The water crisis unfolding in Jackson, Mississippi, was decades in the making: the culmination of crumbling infrastructure, systemic racism and more extreme weather. It’s also a stark warning of trouble to come as climate change piles new stress onto the essential services Americans rely on every day.
In addition to warming up the planet by nearly 1.2° Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, climate change is making precipitation events more intense, and therefore more likely to overwhelm strained systems. Lower-income and minority communities such as Jackson — which is 82% Black and where a quarter of residents live in poverty — bear the brunt of the impacts.
“The situation in Jackson isn’t new,” said Dominika Parry, president of the climate activism group 2CMississippi and an environmental economist. “It’s a consequence of many, many decades of disinvestment in water infrastructure, in general infrastructure in the city of Jackson.”
After heavy rainfall caused the Pearl River to flood, the main water-treatment plant in Jackson, which has a history of pump problems, failed. The rain wasn’t record-setting or even as bad as initially predicted. But the outage left thousands without safe drinking water for days.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba declared an emergency on Monday, after the underfunded, understaffed water plant started to fail. The next day Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency, calling on the state National Guard to distribute water for drinking and other purposes.
By Wednesday, President Joe Biden had declared a federal emergency. Jackson residents have been waiting in line to get water, and restaurants and other businesses have had to source additional bottled water.
While the situation in Jackson is acute, its problems aren’t unique. “Jackson quickly has become symbolic of everything that we’re talking about when we talk about environmental and climate injustices,” said Katherine Egland, who serves on the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but “this is happening all over the nation.”
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s drinking water infrastructure a C- in its annual report card last year, describing the need for public investment as “staggering.”
Water systems across America were built for a climate that no longer exists, says Jesse M. Keenan, an associate professor at Tulane University and an expert in how climate change affects cities. Their upkeep is getting more expensive by the day, and for infrastructure that’s already deteriorating, the problems and costs are even higher: Keenan estimates the backlog of capital investments “far exceeds” the $550 billion in President Biden’s infrastructure law.
“Underinvestment in everything from maintenance to capital improvements, combined with the increased costs of climate impacts, means that for cities like Jackson — clean and reliable water is not guaranteed,” he wrote in an email.
According to NOAA, Mississippi has experienced above-average precipitation since the 1970s, and its precipitation patterns are likely to change, with less expected in the summer and more in the fall and winter. The state has experienced little warming from climate change so far, but “historically unprecedented warming” is projected to affect it this century.
Critical water failures have been building up over time in Jackson. Following a severe winter storm in February 2021 — the same storm that knocked out electricity in Texas, resulting in hundreds of deaths — utilities in Mississippi were socked with both power failures and natural-gas supply problems. Water utilities were hit especially hard: Statewide, boil-water notices were issued in 40 counties. Jackson was unable to lift its boil-water notice until March 17, a month after the storm.
Leaders in Democratic-run Jackson pleaded for $47 million to address the situation. State lawmakers, who are mostly White and Republican, gave the city $3 million instead.
But the crisis has roots going back much further. Desegregation efforts in the 1950s contributed to White residents moving out of Jackson, and White flight continued for decades. The city’s White population dropped from 52% in 1980 to just over 16% today, with most of that drop occurring between 1990 and 2010.
“People who were left were lower income,” said 2CMississippi’s Parry, and the result was “a shrinking population and a shrinking amount of money available for investments in the city.”
With White flight came the contraction of Jackson’s overall tax base and of customers paying into the water system. So as the water infrastructure worsened — adults who grew up in Jackson recall boil-water advisories from childhood — the city had less revenue to make fixes. (Some of the suburbs that White former residents moved to incorporated as their own cities, and did so explicitly to create their own water systems.)
Fast forward to today and it’s clear that even if reliable water quickly returns, another rainstorm or winter storm could trigger problems anew. There’s also the issue of the city not having enough people working in the water-treatment plant. The likely remedy is a massive overhaul of the city’s water system. That will be expensive, and it’s unclear who will pay.
Last December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced nearly $75 million in funding for water infrastructure projects in Mississippi. That’s part of the $429 million that Mississippi residents can expect to receive over the next 5 years from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Another injection of funds came in April, when the legislature directed some $450 million from the American Rescue Plan to carry out drinking water, stormwater and wastewater projects.
Yet even if all of the funding made available to the state were devoted to resolving the problem in Jackson, it still might not be enough. Lumumba said that it could cost $1 billion to repair the water distribution system and billions more for a complete fix.
Without federal or state intervention, if cities raise capital for dramatic overhauls of their water systems, most of it will come from the bond market and utility ratepayers, Tulane’s Keenan says. That could mean a huge increase in water bills for millions of Americans — and one in 6 U.S. households is already struggling to pay their utility bills.
Other impacts of climate change besides drinking water outages are already “very clear” in Jackson, says Parry. “We have extreme heat that happens and the urban heat island effect in formerly redlined districts,” Parry said, referring to the higher temperatures that scientists have recorded in urban areas subject to real-estate discrimination. “We have flash floods.”
In the past, powerful people “had no interest in making the city better for its largely Black, mostly poor African American citizens who now populate Jackson and Mississippi,” said Beverly Wright, the executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and a member of Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
As climate impacts become more frequent and widespread, helping the people who are most acutely feeling them now will help everyone in the long run, Wright said: “These are the consequences of caring less for some people than you do others.”
