Great Lakes Merit Protection

I grew up near the shores of Lake Erie, in suburban Cleveland. After a seven-year stint in Iowa and Nebraska, I ended up in Chicago, where I have lived since 1985. The Great Lakes have been part of my ecological and geographic consciousness for essentially 90 percent of my lifetime. As an urban planner, that means I am deeply aware of their significance on many levels.

It will surprise no one, then, that as a planner who has focused heavily on environmental and natural hazards issues, I have been involved in projects aimed at protecting that natural heritage. As manager of the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), I involved APA as a partner with the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) as ASFPM developed its Great Lakes Coastal Resilience website with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) support. Later, I prepared a successful grant for support from NOAA’s Sectoral Applications Research Program for a project on integrating climate change data into local comprehensive and capital improvements planning. In that project, APA collaborated with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the University of Illinois. That project, which involved work with five pilot communities in the Chicago metropolitan area, was (and still is) ongoing when I left APA at the end of May 2017. The aim was to develop applicable models for such planning for other communities throughout the Great Lakes region.

It is thus always encouraging to see others pick up the same mantle. It was hardly surprising that the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC), a long-time Chicago-based staple of the public interest community, would see fit to do so. On March 20, in concert with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, ELPC released “An Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on the Great Lakes,” with 18 scientists contributing to the 74-page report. I spoke two weeks later with Howard Learner, the long-time president and executive director of ELPC, about the rationale and hopes for the report.

The impact of adding one more report to the parade is cumulative but important. Learner explained that national studies, particularly the National Climate Assessment, mention regional impacts of climate change, but that drilling down to the impacts on a specific region and making local and state decision makers aware of the issues at those levels was the point. Thus, he asked Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois and a science adviser to ELPC, to assemble a team of experts for the purpose. Wuebbles recruited most of the team, with the goal not only of identifying problems but of developing or pinpointing solutions. Repeatedly, Learner emphasized the public policy role of ELPC as a “problem-solving” institution. The intended audience was governors, provincial ministers, congressional delegations from Great Lakes states, and other public officials, providing them with an assessment of the state of the science concerning the Great Lakes.

I won’t even attempt to review all the data in the report, but certain points are essential to an adequate public understanding. For one, the Great Lakes are simply huge and constitute a very complex ecosystem in a heavily populated region of more than 34 million people in the U.S. and Canada, the vast majority of whom repeatedly express support for protection of the Great Lakes in public opinion polls. It is the largest freshwater group of lakes on the planet, and second largest in volume. It is a binational ecosystem that demands cooperation across state, provincial, and national boundaries. It is home to 170 species of fish and a $7 billion fisheries industry. It has long been home to one of the most significant industrial regions of both nations. What happens here matters.

The term “lake effect” is most often associated with the Great Lakes because their sheer mass has a measurable impact on local and regional weather patterns. Winds pick up considerable moisture that often lands downwind in the form of snowstorms and precipitation. For instance, any frequent visitor of farmers’ markets along the Great Lakes is likely to be aware of western Michigan’s “fruit belt” offerings of apples, cherries, pears, and other crops dependent on the lake effect.

Figure 3. Observed changes in annually-averaged temperature (°F) for the U.S. states bordering the Great Lakes for present-day (1986–2016) relative to 1901–1960. Derived from the NOAA nClimDiv dataset (Vose et al., 2014). Figure source: NOAA/NCEI (Both images reprinted from report courtesy ELPC.

Figure 4. Projected change in annually-averaged temperature (°F) for U.S. states bordering the Great Lakes from the (a) higher (RCP8.5) and (b) lower (RCP4.5) scenarios for the 2085 (2070-2099) time period relative to 1976-2005. Figure source: NOAA/NCEI

The lake effect, of course, is a part of the natural system in a region carved out of the landscape by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Recent climate change is another matter. The region has already experienced a 1.6° F. increase in average daily temperatures in the 1985-2016 period as compared to the 1901-1960 average. Those increases are expected to accelerate over the remainder of this century. It is not just temperatures that change, however, because changing weather patterns as a result of long-term climate change result in altered precipitation patterns. Summer precipitation is predicted to decline by 5 to 15 percent, suggesting some increased propensity for drought, while winter and spring precipitation will increase, producing an increased regional propensity for spring flooding. Increased intensity of major thunderstorm events will exacerbate the vulnerability of urban areas to stormwater runoff, resulting in increased “urban flooding,” often a result of inadequate stormwater drainage systems in highly developed urban areas. That, in turn, has huge implications for municipal and regional investments in stormwater and sewage treatment infrastructure. In addition, heat waves can threaten lives and public health. Public decision makers ignore these implications at the fiscal and physical peril of their affected communities.

Among those impacts highlighted in the report is the increased danger of algal blooms in the Great Lakes as a result of changing biological conditions. The report notes that the largest algal bloom in Lake Erie history occurred in 2011, offshore from Toledo, Ohio, affecting drinking water for a metropolitan area of 500,000 people.

There is also danger to the stability of some shoreline bluffs, an issue highlighted on the Great Lakes Coastal Resilience website, as a result of reduced days of ice cover during the winter. While less ice cover may seem a minor problem to some, in fact it means changes in water density and seasonal mixing patterns in water columns, but it also means the loss of protection from winter waves from storm patterns because the ice cover prevents those waves from reaching the shore until the spring melt. The result is increased shoreline erosion.

All of that harks back to the central question of my interview with Learner: What do you hope to achieve? “The time for climate action is now,” he insisted, noting that the Trump presidency has been “a step back,” making it important for cities and states to “step up with their own climate solutions.” Learner hopes the report at least provides a “road map” for governors and Canadian premiers to focus their actions on the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes, such as “extreme weather events.”

Curiously, one arena in which new action may be possible is the city of Chicago itself, which on April 2 elected a new mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Media attention has focused on the fact that she is both the first gay mayor and the first African-American female mayor in the city’s history, but equally significant is her history as a former federal prosecutor who campaigned against corruption. Learner notes that outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel convened a Chicago Climate Summit in November 2017, and that ELPC is now “looking to Mayor Lightfoot to step up Chicago’s game” to benefit both the local economy and environment with a stronger approach to climate change.

The same can be said, of course, for numerous other municipalities choosing new leadership and for the new governors of the region, including J.B. Pritzker in Illinois. They all have much work to do, but an increasing amount of research and guidance with which to do it.

Jim Schwab

Can You Sue the Government for Climate Change Impacts?

The American Planning Association has just posted today this article I wrote for its APA blog: https://www.planning.org/blog/blogpost/9111027/.

Jim Schwab

Resources for Planners to Address Hazards

Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

One benefit of increased attention to hazards and climate change within the planning profession is a growing array of valuable literature that can benefit practicing planners and widen the scope of thinking on the subject among academics. This review of books published within the past year or so is intended to highlight some of this new literature and offer some comparisons on the focus and practical value the authors provide.

Because urban planning is ultimately about people and the built environment, it may make sense to start this survey with two books that examine the context within which risk happens. Kathleen Tierney, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the Natural Hazards Center there, sets out in The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2014) to reorient our thinking away from the idea that individual natural phenomena—earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.—“cause” the death and destruction that we often associate with them. In fact, she says, the death and destruction, particularly in the modern world, is an artifact of the social decisions that produce and, equally important, distribute risk differentially among populations, often producing widely varying impacts. In the opening chapter, she states, “the organizing idea for this book is that disasters and their impacts are socially produced, and that the forces driving the production of disaster are embedded in the social order itself.”

By itself, the idea that disaster losses result from the collision of natural forces with the built environment should not surprise any planners with a modicum of intelligence. And the built environment is inevitably the result of both individual and community decisions. The devil of Tierney’s thesis lies in the details: paying attention not only to all the social, institutional, and political decisions that either enhance or mitigate risk but to how those decisions get made and for what reasons. It is clear that those impacts are anything but randomly distributed and that most are avoidable, yet the litany of losses marches on. Tierney notes that a great deal of professional attention in recent decades has focused on how people perceive risk, a legitimate area of inquiry, but not nearly as much has focused on the origins of risk and how it was socially constructed. There are reasons, after all, why a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti kills an estimated 300,000 (but who really knows?) yet only dozens at most in California, and why the 1,800 who died during Hurricane Katrina included overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of the economically disadvantaged.

Most planners work in local or regional government, and they serve power structures that must make the decisions, even when they choose to do nothing, that affect these outcomes. In that sense, some of Tierney’s theories and conclusions may challenge our comfort zones because they imply (or state directly) a need to challenge power with regard to these issues. For precisely that reason, I recommend reading it. Most social progress results from stepping outside traditional comfort zones. For planners, it is also within our ethical and legal responsibilities to help protect public health, safety, and welfare.

Those who wish to examine more closely how differential risk affects more vulnerable subsections of community populations can follow up with a case in point provided by Michael R. Greenberg, professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers in New Jersey, where he had a front-row seat to observe Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As a baby boomer with aging parents, he says, the event inspired him to examine the issues such events pose for seniors. Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters: From Hazards and Vulnerability to Prevention and Resilience (Routledge, 2014) closely dissects the vulnerabilities of the rising generation of seniors among baby boomers. It exposes the resulting collision of demographics with natural hazards and often inadequate public policy in considering the reduced resilience that may result. At the same time, he notes that many seniors in good mental and physical health can become assets in using their to help build the very resilience many communities will need in coming decades, if only their communities learn to focus these social resources to address and help solve such problems. My only regret after reading this thoughtful book is that the publisher chose to make it so expensive ($145 hardcover), but perhaps a library or electronic copy can make it more accessible.

Six authors, mostly at Texas A&M University (TAMU) have addressed the question of resilience head-on in Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerability to Disasters (Island Press, 2014). Jamie Hicks Masterson, program director of Texas Target Communities (TAMU); Walter Gillis Peacock, professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and director of the Hazards Reduction & Recovery Center (TAMU); Shannon S. Van Zandt, associate professor in the department and director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development (TAMU); Himanshu Grover, assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo; Lori Feild Schwarz, comprehensive planning manager for the City of Plano, Texas (and formerly in Galveston); and John T. Cooper, Jr., associate professor of practice in the same department at TAMU, have combined somehow to produce an almost seamless document that lays out a very practical approach to understanding and developing resilience within communities. The book is littered with tables, checklists, and exercises to walk planners and city officials through the necessary analysis to grasp the impacts of everyday planning decisions in connection with natural hazards. The book tends to rely heavily on the Texas and Gulf Coast experiences of the authors, but as they note with a wry sense of humor, “We like to say that if you can plan in Texas, you can plan anywhere.” For the practicing planner, this may well be the most useful of the five books reviewed here.

Two other books represent the rising level of interest among planners in addressing the impacts of climate change, a subject implicit, and sometimes explicitly expressed, in the three books noted above. One of these, Local Climate Action Planning (Island Press, 2012), by Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale, is actually three years old but still a very useful and well-informed primer for those planners and city officials undertaking to address climate change. The primary focus is actually not hazards but climate action plans, which focus on mitigating climate change by using public policy and planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For climate change skeptics, it is worth noting that many of the resulting strategies have local environmental and economic benefits that add to the allure of effective climate action plans. While much of the book addresses techniques like inventorying local greenhouse gas emissions and developing reduction strategies, nonetheless, the authors devote one chapter to climate adaptation and outline means of assessing community sectors for vulnerability to climate change impacts.

Finally, Adapting to Climate Change: Lessons from Natural Hazards Planning (Springer, 2014), assembled from a variety of contributions by editors Bruce C. Glavovic, of New Zealand’s Massey University, and Gavin P. Smith, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brings together the subjects of climate and natural hazards in a way that points to future successes in addressing the increased vulnerabilities associated with climate change. Unlike the other books, it is less a single narrative than an anthology using examples of climate change adaptation from around the world. It is unquestionably the most cosmopolitan and far-reaching of the five books in its aspirations for global relevance, using case studies from South Africa, Peru, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, among other locations, in addition to the United States. The two editors first met while working in different capacities along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and have collaborated periodically ever since. Both have been anxious to explore and explain the critical roles of planning and governance in managing exposure to natural disasters, especially as “practitioners from diverse backgrounds  . . . are faced with the grand challenge of adapting to climate change. Planners who like to mine the experience of other cities and regions in case studies will find plenty to contemplate as they review the mixed international track record of community resilience in facing floods, coastal storms, and other weather-related phenomena influenced by a changing global climate with its wide-ranging variations in specific local settings. It may take a while to digest this substantial book, but it is probably well worth the effort.

 

Jim Schwab