Community leaders in Portland, Maine are preparing for a growing number of Central American "climate refugees."

Intense storms and drought in the region have devastated many subsistence farms and indigenous areas, forcing people to head north in search of food and shelter.

Crystal Cron, executive director of Presente! Maine, said not all migrants are chasing the American dream.

"Why would people want to leave their homes in such huge droves if they didn't have to?" said Cron.

Portland has long been a resettlement hub for asylum seekers. More than 1,000 arrived in Portland in the first half of 2023 alone.

Cron said climate refugees are joining those already fleeing violence in their home countries and that the U.S. has a responsibility to care for them.

Gov. Janet Mills says these new Mainers could help relieve worker shortages in healthcare, education and construction. Her office has set a target of attracting 75,000 new workers in the next several years.

Kristina Egan, executive director of the Greater Portland Council of Governments, said the state should welcome the people who can help build its future.

"We need some changes to our infrastructure - more housing, more public transportation," said Egan. "But we also need some changes to our mindset so that we in Maine can really open our arms to this great possibility."

Egan said the state already faces a housing crisis but will need to ensure that sprawl doesn't eat up vital agricultural land needed to feed a growing population heading north.

By Liz Carey for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for Kentucky News Connection for the Daily Yonder-Public News Service Collaboration

In the wake of Hurricane Helene flooding areas of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, a new research study hopes to not only determine what causes flash flooding in the mountainous areas of Appalachia, but how to prepare residents for coming disasters.

In 2022, flash floods hit the hills of eastern Kentucky leaving in their wake, millions of dollars of devastation. A new research project at the University of Kentucky hopes to dive into what happened during that event and how planners can use that information to be better prepared in the future.

The four-year project will look at flash flooding in the small headwater streams in Appalachia. Part of a $77.8 million investment by the National Science Foundation into infrastructure improvements in the face of climate change, the study will bring together researchers from UK, the University of Louisville, Eastern Kentucky University, West Virginia University and Marshall University. Using sensors in streams and data from the Robison Forest, a teaching, research and extension forest in the Cumberland Plateau, researchers use the information they gather to identify specific issues related to flash floods.

Kenton Sena, Ph.D., co-principal investigator and lecturer at UK, said sensors in the forest have been accumulating data for more than 50 years. The data will help them dig deeper into the temperatures, precipitation and weather conditions prior to flooding events which can lead to a better understanding of flooding scenarios. While national weather data can give researchers a daily precipitation amount, he said, the data from the Robinson Forest can give them hourly precipitation amounts.

“We can get a little bit more information out of the data like what kind of storm was this, was this a really intense thunderstorm where it rained cats and dogs for three hours and then stopped, or was this a more chill storm event that lasted for the whole day and was more gentle and less intense, because obviously the watershed will respond differently to those different scenarios with respect to flooding,” he said in an interview with the Daily Yonder.

Between July 25 and July 29, 2022, eastern Kentucky was hit with what the National Weather Service called the deadliest non-tropical weather event in the U.S. since the 1970s.

The rains started on July 25, but by the next morning, flash flood reports started coming in. Rains in excess of four inches an hour fell across 13 counties, inundating the area with upwards of 16 inches of rain.

By the evening of July 28 buildings, mobile homes and cars were swept down the valley as a wall of water left roads and bridges impassable and some residents trapped on hillsides. In the end, 45 people died and nearly 1,400 required rescuing. All 13 counties were declared federal disaster areas with nearly 9,000 homes damaged or destroyed and hundreds of families relocated to temporary shelters.

In 2023, a report from the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center found that rebuilding the homes damaged in the 2022 flood would cost about $450 million, but relocating and replacing many of the homes to less flood-prone areas would raise the total to more than $950 million. 

It’s not the first time the area had seen catastrophic flooding. According to a report by the Federal Reserve of Cleveland, the 13 county area has seen flooding 27 times. 

The study may also help scientists better understand flooding in other areas, like the Hurricane Helene disaster in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. In September, tropical storms leftover from Hurricane Helene besieged the Great Smoky Mountains. Already saturated from days of storms prior to Helene’s arrival, some areas received nearly 30 inches of rain causing streams to overflow their banks and take out anything in their path.

The storm left at least 224 dead — 96 from North Carolina and 17 from Tennessee. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Wednesday the storm caused more than $53 billion in damage. The state said the storm and its aftermath caused 1,400 landslides and damaged more than 160 water and sewer systems, 6,000 miles of roads, more than 1,000 bridges and culverts and an estimated 126,000 homes. In his request to the North Carolina legislature, Cooper asked for $3.9 billion to begin the process of rebuilding.

“Helene is the deadliest and most damaging storm ever to hit North Carolina,“ said Cooper. “This storm left a trail of destruction in our beautiful mountains that we will not soon forget, but I know the people of Western North Carolina are determined to build back better than ever.”

While the research can help with planning and prevention in the future, Sena said, the initial goal of the research is to save lives.

“We can look at what if we have a 2-inch rain event in three hours? We can look at what kinds of flood risk we’d be looking at,” he said. “And I think that helps us to build out the kind of predictive framework that we really need in order to move to a phase three which would be an on-the-ground meaningful warning (system) that will hopefully give folks time to evacuate.”

Additionally, he said, the researchers will be able to determine how best to communicate the threats to rural residents in a way that is meaningful to them.

“We’ll be working together… to better understand how the local community members would prefer to receive and distribute that kind of information,” he said. “Whatever we develop will hopefully be useful and ready to implement.”


Liz Carey wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

This week, world leaders gather in Baku, Azerbaijan for the 29th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP29. Last year’s global climate conference broke new ground as the first to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from food, with over 100 countries signing a key declaration to deliver change in their food sectors by 2025. Food systems are responsible for a third of global emissions, mostly driven by meat, especially beef. Yet even as a chorus of researchers repeatedly stress the urgency of fixing our broken food systems, only a fraction of the countries who pledged support have made any progress.

Many Countries Still Need to Update Climate Plans, Despite Pledges

At COP28, 160 countries signed on to the UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. These countries play a significant role — the 160 make up 70 percent of farmers and 80 percent of emissions from agriculture. A key point of the declaration: the countries committed to adding agriculture and food systems into their national climate plans — also known as “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDCs). In other words, the agreement promised a concrete commitment to reduce food-related emissions.

Yet progress has been slow. Based on estimates, there are roughly just 40 countries on track to have a revised NDC in time for COP30 in Belém, Brazil next year, Edward Davey, a senior advisor for The Food and Land Use Coalition at the World Resources Institute (WRI), tells Sentient. That means 120 countries haven’t done any work to incorporate food into national climate plans so far.

While Davey says he is “very proud” of what was achieved at COP28 — calling it “a privilege to be involved in a supporting role to the UAE government as it brokered the food declaration” — he also expressed concern: “we do very much need to deliver on that declaration,” he wrote to Sentient in a subsequent email, stressing the critical importance of all 160 countries bringing revised NDCs to Brazil.

One country that has signaled they will bring a revised NDC to this year’s COP is the United Kingdom. The UK cannot possibly meet its net zero goals by 2035 and beyond if it doesn’t address diet shifts, Davey says.

And this isn’t just the case for the UK. Researchers at the World Resources Institute have warned that Global North countries cannot meet their international climate commitments without making dietary change — that is, shifting to more plant-forward diets — part of the solution.

For his part, Davey has recommended “forcefully” to the UK Government that its revised national climate plan should include solutions that address the way we farm and the way we eat. Davey cites strategies like better land management, changes to feed, reducing herd sizes, reducing food loss and waste precision breeding, among others. But dietary change — “people of the UK eating less meat per capita” — has to be in the mix too, he says.

There are obvious challenges. Shifting diets and the politics of meat consumption is a contentious subject in the UK, just as it is in the United States. And yet, meat consumption in the Global North plays a massive role in driving global emissions.

There are roughly 20 Global North countries –– including the UK and United States –– that contribute the majority of global agricultural and land use emissions, Davey says. “I think the UAE Declaration will succeed or fail [depending on] whether those 20 or so countries come back to Belém next year with a serious, quantifiable goal of food [and land use] management.”

At COP28, food system pledges also came from businesses and foundations. More than $7 billion was allocated last year from the UAE, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund among others. Jeff Bezos’ foundation committed $57 million into climate food solutions such as reducing methane emissions from livestock. Further, more than 200 non-state actors, including businesses, financial institutions and farmers, signed up to the a UN Call to Action to transform food systems. Large food companies like Nestle and Danone were also signatories.

The United Nations Roadmap Faces Delays and Scrutiny

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced a three-part roadmap for food systems at last year’s conference — aimed at curbing food-related emissions while also addressing global food security concerns. The UN has predicted the world’s population will hit 9.7 billion by the year 2050, so an ongoing global food system challenge is figuring out how to feed nearly 10 billion people without making climate pollution even worse.

The roadmap is supposed to illuminate a path forward — a way for countries to mesh food system change with climate and health goals.

Here too, however, progress has stalled. The full version of the first part of the roadmap has been very delayed and the current “brief” version has also drawn criticism. Experts from the U.S., Brazil and Norway published a comment in Nature earlier this year critiquing the roadmaps various “missed opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions reductions,” among other issues. The guidelines on how to sustainably increase productivity in the Global South, while still protecting the environment, has also been left ambiguous, notes Beatriz Luraschi, a policy analyst at the European Climate Foundation.

Another setback to the roadmap was a letter to the FAO signed by more than 100 academics, calling for a controversial livestock “Pathways” report published at COP28 to be retracted over unclear and inaccurate methods. They called for the release of the roadmap to be “delayed until the FAO has engaged in serious dialogue with experts and civil society in a reflective process to assess what went wrong in the Pathways report,” as well as an overhaul of the FAO’s internal review processes.

That Pathways report seemingly promoted growing the livestock industry while ignoring emissions. The authors of a study mentioned in the report also spoke out separately, saying the FAO report “distorted” their research and underestimated the climate impact of reducing meat consumption.

These criticisms “cast a shadow over the roadmap,” says Davey, who is hopeful for the roadmap’s next installment.

The first two parts of the roadmap — both global and regional “pathways” — are due to be published at COP29. However, so far there has been no formal review or consultations with stakeholders, Luraschi says, so it’s still unclear whether the FAO will address the raised concerns in the new reports.

The Launch of a Dedicated Food Transformation Coalition

Despite the slow movement elsewhere, one coalition has made progress. The Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF) comprising Norway, Brazil, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Cambodia, was born at last year’s COP to drive change in their country’s prospective food systems. The Alliance is “incredibly powerful [and] one of the best things that happened at COP28,” Davey says.

Supported in part by the Bezos Earth Fund, The Alliance acts across ten key priority areas to transform food systems, including food waste reduction and gender parity advancement. These sweeping focus areas are significant, says Clem Perry, director of partnerships for the Food and Land Use Coalition which acts as part of the ACF’s Secretariat, as each of these individual countries face their own unique challenges. “The production, the consumption, the trade flows, the land use challenges, the nutrition [and] health levels and challenges are very, very different in each [Alliance] country,” Perry tells Sentient.

Members of the Alliance spent this year in regular talks, both by phone and in person every three months, hashing out their biggest challenges and goals. “One of the most difficult trade-offs that we’ve been grappling with are those between improving or enhancing national feed production whilst not negatively impacting nature,” Perry says.

Sierra Leone has set an example of how to do this effectively by cracking down on their excessive rice imports and reforming their own national food system without encroaching on virgin rainforest. With a $100 million investment from the African Development Bank, Sierra Leone has put the infrastructure in place to increase rice production without deforesting. “In less than a year, that felt like a really significant and massive win and is exactly the kind of thing that we’re looking to replicate with other countries,” Perry says.

The hope is that countries can rally together to act as a collective to tackle food systems, Davey says, as we don’t want developed countries to simply offshore the environmental impact of farming to others. “We live in an integrated world. The decisions that one country takes [has] a bearing on another,” he says. It remains to be seen whether this week’s conference in Azerbaijan can correct the course.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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A small rural town in northwest Pennsylvania is using a combination of state and federal funds to implement "green" projects as part of its Climate Action Plan.

Meadville's plan started in 2018 by measuring its greenhouse gas emissions and setting local goals to reduce them, and to make the community more resilient.

Autumn Vogel, a member of the Meadville City Council, said an Environmental Advisory Council was created, and government funding has allowed them to open the bidding on a rooftop solar array on the Victor C. Leap Building, located downtown.

"That building just got a new roof and new utilities," Vogel explained. "It's already pretty efficient and so we will be able to do this rooftop solar installation thanks to some of the added capacity of our Shared Energy Manager; also some support we've gotten from PA Solar Center."

Vogel pointed out it has been financially feasible due to the Treasury's "direct pay" program, which will decrease the cost of the solar installation. Meadville is also one of two Pennsylvania communities, along with Reading, to receive support from the nonprofit Green Building Alliance Resilient Communities program.

Jaime Kinder, mayor of Meadville, said green projects require significant creativity and effort to secure federal and state funding, and said they've skillfully navigated the application process to get these funds. Kinder emphasized new projects now on the agenda include transportation upgrades.

"As far as something new, it would be to put solar on the fire department," Kinder noted. "We've already tried that, and we're going to keep pushing for that. And then some EVs, some charging stations. We have no public charging stations in our town. We're looking hopefully, to put some EV charging stations around 'the diamond.'"

Kinder added the Climate Action Plan also includes making Meadville more walkable, to improve accessibility and reduce car dependence. With a "Walk Works" grant, they are making plans for better crosswalks, sidewalks and bike paths.


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