Indigenous food systems and traditional land management techniques are the best options for tackling ecological restoration. However, outdated scientific models and conservative views on environmentalism has led many researchers to overlook and discount traditional ecological knowledge held by Indigenous peoples. That’s according to a new study in Frontiers.
Researchers from the Indigenous Ecology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia and the Historical-Ecological Research Laboratory at Simon Fraser University looked at two restoration efforts in St’at’imc and Quw’utsun territories and outlined a method known as “pop-up restoration” employed by environmental NGOs, extraction industries, and government agencies that offers prescriptive techniques to restore and heal land without considering local, Indigenous scientific practices. Pop-up restoration, the authors suggest, comes from deeply rooted misconceptions of Indigenous livelihoods and knowledge due to long-standing, deeply ingrained prejudices and racist ideas.
According to the researchers, pop-up restoration, or restoration initiatives that don’t make their restoration goals and impose inequities on unceded and stolen lands, often overlooks traditional food systems and Indigenous histories.
In the report, the authors assessed two disturbance-restoration cycles and the ways Indigenous food systems approach restoration ecology and Indigenous land — especially when restoration erases longstanding land management and stewardship efforts.
“An Indigenous food systems lens provides a holistic approach to food production, distribution, and consumption, that centers humans’ coexistence with other living beings and prioritizes a cultural-ecological equilibrium over exploitation or fixed restoration goals,” wrote the authors.
The first example comes from St’at’imc territory in British Columbia, where St’at’imc voices were ignored by the government, hunters and ranchers while providing traditional knowledge for the restoration of lands devastated by a wildfire.
In June 2021 a heat dome in the region created record-breaking temperatures resulting in 619 heat related deaths and creating extreme fire conditions over much of the Pacific Northwest eventually leading to the McKay Creek Wildfire which burned about 85 miles of forest.
In response, a technical committee was created to facilitate communication between affected Indigenous and settler communities, the Canadian government and ranchers. The St’at’imc Nation were given the opportunity to take part in the committee, and share their ideas on the best ways to restore the land.
But during the restoration process, government-led wildfire recovery in the region was largely driven by the values, goals, and priorities of only a few interest groups. Ranchers wanted to reseed much of the landscape with crop species that would introduce non-native plants, reducing native vegetation needed for the survival of mammals, birds and other wildlife — many of which are relied on by the St’at’imc Nation.
“We observed how government policy and decision-making overlooked, and in some cases outright dismissed, St’at’imc voices, knowledge, and expertise at the table,” wrote the authors.
“Non-Indigenous hunter and rancher interests seemed to be given priority over St’at’imc values, goals, and priorities, especially when those interests were at odds.”
The authors highlight that the settler colonial history in the St’at’imc region began in the late 1850s with the Fraser River Gold Rush, which led to the establishment of cattle farming on the forests and grasslands in the area. The clearing of land for cattle, introduction of invasive species through fodder, wildfire suppression, the ownership of land by settlers and the removal St’at’imc peoples from their lands resulted in damage to the region, which helped the McKay Creek wildfire, the climate, and the St’at’imc people.
Overall, the authors of the study said acknowledging the effects of past and ongoing waves of colonialism, being genuinely open and flexible to evolving community needs, being familiar with past failures and wrongdoings, and understanding and having compassion for the varying levels of interest, knowledge, resources, and skills for supporting land healing initiatives are important to the redevelopment and maintenance of lands.
“Results suggest that applying an Indigenous food systems lens to ecological restoration may provide a tangible framework for resolving some of the issues faced in top-down colonial policies common in pop-up restoration contexts,” the authors wrote.
Blogger Donna DeForbes shares some new tips on how to get kids to recycle, from turning a stuffed animal into a recycling mascot to playing online games.
The people of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe of Washington State have lived in the Lower Elwha River Valley and its neighboring bluffs on the Olympic Peninsula since time immemorial.
The community is based around the Elwha River, which provides water and sustenance in the form of salmonfishing. More than a century ago, two dams were placed on the Elwha, blocking almost 90 miles of the river and its tributaries, reported The Seattle Times.
The dams were removed in August of 2014, but the tribe had to wait for a run of salmon that was healthy enough to be fished. Now, for the first time in more than a hundred years, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe are fishing for coho salmon on the free-flowing river.
“It’s been a long time coming. The laughs, the joy we all feel in our hearts, is just tremendous, it’s historic,” said Russell Hepfer, vice chairman of the tribe, to a crowd gathered before resuming the fishery earlier this week, as The Seattle Times reported.
Since 1911, more than 90 percent of the flow of the river had been blocked by the two dams. Removing them was the biggest dam removal in history.
There is still a broad moratorium on fishing the Elwha River, but the tribe can fish for subsistence and tribal use due to an agreement with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife and Olympic National Park.
The tribe is able to take 400 of the 7,000 coho run for now.
“It means everything to have that food security to know that I can catch a fish to feed my family,” said Vanessa Castle, the tribe’s natural resources technician, as reported by The Seattle Times. “I know my ancestors were standing with us.”
Coho salmon are most abundant along the coast of southeast Alaska down to Central California. They have also been introduced into the Great Lakes. The fish have beautiful shimmering greenish or blue backs and are commonly called silver salmon for their silver sides, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Coho begin their lives in freshwater streams and rivers, spending a year there before migrating to the ocean. Their migrations can be more than 1,000 miles. During the time coho salmon live in the ocean to feed, they develop small black spots on their tail and back. After about one-and-a-half years in the ocean, the salmon return to the river or stream where they were born, usually in the fall or early winter, to spawn.
So that everyone from the tribe who wants to can fish for the salmon, fishing poles are being used for now, with net fishing later in the month, according to The Seattle Times.
Last year, approximately 6,821 coho returned to the Elwha River, about 36 percent of which had spawned on their own rather than being born in the hatchery, the tribe said. The numbers were 10 percent higher than the year before, and it was the largest return of coho to the river in four years.
Now, relocation of the fish from the lower river hatchery is no longer needed to boost the fishery in the main part of the river and its tributaries.
“The fish are doing it on their own,” said Mike McHenry, the tribe’s fish habitat manager, The Seattle Times reported. McHenry has been working on the recovery of the Elwha River for 32 years.
Removing the dams allowed the flow of sediment, wood and gravel to begin again, which the river needs to create side channels and log jams that create the variety of environments fish need to thrive.
“It will be a great time to introduce our children to the river, and hopefully be able to revive some of those basic ceremonies around it,” said tribal member Wendy Sampson.
Restoration of the Elwha River is in its early stages, but has inspired dam removals in other places, like on North California’s Klamath River, which will supersede the Elwha to become the largest dam removal in history.
“I think the Elwha gives people hope for what might be possible,” said Matt Beirne, the tribe’s natural resources director, as reported by The Seattle Times.
Tribal member Mel Elofson, who is the tribe’s assistant habitat manager, had heard about the possibility of dam removal from his elders.
“Now I’m getting to witness it for my elders who were unable to see it,” Elofson said.
The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the “social cost of carbon,” one of the most important calculations in U.S. climate policy, on Tuesday. The controversial metric attempts to quantify the hidden price of emitting carbon dioxide, from flood damage to health effects. The court’s surprise decision sets the stage for the Biden administration to broaden the metric’s use across federal agencies when formulating climate-related regulations.
One of President Joe Biden’s very first executive orders in January 2021 directed agencies to recalculate the social cost of carbon — currently placed at $51 a ton while the government finalizes its revised estimate. In the meantime, Republican state attorneys general have been flinging lawsuits at the administration in an attempt to block its ability to use the metric in evaluating regulations.
But their plans were thwarted by Tuesday’s order from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Without any explanation, the justices declined to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case in which 12 states alleged that Biden’s executive order violated the constitutional separation of powers. A federal appeals court ruled last year that the states suing over the use of the estimate didn’t have legal standing because they couldn’t show they’d been harmed by the way agencies had applied the metric.
It’s the second time the Supreme Court has declined to take up a challenge to the social cost of carbon. Last year, the justices blocked a similar request led by Louisiana.
The social cost of carbon is likely to have cascading effects on agriculture, power plants, oil and gas leases, and more. That’s because federal agencies have to weigh the costs and benefits of any regulation they adopt. If the government accounts for the true costs of emitting greenhouse gases — lost lives, dying crops, homes swallowed by rising seas — then decisions that result in more carbon emissions start to look a lot more expensive, while those that reduce emissions look like a smart deal.
The Obama administration, the first to require agencies to use this metric in assessing rules, placed the social cost of carbon at $43 a ton — a move that helped justify things like stronger emissions standards for vehicles. The Trump administration calculated the number differently and, in typical fashion, slashed the number down to a couple bucks per ton. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed $190 a ton, nearly four times higher than the estimate the Biden administration currently uses. (The EPA’s number is in line with estimates from independent experts.)
Because the social cost of carbon is so influential in developing climate policy, some Republicans consider it a paragon of the “radical climate agenda.” In response to the Supreme Court’s rejection of Missouri’s challenge, Andrew Bailey, the state’s attorney general, vowed to “continue to combat government overreach at every turn.”
Analysts say the fight isn’t over yet. In a note to clients, the research firm ClearView Energy Partners said the ruling doesn’t preclude states — or anyone else — from suing over specific agency actions and rules that rely on the social cost of carbon, E&E News reported.
In recent months, the White House announced that it was considering applying the social cost of carbon more broadly across agencies, in everything from annual budgets and permitting decisions to fines for violating environmental regulations. It represents a sea change in how the government approaches climate policy: For decades, policies to reduce emissions had been cast as an economic burden, a narrative propelled by oil industry-backed studies that made legislation look prohibitively expensive. Now, the frame has switched: Carbon emissions are viewed as the economic harm, and climate policy is the balm.
With the increasing demand for artificial intelligence (AI), a researcher has found that this technology could have a massive energy footprint, requiring as much electricity as a small country.
Alex de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam School of Business and Economics and founder of the website Digiconomist, which has long reported on the energy demands of technology like Bitcoin, has published initial research in a commentary piece in the journal Joule on AI’s potential future energy demand.
Although AI has been around since the 1950s, the past two years have seen rapid growth of this technology with tools like ChatGPT making headlines. But de Vries warns that this technology requires a lot of electricity to train and run, and this is only going to go up as AI becomes more prevalent.
“Looking at the growing demand for AI service, it’s very likely that energy consumption related to AI will significantly increase in the coming years,” de Vries said, as reported by ScienceDaily.
According to de Vries, training AI is one of the most energy-consuming processes of using this technology. For instance, Hugging Face, an AI company, shared that one of its AI models alone, BigScience Large Open-Science Open-Access Multilingual (BLOOM), needed 433 MWh of electricity for training. That’s enough energy to power about 40 average U.S. households for a year, Euronews reported.
After training, AI goes through an inference phase, where users put in their questions and AI generates responses based on these new prompts. This also requires a lot of energy. De Vries wrote, “Research firm SemiAnalysis suggested that OpenAI required 3,617 of NVIDIA’s HGX A100 servers, with a total of 28,936 graphics processing units (GPUs), to support ChatGPT, implying an energy demand of 564 MWh per day.”
Although some AI-developing companies have expressed plans to make their tools more energy-efficient, de Vries warned that this could just increase how frequently AI is used, ultimately negating any benefits from improved efficiency.
“By 2027 worldwide AI-related electricity consumption could increase by 85.4–134.0 TWh of annual electricity consumption from newly manufactured servers. This figure is comparable to the annual electricity consumption of countries such as the Netherlands, Argentina and Sweden,” de Vries said on Digiconomist. “While this would represent half a percent of worldwide electricity consumption, it would also represent a potential significant increase in worldwide data center electricity consumption. The latter has been estimated to represent one percent of worldwide electricity consumption.”
De Vries further warned that AI has limitations and shouldn’t be used for everything, especially considering its privacy concerns and high energy demand. Instead, he said companies should be mindful of how they utilize this technology, only using it when it is really necessary or so beneficial that the costs are outweighed. De Vries also recommended that policymakers consider requiring environmental disclosures for AI and AI supply chains.
Last week, Grist published a special multimedia project exploring the many tools that cities have at their disposal to prepare for one of climate change’s deadliest impacts: extreme heat.
But as we’ve discussed in this newsletter, promising adaptations to extreme heat abound, and many cities and towns are already planning for a hotter future and implementing life-saving measures like cool roofs, green corridors, and tree-equity plans. Early on in Grist’s planning for a summer of extreme heat coverage, Jake Bittle was interested in taking a comprehensive look at the solutions that are out there. Meanwhile, Naveena Sadasivam wanted to explore how cities in the hottest parts of the world have harnessed clever design principles to keep cool.
“We were like, ‘What if we just did a thing about how to redesign an entire city for heat?’” Jake recalls. The result: a multimedia project that envisions a combination of heat-proofing strategies used together to build more resilient — and low-carbon — living spaces.
The pair teamed up and reached out to city planners, architects, and other experts to get a full picture of the landscape of heat solutions — and they and their editors quickly decided that the project should be a visual one. They collaborated with artist Florencia Fuertes to help bring the solutions into full view.
The finished product examines different heat-proofing measures grouped by the types of locations where they would be implemented: city centers, residential areas, or commercial zones. And for each, you can explore a futuristic rendering of what an area could look like if it were heat-proofed to the fullest extent.
Throughout the reporting, a few themes emerged. “People kept saying over and over again, ‘You don’t have to find a bespoke and crazy gizmo for each part of the urban environment,’” Jake says.
The principles of shade, green space, water, airflow, and good insulation and energy-efficiency in buildings were repeatedly mentioned — things that generally are not that hard or high-tech, and often come with additional benefits besides cooling. But while adding shade and plants and maximizing energy efficiency may seem straightforward, they’re still interventions that require planning and resources.
“The challenge is in the implementation,” Naveena says, adding that “a lot of these solutions have to be tailored to the geographic location — the specific city or community or neighborhood that you’re talking about.” For instance, in a desert city like Phoenix, relying on water to help keep cool wouldn’t make the most sense. Paris, on the other hand, found a cooling solution in a network of pipes that draw cold water from the Seine River to buildings throughout the city.
Although heat-proofing will take time — and money — Jake and Naveena found that the experts they spoke to shared a great amount of consensus around the solutions. Compared with other climate issues, like flooding, wildfires, or decarbonization, they didn’t find much debate or controversy about what needs to be done to better prepare cities for extreme heat, which they said was encouraging.
We’ve excerpted just a few of the solutions that Jake and Naveena found most interesting throughout their reporting. You can explore many more, along with 360-degree views of what they could look like all together, here.
— Claire Elise Thompson
Cooling towers stick up above a cluster of buildings, illustrated by Florencia Fuertes.
SHADED STRUCTURES: Waiting 20 minutes for the bus in triple-digit weather isn’t just unpleasant — it can be dangerous. Bus stops, train stations, and other outdoor transit facilities are some of the biggest heat pinch points in the urban environment. The easiest way to address this risk is to install shade structures. But urban planners told Grist communities need to make sure these are big enough to fit more than a person or two if they hope to increase ridership: Earlier this year, Los Angeles debuted a prototype called La Sombrita, which was designed to provide shade to people at bus stops in places where the city couldn’t build full shelters. But the structure was so skinny that it couldn’t block out the sun for more than one person at a time.
COOLING TOWERS: Wind catchers, tall chimney-like towers attached to the sides of homes and buildings, are great passive cooling systems and make use of pressure differences within a building to increase ventilation. These “Barjeel” towers are a common sight in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries. Air entering the building is cooled down through wet cloths; warmer air inside the structure rises and escapes through towers. The wind catchers are typically four-sided, although cylindrical, hexahedral, and tetrahedral towers also exist. A variation of this idea is the solar chimney, which has been around for centuries. A chimney structure made with heat-absorbing materials such as glass or metals is used to heat a specific section of air within a building. As the hot air rises, it creates a natural vertical ventilation flow that circulates cool air.
WASTE HEAT CAPTURE: In addition to creating a large buffer around industrial facilities, companies can also cut down on waste heat by investing in heat capture technology. A heat exchanger at a big factory can suck up leaking heat and cycle it back into the facility, which also cuts down on energy demand. This capture can make a building more energy-efficient by capturing the 20 to 50 percent of energy that gets wasted as heat. One estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that catching the usable waste heat in the U.S. could generate 7.6 gigawatts of power, enough juice for millions of homes.
Another solution that Jake and Naveena found was green walls — a concept similar to green roofs that involves covering the walls of tall buildings with ivy or other plants that block the sun’s rays and help to keep the outside air tool. They also add beautification. Here’s an example in Tokyo, Japan.
This story is co-published with Arizona Luminaria and is part of The Human Cost of Conservation, a Grist series on Indigenous rights and protected areas. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
On a breezy spring day, Lorraine Eiler, a member of the Hia-Ced O’odham tribe, walked with me around the border of Quitobaquito Springs — a strawberry-shaped oasis in the Sonoran Desert near Pima County, Arizona. Her family has lived in the area for generations.
“If you do research on Quitobaquito, the majority of times you will read about the cattlemen that lived here in the area, about the people that went through Quitobaquito,” she said. “You hear nothing about the fact that it’s an old Indian village. It was abundant. Now, it’s just … well, you see what it looks like.”
The first thing you notice most about Quitobaquito Springs is the trees. It’s the only source of water for miles in the desert and the lush vegetation around it is stark against the dry tan and khaki landscape and occasional organ pipe cactus. The second thing you notice: the border wall, 30 feet tall, just feet from the water’s edge. I asked Eiler how the landscape compares to her early memories of the site.
“Barren,” she said. “Very, very barren.”
For thousands of years, people have used Quitobaquito as a place to trade, to grow food, and to rest. The springs also provided water for animals in a region where it’s hard to come by. Quitobaquito’s springs are still sacred to O’odham people today and several of Eiler’s relatives, for example, are buried here.
“It has always been a place of refuge, a place of survival for anybody and anything that’s ever crossed through that territory,” said Amy Juan, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Tohono O’odham Hemajkam Rights Network, a collective of college students and youth focused on issues impacting Tohono O’odham peoples.
In the 1900s, the springs and the surrounding area were selected by the U.S. government for conservation and given one of the highest levels of environmental protection in the world. But today, Quitobaquito’s sacred springs are drying up. So what went wrong?
Quitobaquito Springs is part of the O’odham people’s traditional homelands — especially the Tohono and Hia-Ced O’odham nations. Before it was part of a National Park, before Arizona became a state in 1912, and even before there was an international border, the springs were really more like a marsh. Water flowed into the wetlands, feeding the gardens of squash, corn, and melons in the middle of the desert.
But settlers, warfare, and political decisions in the 1800s dispossessed the O’odham of their lands and carved the region into pieces. First, the U.S.–Mexico border split O’odham communities, separating families and cutting people off from their lands. Decades later, the U.S. government seized O’odham lands by congressional act, and, without a treaty, pushed the Tohono O’odham onto a reservation. Meanwhile, lawmakers created more policies intended to protect Quitobaquito’s fragile ecosystem. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt used the newly claimed lands surrounding Quitobaquito Springs to create Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
In the early days of the National Park Service, parks were mostly created with entertainment, sightseeing, and aesthetic beauty in mind. The agency believed that these areas should be kept wild, and protected from human interference.
But what they missed was that places like Quitobaquito were already a product of thousands of years of human maintenance — and that the park still had people in it. For instance, the Oroscos, a Hia-Ced O’odham family, were living in Quitobaquito Springs at the time when the park was created. They stayed in the area long after many tribal members were pushed out.
The family’s animals, buildings, and machinery didn’t match the agency’s vision of a wild, peopleless park. Finally, after decades of pressure, the National Park Service purchased the land for $13,000, bulldozed the Oroscos’ home, dug out a bigger collecting pond for water from the spring, and built a parking lot nearby to attract visitors.
“There was this idea that you would take the people out of living in these protected spaces, but they could come and they could visit and they could enjoy the natural environment, and we would protect that environment up to an extent,” said Rebecca Tsosie, an attorney and professor at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona. “But Indigenous presence is vital to the stewardship of the land.”
Without livestock to graze by the water’s edge, cattails invaded the pond, decreasing water flow. The decrease in water flow led to sediment build up, and in 1962, that increased sediment prompted park officials to dredge the pond. But dredging made the water too deep and too cold for the Sonoyta pupfish, one of the two endangered species endemic to the area. This forced the Park Service to build a kind of shelf in the pond so the fish could live in warmer waters.
At the same time, the nearby parking lot meant visitors had easy access to the water, and one park visitor released a golden shiner into the pond — a fish so well suited to the springs it started outcompeting the pupfish and driving it toward extinction. Once park officials realized this, they removed the pupfish, poisoned the pond to get rid of the golden shiners, refilled the pond, and then put the pupfish back in.
On a recent visit to Quitobaquito, I managed to spy a few pupfish — brown slivers of movement in the shallow waters of the springs. Tyler Coleman, a biologist and researcher with the National Park Service, told me that one of the biggest threats to the species today is low water levels. Ever since the 1990s, which saw a long term drought in the region, Quitobaquito has been drying up.
“So the little water that is produced in the Sonoran Desert is really valuable,” he told me. He pointed to the main springhead, a trickle of water which he described as a crack in the side of the mountain. “Any amount lost is going to be a problem.”
The decline of the springs has been attributed to drought, climate change, and the expansion of nearby farming that taps into the natural underground aquifers.
Then the border wall came.
In 2020, the U.S. government began building the controversial wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, 30 feet high, that cut across the entire southern edge of the park. Crews drilled for groundwater near the declining springs that they used to make cement.
“Unfortunately, during that period of time, the water levels started going down and the pond itself right in the center just became dry, which was something new,” Eiler said.
It’s not entirely clear if border wall construction caused water levels to drop. And we may never know, because the Trump administration waived all environmental assessments in the name of national security.
“The United States has some of the best environmental laws of any nation in the world,” said Tsosie. “But on the border, they wanted a full-scale, speedy construction of the border wall. So they bypassed all of those things.”
In 2022, the Park Service relined the pond, with support from the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, a nonprofit organization that Lorraine Eiler works with. People from U.S. government agencies and the Tohono O’odham nation worked to delicately scoop the turtles and pupfish into holding tanks until the lining was replaced and the pond was refilled.
But restoration is ongoing and it’s not yet clear whether or not these efforts will restore water levels — or how long that fix will last.
“Whatever was here is gone,” Eiler said. “We can try to make it. We’ll never get to the point of what it used to look like. And it all depends on water.”
Around the world, in the face of biodiversity loss and climate change, there are calls to expand protected areas like Quitobaquito — though, as the springs show, a designation doesn’t guarantee protection. Last December, 196 countries agreed to “30×30,” a global goal to conserve 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by 2030. The U.S. has its own version of that project, called “America the Beautiful.” Many of the areas targeted for protection under these policies are in Indigenous territories or on lands integral to Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods, and many have not sought consent from those communities or integrated their knowledge or practices in protection plans.
“I think a lot of the border violence, a lot of the impacts on the Tohono O’odham, those are invisible when you’re visiting [Quitobaquito],” Tsosie said. “That cultural landscape is part of the environmental landscape. And we need to steward that and protect it and care for it just as we do those endangered species.”
Amy Juan agrees that Quitobaquito needs to be protected, but from a country that has caused more harm to the springs than good, not from the people who have cared for it for generations.
“Sometimes it feels out of our hands,” she said. “But what we can control and what we can continue to do is make sure that we maintain these traditions, these ceremonies, these connections, because once we let go of them, once we lose them, once we don’t maintain them, that just continues to hurt who we are as O’odham. We’re desert people. We have to take care of all these things that make us who we are.”
For millennia, the South has been shaped by its water. The bayous and brackish tributaries that drift into the Mississippi flowed with communication and commerce, while cities like Memphis and Nashville sprang up in the mouths of rivers. Suburbs grew around ports as waterways bustled. Exurbs expanded as they quieted.
Amidst these tides of progress, low-income communities have been relegated to the watery South’s “bad land — that constantly floods, that doesn’t have drainage,” said Reese May, chief strategy and innovation officer at SBP, a grassroots national recovery and resilience organization headquartered in Louisiana. When these areas are submerged, a more and more common occurrence, families who are least able to recover are hit the hardest.
May and SBP case managers watched this dilemma unfold for many years in Louisiana, as they helped New Orleans slowly rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. A full decade after the storm, May recalls a man in his 90s and his elderly daughter walking into SBP’s office. “She dragged him in the door, because he couldn’t humble himself to do it,” May said. Edward Lee was the first member of his family who was not born enslaved. He volunteered for combat duty in World War II, signing up “to serve his country at a time when his country would not stand up for him,” May said. By the time May met him, Lee had been displaced from the home he built over 10 years.
It only took SBP two phone calls to find the money to rebuild Lee’s house. “There was an enormous celebration. People were so proud of us. And it really felt gross,” he said. “That man suffered for a decade for something we might have solved in one year.” Lee’s experience sticks with May because “it reminds me of the importance not just of rebuilding a home, but of understanding why it doesn’t get rebuilt.”
Residents in LaPlace, Louisiana ride in the back of a high-water rescue truck as rain from Hurricane Ida floods their neighborhood in August 2021. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
As SBP expanded its recovery work to communities hit by natural disasters in New York and Texas, employees like May saw family after family wrestle with complications with FEMA payouts and denied insurance claims. The repercussions are rippling: Damage from natural hazards like flooding is a major contributor to national wealth gaps, amplifying existing disparities.
Across the country, flooding is a growing risk — both in how high waters surge, and as a new hazard in areas previously unlikely to be inundated. As storms arrive more frequently, flood insurance and disaster relief programs themselves are now failing.
Yet most homeowner policies do not cover flood damage, requiring families to acquire an entirely different, second insurance plan. Most of these are purchased through a government-backed program called National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP. “Private markets pulled back from flood decades ago,” Kousky explained.
But as prices surge, hundreds of thousands of people have dropped their flood insurance, growing the burden on federal disaster assistance and straining its already stretched budgets. Many are falling through the cracks.The lack of clarity on what assistance will be available from insurance or disaster relief prevents many families from receiving the aid they need. After New England’s flooding this summer, for instance, residents who received money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, in 2011 during the last once-in-a-century storm are only just realizing unmet insurance requirements mean they are ineligible for further emergency assistance.
These widespread hurdles are why SBP has stopped measuring success by how many buildings they could help reconstruct. Instead, May said, “We started thinking about what we could do to prevent a survivor from needing our help in the first place.”
The majority of natural disasters in the United States already involve flooding. It’s a problem that will get worse with sea-level rise and more intense rain events. By 2050, coastlines will see a national average of 45 to 85 days per year of high-tide flooding. Meanwhile inland, rivers and streams are spilling over their banks more frequently, a type of flooding projected to increase by as much as 30 percent as temperatures rise. Extreme rain is also becoming more common: Peer-reviewed data from the First Street Foundation, a climate research nonprofit, suggests about 20 percent of the country will now see a “once in a century” rainfall about every 25 years.
Laura Humphrey walks a wheelbarrow to a pile of debris while volunteering to clean up flood damage in Perry County, eastern Kentucky in 2022. Michael Swensen/Getty Images
Despite this risk, just 4 percent of homeowners in the U.S. have flood insurance. Even those who do pay for flood protection are often misinformed about their property’s risk.
FEMA produces maps that designate which houses are in a 100-year floodplain, estimated to have a 1 percent chance of flooding in any particular year. Homeowners in these areas with federally-backed mortgages are required to purchase flood insurance. While a few private companies still offer their own policies, the vast majority of coverage that Americans buy is through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program. Introduced in 1968 after Hurricane Betsy, the country’s first billion-dollar hurricane, the federal program was intended to help provide affordable flood insurance, and in turn address the ballooning expenses of post-disaster relief.
Funded by the government and delivered through private companies,the NFIP program will insure up to $250,000 of building damage. (That limit has not changed since 1994, when the average cost to build a house was $154,000.) But as massive storms like Katrina and Sandy become more frequent, the program has run $20 billion into the red; last year, its interest on that liability alone was $280 million.
Thanks to climate change, the problem is compounding. “Frequent high-cost flooding will prevent the NFIP from paying its debt,” a recent FEMA report warned. This is partly because the NFIP cannot refuse to insure properties, something critics have long suggested encourages building — and rebuilding — in vulnerable places. By law, it also cannot raise rates for most policies by more than 18 percent a year. “We want to maintain cheaper insurance than it actually costs to pay all those losses,” said Carolyn Kousky, the associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Though FEMA’s flood maps influence everything from people’s insurance rates to where development occurs, they haven’t been doing a good job of capturing changing risks. Between 2015 and 2019, 40 percent of NFIP claims were outside of FEMA’s flood hazard zones. The agency is supposed to update its maps every five years, but delays are common, and pressure from local residents seeking to develop or politicians eager for larger tax bases can influence their extent. These maps use historical meteorological data that doesn’t take climate change into account.
Floodwater surrounds a farm in March 2019 near Craig, Missouri. Scott Olson/Getty Images
To help address some of these concerns, FEMA recently decided to change its assessments for the first time since the 1980s. Roy Wright, the former chief executive of the National Flood Insurance Program who kickstarted the process back in 2015, says the agency’s new Risk Rating 2.0 Program will incorporate more sophisticated models, improve the agency’s accuracy, and catch up to private insurers, who have long used more advanced techniques. The new methodology, which began in 2021 and rolled out to all of NFIP’s policies in the spring of 2023, now considers rainfall-driven flooding, and includes factors like individual property value, and the cost to rebuild.
One of FEMA’s goals with these changes was to more fairly price its insurance. But while nearly a quarter of NFIP policyholders saw their premiums go down, on average its rates increased. Policies in some states like Louisiana and Florida spiked by more than 500 percent, phased in over years. “There is no greater risk communication tool than a pricing signal,” Wright said. But “people don’t like to know that they’re at risk. And they most assuredly don’t like it when there’s a price for it.” Ten states and many smaller municipalities are now suing to block these higher premiums.
Insurance experts like Kousky think Risk Rating 2.0 is just one of many steps still required to improve the program. “Risk Rating 2.0 was very necessary,” she said, “but it needed to be coupled with an affordability program.” She thinks a safety-net plan is essential to help cover the rising costs of flood insurance — both for lower-income homeowners, and the mortgage creditors who stabilize the economy. Wright agrees further changes are needed, pointing out that Congressional limits on NFIP payouts have not even kept up with inflation. “If you want to have an affordability program, you’ve got to pay for it,” he said, adding that to do so, Congress will have to stop relying on insufficient premium revenues.
Yet the government has continually kicked these decisions down the road through short-term extensions of the NFIP program, which was set to expire again this fall. In September, the Mortgage Brokers Association wrote in a letter to Congress that allowing this was an “imminent threat” for real estate markets, and that better long-term solutions were overdue. “MBA members are very concerned that private property insurance has reached a point of critical market dislocation,” the letter said. The program almost ground to a halt along with government funding during the Republican stand-off at the end of September. A lapse in the NFIP, which would disrupt thousands of real estate transactions a day, was only avoided by a temporary 45-day extension. In the meantime, a slew of major disasters this summer had depleted FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, running the agency into debt and forcing it to restrict its activities in August. As part of the last-minute temporary spending package, Congress approved an additional $16 billion for disaster relief — just in time for New York City to face a deluge that raised water levels so high a sea lion escaped from its enclosure at the Central Park Zoo.
New Yorkers wade through flooded streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn following heavy rains in late September. Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The close calls demonstrate just how unstable these systems are. As storms repeatedly swamp what was formerly dry land, someone is going to have to pay for flooding. Reinsurance company SwissRe recently found that although improvements in Florida’s building code have reduced annual losses expected from hurricanes by 90 percent, those gains have been “dwarfed” by increased exposures, primarily from a big surge in population living in risky areas. But conversations about the only true alternative — managed retreat, or encouraging communities to relocate — have been halting.
“Our responses are always punctuated by disasters,” Kousky said. After a catastrophe like Hurricane Andrew, for example, insurance prices go up, the number of companies writing policies goes down, and the role of regulators was thought to be to help protect consumers from that type of volatility. “But the prior expectation was that everything would re-calibrate post-disaster — as time went on, more capital would flow into the market.”
Now, she said, it’s not just that “insurers had to get through the shock of having such high levels of losses — they are now actually fundamentally rethinking the trajectory of risk.”
As the country’s insurance system flounders, companies are getting stricter with their payouts. Many homeowners are finding out they have sub-limits — conditions that exclude broad categories of damage, like mold, or policies that only kick in if a storm is named — after a disaster. “People go to rebuild, and they find out that they actually have insufficient amounts of money to get back on their feet,” Kousky said.
That gut-wrenching experience turned Douglas Quinn’s dream of living on the water into a nightmare. He had carefully checked FEMA’s flood zones before purchasing a home on the shore in Toms River, New Jersey, in 2011. The 50-year-old house had never flooded, but with its beachfront location, Quinn, a financial advisor, chose to buy the NFIP’s maximum coverage amount of $250,000. As Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey, he waded out of his new home, shocked at how deep the water had risen. The dark night was illuminated only by flashes from downed power lines shorting out.
Douglas Quinn stands in floodwater outside his home in Toms River, New Jersey in 2012. Courtesy of Douglas Quinn
A little over a year after he moved in, Quinn had lost almost everything he owned to the storm. At first, he wasn’t worried. “I believed in insurance,” he said. His insurance company sent an engineer out to assess his damage. They claimed the foundation damage was not from the pressure of the water, but rather a pre-existing problem from movement in the supporting soils — something excluded from his flood policy. But Quinn had done a pre-purchase inspection, so he had proof the cracks were new. “In the beginning, I’m just kind of thinking, well, it’s a mistake,” he recalled. “I just need to show them the pictures.”
He and his teenage daughter lived out of his car while they tried to get through the paperwork and find a temporary place to rent. Despite his meticulous appeal, FEMA sided with the insurance company. (The nonprofit New York Legal Assistance group found that in post-Sandy appeals, the agency sided against homeowners 92 percent of the time.) Along with over 1,600 other homeowners, Quinn filed a lawsuit. It was still pending when New York’s new attorney general launched a criminal inquiry, uncovering evidence that engineering reports had been routinely changed by insurance companies to lower claims, prompting FEMA to review all damage claims from the hurricane. “It is intentional. It is a strategy. And it happens all over the country,” Quinn said.
Because of this experience, he left his career in finance to become the executive director of an insurance watchdog organization, American Policyholder Association. In 2021, the association was working with whistleblowers within the Florida insurance industry. They filed an extensive report about similarly altered assessments to the state Office of Insurance Regulation, where it sat for months. Then Hurricane Ian hit — and new homeowners started running into the same hurdles. In the aftermath, insurers or the vendors they hire to help process claims have been aggressive in their attempts to reduce claims, in some cases directly modifying reports to lower payouts. One such case downgraded a $60,000 estimate for roof repairs to roughly $3,000, according to Quinn.
The Insurance Commissioner of Florida at the time, David Altmaier, resigned December 28, 2022 — days before a new anti-lobbying law went into effect, banning former agency heads from a ‘revolving door’ into lucrative positions as lobbyists for six years. In March of 2023, Altmaier announced his new position as a lobbyist at the Southern Group, where he says he’ll “leverage over a decade of experience to help insurance and insurance-adjacent entities navigate the complex world of regulation.”
A resident of Seabrook, Texas sits in his house following the removal all waterlogged carpeting, flooring, and lower dry wall after Hurricane Ike in 2008. Nick de la Torre/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
These kinds of widespread insurance practices worsen existing disparities; research shows Black homeowners pay higher premiums than nonwhite homeowners. May at SBP says that his clients regularly see similar biases in FEMA payouts, with people of color receiving far less for the same amount of damage. To make things worse, many Black property owners have inherited their homes, and can face challenges documenting their title, making it more difficult to file claims. Racial differences in who owns homes add to this gap: nationwide, 56 percent percent of Black families rent, compared to 28 percent of white families.
And flooding often hits neighborhoods with high numbers of renters hardest. When a landlord’s insurance costs skyrocket, that’s often passed on to tenants through rent increases. While FEMA does offer some flood insurance for renters, many do not purchase it, leaving their own property losses unprotected. And some rental situations, like removing a destroyed mobile home from rented land, are not covered at all. “When people don’t get paid, it’s a generational loss,” said Quinn.
Even with his financial background, navigating the insurance claims process during the years he was trying to piece his life back together almost broke him. “I had days when I couldn’t get out of bed,” he said. These difficulties are why May and SBP are now advocating for changes to disaster relief, including creating a single application for disaster assistance that would streamline sharing information between the federal, state, and local agencies that survivors often bounce between for years.
Meanwhile, in New York City, a unique partnership is now trying out a small pilot program to help get people recovery funds more quickly after a flood. In a collaboration that includes the Environmental Defense Fund, SBP, broker Guy Carpenter, and major insurance company Swiss Re, the team launched a parametric insurance scheme this summer. If particular metrics are hit — a combination of factors like a certain amount of rainfall or flood footprint — an automatic payment of up to $15,000, depending on the severity of the flood, will be issued to low-income families and can be used for anything the family needs. Once an event that meets the program’s requirements occurs, its application portal will open, and families who live in certain neighborhoods will be able to apply for these payments.
With this kind of approach, “You don’t have to send a loss adjuster weeks after the event to assess how much damage there was, and then fight with your insurance company,” Kousky of the Environmental Defense Fund explained. She hopes the program, the first of its kind in the United States, will be able to scale up quickly. It is funded through a joint program between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.
A homeowner in the Breezy Point section of Queens, New York tries to dry out her waterlogged wedding album following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty Images
New solutions are sorely overdue. In 2023, there have already been 24 disasters that cost more than $1 billion in damages, a new national record. Yet since the pandemic began, the number of people moving into the most-flood prone counties have more than doubled, putting an additional 400,000 Americans at risk. “We need a collage of solutions,” Kousky said, “because there’s not just one thing that will solve [the insurance crisis].”
In the meantime, once again in the midst of hurricane season, Quinn catches himself constantly looking out his window at the water, checking to make sure it’s not rising. After seven years, he was finally able to return to his house — and it’s now built 10 feet higher. But the trauma of losing his faith in the financial systems he thought protected him hasn’t dissipated. “It’s a storm after the storm,” he said. “When that safety net fails, what you go through is devastating. And nobody talks about it.”
Flooding can destroy a house in a night, but the full tragedy, Quinn said, takes years to unfold. “The news crews show up in their windbreakers, they find the worst damage that they can stand in front of while they shoot. And then poof, they’re gone,” he said. “Nobody follows what the survivors go through — the months and years of slow, grinding recovery.”
