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It started with a storm. And then another and another. Rain, a natural occurrence so often harmless, compounded to be anything but. The Mississippi River rose steadily month after month, and then all at once.
Then came the flood. It wasn’t biblical. It wasn’t a stunning still from a classical painting. It was an unromantic reckoning.
At its peak, the water rose nearly 20 feet above St. Louis’ flood stage, flowing fast enough to potentially fill Busch Stadium in less than 70 seconds. It drowned farmlands across multiple states, leaving behind a sea of sand that rendered soil useless and former homes uninhabitable. More than 50 died, and many more were left burdened.
This was the Great Flood of 1993, the most economically devastating natural disaster to ever strike Missouri and, at that time, the most destructive flood in modern U.S. memory.
But could the worst still be to come?
A Grim Report
In August, The United Nations released a report that UN Secretary-General António Guterres called “a code red for humanity.” The world has warmed by almost two degrees Fahrenheit, and this warming is producing worsening heat waves and storms. A few of its other findings:
- “With further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers.”
- “Cities intensify human-induced warming locally, and further urbanization together with more frequent hot extremes will increase the severity of heatwaves (very high confidence).”
- In North and Central America, “Under all future scenarios and global warming levels, temperatures and extreme high temperatures are expected to continue to increase (virtually certain) with larger warming in northern subregions.”
- “Heavy precipitation and associated flooding events are projected to become more intense and frequent in the Pacific Islands and across many regions of North America and Europe (medium to high confidence).”
In the region the report labeled Central North America, where Missouri is located, it further predicted an increase in extreme precipitation and an increase in river flooding.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came to an explicit conclusion: There’s little humans can do to stop the escalation of the climate crisis. Although we’re in a critical window to lessen the blow, devastation is inevitable, especially for coastal cities.
This comprehensive report has many Americans considering the best places to live in the coming decades. Globally, the move has already begun. In 2021, 1 percent of the world is a “barely livable hot zone,” according to The New York Times. That number could increase to 19 percent in 2070. In the African Sahel, people have already begun to move from rural areas toward the coasts due to drought.
Climate havens offer a low risk of such natural disasters as inland flooding, rising sea levels, and wildfires, among others. So, while New York City and Los Angeles may be popular destinations today, the Midwest might be the world of tomorrow.
Does St. Louis have what it takes to become a climate haven? As of now, probably not. The favorite cities for potential climate refuge—places like Minneapolis, Detroit, or Madison—are northern and thus less susceptible to the dangers of extreme heat. In 2019, Eyiul Tekin, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University, analyzed data from the Notre Dame Adaptation Initiative and found that, in the case of a climate disaster, St. Louis’ risk score was 50 out of 100. Similar cities scored an average of 39. But, our readiness score was almost 54. Other cities scored 46.
As laid bare in the UN’s report, no region is exempt from climate change, meaning there’s room for all of us to improve. Just like the rest of the world, there are key changes that St. Louis can make so that the city is more inhabitable when it matters most.
Hope for St. Louis
Despite the UN report’s message, Catherine Werner says she saw a silver lining in its consensus. Werner became the city’s first sustainability director in 2009 and since then has led the development of a comprehensive sustainability plan, adopted by the planning commission in 2013. She’s also led efforts such as the Sustainable Neighborhood Initiative, Climate Protection Initiative, Milkweeds for Monarchs: The St. Louis Butterfly Project, and an energy-efficiency financing program. The city’s climate goals include achieving carbon neutrality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions 100 percent by 2050. In 2018, it won the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge award.
“It would be one thing if there was no alternative or means to address the climate crisis, but the report balanced the direness of the situation with a strong reminder that we already have the tools we need to combat the worst impacts,” Werner notes in an email. “This left me feeling a sense of even greater urgency, but one laced with hopefulness.”
And there is hope in the UN report. In the section titled “Limiting Future Climate Change,” the authors state that this goal would require reducing “cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions.” If a global net zero CO2 emissions is achieved and sustained, the earth’s surface temperature would be gradually reversed. However, it would take several centuries, at least, to reverse the global mean sea level.
But to address the question of whether St. Louis has the potential to become a climate haven, we first need to understand the greatest threats facing the city. “One of the challenges with climate change is knowing what is most important,” Werner writes. “Having goals is great, and they can play a key role for motivating action, but without knowing what to do first or where, actions can feel like an ad hoc approach with limited or unknown impact.”
In 2018, Werner and the city partnered with Washington University to develop a Climate Vulnerability Assessment. They determined that extreme heat, the deadliest natural disaster in the U.S., is at the forefront of concern for St. Louis, not to mention the similarly worsening issues of extreme cold, tornadoes and extreme winds, drought, and flooding and rainstorms.
So where do we go from here? Above all, Werner sees renewable energy and electric, clean transportation as one of many central components to improving St. Louis’ sustainability, as carbon emissions and air pollution are large contributors to urban heat waves. The city has made progress with a Solar-Readiness Ordinance and Solar Workforce Development.
The Solar-Readiness Ordinance, signed in December 2019 by then–St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, requires new construction, including residential homes, to be designed in a way that allows for rooftop solar panels, should the owner want to install them. Solar-ready buildings lower upfront costs as well as the barrier to installation and the energy savings afforded by solar panels—they could save the owner anywhere from $4,000–$25,000. In 2020, the city, with help from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the American Cities Climate Challenge, piloted a solar workforce development program. It trained 10 people on how to install the panels.
“While the impact of municipal efforts tends to be modest when compared to the impact that community-based actions can have, I think it is important to demonstrate leadership in this way,” Werner writes.
Including the Most Vulnerable
Washington University student and activist Brianna Chandler is one of many young community members pushing for change. She, along with Grace Tedder and Sam Jonesi, are members of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate advocacy organization with chapters across the nation. The Sunrise Movement advocates for such things as the Green New Deal. Their passion fuels their activism—but so does frustration with how the world has been handled.
Tedder explains how the rhetoric surrounding climate change drives the action. Where it was once a conversation of how to stop it, now it’s more a matter of how to adapt to it.
“How can we prepare for climate refugees?” Tedder says as an example. “How can we adapt as best as possible? How can we minimize the harms and start to heal different things? I think once you frame it that way, it’s a little bit less overwhelming.”
Central to their understanding of what needs to be done is thinking of how to assist those the climate wreckage will impact most: the unhoused, those who live in poor-quality housing, and those who live in neighborhoods with inadequate infrastructure. Although completely reversing the course of climate change might be impossible, St. Louis could become a place of refuge through viable infrastructure and social programs expanding the work of organizations like Unhoused STL.
“St. Louis can’t be a climate haven without indigenous sovereignty, without housing justice, without taking racism into account,” Chandler says. “We can’t focus so much on solving the problem that we forget those who are most harmed by the problem.”
Chandler, Tedder, and Jonesi say sustainability should focus on indigenous people, who lived that way for years. “We know there are cultures that have access to or knowledge about best practices in regards to land stewardship,” Chandler says. “We’re doing a disservice to ourselves on the Earth by not listening to those cultures.” (While Chandler, Tedder, and Jonesi are passionate about this position, they acknowledge that they aren’t spokespeople for indigenous people. They’re particularly inspired by attorney Tara Houska, founder of the Giniw Collective.)
Still, Jonesi insists there’s always somewhere you can start, whether it’s calling upon elected officials or joining organizations. “Even if it’s not necessarily Sunrise, find a group of like-minded people with a mission that you believe in, and don’t believe that you have to do everything at once,” Jonesi says. “Nobody starts out at the gate doing everything—start with what is comfortable.”
