NATCHEZ — Natchez Mayor Butch Brown joined other Mississippi River mayors in Paris this week to announce an agreement Brown said he hopes will directly impact the Mississippi River and the Miss-Lou.

Brown is in France attending COP21, the United Nations climate change conference as a member of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, a coalition of mayors along the river aimed at creating a unified voice for the Mississippi River.

MRCTI signed a multinational agreement Monday to mitigate climate impact to the world’s food and freshwater supply.

“One of the greatest climate change threats to the world is a dramatic alteration to our food supply and decrease of freshwater,” said Mayor Chris Coleman of St. Paul, Minn., and MRCTI co-chair said. “Since the Mississippi River basin tops the list in food production, we saw the development of an international sustainability agreement imperative to saving river basins — including ours — from climate change and major population growth,”

“It’s been a good meeting, and it’s been very enlightening and there’s so much work to be done,” Brown said.

That work begins here at home, Brown said.

MRCTI has been meeting with representatives from food-producing river basins seeking to protect river basins around the world and sharing ideas on how to protect food sustainability, water quality and other conditions the Mississippi River basin and other food-producing river basins are facing.

Brown said many of the agreement’s policies he hopes to apply to Natchez have to do with water quality.

“Natchez certainly can benefit from how we use water from the river and how we put it back,” Brown said.

Brown said that controlling the quality of the water that runs from the city to the river could help improve the river’s ecological health.

“And that’s not hard to do,” Brown said. “We have water treatment already in place in Natchez.”

Brown said some changes could be made to agricultural techniques in the Miss-Lou to protect the Mississippi River. Brown said he learned how some fertilizers and agricultural chemicals seep into the soil over time, but are swept into the river with floods and heavy rains.

“That makes them more contaminated and less productive for wildlife, for fish, for agriculture and for drinking water,” Brown said.

Brown said Natchez’s comparatively small size does not mean it has a small effect on the environment.

“We are apt to participate in a bigger way than many big cities,” Brown said. “We’re making a strong difference. There are a hell of a lot more smaller cities than big cities. If you don’t have the small cities in the initiative, you certainly don’t have enough people to make it work.”

Mayor Frank Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa, said in the MRCTI’s presentation Monday that the Mississippi River basin farmers were crucial to the future of the nation’s food security.

“We have to work together to think about the future of food sources,” Cownie said. “We have to be very careful that the processes we use today are in no way destroying the ability of my grandkids and great-grandkids to do the same thing and get similar yields.”

Climate change is believed to be responsible for increased natural disasters, including droughts and floods that potentially impact food production among other effects.

Brown said the initiative could only be effective if farmers support the policies. He said improvements to agriculture’s sustainability could also mean improvements to the business of agriculture, too.

“We want to make it more profitable for them, not less,” Brown said. “We want to bring new techniques that make agriculture bigger and more sustainable.”

Cownie said farmers should be excited to support the initiative.

“We are working very carefully to try to find ways (to enact change,) and we hope it doesn’t get to rules and regulations and laws,” Cownie said.