Rural Communities Rise to the Challenge of Dual Disasters

Rural Communities, Climate, and COVID-19 Recovery
Find out more about the briefings in this series below:
June 16	Implementing Energy Efficiency Programs in Rural America
June 17	The Bioeconomy’s Role in COVID-19 Recovery and Climate Solutions
June 18	Rural Communities Rise to the Challenge of Dual Disasters

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a series of one-hour online briefings about rural communities, climate change, and COVID-19 recovery. The briefings explored the challenges rural communities face, including high energy costs, a struggling agriculture industry, and low investment in resilient infrastructure, as well as the solutions rural communities have developed in the face of these multiple stressors.

Rural communities face unique challenges in preparing for flooding and addressing related infrastructure needs. Local governments with small staffs often do not have the capacity to apply for disaster preparedness funding and can be left out of valuable federal programs. This briefing characterized these issues in the context of COVID-19 and highlighted solutions communities are implementing to meet them. Dr. Richard Norton, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan (UM), discussed his work with Great Lakes coastal communities, which are mostly small and rural communities, and he used the example of the recent Midland dam floods to highlight governance challenges in repairing critical infrastructure. Steve Samuelson, CFM, National Flood Insurance Program Coordinator for the State of Kansas Department of Agriculture, discussed the issues small towns face when attempting to access federal mapping and flood protection programs, and the programs that are working to build flood resilience in these rural areas.

 

HIGHLIGHTS

 

Dr. Richard Norton, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan

• Trends toward urbanization and large-scale farming have created challenges for rural communities planning for and responding to natural disasters.
  • It is growing more difficult to survive as a small farmer or forester, and demographic trends of young people moving away from rural communities mean that the average age of farmers is increasing with relatively few young people interested in entering the farming industry.
  • Rural areas, on average, experience higher levels of poverty, unemployment, and disability, fewer educational opportunities, and less diversity than urban areas.
• Challenges for rural planning are typically rooted in scale or politics and culture.
  • Rural populations are more spread out, so the per-capita cost of infrastructure and services is higher than in densely-populated areas. Smaller tax bases also limit rural governments’ administrative, analysis, and planning capacities.
  • Rural residents tend to oppose regulation and value property rights, which often leads to pushback against infrastructure and disaster planning.
• The Midland Flood that affected rural Michigan in May 2020 is a case study of some of the challenges faced by rural communities. The failure of the Edenville Dam required the evacuation of 10,000 people and caused $190 million in losses and $55 million in response and infrastructure costs. Floods continue to be a threat across the state, which has only two dam safety inspectors for its 2,500 dams (of which 1,061 are regulated).
• Solutions to address rural flood challenges should keep rural places rural and keep farming and forestry as viable economic options. Towns should be kept compact, and should be built or moved away from hazard-prone areas. Economies should be locally-focused, and farmers should use sustainable methods and plant diverse crops.
• Rural communities will face new kinds of challenges as they deal with climate change. It can be difficult to see how small, local actions affect larger systems. This disconnect and political polarization often prevent necessary changes and perpetuate underinvestments in government.
• Necessary steps to build rural resilience are to act before disasters happen, promote good governance, fit policies to the landscape they will affect, learn to live with nature instead of fighting it, develop stewardship-based economies, and implement “no-regrets” policies that will strengthen communities even if climate change does not affect them.

• COVID-19 has made pursuing necessary collaborations and policy change more difficult.

 

Steve Samuelson, CFM, National Flood Insurance Program Coordinator for the State of Kansas Department of Agriculture

• Large parts of the country, and many counties in Kansas specifically, are not yet covered by federal flood maps, which limits information accessible to communities and can prevent them from accessing some federal assistance and grant funds. For many people, the lack of information about their vulnerability to a risk makes them think that they are not vulnerable.
• Small, rural towns typically have limited staff with people working multiple roles. In some cases, staff have had to step away from some roles, including flood planning, to respond to COVID-19.
  • When we talk about small towns in Kansas, we can be talking about communities with 50 people as well as communities with 10,000 people. Within this space of “small and rural,” there is still a wide range of communities.
• Kansas experienced heavy flooding in 2019. The town of Strong City flooded three times, and did not receive any response or mitigation assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The town’s small size meant that it did not meet requirements for dollars of damage to qualify for a disaster declaration.
  • Strong City has been denied federal grants to improve infrastructure resilience in the past. To respond to flooding on a s