[SERIOUS MUSIC] Here in the Ozarks, we are living in climate change.

I think oftentimes, we talk about climate change as in, it's getting warmer.

But that's not the only thing.

Ozarks is seeing more precipitation than it has historically.

And that precipitation is concentrated in more severe events.

The frequency of flooding has been a concern recently.

Where we're really seeing impact is in our rivers and streams.

Climate change seems like it's making a bigger difference than it ever has before.

What is our day-to-day life going to be like with this new environment that we have?

What's that impact economically?

What's that impact on our health and wellness?

The longer we wait, the higher that cost is.

So the question is, how much do we want it to cost?

[SERIOUS MUSIC] I think the most important changes we're seeing in the midwest, the ones that are going to affect us economically and personally, are in the precipitation patterns and amounts that we're seeing.

It's precipitation, and that effect that it has on the crops we grow, the cost of home ownership, and in flooding.

That's really the climate change impact that does have the biggest effect on our day-to-day life right now.

WILLIAM GUTOWSKI: We have been burning fossil fuels for quite some time now.

By that, I mean especially coal, and then petroleum.

And in doing that, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide acts, in a rough sense, like putting on a blanket, because the earth arrives at its temperature by getting heat energy from the sun.

And then the Earth radiates energy back to space.

And so it loses heat.

So there's a balance between what's coming in and what's going out.

And when we increase the greenhouse gases, while we block some of that ability of the Earth to send energy back to space.

And so that's causing the planet to warm up in a general sense.

TOBY DOGWILER: At the fundamental level, the warmer the air is, the more moisture it can hold.

A lot of the moisture that falls as rainfall in the midwest is sourced in the Gulf of Mexico.

So that water precipitating out of the sky, it's coming from either the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean.

A lot of it's from the Gulf.

And the Gulf is record hot.

It's been record hot for years.

And so you've got this big, hot, body of water down there.

It's evaporating a lot of water.

Air currents, weather patterns move that up into the midwest.

So we get all this warm, juicy, moist air that comes up here, and then gets wrung out as precipitation.

We have fewer storms.

And the duration of storms is shorter than it used to be.

But when it does rain, it rains harder, and we get more rain out of the storm.

And we get higher average annual precipitation than we used to.

So we're getting more rain, but we're getting it in fewer, more intense events.

That also means that there's a longer period between storms on average.

So we're more exposed to drought, ironically.

We're getting more rain.

But we're also, especially in the Ozarks where we don't have thick soils, we don't have the ability to store a lot of soil moisture, we're getting a lot of rain, but it's coming too fast and too hard for us to really capture all that.

A lot of it just runs off.

Higher stream flows, more floods.

NICOLETTE ZANGARA: This has been an extremely active year.

It feels like every month, there's something that we're either responding to directly or still recovering from.

So just to go back to April 29, which really kicked off this really busy storm season, we had over a thousand calls coming into our public information call center.

That's where we get the storm damage reports.

And that's how we know where to send people after the fact.

Of those calls, we had over 119 residential structures either majorly affected or destroyed.

And that means that they had to go through significant uphill battles to get that repaired.

So whether that's getting a ginormous tree off of their house, or getting a power pole fixed that also went through their house, these are the reports that are the hardest to respond to from a personal level.

So we try to get those taken care of as fast as we can.

The initial storm that happened in 4/29, the initial night, we had over 200 service requests for trees that were down.

And so at first, you're really in an emergency response mode where you're just trying to get the roads cleared, and you're doing everything you can to make sure that the roads are clear and passable.

And then the following week is where you're really trying to clean up the community.

And then that's something that will continue for many months from now, even.

We're in the area of over 500 trees that we lost, or that we're still repairing.

We're going to see that number grow as the year goes on.

From April 29 alone, we had over a thousand calls coming in.

June 29, we still had several hundred calls coming in.

That's a pretty large number for our office to handle.

But both of these events were so widespread, that it was hard to drive around and not find more people to try and help, and help through that recovery process.

I think in years past, while we have had several tornadic events, ice storms, wind-driven events, hailstorms, they've been pretty localized in the worst of the damage.

And what we're seeing this year is that they're more widespread.

COLTEN HARRIS: A lot of our work has to do with watching the forecast.

And ahead of larger rain events, we're trying to clear the grates ahead of time, or after rain events, we're trying to clear grates to make sure that things are flowing well.

And unfortunately, there's places around town where if we get enough rain, we know that probably, we're going to have to block that area off because it's going to cover the road for a time.

And so there's larger projects in the work to try to eliminate those areas.

But our stormwater infrastructures throughout the city is aging.

MARC OWEN: The frequency of flooding has been a concern recently.

There's a lot of economic impacts with that in terms of bridges, and roads, and things like that.

Who's going to pay for the roads and bridges to get repaired or replaced?

Taxpayers are going to do that.

Insurance rates go up.

It really impacts us all in some ways.

I think oftentimes, we talk about climate change as in, it's getting warmer.

But that's not the only thing.

There's lots of other kind of components to climate change, and things we don't know.

And so uncertainty in this whole what's happening with species, and climate change, is a big factor that we just have to accept, and try to understand.

CHRIS BARNHART: Ozarks is seeing more precipitation than it has historically.

And that precipitation is concentrated in more severe events.

And those extreme weather events can do a lot of damage.

They can affect caterpillars, and eggs of butterflies.

So those spring deluges probably help to explain why we have so few butterflies up until just about now, this year.

Only in this past week have we started to see species at the abundance that we're used to in the gardens.

It was really thin up until this week.

JAMES GIOCOMO: There are a lot of species that are declining.

I focus mostly on the North American and this hemisphere.

And most of those birds, we've seen a 70% decline in some of our most-common birds.

What's happening is we're having more extreme heat waves, and more extreme rainfall and wind issues.

And even a more extreme winter.

So rainstorms during the breeding season will flood out even nests, and bushes, and trees if the water gets high enough, or if there's enough rain coming down that it just soaks the parents that are trying to shelter the eggs in the nest.

So a lot of the impacts from climate change will come from these extremes.

MIKE KROMREY: Here in the Ozarks, we are living in climate change.

Where we're really seeing impact is in our rivers and streams.

Erosion is happening more quickly, which is doing things like eating up hay fields and cropland, eroding people's yards, and stream banks, and their farms.

It's really quite remarkable.

This is being driven by an increased frequency and magnitude of flooding, which probably isn't rocket science to anybody listening.

We've noticed these massive floods this year.

In fact, here at the Watershed Center, we had about six storm events, which we used to only have one of those every two or three years, really big storm events that wash out our trails and things.

Channel changes due to increases in flooding, as well as the frequency of flooding, has been a concern recently.

We've measured river stages and flow for over a hundred years at some stations in the Ozarks.

And those two show there's been a increase in the frequency and magnitude of floods, particularly over the last couple of decades.

And so that, in turn, creates a situation where rivers have to adjust to that increased frequency and magnitude of flooding.

Rivers have started to adjust to that new amount of rainfall.

And so we see them getting wider.

I've observed sometimes widths have changed maybe 30% all the way up to 100% change over those 80 years, with an increase in that rate over the last couple of decades is very noticeable.

You end up getting erosion, and sediment transport of gravels, and other soil, and sediment, through these systems that can cause problems.

TOBY DOGWILER: The most common impairment in the country is suspended sediment turbidity, or suspended sediment in a stream.

So when you're getting more intense, harder rainfall, you get more runoff.

That runoff is able to erode soils, erode sediment, and carry them into the stream.

And that has impacts across the board on stream ecology.

If you're a bass fisherman, those bass eat bugs.

Other critters that live in the stream or in the lake that they need to eat, they're being impacted by those changes in the water quality.

That's not to mention that there's also a work out there that shows when we have these prolonged periods of dryness.

Chemicals build up in the soil.

And because it doesn't rain for a long time, or maybe we get a few light rains, not enough to really flush anything, and then we get these big, intense rainfalls, it flushes all that stuff out of the soil at once.

That ends up in the groundwater in the stream.

So we get these really high-concentration slugs of pollution into the system all at once.

We have reservoirs that fill in with sediment.

Those might be drinking water supplies.

MIKE KROMREY: The cleaner waters are, the cheaper they are to treat to deliver as high-quality drinking water.

So there's an economic benefit there too.

Big time.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

It's really expensive to try to mitigate pollution, especially in the aquifer.

We need to keep it clean in the first place.

It'll serve us well now.

It'll serve our economy well.

It'll serve future generations well.

MARC OWEN: It could carry, for instance, nutrients.

When nutrients get into our riverways, it creates algal blooms and other drops and dissolved oxygen.

And that has a lot of impacts on the aquatic organisms, but also in terms of recreation, and things like that.

Seasonally, we get nutrient dumps, like we've had here in the spring when we get a lot of rain.

And that rain water runs off into our lakes and reservoirs.

When we get a mix of nutrients, sunlight, and warm temperatures, it's just prime conditions for algal blooms to occur.

And that negatively impacts the water quality on the source side.

KARA TVEDT: Then, once the nutrients get into the water body, you add sunlight to them.

Then you start getting your plankton blooms that makes the water a little greener.

It can like give it an off taste.

WILL SAPPINGTON: The more algae that is present in our lakes and reservoirs, that comes at a treatment cost.

It is not aesthetically pleasing.

And nobody wants to drink water that doesn't taste good.

MIKE KROMREY: Wetlands are like the Earth's natural water filters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wetlands are a really great water quality tool.

They're also a aquifer recharge tool.

They're also a habitat tool.

And there's a local partnership led by the Missouri Department of Conservation to install floating wetlands in some of our local bodies of water, including Fellows Lake, McDaniel's Lake, Valley Water Mill Lake here, some parks around town, and some private residents.

And these are little islands of diverse, native plants, that provide a habitat.

They're beautiful.

And also, they're sucking up nutrients out of the water, essentially sort of filtering the water.

CU's interest in the Floating Wetlands Project is primarily water quality.

So this is a tool in the toolbox to hopefully better the conditions of the source water, which eventually benefits the drinking water.

FRANK NELSON: What we do know, floating islands and wetland plants benefit nutrient transformation and recycling.

And so every bit that we add is beneficial.

Just a few little wetlands can make a difference.

You can almost see immediate reduction in filamentous algae.

WILL SAPPINGTON: With this solution, we're being preventative.

Being able to do a natural remedy for a natural cause is really awesome.

And its being self-sustaining, it comes at a one-time cost as opposed to an ongoing cost.

MIKE KROMREY: Wetlands are a key for water quality.

This is actually a constructed wetland.

There aren't many wetlands in southwest Missouri at all.

But we wanted to have a wetland here to showcase what they're all about.

This is helping water soak into the ground.

It's helping flood waters slow down and spread out.

It's allowing some of that sediment, which we don't really want in the lake, to add to our wetland area here, which is kind of a plus.

FRANK NELSON: The fact that we planted it this year, they're going to continue to grow and become more and more robust and thick.

It's exciting to see that kind of change and growth over the years.

It's going to be its own little ecosystem and habitat.

There's never a silver-bullet solution.

You have to come at it from multiple angles.

And so this is just one way in which we can kind of target and try to, if nothing else, try to reduce the extremes of algal blooms.

And by providing this habitat, the plants and the microbes that are working on the nutrients itself try to reduce the harshness of algal blooms that are so hazardous to human and wildlife health.

This is an opportunity in which we're trying to work with folks where they live, trying to expand maybe people's expectations of where they can do conservation, and where we can meet them in their own backyards.

Here in Springfield, we've got a lot of projects that we have-- you might have heard of rain gardens, or infiltration basins, even rain barrels, and things like that.

They capture water that you can use later for things, watering plants, or whatever.

If somebody were to ask me, what's one thing I can do related to a waterway?

trees are the answer.

MARC OWEN: Trees hold a lot of water, and they really can impact runoff rates because they have leaves, and they slow down runoff because of how rain has to go down through their canopy.

The health of our water is directly connected to the health of our land.

That's why Watershed is our name.

It's about the land that feeds into our riverways, which is also our drinking water.

Here at the Watershed Center, we try to get the rainwater that falls here to slow down, spread out, and soak in.

Climate change is a big global problem.

It's hard to address.

We can help people respond in ways that are good for groundwater recharge, good for rivers, and lakes, and fish, and good for local economy.

So we work with local producers on the rural and agricultural spectrum to help them do conservation practices that are good for soil and water.

I'm not that pessimistic.

We might have the ability to help reduce some of those impacts through innovation and technology.

And I think there's a lot of opportunity there for people that have ideas, really just scratching the surface of maybe what we can do.

MIKE KROMREY: We really advocate for native plants.

They're food for local wildlife.

They're adapted to our local soils.

So they don't need fertilizer.

They're adapted to our climate.

Once they're established, they don't need to be irrigated.

They have wonderfully-deep roots, which are a great water quality benefit.

They improve soil, they help uptake nutrients that would maybe otherwise run off.

And they're just beautiful.

So native plants are such a wonderful thing for anybody to learn about and to grow.

BARBARA KIPFER: When we moved here in 1973, this was a very sterile neighborhood.

Everybody had the same plants in their yard, the same things that didn't support any wildlife at all, just looked decent.

And then at some point, I learned that if I planted native plants, I would have a much more interesting yard.

And that certainly is what has happened.

Native plants, once they're established, do so well.

You don't have to water them, or fertilize them.

And the best time to plant them is actually in the fall when they don't have the issues of heat and drought.

Native plants are a beautiful and wonderful tool for water quality.

They're also good for reasons like habitat.

The more species you have, the more ecological niches are filled, the more resilient that system is.

You're nurturing more than just plants.

You're nurturing birds, reptiles, animals of all kinds.

It makes your yard really interesting.

It's not boring.

So in the springtime, the first thing that blooms is the clove currant over there.

It smells heavenly.

And you'll see all kinds of critters all over the clove currant.

You can see just an immense amount of pollinators on it.

I see honeybees, I see native bees.

A lot of these organisms need native plants to survive.

BARBARA KIPFER: So this is cliff goldenrod that can just stick out like you see here.

You can see the little berries that are forming on there.

And that will feed some of the wildlife.

I also get to share this with my neighbors.

So when they see, sometimes, some of them actually become converted.

To have a healthy corridor is to have a corridor with lots of native plants, lots of grasses, and trees, particularly shrubs, dense vegetation.

That helps slow down floods.

It helps prevent erosion, helps keep the water cool.

Ultimately, it helps the stream be healthier, and keep your yard, or your hay field, from eroding away.

So it's a great strategy to plan and mitigate climate impacts that we're seeing here in the Ozarks right now.

Climate change seems like it's making a bigger difference than it ever has before.

My name is James Tucker.

I'm a sixth-generation farmer from Willard, Missouri.

We raise corn, and soybeans, and wheat, and put up some hay, and run some beef cattle as well on our farm.

2025 in particular has been probably the most dramatically-difficult time to raise crops in southwest Missouri that I've experienced in my relatively young farming career.

What we're seeing generally, I would say, is longer periods of rain, longer periods of dry, longer periods of heat.

And it seems like what we're really having is an imbalance in the weather patterns, which is making it much more difficult to get in the field in a timely manner, to plant, to cultivate, to spray, to harvest, different things like that.

What we end up having later on in the year when the crops are maturing and filling is we have periods like we're having right now, which is extreme heat, and longer periods of drought.

So you really need to get in early to try to take advantage of those spring rains.

And when you get all this moisture in April, you're delayed and you have to get the crops out later.

And it just becomes more and more challenging to raise a good crop.

JACQUELYN WRAY: So the biggest things that affect agriculture right now are the extreme weather events that we have.

So there's more drought stress, more heat stress.

And more damaging is those late-season freeze events.

And all of our plants are already coming out of their dormancy at that point.

So whenever that hits, it kills off a good portion.

JAMES TUCKER: These more extreme weather patterns, we seem to get locked into.

Like, once we get locked into one, it seems like it's harder to get out of it, and we can't seem to get a nice balance of rain, and sunshine, and moderate temperatures.

It has definitely impacted our bottom line, because we've had these drought snaps late in the summer, where we're trying to fill a soybean crop, or trying to fill a corn crop, or trying to plant corn in the spring and we can't get in the field because it's so wet.

A lot of people think you can't have too much rain.

But it's not true.

There's kind of an old saying in farming that is, farmers spend half the time wishing it would rain, and the other half wishing it would stop raining, which is really true.

We're trying to stay on the edge of the latest hybrids that have been bred with climate change in mind that are going to be more resilient during longer periods of dry, and heat, and the same thing with longer periods of wetness.

For the last two or three years, it's been really tough to raise a good soybean crop, which has been historically about half of what we grow.

When you have a very limited window of opportunity, and you have periods of rain, and rain, and rain for weeks at a time, you're going to have more problems with weeds.

You're going to have fertilizer leaching out of the soil.

And it's ultimately going to become more expensive to grow a good crop.

It takes a while for farmers to get on board with climate change, largely because it becomes such a politicized issue.

It's hard to deny reality.

You talk about the record rainfall we had this spring, and the dry we're having now, it becomes so evident to people.

And the reality is, farmers know what's going on with the weather just about better than anybody.

And they're going to be able to see the patterns that are developing.

I've long kind of accepted that this is something we're going to have to deal with, and that climate change is a reality.

I'm kind of, like, losing hope that something is really going to be done in the near future to alleviate the problem, let alone solve the problem.

And it's going to be kind of more like, how do you adapt to survive these dramatic swings in the weather.

JARED OPSAL: I think people are starting to make those connections that scientists have been warning us about for many years that oh, it's not like it used to be.

Things are different.

And that's scary.

And how are we going to adapt?

And that's something that we've been engaging with as an agency is that climate adaptation.

So we've been working on the mitigation and prevention side of climate change.

And we're going to continue on that front.

But we're now getting into that adaptation of, what is our day-to-day life going to be like with this new environment that we have?

What are we going to do about these extreme heat events?

What are we going to do about the urban core of Springfield, or Kansas City, St.

Louis, wherever in our state, getting hotter, and hotter, and more unlivable?

Are people going to want to be walking on the sidewalks when it's that temperature?

And what's that impact economically?

What's that impact on our health and wellness?

We know that climate varies.

There's no question about that.

What's different about what's going on in the last hundred years, and really a lot in the last 30 years, is the rate.

There's no time in the geologic record where we ever see, in all those hundreds of millions of years, there's no time where we see rates of change like we're seeing now.

It's never changed this fast.

The only reason that it's changing this fast is because of CO2 being released by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, things like that.

That's the difference.

That was never happening in the past.

So it's really that simple.

And we know that the excess CO2 is from the burning of fossil fuels.

There's really no debate about that.

It's not a controversial statement to make in scientific circles.

I think there's also fear.

It's fear of the change.

How is this going to affect us?

What are we going to do about it?

How much is it going to cost us?

And it's really easy psychologically to just try to ignore it, to put our heads in the sand.

I think there are solutions that are out there that can work, that can be market driven, that would be seen as a strong compromise by most people.

And we just have to get back to a point where we can talk about and consider those.

There is a cost in the long term to not doing anything.

And just like many things in life, it's going to be cheaper to deal with this problem now than to leave it to our kids or grandkids to finally deal with it later, because their options are going to be much more limited at that point, because a lot of the change will be baked into the cake.

The longer we wait, the higher that cost is.

So the question is, how much do we want it to cost?

We need to learn how to have civil conversations with one another about this.

We need to learn how to discuss this.

This is something that's real.

It's something that's affecting us all.

It's going to affect future generations.

If we learn how to talk about it, then we can learn how to communicate what we want our politicians to do, people who represent us.

WILLIAM GUTOWSKI: Efforts to promote what you might call sustainable energy, especially wind energy, solar energy, have been growing here in the midwest.

So things that stop the burning of fossil fuels would certainly be a step in the right direction.

If everybody started to make changes, it's moving things in the right direction.

These changes aren't going to cause major changes overnight, but I try to get people to think about what the future holds for their children and their children's children, and to give it some context about what kind of a world they want to provide for their children and grandkids.

One person by themself isn't going to cause the world to change.

But if we all do this together, that collective behavior of everyone does make a difference.

There's no question about it.

TOBY DOGWILER: But it also creates an ethos when you feel like you've got skin in the game, because hey, I'm doing my part.

I'm doing something.

Then, you're also going to be more likely to advocate, you're setting a good example for your children.

You make those things normal.

And then that makes it more likely that we can get the political change to make the really big differences.

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