Cities prepare for worst
Local governments act against climate change without federal help
BOSTON – On a sunny summer’s day at historic Christopher Columbus Park on Boston’s waterfront, it’s hard to picture the dormant fury of the Atlantic Ocean as it laps softly at the creaking docks.
But one day, according to the city’s climate projections, a massive storm driven by unusually high winds and high tides will pour water over the park’s grassy rise and inundate the arbors where grapevines trail and newlyweds pose for photos. The waters will rush across the brick pavers onto Atlantic Avenue and flow toward historic Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, where generations of tourists have learned about the Boston Tea Party. The floodwaters will threaten nearby Old North Church, where Paul Revere’s ride kicked off, and lap at the edges of Bunker Hill.
High tides and strong storms already regularly inundate the area, but this
“It’s really simple: This isn’t a political issue. The changes we are seeing firsthand are affecting our communities, our economies, affecting ways of life that have existed for millennia.”
Michael LeVine Ocean Conservancy
storm would be different. It’s a vision that keeps Boston Mayor Marty Walsh up at night.
That’s why Walsh is preparing to have the city spend billions of dollars over the next decade to try to blunt the effects of climate change on the city, including armoring Columbus Park and gently raising it to provide a buffer against the worst the Atlantic can throw.
The plans to harden Columbus Park and large portions of the city’s 47 miles of shoreline are part of a massive but generally uncoordinated local-level effort across the country to fight the changes that will accompany the Earth as it continues warming.
Frustrated by what they see as the Trump administration’s decision to de-emphasize the danger posed by climate change, local government officials, nonprofit leaders and university researchers are busily forging ahead with limited resources in a piecemeal approach they said is better than nothing. They’re hardening buildings, digging bigger storm drains and changing zoning laws to keep homes from being built in lowlying areas prone to flooding.
Though many cities and states are trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases to slow global warming, these more concrete efforts are aimed at mitigating the actual impacts of climate change, which many elected officials said is politically easier to tackle.
“Climate change is real, and it’s impacting our city right now,” Walsh said. “We just can’t back down from the threat, regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. I would love to have a strong federal partner. We don’t have that right now. But that doesn’t mean we stop.”
An exhaustive federal report issued last month warned that climate change could, under a worst-case scenario, deliver a 10 percent hit to the nation’s GDP by the end of the century. The 1,600-page National Climate Assessment details the climate and economic impacts U.S. residents will see if drastic action is not taken to address climate change.
President Donald Trump downplayed the report’s findings, complaining that the USA is already very “clean” and that other countries aren’t addressing climate change.
“I’ve seen it. I’ve read some of it. It’s fine,” Trump said. Speaking about the potential economic effects, Trump said, “I don’t believe it.”
Broad scientific consensus says the Earth’s climate is warming, and humans accelerate that process though the burning of fossil fuels.
Climate change threatens the health and well-being of the American people by causing increasingly extreme weather, changes to air quality, the spread of new diseases by insects and pests and changes to the availability of food and water, the NCA researchers said.
The report says the changing climate poses a cascading series of linked risks, such as storms destroying aging bridges and roads, which would make it harder to move food and fuel around the country, and droughts making it harder for power plants across the West to safely generate electricity because of a lack of required cooling water.
“Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities,” the report concludes.
Experts said the devastating and unusually powerful hurricanes that struck the East Coast over the past decade have done more than any politician could to raise awareness of how much risk the nation faces. Heavy flooding in Texas, warming ocean waters in the Pacific Northwest and New England, and eroding islands in Alaska add even more weight. Scientists have warned for years that ocean levels are rising and that storms will become more violent.
“The number of people having that conversation is larger today than it ever has been in the past,” said Mark Misczak, a longtime emergency manager who spent the bulk of his career as a Federal Emergency Management Agency leader under multiple presidents. “The disasters, as terrible as it sounds, provide an opportunity to re-envision how things function and to consider that resiliency.”
Across the country, communities large and small draw on university experts and nonprofit scientists to help chart their course, which they say must be laid down to prepare for climate-related disasters.
Some of the efforts are small, such as Denver’s decision to create a list of airconditioned facilities where residents can take refuge during heat waves. Others are more ambitious: In Alaska, officials are preparing to relocate several native villages in danger of being washed away by seas that no longer freeze solid for months at a time. Many more actions fall into the middle, such as the decision by Florida Keys officials to raise portions of their low-lying roads to serve as flood barriers, or efforts by Austin, Texas, to reduce water consumption in anticipation of droughts.
“It’s really simple: This isn’t a political issue. The changes we are seeing firsthand are affecting our communities, our economies, affecting ways of life that have existed for millennia,” said Michael LeVine of the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, which worked on climate change issues in Alaska. “We simply don’t have a choice. It is incumbent on us as Alaskans to work together. We are past the point of fighting about who did what, who caused what or what the political consequences might be. Our way of life depends on adapting to the changes that are happening.”
For many, dealing with climate change is inherently a political issue. A report issued in December by the state of Texas about the need to “futureproof ” the state from worsening natural disasters never directly mentions climate change or the role humans have played in emitting heat-trapping carbon dioxide by burning the oil and gas Texas has long been known for.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, in releasing the report, said it was “impossible” for him to say whether climate change caused the worsening disasters that hit Texas.
“We need to stop making the old mistakes in local development that expose homes and businesses to risks that only become apparent when disaster strikes,” according to the report. “To paraphrase the old saying, an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure.”
While climate change has largely broken down along partisan lines at the state and federal level, the nation’s mayors have overwhelmingly put aside political parties to address the issue. A survey of mayors this year found that 57 percent of cities plan to take climate-related actions in 2019. Dozens of the country’s largest cities committed to meeting the terms of the 2025 Paris Agreement on climate change, which Trump is withdrawing from on a national level.
In Boston, Walsh is trying to figure out how to get funding for the city’s climate resiliency plan. Taxpayers will contribute 10 percent of all new capital funding in the city toward resilience, but the mayor knows he needs more help from businesses and the state and federal government.
“We’re not just planning for the next storm we’ll face, we’re planning for the storms the next generation will face,” Walsh said. “Whatever the federal policy is, it’s still going to be incumbent on local leaders to carry out these plans. There’s no question that our environment is in trouble, and humans are responsible.”
“We just can’t back down from the threat, regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C.”
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh