A new report from Union of Concerned Scientists pushes for wetland protections in a new Farm Bill. (Photo courtesy of USDA)
A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found wetlands in the Upper Midwest region are “in peril” due to recent legal challenges and a lack of state-level regulation. The report looks to a new farm bill as a vessel to protect wetlands.
The report, authored by Stacy Woods, the research director for the Food & Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said industrial agriculture has inflicted “devastating damage” on wetlands across the country and that Iowa has more than 640,000 acres of wetland.
These wetlands, along with those in states across the Upper Midwest region, act as “natural barriers” to flooding. The report found this flood protection equates to nearly $23 billion in annual residential flood protection. Iowa’s wetlands alone could mitigate $477 million worth of flood damage to residential areas.
These estimates in the report are extrapolated from a 2022 study that found one acre of wetland was the equivalent to $745 in benefits from prevented flood damage.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is a non-profit advocating for “science and evidence-based decision making” for climate, energy, transportation, food and equality issues.
The report alleges the Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “stripped” Clean Water Act protections from wetlands that are not connected to federally recognized bodies of water.
The new interpretation of the law, combined with the “absence of state-level wetland protections” in Iowa and other Upper Midwestern states makes wetlands “particularly vulnerable” to pollution or drainage, the report found.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2020, the Conservation Reserve Program had restored more than 3 million wetland acres across the country since the program started in 1985. The same program has restored over 118,000 acres of wetland in Iowa and enrolled 66,000 acres as “buffer” in farmable wetlands, according to data collected by Environmental Working Group.
A hope for Farm Bill protections
The report looks at the Farm Bill as a place to implement wetland regulations to stop “large-scale commodity growers and corporate agribusiness interests” that “exploit wetlands for agricultural expansion.”
Farm bills in the past have established protections for wetlands, including the Conservation Reserve Program and the “swampbuster” provision that linked a landowner’s eligibility for USDA incentive programs to their preservation of wetlands.
An Iowa landowner recently sued the USDA over the provision and several groups including Iowa Environmental Council, Iowa Farmers Union, Dakota Rural Action and Food & Water Watch, sought to intervene in the lawsuit, which a federal judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa approved Tuesday.
The lawsuit alleges swampbusters created an unconstitutional condition for a farmer to receive USDA benefits, while the now-approved intervenors say without the law, there would be little to no protections for wetlands from farmers seeking to expand their croplands.
In addition to swampbuster, the report details other Farm Bill provisions that have protected wetlands, including conservation and wetland easement programs and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, which “enhance(s) wetlands” by promoting soil and water conservation.
The report calls for the next Farm Bill, which Congress has been unable to agree on and pass for more than two sessions now, to “enhance” existing conservation programs and implement new incentives that “foster soil and water health.”
These suggestions include: increasing the Conservation Reserve Program acres to 45 million acres; increasing funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program from $1 billion to $4 billion annually; expanding funding to historically underserved, disadvantaged and new farmers, and to link the Federal Crop Insurance Program to a farmer’s participation in conservation practices.
According to the report, investments from these recommendations constitute “only a fraction of the significant annual value wetlands deliver.”
“Integrating these initiatives into the next food and Farm Bill will fortify USDA programs that safeguard wetlands from industrial agriculture, ensuring these vital ecosystems thrive and continue to mitigate flooding, purify water, and support our communities and our climate,” the report said.
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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.
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
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.
Downtown Grafton, Ill., is seen from the Tara Point Inn on May 29, 2019. Floodwaters reached their second highest level ever at Grafton nine days later, three feet below the record set in 1993. (Brent Jones / St. Louis Public Radio)
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.
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.
Floodwaters from the Mississippi River engulf the riverfront and Main Street of Grafton, Ill., on May 29, 2019. The community was among many that suffered a combined billions of dollars in damages from the flooding that year. (Brent Jones / St. Louis Public Radio)
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.
Sheldon Auto Wrecking is a local institution in southwestern Wisconsin’s Vernon County. It’s tucked in a lush valley just downstream of a 50-foot earthen dam, locally known as “Maple Dale.”
The salvage yard, which buys used vehicles and farm machinery in this rural area to sell for parts, has been in business for nearly 70 years. For most of those years, the dam — less than a half-mile up the road — has protected its yard of hundreds of old cars and broken-down equipment from frequent and sometimes severe flooding in the area.
The dam “was put in place for a reason,” said owner Greg Sheldon.
But it might soon go away.
Maple Dale is one of thousands of dams constructed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, beginning in the mid-20th century, for the purposes of flood control.
In 2018, five similar dams in the region failed during a massive rainstorm that caused property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. A study determined that several other dams in the watersheds hit hardest by the flood, including Maple Dale, were also vulnerable to failure but would be too expensive to replace.
Flooding near the Monroe-Vernon county line in Wisconsin is shown after a massive storm swept through the area Aug. 27 and 28, 2018. (Courtesy of the National Weather Service)
As a result, local officials are voting on whether to dismantle the dams by cutting large notches in them, allowing the water to flow again, in a process called decommissioning. Experts say it could be the most dams ever decommissioned in a single county in the U.S.
And it could be a harbinger for other communities.
Although the county may be the first to take on a project of this size, it’s unlikely to be the last. Dams across the country are aging and also facing pressures from urban sprawl and intensifying floods wrought by climate change. The price tag to fix what’s broken, though, is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, meaning dam owners could face hard questions about what to do with them.
In Viroqua, it’s also leaving the people who own property below the dams uneasy about what comes next — including Sheldon.
“To come along and just rip a big hole out and let the water run is a mistake,” he said.
Removal plan controversial
The southwest Wisconsin dams are among nearly 12,000 that have been built under the USDA’s Watershed Programs. Generally smaller and set in rural agricultural areas, they’re mostly clustered from the center of the country eastward. Oklahoma has the most, followed by Texas, Iowa and Missouri.
The idea for the watershed program dams arose during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Because there was little vegetation left on the landscape to soak up rain when it fell, there were several severe floods during that time, prompting federal agencies to look for a way to control the water.
To get the dams built, the Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a contract with a local sponsor, such as a county. NRCS covered all the construction costs and helped the sponsor with inspections and repairs. In return, the sponsor maintained the dam for a certain number of years — under most contracts, 50 — to ensure taxpayers got their money’s worth out of the project.
Since many of the dams were built in the 1960s and 1970s, their contracts are now up, said Steve Becker, Wisconsin’s state conservation engineer for NRCS.
“We pretty much told the counties, ‘You have full autonomy to do whatever you want with those dams,” Becker said. “You can maintain, you can rehab, you can repair. It doesn’t really matter. We’re out.’”
Vernon County resource conservationist Mark Erickson points to the work being done to decommission Mlsna Dam in Vernon County, Wis., on July 31, 2024. Mlsna Dam was one of five dams that failed in the area during a massive storm in 2018, and now several other dams are proposed to be decommissioned. (Bennet Goldstein / Wisconsin Watch)
When the Wisconsin dams failed, however, local officials enlisted the help of NRCS to figure out what to do. The agency launched a study of all the dams in the watersheds and found that, while they’d controlled flooding over the last few decades, they fared much worse under future modeling because of their age and projected increases in heavy rainfall. Because the cost to replace them was too steep, NRCS recommended taking them out of service, on the federal government’s dime.
In Vernon County, home to the majority of the dams examined in the study, that plan has been controversial.
Garrick Olerud is treasurer of the Snowflake Ski Club in Westby, which is below three of the dams that are set to be dismantled. The club has had to spend “a lot” of money over the past decade fixing flood damage to the ski jump and the golf course on the property, Olerud said — and that’s with the protection of the dams.
“When you remove those dams, I guess I have big, big concerns about the long-term effects it’ll have,” he said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t believe that the course or the ski jump will continue to … have the financial means to build back after stuff gets washed away.”
To others, leaving the dams in place risks a bigger catastrophe if more of them fail during a storm.
“When (the dams) work, they work, but when they go out, it’s 10 times worse than a regular flood,” Frank Easterday, a member of the Vernon County Board, said during an Aug. 15 meeting.
At the meeting, the board voted to accept federal funding from NRCS so the agency can move forward with decommissioning. Nearby La Crosse and Monroe counties, which have a handful of such dams between them, have followed suit.
Aging dams, climate threats make for ‘perfect storm’
Threats to America’s dam infrastructure were thrust into the spotlight in June when the Rapidan dam in southern Minnesota partially failed, pushed to its limit by days of historic flooding across the upper Midwest.
In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest Infrastructure Report Card, released in 2021, the group gave the nations’ more than 91,000 dams a “D.” That’s largely because of their age — the average age of a dam in the U.S. is over 60 years old, said Del Shannon, the lead author of that section of the report card.
As residential development has sprawled nationally, some dams that once posed little risk to human life if they failed are now a bigger threat.
To date, almost 6,600 of the watershed program dams will have completed their contracts, according to an NRCS spokesperson. In the next five years, that number will rise to 7,383. That means many more places like Vernon County will have decisions to make about how — and whether — to keep them up.
Residents watch as the Kickapoo River jumps its banks and floods the small town of Viola, Wis., in August 2018. (Tim Hundt/Vernon Reporter)
In 2015, now-retired NRCS watershed program engineer Larry Caldwell warned in a memo that a “perfect storm” of problems with watershed dams could put people and property at risk. He outlined seven such problems: These dams are everywhere across the nation, downstream landscapes have filled in since they were constructed, they’re getting old, climate change is bringing more extreme weather, limited funds for repairs, loss of institutional knowledge about the dams, and the fact that the failure of smaller dams can — and have — killed people.
“Any one condition is cause for concern. The presence of two or three would be cause for alarm,” Caldwell wrote. “But all seven are occurring simultaneously which will eventually create a crisis for many communities.”
Properly maintained dams can continue doing their job “well beyond” their contracts, the NRCS spokesperson said. Still, understanding the proper path forward for an individual dam can be challenging because all dams are unique, Shannon said.
What’s more, there’s not a good understanding of how long these kinds of dams can function, a gap Shannon called “astonishing and embarrassing.” He’ll take part in a forthcoming study that seeks to give dam owners broad information about when dam parts start to show wear — like crumbling concrete spillways or corroded metal gates — and when to think about repairing, replacing or charting another course.
High price tag for dam rehab means other solutions may be necessary
Shannon said he views it as a down payment, but more funding is obviously needed. The southwest Wisconsin dams, for example, would cost a few million dollars apiece to replace, Becker estimated — racking up close to $100 million just for one small region.
“What can we afford to do? We can afford to notch them out,” Becker said. “If some big benefactor came in and said, ‘23 dams times $3.5 million? We can help pay for that,’ we’d re-evaluate.”
Residents walk through the area where the Jersey Valley Dam once operated in Vernon County, Wis., in August 2024. The dam breached during a catastrophic storm in 2018. Officials plan to decommission it and build a new one just downstream to preserve a recreational lake. (Tegan Wendland / Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk)
Although recent federal funding will move the needle, looking at the total cost can be depressing, said Lori Spragens, executive director of the Association of State Dam Safety Officials — particularly when remembering that dams are aging every day. She called it a “one step forward, two steps back” situation and said there’s an urgent need to make progress.
“I think we are going to see more dams under stress, or even failing,” Spragens said. “It’s not really fun to look at in the future.”
Amid these challenges, there’s growing interest in natural solutions to reduce the impact of floodwaters in place of built infrastructure. Moving away from areas that flood often and using farming practices that help the land hold on to water, instead of allowing it to run downstream, could help.
The community in Vernon County recognizes that.
“With or without the dams, flooding is going to be a huge challenge in this community,” county conservationist Ben Wojahn told the board during the Aug. 15 meeting. “Decommissioning these dams is not the end … keeping the dams would not be the end.”
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.
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