Schwarz. “The increased risk of infant mortality suggests that populations living in a flood-prone region may also be at higher risk of other adverse health problems such as improper nutrition, water-borne diseases, and poor mental health.”

The majority of the deaths were likely linked to three flooding-related conditions. The first, diarrheal disease, often spreads when flooding overwhelms local sanitation infrastructure and causes drinking water supplies to be contaminated. Cholera, one of the most common and deadliest water-borne bacterial diseases, is a particular concern in poor countries where sanitation infrastructure is underdeveloped. Flooding also contributes to outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, because standing water creates ample breeding ground for mosquitoes. Finally, flooding turns agricultural fields into bogs and can lead to massive crop losses, which contribute to existing food insecurity in Bangladesh. Babies are extremely vulnerable to hunger. The Lancet, a leading medical journal that publishes an annual analysis of the impacts of climate change on human health around the world, has identified bacterial and vector-borne diseases and malnutrition as top areas of concern. 

Drownings and other injuries from the flooding also led to a small percentage of the deaths, the study’s authors told Grist. All of the health-related risks posed by flooding, from the first drowning to the last case of dengue, were exacerbated by socioeconomic factors like food security, family income, vaccination history, access to medical care, and the condition of local infrastructure such as sewage systems and drinking water treatment facilities.

The authors of the study told Grist that their results indicate that the risks of environmental health hazards are shifting as climate change worsens. Government health agencies and researchers often collect information on the immediate public health impacts of a single extreme weather event. But, because a warmer world also means a world plagued by more frequent and intense disasters, communities are being affected by extreme weather repeatedly. The long-term, cumulative health consequences of events that occur on a yearly or sometimes even more frequent basis are not well understood by the scientific community. And as such, the world has a flawed understanding of the true human cost of extreme weather.

“We need to understand this kind of long-term impact in the context of climate change because communities are going to be repeatedly and systematically exposed to these hazards,” said Tarik Benmahria, an environmental health researcher at University of California, San Diego, and one of three authors of the Bangladesh study. “These types of issues used to be exceptional by definition,” he added. “They’re not anymore.”

The method used by the researchers to determine the burden of flooding on communities in Bangladesh over multiple years, Schwarz said, “has the potential to be applied to evaluate the long-term effects of other climate exposures.” Extreme heat, hurricanes, and drought, to name a few of the environmental disasters being exacerbated by climate change, can also have compounding health effects that occur weeks, months, even years after the event takes place. If future research pinpoints how and when these effects occur, it could potentially save lives. “The approach is very relevant to other areas of the world that are vulnerable to recurrent climate hazards,” Schwarz said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden death toll of flooding in Bangladesh sends a grim signal about climate and health on Dec 11, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

He spoke to UN News’s Abdelmonem Makki, who began by asking what the situation was like on the ground there for children, as a fragile ceasefire holds amid the release of hostages.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Abdelmonem Makki.

The devastation puts extra pressure on a sector of the population already reeling from junta economic mismanagement that has caused the kyat to tumble since the military’s February 2021 coup d’etat. International sanctions to punish the regime has added to the pain.

A deluge on the night of Oct. 8 caused the Bago River to rise around 1.2 meters (4 feet) above its critical level and flood the townships of Bago, Kawa, Daik-U and Thanatpin, farmers told RFA Burmese on Thursday.

The flooding – which caused chaos across five regions in total – prompted 13,000 people in Bago region alone to relocate to relief camps or Buddhist monasteries for shelter.

About 20 centimeters (8 inches) of rain fell in Myanmar over 24 hours — the highest level in nearly 60 years, according to the country’s Department of Meteorology and Hydrology. A dozen neighborhoods and seven villages across the region’s capital, Bago city, were inundated with water when the Bago River overflowed.

All rice-growing villages in the southern part of Bago city and to the east and west of the Bago River were inundated by the flooding, said a person providing assistance to farmers in the region and who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

“Thanatpin township lost about one-third [of its rice fields], and Kawa township also lost about one-third, so I believe that in the vicinity of Bago and Bago township, the loss will be hundreds of thousands of acres,” he said.

A farmer from the region told RFA that there are more than 2.8 million acres of farmland in the Bago region. He said around 50,000 of Kawa township’s 184,000 acres are likely to have been destroyed by the flooding.

In Thanatpin township, farmer Zaw Myo said he had lost at least 20 acres of farmland. He said that if he is unable to repay the debt he had taken on for this year’s crops, “I’ll go from being a farm owner to a farm laborer.”

“I made an investment in this farm by taking out an agricultural loan from the government,” he said. “Since my farm was submerged, I won’t be able to pay off my debt to the creditor.”

Unrealistic reference price

On Oct. 10, the Leading Body for Protection of Farmer Rights and Enhancement of Benefits, under Myanmar’s junta-appointed Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation, issued a statement saying that “100 baskets of clean rice [per acre] with 14% moisture is set as the reference price of 7.5 million kyats (US$3,570).”

But Wa Khaing, another farmer from Thanatpin, noted that because of soaring prices of fuel and fertilizer since the coup, the cost of sowing and harvesting one acre of farmland is as much as 800,000 kyats (US$380). That means the reference price set by the ministry “is not even enough to cover the capital expenditure.”

“When dealing with bad weather and floods, some farms may only be able to harvest a small percentage, which will result in a huge loss for the farmers,” he said.

Farmers told RFA that due to the flooding, they can only expect to harvest around 20% of their expected yield per acre.

San Koon, a 75-year-old farmer, noted that this is the second time this year that paddy fields in Bago were flooded, destroying the local rice crop.

“It’s painful for us farmers,” he said. “We lost all our investments after taking credit, so now I have run up a huge debt.”

About 30 of San Koon’s 50 acres of farmland was damaged by the flooding – the worst he’d seen in his lifetime of seasonal farming. He said he’s decided to give up farming entirely.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

But as they strive to return to normalcy, many are struggling with related health issues, including diarrhea and colds.

Flooding in Myanmar caused chaos across five regions, prompting 13,000 people in Bago region alone to relocate to relief camps or Buddhist monasteries for shelter.

About 20 centimeters (8 inches) of rain fell in Myanmar over 24 hours — the highest level in nearly 60 years, according to the country’s Department of Meteorology and Hydrology.

A dozen neighborhoods and seven villages across the region’s capital, Bago city, were inundated with water when the Bago River overflowed.

Local charitable organizations have set up more than 30 relief camps to assist those affected.

A city resident who sought temporary shelter at a flood relief center told Radio Free Asia that he is cleaning up the upper floor of his house so his family can return home, even though water remains on the lower level.

Meanwhile, sections of the Yangon-Bago highway and several villages remain submerged as of Friday.

About 40 miles from Bago, villagers living in communities along the highway are grappling with flooded fields. Farmers have reported that tens of thousands of acres of nearly ripe paddy fields in the region are submerged due to the flooding.

Flooding caused by torrential monsoon rains also inundated the Mandalay and Yangon regions, displacing residents and disrupting traffic.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

• Idalia heads out to sea, leaving power outages and flooding and fallen tree damage in the Southeast.
• President Biden visits FEMA employees in DC, calls on Congress to fund Agency.
• Unemployment claims down last week, another sign economy still strong despite inflation.
• Santa Clara County officials highlight drug overdose crisis on National Overdose Awareness Day.
• Vallejo police officer who shot and killed young man given his job back.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – August 31, 2023 Idalia heads out to sea, leaving power outages and flooding and fallen tree damage in the Southeast. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• Idalia heads out to sea, leaving power outages and flooding and fallen tree damage in the Southeast.
• President Biden visits FEMA employees in DC, calls on Congress to fund Agency.
• Unemployment claims down last week, another sign economy still strong despite inflation.
• Santa Clara County officials highlight drug overdose crisis on National Overdose Awareness Day.
• Vallejo police officer who shot and killed young man given his job back.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – August 31, 2023 Idalia heads out to sea, leaving power outages and flooding and fallen tree damage in the Southeast. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The day before Independence Day, the summer sun beat down on dozens of clothes and shoes strewn across the backyard and fence of the Cicero, Illinois, home where Delia and Ramon Vasquez have lived for over 20 years. 

A nearly nine-inch deluge of rain that fell on Chicago and its suburbs the night before had flooded their basement where the items were stored in plastic bins. Among the casualties of the flood were their washer, dryer, water heater and basement cable setup. The rain left them with a basement’s worth of things to dry, appliances and keepsakes to trash, and mounting bills. 

The July flood was one of the worst storms the Chicago region has seen in recent years and over a month later many families like the Vasquezes are still scrambling for solutions. Without immediate access to flood insurance, the couple was left on their own to deal with the costs of repairing the damage and subsequent mold, Delia said. The costs of the recent flood come as the Vasquez family is still repaying an $8,000 loan they got to cover damages to their house from a flood in 2009.

Aggravated by climate change, flooding problems are intensifying in the Chicago region because of aging infrastructure, increased rainfall and rising lake levels. An analysis by Borderless Magazine found that in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, extreme weather events and heavy rainfall disproportionately affect people of color and those from immigrant backgrounds. These same communities often face barriers to receiving funding for flood damage or prevention due to their immigration status – many undocumented people cannot get FEMA assistance – as well as language or political barriers.

“You feel hopeless because you think the government is going to help you, and they don’t,” Delia said. “You’re on your own.”

The lack of a political voice and access to public services has been a common complaint in Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago where Latinos account for more than four out of five residents, the highest such percentage among Illinois communities. 

One potential solution for communities like Cicero could come from Cook County and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in the form of their RainReady program, which links community input with funding for flood prevention. The program has already been tried out in a handful of suburbs and is now being implemented in the Calumet region, a historically industrial area connected by the Little Calumet River on the southern end of Cook County. The RainReady Calumet Corridor project would provide towns with customized programs and resources to avoid flooding. Like previous RainReady projects, it relies on nature-based solutions, such as planting flora and using soil to hold water better.

CNT received $6 million from Cook County as part of the county’s $100 million investment in sustainability efforts and climate change mitigation. Once launched, six Illinois communities — Blue Island, Calumet City, Calumet Park, Dolton, Riverdale and Robbins — would establish the RainReady Calumet Corridor.

At least three of the six communities are holding steering committee meetings as part of the ongoing RainReady Calumet process that will continue through 2026. Some participants hope it could be a solution for residents experiencing chronic flooding issues who have been left out of past discussions about flooding.

“We really need this stuff done and the infrastructure is crumbling,” longtime Dolton resident Sherry Hatcher-Britton said after the town’s first RainReady steering committee meeting. “It’s almost like our village will be going underwater because nobody is even thinking about it. They might say it in a campaign but nobody is putting any effort into it. So I feel anything to slow [the flooding] — when you’re working with very limited funds — that’s just what you have to do.”

Where’s the money?

In Cicero and other low-income and minority communities in the Chicago region where floods prevail, the key problem is a lack of flood prevention resources, experts and community activists say.

Amalia Nieto-Gomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a multicultural activist coalition that serves Chicago’s Southeast Side — another area with flooding woes — laments the disparity between the places where flooding is most devastating and the funds the communities receive to deal with it.

“Looking at this with a racial equity lens … the solutions to climate change have not been located in minority communities,” Nieto-Gomez said.

CNT’s Flood Equity Map, which shows racial disparities in flooding by Chicago ZIP codes, found that 87 percent of flood damage insurance claims were paid in communities of color from 2007 to 2016. Additionally, three-fourths of flood damage claims in Chicago during that time came from only 13 ZIP codes, areas where more than nine out of 10 residents are people of color. 

Despite the money flowing to these communities through insurance payouts, community members living in impacted regions say they are not seeing enough of that funding. Flood insurance may be in the name of landlords who may not pass payouts on to tenants, for example, explains Debra Kutska of the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability, which is partnering with CNT on the RainReady effort.

Those who do receive money often get it in the form of loans that require repayment and don’t always cover the total damages, aggravating their post-flood financial difficulties. More than half of the households in flood-impacted communities had an income of less than $50,000 and more than a quarter were below the poverty line, according to CNT. 

Listening to community members

CNT and Cook County are looking at ways to make the region’s flooding mitigation efforts more targeted by using demographic and flood data on the communities to understand what projects would be most accessible and suitable for them. At the same time, they are trying to engage often-overlooked community voices in creating plans to address the flooding, by using community input to inform the building of rain gardens, bioswales, natural detention basins, green alleys and permeable pavers.

Midlothian, a southwestern suburb of Chicago whose Hispanic and Latino residents make up a third of its population, adopted the country’s first RainReady plan in 2016. The plan became the precursor to Midlothian’s Stormwater Management Capital Plan that the town is now using to address its flooding issues.

One improvement that came out of the RainReady plan was the town’s Natalie Creek Flood Control Project to reduce overbank flooding by widening the channel and creating a new stormwater storage basin. Midlothian also installed a rain garden and parking lot with permeable pavers not far from its Veterans of Foreign Wars building, and is working to address drainage issues at Kostner Park.

Kathy Caveney, a Midlothian village trustee, said the RainReady project is important to the town’s ongoing efforts to manage its flood-prone creeks and waterways. Such management, she says, helps “people to stop losing personal effects, and furnaces, and water heaters and freezers full of food every time it rains.”

Like in the Midlothian project, CNT is working with residents in the Calumet region through steering committees that collect information on the flood solutions community members prefer, said Brandon Evans, an outreach and engagement associate at CNT. As a result, much of the green infrastructure CNT hopes to establish throughout the Calumet Corridor was recommended by its own community members, he said.

“We’ve got recommendations from the plans, and a part of the conversation with those residents and committee members is input on what are the issues that you guys see, and then how does that, in turn, turn into what you guys want in the community,” Evans said.

The progress of the RainReady Calumet Corridor project varies across the six communities involved, but final implementation for each area is expected to begin between fall 2023 and spring 2025, Evans said. If the plan is successful, CNT hopes to replicate it in other parts of Cook County and nationwide, he said.

Despite efforts like these, Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District argues that the scale of the flooding problem in the Chicago region is so large that a foolproof solution would be “prohibitively expensive.” Instead, communities should work toward flood mitigation with the understanding that the region will continue to flood for years to come with climate change. And because mitigation efforts will need to be different in each community, community members should be the ones who decide what’s best for them, says Fitzpatrick.

In communities like Cicero, which has yet to see a RainReady project, local groups have often filled in the gaps left by the government. Cicero community groups like the Cicero Community Collaborative, for example, have started their own flood relief fund for residents impacted by the early July storm, through a gift from the Healthy Communities Foundation. 

Meanwhile, the Vasquez family will seek financial assistance from the town of Cicero, which was declared a disaster area by town president Larry Dominick and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker after the July storm. The governor’s declaration enables Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA.

But the flooding dangers persist.

The day after her home flooded, a neighbor suggested to Delia Vasquez that she move to a flood-free area. Despite loving her house, she has had such a thought. But like many neighbors, she also knows she can’t afford to move. She worries about where she can go.

“If water comes in here,” Vasquez said, “what tells me that if I move somewhere else, it’s not going to be the same, right?”

Efrain Soriano contributed reporting to this story.

This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Grist, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal and Wisconsin Watch, as well as the Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation.

Editor’s Note: As noted above both this project and the Center for Neighborhood Technology receive funding from Joyce Foundation. Borderless also receives funding from the Healthy Communities Foundation. Our news judgments are made independently — not based on or influenced by donors.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A community-led approach to prevent flooding expands in Illinois on Aug 20, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maia McDonald.

Tune into news from about any part of the planet, and there will likely be a headline about extreme weather. While these stories will be specific to the location, they all tend to include the amplifying effects of climate change.

This includes the wildfire devastation on the island of Maui in Hawai’i, where rising temperatures have dried vegetation and made the risk that much greater.

In Italy, summer temperatures hit an all-time high one week, followed by massive hail storms and flooding the next.

• READ MORE: Auckland floods: even stormwater reform won’t be enough — we need a ‘sponge city’ to avoid future disasters
• National’s housing u-turn promotes urban sprawl – cities and ratepayers will pick up the bill
• We’re building harder, hotter cities: it’s vital we protect and grow urban green spaces – new report

Flooding in Slovenia recently left three people dead and caused an estimated €500 million in damage.

At the same time, rainfall in Beijing has exceeded a 140-year record, causing wide-scale flooding and leaving 21 dead.

These northern hemisphere summer events mirror what happened last summer in Auckland, classified as a one-in-200-year event, and elsewhere in the North Island.

So far this year, rainfall at Auckland Airport has surpassed all records dating back to 1964.

Given more rainfall is one of the likeliest symptoms of a changing climate, the new report from the Helen Clark Foundation and WSP – Sponge Cities: Can they help us survive more intense rainfall? – is a timely (and sobering) reminder of the urgency of the challenge.

Pipe dreams
The “sponge city” concept is gaining traction as a way to mitigate extreme weather, save lives and even make cities more pleasant places to live.

This is particularly important when existing urban stormwater infrastructure is often already ageing and inadequate. Auckland has even been cutting spending on critical stormwater repairs for at least the past two years.

A new report sets out the practical ways New Zealand can improve its urban resilience to flooding due to climate change.

But time, rather than money, is of the essence, @TimFWelch (@AucklandUni) writes.https://t.co/RrO48DP61Y

— The Conversation – Australia + New Zealand (@ConversationEDU) August 14, 2023

Politically at least, this isn’t surprising. Stormwater infrastructure, as it is currently built and planned, is costly to develop and maintain. As the Helen Clark Foundation report makes clear, New Zealand’s pipes simply “were not designed for the huge volumes they will have to manage with rising seas and increasing extreme rainfall events”.

The country’s current combined stormwater infrastructure involves a 17,000 kilometre pipe network – enough to span the length of the country ten times. The cost of upgrading the entire water system, which encompasses stormwater, could reach NZ$180 billion.

This contrasts starkly with the $1.5 billion councils now spend annually on water pipes. The report makes clear that implementing sponge city principles won’t wholly solve flooding, but it can significantly reduce flood risks.

Trees and green spaces
The real bonus, though, lies in the potential for sponge city design to reduce dependence on expensive and high-maintenance infrastructure.

There are already examples in Auckland’s Hobsonville Point and Northcote. Both communities have incorporated green infrastructure, such as floodable parks and planted wetlands, which kept nearby homes from flooding.

But the report’s recommendations are at odds with some of the current political rhetoric around land use policy — in particular “greenfields” development that encourages urban sprawl.

The report urges that cities be built upwards rather than outwards, and pushes back on residential infill development encouraged by the Medium Density Residential Standards.

Citing a recent report on green space from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, the Helen Clark Foundation report argues for the preservation of urban green spaces — like backyards — as part of the flood mitigation approach.

Preserving tree cover is another urgent priority. Trees help absorb rainfall, reduce erosion and provide essential shade and cooling in urban areas — counteracting the dangerous urban “heat island” effect. Citing data from Global Forest Watch, the report states:

Auckland has lost as much as 19 percent of its tree cover in the past 20 years, Dunedin a staggering 24 percent, Greater Wellington around 11 percent and Christchurch 13 percent.

Incentives for homeowners
Making Aotearoa New Zealand more resilient to extreme weather, the report says, need not break the bank.

It recommends raising the national minimum standards governing the percentage of the total area of new developments that must be left unsealed. This would ensure the implementation of sponge city concepts, and see buildings clustered to maximise preserved green space.

The government should also require local councils to plan for and provide public green spaces, and to develop long-term sponge city plans — just as they do for other types of critical infrastructure.

Neighbourhoods could be retrofitted to include green roofs, permeable pavements and unsealed car parks. Land use and zoning could also encourage more vertical development, rather than sprawl or infill housing.

The government could also provide incentives and education for homeowners to encourage minimising sealed surfaces, unblocking stormwater flow paths, and replacing lawns with native plants and rain gardens.

More extreme weather and intense rainfall is a matter of when, not if. As the Helen Clark Foundation report makes clear, spending future billions is less of a priority than acting urgently now.

Dr Timothy Welch, senior lecturer in urban planning, University of Auckland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Video clips of scuffles, lengthy altercations and clashes with police have emerged on social media in recent days, showing embattled rural residents facing off with officials who want to flood their homes and farmland to protect Beijing, as well as ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's pet project -- Xiong'an New Area.

In one Aug. 2 clip posted to X by the citizen journalism account "Mr Li is not your teacher" residents of Ci village in Hebei demand an official letter from a demolition team leader getting ready to breach a dyke to allow floodwaters to inundate their village.

"This guy was trying to dig through our dyke sneakily," one villager says on the video. "We've been sitting out here protecting it through the night," says another. 

Another adds: "You don't actually have an official document, right?"

"On whose orders are you digging a hole here?" says another resident. "Who ordered this?"

They also complained they haven't been able to eat anything lately, and that they lack drinking water.

Scuffle over dyke

A later video from the same dispute showed villagers piling aboard a police bus, shoving and shouting.

In a similar dispute near worst-hit Zhuozhou city, a video clip shows a number of police vehicles on a road in the dark and rain, with the commentary: "The police have suppressed the villagers who were trying to stop them from breaching the dyke – they say that the dyke has to be breached."

"They're about to breach it now," the person shooting the clip, also dated Aug. 2, says.

Another social media video showed a similar dispute in Zhuzhuang village near Zhuozhou.

"We are here watching the levee so they can't come here and dig through it," one villager says on the clip. "If they do, it will destroy several villages."

"The excavator is parked right there, so we villagers have to protect ourselves."

A Hebei resident who gave only the surname He for fear of reprisals said public trust in the authorities is at a low ebb.

"We've seen so many disasters in our lives, whether it be earthquakes or floods, and nobody trusts them any more," he said. "Anyone with any sense knows [what they're like]."

"Somebody could just breach the dykes at any time with no regard for danger to people's lives," he said. 

Buffer for Beijing

The disputes came as China's water resources minister Li Guoying called for flood control measures to prioritize protecting Beijing, Daxing Airport and Xiong'an New Area, while Hebei provincial Communist Party secretary Ni Yuefeng called on officials to treat the province as a buffer zone for Beijing.

A water conservation expert who gave only the surname Sun for fear of reprisals said both statements were political rather than based on best practice.

"The second flood peak is hitting Zhuozhou now, and the water is nearly up to the level of the traffic lights at its deepest point," Sun said. "Basically [allowing the city to flood] will ... put pressure on the Haihe River basin downstream, around Tianjin."

"They should just come out and say why they want to protect Beijing at all costs," he said.

A compilation of clips from Zhuozhou showed the city and surrounding farmland under water on Friday, with residents walking along railway tracks from which the embankment had been washed away, and hundreds of residents of a tower block stranded, awaiting rescue.

The flooding of Zhuozhou comes after China's water resources minister Li Guoying called in an emergency meeting for the protection of Beijing, Daxing Airport and Xiong'an New Area to be prioritized, according to the official China.com news website.

"As the flood peaks in the Daqing and Yongding rivers ... move downstream, some designated flood storage areas have already been flooded, and some river embankments are in danger," Li was quoted as saying. "This is a critical moment for our flood defenses."

"We must take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of the capital Beijing (including Daxing Airport), Xiong'an New Area, and the safety of those living in the flood storage areas," he said.

Politics in command

Meanwhile, Sun said there is still ongoing pressure on reservoirs upstream of Beijing's flooded western districts, and Zhuozhou, further downstream.

"The Shisanling Reservoir in Changping started raising the sluice gates this morning to free up storage capacity and protect Beijing," he said.

"Everything in this flooding crisis is being decided first and foremost by political considerations," he said.

Germany-based water conservation expert Wang Weiluo said the flooding that hit the western Beijing suburb of Mentougou earlier this week had barrelled down the Yongding River, while the flooding that hit Zhuozhou had come down the Juma River from the western Beijing district of Fangshan.

"It was set up this way because the highest priority is to protect Beijing, and it also protects Tianjin," Wang said.

Social media comments have complained in recent days that the Communist Party secretary and mayor of Zhuozhou haven't been seen in public for days.

"Desperately seeking the mayor and party secretary of Zhuozhou city," said a satirical "missing persons notice" circulating on social media.

"Someone needs to take charge of the situation and the people need to know what's really happening," it said.

Repeated calls to the volunteer flood hotline went unconnected, while repeated calls to the Zhuozhou municipal government hotline and flood control headquarters rang unanswered on Thursday.

Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.

The floods have left at least 20 dead and millions displaced. In Hebei Province over 1.2 million people have been evacuated to safety, with some officials coming under fire for suggesting that Hebei and other surrounding areas were sacrificed to alleviate flooding in the Chinese capital, as well as to save pet leadership development projects.

In keeping with traditional low-key signaling, on Thursday, the head of the Party’s central secretariat Cai Qi met with “experts” in Beidaihe.

The two-week holidays in Beidaihe – a coastal resort on Bohai Bay, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) east of Beijing – are usually announced by a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader meeting with “experts.”

Cai Qi is No. 5 in the CCP hierarchy.

President Xi Jinping and other senior Politburo members have already disappeared from the spotlight for several days – Xi was last seen in public on Monday. Neither Xi nor Premier Li Qiang have spoken in public on the flooding.

State broadcaster CCTV continues to report on their directives but not on their whereabouts.

Routine government and policy activities will slow down, as they regularly do in the first two weeks of August. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs suspended its daily press conference for two weeks on Monday.

Jeremy Goldkorn, editor in chief of The China Project, said in an emailed newsletter: “Beidaihe is like the Hamptons for Chinese communists.” 

@MacroPolo, a Paulson Institute think tank, called Beidaihe China’s Camp David.

“Just like we never know what New York’s financial elite and some of their political friends discuss during their summer breaks at the Hamptons, what happens at Beidaihe stays at Beidaihe,” said Goldkorn.

Some, including @MacroPolo, would argue that is not entirely correct. Famously, China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward – a failed attempt to recast China overnight as a manufacturing giant by melting saucepans and cutlery (leading to mass famine) – was allegedly conceived and launched by the beach in 1958, or at least hastened into being there.

In the same year, Mao decided to shell the Kuomintang-held island of Quemoy, now better known as Chinmen, or Jinmen. Attempts to take the island were repelled by KMT troops.

In 1971, Lin Biao, a People’s Liberation Army general and one of Mao Zedong’s most trusted allies is believed to have fled the beach resort, destination the Soviet Union. His plane “crashed” amid one of the biggest purges in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

The Beidaihe summer retreat was the brainchild of Mao Zedong in 1953, and it grew in importance in the years that followed.

“Interrupted during the Cultural Revolution, Beidaihe wasn’t restored until 1983 under Deng Xiaoping,” writes @MacroPolo. “Under the Deng [Xiaoping] era, the seaside retreat continued to play an important role in Chinese elite politics, where reform decisions and personnel choices were made.”

Beijing’s moat

This year’s Beidaihe gathering takes place against a background of pointed criticism of government officials over the extensive flooding in northern China.

Bloomberg reports that “a hashtag playing off a comment by Ni Yuefeng, the Communist Party boss of Hebei province, had more than 80 million views on China’s Twitter-like Weibo on Thursday.

Ni riled Chinese “netizens” by calling for cities in the province bordering Beijing to “resolutely play a good role of moat for the capital.”

The Hebei head official even went so far as to say that the Xiong’an area – a project that Xi has described as being of “millennial significance” – represented “the top priority of flood control in our province.”

Local Hebei residents have publicly posted accusations on social media that towns such as Zhuozhou, which has a population of 630,000, and Baoding City, with a metropolitan population of more than 2 million suffered due to flood discharges aimed at protecting Beijing.

One Weibo user posted a photo of a museum in Baoding with a “sign [that] lists the objectives of the city’s flood-control efforts,” reported Bloomberg: “First, protecting Beijing and Tianjin. Second, protecting Xiong’an. Third, protecting Baoding itself.”

“If local leaders dared to put this slogan on a board and showed the public, they should also dare to face people’s questioning,” said the Weibo user in a post that later disappeared.

A middle school teacher in Hebei Province who only provided the surname Tian told the RFA Mandarin service that while natural disasters caused suffering and many deaths in China, “man-made disasters” should not be ignored.

“I saw on the Internet that the flood was caused by the water reservoir being opened to protect Xiong’an and Beijing,” Tian told RFA. “This natural disaster was mainly caused by man-made disasters. I believe that many people must have died [as a result]."

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.

Parts of Vermont experienced their worst flooding this week in nearly a century after two months’ worth of rain fell over the course of 48 hours. Nearly 100 people have been rescued, and locals are deeply concerned for the unhoused residents. “The state has really been hammered,” says journalist David Goodman in Waterbury. The host of the public affairs podcast and radio show The Vermont Conversation explains how the town adapted to flooding caused by Hurricane Irene, and calls for the state to adapt rather than simply replace damaged infrastructure: “​​In a climate changed world, that doesn’t work.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Damian Rance said around 1,700 people have had to evacuate from flooded homes in the major southern city, and one of most direct threats is a doubling or even tripling of the threat posed by landmines, being swept away to new locations.  

Oleksandra Burynska began by asking him what the latest was on the ground in the disaster area: 

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by UN News.

Evacuation efforts are underway in southern Ukraine, where floodwaters are rising after a dam on the Dnipro River was breached overnight in the Ukrainian city of Nova Kakhovka. The breach has created an additional humanitarian disaster in an area that’s seen heavy fighting since Russia’s invasion. Ukraine’s government says floodwaters are threatening 80 towns and villages, as well as the city of Kherson, home to 300,000 people. The breach could also limit drinking water supplies across Kherson and Crimea. Ukrainian officials accused Russia’s military of deliberately sabotaging the dam, calling it an act of “ecocide,” while Russian officials blamed Ukrainian artillery fire for the breach. The disaster has raised fears of a nuclear accident at Europe’s largest nuclear power station, the six-reactor Zaporizhzhia plant, which is upstream of the dam breach and relies on a reservoir formed by the dam for critical cooling systems. We go to Kyiv to speak with Olexi Pasyuk, deputy director of the Ukrainian NGO Ecoaction, to discuss the environmental implications.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

French Polynesia’s newly-elected President Moetai Brotherson has presented a 10-member government, which includes four women.

Brotherson has confirmed his pre-election choice of Eliane Tevahitua as Vice-President as well as Culture, Lands and Environment Minister.

Several of the ministers are new to politics, with 29-year-old Jordy Chan as Infrastructure and Transport Minister being the youngest.

• READ MORE: Tahiti’s pro-independence ‘blue wave’ back at helm with decisive win
• Other Tahitian politics reports

Vannina Crolas, who was an official in the now ruling Tavini Huira’atira party, is the new Public Sector and Employment Minister.

Minarii Galenon, who has been the president of the Women’s Council, is the new Housing Minister.

Nahema Temarii has been made Sports Minister.

Brotherson said weeks ago he had more women than men aspiring to be ministers but as some women withdrew, he has not been able to form a government with gender parityas he had expected.

Gender parity the aim
Before the election, Brotherson said he planned to have a government made up by at least half with women.

Ronny Teriipaia has been made Education Minister, and Tevaiti Pomare has become Finance Minister.

Cedric Marcadal has been made Health Minister, and Teivani Teai is the Primary Industry Minister.

He added an additional position to his line-up by making Nathalie Salmon-Hudry an interministerial delegate responsible for People with Disabilities.

Wanting a broad government, Brotherson offered one ministerial position to the pro-autonomy opposition A here Ia Porinetai party, but it declined.

The term of government is five years.

Meanwhile, Brotherson has reaffirmed that the main priority for his government is not independence from France but continued assistance to the victims of the flooding two weeks ago.

The pursuit of independence, which is the central tenet of their Tavini Huira’atira, has been Brotherson’s repeatedly stated endeavour and a long-term goal but, like his predecessors, he has shown no hurry to call a referendum.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French Polynesia’s newly-elected President Moetai Brotherson has presented a 10-member government, which includes four women.

Brotherson has confirmed his pre-election choice of Eliane Tevahitua as Vice-President as well as Culture, Lands and Environment Minister.

Several of the ministers are new to politics, with 29-year-old Jordy Chan as Infrastructure and Transport Minister being the youngest.

• READ MORE: Tahiti’s pro-independence ‘blue wave’ back at helm with decisive win
• Other Tahitian politics reports

Vannina Crolas, who was an official in the now ruling Tavini Huira’atira party, is the new Public Sector and Employment Minister.

Minarii Galenon, who has been the president of the Women’s Council, is the new Housing Minister.

Nahema Temarii has been made Sports Minister.

Brotherson said weeks ago he had more women than men aspiring to be ministers but as some women withdrew, he has not been able to form a government with gender parityas he had expected.

Gender parity the aim
Before the election, Brotherson said he planned to have a government made up by at least half with women.

Ronny Teriipaia has been made Education Minister, and Tevaiti Pomare has become Finance Minister.

Cedric Marcadal has been made Health Minister, and Teivani Teai is the Primary Industry Minister.

He added an additional position to his line-up by making Nathalie Salmon-Hudry an interministerial delegate responsible for People with Disabilities.

Wanting a broad government, Brotherson offered one ministerial position to the pro-autonomy opposition A here Ia Porinetai party, but it declined.

The term of government is five years.

Meanwhile, Brotherson has reaffirmed that the main priority for his government is not independence from France but continued assistance to the victims of the flooding two weeks ago.

The pursuit of independence, which is the central tenet of their Tavini Huira’atira, has been Brotherson’s repeatedly stated endeavour and a long-term goal but, like his predecessors, he has shown no hurry to call a referendum.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“Is it green energy if it’s impacting cultural traditional sites?” 

Yakama Nation Tribal Councilman Jeremy Takala sounded weary. For five years, tribal leaders and staff have been fighting a renewable energy development that could permanently destroy tribal cultural property. “This area, it’s irreplaceable.”

The privately owned land, outside Goldendale, Washington, is called Pushpum, or “mother of roots,” a first foods seed bank. The Yakama people have treaty-protected gathering rights there. One wind turbine-studded ridge, Juniper Point, is the proposed site of a pumped hydro storage facility. But to build it, Boston-based Rye Development would have to carve up Pushpum — and the Yakama Nation lacks a realistic way to stop it.  

Back in October 2008, unbeknownst to Takala, Scott Tillman, CEO of Golden Northwest Aluminum Corporation, met with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a collection of governor-appointed representatives from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana who maintain a 20-year regional energy plan prioritizing low economic and environmental tolls. Tillman, who owned a shuttered Lockheed Martin aluminum smelter near Goldendale, told the council about the contaminated site’s redevelopment potential, specifically for pumped hydro storage, which requires a steep incline like Juniper Point to move water through a turbine. Shortly thereafter, Klickitat County’s public utility department tried to implement Tillman’s plan, but hit a snag in the federal regulatory process. That’s when Rye Development stepped in.

“We’re committed to at least a $10 million portion of the cleanup of the former aluminum smelter,” said Erik Steimle, Rye’s vice president of project development, “an area that is essentially sitting there now that wouldn’t be cleaned up in that capacity without this project.”

Meanwhile, Tillman cleaned up and sold another smelting site, just across the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, a Superfund site where Lockheed Martin had poisoned the groundwater with cyanide. He sold it to Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which operates water-guzzling data centers in The Dalles and plans to build more. For nine years, the county and Rye plotted the fate of Pushpum — without ever notifying the Yakama Nation.

The tribal government only learned of the development in December 2017, when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a public notice of acceptance for Rye’s preliminary permit application. Tribal officials had just 60 days to catch up on nine years of development planning and issue their initial concerns and objections as public comments.

When it came time for government-to-government consultation in August 2021, FERC designated Rye as its representative. But the Yakama Nation refused to consult with the corporation. “The tribe’s treaty was between the U.S. government and the tribe. We’re two sovereigns,” said Elaine Harvey, environmental coordinator at Yakama Nation Fisheries, who’s been heavily involved with the project. “We’re supposed to deal with the state.”

FERC countered that using corporate stand-ins for tribal consultation is standard practice for the commission. When the tribe objected, FERC said it could file more public comments to the docket instead of consulting.

But sensitive cultural information was involved, which, by Yakama tribal law, cannot be made public. Takala noted, for example, that Yakama people don’t want non-Natives harvesting and marketing first foods the way commercial pickers market huckleberries: “That has an impact for our people as well, trying to save up for the winter.” The tribe needs confidentiality to protect its cultural resources.

There’s just one catch: Rule 2201. According to FERC, Rule 2201 legally prohibits the agency from engaging in off-the-record communications in a contested proceeding. Records of all consultations must be made available to the public and other stakeholders, including prospective developers and county officials. Who wrote Rule 2201? FERC did. 

“Nevertheless,” FERC wrote to the Yakama Nation in December 2021, “the Commission endeavors, to the extent authorized by law, to reduce procedural impediments to working directly and effectively with tribal governments.” FERC said the nation could either relay any sensitive information in a confidential file — though that information “must be shared with at least some participants in the proceeding” — or else keep it confidential by simply not sharing it at all, in which case FERC would proceed without taking it into account. So formal federal consultation still hasn’t happened. But FERC is moving forward anyway.

“It’s important for First Nations to be heard in this process,” said Steimle, the developer. During a two-hour tour of the site, he championed the project’s technical merits and its role in meeting state carbon goals. “If you look at Europe at this point, it’s probably 20 years ahead of us integrating large amounts of renewables.”

Steimle repeatedly described Rye as weighed down by stringent consultation and licensing processes. Rye, he said, lacks real authority: “We don’t have the power in the situation to ultimately decide, you know, it’s going to be this technology, or it’s going to be in this final location.” Becky Brun, Rye’s communications director, echoed Steimle’s tone of inevitability: “Regardless of what happens here with this pumped storage project, this land will most certainly get redeveloped into something.”

When asked what Rye could offer the Yakama people as compensation for the irreversible destruction of their cultural property, Steimle suggested “employment associated with the project.”

Takala wasn’t surprised. “That’s always the first thing offered on many of these projects. It’s all about money.” 

Presented with the reality that Yakama people might not want Rye’s jobs, Steimle hesitated. “Yeah, I mean I, I can’t argue that — maybe it won’t be meaningful to them.”

But for Klickitat County, the jobs pitch works: It’s a chance to revive employment lost when the smelter closed. “That was one of the largest employers in Klickitat County — very good family-wage jobs for over a generation,” said Dave Sauter, a longtime county commissioner who finished his final term at the end of 2022. The smelter’s closing was “a huge blow,” he said. “Redevelopment of that site would be really beneficial.”

Sauter acknowledged the pumped hydro storage facility would only provide about a third of the jobs that the smelter offered in its final days, but “it will lead to other energy development in Klickitat County.” The county, with its armada of aging wind turbines and proximity to the hydroelectric grid, prides itself on being one of the greenest energy producers in the state and has asked FERC for an expedited timeline.

Klickitat County’s eagerness creates another barrier to the Yakama Nation. In Washington, a developer can take one of two permitting paths: through the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, or through county channels. Both lead to FERC. In this case, working with the county benefits Rye: Klickitat, a majority Republican county, has a contentious relationship with the Yakama Nation, one that even Sauter described as “challenging.” 

“Klickitat County refuses to work with us,” said Takala. On Sept. 19, 2022, Harvey logged into a Zoom meeting with the Klickitat County Planning Department to deliver comments as a private citizen. Harvey says county officials, who know her from her work with the Yakama Nation, locked her out of the Zoom room, even though the meeting was open to the public and a friend of hers confirmed that the call was working and the meeting underway. Undeterred, Harvey attended in person and delivered her comments.

The Planning Department denied that Harvey was deliberately locked out, claiming that everyone who arrived on Zoom was admitted. They also said they were having technical difficulties.

Fighting Rye’s proposal has required the efforts of tribal attorneys, archaeologists and government staffers from a number of departments. “Finding the staff to do site location is very difficult when we don’t have the funds put forth,” Takala said.

And Rye’s project is just one of dozens proposed within the Yakama Nation’s 10 million-acre treaty territory. Maps from the tribe and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife show that of the 51 wind and solar projects currently proposed statewide — not including geothermal or pumped hydro storage projects, which are also renewable energy developments — at least 34 are on or partially on the Yakama Nation’s ceded lands. Each of these proposals has its own constellation of developers, permitting agencies, government officials and landowners.

“There’s so many projects being proposed in the area that we here at the nation are feeling the pressure,” said Takala. He noted that when it comes to fulfilling obligations to tribes, the United States drags its feet. “But when it’s a developer, things get pushed through really quickly. It’s pretty much a repeating history all over again.”   

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Green colonialism is flooding the Pacific Northwest on Apr 9, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster.

Now, as California closes out a historically wet winter, Tulare Lake has reappeared for the first time since 1997. As runoff from several rivers drains into the valley, the homes and streets and fields that sit on the lake bed, which covers 1,000 square miles, are being inundated once again. The flooding will only increase over the next few months as the state’s record snowpack melts, dousing the area with the equivalent of 60 inches of rain.

Tulare Lake has always emerged during especially wet years, but the flooding will be worse this time: the region’s powerful agriculture industry has compounded flood risk around the lake by pumping enormous amounts of subterranean groundwater, turning the region into a giant bowl. Farmers overdraw the basin’s aquifer by around 820,000 acre-feet per year, far more water than Los Angeles consumes over the same period, and this pumping has caused the southern Central Valley to sink faster than almost any other place in the world.

Subsidence is occurring throughout California, but the problem is at its worst in the area around Tulare Lake, which is about 200 miles north of L.A. Some cities near the lake bed have sunk by as much as 11 feet over the past half-century. That rapid decline makes homes and crops in the basin much more vulnerable to flooding than when the lake last appeared 35 years ago. What’s more, the levees and channels that control flooding are getting less effective as the land around them subsides.

“Tulare Lake is playing Russian Roulette with flooding, and they just lost,” said Deirdre Des Jardins, an independent researcher and consultant who has studied flood risk in the Central Valley. “Water is flowing differently because of the subsidence, and they don’t have any kind of flood management.”

Even as flood risk has grown due to subsidence, local leaders have rejected the state’s attempts to finance new flood defenses. When California began to draft a statewide flood protection plan after Hurricane Katrina, many counties and flood control districts in the agriculture-dominated Tulare Lake basin declined to participate, denying themselves state funding for new levees and bypass systems.

“The local interests who were there at those meetings were pretty adamant that they did not want to be part of a state level plan,” said Julie Rentner, president of the California-based environmental organization River Partners, who participated in the drafting of the plan. “They felt like they had it under control. Especially in some of the more conservative parts of California, there’s a real concern and real suspicion that the state intervening in the way water is managed will have deleterious impacts on local communities or local economy.” 

In other cities, like Sacramento, the state spent billions to improve a network of levees and channels that helps manage runoff, but the Tulare Lake basin has no centralized flood infrastructure at all. Tulare County last updated its flood control master plan in 1972, when land in the area was several feet higher. The only levees in the lake bed are those owned and maintained by local flood control districts, which often lack the capital to make significant improvements. Those structure seem all but certain to fail as the lake reappears over the coming weeks, and some already have. 

The officials charged with managing groundwater around Tulare Lake have also resisted the state’s attempts to control the pace of subsidence. Earlier this month, state officials chastised a group of local groundwater control agencies for failing to set “minimum thresholds and measurable objectives” for countering subsidence as required by state law. The agencies had said they wanted to limit the region’s subsidence to between 1 and 2 feet over 20 years, a number so high state officials thought it was a typo.

(Groundwater agencies and flood control districts that represent the Tulare Lake area didn’t immediately respond to interview requests.)

Much of the land on the lake bed is owned by J.G. Boswell, an agricultural company founded by the famous land baron of the same name. Boswell is one of the titans of the Central Valley, and has long been among the largest private farming operations in the world — it grows cotton, tomatoes, wheat, and a variety of other staples on fertile land that used to be underwater. The company maintains pumps and flood cells to protect its crop from inundation, but many of its fields will likely flood later this spring.

But it’s not just farmland that stands to flood. The Tulare Lake basin is home to half a dozen small towns, including Allensworth, the oldest town in California founded by Black people, and Corcoran, which houses a large state prison and a large population of agricultural laborers. Due to the pace of subsidence, these towns grow more vulnerable to flooding with every passing year, and some have already taken on several feet of water this year. Earlier in March, someone sliced a hole in a barrier along a local creek, flooding most of Allensworth.

Few people in these towns have flood insurance. Corcoran, one of the largest cities on the lake bed, has a population of around 22,000, but only five of its households participate in the National Flood Insurance Program. Furthermore, the Federal Emergency Management Agency hasn’t updated federal flood maps to account for the past decade of subsidence, so many residents in flood zones may not even be aware of the risk they face. 

The worst is yet to come. Snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada is almost triple the size of an average year’s, and warming weather will send the equivalent of 60 inches of rain toward Tulare Lake. That water will stick around for months or even years; as the lake grows, flooding could expand north toward the city of Fresno more than 40 miles away, putting thousands of homes and farms at risk. The lake bed also contains facilities like a sewage sludge composting plant that could leak or rupture as the area fills with water.

The result is a brutal irony. Draining Tulare Lake made it possible for the agricultural industry to thrive in the southern Central Valley, but that same industry has made the region more vulnerable than ever as the lake returns.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ghost of Tulare Lake returns, flooding California’s Central Valley on Mar 28, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

This decade is the critical moment for making deep, rapid cuts to emissions, and acting to protect people from dangerous climate impacts we can no longer avoid, according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The synthesis report is the culmination of seven years of global and in-depth assessments of various aspects of climate change.

It reiterates that the world is now about 1.1℃ warmer than during pre-industrial times. This already results in more frequent and more intense extreme weather, causing complex disruption and suffering for communities worldwide.

• READ MORE: ‘It can be done. It must be done’: IPCC delivers definitive report on climate change, and where to now
• Floods, cyclones, thunderstorms: is climate change to blame for New Zealand’s summer of extreme weather?
• Other climate reports

Many are woefully unprepared.

Key takeaway from #IPCC 2023 Synthesis Report for every nation, business, investor & individual who contributes to #climate change: we must move from climate procrastination to climate activation. And we must do it today.https://t.co/wqPf6CveMB

— Inger Andersen (@andersen_inger) March 20, 2023

The report stresses our current pace and scale of action are insufficient to reduce rising global temperatures and secure a liveable future for all. But it also highlights that we already have many feasible and effective options to cut emissions and better protect communities if we act now.

Many countries have already achieved and maintained significant emissions reductions for more than ten years. Overall, however, global emissions are up by 12 percent on 2010 and 54 percent higher than in 1990.

The largest rise comes from carbon dioxide (from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes), followed by methane.

The world is expected to cross the 1.5℃ temperature threshold during the 2030s (at the current level of action). Already, the effects of climate change are not linear and every increment of warming will bring rapidly escalating hazards, exacerbating more intense heatwaves and floods, ocean warming and coastal inundation.

These complex events are particularly severe for children, the elderly, Indigenous and local communities, and disabled people.

But in agreeing to this report, governments have now recognised that human rights and questions of equity, loss and damage are central to effective climate action.

New @IPCC_CH Synthesis Report released
One of the most impressive figures relates to the fairness across generations. The generation of my kids born in 2010s will face substantially more heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts during an average lifetime than their grandparents. pic.twitter.com/hWivpq74iO

— Erich Fischer (@erichfischer) March 20, 2023

This report also breaks emissions down to households — 10 percent of the highest-emitting households contribute 40-45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while 50 percent of the lowest-emitting households (including small islands communities), contribute less than 15 percent of overall greenhouse gases.

Climate-resilient development
The report points to solutions for climate-resilient development, a process which integrates actions to reduce or avoid emissions with those to protect people to advance sustainability. Examples include health improvements that come from broadening access to clean energy and contribute to better air quality.

But the choices we make need to be locally relevant and socially acceptable. And they have to be made urgently, because our options for resilient action are progressively reduced with every increment of warming above 1.5℃.

This report is also significant for recognising the importance of Indigenous knowledge and local community insights to help advance ambitious climate planning and effective climate leadership.

Cities can make a big difference
Cities are key drivers of emissions. They generate around 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally, and this is rising largely through transport systems relying on fossil fuels, building materials and household consumption.

But this also means urban spaces are where we can really exercise climate leadership. Decisions made at the level of local councils are going to be significant globally in terms of bringing national and global emissions down and protecting people.

Cities are sites for solutions where we can decarbonise transport and increase green spaces. While tackling climate risks can feel overwhelming, acting at the city level is a way communities can have more control over reducing emissions and where local action can really make a difference to our quality of life.

We know there is much more money flowing into mitigation than adaptation. But we have to do both now, and move beyond adaptation focused on physical protection (such as sea walls).

We also need to be thinking really carefully about green infrastructure (trees and parks), low-carbon transport and social protection for communities, which includes income replacement, better healthcare, education and housing.

This report was particularly difficult to negotiate because we now live in a changed reality. More and more countries are experiencing very significant losses and damages. As countries face increasingly extreme weather events, the stakes are higher.

Governments everywhere, in my view as a political scientist, are now facing hard choices about how to protect their own national interests while also making significant efforts to tackle our global climate crisis.

In negotiations, larger countries can dominate debate and it can take a long time to get to agreement. This puts enormous pressure on smaller nations, including Pacific delegations with fewer people and diplomatic resources.

This is yet another reason to ensure action is inclusive, fair and equitable.

After working beyond the scheduled conclusion of #IPCC58, exhausted policymakers and authors celebrated the adoption of final outputs of the sixth assessment cycle: the Synthesis of the Sixth Assessment Report and its Summary for Policymakers #AR6

Read https://t.co/Qf2U4EXPgJ pic.twitter.com/mQa4R8eu0i

— Earth Negotiations Bulletin (@IISD_ENB) March 20, 2023

For authors of the IPCC core writing team, the past 18 months have been intense. We all felt significant responsibility to accurately summarise years of work, completed by hundreds of our global scientific colleagues, who contributed to six reports in this assessment cycle: on physical science, adaptation and vulnerability, mitigation, and special reports on land, global warming of 1.5℃, and ocean and cryosphere.

These reports show the choices we make in this decade will impact current and future generations, and the planet, now and for thousands of years.

• Fear & Wonder is a new climate podcast, brought to you by The Conversation. It will take you inside the IPCC’s era-defining climate report via the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it. The first episode drops on March 23. Learn more here, or subscribe on your favourite podcast app via the icons above.

Dr Bronwyn Hayward, Professor of Politics, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest insurer says 20,000 homes across the country are at severe risk of flooding and it is in talks with government about where flood-damaged houses should be written off for good.

IAG is part of an advisory panel that is helping the government with managed retreat legislation.

Those in regions hard hit by Cyclone Gabrielle, who want to walk away from their flood-damaged homes, need answers, among them Peter Johnstone.

• READ MORE: Other Cyclone Gabrielle reports

He stood on the roof of his house the night Pakowhai flooded, and felt creaking and groaning and feared the roof would collapse. Two weeks on, he was shocked to learn the insurer planned to fix his home.

“The people that are there to assess are sort of saying, ‘Oh no, this is rebuild, this is a refix’, refix is the word they’re using,” he said.

“I said, ‘You be kidding me, the whole bloody lot could be condemned, Pakowhai should be condemned’. Every house in Pakowhai is munted.”

He is 75 and together with his wife has lived on the four hectares for three decades.

‘Daunting for me’
“It’s just daunting for me — I’m not scared of hard work but it’s daunting for me. How on earth will I get that place back up?”

They want out and have commissioned an independent engineer to determine if the yellow-stickered home is, in fact, a write-off.

Also in Pakowhai, Keith Gore and his wife live between the two rivers and also want out. An assessor visited this week.

“The assessor is out of Christchurch and he’s been in the game for 43 years,” Gore said.

“He did the Christchurch earthquake, floods at Taeri, floods at Greymouth and one other, and when he walked in our house he said: ‘This is the worst I’ve ever seen’.”

He was not impressed that the insurer wanted to scope costs to rebuild the silt-ridden house.

RNZ talked to three different councils in the East Coast — none would say which areas should be vacated for good.

Quick decisions needed
Minister of Finance Grant Robertson said on Sunday decisions need to be made quickly on whether some places should be rebuilt the way they were — before money and resources were wasted in areas that would need to be abandoned.

IAG chief executive Amanda Whiting said the insurer had maps of areas at high risk of flooding, and was sharing these with officials.

“They vary and we’ve got to do a bit more mapping yet because we’ll have to agree on the parameters that deem those high flood risk zones. But we do have a lot of that mapping available and we’ll share that with government and other stakeholders,” she said.

IAG’s modelling shows 1 percent of homes — around 20,000 around the country — are at risk of severe flooding.

Until there was certainty over areas for managed retreat, Whiting said homeowners caught in limbo should let their insurer know if they want to relocate.

“Talk to us. As we start to get a bit of a sense of those people who are wanting to retreat that will help us with the government on a plan.”

In central Hawke’s Bay, around 200 homes flooded in Waipawa on the night of the cyclone.

Bryce Fergusson was among locals who ran to safety when the river’s stopbank overflowed. Even so, he wanted to rebuild.

“I’m pretty sure it’ll be in hot demand living up on the hill now but we love our land. We’re really hoping this is a once in a lifetime experience.”

Central Hawke’s Bay mayor Alex Walker said there was no urgency to relocate entire communities in Waipawa.

“There’s not a clear locality within central Hawke’s Bay district where we would be talking about urgent withdrawal of property but there might be some isolated pockets of one or two properties where there is a requirement for that conversation about where and how people may rebuild.”

Hastings mayor Sandra Hazlehurst said residents were already making decisions about whether to stay or go, and needed certainty — especially those in 680 yellow-stickered homes.

“We pretty quickly need to sit down with our affected communities, government, insurance council and banks and work out what this process will look like to give them some certainty about next steps and a timeframe.”

Up the coast, Gisborne District Council chief executive Nedine Thatcher Swann said it would likely to take time, and Māori landowners needed to be consulted.

“We’re talking about people who are deeply ingrained, who have whakapapa here.

“So it’s not a matter of simply, you know, redesigning and rebuilding and relocating. It’s a long journey that we need to work closely with our hapū and iwi on.”

For those in limbo like Peter Johnstone, it was a waiting game.

“I’m really worried about what’s around the corner, what do we accept. The government should be saying this is worse than an insurance problem, this is a major and we don’t want that little town to be there any longer.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The belt of torrential rain which has brought flooding and slips across northern New Zealand is currently mainly centred over the Waikato and Waitomo district.

But it is also reaching northern Taranaki and parts of the upper South Island.

A train was derailed in Te Puke due to heavy rain.

• READ MORE: Auckland floods a future sign – city needs stormwater systems fit for climate change
  NZ’s first climate adaptation plan is a good start, but crucial questions about cost and timing must be answered
• With seas rising and storms surging, who will pay for New Zealand’s most vulnerable coastal properties?
• Other Asia Pacific Report coverage of Auckland’s flooding
• Follow RNZ live news updates

Residents in already hard-hit areas like Auckland, Coromandel and Bay of Plenty are on watch for thunderstorms and more heavy rain.

MetService now says there could be heavy rain and thunderstorms as far south as the Marlborough Sounds and the Rai Valley as well as Tasman.

It has put in place heavy rain warnings for Auckland, Waikato, Waitomo, Mount Taranaki, Marlborough Sounds and Tasman northwest of Motueka.

In other developments:

• At least three people have died and one person is still missing after slips and heavy flooding in Auckland
• A train has derailed in Te Puke due to rain on the tracks.
• Auckland and now Waitomo are under a state of emergency
• Heavy rain has hit Coromandel and Bay of Plenty overnight
• A house has collapsed in Tauranga but no injuries were reported.
• An Interislander ferry lost power in Cook Strait but managed to restart its engines and arrived in Wellington about 9pm on Saturday

Officials say people in immediate danger should call 111, keep an eye on social media, and evacuate to a nearby shelter if they need.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Radar update: thunderstorm bringing heavy rain to Pukekohe

Keep an eye on the radar at https://t.co/7k3nmeeZKF

Severe Weather info https://t.co/qHyE5zzql5 pic.twitter.com/F97wV6fpU9

— MetService (@MetService) January 28, 2023

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has acknowledged the way Aucklanders have come together and opened their homes to those in need, with the New Zealand government focused on providing the resources needed to get the city back up and running.

The new prime minister — just four days into the job — has been speaking to media after assessing flood damage and talking to locals around West Auckland this afternoon.

Hipkins was joined by Auckland mayor Wayne Brown and Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty in northwest Auckland.

• READ MORE:  Auckland thunderstorm: Furore over unsent Civil Defence warning texts
• Three dead, at least one missing, and airport closes in Auckland floods
• Auckland thunderstorm damage in pictures
• Follow RNZ News live updates

With three deaths now confirmed, the prime minister offered his condolences to the families of the deceased.

He said he was focused on supporting Aucklanders through this event and providing the full resources to get Auckland back up and running in the safest way possible

“I want to focus on getting Auckland through the next period.”

Hipkins said the government’s priority was to ensure Aucklanders were housed. He said there was an assessment of public and community housing underway today.

Having surveyed the damage, he said it was clear it was going to be a big clean up job after Auckland’s wettest day on record.

Watch a live stream here

PM Chris Hipkins and mayor Wayne Brown speaking.      Video: RNZ News

Hipkins said it was important for Aucklanders to avoid unnecessary travel and to stay out of the water.

He said this was the time to check in with loved ones and “take care of each other”.

He acknowledged the way Aucklanders had come together and opened their homes to those in need, when dealing with an unprecedented event in recent memory

The prime minister said Aucklanders should expect more rain — “don’t take the good weather for now for granted”.

Hipkins thanked those working in the emergency services, the lines companies, supermarkets and health sector.

‘Tough night for all’
Mayor Wayne Brown said last night was a “tough night for all”.

Brown said he shared concerns and worries for families deeply affected — especially those who had lost their lives.

He said the response to the storm last night took a lot of concentration, happened quickly and the response was way quicker than people believed.

“Everyone was out there way before [the emergency was declared] and lasted all night long.”

He said he followed the advice of the professionals when deciding whether to declare an emergency.

“It’s not something you do lightly.”

He said the council would review “everything that took place”.

‘Lessons to be learned’
Hipkins said he accepted people would have questions and observations — and there would be an appropriate time soon to go through those.

“There will be lessons to be learned from the experience.

“The most important thing is supporting Auckland through the next 24 hours and beyond.”

Duty Controller Andrew Clark from Auckland Emergency Management said the event was “beyond anything we’ve ever seen”.

He said rescuing people was the priority, while also providing shelter for those in need.

“We had a crisis within a crisis.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Auckland flooding: Third death confirmed after body found in Remuera house https://t.co/DW8P4F1kMG

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) January 28, 2023

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

RNZ News

Two people are dead and at least two people are missing following the flooding overnight in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.

About 1000 people were still stranded today after Auckland Airport was closed last night because of flooding of the arrival and departure foyers. Flights were cancelled for the morning.

Police responded to a call after a man was found dead in a flooded culvert in Wairau Valley, about 7.30pm last night.

• READ MORE: Auckland mayor declares emergency as wild weather lashes NZ’s north
• RNZ’s live news updates on Auckland’s wild storms

The spokesperson said police were called to a flooded carpark on Link Drive, also in Wairau Valley, after a report of another man found dead about 12.30am on Saturday.

Inquiries into the circumstances of both deaths were ongoing, police said.

Police are also investigating reports of a man having been swept away by floodwaters in Onewhero shortly after 10pm on Friday.

A search and rescue team will deploy today to search for the missing man.

Landslide brings down house
Emergency services also responded to a landslide that brought down a house on Shore Road, Remuera about half past seven. One person remains unaccounted for and the property will be assessed this morning.

Police continue to urge people to stay home and not drive unless absolutely necessary today.

Police said they were continuing to respond to a high number of calls after the severe weather.

Auckland mayor Wayne Brown said staff would today be assessing what damage had occurred and what steps needed to be taken next.

He declared a state of emergency last night that will remain in force for seven days.

Unprecedented flooding
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the flooding in Auckland was an unprecedented event.

Hipkins said more should been known in a few hours about how bad the damage was after a day of torrential flooding.

He was with a team at the Beehive bunker overnight, talking to the teams coordinating the response in Auckland.

Hipkins said it was difficult to get information about what is going on but up to 1000 people were still stranded at Auckland airport, and right across the region there were many people just simply stuck somewhere where they would not normally be early on a Saturday morning — including in their car, or at a business.

MetService said the airport had smashed its all-time record for rainfall in a single 24-hour period — recording 249mm yesterday, beating the previous record set nearly four decades in 1985 — 161.8mm.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Record breaking rain in Auckland. Although the heavy band of rain has moved off to the east there is still a change of showers so the total for rainfall could climb even higher. The impacts of the last 24 hours will be felt by many in Auckland for a long time. Take care out there pic.twitter.com/kiIm6Tsrro

— MetService (@MetService) January 27, 2023

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Mayor Wayne Brown has shut down criticism that he was too slow in declaring a state of emergency after severe flooding in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.

In a media stand-up late on Friday evening, Brown said he was following advice from experts and as soon as they said it was time to declare an emergency, he signed it off.

“It wasn’t as if nothing was happening before that,” Brown said.

• READ MORE: RNZ’s live news updates on Auckland’s wild storms

Brown said he was confident the state of emergency had been declared at the right time as it would have been “irresponsible” to rush ahead and declare the emergency just because the public was calling for it.

It was officially declared at 9.54pm.

He said it was “not my job to rush out with buckets”.

Evacuations underway
Meanwhile, evacuations were underway across the city as the wild weather flooded homes, caused slips and power outages.

Auckland Airport closed its international terminal due to flooding inside the building.

“Due to the damage, no domestic or international flights will be arriving or departing from Auckland Airport before noon Saturday, 29 January,” said an announcement.

The wild weather also led to the cancellation of Sir Elton John’s concert at Mt Smart Stadium just a few minutes before the singer was due to take the stage.

Earlier, RNZ News reported that residents in flood-prone areas of West Auckland were being asked to prepare to evacuate as the bad weather caused power cuts and car crashes across Tāmaki Makaurau, with a severe thunderstorm watch in place for the north of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Auckland Emergency Management said the severe weather across the city was worsening and it was trying to assess what action was needed.

‘At risk’ phone number
If lives were at risk, residents should phone 111 immediately, it said in a social media post.

It also asked people to check on neighbours, friends and family members but not to put themselves in danger to do so.

Aucklanders had faced a chaotic commute ahead of the long weekend for the city’s anniversary with some ferries cancelled, and crashes on the northwestern and southwestern motorways.

The north, and north west, areas of Auckland have been particularly hit by the weather, police said in a statement.

Auckland Anniversary Day on January 29 is a public holiday observed in the northern half of the North Island of New Zealand, being the region’s provincial anniversary day.

It is observed throughout the historic Auckland Province, even though the provinces of New Zealand were abolished in 1876.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Flooding has forced us out of studio. More to come

— Checkpoint (@CheckpointRNZ) January 27, 2023

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The death toll from two weeks of flooding in California has reached at least 20. As climate scientists are predicting more extreme weather linked to climate change over the next two years, outrage is growing over how fossil fuel companies were fully aware of the link between fossil fuel emissions and global warming but spent decades obscuring the science in order to make maximum profits. We speak with Democratic California Congressmember Ro Khanna, who recently concluded a congressional investigation into the allegations and says the oil industry needs to be held accountable for the damage it has wrought. Khanna also discusses the looming fight over raising the federal debt ceiling, the refugee crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, espionage charges against Julian Assange, charges Biden faces of having classified documents at his home, calls for Republican George Santos to resign and more.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

In California, at least 19 people have died as storms continue to batter the region, leading to widespread flooding, mudslides and power outages. The National Weather Service says large portions of Central California have received over half their annual normal precipitation in just the past two weeks — and more rain is coming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 34 million Californians are under a flood watch. Despite the devastating impacts, few media outlets have drawn a connection between the historic weather and human-induced climate change. For more on the climate emergency, we are joined by Daniel Swain, climate scientist at UCLA, fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and author of California weather blog Weather West.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Chaos in the ranks of House Republicans. After three rounds of voting, Kevin McCarthy falls far short in his bid to become the new House Speaker. His opponents say he can’t be trusted to drain the swamp.
• California is bracing for a new storm – an atmospheric river expected to bring flooding, winds, and colder temperatures.
• The Wood Street encampment in Oakland is bracing for the storm, and for another city eviction on Monday January 9. The Wood Street encampment in Oakland is bracing for the storm, and for another city eviction on Monday January 9. 
• The California snowpack is off to one of its best starts in 40 years but it’ll take more storms to climb out of the state’s prolonged drought.
• Ultranationalist Israeli Cabinet minister Itamar Ben Gavir pays a provocative visit to the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound in Jerusalem.
• And an annual report on racial profiling shows that California law enforcement was more than twice as likely to use force against people they perceived as Black than those they believed to be white.

Image: Jared DeFigh rakes wood chips at the Wood Street Commons to help with mud, after rainstorms flooded parts of the encampment in Oakland. Photo by Corinne Smith / KPFA News

The post Rep McCarthy fails to win Speaker role after three rounds of voting; Northern California expects intense storm, flooding and high winds; Wood Street encampment in Oakland braces for storm and city eviction January 9 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

This year was another huge one for Local Democracy Reporting, with our reporters at the forefront of uncovering some of the biggest stories in their regions.

Felix Desmarais in Rotorua exposed hitherto secret plans by the council to revoke the reserve status of seven council reserves, paving the way for new housing to be built on them, including social housing.

It became a major election issue with residents using the ballot to choose candidates opposed to the plan, which was subsequently canned by the new council.

• READ MORE: Other Local Democracy Reporting stories on APR

Steve Forbes covered the chaos created by understaffed and overstretched Emergency Departments, with a deep dive in to the death of a patient who visited Middlemore Hospital.

He was first with a damning independent report that found the ED was “an unsafe environment for both patients and staff”.

It was a year of climate change-induced severe weather, and LDR reporters produced numerous stories on how councils were coping, or not, when it came to putting back together what Mother Nature had torn apart.

Flooding this year continued to represent an existential threat to Westport after the devastating inundation seen last year as well. Brendon McMahon’s stories have reflected the reality on the ground, such as the predicament faced by residents on Snodgrass Road who had been left out of a proposed flood protection scheme.

Nelson clean-up
Nelson reporter Max Frethey has kept readers up to date as that city deals with its own clean-up after devastating downpours in August, which left the city with a repair bill of between $40 million and $60 million, the biggest in its 160-year history.

The weather kept Marlborough’s Maia Hart busy this year as well in a region with communities still cut off or with limited access due to damage caused a year ago.

But it was her story on the resilience of elderly Lochmara Bay resident Monyeen Wedge that really captured readers’ attention. Living alone, she went three days without power and was forced to live off canned food.

The pandemic and the response of health authorities and councils continued to be an area of inquiry for LDR in 2022, and none more so than Moana Ellis in Whanganui.

While high vaccination rates amongst pākehā protected thousands from the worst affects of the Omicron wave, it was a battle for DHBs to reach many Māori, who already had a distrust of health authorities. Moana’s reporting ensured these communities were not forgotten.

In one of LDR’s most read stories of 2022, Alisha Evans uncovered the extent of bureaucratic overreach in Tauranga when through traffic was discouraged on Links Ave with the help of a fine. A glitch led to infringements being issued to drivers living as far away as the South Island who had never even visited the city.

Reporters have documented the good and the bad of people’s interactions with vulnerable ecosystems. North Canterbury’s David Hill shone a light on the wonton destruction of endangered nesting birds in the region’s braided river beds by 4WD enthusiasts.

Community efforts
While Mother Nature was the winner following a series of stories from Taranaki’s Craig Ashworth on community efforts to protect dwindling stocks of kaimoana, which finally resulted in a two-year long rāhui.

The national roll out of flexible median barriers, aka “cheesecutters”, caused consternation in Whakatāne where Diane McCarthy talked to police who said they would struggle to pass drivers on their way to emergencies and farmers driving slow-moving tractors worried about extra levels of road rage from slowed-up motorists.

The dire state of the country’s water infrastructure is magnified in places like Wairarapa, with its small ratepayer base and decades old pipes and sewage treatment. There was no better illustration of this than Emily Ireland’s reporting on Masterton’s use of its Better Off funding where it was pointed out a mum was using a council provided portaloo to potty train her toddler because sewage was backing up in the town system whenever there was heavy rain.

The human impact of decisions around water infrastructure was also brought in to sharp relief in Ashburton reporter Jonathan Leask’s excellent reporting. He took up the cause of a couple and their three children who were shut out of moving in to their dream home due to high nitrate levels limiting the building of any more septic tanks.

One of the biggest changes around council tables this year was the election of Māori ward candidates, with half of all councils now having these. Northland’s Susan Botting has been first out of the blocks reporting on the new dynamics at play, starting with Kaipara mayor Craig Jepson’s ban on karakia to open meetings. The ban was hastily reversed, but led to the largest hikoi in Dargaville for some time.

As with all of LDR’s reporters, choosing just one stand out story from the many fine pieces published throughout the year is almost impossible. None more so than Tairāwhiti reporter Matthew Rosenberg.

But no wrap of 2022 would be complete without mention of his story on bulldozer driver Hamish Pryde. The 65-year-old helped save Wairoa from a dangerously high river by negotiating already badly flooded paddocks and opening up a sand bar so the river could drain out to sea.

As Matthew says, “not all heroes wear capes, some drive bulldozers”.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Asia Pacific Report is a partner in the project.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It’s appealed to all donors to step up their support for the most vulnerable, from Burkina Faso to Nigeria, where fields, farms and roads have been flooded.

With the latest, here’s UNHCR’s Olga Sarrado, speaking to UN News’s Daniel Johnson.

This content originally appeared on UN News - Global perspective Human stories and was authored by Daniel Johnson.

Fiji’s weather office predicts that up to seven tropical cyclones may affect several Pacific countries in the coming cyclone season — and up to four of them may be severe.

In its 2022/2023 Tropical Cyclone Seasonal Outlook, the Fiji government predicted that the region would experience less than the annual average cyclone activity.

Fiji’s National Disaster and Management Minister Jone Usamate announced there would be between five and seven tropical cyclones and that three or four of them may be severe.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific cyclone reports

The minister said at least two of those cyclones were likely to pass through Fiji during the cyclone season which runs from early November to the end of April.

The Fiji Meteorological Service also serves as the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre (RSMC) and functions as the weather watch office for the region from southern Kiribati to Tuvalu, Fiji, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna and New Caledonia.

It also provides forecast services for aviators in an area that includes Christmas Island (Line Islands), Tokelau, Samoa, Niue and Tonga.

“On average seven cyclones affect the RSMC Nadi region every cyclone season. Thus, our 2022-2023 cyclone season is predicted to have an average to below average number of cyclones,” Usamate said.

“On average, three severe tropical cyclones affect the RSMC Nadi region every season, therefore the 2022-2023 tropical cyclone season is predicted to have an average to below average number of severe cyclones. For severe cyclones which are category three or above, we anticipate one to four severe tropical cyclones this season.”

Early warning
However, the minister sounded an early warning for extensive flooding which is typical of La Niña which may continue to affect the region to the end of 2022.

The RSMC outlook said: “This season’s TC (tropical cyclone) outlook is greatly driven by the return of a third consecutive La Niña event, which is quite exceptional and the event is likely to persist until the end of 2022.”

Additionally, the RSMC warns countries in its area of responsibility of the possibility of out-of-season cyclones.

The peak tropical cyclone season in the RMSC-Nadi region is usually during January and February.

“While the tropical cyclone season is between November and April, occasionally cyclones have formed in the region in October and May and rarely in September and June. Therefore, an out-of-season tropical cyclone activity cannot be totally ruled out,” the RSMC said.

“With the current La Nina event and increasing chances of above average rainfall, there are also chances of coastal inundation to be experienced. All communities should remain alert and prepared throughout the 2022/23 TC Season and please do take heed of any TC warnings and advisories, to mitigate the impact on life and properties.”

According to Usamate, Fiji Police statistics show that 17 Fijians have died from drowning in flooding which occurred between 2017 and the most recent cyclone season.

“The rainfall prediction for the duration of the second season is above average rainfall. That means we should expect more rain in the next six months.

“As you all know, severe rainfall leads to flooding and increasing the possibility of hazards such as landslides. In Fiji, flooding alone continues to be one of the leading causes of death during any cycle event,” Usamate said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Floods can result in the loss of life and in damages to property and the environment. Each year, flooding causes more deaths than any other storm-related hazard, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To help minimize the risks, editors and journalists should consider the following safety information and plan accordingly.

Pre-Assignment

• Prepare to be self-sufficient in case you cannot rely on support from aid agencies. Consider bringing non-perishable foods, a head torch, multi-tool, can opener, tent, and an appropriate sleeping bag. Also bring a decent amount of cash to pay for things on the ground, especially if credit card payment systems don’t work.
• Keep in mind that while being fully equipped is essential, there is a balance between the weight of equipment you have to carry and being fully prepared.
• Access to clean drinking water is likely to be an issue, so consider taking water purification tablets, a reusable filter bottle, or a portable water purification system. You may need to take a supply of drinkable water with you in extreme circumstances.
• Complete a thorough risk assessment, detailing contingency plans and medical evacuation procedures. Develop a check-in procedure for the duration of your trip, and plan to communicate regularly with your news desk or team about your plans and whereabouts. Identify key authorities or other individuals who can be called upon in an emergency. Note that you may have to update your risk assessment during the trip, depending on changing events on the ground.
• Take a well-stocked individual first aid kit.
• While en route and during the assignment, keep up-to-date on weather forecasts. A rapidly deteriorating scenario may require a change of plans.
• Dress appropriately for the conditions, with suitable footwear that has sufficient ankle support. Cuts to feet can easily become infected, so ensure your feet are completely protected.
• Make sure your passport, visas, immunization records, and other documentation are handy and stored in a waterproof container.

On Location

• On arrival, identify a safe accommodation or place to shelter with food and water (if possible), which may be unavailable or in short supply in areas with high levels of destruction. If necessary, stay outside the epicenter of the flood damage and make trips into the affected area. Avoid large glass windows and corrugated sheet roofs if reporting in stormy conditions. Be mindful of where you are staying: Keep away from areas that are prone to flooding, such as low spots, canyons, and washes.
• Work out an exit strategy and safe place to fall back to, if necessary. Identify medical facilities and locations where you can seek assistance in case of an emergency. If you need to evacuate, turn off the utilities using the main power switch and close the main gas line (if applicable) before leaving your accommodation.
• Always have access to safe and reliable transportation in case you need to leave quickly. Never rely on public transport or taxis.
• Before you leave for your assignment, prepare by fully reviewing guidance about how to exit your car if it becomes submerged in water. If your vehicle is suddenly stuck in rising water, get out immediately and find higher ground. If your car becomes submerged, don’t panic. Some fire departments advise waiting for the vehicle to fill with water and opening the car door once the vehicle is full, before swimming to the surface. Once you are outside of the car, it’s advisable to point your feet downstream if you’re swept into fast-moving floodwater. Remember to always go above obstacles, not underneath them.
• Do not walk across flooded roads or streams. The water might be faster than it looks, and it takes as little as six inches of water to knock someone off their feet. Be especially careful at night, when flood conditions are harder to see.
• Be aware of drains or down holes and uncovered manholes when walking around flooded areas.
• Be aware that standing water can pose a significant health risk. It can contain sewage and chemical hazards and spread infectious diseases.
• Sanitize your hands regularly, and do not expose open wounds to water, due to the risk of infection.
• Local telecommunication networks might be disrupted or down, so consider taking satellite phones and a BGAN (Broadband Global Area Network) terminal, if legal and safe to use in the country. Be sure to communicate regularly with your news desk or team about your plans and whereabouts as part of your agreed upon check-in procedure.
• Be alert for any escaped wildlife.

Sources:

• NOAA
• CDC
• San Antonio Fire Department
• American Safety Council

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

CNN reports that satellite photos show that the overflowing Indus has created a new body of water in southern Pakistan some 62 miles (100km) wide. It will take days or weeks for the water to recede, and in the meantime millions are left homeless and over all, 33 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon floods in recorded history. CNN quotes Pakistan's Climate Minister Sherry Rahman as saying "That parts of the country 'resemble a small ocean,' and that 'by the time this is over, we could well have one-quarter or one-third of Pakistan under water.'"

Because of our burning of fossil fuels to drive cars and heat and cool buildings, the world is heating up. But the Indian Ocean is heating up a third faster than the rest of the world. Very warm waters in the Bay of Bengal are helping create more destructive cyclones and flooding. The air over warming waters contains more moisture than the 20th century average. Warming waters also make the winds that blow over them more erratic, and wayward winds from the Arabian Sea helped push the heavy monsoon rains farther north than they usually extend.

We don't have to look far for the culprits. J. Blunden, and T. Boyer, Eds., 2022: "State of the Climate in 2021" Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 103 (8), Si–S465, https://doi.org/10.1175/2022BAMSStateoftheClimate provides a state of the climate report for 2021.

It isn't good news. The concentration in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide increased another 2.6 parts per million, to a year-long average of 414.7 parts per million of CO2. We should be trying to get to zero increases of carbon dioxide, not increasing it. Arctic snow cores show that there hasn't been that must CO2 in the atmosphere for at least 800,000 years, i.e. nearly a million years. It turns out that if you go back to "1 million Years B.C." you don't find Raquel Welch, you find a steaming tropics of a world. The growth rate for methane was the highest on record. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas, and CO2 isn't any slouch itself. Methane, though, dissipates quickly if you don't keep adding to it in the stratosphere, in as little as nine years. If you put carbon dioxide up there, though, it can last thousands and thousands of years. It is gradually absorbed by the oceans or igneous rocks, but he ocean may reach its capacity for absorption of CO2 in only 15 years, after which the stuff will just stay up there, making earth hot.

The report says that Death Valley, California, reached 54.4°C (130.46 F.) for the second time since records have been kept. Across the global ice concentrations or "cryosphere," glaciers lost ice mass for the 34th consecutive year. Now the BBC is predicting that in the near future the glacier ice lost will become so great that it will threaten the water supplies of Switzerland and other European countries.

And in horrific news for Bangladesh and Egypt, the report says, "Across the world's oceans, global mean sea level was record high for the 10th consecutive year, reaching 97.0 mm above the 1993 average when satellite measurements began, an increase of 4.9 mm over 2020."

Seas rising, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere rising to best a million-year-old-record, super-monsoons. We can change all this, but we have to hurry to shut down CO2 emissions quickly.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Juan Cole.

With hundreds of thousands of people displaced, more than four million crops destroyed, and nearly a million homes demolished or severely damaged, Pakistani officials and rights campaigners on Monday called for a major international aid push following flooding throughout the country fueled by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency and an unprecedented season of monsoon rains.

"An unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking nonstop havoc throughout the country."

More than 30 million people are in urgent need of help, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said after conducting a rapid needs assessment three days after the Pakistani government declared the flooding, which has killed more than 1,000 people, a national emergency.

Both the IRC and government officials have explicitly linked the flooding to the climate crisis, with IRC country director Shabnam Baloch noting, "Despite producing less than 1% of the world's carbon footprint, the country is suffering the consequences of the world's inaction and stays in the top 10 countries facing the consequences."

Amid a monsoon season which has so far seen 784% and 500% more rains than average in Sindh and Balochistan provinces, respectively, the IRC is anticipating a sharp rise in food insecurity as 71% of Pakistanis surveyed by the group are already without access to sufficient clean drinking water. The disaster has also left 84% of women and girls without access to hygiene supplies, 63% of pregnant and lactating women "extremely vulnerable," and as many as 40% of people without access to critical healthcare.

"Our needs assessment showed that we are already seeing a major increase in cases of diarrhea, skin infections, malaria, and other illnesses," said Baloch. "The IRC has reached almost 20,000 people with critical food, supplies, and medical support. We are urgently requesting donors to step up their support and help us save lives."

Pakistani Climate Minister Sherry Rehman did not mince words Monday as she pointed out the link between the climate crisis and the suffering of the tens of millions of people directly affected by the flooding.

"This is very far from a normal monsoon [season]—it is climate dystopia at our doorstep," Rehman told Agence France-Presse. "We are at the moment at the ground zero of the frontline of extreme weather events, in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking nonstop havoc throughout the country."

The season of what officials are calling "overwhelming" monsoons followed a heatwave earlier this year in which temperatures soared to 116.6°F in Sindh province.

"This is what the climate crisis looks like," former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner said on social media Monday, posting a video of Pakistanis struggling to walk through rushing waters in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forced from their homes by the flooding are currently staying in makeshift shelters, but Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Sunday announced a $45 million relief fund for Balochistan province, 75% of which is underwater. Sharif added that the government would provide shelter for all those who have lost their homes.

The country's latest climate crisis-fueled catastrophe comes amid an economic crisis, with the annual inflation rate above 38% and sovereign debt exceeding $250 billion.

Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on Sunday called on the International Monetary Fund to release $1.2 billion as part of Pakistan's bailout, and the United Nations is expected to launch an international appeal for aid in Islamabad on Tuesday.

"Going forward, I would expect not only the International Monetary Fund, but the international community and international agencies to truly grasp the level of devastation," Bhutto-Zardari told The Guardian. "I haven't seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words... it is overwhelming."

Aid flights arrived from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates on Sunday with tents, food, and other supplies.

Rehman said international policymakers must treat Pakistan's catastrophic flooding as "a global crisis" and invest in helping the Global South to fund its defenses against the climate emergency.

"We will need better planning and sustainable development on the ground," Rehman told Turkish news outlet TRT World. "We'll need to have climate resilient crops as well as structures."

The devastation across Pakistan, said Amnesty International secretary general Agnes Callamard, illustrates that the climate crisis "demands effective, committed global governance" instead of "mediocre, self-interested, selfish" policies from the world's wealthiest countries, which blocked discussions about loss and damage financing for the Global South at the Bonn Climate Change Conference in June.

"Climate injustice is deadly. Violent. Unequal," said Callamard. "It is a human rights issue."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

The lawsuit, filed in Breathitt County Circuit Court last week, seeks damages for personal property such as homes and vehicles ruined by the early August flooding that killed 39 people and left hundreds of Kentuckians without a place to live. Many residents of Lost Creek, an unincorporated town in eastern Kentucky, are now without their homes and living in tents. They are also seeking compensation for emotional damages from Blackhawk Mining and Pine Branch Mining.

Blackhawk Mining, founded in 2010, currently operates eight coal facilities in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, including the Pine Branch complex, a subsidiary of open pit mines roughly seven miles from Lost Creek. The company has grown in recent years despite its former bankruptcy and a global coal investment downturn where large financial institutions have pulled out of coal operations. The Pine Branch coal mine is uphill from Caney Creek, a tributary of the North Fork Kentucky River, and neighbors the River Caney community of which Lost Creek is a part.

Coal mining has deep roots in eastern Kentucky and may have directly caused some of its worst floods ever. Past research suggests that flood-prone communities in eastern Kentucky overlap with heavily mined landscapes changed by mountaintop removal—a process where mountains are blasted with explosives and rain-absorbing vegetation is killed to access coal seams beneath. The lawsuit alleges that Blackhawk and Pine Branch operations were “ticking time bombs ready to explode with any type of heavy rainfall.”

“They won’t have water for six months. All the power lines are down,” Ned Pillersdorf, the attorney representing Lost Creek residents, told Grist. “Most of the people, if not everybody, are displaced.” Pillersdorf has experience suing coal companies in the wake of devastating floods and represented West Virginia coal miners fighting for paychecks after coal giant Blackjewel’s bankruptcy.

The lawsuit alleges that Blackhawk and Pine Branch did not properly maintain their silt retention ponds, which caused contaminated waters to flood the homes of Lost Creek residents. These ponds amass debris, sediments, and water stemming from coal mining. Silt pond flooding is not new to coal communities and has caused the evacuation of neighboring residents for decades, and has contaminated nearby waterways.

The lawsuit alleges that “debris, sediment, and other matter, including fish, escaped from the silt ponds and came onto the property of many of the plaintiffs,” and the neighboring coal companies violated state law by not properly maintaining these ponds. 

Blackhawk Mining said in a company statement that they do not agree with the claims made in the lawsuit. Recent flooding has not stopped the coal company from blasting mountains, however, and the lawsuit alleges that the company posted notices that blasting will continue in the coming months even though communities are still recovering from the flooding. A report from NBC News also found that Pine Branch has circulated notices detailing that operations will continue from now until next July. 

“Our people were deeply impacted by the flooding, including loss of loved ones, homes and belongings. We have been supporting the community with relief efforts from the beginning and our sympathies are with those affected,” said the statement. “The flood was a natural disaster without precedent.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Kentuckians want to hold coal companies accountable for deadly flooding on Aug 29, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Floods have struck the West Papuan city of Sorong following heavy rains early this week.

There are reports of 1.5 metre-high flooding and landslides with two people killed.

Roads and thousands of houses in the city were inundated by floodwater.

Two people died when their house was engulfed by a landslide. They were a 35-year-old mother and her eight-year-old son.

The father survived.

The city’s disaster mitigation agency head, Herlin Sasabone, said emergency authorities were continuing to monitor the flood situation.

Herlin said the Sorong Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD), in collaboration with the National Search and Rescue Agency, the Indonesian Military, and the National Police continued to monitor the flood situation in the city.

“People who need help and see their homes damaged by landslides can report to the Sorong BPBD office,” Herlin said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Minister of Finance Grant Robertson used today’s post-cabinet briefing to discuss the shifting ownership of the national Kiwibank and flooding in the South Island districts of Nelson and Marlborough.

But they also faced questions over rogue Labour MP Dr Gaurav Sharma and planned protests tomorrow at Parliament.

Cabinet this week was expected to consider further support for flood-affected communities, including in Nelson and Marlborough after Ardern and Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty examined the damage today.

• READ MORE: Parliament protest: Barricades erected, public urged to plan ahead

Ardern said she was always mindful that visits to significant weather events — like those in Nelson — and natural disasters only gave a snapshot, often several days into the response and after some of the clean-up had begun.

“With all of that in mind there is no question that the rain in the region has been devastating. Homes have either become uninhabitable or they have large slips sitting precariously behind them,” she said.

The recovery would take some time, but she saw a very tight-knit community working hard to help out one another.

“Scones being brought to workers, the woman who delivered chocolates to the digger operators. I asked one woman if her home was okay. ‘Yeah, we’re absolutely fine,’ she said, ‘except for the car hanging above it.’

“It transpired that she couldn’t return home, but she seemed much more worried about everyone else, much more so than herself.”

Ardern said one of the biggest concerns in the Marlborough region at the moment was reconnecting those who had been cut off from the usual transport routes.

Watch the media conference

After discussion with McAnulty, the government will be kicking an initial $100,000 into the Marlborough relief fund, which was expected to be further extended.

The Nelson mayor had also requested a further $100,000, which took the Nelson fund to $300,000.

These funds were for immediate response, and were highly discretionary on the part of the mayors.

Ardern highlighted that they did not amount to the full recovery cost, and came separately to things like the funding for repairing roading, or support from the Ministry of Social Development.

Government taking control of Kiwibank
Ardern said it was both exciting and reassuring that the government had secured Kiwibank’s long-term future in New Zealand ownership, with the crown taking over from crown-owned NZ Post, Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) and the NZ Superannuation Fund.

“Not only will this safeguard all future profits to stay in the country — unlike the Australian-owned banks — it will also continue to enhance competition in the banking sector,” she said.

“The government is fully committed to ensuring Kiwibank is supported to meet its full potential and that includes ensuring access to capital, so the bank can be a genuine and credible competitor … which operates independently of the government but that is able to compete on a level playing field with the big Aussie operators.”

Robertson said the move honoured the purpose and intent of Kiwibank when it was set up in 2002.

“This transaction has come about as the circumstances for the shareholders since 2016 — New Zealand Post, ACC and the New Zealand Super Fund, all crown-owned — their interests in Kiwibank have diverged … since this time.”

He said the acquisition would not change the overall value of the crown’s balance sheet, but owning shares in Kiwibank did not fit with NZ Post and ACC’s long-term plans, including NZ Post’s goal of growing its core delivery business, and ACC’s long-term investment strategy has evolved beyond owning shares in a bank.

NZ Super Fund was interested in a majority holding, but withdrew its interest as it did not align with the government’s ownership objectives.

New Zealand public ownership of the bank was a bottom line for the government, Robertson said, as it was for the previous National-led government.

“Kiwibank will continue to operate independently and at arm’s length from the government with the crown’s ownership of Kiwi Group Holdings through a newly incorporated schedule for a company, Kiwi Group Capital.”

Robertson said Kiwi Group Capital would be governed by a board of directors and the shares would be held by shareholding ministers as usual.

“At one level the acquisition is a straightforward transfer of assets … the government does have to fund this transaction and this will be through the government’s multi-year capital allowance.

“This means that the cost to purchase is already reflected in the borrowing programme we announced at Budget 2022 and has no impact on the crown’s overall debt forecasts.”

He said part of the transaction would include a special dividend payment to the crown, which was yet to be determined by the board.

Robertson rejected the suggestion the Kiwibank ownership model was changing because New Zealand Post was struggling with its business model.

“What this is, is making sure that a banking institution, that we think’s got a really important role in New Zealand, stays Kiwi-owned, and when the five-year exit limit came off last year we began discussions.”

The Super Fund had wanted a level of flexibility which would have allowed foreign ownership or final sale to foreign entities, “which we simply couldn’t do because our bottom line was to stay Kiwi-owned”.

He believed the bank remained an important part of New Zealand’s banking landscape.

Ardern said after 20 years of operation for Kiwibank, it was an exciting milestone.

Labour backbench MP Gaurav Sharma
Labour’s caucus will tomorrow consider expelling Hamilton West MP Dr Gaurav Sharma.

Ardern said there had been no basis to a lot of the claims that had been made by Dr Sharma, “and I think we do need to have thresholds before we launch into things like inquiries that of course come at considerable expense and of course stress and anxiety to the staff that have been drawn in”.

Dr Sharma provided a recording of someone he said was a senior MP in the caucus to Newshub, who called him after a meeting he was not invited to.

Ardern said she did not think the fact it was secretly recorded was appropriate and she did not intend to chase down details of who it was.

She said it was her personal belief the person who contacted Sharma was trying to help the situation.

A message from minister Kiri Allan, shared to the caucus, which Dr Sharma shared with media in a screenshot he claimed showed backbench MPs were being advised on how to avoid the Official Information Act, had been taken out of context, Ardern said.

“What you can see there is a minister who is concerned — as a decision-making minister, Minister of Conservation, remember … she needs to ensure that no one seeks to compromise that decision-making. It’s only appropriate to remind MPs that it wouldn’t be appropriate to lobby a decision-making minister.”

Ministers worked hard to ensure, where they did have decision-making powers, they treated those decisions very seriously, she said.

“We often can be judicially reviewed on the basis on which we make decisions, we do need to make sure that we undertake those decisions with due caution and it’s important to make sure colleagues know how seriously we take that as well.”

Responding to further questions about Sharma’s claim that MPs were being taught to avoid the OIA, Ardern said it was important that MPs had knowledge about how to handle information.

“A question was asked where an MP raised a situation where a constituent’s information was released in an OIA and was concerned about that … we find ourselves in a conversation where we’ve got a complete misrepresentation of the situation.”

She said whether or not Dr Sharma was expelled would be decided by caucus tomorrow.

The rules dictate that a member facing expulsion must be granted the right to attend and speak, “and of course we follow our rules closely”.

She said Sharma had, to date, not chosen to offer a defence to the caucus, nor had he taken up the offer of mediation.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Hundreds of people in Nelson in Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island spent the night out of their homes and a state of emergency was declared after the Maitai River burst its banks.

Occupants of 233 homes near the Maitai River were evacuated and cordons put in place at Tasman and Nile Streets.

Soldiers have been patrolling the streets to keep an eye on evacuated properties and all residents are being asked to stay home if possible.

• READ MORE: Building in flood-prone locations needs to stop, insurer IAG says
• Follow RNZ’s state of emergency live blog

The country’s largest insurer, AIG, said building in flood-prone areas had to stop.

IAG has released a three-part plan to try speed up efforts to reduce flood risk from rivers.

It said climate change was having an enormous impact on the insurance sector, and there needed to be simple, practical, concrete actions quickly.

IAG has released a three-part plan to try speed up efforts to reduce flood risk from rivers.

There have been 10 major floods in the past two years with total insured losses of about $400 million, while the wider economic and social costs extend into the billions.

People in 160 homes in low-lying parts of Westport were been asked to leave so they would not have to be rescued if their homes were flooded.

On the West Coast, the Buller River levels are dropping but civil defence remains on alert with more rain forecast.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Evacuated Nelson residents wait to discover extent of flood damage https://t.co/wTXwBuWJor

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) August 17, 2022

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Record-shattering rainfall in Seoul, South Korea overnight Monday killed at least eight people and—according to scientists—offered further evidence that the planet is in the midst of a climate disaster.

According to The New York Times, "Three of the dead, two sisters in their 40s and a 13-year-old girl, were found early Tuesday as emergency workers pumped out the water that had flooded their semi-basement home in southern Seoul."

"Another was a municipal employee, apparently electrocuted while removing a tree that had fallen onto a sidewalk," the Times reported, citing local authorities. "In addition to the eight confirmed deaths, officials said seven people were missing after floodwaters pulled them into manholes, underground passages, or streams."

The Korea Meteorological Administration said the downpour marked the largest total amount of rainfall experienced in the city in eight decades. Increasingly extreme rain and flooding have been linked to the human-caused climate crisis, driven by the continued burning of fossil fuels.

"It's the rainiest day in the history of Seoul," wrote meteorologist Eric Holthaus. "Three hundred seventy-nine millimeters (15 inches) of rain in just 12 hours—two months' worth of rain in half a day."

"We are in a climate emergency," Holthaus added.

Video footage and photos posted to social media show cars completely submerged in water in downtown Seoul, where some drivers were forced to abandon their vehicles in search of safety.

"This is what happens when you warm a planet," environmentalist Bill McKibben tweeted, responding to a photo of a man sitting on top of his car as water engulfed it.

The Korea Times reported Tuesday that "the unprecedented amount of continuous rainfall impacted underground metro stations as well."

"The ceiling over a platform in Isu Station in Dongjak District collapsed, dropping a torrent of rain and ceiling panels onto the platform," the outlet noted. "The underground levels of several other metro stations in the city were also flooded, causing trains in operation to pass the inundated stations and forcing people inside the stations to look for other forms of transportation.

The destructive rain in South Korea came as U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Kentucky to survey the devastation inflicted last month by the worst flooding in the state's history.

"The risk of flooding is going up dramatically over much of the planet where people live, and Kentucky is one of those places," Jonathan Overpeck, an earth and environmental sciences professor at the University of Michigan, told Inside Climate News in a recent interview. "The evidence is clear that climate change is a growing problem for Kentucky and the surrounding region."

As Reuters observed in June, "Extreme weather events—from scorching heatwaves to unusually heavy downpours—have caused widespread upheaval across the globe this year, with thousands of people killed and millions more displaced."

"Monsoon rains unleashed disastrous flooding in Bangladesh," Reuters noted. "Overall, episodes of heavy rainfall are becoming more common and more intense. That's because warmer air holds more moisture, so storm clouds are 'heavier' before they eventually break."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

While its thousands of lobbyists work fervently on Capitol Hill, the pharmaceutical industry is flooding the airwaves in several states with deceptive ads in a last-ditch campaign to block Senate Democrats' plan to curb the unchecked pricing power of drug corporations.

Included as part of a reconciliation package negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the proposal would require Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small number of drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies, which can currently drive up costs as they please—boosting their profits at the expense of patients.

"We aim to pass reforms to lower Rx prices in the coming days and curb pharma's power to dictate prices to Americans. Let's see it through."

The measure would also cap out-of-pocket medicine costs at $2,000 a year for recipients of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit provided through private plans approved by the federal government.

The drug industry—which has repeatedly fought off price regulation attempts in recent decades—has lashed out furiously against Democrats' plan, even though it is in some ways significantly weaker than a proposal that the House passed last year. Republicans bankrolled by Big Pharma are also working to tank the bill.

Roll Call reported Friday that the "Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the National Association of Manufacturers, and a group called American Commitment have collectively spent millions of dollars on ads in July" to attack Democrats' proposal, key parts of which are overwhelmingly popular with the American public.

"We're going to use every tool in the toolbox to relentlessly educate lawmakers about the flaws in this bill," declared Stephen Ubl, president of PhRMA, the nation's leading drug industry trade group.

American Commitment, a nonprofit with ties to the Koch Brothers, launched a new seven-figure ad buy on Thursday, targeting audiences in Washington, D.C. as well as West Virginia, Nevada, and Georgia.

The ads, which can be viewed in full on American Commitment's website, recycle the false and repeatedly debunked claim that Democrats' bill would cut "nearly $300 billion from Medicare," distorting the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the legislation would save the federal government roughly $290 billion over ten years.

The American Prosperity Alliance, a dark money group, is running similarly misleading ads.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) responded directly to the ads—one of which attacks her directly—in a speech on the Senate floor earlier this week, noting that the 30-second spots led hundreds of constituents to call her office seeking an explanation.

"They were anxious and alarmed over a deliberately misleading ad that is running on TV, on Facebook, and via a text campaign," said Cortez Masto. "In Reno this past weekend, Nevadans came up to me because they were concerned about these false accusations. This ad incorrectly claims that I support a bill that would strip $300 billion dollars from Medicare. This couldn't be further from the truth."

"Powerful interest groups out there don't want this legislation to succeed, so they're pouring dark money into efforts to stop it," the senator continued. "Well, let me just say this: it won't work."

In an analysis of Democrats' proposal published Wednesday, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) concluded that the bill has the potential to "limit annual increases in drug prices for people with Medicare and private insurance" and "provide substantial financial protection to people on Medicare with high out-of-pocket costs."

The precise impact of the legislation, KFF stressed, will depend on which prescription drugs Medicare chooses to negotiate. A separate KFF analysis released last year found that a small number of drugs make up a major share of Medicare's prescription drug spending.

"We are inches from the goal line," David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, tweeted Friday. "We aim to pass reforms to lower Rx prices in the coming days and curb pharma's power to dictate prices to Americans. Let's see it through."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

CNN and The Independent reported this week on a massive ice melt in Greenland, with on the order of 6 billion tons of ice lost in three days. The melting was because of a heat wave at the top of the world, caused by our burning coal, gasoline, and methane gas and spewing billions of tons of the dangerous heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

These sorts of events are directly responsible for sea level rise and coastal flooding around the world and in the United States (which has a lot of coast if you think about it). Often it is the poorest and most disadvantaged who will suffer most severely from disruptions like storm surges, coastal erosion, salt water invasion of lagoons, and urban flooding.

A heat wave in Greenland only makes it about 60 degrees F. (15C), when most of us would still feel the need for a sweater. But ordinarily, according to a climate and weather site, “In July the average maximum daytime temperatures are cold and range from 6°C (43°F) in KapTobin to 10°C (50°F) in Angmagssalik. Nighttime temperatures generally drop to 2°C (36°F) in Angmagssalik and 0°C (32°F) in KapTobin. It is one of the warmest months of the year.”

So, yeah, 60F/ 15C is a stretch.

I think it was René Marsh and Angela Fritz at CNN who came up with the explanation of what 6 billion tons of ice melt looks like, saying it was enough to put the entire state of West Virginia under a foot of water.

A loss of 6 billion tons of ice is worrisome, especially since all this is cumulative. Over time all the surface ice will melt if we go on burning fossil fuels. But we’ve seen considerably worse, say Marsh and Fritz. In 2019, they explain, a hot spring and summer melted away the ice sheet’s surface, sending 532 billion tons of ice into the oceans, raising them permanently by over half an inch (1.5 millimeters).

If all Greenland’s ice melts, it would raise the seas by more than 24 feet (7.5 meters).

We can still halt an apocalyptic scenario like that, which would wipe out coastal cities around the world, if we stop spewing out carbon by 2050. The existing CO2 in the atmosphere will all go into the oceans. That will make them acidic and wipe out a lot of marine life, but temperatures would immediately stop rising and would gradually go back to a nineteenth-century normal.

Average sea level has already risen about 9 inches (24 cm.) since 1880, which has put coastal regions and cities under pressure. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is a lot. It gets magnified if there is a storm surge, and worsens flooding. Moreover, the oceans are not flat — they are higher in some places than others, and some parts rise faster than others. The ocean at Miami Beach is a full foot higher now than even in 1990, and floods on rain-free sunny days are 4 times more frequent than just three decades ago.

The World Economic Forum found that African-American urban communities are most at risk from sea-level rise, with the risk of flooding in their neighborhoods increasing by 20% by 2050.

Flooding currently costs the US $32 billion a year, but that number is expected to increase substantially if the seas rise at a rapid clip.

We’re seeing increasing coastal flooding alerts in places like Maine. Sarah Long at WMTW quotes Meteorologist Donny Dumont: “It makes sense we have more advisories just due to the fact that we are getting more coastal flood impacts . . . Sea level rise is not showing a super rapid increase but it is constant. Every single year we get a couple of millimeters and you add that up over a decade and you’re just getting more coastal flooding than you used to.” Note that a 10-millimeter increase per decade is nearly half an inch.* But as we saw in Miami Beach, at other places the increases are more dramatic.

In Ghana, the Atlantic Ocean has already surged six feet into the country’s interior, threatening to wipe out a whole series of coastal settlements. Coastal erosion is accelerating and the new conditions can interfere with fishing. People’s livelihoods are in danger.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Juan Cole.

The post How Climate Change is Making Flooding Worse appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Frances Davenport.

Footage circulating on social media Tuesday showed a home in Gardiner, Montana crashing into the flooded Yellowstone River after rushing water undermined the foundation and broke the house's stilts, offering what climate campaigners warn is a picture of the kind of catastrophe likely to become more common as the climate crisis worsens.

"A hot world means more rain," said author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben in response to the video.

The building—reportedly a multi-family house where five local families and individuals lived—was swept into the rushing river after heavy rains and the region's fast-melting snowpack triggered historic flooding.

While an unknown number of tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park were evacuated, journalist Kathleen McLaughlin tweeted, "the impact of catastrophic flooding in the Yellowstone region will fall hardest on working-class people" who live there year-round.

Power outages were reported on Monday across Yellowstone National Park, which covers 2.2 million acres in parts of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, while officials evacuated visitors and closed entrances to the park indefinitely, according to NBC News.

"This is flooding that we've just never seen in our lifetimes before."

"We will not know timing of the park's reopening until flood waters subside and we're able to assess the damage throughout the park," park superintendent Cam Sholly told CBS News.

Road access to Gardiner, home to about 900 residents, was cut off due to the flooding as mudslides and rockslides were reported in the area.

"This is flooding that we've just never seen in our lifetimes before," Cory Mottice, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service based in Billings, Montana, told NBC.

The river crested at 13.88 feet on Monday. The previous record, 11.5 feet, was set in 1918.

NBC reported that "numerous homes and other structures were destroyed" in addition to the home that collapsed into the river, but said there have been no reports of injuries thus far.

Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, said the dramatic footage of the house should push policymakers to "speed up climate action this decade, this year, this month, this week, today, right now."

"Nowhere on Earth is immune to climate change," said Dasgupta.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

Petrochemical storage tanks often have floating roofs that sit right above the product, and the unusually heavy rainfall caused tank roofs to sink, partially submerge, or float and release their contents into floodwaters. In total, the storage tanks released 3.1 million of the reported 8.3 million pounds of excess pollution that were emitted during Harvey.

Many of these accidents could have been prevented if the tanks had been designed to account for the heavier rainfall events brought on by climate change, according to a new report by the environmental and consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen Texas. The report argues that state regulations and industry standards use outdated rainfall data to set minimum thresholds for building storage tanks and other petrochemical equipment. With climate-fueled storms bringing more frequent and heavier rainfall, the facilities are more likely to fail and release toxic chemicals into the air and water, according to the report. 

“Natural disasters are being followed by man made chemical disasters,” said Adrian Shelley, Public Citizen’s Texas office director. “If we know of a weakness, then it should be fixed. If these failures happen again, neither industry nor regulators can claim they weren’t warned.”

Extreme weather events on the Gulf Coast are almost always followed by industrial accidents and pollution. Pollution during hurricanes can take several forms. Facilities that choose to shut down in anticipation of a hurricane often release tens of thousands of pounds of emissions as they burn off excess product in the system and wind down operations. Similarly, these facilities release an elevated amount of pollution when they start back up after the rainfall has subsided. Aside from these foreseen emissions, facilities often also face equipment failures of various types. Generators may become submerged and cause power outages. Valves or pipes may break off. And, as was overwhelmingly the case during Harvey, storage tank roofs may sink or be otherwise damaged. 

A key cause of such accidents is Texas’ reliance on outdated and inaccurate standards, according to the report. Construction standards in Texas, including those embedded in state statutes and industry handbooks, often rely on definitions of “100-year storms” and “25-year storms.” The former has a 1 percent chance of occurring during any given year, and the latter has a 4 percent chance. State administrative codes refer to Technical Paper 40, a compendium of rainfall frequency published by the Weather Bureau in 1961, to define these storm events. 

The problem is that the compendium uses rainfall data from 1938 to 1958, and rainfall patterns of today are very different from those of the 1940s and 1950s. For instance, Hurricane Harvey dropped nearly 20 inches of rain in the first 24 hours, but the paper’s 24-hour rainfall data for Houston tops out at 12 inches.

The Public Citizen report recommends adopting Atlas-14, a set of rainfall data released by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association in 2018, in place of Technical Paper 40. Although Atlas-14 uses data from the 1980s, the rainfall estimates are more accurate than those the state currently uses. It defines 17 inches of rain over 24 hours as a 100-year event and 29.8 inches of rain as a 1,000-year event.

“Texas’ petrochemical industry is unprepared for severe rainfall because our laws and regulations have not kept pace with our new climate reality,” the report concludes. “Updating these definitions is one way to prepare for even more extreme weather resulting from climate change. Just as the National Weather Service has redrawn its maps, it is time for Texas to redefine extreme weather.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How 60-year-old weather data is flooding Texas with pollution on Jun 8, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

Dana Eness expertly navigates that gauntlet. The executive director of the Urban Conservancy, a New Orleans nonprofit that provides resources related to environmental stewardship, knows the neighborhood well. From her car, she can identify what material was used to make a particular parking lot, which homes have the best drainage systems, and which native plants, from muhly grass to sweetbay magnolias, would best serve the drainage or water management needs of each yard. She’s part of a grassroots coalition called Umbrella working to keep Hoffman relatively dry — no mean feat in a city that averages over 60 inches of rain a year — using landscaping interventions that can be implemented one yard at a time. 

“You can do two things at once,” says Eness. “You can create space for water to go, and, if you’re thoughtful about it, you can create space within society for people who are being shut out economically.”

New Orleans is in the midst of a green infrastructure revolution, and in smaller neighborhoods like Hoffman Triangle, residents are leading the way, house by house, block by block. Along oak-lined South Galvez Street, Eness pulls over in front of Stronger Hope Baptist Church. It’s one of roughly 17 congregations in the neighborhood, which sits on less than a square mile. She points out a small rain garden the Umbrella coalition constructed to capture runoff from the church parking lot. Once, this was nothing more than ragged tufts of grass sprouting up from a broad swath of concrete. Now, there’s rich mulch with manicured rows of shrubs and clean, permeable pavement in the driveway. It’s been raining all week, and the new garden is soaked through, but the sidewalk and driveway are dry. The front yards of the homes across the road, meanwhile, are swamped with several inches of water.

For many New Orleanians, water management isn’t about billion-dollar levees or century-old pumps. It’s about small, nature-based projects like that rain garden or pavement that allows water to soak in, new wetlands, or streets lined with trees. These installations reduce the burden on the city’s aging, overwhelmed drainage system and can do a lot toward improving the quality of life for residents fed up with routine flooding. 

But as the neighborhood of Hoffman Triangle has shown, flood resilience takes a village. Many of the Umbrella projects are constructed by landscaping firms owned and operated by New Orleans locals using this green revolution as an opportunity to bring in jobs and money. And by harnessing the power of the community, it can be done cheaply and effectively when time is running out for adaptation. 

Year-round, New Orleanians deal with a chronic kind of inundation researchers vaguely call “urban flooding.” Overtaxed pipes back up, roadside ditches fill, and water pools, creating mosquito breeding grounds and blocking access to sidewalks and front steps. It eats away at foundations, damages cars, and allows mold and mildew to flourish.

For over a century, the city’s rapid, haphazard development created vast landscapes of pavement and concrete, which can’t effectively absorb water. Increasingly intense storms linked to climate change have brought one swift inundation after another. No longer able to soak into the ground, runoff from rainstorms flows into aging stormwater pipes, picking up all kinds of junk from fertilizer residue to miscellaneous litter along the way.

Much of New Orleans lies in a shallow bowl that dips below sea level, so to prevent flooding, every drop of water must be siphoned into Lake Pontchartrain through an elaborate system of canals and pumps. That leaves the underlying clay soils parched and brittle, unable to support the weight of the city’s infrastructure. As a result, New Orleans sinks a little lower every year. Meagan Williams, an engineer at the Department of Public Works, compares the soil under the city to a sponge: When it rains, the sponge expands; wring the water out, and it shrivels and hardens.

To compound the sponge problem, the city’s so-called “gray” infrastructure — the existing network of concrete pipes, pumps, and levees — isn’t always reliable. During floods in August 2017, several pumps failed. One investigation found that over 11,000 of the city’s catch basins were clogged by debris. Old-fashioned neglect has also created areas that Todd Reynolds, executive director of the nonprofit Groundwork New Orleans, calls “drainage deserts.” On South Johnson Street in Hoffman, for] example, there are four blocks without a single catch basin. “When it rains, every corner has two feet of water on it,” Reynolds says of these undeveloped stretches. “People shouldn’t have to live that way.”

One solution to all this flooding would be to rip up all the underground pipes and put in bigger ones to handle more water. But Reynolds says that’s a “trillion-dollar fix,” completely out of reach for any American city, let alone New Orleans. 

Green infrastructure is a cheaper option to improve urban drainage. Some projects are as simple as the installation of a rain barrel that catches water flowing off a rooftop. Others transform entire “green” streets with planters, rain gardens, trees, and permeable pavement. They can be easier to build — simple enough for an individual homeowner to install — and, in the case of plant-based fixes, they can get stronger as greenery takes root and grows, rather than decaying with age. 

The goal of “nature-based” solutions is to reduce the pressure on pipes and pumps by using landscaping to slow the flow of water. Projects can store water so it soaks into the soil or slowly flows into a storm drain at a rate the system can handle. Plants can also absorb water into their roots, leaching out pollutants in the process. They also come with various added benefits like improved water quality, mosquito control, and increased open space to cool the sweltering Louisiana air. 

But even natural flood resilience measures can get expensive. Before green infrastructure projects can really take root, residents and city officials need to invest in undoing the damage that’s been done: namely, hacking away the existing concrete jungle.

The Urban Conservancy has carved out a niche for itself as the pavement removal experts. Its signature program, the Front Yard Initiative, provides technical assistance and partial reimbursement for DIY projects transforming patches of concrete into colorful native plant gardens, gravel trenches called French drains, trees, and porous pavement that can capture water. 

Hoffman, though, has one of the lowest median incomes of any neighborhood in New Orleans, and many residents can’t afford a Front Yard project, even with partial reimbursement. So the Urban Conservancy partnered with a handful of groups, each with their own green infrastructure expertise, to form Umbrella, a neighborhood-wide program in the Triangle that provides pro bono residential installations. 

The model is all about “small but meaningful actions.” At the home of Mr. Leroy on South Rocheblave Street, for example, water used to pool up to his back steps when it rained. The Umbrella coalition replaced 500 square feet of concrete with permeable paving and sod, allowing up to 1,000 gallons of water to slowly soak into the soil. Jesse and Ardean, other Hoffman homeowners, say they use water stored in their rain barrels for their gardens, helping plants and trees to thrive on their properties and saving money on their monthly water bill in the process. 

“If every house does a little bit, we can make a huge impact,” said Arien Hall, a co-founder of the landscaping firm Mastondonte.

Mastondonte worked on another home on South Johnson Street owned by Leo Young, a longtime resident fondly referred to as “Coach” by his neighbors. Young had to deal with water pooling in the vacant lot next door, subsidence, and a sidewalk riddled with potholes and mud. The Umbrella coalition helped replace his home’s rusted gutters, fix pothole-riddled sidewalks leading up to his drive, and put in gravel trenches to help water soak into the ground and restore access to the sidewalk. But to truly fortify the neighborhood, properties can’t just be considered in isolation and Coach realized he needed to convince his neighbors to do the same. Since then, he’s become something of an ambassador for green infrastructure in Hoffman, talking about his project on the evening news and encouraging his neighbors to undertake similar work. 

For all its climate benefits, New Orleans’ green infrastructure boom is as much about building a community and mutual aid as storing water. “We’re there to meet the felt needs of people,” says Chuck Morse, one of Umbrella’s founding members and a minister at a local Baptist church. “I believe that people don’t care how much you know, until they know that you care.”

The Umbrella coalition ended up in Hoffman largely because of Morse’s many connections in the neighborhood. In addition to his other roles, he’s also president of the neighborhood association and sits on the Equity Committee for the city’s Climate Action Plan. His personal breaking point with flooding came in 2018 when he almost missed his daughter’s graduation due to inundated streets after a storm. “That’s just truly not how it needs to be,” he says, shaking his head.

Morse’s role is to run a workforce development program to train young residents in green infrastructure construction and support locally-owned landscaping firms that can build these projects. He’s also connected Umbrella with faith-based communities in Hoffman. He frames water management in terms of his Christian notions of “stewardship” to get local ministers on board, and Umbrella has branched into larger green infrastructure projects on church property. While a homeowner can store maybe 1,000 gallons of water on a small lot, a church can store upwards of 20,000. 

Kenneth Thompson, the pastor of Pleasant Zion Baptist a few blocks down from Coach, has said that the new trees and rain barrels on the church property are “a blessing to the neighborhood,” making community spaces more resilient in a way that will benefit more than just one building. That’s especially important because the majority of Hoffman residents are renters, meaning they have less power to modify their homes. To that end, the current homeownership crisis in the United States certainly illuminates some of the limitations of a property-focused approach to climate resilience — at some point, the city does have to step in.

In 2016, New Orleans secured over $140 million in funding through the federal government to develop a multi-faceted “resilience district” in one of the city’s largest neighborhoods. There’s $3 million for workforce development (which Morse’s Thrive is managing), a Community Adaptation Program that installs projects for homeowners, and over 8 miles of streets and canals that will be transformed into blue and green corridors of open space. At the same time, the city is undertaking its largest investment ever in roadwork, with $2.2 billion across 200 projects that include green infrastructure elements wherever possible.

It’s hard to compare the scale of grassroots effort to the city’s plans, or even what is needed overall to shore up New Orleans against the rising seas of the 21st century. Yet, everyone agrees that there’s a great need for the kind of house-by-house, neighborhood-level adaptation that Umbrella facilitates. 

Colleen McHugh, a planner at the Water Institute of the Gulf, adds that grassroots efforts bring stability. Every time a new mayor comes on board, McHugh says, “you have a bunch of folks who started something, leave, and move on.” Community groups are more nimble, though, and keep momentum going through those transitions. 

Williams, from the Department of Public Works, says that the city needs people working at every level to make green infrastructure work. Grassroots groups, she says, provide a “huge service” for individual residents. As the Stormwater Program Manager for the entire city, she adds that groups like Umbrella “shine a light on some of the boots-on-the-ground issues” like where it regularly floods, what’s working, and what’s not. 

Of course, there are challenges. Projects on public property require permits that can be cumbersome to acquire. Todd Reynolds, from Groundwork, says it’s taken him years in some cases to get approval. The original design for Coach’s house on South Johnson Street, for example, originally envisioned putting permeable pavement in the right-of-way in front of his house, but the city blocked it because it interfered with its planned roadwork. 

Then there’s the question of maintenance. Green infrastructure saves money down the line, but it can require more routine maintenance, such as nurturing seedlings as their roots take hold. On paper, it’s straightforward: The homeowner is responsible for upkeep, like keeping native plants alive, dumping out rain barrels, or clearing drains. But in a neighborhood like Hoffman with many older and fixed-income residents, that means carefully designing projects that owners will be able to manage physically and financially. Eness has taken to driving around with trash bags in her trunk to collect litter and keep projects clean.

Eness recently drove by a newly constructed home on Jackson Avenue where the Umbrella coalition had put in a permeable driveway to help direct water away from the structure. She hopes to see more projects like that in the future, where green infrastructure is incorporated into new constructions, to spare future residents the stress and cost of flood management. Without better long-term strategies and dedicated funding for maintenance, everyone agrees that no acres of rain gardens or miles of green corridors will solve the flooding problem.

There will also always be rainstorms that overwhelm the system, and green infrastructure alone won’t save the city from rising seas, intensifying storms, and sinking streets. As Hoffman resident Coach says: “The water got to go somewhere. You got to live with it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How New Orleans neighborhoods are using nature to reduce flooding on Jun 8, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Leah Campbell.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Border Updates to be notified when we publish stories about immigration and the U.S. border.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Federal prosecutors reached a settlement agreement this week with the construction company that built a troubled private border fence along the Rio Grande in South Texas.

The settlement caps off two and a half years of legal wrangling after the federal government sued Fisher Industries and its subsidiaries, alleging that the 18-foot-tall and 3-mile-long fence led to erosion so significant that it threatened to shift the border and could cause the structure to collapse into the river, impacting a major dam.

Under the agreement, the company must conduct quarterly inspections, maintain an existing gate that allows for the release of floodwaters and keep a $3 million bond, a type of insurance, for 15 years, or until the property is transferred to the government, to cover any expenses in case the structure fails.

Experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that the settlement provides insufficient protection to the Rio Grande’s shoreline and leaves too much discretion to the builder when it comes to maintaining and inspecting the bollard fence.

“They’re putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids to fix the initial problem that they caused,” said Adriana E. Martinez, a Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor who studies river systems. She said the settlement does not require enough from the company to prevent additional flooding or damage from the fence.

The settlement lets Fisher Industries select the places along the fence to inspect for damage, decide what triggers some repairs and reject any proposed changes to the maintenance plan suggested by the government. It also allows the company to police itself instead of requiring a third-party inspector, said Amy Patrick, a Houston forensic structural and civil engineer and court-recognized expert on wall construction.

“It appears as though they are trusting the contractor far more than I have seen other contractors trusted,” she said.

As part of the settlement, Fisher and its subsidiary must destroy copies of an engineering report, commissioned by the Department of Justice, that studied the project’s soundness. Federal officials said the report contains “proprietary information.”

ProPublica and the Tribune requested copies of the report in August, months before the settlement, but the DOJ refused to provide the records, citing a confidentiality order in the ongoing lawsuit.

Ryan Patrick, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said that his office first filed the lawsuit to stop the construction of the project because it violated the law and it was too close to the river. “We always knew it was a joke, but it was a dangerous joke,” said Patrick, now a partner at a law firm in Houston.

Patrick said he still thinks the fence should be removed, but he declined to discuss the settlement, saying there might be information related to the difficulty or cost of taking it down that he doesn’t know since he left office in February 2021. “But I am still concerned for the surrounding towns if a big storm hits that thing.”

Neither the builder, Tommy Fisher, nor his company’s attorney responded to requests for comment. DOJ officials declined to comment, saying they did not have additional information besides what was available in court documents.

Fisher Industries started building the bollard fence along the banks of the Rio Grande in 2019 as part of a wider effort of We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization founded by Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran. The nonprofit raised more than $25 million, Kolfage said, to help former President Donald Trump build his “big, beautiful wall” along the border. In April, Kolfage pleaded guilty to federal charges of defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to the wall effort.

The government filed a lawsuit soon after Fisher started construction of the project. It alleged the fence violated a treaty with Mexico that requires both countries to approve any development that can affect the international boundary. A state district judge in Hidalgo County granted the government a temporary restraining order to stop construction, but a federal judge reversed it a month later.

By February 2020, Fisher completed the 3-mile fence along the river’s edge.

Later that year, ProPublica and the Tribune reported that severe erosion at the base of the fence outside of Mission, Texas, could result in the structure toppling into the Rio Grande if not fixed. Following the reporting, Trump attempted to distance himself from the project, saying on Twitter that it had been constructed to make him look bad, despite some members of his family and top advisers previously vouching for it.

Two engineering reports, commissioned by the nearby National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit that opposed the project because of flooding concerns, later confirmed the news organizations’ findings.

In the summer of 2020, Hurricane Hanna dumped about 15 inches of rain into the area, leaving waist-deep cracks on the banks of the Rio Grande along parts of the fence, which threatened the structural integrity of the project, experts told ProPublica and the Tribune at the time. Fisher, the CEO who put more than $40 million of his own money into the project, told ProPublica and the Tribune that erosion was expected given the amount of rainfall.

He said his company had fixed the erosion, in part by adding a 10-foot-wide road made out of rocks for the Border Patrol to drive over. “I feel very comfortable with what we’ve done,” he said a month after the hurricane.

But Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, said she worries that the hurricane season, which began Wednesday and is expected to be more active than usual, could cause the structure to fail, potentially flooding communities and properties on both sides of the border and damaging the Anzalduas Dam, which provides irrigation water in the Rio Grande Valley.

Treviño-Wright called the settlement agreement a “total miscarriage of justice.”

Sally Spener, a spokesperson for the International Boundary and Water Commission, which will be in charge of oversight as part of the settlement, expressed support for the agreement and said she believed it addressed previous concerns. The binational commission is now responsible for ensuring the owners comply with the inspections and address any issues that arise.

Patrick, the former prosecutor, called the fence “a mess” that will have long-term implications.

“Looks like the builders of this thing are going to have to feed and care for this white elephant for quite some time and will in the end be far more expensive and a pain to deal with than they ever envisioned,” he said.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Perla Trevizo and Jeremy Schwartz.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s new NZ SeaRise website, designed to show how the country’s coastline will be affected by rising sea levels and land subsidence, has been hit by a cyber attack.

Project co-leader and Victoria University of Wellington earth sciences Professor Tim Naish said the website went live this morning at 5am, and since then it had been getting 10,000 hits per second which had ”just killed” the website.

”We’re trying to get it back up and running,” he said.

• READ MORE:  Climate change: sea levels rising twice as fast as thought in New Zealand
• Other climate change reports
• NZ SeaRise’s online tool — available here from 5am, today May 2.

”The guess is that these are anti-climate change people or the Russians — who knows.

”We don’t know for sure, but we think they’re using an autobot. They’re coming from an overseas IP address.

”It’s just hitting us with thousands of hits and our website can’t cope.”

It was frustrating because local government mayors were being asked to comment on the website, but were unable to because it was inaccessible at the moment, he said.

Frustrating for residents
It was also frustrating for residents interested in what was going to happen on their own land.

The NZ SeaRise website shows location-specific sea level rise projections to the year 2300, for every 2km of the coast of New Zealand.

Climate change and warming temperatures are causing sea levels to rise by 3.5mm a year on average, but until now, the levels did not take into account local vertical land movements.

Professor Naish said continuous small and large seismic events were adding up to cause subsidence in many parts of New Zealand, and the new projections showed the annual rate of sea level rise could double.

Project co-leader and GNS Science associate professor Richard Levy said the team had connected vertical land movement data with climate-driven sea level rise to provide locally-relevant sea level projections.

“Property owners, councils, infrastructure providers and others need to know how sea level will change in the coming decades so that they can consider how risks associated with flooding, erosion and rising groundwater will shift,” he said.

”We have estimated future sea levels for 7434 sites around our coastline. The largest increases in sea level will occur along the southeast North Island along the Wairarapa coast.

Land subsidence rates are high
”Here, land subsidence rates are high and sea level could rise by well over 1.5m by 2100 if we follow the least optimistic climate change scenario.

”In contrast, land is rising near Pikowai, in the Bay of Plenty, and uplift rates may keep pace with climate change-driven sea level rise, causing a small fall in sea level if we follow the most optimistic climate scenario.”

Dunedin and Invercargill were not likely to be any closer to inundation by the sea than had already been predicted, because ground movement in the South was ”quite stable”, he said.

Based on present international emissions reduction policies, global sea levels were expected to have risen about 0.6m by 2100, but for large parts of New Zealand that would double to about 1.2m because of ongoing land subsidence.

”We know that global sea-level rise of 25cm-30cm by 2060 is baked in and unavoidable regardless of our future emissions pathway, but what may be a real surprise to people is that for many of our most populated regions, such as Auckland and Wellington, this unavoidable rise is happening faster than we thought.”

Vertical land movements mean sea level changes might happen 20-30 years sooner than previously expected.

For many parts of New Zealand’s coast, 30cm of sea-level rise is a threshold for extreme flooding, above which the 100-year coastal storm becomes an annual event.

Climate change adaptation options
Joint Otago Regional and Dunedin City Councils’ South Dunedin Future group programme manager Jonathan Rowe welcomed the new information and said it would feed into many aspects of the councils’ work, particularly that relating to the South Dunedin programme which was considering climate change adaptation options.

ORC operations general manager Gavin Palmer said the information would also feed into flood protection planning to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise in other parts of coastal Otago, such as the Clutha Delta and the Taieri Plain.

Rowe said for South Dunedin, the new data confirmed previous guidance, that further sea level rise of 24cm-35cm was predicted by 2050-60, and up to 112cm by 2100, depending on global emissions.

A climate change adaptation plan would be presented to both councils in June, he said.

Climate Change Minister James Shaw said the findings were “sobering” and the government’s first plan to cut emissions in every part of New Zealand, would be published later this month.

• The website appeared to be accessed normally later today with an earlier notice saying “The NZ SeaRise maps are down temporarily for maintenance” having been dropped.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. It was first published on the Otago Daily Times website.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

From Brisbane to Sydney, many thousands of Australians have been reliving a devastating experience they hoped — in 2021, 2020, 2017, 2015, 2013, 2012 or 2010/11 — would never happen to them again.

For some suburbs built on the flood plains of the Nepean River in western Sydney, for example, these floods are their third in two years.

Flooding is a part of life in parts of Australia. But as climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of floods, fires and other disasters, and recovery costs soar, two big questions arise.

• READ MORE: After the floods comes underinsurance: we need a better plan
• You can’t talk about disaster risk reduction without talking about inequality

As a society, should we be setting up individuals and families for ruin by allowing them to build back in areas where they can’t afford insurance? And is it fair for taxpayers to carry the huge burden of paying for future rescue and relief costs?

Considering ‘managed retreat’
Doing something about escalating disaster risks require multiple responses. One is making insurance as cheap as possible.

Another is investing in mitigation infrastructure, such as flood levees. Yet another is about making buildings more disaster-resistant.

The temporary levee in Maryborough that’s prevented much of the CBD from being inundated. Floodwaters are slowly dropping @abcnews pic.twitter.com/Vpxccl1Ej7

— Johanna Marie (@JohannaMarie_) March 1, 2022

The most controversial response is the policy of “managed retreat” — abandoning buildings in high-risk areas.

In Australia this policy has been mostly discussed as something to consider some time in the future, and mostly for coastal communities, for homes that can’t be saved from rising sea levels and storm surges.

It’s a sensitive subject because it uproots families, potentially hollows outs communities and also affects house prices — an unsettling prospect when economic security is tied to home ownership.

But managed retreat may also be better than the chaotic consequences of letting the market alone try to work out the risks to individuals and communities.

Grand Forks: a case study
The strategy is already being implemented in parts of western Europe and North America. An example from Canada is the town of Grand Forks, a community of about 4000 people 300 kilometres east of Vancouver.

The town is located where two rivers meet. In May 2018 it experienced its worst flooding in seven decades, after days of extreme rain attributed to higher than normal winter snowfall melting quickly in hotter spring temperatures.

Deforestation has been blamed for exacerbating the flood.

The flood damaged about 500 buildings in Grand Forks, with lowest-income neighbourhoods in low-lying areas the worst-affected.

In the aftermath, the local council received C$53 million from the federal and provincial governments for flood mitigation. This included work to reinforce river banks and build dikes. About a quarter of the money was allocated to acquire about 80 homes in the most flood-prone areas.

The decision to demolish these homes — about 5 percent of the town’s housing — and return the area to flood plain has been contentious.

Some residents simply didn’t want to sell. Adding to the pain was owners being paid the post-flood market value of their homes (saving the council about C$6 million). There were also long delays, with residents stuck in limbo for more than year while authorities finalised transactions.

A sensitive subject
Grand Forks shares similarities to Lismore, the epicentre of the disaster affecting northern NSW and southern Queensland.

Lismore is also built on a flood plain where two rivers meet. Floods are a regular occurrence, with the last major disaster being in 2017. Insuring properties in town’s most flood-prone areas was already unaffordable for some. In the future it may be impossible.

Last week, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said about 2000 of the town’s 19,000 homes would need to be demolished and rebuilt, a statement the local council general manager downplayed, saying in the majority of cases “people will not have to worry”.

For a community traumatised by loss, overwhelmed by the recovery effort and angry at the perceived tardiness of government relief efforts, discussing any form of managed retreat is naturally emotionally charged.

But there is never an ideal time to talk about bulldozing homes and relocating households.

Uprooting communities
Managed retreat has far-reaching financial ramifications. As in Grand Forks, the first questions are what homes are targeted, who pays, and how much.

Some residents may be grateful to sell up and move to safe ground. Others may not, disputing the valuation offered or being reluctant to leave at any price.

Managed retreat policies also affect many more than just those whose homes are being acquired. Demolishing a block or suburb can push down values in neighbouring areas, due to fears these homes may be next. Those households are also customers for local businesses. Their loss can potentially send a town economy into decline.

No wonder many people want no mention of managed retreat in their communities.

Pricing in climate change
Markets, however, are already starting to “price in” rising climate risks.

Insurance premiums are going up. The value of homes in high-risk areas will drop as buyers look elsewhere, particularly in the wake of increasingly frequent disasters.

The economic fallout, both for individual households and local communities, could be disastrous.

The Reserve Bank of Australia warned in September 2021 that climate-related disasters could rapidly drive house prices down, particularly in areas that have previously experienced rapid house price growth.

These disasters are also amplifying inequality, with poorer households more likely to live in high-risk locations and also to be uninsured.

In Lismore, for example, more than 80 percent of households flooded in 2017 were in the lowest 20 percent of incomes. These trends will intensify as growing climate risks translate into higher insurance premiums and lower house prices.

A deliberate strategy of managed retreat, though distressing and difficult, can help to minimise the upheaval in housing markets as climate risks become increasingly apparent.

We can do better than leaving the most socially and economically vulnerable households to live in high-risk areas, while those with enough money can move away to better, safer futures. Managed retreat can play a key role.

Dr Antonia Settle is an academic and McKenzie postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Melbourne. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Fiji’s Department of Mineral Resources needs time to liaise with a number of agencies before emergency warnings or alerts are issued, says acting Prime Minister and Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.

He made the comment after being quizzed on the delay in issuing a tsunami warning in Fiji following the underwater volcanic eruption in Tonga on Saturday.

The National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) issued a public advisory after 7pm on Saturday — two hours after the volcano erupted.

• READ MORE:  Tongan volcanic eruption reveals the vulnerabilities in global telecommunications
• Tonga’s undersea communications cable could take weeks to repair
• Why the volcanic eruption in Tonga was so violent, and what to expect next
• Other APR reports on the tsunami

While many found out about the volcanic activity on social media, just as many thought the explosions were thunder.

Many living in coastal communities were also unaware the volcano was erupting — until tidal surges flooded their communities.

Sayed-Khaiyum said the Mineral Resources Department was in close contact with seismology experts in New Zealand.

He said the department was also in contact with various other international agencies for assessments, adding that it required very “sophisticated equipment to predict these things as to when it would occur”.

“It is not our ability to say that this will happen in the next hour and that is something the experts will tell us, so this is why it is critically important to keep the radio on as all messages as and when needed will be given on the radio,” he said.

Luke Nacei is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A new study shows rising sea levels in the Marshall Islands will endanger 40 percent of buildings in the capital Majuro, with 96 percent of the city likely to flood frequently.

The study, “Adapting to Rising Sea Levels in Marshall Islands”, is compiled by the Marshall Islands government and the World Bank.

It provides visual projections and adaptation options to assist the Marshalls in tackling rising sea levels and inundation over the next 100 years.

• READ MORE: Other COP26 reports

As COP26 begins in Glasgow, the new visualisations demonstrate the existential threat the Marshall Islands faces.

If existing sea level rise trends continue, the country will confront a series of increasingly costly adaptation choices to protect essential infrastructure.

World Bank senior municipal engineer and the leader of the study, Artessa Saldivar-Sali, said these visual models give insights that have not been available before.

She said these will be critical for decision-makers to understand the potential benefits of adaptation options, such as sea walls, nature-based solutions and land raising.

Saldivar-Sali said the modelling paints a clear picture of the need for significant investment in adaptation for, and by, atoll nations like Marshall Islands.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The world is on the brink of a climate catastrophe, with just a narrow window for action to reverse global processes predicted to cause devastating effects in the Pacific and world-wide, says the leader of the 18-nation Pacific Islands Forum.

Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna said a major UN scientific report released on Monday backed what the Blue Pacific continent already knew — that the planet was in the throes of a human-induced climate crisis.

The report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) described a “code red” warning for humanity.

• READ MORE: There’s no time left for empty climate promises, says Pacific activist
• IPCC report: ‘Last gasp’ warning on climate response for NZ, the world
• Climate change has already hit. Unless we act now, a hotter, drier and more dangerous future awaits, IPCC warns
• LISTEN: Coral reef systems set for extinction, next 10 years ‘critical’
• LISTEN: Latest IPCC report reminder to cut emissions – youth
• The full sixth IPCC report

Puna said a major concern was sea level change; the report said a rise of 2 metres by the end of this century, and a disastrous rise of 5 metres rise by 2150 could not be ruled out.

The report also found that extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.

To put this into perspective, these outcomes were predicted to result in the loss of millions of lives, homes and livelihoods across the Pacific and the world.

The IPCC said extreme heatwaves, droughts, flooding and other environmental instability were also likely to increase in frequency and severity.

Governments cannot ignore voices
Puna said governments, big business and the major emitters of the world could no longer ignore the voices of those already enduring the unfolding existential crisis.

“They can no longer choose rhetoric over action. There are simply no more excuses to be had. Our actions today will have consequences now and into the future for all of us to bear.”

The 2019 Pacific Islands Forum Kainaki Lua Declaration remained a clarion call for urgent climate action, he said.

The call urged the UN to do more to persuade industrial powers to cut their carbon emissions to reduce contributing to climate change.

However, Puna said the factors affecting climate change could be turned around if people acted now.

“The 6th IPCC Assessment Report shows us that the science is clear. We know the scale of the climate crisis we are facing. We also have the solutions to avoid the worst of climate change impacts.

“What we need now is political leadership and momentum to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.