Best Practices for Climate Resilience: Lessons From Our Colleagues
Since 2016, I've observed, talked with and learned from climate resilience professionals and affected community members from Maine to New Jersey and beyond about how to increase climate resilience.
I synthesize below more than two dozen best practices in nine categories. I also highlight lessons learned on Twitter. Follow me @allenwkratz.
Look beyond typical boundaries
Act synergistically. Municipalities can benefit from an array of federal, state, philanthropic funding. For a conference in Maine, I produced a role-play in which a prototypical town manager and I identified 22 potential sources of mutually-reinforcing funding for her vulnerable hypothetical waterfront community. A similar role play that I produced pertaining to "Floodville, New Jersey" identified 16 possibilities. In Miami Beach, bond financing plus residential and commercial fees have funded protective infrastructure. Multisource funding stretches dollars.
Focus on co-benefits. Resilience projects gain greater support and funding when they address multiple needs, e.g., flood protection, improved housing and job training, as Dubuque has shown.
Innovate. Faced with repetitive losses in low-lying areas of Charlotte-Mecklenburg area, officials used a fee on impervious-surface buildings to fund voluntary buyouts of 700 homes. Result: 200 acres open land flood safely and return to their original storm-buffering function. This program exemplified nature-based mitigation and prompt payments to affected community members. Similarly, Des Moines used $10.5M in stormwater utility revenue to help buy 50 repetitively flooded homes.
Find new funds
Use private-sector funds. The first two years' salary of Houston’s first Chief Resilience Officer will be paid by a grant from Shell Oil.
Use philanthropic funding. The William Penn Foundation and Rotary helped fund four nature-based New Jersey shoreline mitigation projects. Pew Trusts funds valuable research. Nonprofits can play an increasing role.
Enhance the role of philanthropy. Funding from foundations is governed by the intent of the original donor. While adhering to donor intent, foundation officers also enjoy a degree of latitude to adapt the core mission to new circumstances. By voicing your funding needs to a foundation's program officers, you might help the foundation expand the scope of the funds it disburses as it maintains relevance in a changing world. The Kresge Foundation has taken a new approach to climate philanthropy.
Address financial risk. Be aware that credit-rating agencies are looking closely at the extent to which municipalities are reducing risks from climate change. Explore parametric insurance and green bonds to fund resilience infrastructure.
Communicate effectively
Tell a visual story. To illustrate the economic cost of doing nothing to mitigate the effects of sea-level rise, Maine's Island Institute is producing three story maps. The first highlights the challenges faced by the island community of Vinalhaven.
Reframe others' language. .When critics object to funding stormwater management with a "rain tax," parry by stating the reality that your municipality already imposes a "rain tax" -- most likely the property tax that goes into the general fund for sewer-system upgrades. Promote a stormwater utility fee that is spread across all property owners, including those exempt from property taxation. That's an equitable tax rather than a "rain tax."
Watch your language. Faced with repetitive losses of properties and personal well-being in flood-prone areas, some communities propose "managed retreat." But "retreat" connotes defeat. Instead, communities do well to engage affected communities members in a comprehensive process of "moving up" -- up topographically and economically, too.
Avoid misleading technical talk. Some professionals talk about "total water level" -- and use visualizations -- instead of saying "100-year flood" and 1% storm.
Make it personal. Explore personal mitigation strategies. Travel by bus or train instead of by plane? Reduce food waste? For reasons of health -- environmental, animal and personal -- my husband and I became vegans three years ago. Fewer belching bovines in Nebraska for beef tenderloin means lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Follow facts
Follow the science. The National Oceanic and Aeronautic Administration (NOAA) and other government agencies provide valuable data. The Maine Climate Council's six working groups rely on a 21-member Scientific and Technical Subcommittee. Likewise, "Start with the Science," is the first guiding principle of New Jersey's Statewide Climate Change Resilience Strategy.
Use technology. Boston is installing monitors in what will be “smart sewers” that measure real-time storm performance so that seawater-backup can be diverted away from treatment plants. The diversion protects the bacteria that are vital for secondary treatment.
Encourage academic research. Flood Lab is working with eight universities to enhance flood-risk modeling. To what extent does your academic institution fund research related to climate mitigation and adaptation? What more could it do? Reach out to the institution's officials responsible for establishing government-funded research and recommend promising new areas of inquiry.
Expand networks
Coalesce with allies. Land conservation organizations, like those in New Hampshire, can help assemble funding and financing for climate-change projects.
Look for love in all the right places. Ask this question: Who has a stake in climate resilience? For example, will the suburban garden club expand its mission to also nurture the new bioswales in the adjacent city? Does the regional sewerage authority have an interest in helping a municipality within its catchment area fund a stormwater detention park that will reduce the combined sewer outflow load on its treatment plant?
Expand trade association awareness. As a member of a trade association, you can encourage the organization to look at its core mission through the added lens of climate mitigation and adaption. For example, if the association focuses on transportation policy, does it sponsor training, webinars and internships that enhance understanding of climate-change issues?
Act politically
Raise awareness. Where do your elected local, regional, state and federal candidates for public office stand on climate mitigation and adaption? Questioning them puts climate resilience on the political radar. Support climate-resilience advocates and increased funding.
Help elected officials make hard choices. Given the enormous financial burden that climate change imposes, elected officials face a growing challenge: Who pays -- and how? To help build a constituency that supports civic investment in mitigation and adaption, organize a "friends" group of respected community members to start neighborhood meetings about taxation, creating a stormwater utility fee, increasing bond-issuance capacity and other means of paying for climate resilience.
Manage effectively
Go for everything. When community members along the East River in Manhattan realized that the City had reduced the cost of a resilience project by cutting numerous amenities. community leaders organized. The result: a 42-point agreement with the City that restored most of the eliminated design features.
Watch details, meet deadlines. Receiving funds for a resilience project is great (of course!) -- and requires vigilance. Make sure your project meets all deadlines to avoid a lapse in funding or, worse, a recapture of funds already spent. Protect funding from undue political whims.
Work in concentric circles
Think comprehensively. If reducing greenhouse emissions by creating market incentives for plug-in electric vehicles, question the source of the electricity. Offshore/onshore wind? Solar? Fracked natural gas? In short, focus on more than the tailpipe. Avoid environmental burden shifting.
Think globally. Either virtually or in person) when conditions permit safe travel, visit innovative projects in, for example, the Netherlands, Great Britain, etc. Tell stakeholders and influencers in your community what you've learned.
Think regionally. The cost of adaptation infrastructure (seawalls, pumping stations, new piers, raised causeways, etc.) often exceeds the financial capacity of any single municipality or even a single state. As the financial services develops new tools such as resilience bonds to finance huge projects, states will do well to coalesce in ways that attract private-sector investment in mega-projects. Consider inter-municipal shared-service agreements to reduce costs.
Think locally. Mitigation that works in one state may not work in another. Example: Zero-emission electric trucks, popular in California, cannot yet haul 40-ton loads of logs from Maine's forests. Instead, biomass energy may be a better alternative to diesel fuel.
Be equitable. The effects of climate change typically hurt low- and moderate-income community members, as well as people of color before higher-income community members experience those effects. Conduct all discussions, planning and implementation to achieve equity within your community. Foundation funding can help engage community members.
Build upon existing public policies
Repurpose existing public policies. Transferring development rights from one area within a municipality, e.g., a historic district, to a less-intensively-developed "receiving" area elsewhere in town enables communities to simultaneously encourage both private-sector economic growth and historic preservation. Similarly, in Dover, New Hampshire, TDRs are becoming a way of encouraging high-ground development while flood-prone waterside land reverts to its flood-buffering function (nature-based mitigation).
Incorporate resilience into land-use plans and policies. To be truly comprehensive, master plans should address resilience.
News that pertains to funding climate mitigation and climate adaption occurs nearly every day.
Follow me on Twitter @allenwkratz, where I retweet key news items — usually with my added-value comments.
