October 15, 2025
Originally published in JHU’s HUB.
“Baltimore is sinking, and the sea is rising,” Benjamin Zaitchik pronounced on a drizzly, late-summer day in his office at Johns Hopkins University. A professor of Earth and planetary sciences, Zaitchik’s brow furrowed as he talked about the state of environmental health research in an era of extreme weather. In a nutshell: It’s not good.
“In Baltimore, excessive rainwater pours into an aging infrastructure and underground water-flow channels that are, in many cases, unknown and complicated,” he continued. “The soil doesn’t stay frozen as long in January, and it rains much more than it snows.” These conditions beget floods. And floods beget sewage backups and mold, which beget health problems, home-repair expenses, decreased property values, and stress.
But Baltimore faces additional challenges—many of them representative of those seen in dozens of other midsized industrial cities in the United States, Zaitchik said. Among the challenges: a stagnant population, rising temperatures and heat, and water and air pollution.
Remedies exist for these problems, and Zaitchik and his colleagues want to help devise solutions. They applied for and won a five-year, $25 million grant through the Department of Energy, one for which they teamed up with universities, utility companies, city agencies, and community organizations across the mid-Atlantic region to determine the best path forward. This past March, however, in the fourth year of their work, the federal government pulled back the funding.