Americans Towns and Cities Facing Water-Related Impacts of Climate Change

Hurricane Irene capped off—we hope—four months of punishing weather across the country. From the flooding that ravaged the Mississippi River basin to the drought that scorched the Southwest to the heat wave that gripped most of the nation, this has been a summer of extremes.

Each one of these events—hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves—happens every year, but the intensity of these familiar weather patterns has everyone wondering if what we are seeing today is climate change in devastating action.

My colleague Dan Lashof, the director of NRDC’s Climate Center and a participant in the scientific assessment of global warming through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that the extreme events we seen this year are no longer a matter of “freak weather.” Instead, he has noted the “increasingly clear links between weather events and climate change. As Dan explains, no one can say that a particular weather event was “caused” by climate change, but the odds are changing—against us.

In New York City, for instance, Hurricane Irene’s storm surges were made more damaging by the fact that the city’s sea level is about 13 inches higher than it was a century ago. While it didn’t point out that relationship, the New York Times over the weekend published an article that made the connection, entitled “Seeing Irene as a harbinger of climate change.” 

People used to talk about global warming in the future tense. But, as my colleague Kim Knowlton has written, we can see the finger prints of climate change right now in communities across the country. It already shaping people’s lives and influencing city budgets.

Some of the first and most devastating impacts of climate change will be water related, and NRDC’s newly redesigned Water Program has been focusing what that means for American towns and cities.

In the past month, for instance, we released two groundbreaking reports on the topic.

In Thirsty for Answers: Preparing for the Water-related Impacts of Climate Change in American Cities, we found that climate change is leaving communities open to a range of vulnerabilities. We looked at 12 target cities, and confirmed that fortunately, some are trying to become better prepared to deal with these changes.

Boston, for instance, has experienced an increase in relative sea level of 11.8 inches in the past 20 years. Now water development projects, such as Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Seaport Square, are placing ground floors and critical electrical and plumbing systems at higher elevations to reduce the risk of further sea-level rise.

The frequency of heavy rainfall in Chicago is expected to increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years, and without improvements to the city’s aging water infrastructure, it will dramatically expand the number of raw sewage that ends up in Lake Michigan and its beaches. In recent years, the city has turned to green infrastructure—things like pocket parks, rooftop gardens, and grassy swales—that can keep rain where it falls and prevent it from flooding sewage treatment plants. Since 2008, the city has increased permeable area—places where rain can filter right into the ground—by 20 percent in more than 265 new development projects.

For many other cities, the challenge comes not from too much water, but not enough. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, for instance, are already confronting shirking water supplies as a result of shifting snowfall in the regions they draw their water from.

The good news is that increasingly cities are planning to protect water resources, but as USA Today reported in a story that included the views of my colleague, Michelle Mehta, the Water Program also recently published a report that found that Western water shortages could become more extreme if water-intensive fossil fuel development continues to grow.

Between a Rock and a Dry Place: The Water Supply Impacts of Oil Shale Development and Climate Change on the Colorado River Basin Water Supply, concludes that oil shale drilling combined with unchecked climate change could have major impacts on a source of water for 30 million people from Wyoming to Southern California.

Water from the Colorado River Basin is already over-promised.  The supply in this drought-prone region can’t keep up with demand from farmers, ranchers, and urban water users. Climate change will intensify drought conditions and cause more precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow, leaving more communities short of water come the spring melt.

Meanwhile, getting oil out of shale rock is highly water intensive: it takes about 3 to 5 barrels of water to produce 1 barrel of oil. By the time it is burned as fuel, it releases up to three times carbon emissions as diesel.

Given the summer we have had—and health problems, property damage, and strained city budgets these weather events left in their wake—it seems foolhardy not to focus on reducing our carbon pollution.  But planning for the impacts of climate change is also indispensible.  Thirsty for Answers and Between a Rock and a Dry Place point us in the right direction.  Whether you spent the summer with too little water or too much, it’s clear the time to act is now.