Kansas is home to almost 3 million people, and home to Dodge City, the windiest city in the United States, where wind speeds average 14 mph. Literally flatter than a pancake (topographers conducted a comparison), Kansas averages 61 tornadoes every year. Over 87% of the state’s 81 thousand square miles is farmland - the largest amount of cropland in the nation - allowing Kansas to produce enough wheat per year to bake 36 billion loaves of bread.
Increasing heat and accompanying droughts pose a dangerous threat to the entire Great Plains region, and Kansas is already seeing these effects of climate change. Having already seen a rise of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century, Kansas currently averages about10-15 extreme heat days per year. By 2050, Kansans will experience roughly 35 to 70 extreme heat days annually, depending on the exact location and temperature threshold used to define a dangerous heat day. Recently, University of Kansas researchers warned that a lack of comprehensive, coordinated strategy and documentation for extreme heat will hurt communities and make it more difficult to track the impact of heat waves across time. As the aquifers become depleted, experts have called the long-term sustainability of the Great Plains into question—Kansas farmers could see crop yields decline by nearly 24% by 2050. Additionally, Kansas’s threat from wildfire is expected to quadruple by midcentury.
Wind has been the largest source of electricity generation in Kansas surpassing coal in 2019. In 2024, renewables overall contributed over half of total net generation, with wind power providing the majority (52%).The rest came from solar, biomass, and hydroelectric. Kansas has the third largest share of wind generation in the U.S. behind Iowa and South Dakota, and the fourth highest total installed wind generating capacity, with 9,000 megawatts in 2024. The state’s largest wind facility, the High Banks wind farm, came online in late 2023. In 2024, natural gas was 10% of total net electricity generation, nuclear 16%, and coal 22%, down from 58% a decade earlier. Kansas has low installed solar capacity, ranking 40th for utility-scale farms, despite high solar potentials. In June 2026, permits were approved for two new utility-scale solar farms, Tallgrass Solar Development in Ellis County and Sherlock Solar and Sherlock Storage in Finney County, which will become the state’s largest solar farm and battery energy storage facility.
In 2009, the Kansas Renewable Energy Standards Act created a state Renewable Portfolio Standard, requiring utilities to generate 20% of the state’s energy from renewable resources by the year 2020, which the state has clearly surpassed. The revenue from wind energy production and economic growth for rural communities has driven continued growth in the industry. This growth has continued even in the absence of legislation incentivizing the renewable industry.
Through funding from the IRA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment produced Kansas’s first statewide climate plan in February 2024: The Emissions Reduction and Mitigation Plan (E-RAMP). The plan includes a greenhouse gas inventory, greenhouse gas reduction measures, and a low income and disadvantaged communities benefits analysis.
According to Sierra Club Kansas’s 2026 Legislative halftime report, corporate polluters are “winning,” as environmental bills fail to pass. In addition to tracking legislation, Sierra Club Kansas is working to protect wetlands, expand renewable energy, and has been in ongoing litigation for eight years against the Kansas Department of Health and Environment for failures to enforce environmental regulations on CAFOs.
Located in Wichita, Kansas, the Heartland Environmental Justice Center provided training, support and funding for environmental justice organizations and leaders across the Midwest, before its funding was terminated by the EPA in February 2025 under the Trump administration.
In the first review of nitrate levels in public water systems across the country, the Environmental Working Group found that overall 1 in 5 Americans are exposed to nitrate-polluted water. For Kansans, the figure rises to 1 in 3 people. Kansas is one of the states with the highest nitrate levels in drinking water, largely due to agriculture. In Garden City, Kansas, for example, nitrate levels are among the highest in the country at four times the legal limit. Meanwhile, near Garden City, residents of Finney County are fighting a proposal for a new cattle feedlot due to nitrate pollution from CAFOs. Climate change is also exacerbating nitrate levels as drought conditions and runoff leads to higher concentration in soils and waterways.
