St. Louis Today: Region grapples with hotter future as it looks to adapt to climate change
LIVING WITH CLIMATE CHANGE
CREVE COEUR • In a greenhouse at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, where the temperature is pushing 90 degrees, tiny cameras hang from the ceiling, catching the slow-motion growth of more than two dozen varieties of corn.
Soon, researchers will fill an automated, indoor system with still more corn plants, rotating them on a conveyor belt and meticulously measuring their dosage of water and heat.
Similar experiments will go on at the high-tech facilities, and in the field, for the next several years as scientists search for the best corn variety to withstand a prolonged drought, such as the one that gripped the region three years ago. Then they’ll map its genes, searching for even more detail that might save farmers — and grocery shoppers — more pain when the next drought comes.
“It’s kind of on everyone’s brain that (corn) is really sensitive to drought conditions,” said Nadia Shakoor, a Danforth scientist who is working on the project. Corn’s drought resiliency, she added, “actually hasn’t been looked at as much as you might think.”
Then again, drought hasn’t been a huge issue for the region.
But in 2012, St. Louis and Missouri sweated through their hottest year on record, with 21 days of at least 100 degrees. By the time the summer ended, the heat had killed 26 people in the St. Louis area. Drought devastated Missouri’s corn harvest, slashing yields in half.
That awful summer spurred some Missouri policymakers to prepare for a future in which weather extremes could well be the norm. The St. Louis Health Department, for example, created a severe weather coordinator position to help protect residents from extreme heat. And the state’s universities and the Danforth Center applied for, and won, $20 million to study the state’s weather patterns and search for drought-resistant genes in food crops.
Those kinds of steps signal an important change in the dialogue over climate change.
No longer are academics, planners and policymakers only talking about how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and mess with the planet’s weather. More and more, they’re preparing for a future without a concerted global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“Like so many things in life, you either pay now and plan prudently or you pay later,” said Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center in Washington, D.C.
Many states and cities along the coasts have already started preparing, driven in part by the visibility and irrefutable danger of rising sea levels.
The Midwest faces its own unique threats from a changing climate, with the National Climate Assessment warning of droughts, floods and longer heat waves. But many governments in the region, including those in the St. Louis area, have only just started thinking about how to adapt.
“I think the implications for the center of the country, especially given the importance of agriculture and what droughts and storms can mean for those industries, is huge,” said Lara Hansen, the executive director of EcoAdapt, a Seattle-area organization that helps organizations plan for climate change.
