Climate Change Is Here. Philadelphia Isn’t Ready

Climate change: Flood damage in Bucks County in July 2023 / Photograph courtesy of Lower Makefield Police Department

Two years after the flood, Dave Love can’t help but wonder about all the small details that could have changed his fate. The timing, the turn-offs, the many ways that he and Yuko Love, his wife of 33 years, could have avoided being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s been back to the site many times now and still can’t make sense of it all.

The couple met at Allegheny College, in western Pennsylvania, and later moved to the Philadelphia region, where Dave became an actuary. Yuko was youthful, an energetic force. Dave used to joke that they would live forever because of all she did to keep them healthy. They were returning from grocery shopping in New Jersey on that Saturday afternoon in July 2023, just a few miles from their home in Newtown, Bucks County, when the skies opened up. The rain had been on and off throughout the day, but it suddenly became a torrent as they headed southwest on Washington Crossing Road, near Houghs Creek in Upper Makefield Township. Nearly seven inches fell in 45 minutes — almost 15 percent of the county’s annual average.

Stopped in traffic, Dave, 65, noticed what looked like a thin sheet of water coming down the hill, then realized he wasn’t in control of the car anymore. “I’m not driving; we’re floating,” he told Yuko. As they stepped out of their Tesla, water was already coming up through the floorboards. Soon, they were knocked to the ground, separated, and carried off the road. “The water was going to send me wherever it wanted,” he says. “This water was all-powerful.”

Dave managed to grasp a tree, clinging tightly as the floodwaters rose up to his neck. In the scramble, his left arm broke in two places; he couldn’t use his arm. He could still feel his fingers, though, and the wedding ring Yuko had given him. He knew by then that she was gone. He curled his fingers tightly so he wouldn’t lose the ring.

Seven people died in the flash flood, including Yuko Love, 64. A hydrometeorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called it “at least” a 200-year event.

Yuko and Dave Love in 2019 / Photograph courtesy of Dave Love

Heavier rainfall is more common as climate change fuels more extreme weather. For every degree of warming, the air can hold four percent more moisture, supercharging powerful storms like the one in Upper Makefield. In the Northeast, the rainiest days now bring 60 percent more precipitation than they did in the middle of the last century, according to a recent study based on NOAA data. And across Pennsylvania, hourly rainfall rates have increased in that time by as much as 28 percent. When rain falls, it now falls harder. In a state with 86,000 miles of rivers and streams — second only to Alaska — and cities and suburbs paved over with endless acres of impervious surfaces, the flood risk is enormous.

In the Philadelphia region, flooding is just one of the many threats climate change poses to residents’ welfare. Hotter extremes and more frequent heat waves are exacerbating chronic health conditions and degrading our already poor air quality. Sea level is rising, compounding concerns about the next flood. Drought is raising the specter of local wildfires, and smoke has occasionally begun drifting in from far-flung outbreaks to turn our air from a lifeline to a hazard. For a city already beset by vulnerabilities including deep poverty, extensive industrial pollution, insufficient tree canopy, and inadequate municipal funding to address the crisis, climate change is an existential concern. And although it’s certainly going to get worse, it’s already here.

“Yuko and I were both believers in the science — that this is a problem we need to do something about,” Love says. “But we certainly didn’t think the impacts were going to hit us so soon. I feel she was an early victim of climate change.”

Bucks County does too. The county filed a lawsuit last March against BP, ExxonMobil, and several other big oil companies, alleging that it “has suffered, is suffering and will continue to suffer injuries” resulting from the firms’ decades-long attempt to mislead the public about the climate-related impacts of burning fossil fuels. The Upper Makefield flood figured prominently in the complaint, which County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia called “our tool to recoup costs and fund public works projects … to weather what is certain to come.”

As the Trump administration undermines our communities’ ability to respond to the mounting threats by embarking on a regulatory slash-and-burn campaign that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator called “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” the weight of mitigation and adaptation will be borne locally. The administration change is expected to result in an additional four billion tons of carbon emissions by the end of the decade, according to one recent analysis — enough to cause $900 billion in global damages. With federal funding being pulled from a range of projects intended to help our region respond to the climate crisis, our local problems appear increasingly likely to require local solutions. Anything less will expose our communities to the slow accumulation of physical stress and the type of extreme weather events that can upend a life in a matter of moments.

“Everywhere in the world,” Love says, “we need to start thinking about being prepared for the next disaster.”

In November, in the midst of the longest drought in Philadelphia history, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the region. The combination of low humidity, high temperatures, and strong winds had created a heightened risk of wildfire; at the New York-New Jersey border, a parks employee had recently died helping to fight a blaze. Two major New Jersey reservoirs were at half capacity following the driest two-month period the state had ever seen, and the salt front had crept at least 17 miles up the Delaware River to endanger Philadelphia’s drinking water.

Mathy Stanislaus, executive director of Drexel’s Environmental Collaboratory, which fosters community-based climate solutions, was speaking to a room full of community leaders and climate change experts at the Sunday Breakfast Club (a monthly gathering of Philadelphia civic and business leaders) as it all unfolded, so he asked who was aware of the red flag and whether anyone had prepared a go bag or otherwise braced for the risk. Crickets. For Stanislaus, who had led the Obama administration’s emergency response to environmental disasters including Superstorm Sandy and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill while at the EPA, the silence was an indication of just how ill-prepared we are for the realities of climate change. Two months later, wildfires in Los Angeles killed 30 people, burned 37,000 acres, and put 200,000 people under evacuation orders.

“I don’t think any significant population center is fully prepared for what’s coming,” Stanislaus says.

Philadelphia, in particular, faces a confluence of environmental threats that make us vulnerable to climate change, even though our region puts up a relatively placid facade.

Our forebears capped many of our rivers and creeks to protect against heavily polluted water, only to leave us with an ocean of impervious surfaces dotted sparsely with the vegetation that absorbs stormwater. Flanked by two major rivers, with sea levels expected to rise nearly a foot by the 2030s, the city is in a dangerous predicament. Hurricane Ida made that clear in September 2021, overflowing riverbanks and leading 55,000 households to apply for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which the Trump administration now aims to neuter.

Our tree canopy has declined by six percent in the past decade, fueling even greater concerns about the urban heat island effect that sees some barren neighborhoods regularly record temperatures 20-plus degrees higher than their leafier counterparts. (The $12 million federal grant intended to fund the first stages of the Philly Tree Plan, a long-term reforestation effort, was frozen and then reinstated, leaving uncertainty about its future.)

Firefighters battle an April wildfire in Ocean County / Photograph via New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection/AP

Our infrastructure is ancient — the median home in the city is almost 100 years old — and many of our region’s houses, roadways, and industrial facilities were long ago built alongside waterways, leaving them susceptible to flooding.

Perhaps our greatest cause for concern is the poor state of our public health even before climate change complicates matters. The city’s childhood asthma rate of 21 percent is more than triple the national average, and cancer rates are above the national and statewide averages too. That’s largely a result of our poor air quality, which falls short of EPA standards for both particulate matter and ground-level ozone, according to Russell Zerbo, an advocate at the Clean Air Council.

Consider those our preexisting conditions. Then factor in the hotter, wetter weather climate change creates — what Jerome Shabazz, executive director of the Overbrook Environmental Education Center, calls “a rather elegant chemical combination.” Adding heat and water to anything is bound to change its biology, he says, exacerbating the baseline health conditions that already trouble many in the region. What’s more, he says, “these are changes happening at a rate that most people will not even realize unless somehow you’re keeping score.” We are all, in some respects, the proverbial frog that doesn’t yet realize it’s being boiled alive.

Add it all up and Philadelphia is more vulnerable to climate change than 91 percent of counties nationwide — and ranked highest in Pennsylvania — according to the Climate Vulnerability Index, a tool published by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University that considers 184 different factors, such as air pollution, socioeconomic stressors, exposure to extreme events, and anticipated costs of climate disasters. Across all U.S. census tracts, four in Philadelphia — those situated at the foot of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, along Torresdale Avenue in Frankford, near Frankford Creek in Northeast Philly, and just a bit south in Port Richmond — rank in the top 100 out of more than 84,000 for climate vulnerability, according to Grace Tee Lewis, a senior health scientist at the EDF. Communities that rank high in the vulnerability index typically have a history of long-standing disparities, including socioeconomic and infrastructure deficits. “Layer climate on top of that and it exponentiates the existing vulnerabilities,” Lewis says.

Adapting to increasing heat and precipitation and sea level rise will cost Philadelphia an estimated $3.3 billion by 2040, according to a report from the Center for Climate Integrity that considered eight measures needed to respond to a range of impacts, including planting trees to combat the urban heat island effect, building coastal and inland seawalls, and reinforcing bridges. It would take more than $150 million to install air-conditioning in the city’s schools, more than half of which lack sufficient cooling, leading to educational deficits and early dismissals on extremely hot days. And it would cost nearly $2 billion to improve the city’s stormwater drainage system, the report found — a pressing concern given the 15 billion gallons of polluted water that overflows from our combined sewer system annually, carrying raw sewage into our waterways.

Abby Sullivan, chief resilience officer in the city’s Office of Sustainability, says those cost estimates may overstate the financial burden of climate change adaptation in some respects, but she acknowledges that “it’s going to be painful, because we’re so strapped for resources and there’s some work that’s already grossly underfunded.” As is so often the case, the most vulnerable populations will bear the brunt of the impact: those without air-conditioning or the means to afford it, communities like those in Eastwick and Germantown that are most exposed to flooding and have nowhere else to go, those without the capacity to recover following an extreme weather event or the ability to shield themselves from the daily stressors of an inhospitable environment.

In the time he spent on the Gulf Coast while at the EPA, Stanislaus saw a communal response to hurricanes that had been ingrained across repeated cycles of disaster. Institutions — from schools and hospitals to fire departments and social services — understood what was needed to protect the vulnerable and offer mutual aid in the lead-up and aftermath. As the effects of climate change become more tangible, he worries that we’re not ready to marshal the resources necessary to confront what’s coming.

“I don’t see the rest of the country understanding that that’s the level of intensity we need to approach this moment,” he says.

In June 2023, Philadelphia was blanketed by smoke that had ventured south from a series of Canadian wildfires. The skies turned an eerie and foreboding orange, an embodiment of the often invisible effects of climate change. The city’s air quality index pushed well past 400 on a scale on which anything above 300 is considered hazardous. For a brief time, we had the most dangerous air in the world.

“I’ve been working in this space for a really long time,” Sullivan says, “and none of us were thinking about air quality impacts from a wildfire 2,000 miles away.” The city has worked hard to ensure that its municipal buildings have clean air, she says, “but how do you protect an entire community if the air outside is not safe to breathe?”

Such are the questions that face Philadelphia in the era of climate change. And when it comes to wildfires and their effects, it’s not just the mysterious intrusion of caustic air from foreign lands we need to worry about.

Canadian wildfire smoke blanketing Center City in June 2023 / Photograph by Joe Lamberti/AFPGetty Images;

Erica Smithwick, a distinguished professor of geography and head of the Penn State Climate Consortium, spent most of her career studying wildfires in the West, like the 1988 blaze that burned 1.2 million acres in and around Yellowstone National Park. When she moved to Pennsylvania 18 years ago, she thought her focus would remain out West. “Well, now I’m studying Eastern wildfire,” she says. Given the population density of our region, the impact of a major event would be all the more severe. Several years ago, Smithwick notes, a Rolling Stone story suggested that the country’s worst wildfire might happen in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, a million-acre tinderbox surrounded by well-developed suburbs. In April, wildfire spread across a 15,000-acre swath of wilderness in Ocean County, triggering the evacuation of about 5,000 residents; at press time, it had been burning for a week and was 75 percent contained, according to the state’s Forest Fire Service.

It can take months for a person’s respiratory system to recover from an event like the 2023 wildfire haze, the Clean Air Council’s Zerbo says. “And if the air quality isn’t good otherwise, you’re not really recovering from it,” he adds.

As a major population center crisscrossed by an abundance of highways and home to extensive industry, Philadelphia faces a perfect storm of air pollution, Zerbo says. In the Climate Vulnerability Index, the city ranks in the 94th percentile nationwide for anticipated deaths from air pollution and in the 99th percentile for concentration of nitrogen dioxide, which can cause respiratory illness. Heat acts as a chemical catalyst to create more ozone, a potent pollutant, and by 2050 Pennsylvania is expected to have 37 days each year above 90 degrees, compared with just five at the start of this century, according to the Center for Climate Integrity report.

Beyond the risk of air pollution, consistent levels of intense heat will lead to more cardiac events, endanger maternal health, and threaten the livestock on which our agricultural state relies. Shabazz, at the Overbrook Center, worries about how community members will absorb the consistent stress of temperatures creeping ever higher. “Are we dying a slow death?” he wonders. “Just because it isn’t dramatic, is it still not harmful?”

Flooding, too, brings with it both direct and indirect health risks that accumulate over time, while threatening the type of catastrophe the Loves and others in our region have experienced. Among those studying how flooding will impact our communities in the future, though, the greatest concern may actually be focused on the potential for toxic pollutants to escape containment in the event of a disaster. There are more than 15,000 industrial facilities, brownfields, Superfund sites, and chemical storage tanks in the upper estuary region of the Delaware River alone, according to a recent report from the Center for Progressive Reform. Zerbo points to the former Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery site in South Philadelphia, which is now being redeveloped as the Bellwether District, as an example of what could go wrong. There, at least 800 acres of impervious pavement is being added in the 100-year floodplain, increasing the potential for a flood that could unearth benzene, a known carcinogen, and lead, whose negative health effects include brain damage.

“There are some really frightening implications for what happens if the contamination left underground is disturbed by a flood,” Zerbo says.

Lara Fowler, the former chief sustainability officer at Penn State, who has spent much of her career focused on flood and water management issues, says the region has the opportunity to develop a range of green stormwater infrastructure projects that allow water to recharge, more like a natural sponge, in areas that have long since been paved over. (Philadelphia is in the 99th percentile nationally for land covered by impermeable surfaces, according to the Climate Vulnerability Index.) For inspiration, she contrasts the Dutch model of making room for rivers to flow naturally with our local historical approach of burying waterways. But, she notes, our regional watershed boundaries are not the same as our municipal boundaries, which complicates the task of addressing a problem that extends beyond municipal borders.

A helicopter picks up water to fight an April wildfire in Ocean County, which burned more than 15,000 acres. / Photograph via New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection/AP

Our energy grid is another under-the-radar area of concern for climate experts and advocates — and one that crosses similar boundaries. As Texas learned in February 2021 when a crippling winter storm caused a massive grid failure that left 4.5 million homes without power and killed 246 people, the reliability of our electrical systems is all the more critical in the midst of climate disasters. Rob Altenburg, director of the PennFuture Energy Center, worries about the stability of the grid on peak days in both the winter and the summer, when demand spikes for heating and cooling, respectively. Our infrastructure, including the energy grid, was largely planned at moments in the past when the present and future stresses on our systems weren’t well understood, he says. We designed based on assumptions about worst-case scenarios that have, in many cases, proved conservative.

“How many of those assumptions are no longer valid?” he says. “We don’t know. So we’re increasingly likely to be surprised by things we didn’t realize we needed to plan for.”

In Philadelphia, where many residents already struggle to afford the heating and cooling they need to survive extreme weather, any weakness in the power grid is a grave concern. (Notably, the entire staff of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, a federal program that helps Americans pay their energy bills, has been fired.) For Sullivan, in the city’s Office of Sustainability, the danger of compounding and cascading events is among our greatest climate risks.

“The things that keep me up at night are thinking about a storm that comes through, there’s an outage, and then a heat event comes on the heels of that,” she says.

Responding to these varied threats will take a concerted effort from our leaders and institutions across decades, but climate adaptation is not just a long-term challenge. Overlooking the short-term danger — the floods and heat waves and polluted air we already experience — would be a mistake. As Stanislaus, the former EPA official, says, “Tree canopies are all good, but the benefit of all that is 15 to 20 years away.” In other words, we need solutions now.

When the Philly Tree Plan was introduced, in the spring of 2023, it offered a glimmer of hope for the distant future. For many in Philadelphia’s environmental community, committing to the restoration of our depleted tree canopy was an indication that there was room to prepare for the effects of climate change, even while addressing the present-day fragility of daily life for many in the city. Across a 30-year investment, the plan estimated that it would result in 400 fewer premature deaths each year, a 12 percent reduction in crime, and $20 million in annual environmental benefits, all while serving as a central piece of the city’s effort to combat global warming. All it would cost to cover 30 percent of the city in trees, the plan said, was $25.5 million per year.

As of mid-April, it appears that the five-year federal grant used to kick-start the plan is once again flowing after being interrupted when the Trump administration froze it earlier this year. But achieving the plan’s lofty goals — like all bright ideas to protect us from climate change — will take the type of committed, long-term support that’s hard to come by without federal backing. And right now, relying on the federal government to address environmental crises is like banking on a fan to stop a forest fire.

Across the region, climate resilience and adaptation have been hit hard by Trump and Elon Musk’s bid to shrink the government. The administration cut a $500,000 grant to plant trees and weatherize homes in Hunting Park, one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods. The Overbrook Center lost a $700,000 EPA grant that would have allowed it to help organizations in communities facing environmental injustice navigate the federal funding maze. The administration also terminated a $1 million grant intended to address flooding in Eastwick and froze money meant to help schools convert to renewable energy and install air-conditioning. In all, Pennsylvania has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support for environment- and climate-related projects, Governor Josh Shapiro alleged in a lawsuit seeking to have the cuts declared illegal.

The Trump administration has also ended a landmark climate-adaptation initiative — the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program — that funded billions of dollars’ worth of disaster planning, including flood resilience. FEMA, which oversaw the program, is in the crosshairs.

Michael Mann, a leading climatologist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at Penn, which has had $175 million in research halted, says the reverberations of the drastic cuts will ultimately be felt by community members.

“All of us who study and teach about public and environmental health, including the climate threat, are concerned about the dire consequences these cuts will have not just for the critical underlying research, but for the actual people of our community who benefit from studies and implementation of climate resilience measures, such as those we’re researching here at Penn,” Mann says.

Like others studying climate change and those building the solutions that will protect our communities from it, Mann is hopeful that donors and funders will stand up to back the work that needs to be done. But there are limits to what can be accomplished without the largesse of the federal government, ramping up the pressure on local leaders to guide the way forward.

“This is the moment for city and state,” Stanislaus says.

For its part, the city announced this spring that it had received $600,000 from the William Penn Foundation to fund a comprehensive climate resilience plan that will be its first since 2015. The original plan focused only on municipal impacts, but the new one will consider how different communities and sectors of the city are being affected, seeking residents’ input on how to build resilience. The city also formally embedded resilience in its capital planning for the first time, Sullivan says, so that projects will be screened for their climate exposure.

Are we going to see more flash floods? Yes, we are. Are we going to have more emergency situations and deaths? Unfortunately, yes. How do we not just stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away? Why were those hot spots? What happened with them?” — Lara Fowler, former chief sustainability officer at Penn State

At the neighborhood scale, the Office of Sustainability has been working to address flooding and quality-of-life issues in Eastwick since 2022, and recently began a similar effort in Strawberry Mansion, where extreme heat is an increasing threat. But Sullivan’s resilience team comprises just six people, and its neighborhood-level work relies, in part, on EPA grants, she says. She and her colleagues want to expand their community-scale program and sustain the trust they’ve been building, but doing so in a city with limited resources and seemingly unlimited need is a tall task.

“It’s really hard if there are critical investments needed right now to be thinking about putting money toward something that’s seen as an issue for 50 years from now,” Sullivan says. “So there’s a lot of communication and education that we have to do.”

In this environment, the climate lawsuit brought by Bucks County following the 2023 flood seems all the more sensible. It joined a series of suits filed by cities and states in recent years targeting oil companies’ deceptive promotion of their products, following similar logic as past claims against tobacco companies for smoking-related illnesses and pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid epidemic. A Bucks County judge heard arguments in March over the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case. The lawsuit may be a Hail Mary in the face of a devastating foe, but it demonstrates the lengths to which local municipalities will have to go if they want to meet the challenge before them.

“The only way to address [climate change] is to make it a priority,” says State Representative Chris Rabb, D-Philadelphia, who has introduced a range of climate action legislation in Harrisburg, including a first-of-its-kind greenwashing bill targeting companies that mislead consumers about the environmental benefits of their products. “And the only way we make it a priority is to punish the folks who are responsible. That’s something we don’t have a lot of history of.”

Although it’s more uncertain than ever where the funding for climate research and resilience will come from, those working to develop solutions — from planting trees to building green stormwater infrastructure — are stubbornly hopeful about how our region will respond. Fowler, the former Penn State sustainability officer, has seen enough communities adapt to flooding and other climate threats — both preemptively and in recovery — to trust that a united response is possible. But doing so will require a comprehensive commitment to understanding what’s here, what’s coming, and how we can meet the moment.

“Are we going to see more flash floods? Yes, we are,” Fowler says. “Are we going to have more emergency situations and deaths? Unfortunately, yes. How do we not just stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away? Why were those hot spots? What happened with them?”

By understanding the answers to those questions and others, we might be able to avoid some of the pain in store for our region. With the right level of investment, we might develop resilient infrastructure and early-warning systems that can protect people like Yuko Love when the next storm comes.

Two years since his wife’s death, Dave Love has a hard time thinking that far into the future. He’s more likely to find himself thinking about the temple in Kyoto where the couple debated which of three streams to drink from, each one said to convey a different benefit: success, love, and longevity. This summer, Upper Makefield plans to establish a butterfly garden in Brownsburg Park, a few miles from the site of the flood, to honor the memories of the seven flood victims — a bid for permanence in an impermanent world.

Published as “The Climate Crisis Is Here” in the June 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.