The monster storm that decimated Kipnuk in October threw into sharp relief how much the tiny Alaskan village needed federal help to prepare for climate change.
The Native Alaskan settlement saw its $20 million grant to stabilize a river bank evaporate shortly after President Donald Trump took office. It’s an open question whether the award would have saved the village — but without that money, Kipnuk will have trouble rebuilding and preparing for the next climate-fueled disaster.
Kipnuk is not alone: Numerous other communities throughout the country lost their Community Change Grants Program awards earlier this year. The Biden EPA selected 105 recipients — out of 2,700 applicants — from a cross section of states and territories.
The $1.6 billion climate law program was intended to help mostly lower-income communities facing climate and environmental risks. That made it a target in the Trump administration, which has cut funding for climate programs and “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts.
All 105 awards have now been canceled. That includes $353 million for emergency shelters in multiple communities, $335 million for residential building upgrades and $297 million to employ local people to work on climate resiliency, according to an analysis by Resources for the Future.
Legal challenges to those terminations are ongoing, but a district court dealt awardees a blow in August by siding with EPA. The plaintiffs are appealing that decision while EPA continues to press them to surrender their grants. The agency has declined to comment about that move and pending litigation.
Meanwhile, most grant recipients say they aren’t optimistic that philanthropic or state resources will fill the gap.
“It’s been very difficult to work as long and as hard as we did and then to just have it jerked out from under you,” said Dorothy Darr, executive director of the North Carolina-based nonprofit Southwest Renewal Foundation of High Point, one of the awardees challenging EPA’s cancellations.
The Trump administration’s grant reversal leaves communities exposed to a range of climate and pollution risks, from flooding to heat waves to polluted waterways. Zealan Hoover, who oversaw Inflation Reduction Act implementation at EPA under former President Joe Biden, said the abandoned program fell squarely within EPA’s remit.
“When EPA abdicates its responsibility to protect public health and the environment, then people suffer,” he said.
Here are how the impacts of the canceled grants are unfolding in three communities.
Missisissippi
Power outages are a near-daily occurrence in Jackson, Mississippi, where most transmission lines run above ground.
“There’s no money for maintenance,” said Dominika Parry, founding president and CEO of 2C Mississippi, a Jackson community-based organization. “So, we have a lot of old trees that are very unstable, and a very small wind will make those trees fall. They fall on the electric poles, and people lose power.”
When temperatures in Mississippi’s capital city soar in the summer or plummet in the winter, outages can turn deadly for residents who lack the resources to find shelter elsewhere.
“If you don’t have AC and it’s 110, you go to sleep and you don’t wake up,” Parry said.
Under Biden, EPA committed nearly $20 million from the Community Change Grant Program to help 2C Mississippi build a resilience hub. The idea was not just to provide a permanent emergency shelter and staging center for widespread disasters, but to create a place for people to go during neighborhood-specific power outages and water shortages.
That would be especially helpful in heat waves, which are not uncommon in Jackson. An environmental justice screening tool developed by EPA called EJScreen — an unofficial version of which is now hosted by Public Environmental Data Partners — shows that the city is in the second-highest bracket for vulnerability to extreme heat, with 100 days a year or more when temperatures surpass 90 degrees.
In May, EPA announced that it had terminated the award to 2C Mississippi, the Hines County Department of Emergency Management and its partners. The agency cited the Trump administration’s position on “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.
Jackson is more than 80 percent Black with large pockets of poverty.
Parry noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is also reducing funding for disaster preparedness, and the onus of planning for and responding to emergencies is likely to fall more heavily on state and local governments.
“I have no idea how the city and state are going to be dealing with weather events, and it’s not like we’re going to have less of those,” said Parry. 2C Mississippi has joined other grant awardees in mounting a legal challenge to EPA’s termination.
North Carolina
High Point, North Carolina, planned to use EPA funds to clean up a polluted water supply.
The $18.4 million Community Change grant was awarded to both the city and the Southwest Renewal Foundation.
“I still hope we’ll get it,” said Darr, the group’s executive director.
One of the grant’s chief objectives was to repair High Point’s century-old sewer pipes so they will stop leaking fecal matter into the Richland Creek watershed, which provides drinking water for some 500,000 residents.
High Point is located on North Carolina’s Piedmont plateau, at the highest point along the historic North Carolina Railroad. It’s also where Richland Creek first comes out of the ground, before it feeds into Deep River and eventually into a reservoir that serves the City of Greensboro and other areas.
The EJScreen mapping tool shows that much of High Point is in the highest bracket for low-income residents and the highest category for exposure to hazardous waste. EPA in 2004 released an analysis that showed the creek had 82 percent more fecal coliform than was acceptable. A North Carolina State University survey in 2023 found “consistent evidence of fecal contamination” from human waste entering the creek via leaky pipes.
Darr said the city lacked the capacity to fix the leaking pipes without federal help, but that doing so would improve drinking water for the whole region.
“It’s cheaper to treat it upstream than downstream,” she said. “We are right at where the water originates. So if we’re up here polluting like crazy, all of that water flows down to the Deep River and to Randleman Reservoir eventually.”
The presence of fecal coliform indicates that the water may contain disease-causing microorganisms like salmonella and E. coli, which could lead to a public health emergency. Darr said the local community knew that the creek was unsafe.
“The kids can’t go down and play in it. If they do, they’ll probably get eye and ear infections,” she said, adding: “It’s just not a healthy situation.”
Hawaii
The only Community Change Grant Program awarded in Hawaii went to the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR).
The nonprofit planned to use the $13.8 million to help underserved parts of Oahu build resilience to wildfires and hurricanes.
That includes Pu’uhonua O Wai’anae, a homeless encampment in the southeastern part of the island with high exposure to natural disasters.
“There’s a couple of places on Oahu that are extremely vulnerable to wildfires, and Wai’anae is probably the top of the list,” said Keith Matsumoto, program manager for PICHTR. The area also bears the brunt of hurricanes that hit the island.
The Community Change Grant Program award would have funded a microgrid to serve Wai’anae, which would have enabled the community to grow its own food, Matsumoto said. The grant would also have supported efforts to reintroduce native plants in former sugar plantation lands to slow the spread of wildfires like the one that killed more than 100 people on Maui and burned down most of Lahaina in 2023.
“When the sugar plantations left, the lands weren’t really maintained properly,” said Matsumoto. “A lot of the plants that took over were invasive species.”
Native plants burn less quickly, he said, “so they tend to inhibit the rapid movement of the fire.”
The risk isn’t theoretical. Small-scale wildfires happen in the former sugarlands all the time, said Matsumoto. Wai’anae had a handful this summer but was able to put them out before they did much damage.
“But there’s opportunity, if they were to get into the big grasslands that exist there, that it could spread quite a bit again, like Lahaina,” he said.
