Flood control along the Mississippi River is a central piece of a newly passed federal law — work that advocates believe is critical as the river basin sees more frequent and severe extreme weather events due to climate change. 

The Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) is passed by Congress every two years. It gives authority to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to undertake projects and studies to improve the nation’s water resources. 

Signed into law Jan. 4, this year’s package includes studies on increased flooding in the upper basin, flood mitigation measures throughout the river system, ecological restoration, and a $6 billion floodwall in Louisiana. 

The Mississippi River is managed in large part by the Army Corps, so it often features prominently in the bill, with a dual aim of making the river more suitable for shipping and restoring environmental degradation from flooding, nutrient pollution and climate change. 

Kirsten Wallace, executive director of the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, called this year’s WRDA “a pretty special one.” She said it contained wins for many of the diverse stakeholders along the river, including shippers, environmental advocates, riverfront communities and federal and state agencies — who don’t always agree. 

Advocates lauded the law’s emphasis on nature-based solutions. In a press release, Stephanie Bailenson, policy team lead for The Nature Conservancy, said, “Since 2016, Congress has directed the corps to consider natural and nature-based solutions alongside or instead of traditional infrastructure. This latest act continues that trend.”

But all of these projects are only promised because funding doesn’t come until later, when Congress appropriates it. Many projects authorized in previous versions of the law are still unfunded, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Here’s what will affect the river in the Water Resources Development Act of 2024: 

Study of flood risk on the upper Mississippi River

The law authorizes a large-scale study of flooding on the Upper Mississippi River System, which includes the Mississippi River from its headwaters to where it meets the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois, as well as the Illinois River and portions of some smaller tributaries.

The upper river has seen two major floods in the last few years: one in 2022 and one in 2019, which lasted for months and caused billions of dollars in damage. 

The study’s chief goal: figuring out how to reduce flood risk across the entire river system, instead of relying on municipalities to try to solve flooding problems themselves, which can sometimes have impacts downstream. North of St. Louis, for example, levees constrain the river to protect communities and valuable farmland from flooding — and some levee districts have raised those levees higher, safeguarding themselves but effectively pushing floodwaters faster downstream. 

“This plan allows more of a comprehensive way for levee districts to improve what they currently have … in a way that doesn’t put them in a position to be adversarial or just impose risk somewhere else,” Wallace said. 

She said the study will be a challenge, but that levee districts are eager for solutions as flood risks and heavier rainfall increase. 

Once the study receives funding, it will be led by the Army Corps’ St. Louis District, Wallace said. It’ll solicit input from cities, towns and ports along the river, recreators, the shipping industry and federal environmental agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Flood projects for cities from the headwaters to the delta 

Cities and towns along the river could get help for the localized effects of flooding too, thanks to several projects authorized by the law. Upstream, that includes La Crosse, Wisconsin, which will enter into an agreement with the Army Corps to study the role of the city’s levees, which were constructed around the river’s record flood in 1965. 

“We have to have an eye on maintaining what we’ve got and looking toward the future and whatever conditions the river might undergo to be prepared as best we can,” said Matthew Gallager, the city’s director of engineering and public works. “Because obviously, nature is going to win.” 

Downriver, Louisiana secured the largest project authorization within the law. To protect communities in St. Tammany Parish, a county north of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, plans to build a $5.9 billion levee and floodwall system totaling 18.5 miles in length to protect over 26,000 structures, most of which are family homes. 

The St. Tammany Flood Risk Management Project is slated to receive $3.7 billion in federal funding. The other 35% will come from non-federal sponsors, such as the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA). 

“By authorizing the St. Tammany project for construction, Congress recognizes again the national importance of Louisiana and that CPRA can work with the federal government to execute a multi-billion coastal protection project successfully,” said CPRA Chairman Gordy Dove.

The law also authorizes a federal study of the Lake Pontchartrain Storm Surge Reduction Project, a component of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan meant to protect nine parishes bordering the lake. The Army Corps will investigate whether the proposed project to reduce flood risk is in the federal interest. 

Other approved flood control projects will be funded along the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries, including the Ouachita River in Louisiana. Several counties in Mississippi will also receive funding to improve environmental infrastructure, such as water and wastewater systems. 

Near Memphis, the bill authorizes the Hatchie-Loosahatchie Ecosystem Restoration project, which covers a 39-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River. The project aims to manage flood risks while also restoring and sustaining the health, productivity and biological diversity of the flyway. 

In New Orleans, a study was authorized to investigate ecosystem restoration and water supply issues, such as the mitigation of future saltwater wedges that threaten drinking water and wetlands at the very end of the Mississippi River. 

More support for the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program 

The law also increases the amount of money Congress can give to the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, which funds habitat restoration activities and scientific research on the upper river. 

Congress increased the money it can direct to the research part of the program by $10 million, bringing the total the program can get to $100 million annually. 

The funding boost “really is a recognition of the value of the science … the understanding that has improved about how the system is functioning over the last three decades,” said Marshall Plumley, the Army Corps’ regional manager for the program. 

If given extra funding, Plumley said program staff want to use it to better understand the effects of the increased amount of water that has flowed through the river in recent years. That increase, partly attributed to wetter conditions due to climate change, is changing the river’s floodplain habitats, including forests and backwater areas. 

A change to how new water infrastructure gets funded

The Mississippi River functions as a water superhighway, transporting around $500 million tons of goods each year. Infrastructure to keep shipping running smoothly is costly, and one adjustment in WRDA 2024 is aimed at shifting the burden of those costs. 

Taxpayers have been funding inland waterway infrastructure for nearly two centuries, but in 1978 Congress established the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which requires the private shipping industry to pitch in. 

Today, the trust fund’s coffers are filled by a 29-cent per gallon diesel tax on commercial operators that use the Mississippi River and other inland waterways, adding up to about $125 million per year in recent years. New construction — like wider, more modern locks and dams on the upper river — is paid for through a public-private partnership: the private dollars in the fund, and federal dollars allocated by Congress. 

Until recently, the private dollars covered 35% of new construction costs, and federal dollars covered 65%. The new WRDA adjusts that to 25% and 75%, respectively. 

Advocates for the shipping industry have long believed taxpayers should have a bigger hand in funding construction because it’s not just shippers who benefit from an efficient river. 

The balance in the trust fund “always limits” construction that can happen in a given year, said Jen Armstrong, director of government relations for the Waterways Council. 

“We can’t afford to have projects take three decades or two decades to complete,” Armstrong said, “because we have other locks that are deteriorating.” 

Armstrong said she believes shifting more of the cost to the federal government will accelerate those projects. 

Not everyone supports the cost share change, however, including American Rivers, which has opposed the creation of new locks on the upper Mississippi in favor of helping the river revert to more natural processes. 

Kelsey Cruickshank, the group’s director of policy and government relations, called it “a disappointing development that continues to give short shrift to the incredible ecosystem of the world’s third-largest freshwater river system.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

New federal law addresses climate extremes and flooding along Mississippi River is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Jerry Boardman doesn’t remember exactly when he started collecting acorns in the fall.

But the thousands upon thousands of them he gathers to share with people working to improve habitat along the Mississippi River makes the 81-year-old resident of De Soto, Wisconsin, a small village between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien, a pretty big deal.

“It’s like a myth or a legend,” Andy Meier, a forester for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who receives a portion of Boardman’s bounty, said of the integral role it plays in his work. “It just has always been that way.”

In reality, Boardman began collecting around the time that the need for acorns — a nut that contains the seed that grows oak trees — was growing critical. For the past few decades, the trees that grow in the Mississippi River floodplain, known as floodplain forests, have been struggling. Although they’re named for their ability to withstand the river’s seasonal flooding, they’ve recently been overwhelmed by higher water and longer-lasting floods.

Overall, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa, decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010, according to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi. In the years since, losses in some places have neared 20% — and were particularly acute following a massive flood event in 2019. 

What exactly is driving the excess water isn’t fully fleshed out, but climate change and changes in land use that cause water to run off the landscape faster are likely factors.

The result is mass stretches of dead trees that can no longer perform their functions of providing wildlife habitat, sucking up pollutants that would otherwise run downriver and slowing water during floods.  

Floodplain forests in the lower section of the river are also diminished. The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, which stretches from where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet, in Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico was once almost entirely forest. Today, about 30% of that land is treed.  

Government agencies and various nonprofits are attempting to reverse the forestland decline by planting new trees, and volunteers like Boardman are key to the effort. 

Local is best

Reno Bottoms, a sprawling wetland habitat on the river near Boardman’s hometown of De Soto, is one place where tree die-off has been extensive. Boardman, who has been a commercial fisherman, hunter and trapper on the river for most of his life, called the change in forest cover in recent years “shocking.” To combat it, he puts in about 100 hours a year between August and October gathering acorns from the floodplain in De Soto, Prairie du Chien and La Crosse. 

To maximize his time, Boardman uses a contraption not unlike ones used to pick up tennis balls to scoop up the acorns. One small variety, though, requires one to “get down on your hiney or your knees” to pick them up, he said. For those, he relies on a little grunt work.

The idea is that if the trees that produced the acorns were successful enough at warding off flood damage to drop seeds, those seeds might be similarly resilient if replanted.

Boardman looks for acorns from the bur oak, pin oak and swamp white oak, the latter of which is particularly well suited to the floodplain forest. And the numbers he puts up are impressive — last year, he collected about 130,000; this year, 65,000.

He splits up the total to give to the Army Corps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, both of which have foresters planting trees to restore floodplain habitat.

“Pretty much everything that Jerry collects, in one way or another, will return to the river,” said Meier, the corps forester.

Last fall, for example, between 20,000 and 30,000 of Boardman’s swamp white oak acorns were scattered near McGregor Lake, a river backwater near Prairie du Chien where the corps is piloting an effort to protect trees from flood inundation by raising the forest floor a few inches.

This spring, Meier said, he was “blown away” by the approximately 1,000 seedlings that had taken root there and begun to sprout.

Having access to Boardman’s acorns is important because it gives the corps the chance to experiment with direct seeding, instead of buying young trees and planting them. Direct seeding is both cheaper and more likely to result in a viable tree because the seed is local.

“When we have an opportunity to get something we know came from the river, we know that it’s adapted to growing there,” Meier said.

Not every community has a Boardman, though, and many organizations doing reforestation work have to shell out for seed or look for options from further afield. 

For example, M&C Forest Seeds, based in Clarendon, Arkansas, pays seed collectors cash for acorns and then re-sells sorted seed to government agencies or nonprofits. M&C contracts with collectors to gather acorns at particular latitudes along the river, which they then market to replanting efforts at similar geographic locations. 

Living Lands and Waters, an Illinois-based environmental organization, uses nurseries to cultivate oaks from the region and distributes more than 150,000 trees annually in three-gallon pots to volunteers or individuals. 

Little by little, through the efforts of various government agencies and nonprofits, it all ends up in the ground. 

For instance, since 2007, Living Lands and Waters has planted more than 2 million trees along waterways in the Mississippi River Basin. The Nature Conservancy, using U.S. Department of Agriculture and other program funds, has reforested about a million acres across Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas in the last 30 years. Much of that acreage was on low-lying farmland prone to flooding that had once been forest.

Volunteers key to planting efforts

Whether collecting seeds or planting them, volunteers like Boardman are key to making the work happen. 

Ev Wick, a fifth grade teacher at De Soto’s Prairie View Elementary, has taken his students out for an acorn-gathering day with Boardman for the past several years. Boardman scouts the best trees ahead of time, Wick said, then the kids get to work. They can pick up between 5,000 and 6,000 in a day, propelled by friendly competitions to see who can collect the most or fill their bucket quickest.

They’re interested when Boardman tells them all the acorns they collect will eventually be planted on the islands they see in the river, Wick said. 

Last October, Living Lands and Water brought together people from groups like the Clean River Advisory Council and the Rock Island County Soil and Water Conservation District to plant oak trees near the Quad Cities. Volunteers planted 85 oak trees in a park by the Mississippi River in Illinois City, Illinois. This event helped restore forests but also provided opportunities for people to learn and connect with nature.

“We get individuals that may have never planted a tree before but want to come out because it sounds like a cool, fun thing,” said Dan Breidenstein, vice president of Living Lands and Water. “Not only did they learn how to plant a tree, but they also learned about these different species that we were doing. Every time they visit that area or drive past that building, they’re connected to the area around them, and that tree’s not going anywhere.” 

Organizers are particularly tickled when young people show up.

“My favorite part of today is being outside and in the environment because I don’t go outside much,” said Brooklyn Wilson, a high school junior who volunteered at the October event. “The most important thing to understand is that as a community we need to be able to come together and help and pick up and do what we need to do to better our environment and neighborhoods.” 

Perhaps some of the young volunteers will follow in Boardman’s footsteps. 

As for Boardman, the chance to donate acorns or otherwise help out is a no-brainer.

“That river has given me so much,” he said. “I’ve just got to give back all I can give.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Disclosure: The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, The Nature Conservancy and the Clean River Advisory Council receive funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

Volunteers collect and plant acorns along Mississippi River to save struggling forests is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Early on Election Day, highways in the St. Louis area were inundated with water. Over several days, intense storms battered Missouri, bringing six to 10 inches of rain — record-breaking amounts for November.

The flash flooding killed at least five people, including two older poll workers whose vehicle was swept from a state highway.

Mayors along the Mississippi River have watched for years as intensifying rain storms and flooding wreak havoc on their communities.

Take Grafton, Illinois, which escaped Election Day flash flooding but suffered $160,000 to $170,000 in damages from a heavy rain event in July. The town’s main intersection was blocked with logs and debris, and the storm blew out a water line and left streets in need of repair.

But Grafton never received a federal disaster declaration and was not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Instead, it paid for road and water line repairs through its Department of Public Works’ annual budget. As a result, the city could no longer purchase new trucks for snow plowing this year, as it had planned.

“What it means is that we’ll limp through another year, keep the vehicles running,” said Grafton Mayor Michael Morrow, who oversees the $1.2 million annual budget for the small riverfront city of about 600.

River communities have suffered repeated losses. But federal disaster funding can take weeks, months or even years to pay out. Traditional insurance programs are tied to property and require proof of loss for a payout, which can be burdensome and lengthy to assemble. 

So this fall, the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) announced a new insurance pilot, with hopes of better helping river towns recover. 

MRCTI, which represents 105 cities in 10 states in the Mississippi River Basin, including Wisconsin, is working with Munich Re, a German multinational insurance company, to create the insurance product. 

The resulting pilot will test a novel type of insurance pool — called parametric insurance — that is designed to rapidly fund emergency response after natural disasters such as flooding. 

Pilot will test usefulness of new ‘parametric’ insurance policies

The likely cause of intensifying rainfall and floods is human-caused climate change, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a scientific report created every four years for the United States Congress and the president, to help explain the impacts, risks and vulnerabilities associated with a changing global climate.

In 2019, communities in the Basin saw months of flooding, spanning across the Mississippi, Missouri and Arkansas rivers. Reported losses totaled almost $25 billion across at least 17 states, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The central U.S. is emerging as a new flash flooding hotspot, according to research published in Nature’s Communications Earth & Environment journal. With its new role as a hotspot comes more disaster damage – and need for insurance that addresses that.

While conventional indemnity insurance requires insured owners to prove specific losses by amassing evidence and presenting pre-storm documentation, parametric insurance pays out quickly after agreed-upon “triggers” – such as wind speeds or river heights – reach a certain level. 

For the MRCTI pilot, Munich Re has suggested using watershed data from the U.S. Geological Survey to determine the best gauges along the river to measure flood depth. Once the river flooding reaches a certain depth, the payout would be triggered. 

Getting that trigger right is key, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of Climate Resilience for All, a nonprofit focused on climate adaptation.

“You want to have sufficient understanding of how you set the triggers at a certain place and why,” she said. “There’s a lot of engagement necessary to get everybody on the same page about what the product is, how it works, what the trigger should be.”

The goal of Munich Re’s pilot program is to demonstrate in real time how a parametric insurance payout policy would function in current insurance market conditions and how swift payouts could better assist a city’s disaster response in the immediate days following a flood.

First, Munich Re will develop a mock-up of the insurance policy for one hazard – flooding – with the understanding that multiple hazards, like intense heat, or drought, could be added later, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of MRCTI and, as of Nov. 6, a newly elected state representative for Missouri District 105. 

The mock-up would calculate a range of premium costs and theoretical payout options that would be available for cities of varying sizes along the river. But the pilot won’t cost the cities a cent – and it won’t pay them anything either, until the pilot moves into implementation. It’s unclear which entities will ultimately foot the bill of the pilot and eventual product because it’s so early in development.

When Munich Re moves into implementation, individual city governments would hold the policies and receive payouts. Wellenkamp hopes to convince larger corporations that rely on a healthy and functioning Mississippi River hydrology to pick up the tab on the premiums, he said. 

Quick payouts could take burdens off cities

“In the first 24 to 72 hours after a disaster event, very little money can help a whole heck of a lot,” Wellenkamp said. “We use that time for evacuations and to move people out of additional harm’s way in the aftermath.”

But soon after the initial emergency response, municipalities start to look for funds for longer-term cleanup and repair. Under the current paradigm, that money can be hard to tap.  

In the spring of 2019, major flooding on the Mississippi inundated many communities, including Grafton, where the downtown partially closed and people were forced to evacuate. 

The Trump administration didn’t declare a major disaster until September of that year, months after flood waters had receded. It took until 2022 for federal money to reach Grafton, Morrow said.

“The former administration went through that flood,” Morrow said. “I’m the mayor now, and I was getting some of the money that they had put in years ago.”

That wait places stress on a city’s finances, especially smaller ones like Grafton, Morrow added. 

Traditional insurance doesn’t always help either. Grafton has a flood policy, but it only covers property owned by the city. Residents and businesses in the community would need to take out their own flood protection. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which underwrites many flood insurance policies, has various coverage restrictions. For example, NFIP doesn’t cover roads or wastewater infrastructure. 

The policies also require proof of loss before issuing a check because they cover specific damage, like to a particular building or its contents. This “proof” can take days to document, and longer to process, which delays how fast a local government can begin repairs. Without proper pre-storm documentation, damage can sometimes be nearly impossible to prove.

Parametric insurance – which works with measurable triggers and isn’t tied to documentable losses – could ease the process. 

Cities from the headwaters to the mouth of the Mississippi could buy into the policy, creating a pool that spreads out the risk that any individual community faces. 

“Not every city is going to flood every year, but the flooding will impact at least one section of the river,” said Raghuveer Vinukollu, head of climate insights and advisory for  Munich Re in the U.S.

The insurance pool would protect a town from the risk of ruin, and a more timely payout would increase the town’s resiliency through swift reinvestment in its infrastructure, he added.

Parametric insurance in the Mississippi Delta and beyond

For flooding on rivers, this kind of insurance risk pool is new territory, Vinukollu said. As climate risks become more extreme, the insurance industry is working with a number of communities to address their evolving needs, he said.

While parametric insurance is still developing, one early example stands out to Vinukollu — the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF).

CCRIF pools risk for Caribbean countries, which face hurricane risks each year. By pooling risk together each island can receive a larger payout than if it had taken out an individual policy. 

In July, a mere 14 days after Hurricane Beryl devastated 90% of buildings and agriculture on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, the government of Grenada received its first payout from CCRIF to fund disaster recovery. 

The tropical cyclone policy paid more than $42 million to Grenada, the largest single payout from CCRIF since its inception in 2007.

In the Mississippi River Basin, Vinukollu hopes to apply this kind of shared risk pool to insure cities at risk for inland flooding. 

“The triggers are different, the perils are different, but the concept is the same,” said Vinukollu.

Given its position near the end of the Mississippi River, New Orleans is no stranger to the devastating impacts of extreme weather. Several city-run institutions, such as NOLA Public Schools, have taken out parametric insurance policies to protect important infrastructure. 

One of the first tests of these policies came in September when Hurricane Francine’s storm surge, rain and winds pelted southern Louisiana. 

But NOLA Public Schools did not receive a payout from its policy with Swiss Re. 

While wind speeds were high, they were not high enough to meet the policy’s triggers of more than 100 miles per hour for one minute.

New Orleans is more likely to experience repetitive, severe losses from named storms than a city in the upper Basin, such as Minneapolis, so cities closer to the Gulf Coast may end up paying higher premiums once the policy officially rolls out, said Wellenkamp, of MRCTI.

Cities that choose to cover more hazards or lower-level disasters may pay higher premiums because it could result in more frequent payouts, Wellenkamp said. Ultimately, municipalities could still end up footing the bill for events like the July flooding in Grafton or the Election Day storms in St. Louis.

McLeod, of Climate Resilience for All, argues communities shouldn’t expect payouts from parametric insurance all that often. “Just by the nature of the product it shouldn’t (pay every year),” she said. “Insurance is for the worst of the worst.”

Munich Re advises that parametric insurance works best to complement – not replace – traditional insurance policies. But company officials believe that these new policies offer the chance for insurance to adapt to changing risk landscapes, as weather events become more extreme.

Despite its potential to facilitate faster disaster response, parametric insurance is no silver bullet, said McLeod. 

The best solution to her is reducing the underlying risk from climate change. 

“The big picture is it’s a really important tool in financing and managing the risks of climate change, and we need every tool,” she said. 

But more than any new financial tool, McLeod said, the most effective financial step would be addressing the root causes of climate change, and building – or rebuilding – more natural protections, like wetlands.

“You’ve got to reduce the risk (or) you won’t be able to afford the insurance on it,” she said. “It’s not insurance if you know this thing is going to happen.”

The Lens’ Marta Jewson contributed reporting to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Mississippi River towns pilot new insurance model to help with disaster response is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.