The new National Climate Assessment warns that Alabama and other Southeastern states will face more extreme heat, floods, droughts, stronger storms and significant sea-level rise in the decades to come, and that these changes will heavily impact already-struggling communities across the Southeast.

“The [Southeast] region’s history of both racial and economic marginalization places poor communities and communities of color at more rapidly growing risk from climate impacts,” said Allison Crimmins, an EPA climate scientist and director of the NCA5 project.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment is the U.S. government’s official “State of the Union” on climate change, according to the National Weather Service, compiling the latest climate-related research into one massive report, containing thousands of pages, compiled by hundreds of scientists from universities, government agencies and private groups.

Crimmins said the report shows how human greenhouse gas emissions — largely from burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas — are already impacting people across the United States. These gases in the atmosphere trap heat around the planet, raising the global temperature, causing melting of polar ice sheets, sea-level rise, and fueling more extreme weather events such as hurricanes and other strong storms.

“The assessment shows that more and more people across the U.S. are experiencing climate change right now, right outside their windows, especially during the impacts of extreme weather events,” Crimmins said in a conference call with reporters.

MORE: Explore the full NCA report | Chapter 22: The Southeast

Crimmins said that with each 10th of a degree that global average temperature increases, the country is likely to face more dire impacts. But she said the reverse is also true. Any warming that is avoided — by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or removing these gases from the atmosphere — can reduce some of the worst consequences of climate change.

“The good news is that this assessment finds that the benefits of taking climate action now far outweigh the costs,” Crimmins said. “And those actions have the potential to improve wellbeing, strengthen resilience, protect our ecosystems, benefit the economy and in part redress legacies of racism and injustice.”

The NCA report is compiled every four years as required by Congress under the Global Change Research Act of 1990.

This year’s report also focused on the communities that stand to be most impacted by climate change, said Jeremy Hoffman, lead author of the NCA chapter on the Southeast.

“The Southeast, as a region, tends to kind of pop out as an area of the country that is experiencing all of the potential ways that climate change can influence our day to day lives,” Hoffman told AL.com. “The Southeast tends to be disproportionately impacted by those.”

The fifth report, in contrast to earlier versions, has an increased focus on the social conditions such as race and poverty that can hurt people’s ability to cope with the coming change.

“Centuries of political and land-use decisions have threatened the landscape and the people, with a few prospering at the expense of many,” the chapter discussing the Southeast said. “These decisions, shaped by a long history of systemic and structural racial discrimination and aggression, continue to have lasting harmful effects on the preparedness of Southeast communities for mounting climate change threats.”

More extreme heat days expected

Hoffman said that south Alabama could expect to see more extreme heat days, where the temperature exceeds 95 degrees, especially in lower income areas such as Alabama’s Black Belt, where people are already struggling to make ends meet.

“Particularly in Alabama, and in your neighboring state of Mississippi in Georgia, we see that we have really high percentages of households that experience what is known as energy burden in the same places where we’re going to see this this increase in the number of days above 95 degrees,” Hoffman said.

“If those energy bills continue to rise, because you have a corresponding rise in the number of hot days, that then takes away from their income in a disproportionately high percentage.”

Those heat conditions are also expected to fuel drought events across Alabama, such as the current drought or the record-setting drought of 2016.

The NCA report also warns that a warming climate will result in sea-level rise that could cause land loss and increased coastal flooding, especially in coastal areas of Alabama, where population is increasing.

“We’re one of the few regions of the country that’s booming in population,” said Kathie Dello, a contributing author and director of the North Carolina State Climate Office. “So we’re moving more people into harm’s way and we’re not doing it in a very coordinated way. So we have people moving into places where they face additional flood risk or heat risk and our cities just aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with climate change.”

Sea level rise

Hoffman said the latest projections show the Gulf Coast could see between 22 and 32 inches of sea level rise by 2050.

“That is a dramatic change in the likelihood of coastal flooding conditions, the severity of storm surges related to extreme storms like hurricanes, and shows the very real problem with additional kinds of vulnerable forms of housing, which we know are concentrated in coastal Alabama,” Hoffman said.

The report also includes new projections out to the year 2150, where impacts could be even more extreme.

“While there’s uncertainty related to exactly how much the ice sheets will respond to additional global warming, the Southeast on average could see over 13 feet of sea level rise by 2150, which is just a staggering number and really underscores the the importance of coastal adaptation and resilience that’s already ongoing across the region,” Hoffman said.

Alabama’s biodiversity, wild places also at risk

In addition to the impacts to human living conditions, the NCA reports climate change is expected to put additional stresses on wildlife, including Alabama’s remarkable biodiversity.

“The Southeast in general is by far one of the most biodiverse regions of the United States and our communities really value the outdoors,” Hoffman said. “I myself am a fisherman, a mountain biker and a hiker, and a hunter and I really value the natural landscapes of the Southeast.”

Hoffman said that widespread development — approximately 2 million football fields of forest have been cleared from 1985 to 2020 — jeopardizes the survival of many species across the Southeast, and that climate change could further hurt these species chances for survival.

“These regional land cover changes, this sprawling development, threatens our unprotected biodiversity hotspots in the Southeast,” he said.

Hoffman said that the impacts of sprawling development harm wildlife and the natural places that people in the Southeast treasure.

“When we talk about our natural landscapes and the importance of them, not only for securing biodiversity, we have to think about why we enjoy those places,” he said. “We love to bring our families to them. We love to share intergenerational experiences.

“Teaching my niece how to fish has been one of the most transformative experiences of my young adult life, and I want that to be secured for future generations.”