Four Mississippi River mayors spent last week in Dubai at the United Nations’ annual climate change conference, where they met with world leaders and announced new climate resilience plans.

Those four mayors — Mitch Reynolds of LaCrosse, Wisconsin; Brad Cavanagh of Dubuque, Iowa; Errick D. Simmons of Greenville, Mississippi; and LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans — are part of a coalition called the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, or MRCTI. In the past, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland has been one of the group’s co-chairs. 

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Surrounded by international leaders, the four Mississippi River municipal mayors shared a slate of new initiatives, including natural infrastructure projects to reduce disaster risks, an agreement with a river advocacy group in India and a new regional insurance system to support Mississippi River towns.

The international climate conference was contentious this year after a disagreement over whether the UN should call for a total fossil fuel phase-out in the conference’s final report. The final international agreement emphasizes the need to transition from fossil fuels.

But LaCrosse’s Reynolds thinks some of the most important work happening at the gathering is among groups like MRCTI.

“Our organization, like so many other subnational groups around the globe, is doing the hard work on the ground at home to adapt to climate change and build resilience so that real solutions can happen quickly,” he said in a statement.

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Climate troubles on the Mississippi River extend far beyond its banks, so MRCTI has sent coalition members to five of the UN’s recent conferences.

By some estimates, one in 12 people globally consume commodities grown in the Mississippi River basin, and more than 60% of grain in the U.S. moves along the waterway to reach international markets. So, climate impacts — particularly recent swings between droughts and floods — hit the river hard.

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Using federal data on the damage costs of natural disasters, MRCTI reported a $246 billion loss throughout the Mississippi River basin in less than two decades.

“Over the past few years, (New Orleans) has seen increasingly stronger storms, and more recently, life-threatening heat waves and a prolonged drought that damaged our greenspace and contributed to a saltwater intrusion that threatened our drinking water,” Mayor Cantrell said in a statement.

She said the group needs to “take collective, global action towards eliminating these risks and creating a safer, healthier environment for our people.”

The executive director of MRCTI, Colin Wellenkamp, said the group met with coalitions from other countries and discussed how similar issues, such as flooding, drought and extreme heat were playing out there, and how they could share knowledge. Wellenkamp said they had conversations about the river basin with French President Emmanuel Macron and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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 Two of the projects MRCTI unveiled in Dubai are for infrastructure on the river.

The first is an effort to make the lower river more resilient. At the time of last year’s UN conference in Egypt, the coalition of mayors was working to secure $40 million for natural infrastructure projects on the lower river to harden it against climate change. Environmental advocates have been lobbying for something like it for years, following suit with a decades-old counterpart in the upper basin.

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They upped the program funding this year, and Wellenkamp said it’ll fund projects, such as expanding floodplains and restoring marshes, across 100,000 acres in eight states. They’re aiming to complete the projects by the end of the decade and estimate it will cost $100 million.

The other infrastructure project on MRCTI’s agenda is funded by a grant from the Netherlands and hosted by the Resilient Cities Catalyst. Cities in the Mississippi River basin will apply to be paired with global engineering experts who will help them form resilience plans.

Still in its early phases, the plan is to divide the river into three regions. Cities will apply to be one of 10 cities in each region to host global infrastructure firms.

The goal is to start matching cities with firms by the end of next year and eventually cut disaster exposure by 25%.

New insurance pilot

The group also announced a new insurance pilot program that would provide payouts to cities and municipalities after disasters. Working with Munich Reinsurance Co., MRCTI is working to bring “reinsurance” to cities in the basin.

It’s called “parametric” insurance, and it provides protection to policyholders against specific events by paying a set amount based on the magnitude of the event — a 100-year storm, for example — rather than the magnitude of the losses.

“Our organization, like so many other subnational groups around the globe, is doing the hard work on the ground at home to adapt to climate change and build resilience so that real solutions can happen quickly.”

Mayor Mitch Reynolds
LaCrosse, Wisconsin

The goal is to create a private market-funded resilience fund for cities to deal with damage from things such as flooding, without having to draw down on federal funds.

Munich Reinsurance will leverage the ecosystem restoration projects run by Ducks Unlimited to create a risk pool whose environmental improvements will then be marketised to the reinsurance program.

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Wellenkamp said because the system is a pilot that Munich Reinsurance hopes to scale, the details are proprietary at this time.

“It’s unique,” he said. “No one else is doing anything like this.”

Agreement with India

In India, the Ganges and Indus River basins are major food sources.

MRCTI’s mayors signed a memorandum of common purpose in Dubai with an Indian river advocacy group, signaling the beginning of a partnership meant to kickstart shared knowledge between the groups.

“All of these river basins are under stress,” Wellenkamp said. “They’re all experiencing significant and persistent climate impacts that are degrading them, and our dependency on them is just growing in direct contradiction to those impacts.”

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The groups are looking at sharing best practices for managing urban rivers, including bringing nature back to urban areas, restoring aquatic ecosystems and monitoring water quality.

Wellenkamp said a delegation from MRCTI hopes to travel to India next year.

This story, written by Keely Brewer and with contributions from Eric Schmid of St. Louis Public Radio and Tegan Wendland, is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The Mississippi River Cities & Towns Initiative is also a Walton grantee.