Working with communities to increase natural resilience against flooding in the Upper Mississippi River Basin

Background/Question/Methods

Since the great flood of 1993, we have encroached further into the floodplain, despite the recommendations from “Sharing the Challenge”, Congress, and many others.  We have also continued to utilize primarily structural means (levees, floodwalls and dams) to limit flood damages, despite their high costs to federal, state and local coffers and to our rivers, wetlands, floodplains and upland and coastal areas.  American Rivers investigated the barriers to implementing nonstructural measures to flood damage reduction.  Our assessment evaluates the regulatory, financial, and political barriers that have prevented nonstructural projects from coming to fruition in the Upper Mississippi River Basin.  We recognize that the services of flood storage and water filtration are most efficiently provided by ecosystems.  Floodplains, wetlands, riparian buffers, agricultural lands and native vegetation provide a range of diverse ecosystem services from flood protection, to biodiversity, to recreation. The cost of identifying and integrating sustainable green infrastructure solutions is typically much lower than solving problems through infrastructure investment alone.  The evaluation of ecosystem services that might be provided by changing land use, and locating where these services can and cannot be provisioned, is useful to show where the economic benefit to society may be greater by changing current land uses.  We utilize the Iowa Cedar River ecosystem services valuation project as a case study to understand the potential for land-use changes by accounting for the breadth of ecosystem services, locating where they are best provided across the landscape, and providing agricultural producers with financial incentives to protect these services by making improvements on the land.

Results/Conclusions

Communities in the Iowa-Cedar River Basin have experienced multiple devastating flood events in the last decade; in 2008 alone cost estimates for flood damages in Eastern Iowa were over $10 billion.  Agencies at the local, state, and federal levels are currently devising plans on how to invest extensively in floods risk management in the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB) while a unique effort to coordinate agency efforts is underway in the Iowa-Cedar River Basin (ICRB).  This project lays the groundwork for how USDA can utilize ecosystem services valuation strategically to meet community, agricultural, and conservation program goals, and provide a case study of how mapping ecosystem services can help ensure limited funds are directed towards projects that yield maximum public benefit, provide sustainable flood protection to safeguard communities and contribute ancillary benefits such as nutrient retention, wildlife habitat, and farm land protection.