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It’s time to play the blame game.
It was 2005 when the world saw its first climate refugees from the Carteret Islands of Papua New Guinea. Now, in 2026, scientists say New Orleans will face the same fate before the end of the century. While Louisiana policymakers might look like they were sitting around, twiddling their thumbs, they were doing something worse: focusing on the wrong approach.
Louisiana has been in a losing fight with coastal erosion since the 1930s, having already lost a Delaware-sized chunk, and the playing field is becoming anything but level. In fact, the land loss is so severe that “a football field of wetlands vanishes into open water every 100 minutes,” according to the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition.
Since the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the establishing of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, billions of dollars have been poured into flood protection infrastructure — sprawling systems of flood walls and levees — and their upkeep. By 2013, lawmakers recognized this solution for what it was, a Band-Aid, and the LCPRA came up with the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, set to be the largest-scale project of its kind in the U.S.
The bold plan was brilliant because its foundation was a nature-based solution to land loss. It was designed to reconnect the Mississippi River to its wetlands by mimicking the natural land building processes that first formed the connecting river basins. A sediment diversion is a channel built into the levee system with gates to control the flow of water and sediment. This would then restore a more natural flow in the Delta and divert sediment to build back up in degraded basins, in turn shoring up the waning buffer between New Orleans and the looming Gulf of Mexico.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, just two years after the project broke ground in 2023, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Jeff Landry made the “boneheaded decision,” as former Republican congressman Garret Graves put it, to cancel New Orleans’ hail mary. He cited threats to the fishing industry and cost as the reasons, but someone should tell Landry about what happens when his citizens can’t get flood insurance.
“The need has not changed,” James Karst of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana told the Louisiana Illuminator. “There’s only one thing that has changed and that is the political landscape, so that is what ended this project.”
When it comes to climate change solutions, lawmakers need to put more stock in nature-based adaptations like Louisiana’s, albeit short-lived, attempt at biomimicry, rather than turn to the current popular values the Republican Party chooses this season.
Let’s get our definitions straight, first. We can attack climate change from two sides.
Mitigation aims to lessen the severity of climate change effects by stopping while we’re ahead — that is, by preventing or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation is a more of a boots-on-the-ground approach, including any process that aims to adjust to current and projected effects of climate change.
With efficiency and sustainability in mind — since the situation that climate change solutions address is more like a volcano actively erupting than a ticking time bomb — designing nature-based solutions should be the first stop for scientists and policymakers alike. Nature-based solutions harness the power of ecosystems to solve problems inextricable from nature. Sort of like a closed-loop economy, this solution is a model approach for biodiversity loss, in particular, because they consult what’s already around us.
If you’re thirsty, and life gives you lemons, are you making lemonade? Or are you unnecessarily involving a third party, like Minute Maid? This is what Louisiana did right. A problem with the Delta? I bet we can adapt the Delta to fix itself! They also applied a greatly underutilized tactic by mimicking natural processes: you guessed it, biomimicry.
The name of the game is, well, in the name.
We all know life imitates art, but what about life imitating life? Is that not a bit of art in and of itself? The word biomimicry comes from the Greek roots “bios” and “mimic,” or to “imitate life,” so biomimicry is in the business of imitating natural designs and processes to solve human problems. This idea is rooted in evolution, seeing as natural selection has had billions of years to optimize and perfect said designs and processes: they’re vetted.
You’re probably already familiar with some biomimetic inventions, besides Louisiana’s scrapped plan. Icarus’ make-shift wax wings in Greek mythology mimicked those of birds, and Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral invented velcro in 1948 that mimicked the hook system of burrs stuck to his dog. Even Shinkansen, Japanese bullet trains, mimic the streamlined beak of the Kingfisher bird.
We can make biomimetic gadgets, sure, but we can also do so much more for our planet. For example, as extreme weather increases in severity and frequency worldwide, one architect in 1996 built a large mall and office building in Zimbabwe that mimicked termite mounds — which catch and vent wind — so it could run on passive and energy-efficient climate control.
This idea of nature-based adaptations can, and should, be applied to your home, too. You’ve heard it in the lackluster cricket concerts out back and in the seemingly weekly, tumultuous summer storms. Even though the Midwest is relatively better protected from climate change impacts than coastal regions like the fire-licked Southern California or sinking Louisiana, no region is immune.
“By mid-century (2040 - 2070) the Midwest region is projected to experience a climate that is hotter with more rain and drought,” according to the City of Bloomington’s 2020 “Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment.” The most worrisome, resultant risks are many: disease, air quality and water and food quantity and quality.
This same document lists several “Recommended Adaptation and Resilience Goals,” but one can only hope that Indiana goes the way of Zimbabwe, not Louisiana. That requires allowing our better judgment and creative climate change adaptations to lead us, not a changing “political landscape” or “boneheaded decision” made by morally bankrupt Republican governors. Mike Braun, I’m looking at you.
Odessa Lyon (she/her) is a senior studying biology and English, pursuing a minor in European studies.
