It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, one year since Hurricane Helene, and just three months since the deadly flash flooding in Central Texas. For Southern communities, these floods aren’t isolated weather extremes; they’re a chronic crisis growing in frequency and intensity as climate change supercharges storms.
To explore what communities need to break the cycle of disaster, recover, and rebuild, the Water Hub convened a virtual media briefing, bringing together experts from Louisiana’s bayous to the mountains of North Carolina. The conversation featured Dr. Angela Chalk, Executive Director of Healthy Community Services in New Orleans, Dr. Arsum Pathak, climate adaptation and resilience expert with the National Wildlife Federation, and Asheville City Councilwoman Maggie Ullman. Even though these speakers live and work in different parts of the South, common themes emerged. Read on for highlights, watch the full briefing (below), or download the briefing transcript here.
Natural defenses, community-led solutions, and proactive planning
Redefining infrastructure beyond pipes and pavement
Natural infrastructure like forests, wetlands, and parks act as natural flood defenses, while also providing additional benefits like community greenspace and cleaner air and water. For example, Councilwoman Ullman spoke about how Hurricane Helene damaged the tree canopy of one of Asheville’s main reservoirs by 35%, leading to landslides and too much debris and sediment in the water to treat. The forests act as an important filter to deliver clean water to the community, and so now they are working to secure federal recovery dollars for nature-based solutions like watershed and tree canopy restoration.
“The biggest lesson I'm seeing, both as an elected who was a frontline leader in this [Hurricane Helene], and someone who's been working on climate action for 20 years professionally, is that we need to design our cities to bend instead of break.”
“Fundamentally, we need to redefine what infrastructure means beyond pipes and pavement… We're really trying to think about how we can look at those forests as natural infrastructure, but FEMA funding is really focused on pipes and pavements. So we're trying to make the case now that not only was our treatment system damaged, but that our forests, our natural infrastructure, was damaged, and therefore deserve federal recovery dollars.”
The power of partnership and community-led solutions
Preparing for a future with more weather extremes means we need to build trust now through community-driven solutions and partnerships. This isn’t a crisis to address in isolation, but one that needs everyone working together: from environmental and community organizations, to local and federal governments, and the insurance, transportation, real estate, and workforce development sectors. We are all impacted and all stand to gain from investing in community-led green infrastructure.
Dr. Angela Chalk spoke about how the Vision 2 Reality Stormwater Park, recently completed in New Orleans’ 7th Ward neighborhood, exemplified this approach. Through a community-led planning process, this park not only reduces flood risk along an important hurricane evacuation route, managing 35,000 gallons of stormwater, but brings green space and ecosystem benefits in a location that has a long history of infrastructure injustice.
“The other thing that I wanted to mention is how important it is for actions to be driven by communities... Because we have to rely on each other during these times. Money is tight. We know that federal monies are not what they used to be, and so I would encourage organizations, corporations, to come up with their social engagement plan and put their money where their mouth is. Because guess what? Your people live in these communities just like we live in these communities.”
"We engage neighbors, I call them the three E's: Engage, Educate, and Empower people to make decisions."
"It has really turned in way beyond what I could have imagined. The unintentional, I call them good unintentional consequences, that came about from this project. But most importantly, stabilizing that heavy business corridor. People are now, businesses are now coming back because they have less fear of flooding."
Shifting from reactive to proactive climate planning
Councilwoman Ullman noted in her remarks that even Asheville, which had done extensive climate planning and was considered a “climate haven,” still experienced catastrophe. Dr. Arsum Pathak spoke about the need to use climate science to guide investments before disasters strike, and working with natural systems rather than against them. She also recognized that flooding events are part of a “changing baseline” due to climate change, and not one-off disasters.
"We're gonna start seeing these flooding events, whether it's in Asheville or in the Hill Country, Texas, they're no more just a one-off event. But we need to start thinking of them as part of this changing baseline. So, as we know, climate risks are changing, they're rather magnifying and intensifying, so we cannot just rebuild to yesterday's conditions anymore. We have to plan for tomorrow's risks.”
"Natural infrastructure works, it protects communities, it reduces that long-term cost, and has that environmental as well as community benefit. Which is very different to what we had a decade ago, when they were just seen as sort of these experimental approaches. So they are becoming… part of that mainstream toolkit now."
"There will never be enough taxpayer dollars to recover from all of this, and to do it after every storm, every storm, every storm. So we need to be shifting that reactionary funding stream into protecting and preparing."