It's autumn, and while many in the state are making do without college football Saturdays at the moment, we still look forward to cool evenings and autumn foliage.
But for millions of Americans, the season only means another dose of their annual exposure to extreme weather. So far this season, more than 4.6 million acres (an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined) have burned in California and Oregon.
In the Gulf of Mexico, the summer's 20th hurricane or tropical storm has made landfall; as of the time we write these words, meteorologists tell us that there are more active tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin than at any time in nearly 50 years. These natural disasters are not isolated events. Rather, as climate change intensifies, they are expected to become ever more commonplace across the country.
Indiana is not immune to these changes. Floods and extreme rains, like those that delayed planting of nearly half of all Indiana's corn and soybeans in 2019, will become an increasingly common occurrence. Indiana University's Hoosier Resilience Index, a publicly available tool to view estimates for Hoosier climate change, predicts that Allen County could experience a nearly threefold increase in the number of days hotter than 90 degrees (from an average of 22 to 61 days per year) and two additional extreme rain events annually by 2050.
People have settled at the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers for centuries. And in that time, they have adapted to changing climatic conditions and much more.
But how prepared are Fort Wayne residents to take on these changes today, at a moment of accelerated change? Do they have the information they want, the tools they'll need, the resolve it takes to adapt to the likely impact of climate change?
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