Day: November 28, 2025

U.S. dams, levees, stormwater, and wastewater systems get D to D+ grades, need almost $1 trillion in upgrades — Jeff Masters (YaleClimateConnections.org)

Click the link to read the article on the Yale Climate Connections website (Jeff Masters):

November 24, 2025

“America’s infrastructure is the foundation on which our national economy, global competitiveness, and quality of life depend,” begins the 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, or ASCE, a trade group. 

The report, issued once every four years, gave America’s infrastructure an overall grade of C, up from a C- grade in its 2021 report. ASCE credited the improvement to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, plus federal partnerships with state and local governments and the private sector.

But dams, levees, stormwater, and wastewater infrastructure components received D to D+ grades. That’s concerning given that climate change is increasingly stressing dams, levees, wastewater, and stormwater systems through heavier precipitation events. What’s more, the federal government has shown little interest in sustaining the funding needed to continue improving infrastructure.

A “D” grade, in ASCE’s words, means “the infrastructure is in fair to poor condition and mostly below standard, with many elements approaching the end of their service life. A large portion of the system exhibits significant deterioration. Condition and capacity are of serious concern with strong risk of failure.” Each of ASCE’s assessments since the first was issued in 1998 has given U.S. dams a “D” or “D+” grade. 

ASCE called for investments of over $165 billion for dams, more than $70 billion for levees, and by 2044, $690 billion for wastewater and stormwater systems. That adds up to about $1 trillion.

The change in heavy downpours (defined as the top 1% of precipitation events) from 1958-2021, from the 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment. (Image credit: Climate Central)

Climate change is increasing the risks to water-related infrastructure

Increased precipitation in the U.S. in recent decades, partially the result of climate change, has caused an additional $2.5 billion a year in U.S. flood damages, according to a January 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers, climate scientists at Stanford University, found that between 1988 and 2017, heavier precipitation accounted for more than one-third of the damage. 

Read: Why is it raining so hard? Global warming is delivering heavier downpours

“There is real economic value in avoiding higher levels of global warming,” study co-author Noah Diffenbaugh said in an interview with E&E News. “That’s not a political statement. That’s a factual statement about costs. And it also shows that there’s real economic value to adaptation and resilience because we’re clearly not adapted to the climate change that’s already happened.”

Aging infrastructure and more frequent and intense rainstorms cause additional strain to the nation’s dams. Since 2018, heavy rains have resulted in approximately 30 dam failures or near failures just in the Midwest, according to ASCE. Some examples:

Minnesota, June 2024: The 115-year-old Rapidan Dam, which had gone through several rounds of repairs since 2002 and was assessed to be in poor condition in 2023, failed. The failure resulted in the destruction of a power station and destroyed part of a riverbank.

Michigan, May 2020: Heavy rains from a 1-in-200-year rainstorm destroyed two 96-year-old dams, the Edenville Dam and Sanford Dam, and damaged four other dams, causing $250 million in damage.

Watch: Video: Michigan dam break shows how climate change strains infrastructure

U.S. dams need over $165 billion in upgrades

Drawing upon the latest data from the Association of State Dam Safety Officials, ASCE estimated the cost of rehabilitating all non-federal U.S. dams (which comprise 96% of the country’s more than 92,000 dams) at $165 billion. Of that amount, $37 billion is needed to address high-hazard dams, defined as those whose failure would result in loss of life and significant property damage. Additional money, which was not quantified in the report, would be needed to upgrade federal dams.

Over 2,500 dams are considered “high-hazard.” This class of dams has increased by 20% in number since 2012, driven mostly by increased development in downstream areas. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the dams it maintains are designed to serve for 50 years. Yet the average age of America’s dams is 64 years, and over 70% of U.S. dams are more than 50 years old. Old dams are a hazard: Approximately 75% of all U.S. dam failures occurred in dams over 50 years old.

Debris fills the Feather River from the damaged spillway of California’s Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest dam, after its near-collapse in February 2017. The Oroville incident forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and cost $1.1 billion in repairs. (Image credit: California Department of Water Resources)

A key problem for old dams is that their reservoirs gradually fill up with sediment as they age, reducing their storage capacity and increasing the risk that the dams will overtop and fail. This problem is exacerbated by climate change, because increased drought and wildfire in the surrounding watershed increase the amount of debris flowing into reservoirs during heavy rains. In addition, dams built for flood-control purposes for the climate of the 20th century may no longer be up to the task for the warming climate of the 21st century, when heavier downpours can be expected to put pressure on infrastructure not designed for such extreme flows.

Worse than most: Vermont’s dams

In Vermont, the average age of the state’s dams is 89 years, and many were not built using modern codes and standards. In other words, they are not designed to withstand increasingly heavy and frequent rainstorms. Following historic flooding in July 2023, state dam inspectors found that 57 dams were overtopped by flooding, 50 dams sustained “notable damage,” and five dams failed.

Read: If a megaflood strikes California, these dams might be at risk

The L-550 levee on the Missouri River overtopping during the spring 2011 floods. (Image credit: USACE)

U.S. levees need significantly more than $70 billion in upgrades

“Twenty-three million Americans nationwide live and work behind a levee,” the report notes. “The National Levee Database contains over 24,000 miles of levees across the U.S., but nearly two-thirds have not been assessed for risks posed to the communities behind them.” 

In that context, the Civil Engineers’ 2025 report card grade of D+ for the nation’s 40,000 miles of levees is concerning. The ASCE said that the cost of bringing the nation’s levees into a state of good repair was significantly more than the $70 billion it estimated in 2021.

U.S. levees are, on average, 61 years old, many built using engineering standards less rigorous than current best practices. The good news is that fewer than 3% of U.S. levees are rated high or very high risk, down from 4% in 2021.

Wastewater and stormwater systems are 70% underfunded

“The nation’s sewers are estimated to be worth over $1 trillion and include nearly 17,500
wastewater treatment plants that operate to protect public health and ensure the well-being of communities,” the report said.

In 2024, the wastewater and stormwater annual capital needs were $99 billion, but funding was just 30% of that – $30 billion per year. The report said, “Assuming the combined wastewater and stormwater sector continues along the same path, the gap will grow to more than $690 billion by 2044.” 

The report’s D and D+ grades for stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, respectively, were unchanged from the 2021 report, despite the injection of $46 billion allocated by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act in 2021 and 2022 to assist the stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water sectors.

Smart infrastructure spending is essential

Although massive investments in our infrastructure are essential, the money must be spent wisely. Many infrastructure upgrades don’t account for future climate extremes. As sea level rise expert Robert Young of Coastal Carolina University wrote in a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “most of the funded projects are designed to protect existing infrastructure, in most cases with no demands for the recipients to improve long-term planning for disasters or to change patterns of future flood plain development. At the very least, we need to demand that communities accepting public funds for rebuilding or resilience stop putting new infrastructure in harm’s way.”

Some of the projects funded in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law were of questionable wisdom. For example, it allocated funds to elevate 19 single-family homes in the Florida Keys. I love the Keys, but cruel math says that it is not cost-effective to defend the low-lying islands, which are all but certain to be swamped by rising seas in the coming decades. A state-commissioned 2020 report by the Urban Land Institute found that spending about $8 billion to combat sea level rise and storm surges in the Keys would only prevent about $3 billion in damages over the period 2020-2070 — a return of just 41 cents on each dollar spent. In contrast, the study found that in Miami, a similar investment would yield a return of over $9 for each dollar spent. 

And civil engineer Chuck Marohn, founder of the nonprofit strongtowns.org, argues that infrastructure spending encouraging sprawl is to be avoided, since “when you sprawl outward, every new house adds more to the public obligation to maintain. More pipes, more roads, more services. But there’s no corresponding bump in tax productivity. Instead, you create what we call a “bad party” — a place where every new resident consumes more than they contribute.”

Bob Henson contributed to this post.

Built to Fail: Rules at UN Climate Talks Favor the Status Quo, Not Progress: Experts say stifling bureaucratic procedures that are disconnected from the climate crisis have consistently stalled COP negotiations — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org)

Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):

November 12, 2025

Frustration about slow progress at the United Nations climate talks boiled over this week. After hours under the equatorial sun at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scores of protesters pushed past security guards Tuesday evening and briefly occupied parts of the negotiating area, calling for an end to mining and logging in the Amazon, among other demands.

The clash symbolized a deeper tension at the heart of the U.N. climate summits. The people demanding change are often outside the gates while those with power inside are bound by rules that slow progress to a crawl.

UNFCCC officials said two people suffered minor injuries and that parts of the venue were temporarily closed for cleanup and security checks. The U.N. and local police are investigating the protests and the talks resumed on schedule Wednesday morning. 

On Instagram, a group calling itself Juventude Kokama OJIK posted a video of the Blue Zone occupation and called it an act against exclusion.

“They created an ‘exclusive’ space within a territory that has ALWAYS been Indigenous, and this violates our dignity,” the group wrote. “The demonstration is to say that we will not accept being separated, limited, or prevented from circulating in our own land. The territory is ancestral, and the right to occupy this space is non-negotiable.”

The Tuesday tumult was a stark contrast to normal proceedings at the annual conference, where delegates with swinging lanyards and beeping phones usually file meekly through the metal detectors and past the espresso kiosks as if they’re heading to an office supply expo rather than negotiations to avert catastrophic climate collapse.

Somehow, that urgency rarely crept inside, partly because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs the annual meetings like a corporate conference, said Danielle Falzon, a sociologist at Rutgers University whose research on the climate talks draws on dozens of interviews with negotiators and other participants from both developed and developing countries at most COPs since 2016. 

In the UNFCCC setting, she said, success is measured by how long you stay in the room, how polished your presentation is, how fluent you are in bureaucratic English—and how well you can pretend that the world isn’t burning outside.

“I’d like to go to the negotiations and see people taking seriously the urgency and the undeniability of the massive changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I’d like to see them break through the sterilized, shallow, diplomatic language and talk about climate change for what it actually is.”

For all its talk of unity, the climate summit has struggled to deliver because the talks mirror the global inequalities they are meant to fix, Falzon said. Based on her research, COP hasn’t made much progress because it still fails to serve the countries that have contributed least to the problem but are suffering the most from it.

The negotiations, she said, are dominated by well-staffed teams from wealthy, developed nations that can afford to be everywhere at once. Smaller delegations from less-developed countries often can’t even attend the dozens of overlapping meetings.

“Everyone is exhausted but people from smaller delegations are just trying to keep up,” she said. That exhaustion, she added, shapes the talks themselves: those with the most capacity set the pace and define the terms, while the rest simply try not to fall behind.

“You can’t just pretend that all countries are equal in the negotiating space,” she said.

The imbalance is built into the institution, she said. The U.N. climate process was designed to keep everyone at the table, not to shake it. That makes it resilient, but also resistant to change, and she said her multiyear study of the talks shows the system values consensus and procedure over outcomes and the appearance of progress over actual results. 

“Much of what’s called success at COP now is the creation of new texts, new work programs, rather than real climate action,” she said. After 30 years of meetings, the pattern delivers new agendas, new acronyms and new promises that keep the gears grinding but rarely move the needle on emissions, she added.

Most people involved in the climate talks see the need for change, but Falzon said that institutions are built to preserve themselves.

How (not) talk about climate

Part of the paralysis Falzon describes stems from a reluctance to speak plainly about the emergency it exists to address, said, said Max Boykoff, a climate communications researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The problems associated with climate change were first framed as scientific issues all the way back in the 1980s, and that has become the dominant way we understand a changing climate,” Boykoff said. “But that has crowded out other ways of knowing; emotional, experiential, aesthetic, or even just visceral ways of understanding that something’s not right.

#Colorado’s #snowpack hits record low, with snowstorms expected to hit mountains during Thanksgiving weekend — The Summit Daily

Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map November 27, 2025.

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Andrea Teres-Martinez). Here’s an excerpt:

November 26, 2025

A two-part storm stretching from Friday night into Monday afternoon could create snowy conditions for Thanksgiving weekend skiers and travelers, but it won’t do much for Colorado’s record-low snowpack

It’s been a lackluster start to the winter season as Colorado’s snowpack hit its lowest level in three decades, but a warmer-than-usual Thanksgiving and subsequent weekend storm could bring some much-awaited snow to Colorado’s northern and central mountains. Colorado’s snowpack is currently at the 0th percentile, meaning the snow water equivalent is the lowest on record for Nov. 26 since 1987. Several basins in Northwest Colorado are at 23% of normal, while snowpack levels along the I-70 corridor are closer to 24% of normal, according to National Weather Service Forecaster David Byers. The state’s end-of-month forecast doesn’t promise much in terms of notable changes to the snowpack…next is a two-part weekend storm expected to bring up to 8 inches of snow to Colorado’s northern and central mountains, according to a Wednesday report by OpenSnow. The first part is set to begin Friday night with 3-6 inches of snow to the northern mountains and 0-4 inches in the central mountains.