Minnesotans stared at their screens in horror last June as the raging Blue Earth River swallowed a beloved country store near Mankato. The same flood badly damaged a nearby dam and caused well over $1 billion dollars in damage across 22 southern Minnesota counties.
It was one of more than 60 billion-dollar weather disasters to hit the state over the past 45 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. About 20 of those have struck since 2021, laying bare the real-world stakes of a warmer, wetter Upper Midwest.
As the Trump administration sits out an annual United Nations climate change meeting in Brazil that could (maybe) produce a detailed roadmap to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels, local governments in Minnesota and across the U.S. are preparing for more extreme weather to come.
Minnesota cities with climate action plans
At least 22 Minnesota city, county, regional and tribal governments have published “climate action” or resilience plans to mitigate the human and financial costs of future weather disasters, according to a report out Tuesday from Josefina Hajek-Herrera, a fellow with the Building Power Resource Center and climate policy consultant.
They include Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, Duluth and 12 other communities with more than 10,000 Minnesotans. Mankato published its own climate action plan less than a year after the June 2024 flood inundated low-lying parts of town.
State Sen. Jen McEwen*, DFL-Duluth, said during a call — hosted by report sponsors 100%, an environmental justice nonprofit, and Building Power Resource Center — that the infrastructure-busting impacts of extreme weather are apparent even in her purported “climate change haven” hometown.
In June 2012, Duluth received over seven inches of rain in less than 48 hours, tearing up hillside roads and sewers. Powerful storms damaged Duluth’s popular Lakewalk a few years later, spurring a major fortification project set to begin construction in 2026.
“(Those floods) woke up a lot of people to the fact that climate change is happening now, in real time,” McEwen said.
The planning push comes as President Donald Trump rolls back ambitious environmental laws, regulations and programs enacted under former President Joe Biden. The Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress have canceled billions in federal grants to help local governments reduce pollution and harden infrastructure against extreme weather. Billions more remain in legal limbo, including $7 billion in renewable energy funding for lower-income communities — which the Biden administration said would cut energy bills for 900,000 households — and nearly $1 billion for “pre-disaster” mitigation projects.
‘Morally indefensible and economically ignorant approach’
“What we’re seeing at the federal level is a morally indefensible and economically ignorant approach to energy and climate action,” DFL State Rep. Larry Kraft said on the call. Minnesota cities, he added, “can pick up the slack.”
Municipal planning staff or outside consultants take the lead on climate action planning, often with substantial input from residents, businesses and community groups. Most plans detail a mix of shorter- and longer-term goals to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions, such as by purchasing renewable power, installing high-efficiency electric heating at city facilities and adding electric vehicles to city fleets.
Those goals mirror or in some cases front-run Minnesota’s statutory mandate for statewide carbon neutrality by 2050. In that sense, the plans put a local spin on what state law already requires over the next 25 years. Given the vast scale of human-caused climate change, however, their direct planetary impact will be negligible.
In recognition that the costs of climate change are already piling up, all but one of the 10 climate action plans released since 2022 contain “climate vulnerability assessments” that identify populations and infrastructure most at risk from extreme heat, flooding, poor air quality, food insecurity and high energy costs, Hajek-Herrera said in the report.
Related: Minneapolis climate action plan: How is the city approaching climate justice?
The report hails successes like St. Paul’s jargon-free Climate Action Dashboard, which shows progress toward its 2030 goal of carbon-neutrality in city operations across city-led initiatives like electric heating at Como Park Zoo and Conservatory and the new, ultra-low-impact North End Community Center.
On the call, Diana Chaman Salas, Hennepin County climate and resiliency department director, ticked off some of her employer’s accomplishments: a 10% cut to miles driven by county vehicles, a comparable reduction in county departments’ electricity use from onsite solar power by 2027 and enough community garden capacity to feed 1,000 people last year.
But recent plans’ focus on “cross-jurisdictional relationships” relating to transportation, education, renewable energy development and other projects offer tacit acknowledgement that local governments can’t do everything on their own.
St. Paul admits its fleet electrification plan has been held back by slow deployment of public charging infrastructure. Grand Marais fell behind on its building electrification goals earlier this decade due in part to a local shortage of qualified heat pump technicians, Hajek-Herrera said in the report. Electric grid constraints and red tape around key grant programs have stymied Northfield’s ambitious plans for solar arrays on public property.
And formidable funding challenges — made worse by the federal government’s war on clean energy and climate science — loom over the entire enterprise.
“Ongoing uncertainty in federal climate policy further underscores the necessity for sustained and enhanced state-level support to bridge implementation gaps and strengthen local capacity,” Hajek-Herrera said.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Minnesota Reformer.
The post Minnesota cities continue climate action plans, despite federal abdication appeared first on MinnPost.
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