Extreme weather and changes in seasonal patterns are fundamentally altering the landscape, in cities and in farming communities. You’re going to pay for it.
BY GABRIELLE GURLEY DECEMBER 4, 2025 (Prospect.org)
This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
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.
Climate change plays havoc with crops as much as it does with water, leading to sticker shock at the grocery store.
Climate change plays havoc with crops as much as it does with water, leading to sticker shock at the grocery store.
Climate change is an affordability issue that demands reassessing the pearl-clutchers’ claims that expensive solutions only burden people with higher costs. This era’s threats should prompt the realization that inaction (or worse, retrenchment) is prompting price hikes right now, which people find intolerable. By contrast, the policy responses and environmental adaptations needed to grapple with the crisis can potentially decrease consumer prices, as the progress in the renewable-energy sector shows.
A warming planet can cause more suffering, more disease, and even mass deaths. But even if you don’t live in a danger zone made more treacherous by climate change, the higher prices you pay for everyday goods—even something as basic as water—mean that no one escapes the impacts.
AFFORDABLE WATER IS AN OXYMORON in New Orleans. The American Water Works Association defines water affordability as “the ability of a customer to pay the water bill in full and on time without jeopardizing the customer’s ability to pay for other essential expenses.” Water affordability is a monumental stressor in a place where the poverty rate is nearly 23 percent and the median income is $55,580. A 2024 investigation by The Lens, a New Orleans–area public-interest newsroom, found that water bills average $115.44 each month, more than twice that of comparable Southern cities.
Not only do New Orleanians already pay premium water and sewer rates, but the infrastructure that delivers drinking water, carries out sewage, and pumps out floodwater is more than a century old, and chronic needs to upgrade or repair contribute to the high rates that residents will continue to pay.
New Orleans stays dry for the most part because its massive, antique system of dozens of pumps, catch basins, drainage pipes, and aboveground and underground canals keeps it that way. At times, this is not enough—the April rains overwhelmed the pumps in certain sections. A system built for the weather patterns of the 20th century can’t keep up with the heavier rainfall of the 21st.
Much of the city’s difficulties rest with the wildly dysfunctional and despised entity that runs the system: the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans (SWBNO). This dysfunction extends to predatory billing practices and water shutoffs that are a regular occurrence in the city. It’s bad enough that working families and seniors are paying the cost of climate change through progressively higher water and sewer bills; it’s worse that those bills are sometimes erroneous.
Gov. Jeff Landry (R-LA) finally convened a special task force to get to the bottom of a myriad of issues, including ongoing maintenance failures despite hundreds of millions of federal, state, and local investments; billing snafus; and no small amount of corruption. The inquiry confirmed what residents and businesses already knew about water “affordability” in New Orleans: “The SWBNO billing crisis may very well be the single biggest hindrance on daily quality of life.”
“Low-income families and those on fixed incomes simply cannot tolerate a ‘surprise’ high water bill,” the task force report reads. “A fairly typical complaint was an inaccurate [water usage] reading leading to a massive bill that was either auto drafted out of the customer’s account or double billed.”
To partially address the lack of confidence in billing, the SWBNO finally launched a system with an outside vendor to work with customers who owe $50 or more to pay their bills interest-free without incurring additional penalties or having their water shut off. As of September, 23,000 customers have been able to catch up on payments and the utility has recovered nearly $19 million in past-due revenue, with an estimated $24 million projected to be paid through the program.
Dandridge-Smith, who once had her water shut off for two months when she was between jobs, says the program appears to be making progress. “But the issue that still remains is that our water bills are high, so the residents are feeling the burden,” she said. “And frankly, the utility is feeling the burden.”
New Orleans isn’t alone. Many municipalities face astronomical water rates at a time when energy bills are also soaring. An April 2025 Bank of America report indicated that in March Americans’ median monthly water utility payments increased more than 7 percent year over year. Durango, Colorado, ratepayers face a 10 to 20 percent hike; San Diego will see a 30 percent hike. Broomfield, Colorado, approved a 50 percent increase. All are blaming aging infrastructure, and shifting climate patterns are at the heart of those unanticipated costs.
Helping people pay their bills is not the same as making sure that water flows to homes at a reasonable cost. “What we really need are affordability solutions that address [bringing] bills down to a level that a household can afford to pay based on their income,” says Mary Grant, who directs the Public Water for All campaign at Food & Water Watch, a national advocacy group.
To address the city’s massive stormwater infrastructure issues, New Orleans residents passed a $50 million bond proposition to improve drainage and stormwater management facilities. Another proposal being debated is a stormwater fee to begin to chip away at the $1 billion in improvements over the next decade that the SWBNO needs to make. According to a Water Collaborative survey conducted earlier this year, a majority of New Orleanians are willing to acquiesce to a fee in return for modern stormwater infrastructure that can offer relief from flooding during smaller storms—as long as the SWBNO isn’t collecting the fee. New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno has said that she supports a regional entity to monitor and address drinking water issues, as well as the stormwater fee. She’s no fan of the SWBNO either.
But the demands of problems like lead pipe replacement and treating drinking water from the Mississippi River for pollutants and salt water intrusion due to sea level rise mean that recurring infrastructure costs still get passed on to consumers. The SWBNO runs its own power plant to help power older segments of the system, a cost that even the utility admits is not sustainable.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, New Orleans had access to the federal Low Income Household Water Assistance Program (LIHWAP), a federal program that mirrored the existing federal home heating assistance program. Congress provided more than $1 billion in funding across the country, sparing more than a million low-income households from shutoffs and bills that they could not pay.
The need is still there, but LIHWAP isn’t; the program expired in 2022. A proposal to restart the program introduced in July by Reps. Eric Sorenson (D-IL), Rob Bresnahan (R-PA), and several other members of Congress is going nowhere fast, given the lack of interest in social programs in Congress and the White House.
But New Orleans never properly utilized LIHWAP during COVID to assist ratepayers, says Dandridge-Smith. “We have a state that, oftentimes, either intentionally or unintentionally, does not mobilize federal dollars to the people who need it the most. This is a constant problem across all issues, and then you have a city that is essentially drowning in its own aging and failing infrastructure,” she says.
CLIMATE CHANGE PLAYS HAVOC WITH CROPS as much as it does with water, leading to sticker shock at the grocery store, one of American consumers’ biggest concerns.
The role of climate can sometimes be surprising. When faced with high coffee prices, many people might blame President Trump’s tariffs on coffee-producing regions like Brazil and Vietnam. But droughts in the region near the equator known as the “coffee belt” sent prices to an all-time high before any tariffs were imposed.
Climate-fueled drought in the Great Plains states have thinned out cattle herds, also leading to higher beef prices. Houston Public Media reported that prices reached $6.32 per pound in September for 100 percent ground beef, the highest ever—and after a drought, ranchers expect to see price increases for the next couple of years.
Every day, there seems to be a new weather-related food disaster. Olive oil prices skyrocketed in early 2024 due to drought. That spring, high temperatures in Ghana and Ivory Coast, home to 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, took those prices up by threefold. By summer, a heat wave in Asia spiked Japanese rice prices by 48 percent and Korean cabbage prices by 70 percent.
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Heavy rains can also ruin fertile soil. A November report from the United Nations Development Programme finds that more than 90 percent of all countries will see lower crop yields because of climate change by the end of the century, even after accounting for farmers adapting to weather changes.
One reason for lower crop yields is changes in the seasons. Trees have adapted to the climate by blossoming earlier, for example, which makes fruits and nuts more vulnerable to spring cold snaps and frosts that can wipe out a whole harvest. That’s what happened to hazelnuts this year in Turkey, the country that accounts for 73 percent of the global supply. The projected 40 percent loss of hazelnut yields translates into a 30 percent increase in price.
In addition to risk from seasonal patterns, a hotter climate can become a breeding ground for pathogens that can debilitate the food supply. The New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on warm-blooded animals like cows and other livestock, has been virtually eradicated in the United States since the 1970s. But it returned to Panama in 2022, has been reported in southern Mexico, and is threatening domestic cattle herds this year, leading to a ban on Mexican livestock to contain the damage.
Huge agribusinesses have fewer water issues, but smaller farmers can be driven out of business by extreme events.
Bird flu, which reappeared in the U.S. this fall, has also been spurred by a warming planet. Changes in migratory patterns have led to diseased birds flying into new places, leaving those areas vulnerable to outbreaks.
Both Brazil, the world’s biggest producer of oranges, and the U.S. have been slammed by citrus greening, spread by an insect, the Asian citrus psyllid. About 50 percent of Brazil’s crop has been infected, while Florida’s production has dropped more than 92 percent in the past two decades. Severe weather has also plagued Florida orange producers: Hurricane Milton destroyed 20 percent of the state’s orange crop.
These alternating seasons of flood and drought, as well as disease and insect infestations, leave agricultural producers wrestling with the basic questions of whether they can afford to keep juggling different climate adaptation strategies.
FOR TWO STRAIGHT YEARS, SUMMER TORRENTS led to extreme flooding in Vermont, with mudslides and washouts that destroyed entire farms and pulverized town centers. A July 10, 2023, deluge across the state lasted 48 hours, produced nearly a foot of rain in the worst-hit enclaves, and led to a federal disaster declaration. Exactly one year later to the day, the remnants of Hurricane Beryl struck some of the same towns that had been inundated before.
It had been more than a decade since Tropical Storm Irene meandered up the East Coast and introduced Vermonters to their own new climate strangeness: severe flooding from weather systems that originate in the tropics. During the decade it took to recover, some Vermonters began to see Irene as a “one-off.” It wasn’t.
This past summer delivered another weird, unwelcome jolt: weeks of extreme drought. The prospect of seasons of inundation and scarcity colors how farmers view the affordability of their enterprises. Huge agribusinesses have fewer water issues, but smaller farmers can experience crises and be driven out of business by extreme events.
Vermont farmers who grow vegetables irrigate their lands with river water or streams and creeks that run through their properties. In the eastern United States, farmers have riparian rights, sourcing their water from nearby bodies of water like streams, rivers, and lakes, or from groundwater via wells. As of 2023, Vermont requires farmers to report their surface water usage annually above a particular threshold. (In the West, under the doctrine of prior appropriation, farmers access water based on water rights acquired decades ago.)
A 2023 Vermont Agriculture Recovery Task Force survey found that extreme weather left farmers with about a 30 percent loss in annual income; nearly 60 percent reported that their cash flow would go negative. Estimated total drought losses reported through the state’s 2025 Agriculture Drought Survey are $13 million for this year alone.
Maddie Kempner, the policy and organizing director for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, explains what it means to local farmers to have uncertain water access. Livestock farmers, for example, have tremendous water demands: “A productive dairy cow needs 50 gallons of drinking water daily,” Kempner says. If a well runs dry, “that means paying to haul water to your farm constantly to keep up with that level of need that your animals have, in order to keep them healthy, alive, and producing the product that is the lifeblood of your business.” It’s also a major cost to bear if the wells that they rely upon have run dry. They may have to drill new ones, up to a five-figure expense.
To make farming work, some regional growers plant crops like carrots and leafy greens like lettuces that they can harvest in a shorter span of time, rather than vegetables like broccoli or brussels sprouts that take months to mature and are at risk in areas subject to flooding.
Kempner spotlighted another major concern: “They don’t have meaningful crop insurance support or disaster relief programs that work for their operation. Those by and large are designed to work for much larger and less diversified farms and poorly serve our farming community here.”
Farmers also must think about moving heating and cooling systems and other infrastructure to higher ground, or shoring up roads and improving drainage, costs that also run into the tens of thousands of dollars. “A lot of our farms are living on thin profit margins where they don’t necessarily have extra room in their budget to invest in those kinds of protective measures,” she says.
All of these additional measures add cost to the produce or beef you buy in the grocery store. And farmers are not just growing the food; they’re buying it, too. “Beyond these climate disasters and extreme weather events, farmers are dealing with the same inflationary pressures as everyone else in general,” says Kempner. “We are facing a pivotal moment in American agriculture, where our population of farmers is aging, and access to farmland and affordability of farmland is a huge challenge for beginning farmers trying to get into farming. These affordability challenges are existential when you think about the future of our food system on the whole.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 2025, FLOODING wasn’t the problem in Middlebury, Vermont, where commercial beekeeper Curtis Mraz runs the Champlain Valley Apiaries. “We actually produced quite a bit more honey in the years where we had significant flooding,” the fourth-generation beekeeper tells the Prospect. “And we were in a part of Vermont where we didn’t have serious washouts like other parts of the state.”
“That being said,” he continues, “the more it rains, the less a bee can fly. We often as beekeepers talk about fly time. We need clear days; they don’t fly at night. So in the last couple years, we had significant rainfall to the point where fly time was limited.”
Until the beginning of July, the apiary’s bees were very productive, but as the month wore on, the amount of honey dropped off. “If you looked out in the Vermont landscape, you’d see goldenrod coming in in August, but not a single bee dancing across it,” says Mraz. “Beautiful flowers, but because there was a drought, there was no water in the soil, and therefore, no nectar in the flowers for the bees to feed on.”
Mraz and his family have worked with bees for a century, and he has an excellent sense of how the bee ecosystem has changed. “In Vermont, we’re getting into these two seasons, where there’s too much water or too little water: Now it’s either mud season or it’s a drought,” he says. Wet conditions mean that Mraz and his workers spend more time moving equipment around, because it’s too muddy for a truck to drive into the fields. That ends up increasing his labor costs.
Last year, beekeepers lost between 60 and 100 percent of their colonies, Mraz says, and his losses were “in that range.” It’s not just the excess rainfall, but the amount: A deluge, then drought, makes the bees susceptible to disease. Colony collapse disorder is what beekeepers now call a mass bee die-off. But while it’s been forecast for two decades, researchers noticed a serious uptick in 2025.
Colony collapse is an imprecise name. “It’s basically this huge conglomeration of pressures that nobody can truly name,” Mraz says, “although I’ll tell you, it’s pesticides that’s the biggest contributing factor.” He adds that the family’s hives once lived from 10 to 15 years; now they last about three. A 60 percent colony loss would have been unimaginable previously, he says: “When my great-grandfather was running the business, a 10 percent loss would be a terrible year.”
Some of the practices used on soybeans and other monoculture crops, like the use of pesticides, contribute to the conditions that produce bee colony losses. After a heavy rainfall, pesticides used to treat them wash off into ditches, then streams and other water sources that bees use, and poison them. Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides that have emerged as a major culprit.
Mraz would like to see a shift in perspectives in using pesticides in the food system at all, especially when the chemicals kill the very bugs that are needed to cultivate crops. But pesticides are used to maintain crop yields that are thinning due to climate change. So the conditions that are killing so many bees have a climate nexus as well.
Because the honeybees that migratory beekeepers tend are central to the economics of pollination for crops like almonds, apples, cranberries, and blueberries, there’s a whole passel of scientists and researchers dedicated to the continuation of the species. Mraz worries that the U.S., unlike Canada and the European Union, isn’t moving fast enough to deal with the threat. Vermont is working on a gradual phaseout, but a ban won’t go into effect until 2029.
“Because our agricultural system is so dependent on honeybees, you can always guarantee that somebody will be out there selling more honeybees,” Mraz says. But like most producers, the costs get passed on to his customers.
“My uncle has a saying: We are no longer beekeepers—we’ve all become bee replacers. I just couldn’t help but wonder, is this really the right future?” Mraz asks. “And the reality is if we want to keep this going, there’s not a ton of government subsidy money for us, like there is for corn, soybean farmers, or dairy producers, so we have to ultimately increase the price of our products.”
The financial pressures of adapting to climate shifts and bee colony collapse weigh heavily on the young beekeeper. “Every year, we’ll take those 40 percent of the bees that survive and we’ll turn 200 colonies back into 1,000. But that comes with a huge genetic cost, a huge labor cost, and then, ultimately, every spring, I’m breaking down and crying again and talking to my beekeeper peers who are ready to walk off a cliff—‘How can we do this again?’”
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Executive Editor
This article appears in Dec 2025 Issue.
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July 24, 2017TAGGED:affordability, agriculture, beekeeping, Cities & Communities, Climate Crisis, Economic Policy, Energy & the Environment, flooding, New Orleans, Vermont, water, weather
GABRIELLE GURLEY
Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis. More by Gabrielle Gurley
