This story was originally published in Modern Farmer and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate crisis.

Eerily empty, abandoned fields stretch across the coast of the southeast United States, replacing once sprawling fields of golden wheat, corn, and soybeans. 

For centuries, farmers have favored the rich soil of coastal areas during the growing season. “It’s very fertile soil, especially in some areas that are called the ‘black lands.’ These are really deep organic soils that formed on the coast over millennia,” says Michael Gavazzi, coordinator of the USDA Southeast Climate Hub coordinator and natural resource specialist. 

It’s a different story when the floods come in. Hurricanes and tropical storms bring torrential rain and powerful winds that cause storm surges—abnormally large waves that can tower up to 25 feet in height. The aftermath of such disasters is devastating. Crop damage and equipment loss can rack up to thousands of dollars for farmers, even with insurance. The spread of invasive species hinders future growing seasons of certain crops. And most of all, flooding risks long-term consequences to soil health and the geological makeup of farms that could force farmers to permanently abandon their land. 

Take, for instance, 2018’s Hurricane Florence. The slow-moving Category 4 giant ravaged southeast coasts, with wind gusts as high as 100 miles per hour, rainfall that exceeded 10 inches in most coastal regions (Swansboro reported 34 inches of total rainfall) and $24 billion in damages—more than Category 5 Hurricane Matthew and Category 4 Hurricane Floyd combined. The initial $1.1-billion damage cost calculation was conservative, and it didn’t account for damages from soil salinization. Even worse, climate scientists say that rainfall estimations were worsened by climate change, an indication that future storms could follow similar patterns. 

The storm rocked North Carolina’s agricultural industry to its core. Five of six top agricultural counties of the state were in the most storm-vulnerable areas. Most eastern farmers’ fields were obliterated; the storm came right before peak harvest season for tobacco, corn, and cotton. Crop insurance didn’t cover all the damages incurred, especially not the long-term costs. 

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“Fresh water [non-saline] flooding from intense rainfall events can [have] short- and long-term consequences,” says Gavazzi, “but the land will usually recover.” However, ocean-driven storm surge flooding is saltwater, and crop productivity can be negatively impacted. Repeated flooding can permanently reduce forest, range, and agricultural production of these coastal areas. 

Soil salinization occurs when seawater from floods eventually evaporates but leaves behind its salt content, which accumulates over years in the soil. With enough flooding, the soil on farms could become so salinized that crops can no longer be grown on that land. 

More often known as saltwater intrusion, soil salinization can also impact local water quality; the salt eventually makes contact with freshwater aquifers, thus salinizing them. Many local communities source water from wells that draw from these aquifers. Aquifer salinization forces these communities to drill new wells deeper and further inland, which further depletes underground freshwater and creates a self-enforcing loop. 

This process isn’t immediately noticeable: One hurricane season isn’t enough for farmers to see the effects. But several years later, farmland productivity starts to plummet. Crop yields never return to previous rates, and there is only so much farmland owners can do to rid the salt before another hurricane comes along. 

The issue, although having long been a concern among agronomists, started to rapidly proliferate in the past couple of years, as hurricanes and natural disasters become more frequent and more severe as a result of human-caused climate change. While not solely to blame for extreme weather, scientists agree that the burning of fossil fuels is supercharging normal weather patterns.. “It seems like it’s become more of an important issue in the last five to 10 years as [soil salinization] started to impact more land,” says Gavazzi. 

“What they can do is hope for rain. Rain before a storm surge can fill up the soil pore space and prevent saltwater from entering the soil. Additional rain that occurs with a hurricane can also flush the standing saltwater off the land and kind of return it back to its previous non-saline state.” 

As sea level increases due to climate change, the difference between ocean water levels and soil elevation is decreasing, making post-storm water runoff more difficult. Although the rain can eventually help flush out salt content in soil, long-term accumulation of salt far exceeds what natural precipitation can remove. Small farmer owners can also use water to flush out salt on their own, but this solution is far from viable for medium to large farm owners. 

Another issue, which is essential to mitigating damage, is that salinization is harder to spot than expected. “[It’s] not always obvious on the surface,” explains Gavazzi. “Sometimes, it washes away, but the salinity of the soil can be increasing … There’s noticeable declines in productivity with that, but it’s kind of quiet after the event.” Farmers not equipped with the proper resources and knowledge to understand this are at particularly high risk of losing farmland. 

“We’ve talked to some farmers that have constructed dikes to try to keep the water out,” he says. But infrastructure also comes with certain drawbacks. “Dikes are good for keeping out some flooding, but when water gets behind them, they hold that water and it also changes the natural landscape [of the area].” 

To support coastal agriculture, the USDA, in partnership with regional and national organizations, provides financial and technical assistance to farmers in order to aid during recovery, post natural disaster. Research studies on future mitigation and resilience strategies are also well underway at universities. A research group formed jointly by scientists from Duke University and the University of Virginia recently published their findings mapping saltwater intrusion across the eastern coast in high-profile journal Nature. They found that between 2011 to 2017, “salty patches”, an indication of saltwater intrusion, have doubled in frequency across Delaware and in parts of Virginia and Maryland. Up to 93 percent of the farmlands analyzed were shown to be in proximity to the salinized areas. The economic implications of such changes were estimated to run as high as $107.50 million annually. 

Other research efforts that revolve around salt-tolerant crop development and cover crop planting practices are beginning to gain traction among farmers. Michelle Lovejoy, a climate resilience manager at the Environmental Defense Fund, says that today’s farmers are more willing to adapt such mitigation practices. 

“We are starting to see that shift as the next generation starts to take over the farm and as farmers are noticing ‘I’m getting more wet years,’” says Lovejoy. 

Lovejoy emphasizes that the impacts of flood damage reverberate throughout state-wide communities, as well as local agricultural ones. When flooding disrupts crop production, especially of staple crops such as corn, wheat or potatoes, grocery stores and farmers’ markets take a hit. 

She explains that, particularly in states that are responsible for producing large amounts of a staple crop, flooding can result in supply chain collapses. Food disappears off store shelves and already food-insecure communities are left to grapple with devastating food shortages. 

“That’s where, collectively as a nation, we need to make sure there’s redundancy in the system, but we, as a society, have made decisions historically that looked at efficiencies and cost,” says Lovejoy, referring to practices that ensure no singular agricultural community is responsible for producing the majority of a crop supply for the rest of the country. 

She draws a comparison to a similar occurrence during the pandemic. “During [COVID-19] when we watched the supply chains collapse, we made decisions that said, ‘We don’t need those redundancies,’” says Lovejoy. “But now we’re realizing [that] part of resilience is having redundancies in the system. That’s a local level conversation that needs to happen.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A silent killer’: How saltwater intrusion is overtaking coastal farmland in the US on Sep 9, 2023.

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

More than a decade ago, two climate scientists defined what they considered at the time to be the upper limit of human survivability: 35 degrees Celsius, or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, at 100 percent humidity, also known as the wet-bulb threshold. In those conditions, a person, no matter who they are or where they live, cannot shed enough heat to stay alive for more than a few hours. The scientists’ operating assumption was that carbon emissions would need to warm the planet 5 to 7 degrees C (9 to 12.6 degrees F) before the world exceeded the wet-bulb threshold every year. Since then, more advanced work has demonstrated the world only needs to warm by about 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) before heat waves in the hottest parts of the world first cross that survivability line.

But just looking at the survivability threshold doesn’t paint the full picture of heat-related risk. The theoretical experiment underpinning that threshold was based on two assumptions: that humans are fully adapted to heat, or used to hot conditions, and that people do everything in their power — seek out shade, fan themselves, and douse themselves with water — to stay cool during an extreme heat event. The reality is that death can occur long before wet-bulb conditions are eclipsed for a variety of reasons that have to do with age, health, adaptation, and access. 

A study published in Science Advances this week used a more realistic threshold to determine when and where the world will become dangerously hot for humans. The researchers, from the University of Oxford and the Woodwell Climate Research Center, used a framework called the “noncompensable heat threshold,” the conditions under which a human being can no longer maintain a healthy core temperature without taking action to cool off. Six hours of unmitigated exposure to these temperatures would be sufficient to cause death. This threshold can be reached under different combinations of air temperature and humidity — the hotter the temperature, the less humidity needed to cross the limit. At 40 degrees C (104 degrees F), for example, you need about 50 percent relative humidity to cross the noncompensable threshold.

The researchers found that parts of the world have already surpassed this threshold. They identified 21 weather stations that clocked conditions exceeding the noncompensable threshold between 1970 and 2020, mainly along coastlines in the hottest regions of the planet such as the Persian Gulf and South Asia. Even more people will face such conditions as the planet continues to warm from fossil fuel combustion.    

Christopher W. Callahan, an earth systems scientist at Dartmouth University who researches health and heat and was not involved in the research, called the study’s results “striking.” “Some locations are already experiencing these critically hot conditions,” he said. “They’re not just a forecast from a climate model, they’re directly observable using quality-controlled weather station observations.”

As more countries experience abnormally high temperatures every summer, using pure “survivability” as the metric for when heat-related mortality will occur is a dangerous proposition. Death can occur much sooner than that. 

At the wet-bulb threshold, “no matter what you do short of air conditioning, you face lethal risk,” said Carter Powis, a researcher at the University of Oxford and the study’s lead author. “The threshold we looked at, noncompensable heat, is you face lethal heat risk unless you do something. Meaning there are still ways you can survive above this threshold such as using a fan, drinking cold water.” Any conditions between these two definitions are what the study’s authors call the “danger zone.” Whether someone dies when they’re in that zone depends on what cooling strategies are available to them and how well adapted they are. 

The study shows that, under current climate change conditions, 8 percent of the globe by land area experiences conditions that are in the danger zone once every decade. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming, a climate change benchmark the world is currently on track to exceed, more than a quarter of the world will experience these conditions at least once a decade. The percentage of the planet that will experience potentially fatal heat continues to grow the more climate change accelerates. 

It’s not just the hottest regions of the planet that are at risk. In the U.S., the Midwest and East Coast could see rapid increases in noncompensable heat exposure. The same is true for the Mediterranean region up north through Europe. These are areas that are not used to extreme heat. 

“While prior research has indicated that fatal wet bulb temperatures will occur more often in the most populated and poor regions of the planet, this research suggests that wealthier countries in North America and Europe will also face increasingly dire heat waves,” Cascade Tuholske, a geographer at Montana State University who was also not involved in the study, told Grist. 

For Powis, the biggest takeaway is that communities need to be aware that past heat-related mortality events are not a good way to gauge future risk. As the planet warms, the past will become an increasingly poor metric for looking at the future. “The danger is, in the near term, in the next decade or two decades, you have one of these extreme heat waves that departs from the historical maximum by a substantial amount, crosses this threshold, and causes wide-scale mortality,” Powis said. “Everything is fine until suddenly it’s not.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Parts of the world have already grown too hot for human survival on Sep 8, 2023.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

About 22 million Americans live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as the housing crisis continues to worsen in places like Arizona, California, and New York, that number could go up.

But for some, mobile homes conjure up an image of rusting metal units in weed-choked lots, an unfair stereotype that has real consequences — advocates argue that mobile homes are not only a housing fix but could also help with the climate crisis.

According to Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, mobile homes are a good solution with a bad reputation. 

It’s unfair, he said, because the residents of mobile homes are often hampered by restrictive zoning laws that make it hard to upgrade maintenance and care of the structures. These zoning laws also have put communities at risk for climate-related disasters, which explains why so many mobile home parks are in floodplains.

“It’s not the home itself that often makes mobile homes vulnerable,” said Rumbach. “It’s actually the fact that we sort of stuck the poor away in these places that makes them vulnerable.” 

A report by the Niskanen Center, a nonprofit public policy organization, echoes Rumbach’s research. The report found that mobile homes have consistently been an affordable and underutilized solution that meets the housing needs of low- and moderate-income people.

Newer models can also be a low-carbon solution as these prefabricated homes, which are built in large pieces for easy assembly, can include things like heat pumps and solar panels, in contrast to older models that relied on propane or natural gas. Older models can also be eligible for retrofits to make them more energy efficient and climate-friendly. 

“They’re a pretty terrific solution,” said Rumbach. “Unfortunately, by law, in many places in the country [mobile homes] are not allowed to be placed anymore because there is such a cultural stigma.”

The Eastern Coachella Valley in California is one place where mobile home parks and residents have been consistently overlooked by public officials. People in the majority Latino area grapple with getting access to necessities like electricity and clean water. Arsenic was found in the water supply and is a persistent issue.

But despite that, there is also an incredible sense of community among the residents of informal mobile home parks in the area, according to Jovana Morales-Tilgren, a housing policy coordinator at Leadership Council for Justice and Accountability, a California nonprofit focusing on underserved rural communities. 

The parks were originally built for migrant farmworkers and today they operate without a permit, which means federal agencies and local governments don’t have official recognition that they exist. So if there’s a disaster, that makes it harder to get federal relief, and if there is a municipal upgrade, it doesn’t happen in those communities.

“They do have a lot more issues than regular mobile home parks,” said Morales-Tilgren. “Many of them don’t have weatherization, insulation. Many were built more than 20, 30, 40 years ago. And so they do have a lot of issues.” 

Mobile homes can be roughly categorized into two sections: older homes that predate the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s rules in 1976, and newer, prefabricated homes that often are greener, more efficient, and better functioning than some traditional homes. 

When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California last month, residents in the unpermitted mobile home parks were trapped, because a power outage meant that residents had to sleep in their cars to get access to air conditioning. 

“[Mobile homes] are not equipped to handle those extreme weather events,” said Morales-Tilgren. 

This is especially an issue because a large portion of people that live in the area are low-income people of color who are undocumented, according to Morales-Tilgren. Consequently, people lack access to resources needed to recover from large flooding events like the kind that Hilary brought.

Another key issue: Mobile home parks, both permitted and unpermitted, are reliant on their own infrastructure. In other types of housing, such as apartments or single family homes, a municipality is usually in charge of providing electricity, water, sewage, and tree maintenance. But in mobile home parks, residents are reliant on owners to provide those services.

In addition, once extreme weather happens, residents are often caught in the grip of the confusing bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. While mobile home parks can vary wildly, the main distinction that the agency makes is whether or not people own or rent the land underneath the home. 

A 2021 study published in the journal Frontiers found that there are numerous barriers to accessing resources, such as money from FEMA, for vulnerable populations in the wake of a flood-related disaster. Affordable housing units were affected more, and often the number of units did not bounce back to pre-disaster levels.

Additionally, mobile home residents are often at risk of being evicted in the aftermath of disasters that might displace them from their homes. This can fuel housing instability because mobile homes tend to be located in climate-vulnerable areas like floodplains, according to Rumbach. 

“Around the country, you see a disproportionate amount of mobile homes located in hazardous areas,” said Rumbach. “The demand is being driven by a segment of the housing market that’s looking for lower costs. And as a result, you see a lot of manufactured housing being placed into relatively climate-vulnerable places, because that land tends to be a little bit less valuable.”

On the other side of the country, though, mobile home owners in Ithaca, New York, have been the beneficiaries of a pilot project aimed at retrofitting mobile homes in the area to be more climate-friendly. 

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This first-of-its-kind project is giving owners funding for heat pumps to replace the polluting natural gas or propane furnaces needed to heat mobile homes. The program also provides money to cover the cost of insulation needed to keep the heating and cooling provided by electric appliances in the home and reduce electric bills. 

Gay Nicholson, president of Sustainable Finger Lakes, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions in upstate New York, says that while their program, which is ongoing, has so far been successful in helping people access funding, they still are limited in their reach. The program would need more money as well as guidance from state and federal authorities to be able to meet the needs of everyone who applied.

Nicholson said that currently, the program is trying to help people transition off of natural gas, which is available cheaply despite its destructive climate impacts. This often puts the onus on consumers to be able to invest in climate-friendly technology, if no additional funding is available.

Cost is a vital aspect of upgrading mobile homes: “It affects how people make decisions,” said Nicholson. “Whether or not they’re going to stay on gas and stick to another cheap gas furnace.” 

Stigma surrounding mobile home parks is a huge reason for issues regarding resource allocation and zoning issues. Additionally, some of the most pressing issues come from a common problem for almost all mobile home residents: They’re just not considered. 

In Ithaca, that means many transmission lines that service mobile home parks are capped at a certain wattage that is far below what it would take to electrify them, which provides challenges for Nicholson. 

“There are no incentives set up by the state or the feds to help to pay a mobile home park owner to upgrade the electrical capacity of his park,” said Nicholson. “We’re way behind schedule for electrification.”

Back in California, in the Eastern Coachella Valley, this means that not only did Tropical Storm Hilary flood mobile home parks but that the roads were closed — further isolating residents. In this case, as in others such as in Texas in 2021, large-scale efforts to avoid the impacts of a disaster such as a hurricane or a cold snap do not consider mobile home residents and owners. 

This is a problem, according to Zachary Lamb, a professor at the college of environmental design at the University of California, Berkeley, because not being considered makes it difficult to be resilient to climate change. 

“Mobile home parks are disproportionately located in parts of landscapes that are vulnerable to climate risks,” said Lamb. “So they’re disproportionately located in floodplains. They’re disproportionately located in places that are exposed to extreme heat. …They’re also disproportionately located in places that are close to other environmental harms.” 

Despite those vulnerabilities, past research shows that in areas where marginalized communities live, people can and do come together to solve issues collaboratively. This makes one of the most misunderstood forms of housing a good place to invest in, according to Lamb.

“Making investments in climate resilience, that is such a no-brainer,” said Lamb. “In terms of both improving the infrastructure quality, and also in terms of giving residents more agency and more control over their communities.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Mobile homes could be a climate solution. So why don’t they get more respect? on Sep 8, 2023.