The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Report highlights climate change’s impact on state
A recently released report from Yale University provided a look into how Connecticut residents’ health can be affected as temperatures rise.
The report, released in September, drew from 19 indicators covering four main areas: Temperature, extreme events, infectious diseases and air quality. Researchers detailed concerning findings in those areas, including a threedegree uptick in yearly average temperature in the state since 1895, rising yearly numbers of Vibrio infections and “increasing abundance” of some kinds of mosquitoes that can carry viruses.
“Climate change is happening now, in Connecticut, and it’s affecting people,” said Laura Bozzi, the lead author. “That’s a different frame than I think climate change has been seen for a long time — that it was more to faraway places, or to the environment and in the future.”
In the just over 100-page document, researchers took a look back at what’s happened in the state so far: Average annual tempera
ture over the course of 124 years increased between 3 to 3.5 degrees depending on the county. Emergency room trips for “heat stress” averaged in the hundreds annually in the state between 2007 and 2016. Devices in New London and Bridgeport indicated more days per year with high tide flooding.
Bozzi said their research did not conduct analysis to tie climate change to these effects, but they are sugges
ting that it is a likely factor in them. The report can be viewed through a few frameworks, she said — that climate change is happening here, its risks exist for everyone but not in the same way and it requires strong action to dial it back.
If nobody tried to cut down on emissions, researchers would expect an average five degree temperature bump, a more than 8 percent rise in annual precipitation, heightened chances of flooding and “[e]xtreme summer droughts that occur three times as often” between 2040 and 2069 in comparison to 1970 to 1999, according to the report.
And since climate change can be a “risk amplifier,” these changes can have effects that disproportionately affect some groups — such as communities of color, people with lower incomes and aging adults — more than others, the report read.
“It’s far worse if we do nothing, or if we do very little. And so we can lessen the impact, but the window for that is shrinking,” Bozzi said. “And so we need to double down. And that’s with individual actions, but especially policy action. And so Connecticut is strong on it, but we need to make sure that the plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are actualized and then we need to go farther than either of those plans have laid out.”
The report lays out seven recommendations to curb climate consequences, including having systems that keep ongoing tabs on key metrics and integrating climate change considerations across different parts of government.
The report marks a “good first step” toward filling the gap in understanding of how environmental changes affect “things that people care about,” said James O’Donnell, the executive director of the Connecticut Institute for Resilience & Climate Adaptation at UConn.
Establishing where the state is currently at can also help with projections about health impacts moving forward, he said, such as what the likelihood of people getting illnesses like Lyme disease, eastern equine encephalitis or Vibrio would be in the years to come.
“Those things all correlate with heat,” he said. “If we know how much more heat there’s going to be, we can then project how much more vulnerable we are to these things that impact us directly.”
The state currently has goals to cut greenhouse gas levels 45 percent by 2030, and then slicing them further to 80 percent by 2050, from its levels in 2001. That’s a less ambitious goal than states like New York, the report notes, which aims to have “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” by the time the nutmeg state would reach 80 percent.
Rebecca French, the Department of Eneergy and Environmental Protection’s director of the Office of Climate Planning, said reaching the 2030 goal is “critical” to accomplishing the 2050 reduction. She also noted the governor had an “incredibly ambitious goal” in the same executive order he used to establish the Governor’s Council on Climate Change: Having a carbon-free electric grid by 2040.
“We are pushing really hard in Connecticut on all these issues,” she said.
The report has “directly informed” the council’s public health and safety working group’s draft recommendations, French said.
Following public input, the 23-member climate change council is expected to integrate their input and deliberate before recommendations are sent to the governor for approval by Jan. 15, the date determined by Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive order in September 2019, French said.