The Stream, January 30, 2025: To Escape Floods, Kentuckians Are Relocating to Mined Mountaintops; World’s Longest Freshwater Lake Sees Fishery Declines

Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the towering flood gates that protect Harlan from high water on the forks of the Cumberland River are emblematic of federal investment in eastern Kentucky. Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

YOUR GLOBAL RUNDOWN 

• Storm Herminia brought downpours to western France over the weekend, swelling rivers and resulting in the worst flooding some communities have seen in decades.
• In India, a dedicated transition to organic cotton production has proved both economically and environmentally beneficial. 
• Residents in Kentucky are moving from flood-prone valleys to mountaintops, as new communities are being built atop former strip mines.
• Tanzania’s fishing industry is in crisis as production in Lake Tanganyika — the world’s longest freshwater lake — is being hurt by climate change and overfishing.

— Christian Thorsberg, Interim Stream Editor

Fresh: From the Great Lakes Region

Federal Funding Uncertainty Hits Great Lakes Region: The Trump administration reversed course Wednesday in its attempt to freeze federal grants, the Washington Post reports. The White House rescinded an order that it had published Monday to pause federal financial commitments. Still, as uncertainty lingers over the future of federal funds, conservation and science organizations in the Great Lakes region expressed concerns over the health of the world’s largest source of fresh water, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. The futures of cleanup and environmental justice initiatives, both crucial to the health of fisheries and people, hang in limbo.  

Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now at Detroit Public Television, Michigan Public and The Narwhal work together to report on the most pressing threats to the Great Lakes region’s water. This independent journalism is supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Find all the work here.

• Toronto-area national park to grow as feds scrap airport plan — The Narwhal
• What furor over drab Gaylord land says about Michigan’s energy transition — Bridge Michigan
• How Ducks Unlimited Became Heroes of the Conservation Movement — Great Lakes Now
• “A crisis”: Lake whitefish survey paints an even more dire picture — Michigan Public

The Lead

In many traditional, genetically modified cotton farms in India, worms have disappeared from the soil, choked out by overused fertilizers and pesticides — products one grower tells France24, “we didn’t even need.” The chemicals pervade water supplies, noses, and eyes, harming cotton harvesters and the local environment. 

Switching to organic cotton farming has proven cost-effective, safer, and better for the land. The return of worms to the soil helps the crops absorb water more efficiently. Roughly 6,000 small-scale farmers, through the benefit of loans from an NGO, have made this transition in India, the world’s top cotton exporter. 

Other growers, afraid of the economic risks of suddenly switching to organic methods, have adopted regenerative farming to ease the transition. Rotating crops, employing more efficient irrigation, and gradually reducing fertilizer concentrations have, so far, also paid dividends. Each year, they say, they are saving on resources without sacrificing production. 

These changes have been made possible by global textile companies prioritizing green manufacturing. While the transition is promising — the market is expected to grow 10 percent by 2026 — it is also slow. So far, only two percent of India’s cotton production is certified organic.

Recent WaterNews from Circle of Blue

• Opinion: Trump’s “Thrilling New Era” Is a Gas — More carbon means powerful storms and floods, worse droughts and wildfires lie ahead.
• World Economic Forum Appoints Circle of Blue Managing Director to its Global Future Council on the Future of the Energy Nexus — J. Carl Ganter Honored In Davos

This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers

40

Years since worse flooding has gripped the city of Rennes in western France, as heavy rains and high winds swelled L’Ille and La Vilaine rivers submerging streets, farmland, and the first floors of homes and businesses, Reuters and France24 report. Roughly 400 residents “living in streets near the city’s Saint-Martin canal” were evacuated as persistent winter rains have slowed drainage and recovery efforts. In the aftermath of the floods, river-based houseboats, remarkably, were lifted to levels equal or higher than street-parked cars.

$800 million

Estimated total cost of an ongoing effort in eastern Kentucky to move flood-hit and flood-prone communities to higher ground, building neighborhoods and relocating families onto mountaintops that were formerly coal mines, the New York Times reports. So far, seven communities across four counties — comprising 665 new properties — have been designed. Of the fourteen homes already completed, about a dozen people have already moved in. The plan came as a response to the devastating floods of 2022, in which 45 people were killed and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. Water depth in some places exceeded five feet. The former strip mines are considered safer than the floodplains and valleys where people once settled. 

“Climate change is real,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, told the Times. “It’s hard to say which natural disaster would or would not have occurred without climate change, because we’ve had some big ones in the past. But what we know is that we see them more often, and sadly, we see them hit a lot of the same places.”

On the Radar

Between 2020 and 2024, fish production in Lake Tanganyika — the world’s longest freshwater lake, sharing borders with Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, and Democratic Republic of Congo — dropped by 20 percent, Al Jazeera reports. The decline has been felt acutely by Tanzania’s fish industry, for whom Tanganyika supplies 40 percent of its catch. While environmental degradation is partly to blame — research suggests that over the past century, the lake’s habitable zones have shrunk by nearly 40 percent — officials last year suspected that overfishing, a result of population growth, was also a major cause of the crisis. They implemented a fishing ban, but had no fish stock data more recent than 1996 to compare the effect of this temporary closure, which concluded in September 2024. Warmer surface temperatures and a lack of wind, both linked to local climate change, are also to blame for the lake’s lack of productivity, scientists say.

Christian Thorsberg

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer from Chicago. He is passionate about climate and cultural phenomena that often appear slow or invisible, and he examines these themes in his journalism, poetry, and fiction.