A French colony before being subsumed by the US in 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase was concluded, Louisiana is famous for its Creole and Cajun cultures and food, as well as its rich history as the birthplace of jazz. With a population of about 4.6 million people, and an alligator population of about half that, the state spans more than 43 thousand square miles.
Freshwater and saltwater wetlands cover about one-third of Louisiana. The state rises gradually from the marshes, bayous, and estuaries along its extensive Gulf of Mexico coastline to the prairie in the state’s north and west. On average, Louisiana is only 100 feet above sea level and has the highest annual rainfall of any state on the US mainland, putting it on the frontlines in the battle against sea level rise with the state losing a football field’s worth of land every hour and a half. Louisiana has warmed 0.5 degrees (F) over the last century, which is less than a third of the warming for the United States as a whole. Yet the state’s warmest interval was the most recent - 2016-2020 - and it is expected to see 115 dangerously hot days per year by 2050, compared to the 35 it experienced in 2015.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 devastated New Orleans, flooding 80% of the city and damaging 70% of the city’s occupied housing. Katrina also shone a light on the differential impacts of environmental degradation across racial lines—a black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. While no single extreme weather event can be tied completely to climate change, warmer temperatures tend to lead to more powerful storms. Additionally, as sea levels continue to rise, flooding from any storm becomes more threatening. The Louisiana coast is particularly vulnerable to severe flooding, and is hit with hurricanes on average once every three years. In August 2020, Hurricane Laura hit Southwest Louisiana, causing $17.5 billion in damage. Doing extremely important work in the state are organizations like the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a mutual aid project for disaster relief and community building in the face of climate change, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, which provides grants to environmental justice communities and mental health support in the aftermath of climate disasters.
Louisiana’s shoreline is the most exposed in the world, and a 2026 study in Nature Sustainability announced that New Orleans and other coastal areas have reached a “point of no return,” losing 75% of wetlands by 2070 and facing 3-7 meters of sea level rise. Rising seas, sinking land, eroding wetlands, increasing and intensifying storms, will all drive climate migration from the region in the next few decades. Instead of losing hope, though, the researchers argue the findings should be incentives for further coastal restoration and for a managed relocation plan which will include building jobs and affordable homes on safer ground. As Brianna Castro of the Yale School of the Environment put it, “Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine. It is one of the rare places where we’re already seeing climate-motivated depopulation combined with other social and economic factors.”
Situated at the mouth of the Mississippi River, Louisiana has abundant crude and natural gas reserves and plays an integral role in moving natural gas through the country. The Henry Hub in Erath, Louisiana is the most active natural gas market center in North America. It will therefore come as no surprise that about 76% of Louisiana’s electricity is generated by natural gas, nearly twice the national rate. It is the third largest natural gas consuming state, after Texas and California. In 2024, the rest of Louisiana's electricity was mostly generated from its two nuclear power plants, which contributed 15%. Coal, which was the second-largest source for electricity in the state until 2015, produced about 4% of electricity in 2024. Renewables provided the remaining 4% mostly from biomass but ⅓ from solar which, in 2024, surpassed hydropower for the first time. Louisiana’s total energy consumption ranks it among the top three states in the nation and its per capita energy consumption is second highest in the nation, largely because of the energy-intensive chemical, petroleum, and natural gas industries in the state’s industrial sector.
In spring 2019, the state government released Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments. The plan identifies key challenges facing coastal communities and suggests a series of policy changes that could mitigate the risks of flooding and enhance resiliency as seas inevitably continue rising. In February 2020, Governor John Bel Edwards assembled a Climate Initiatives Task Force, which Quality Secretary Chuck Carr Brown explained would determine the volume of greenhouse gases emitted by industry and other sources in the state, and then come up with ways to reduce them. In an executive order in August 2020, Edwards set the state on a path toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and in the interim reducing economy-wide emissions 26-28% by 2025 and 40-50% by 2030.
In February 2022, the Climate Initiative Task Force submitted Louisiana’s first statewide climate action plan to Governor Edwards. Titled The Louisiana Climate Action Plan, it was produced by the task force and ten working groups made up of experts and community members. The plan includes strategies and actions to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and to “address the root cause of climate change.” Its objectives included: reducing net GHG emissions; improving health and quality of life for residents; creating a more equitable society; strengthening the economy and workforce; conserving natural resources; and adapting to a changing climate.
Under funding from the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grant, the state produced a Priority Climate Plan in January 2024. The plan’s focus areas for reducing GHG emissions were: offshore wind; community solar; community resilience hubs; transmission planning; industrial decarbonization; methane emissions; fleet transition; clean ports; regional transit; built environment retrofits; community forestry and greening; sustainable agriculture; land protection and restoration. New Orleans and Baton Rouge also received funding to produce their own priority climate plans in 2024.
In June 2026, Governor Jeff Landry signed the Louisiana Energy Protection Act, effectively banning climate lawsuits against oil and gas companies in the state. According to Landry, the law will prevent “frivolous litigation” such that “people can’t theorize the fact that climate change is manmade and then take that as a theory and hold those companies that are producing energy liable for that.” Louisiana is the fifth state this year to pass such a law against state climate lawsuits.
Louisiana is home to an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River dubbed “Cancer Alley,” where predominantly Black residents face 7-8 times higher cancer rates than the national average due to toxic pollutants from over 150 petrochemical facilities and oil refineries in the region. The EPA found that residents of St. John the Baptist Parish in Cancer Alley face the highest cancer risk in the nation from pollution (Listen to residents of St. John the Baptist Parish tell their stories here).
EJScreen, an environmental justice mapping tool which allowed the EPA to identify this risk was removed by the Trump administration via Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
In April 2026, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with oil and gas companies fighting a Louisiana climate lawsuit. A jury in Plaquemines Parish had previously ordered Chevron to pay $740 million in damages for contributing to coastline erosion and wetland destruction, but Chevron and Exxon argued that the dozens of lawsuits they are facing for violations of state environmental laws should be heard in friendlier federal courts instead, which the Supreme Court affirmed. The decision will impact 40 other climate lawsuits in Louisiana, and other litigation across the country.
CREDIT: Democracy Now!
