Flooding

We all want to keep our families, homes, and businesses safe. But floods can be devastating.

Floods are natural and necessary for healthy rivers and communities, but floods become dangerous when people and property are located in floodplains. There are two main reasons floods have become so disastrous:

Flooding has become more frequent and severe with climate change.
70% of the nation’s floodplains are degraded and disconnected from rivers due to human interference, which limits their ability to safely convey flood waters and recharge groundwater.

Unfortunately with flooding events, low-income, Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted. Flooding has always kept people in poverty and that will continue to get worse, unless we take action. We must break the cycle of flooding and poverty.

As damaging as floods can be, there are solutions.

The best way to keep people safe from floods is to give rivers room to flood safely. This means restoring natural floodplains — the low-lying lands along and around rivers.
The communities who bear the disproportionate burden of flood risk and suffer more after floods need to be centered and empowered in decision-making about how they improve their resilience to flooding.

We all want to keep our families, homes, and businesses safe. But floods can be devastating. We can break the cycle of flood damage by restoring rivers and giving communities the tools to protect themselves. We can create a future where healthy rivers and people thrive together