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Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina unleashed a levee-busting catastrophe on New Orleans that woke Americans up to the fabled city’s precarious relationship with water. But it’s not just tropical storms that unleash flooding; the fierce thunderstorms that wind up long before hurricane season can also bring NOLA to grief. In April, a period of flash flooding captured national headlines. Ten inches of rain pelted the Algiers neighborhood on the western flank of the Mississippi River; other areas of the city saw up to seven inches—more rainfall than the city usually sees during the entire month.
“New Orleans is facing, I would say, like a seven-layer cake of challenges in regard to flooding,” says Jessica Dandridge-Smith, executive director of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, a regional water policy, education, and equity organization.
Climate change delivers constant reminders of how humans have completely disrupted the ways water cycles around the planet. There’s more precipitation in some places and next to no rainfall in others, or alternating seasons of flooding and drought. Persistent drought threatens the supply of fresh water, while heavy and more frequent rains, like the ones New Orleans experiences, stress inadequate stormwater systems that struggle to prevent flooding. All of these events complicate whether people can afford the one substance that they can’t live without, and renders the simple act of turning on a faucet a budget-busting financial decision.
Civilizations have prospered according to the rhythms of the natural world. And even in the Anthropocene, societies continue to grow crops and raise livestock that flourish in their environments. For everything else, they turn to global markets. But climate change–fueled natural disasters and shifting weather patterns have hit hard, disrupting where humans live, right along with their traditional agricultural practices. These upheavals mean that people are left scrambling, in some cases almost daily, to respond to a world in constant flux.
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