Lasting Lessons in Resilience

In the latter half of June 2008, it was hard to imagine Cedar Rapids as the city it had been just one month earlier. A massive flood along the Cedar River clobbered the city with a classic double whammy: About the time existing flood crests that had already swamped upstream Cedar Falls hit Cedar Rapids, a severe thunderstorm reached the city to compound the impact. The river, which runs through downtown in this city of 130,000 people, reached a flood level of 31.2 feet, besting the all-time previous record of 20 feet, reached in 1851 and 1929.

Downtown Cedar Rapids undergoing debris removal, late June 2008

Flood waters covered 14 percent of the city, more than 10 square miles. About 10 percent of the city’s population was evacuated from the deluge. Highway ramps became inaccessible, and at one point, a bus carrying prisoners from the county jail stayed just inches ahead of the rising waters to make its escape. City Hall, unfortunately situated on Mays Island in the middle of the river, was underwater, and governmental operations were moved to high ground elsewhere. In the end, nearly 1,300 flood-damaged homes were demolished, many making way for permanent open space as the city used federal hazard mitigation grants to acquire the properties with deed restrictions. Amazingly, as city officials have often said, there were no deaths due to the flood.

Relocated Czech & Slovak National Museum following June 2008 flood, Cedar Rapids

The avoidance of loss of life can be credited to the city and Linn County’s rapid response, which was not limited to emergency management. Within days, the Cedar Rapids City Council adopted a set of recovery goals that guided planning for long-term recovery for months and years afterwards. It shifted outside consulting contracts from riverfront planning to flood recovery. And it moved forward with a litany of creative approaches to business restoration, employment stabilization, and affordable housing development. Cedar Rapids became a living laboratory for community resilience.

For that reason, we made a special point during our Colorado to Iowa road tour for the film Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary project of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, to interview five essential city staff members on Tuesday, July 18, before closing out our trip by heading back to Chicago. These included City Manager Jeff Pomeranz and Community Development Director Jennifer Pratt.

Click here to hear two Cedar Rapids officials—Jennifer Pratt and Brenna Fall—discuss why they are supporting the HMDR film project.

These lessons have had lasting impacts in Cedar Rapids, which also suffered massive tree canopy devastation, as well as building damage, from an August 2020 derecho whose worst winds, exceeding 140 mph, swept through Linn County, including several suburbs. Taking climate change seriously, the city also last year adopted its own climate action plan. Cedar Rapids has quite probably done more to attack these problems in a forward-looking fashion than any other city in Iowa.

In coming weeks, this blog will feature new video clips from a four-day visit to the Florida APA conference in Jacksonville in early September. Meanwhile, plans are afoot for a November trip to Texas to capture additional content from the Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi, follow a mobile workshop exploring Hurricane Harvey recovery in Rockport, a Gulf Coast city where Harvey first made landfall in September 2017, and visit environmentally disadvantaged communities in the Houston area and record interviews with planners and activists there. Those posts will acknowledge the gracious support we are already receiving from several organizations and institutions in Texas.

To support the HMDR film-making effort, use either the donations link here or the QR code below. We will acknowledge all donors, whose help we greatly appreciate. Make this your film too as we move forward.

Jim Schwab

Tampa Bay and the Quest for Resilience

In my last blog post, I discussed the origins of a current active film effort, Planning to Turn the Tide, which I have been leading on behalf of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. This post, which includes the first of a series of blog videos recorded during our travels, discusses what we learned during our meetings and interviews around Tampa Bay, especially during an afternoon at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council (TBRPC) in Pinellas Park, Florida, just north of St. Petersburg.

Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews at Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council.

One of our interviews featured Jerry Stickney, Director of the Sunshine Line, a Hillsborough County agency that provides transportation for disabled and disadvantaged people, including special services during natural disasters. That last point provided the bulk of our discussion because evacuating and sheltering these people during hurricanes, major storms, and other disasters is a major responsibility, but one that ensures some degree of social equity in the face of life-threatening circumstances. Hurricane Ian could easily have become the major hurricane that finally invaded the Tampa Bay region but instead turned east further south, striking the Fort Myers area.

Cara Serra, resiliency planner for TBRPC, discussed her role in facilitating the work of the Regional Resiliency Coalition, which consists of several working groups examining regional issues concerning shoreline management, infrastructure, stormwater management, and resilient building design and land use, among other concerns. They are currently developing a Regional Resiliency Action Plan.

In the quest for regional resilience, learning lessons from disasters elsewhere plays a major role, one that has not been neglected. Sarah Vitale, planning director for TBRPC, led the development of a new iteration of Project Phoenix, originally created in 2009, to help business leaders and others in the Tampa Bay region understand what the impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane might be if it took aim directly at Tampa Bay, something that last happened more than a century ago, when the population was barely one-tenth

Damage from Hurricane Michael, Bay County, FL. Photo by David Taylor

of what it is now. Her training workshop includes video clips of both a simulation of such a storm and real-life stories from Mexico Beach of economic recovery from Hurricane Michael, which struck the Florida Panhandle in October 2018.

Finally, we also spoke with Sean Sullivan, the executive director of TBRPC, whose engaging New England accent kept us captivated as he outlined his vision for a six-county region that is aware of its risks and prepared to handle the impacts of climate change. It is clear that he has a committed staff that is helping to implement that vision and develop the tools for effective change in that direction.

As promised in the video link above, here are links to the film trailer and the donations page to support Planning to Turn the Tide, the documentary film for which all this work is being done:

Film Trailer

Donations Page (QR code below)

Supplemental note:

The impacts of climate change are affecting us all, often in unexpected ways. As I write this, my own sinuses are recovering from the onslaught of smoky air, full of particulate matter, spread south by the winds from thousands of acres of Canadian forests being scorched by massive wildfires. Winds from such fires in Quebec swept through much of the Northeast two weeks ago, including New York City. Yesterday, it was the Midwest’s turn to suffer, and Chicago was one huge grey fog that burned the eyes and made even healthy people catch their breath. The Chicago Tribune reported that we had the worst air quality of 95 major cities worldwide.

If we needed a vivid illustration that climate change and its impacts know no borders, this is certainly it. That is one more reason we at HMDR find urgency in our mission to develop this film and discuss how better planning at local, regional, national, and even international levels can help us turn the rising tide of losses from natural disasters.

Jim Schwab

Envisioning a More Resilient Future

One reason I have long loved being an urban planner is that, ultimately, planning is about imagining a better future. Or should be, anyway. Although I was in my early thirties before I returned to school for a pair of graduate degrees in Urban and Regional Planning and Journalism (a very unusual combination, I soon learned), I was intrigued with the creative process as early as high school. At the time, I applied it mostly to writing, but I learned in college that creativity was valuable for just about any endeavor. Much later, I was enthralled when I read University of Chicago psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s path-breaking 1990 book, Flow, a study of the creative process. By then, I was already in the throes of writing my own books and learning where my planning credentials could take me.

While most planners never write or publish books, we all are quite accustomed to producing plans, reports, and other documents for consumption by the public, public officials, and other decision makers. We learn how to present these materials and visualizations in public at meetings and hearings. Visual depictions, for example, of what a neighborhood not only is, but could become, are standard fare. Many of us learn to work with various kinds of visualization and design software that create renderings of future versions of boulevards and parks and other public spaces. What architects do for individual buildings, we try to do for entire neighborhoods and cities. In the process, we try to feed and amplify the public imagination for what could be, hoping to find options for improvement that will appeal to a public that may be looking for alternatives to an unsatisfactory or uninspiring status quo. Whole books and software programs, such as CommunityViz, have been devoted to sharing strategies with planners for accomplishing these visionary goals.

The written word and visualizations are two ways, often combined, for helping people see new possibilities or change the way they see the familiar. I have used them for decades, in evolving ways, to help people better understand my own planning specializations, hazard mitigation and disaster recovery. When a natural disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake has shaken a community’s assumptions about its own future, it can be time to think about rebuilding in a way that makes that community more resilient in the face of future events. I helped advance the idea of pre-disaster planning for post-disaster recovery, that is, thinking before a disaster even happens about what would expedite the recovery process and allow the community to emerge stronger and more prosperous than before. This has become known as finding the “silver lining” in the dark cloud of disaster recovery, building hope during a process that can take years or even decades in the most drastic situations.

Left to right, crew members Jim Schwab, David Taylor, and Kim Taylor Galway toast the film project at Royal Peacock, Sarasota, FL, June 18, 2023

Even when I left the American Planning Association (APA) at the end of May 2017, I largely envisioned a continuation of my hybrid journalistic and planning career in the form of books and teaching, for the most part, augmented by various consulting jobs. It was only after conversations with high school classmate David Taylor at the 50th reunion of our Brecksville, Ohio, Class of 1968 in June 2018 that another idea took shape. David, a Purple Heart Vietnam Veteran, had taken a very different path in life after recovering from war wounds, by becoming first a photographer, and later a videographer. After retiring from a marketing position with the U.S. Postal Service, he opened his own studio and has done film and photography work for veterans and environmental groups, as well as traditional assignments like weddings.

Dave had followed my career for decades, starting with the publication of my first book, Raising Less Corn and More Hell (University of Illinois Press), in 1988. As I grew into my role as a leader in hazards planning, he became fascinated with what planners do in that realm, regarding them as “unsung heroes” of the recovery process. Further conversations led to a visit to his home in Sarasota, Florida, in February 2019, which included a presentation at a Florida Atlantic University symposium in West Palm Beach, and eventually that fall into the idea of producing a video documentary about the role of planning in helping communities address threats from natural disasters and climate change. As chair-elect at the time of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I took that idea to the executive committee, and they chose to sponsor the project.

Devastation from Hurricane Michael, October 2018. Photo by David Taylor

Thus began, for me, a new way of thinking about how to engage the public on these issues. I had no experience with film as a vehicle for this process, except as a viewer, but the idea captured my imagination. What can one do with film that would be different from the written word? As the script writer, how would I think about the narrative differently? Moving out of my comfort zone forced me to think even more creatively than usual, but I welcomed the experience because I sensed that it might give us a new way to capture people’s emotions and imagination around an idea whose time was overdue. The United States, and the world, were suffering ever more massive losses from natural disasters, in part as a result of climate change, and needed new ways to approach the problem. Maybe the kinetic visual impact of a film could help affect that, if crafted with the right forward-looking perspectives in mind.

It would not be easy, and I readily understood that. Moreover, the first question was how to pay for the project. Movies are inherently more expensive to produce than books, and involve at least as much work in most ways. But if we could pull this off . . . .

Fortunately, incoming chair-elect Stacy Wright was able to arrange a $5,000 donation from Atkins, a consulting firm, to start the ball rolling in the fall of 2019. I became chair of HMDR on January 1, 2020, but the COVID pandemic intervened within weeks and by March 2020, we had to shut the project down and wait for the best. It was the fall of 2021 before we were again able to move forward. We created a Video Project Advisory Committee to provide guidance on the project. It consists of leading voices in the hazards planning subfield. We also began to assemble teams of regional volunteers who could assist us with logistics and recommend leading planners for interviews and advice.

We chose to name the film Planning to Turn the Tide because of the metaphorical implications of seeking to reverse the growing tide of losses of life and property from natural and other disasters. Well aware of the impacts and trends of climate change, we know that the number and costs of America’s billion-dollar disasters has risen rapidly in recent decades. We also know that planning can make a difference.

Outdoor interview with Julie Dennis, owner of OVID Solutions (also a member of Video Project Advisory Committee) in Blountstown, Florida, July 2022. Holding camera is Kim Taylor Galway; to her left is videographer David Taylor.

In the meantime, we raised additional donations from other consulting firms* and won two small grants from the APA Divisions Council to help us get started. We announced our project in May 2022 at the APA National Planning Conference in San Diego and recorded interviews with leading hazards professionals at the Association of State Floodplain Managers annual conference two weeks later in Orlando. By mid-July, we had recorded 14 more interviews in the Florida Panhandle, mostly in Panama City, following the area’s recovery four years after Hurricane Michael struck as the first Category 5 storm to reach the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. In that visit, we had extensive support from both City Hall in Panama City and the Bay County Chamber of Commerce, which provided its board room for a recording studio for an entire day.

Local entrepreneur Allan Branch explains his restoration efforts at History Class Brewing in downtown Panama City, July 2022

By then, our main problem was that we needed an easy way for people interested in supporting the project to make donations. Fundraising can be hard work, but there is little reason these days to make it harder than it needs to be. APA worked with us over subsequent months to create a dedicated donations page where people could donate online. Because we were the first division in APA’s history to attempt a project like this, we were also the first to need such a mechanism, but by late March of this year, it was ready. The donations page, which you can also reach with the QR code below, channels donations directly to HMDR and tracks the donor information for us, so that we can recognize our supporters appropriately (unless they choose to be anonymous). You can help keep this project moving ahead by donating now, and I sincerely hope you choose to do so. You will be helping us sell the concept of resilient communities to America.

If you need more information on the project itself, visit our project information page. I will be adding new posts regularly as we continue our work, including short blog videos summarizing what we are doing along the way. Please stay in touch.

Jim Schwab

*Early Supporters:

Atkins

APA Divisions Council

Michael Baker International

JEO Consulting

Association of State Floodplain Managers (in-kind donation)

Jim Schwab Consulting LLC

OVID Solutions

Richard Roths, AICP

Clarion Associates

Punchard Consulting

 

The Struggle for Climate Sanity

It is Sunday evening as I start this blog post. Whether I finish it tonight is less important than simply getting it done. I had intended to get it done earlier, but other matters intervened, including a death in the family, so I am doing it now.

Part of my motivation is that I feel a small sense of empowerment from a successful start to a two-month series of Adult Forum discussions of climate change at my own church. I became the volunteer coordinator of the Adult Forum, which is the adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday school hour, in 2017, just in time for the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. That is no small thing at a Lutheran church. Last week, introducing the moral and ethical questions surrounding the biggest existential question of our times—the radical environmental changes produced by humans in the industrial age—we had eight people in attendance, not huge but remarkably good as church attendance struggles to regain traction after two years of pandemic lockdowns and fears of new waves of COVID. Our congregation has taken the pandemic seriously, and many of the elderly and the immunocompromised watch the weekly services online. This week, Adult Forum attendance grew to ten. Most people seem committed to the series. And they have lots of questions and paid rapt attention. I supplement what we do in our one-hour discussions with email distribution of links and attachments to additional material.

We started on the first Sunday by focusing on Katharine Hayhoe’s new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. My choice was deliberate. Before we tackled the science and the social and planning issues of climate change, it seemed important to consider how climate change became such a divisive issue for American society and the world. And there seemed no better place to start than with this excellent book.

Roots of Division

Why and how did climate change become such a divisive issue? Part of the answer is that climate simply became one of several issues that provided potent material for political polarization, which has also infected debates about racial justice, immigration, and a frequently paranoid distrust of science that has hampered efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, the larger political environment swept climate change into the cauldron of this hostile partisan warfare. Consider the timing. Newt Gingrich’s right-wing uprising in the Republican party during the Clinton administration, a predecessor of the later Tea Party during the Obama administration, came along just as climate change was emerging as a topic of serious scientific debate. In due course,

Source: US EPA

looking at the data, an overwhelming percentage of scientists in relevant fields came to accept the basic premise that human activities of the Industrial Age are the only credible cause of the warming effects we are seeing today, but the political discourse on the right largely dismissed the evidence. That discourse of dismissal was heavily supported by the fossil fuel industry and a public relations campaign to muddle the issue, a matter discussed in 2010 in the book by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

However, there is also the fact that climate change poses a long-term threat that many people find difficult to recognize as a more immediate crisis, at least before it is too late to reverse the damage. History is replete with examples of people failing in this way, and George Marshall, in Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, published in 2014, explains why we are prone to disregard distant threats in favor of the problems immediately in front of us. Of course, in recent years, as evidence of the more visible and tangible impacts of climate change has accumulated, our attention to the larger problem has grown. But so, too, has the denial in some quarters, fueled in part by the growing distrust of science and scientists, who used to enjoy much higher regard in most quarters of modern society. But that was before they inherited the thankless task of explaining what Al Gore two decades ago called “the inconvenient truth.”

A Matter of Values

Katharine Hayhoe is one of those people who has found a mission in life. Such people are blessed because a positive mission, even or especially in the face of challenges, serves to help clarify one’s values. Hayhoe is clear about hers. An evangelical Christian from Canada, now working at Texas A&M University, she is committed to caring for the poor, the hungry, and the sick, but also to the truth, which means that, for her, facts matter. They matter greatly. She also likes to discuss what faith can teach us and how we communicate with each other in a civil and loving manner, something that is not always easily achieved. There are, in fact, times when the only option in a hostile conversation is to walk away.

The central point is to understand who we are and what we stand for as we undertake to persuade others not only that climate change exists and matters, but why it matters. And so, at the very outset, Hayhoe provides a chapter titled “Who I Am.” It is her suggested inventory of self-assessment:

  • Where I Live
  • What I Love Doing
  • Where I’m From
  • Those I Love
  • What I Believe
  • Be Who You Are

The underlying point, she stresses, is that people will care about climate change for different reasons, their own reasons. People, she notes, generally already have the values they need to care about the issue but often have not connected the dots. The only way those of who do care can help them connect the dots is by first inquiring about those values they share, and then listening. Without listening, we are largely talking past each other, which yields more tension than progress.

Photo from Shutterstock

As an example, she cites the day she spoke to the West Texas Rotary Club, whose banner declared “The Four-Way Test.” The test was, first, Is it the truth? Second, Is it fair to all concerned? Third, will it build goodwill and better friendships? And fourth, will it be beneficial to all concerned? She reports that she skipped the luncheon to spend the next 20 minutes reorganizing her presentation around those principles, noting, for example, that nearby Fort Hood, a military base, now draws 45 percent of its power from solar and wind, “saving taxpayers millions.” She won over some skeptics because, once they connected the dots, the whole proposition of confronting climate change became more meaningful in terms they understood and accepted.

Facts and Tribal Loyalties

Facts are stubborn things,” President John Adams once wrote. They don’t bend to our preconceptions or political wishes. Nonetheless, people like to be able to choose the facts they embrace while ignoring those that fail to confirm their biases. To varying degrees, this probably describes all of us because human nature is seductive about illusions, but reality can be harsh when it asserts itself. The role of education is, in large part, to help us learn how to learn and, in the process, be willing to confront our biases. Learning is a life-long challenge.

One crucial bit of learning regarding opinions on climate change is that not everyone is on one side or the other. There is a spectrum between the polar opposites. While completing work on Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation several years ago, I discovered the work of two researchers, Tony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach, who had produced a journal article titled “Global Warming’s Six Americas.” They systematically described six camps, or tribes, of people with different perspectives on climate change. Two, one on either end of the debate, corresponded with our common tendency to divide people into “pro” and “anti” factions. One, the Alarmed, are those who see a serious and near-term threat to the planet from climate change. Another, the Dismissives, reject any mention of climate change and are most likely to buy into conspiracy theories and misinformation.

But between them are four other groups:

  • Concerned, who accept the premise of climate change but see the threat as less immediate;
  • Cautious, who still need some convincing but are open to persuasion;
  • Disengaged, who “know little and care less”; and
  • Doubtful, who don’t see a serious risk.

I was pleasantly surprised that Hayhoe introduced their work in her first chapter, noting that the percentages of Alarmed had grown in the past decade, basically siphoning some numbers from the Concerned. The two groups combined form a narrow majority, while the Dismissives constitute about 7 percent. The percentage of Cautious had remained at about 20 percent.

The most important fact emerging from the survey work of Leiserowitz and Maibach is that those totally dismissing climate change as a reality are in fact a distinct minority. One conclusion that flows from that is that those working to educate the public on climate change have a large field to work with and can reasonably sidestep the Dismissives. Arguing or even talking with them is likely to prove a waste of time.

The Futility of Guilt

One approach that Hayhoe almost categorically rejects is laying guilt trips on individuals over consumer choices, in part because the tactic seldom includes a realistic assessment of the alternatives that people face in deciding how to live their lives and get things done. She particularly dislikes what she calls purity tests. For example, she notes that one British colleague questioned why she flew to a speaking engagement in Alberta instead of taking the train from Texas. The problem is that no such direct train route exists. Hayhoe calculated the time, hours, and expenses involved in even attempting this approach through roundabout scheduling and found, for one thing, that the miles involved in driving to Oklahoma City to catch a train east and north into Canada from New York City, in order then to use the Canadian rail system to cross the country from Toronto were enough to get her colleague from London to Irkutsk in Siberia. It would also take several days in each direction. It simply was not a practical option.

Many potential alternatives for reducing our carbon footprints must first be created through the political or economic system before individuals can be held accountable for failing to use them. In many parts of the country, people lack the ability to meet online efficiently because our nation has yet to make adequate or high-quality broadband available. One cannot use options that one does not have. People cannot be blamed for driving a car to a meeting in a location where mass transit is not available. It is small wonder that people often feel their efforts do not matter when they are faced with a paucity of individual consumer choices, especially when powerful forces have worked to ensure that more desirable choices cannot be implemented. Understanding this fundamental point is essential in recognizing why the debate over infrastructure policy is a debate about what future we wish to create for ourselves. Once upon a time, our nation chose to facilitate nationwide mobility by creating the interstate highway system. Today’s debate is in part about creating a network of charging stations that will make driving electric vehicles feasible for the average motorist. Societal choices dictate many individual choices, and focusing guilt on individuals is in most cases an exercise in futility. We could better spend that time moving mountains on Capitol Hill.

Why Everyone Matters

There is a great deal more to the book than I am recounting here, as is the case with almost any book that is well worth reading. The important conclusion Hayhoe offers, however, is one that should be common sense but suffers from a surfeit of wishful thinking. Basically, climate change is a situation wrought by humankind and, ultimately, fixable only by humans. Hayhoe makes clear that, in her belief system, it is illogical and irresponsible to expect God to intervene to solve the problem because God has given us agency to tackle problems of our own making. She quotes Proverbs: “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.”

Our failure lies in not realizing that we are simply subject to the rules of physics. Put another way—one perhaps more akin to Eastern philosophies–we have not aligned our lifestyles and social systems with a sound understanding of natural systems. As Hayhoe states, “If humans increase heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the planet warms. Pretending we can defy physics by putting our heads in the sand or cultivating a positive attitude will merely keep us slightly happier until (and more surprised when) the axe falls.”

False hope is often fatal, and at the very least self-destructive. Hayhoe prefers rational hope, wherein we recognize risk and understand the stakes involved in the situation we have created, noting that this requires courage but also provides vision. Ultimately, vision is not simply some magical gift from the Almighty. It flows from the hard work of clarifying our goals and beliefs and acting on those beliefs. It is the hard but rewarding work of empowering the willing.

Jim Schwab

In Harm’s Way or Dodging Disaster?

President Joe Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill aims to fix much that is ailing in America, and its sheer size is drawing predictable—and short-sighted—fire from Republicans in Congress. The nation has a great deal of aging infrastructure, which will eventually pose a massive challenge to economic development. But the American Jobs Plan also takes aim at a growing, urgent, and critical need for infrastructure to cope with the impacts of climate change. These affect many kinds of infrastructure, including transportation, water, wastewater, and energy and communications systems. There is nothing patriotic, it seems to me, in being so oppositional as to allow our nation to deteriorate, Texas-style, in the face of changing climate conditions. There is also nothing about what happened in Texas with frozen energy systems that contradicts “global warming.” The research clearly shows that climate instability, including seemingly less predictable winter storms, is part of the overall impact of a generally warming climate. Nobody but a charlatan ever promised that climate change would be a simple topic.

Earlier this year, I reviewed a book by a former Toronto mayor about what cities are doing about climate change. Later, I reviewed Doug Farr’s elaborate tome on how the design professions are providing solutions to climate challenges in new forms of housing and urban development. In addition, a year ago, I reviewed a new Planning Advisory Service Report by the American Planning Association on planning for infrastructure resilience. I remain committed to highlighting resources for planners, public officials, and interested citizens on issues of climate resilience.

In this post, I feature a new book on community solutions to climate resilience. In Harm’s Way, by John Cleveland and Peter Plastrik, provides a set of detailed ideas for building climate resilience in our communities. In my view, its dominant values in contributing to the discussion of climate change and community adaptation center on two crucial issues: first, how to finance investments in climate resilience, and second, how to build the policy foundations for managing retreat from the most vulnerable coastal areas as a means of avoiding major “natural” disasters. The two co-authors bring interesting backgrounds for such discussion. Cleveland is executive director of the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and a member of the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, a group of business and civic leaders supporting the Boston Climate Action Plan. Plastrik is vice-president of INC and co-author of an Island Press book on networking for social change.

The Biden plan faces a challenging uphill climb toward passage in Congress. The money it promises for what it offers to do is heavily dependent on changes in corporate taxation that may face daunting opposition in Congress. In any case, even passage of the plan does not necessarily mean that every valuable potential investment at the local level in more resilient infrastructure will be assured of adequate funding, nor does it mean that local leaders will always agree with federal priorities for their own communities. The struggle to implement the plan will face years of challenges. In short, this is an important time for the vital discussion by Cleveland and Plastrik on how we can best find the money for essential investments in climate resilience.

Financing climate resilience is essentially an exercise in risk management. The first ingredient in successful risk management is recognition of the problem, which at a national scale has been a political football because of right-wing denial that a problem exists. For four years, this denial was centered in the White House, but the nation clearly chose a sea change on climate policy in the 2020 election. But that does not mean that nothing was happening outside the Trump administration—far from it. Local financial innovations were afoot in numerous American communities, including large cities like Boston, Miami, and San Francisco. Indeed, networks of such cities have been exploring avenues for fostering climate-related investments. The issue in many cases, because local governments seldom have large stores of cash awaiting brilliant ideas, is hunting for money in the financial markets. In many ways, the hunt for climate-resilient investments is a race against time for cities that may face climate-related disasters that may cost far more in damages than the investments they are contemplating to prevent such outcomes. Misalignments between resources and needs are commonplace, the environmental burdens of climate change, particularly on low-income and minority neighborhoods, are often enormous, and public revenue is often insufficient to address the problem. The authors thus focus on the need for innovations in climate resilience finance to meet this challenge. Given the likelihood that at least some of the Biden plan will require some level of local and state matching funds, this issue will remain potent. The authors outline a range of tools for creating these new financial structures. This task is far from impossible, however. Bond-rating firms and others are already recognizing the inherent risks involved in ignoring climate change. Why not invest on the positive side through mitigation and adaptation?

Case studies are always helpful in making clear that some community, somewhere, is at least testing solutions, many of them proving successful. The authors outline a playbook for paying for climate resilience, using eight examples in which communities have generated local revenue, imposed land-use costs on unwise development, leveraged development opportunities to achieve climate resilience, and pursued equity, among other options. Local governments in fact have a range of regulatory tools and incentives they use to leverage many other decisions by businesses and residents, many of the options, such as floodplain management rules, are already common. What is needed is the imagination for new ideas on how to use those tools, as well as accessible guidance on how well those ideas are working and under what circumstances. One city highlighted in this chapter is Norfolk, Virginia, a low-lying city on the Atlantic coast that faces a future laden with nuisance flooding due to sea level rise. Its system of four color-coded zones indicates relative levels of safety or vulnerability as a means of directing redevelopment to safer areas while demarcating those in need of protection. Zoning may not seem like a financial issue, but it is a quintessential financial tool in dictating what sort of development is permissible in what location, thus channeling investment to those areas the city deems acceptable for certain purposes. The problem is that the power of zoning has not always been used with a vivid awareness of the environmental hazards that are tied to urban geography.

In the U.S. system, municipalities are creations of the states, which establish the rules under which cities operate. Notwithstanding the magnitude of federal largesse, it is thus also fitting that the book contains a chapter on how states can help communities invest in climate resilience. States can serve as both barriers to and intentional supporters of local innovations in financing climate resilience.

Collapsed houses after Hurricane Sandy on the Jersey shore. The results of climate-driven disasters are seldom pretty.

In the end, however, all of this depends to some degree on political will, a subject addressed in a final chapter on managed retreat under the caption, “Can it happen here?” Communities have long shied away from open discussion of retreat from the shoreline or highly volatile riverfronts. Seashore land has historically been some of the most valuable real estate in the nation, and not only because it can become a haven for rich owners of second homes, but because beaches attract tourism and harbors attract economic development and transportation infrastructure. What public official wants to say no to new shoreline development, let alone talk of managing retreat from existing settlements? Yet the sheer long-term cost of such reluctance to lead with courage is something I discussed in another book review early last year. The Geography of Risk was a book that detailed wave after wave of catastrophic destruction on the New Jersey barrier islands as a result of investments by entrenched real estate interests that resisted risk-based land-use reforms.

But Cleveland and Plastrik insist that retreat will happen, and the question is not if, but when, and under what circumstances. Basically, they say, in coastal areas threatened by climate change and sea level rise, retreat will be driven either by disasters, or by the market, or by plans. In the first instance, nature itself will make decisions that force painful choices that we cannot control. In the second, recognizing the inherent dangers of such stubborn persistence, market forces will withdraw investment from areas that are no longer viable as a result of climate change, with major losses for those who either lack the means to move or who fail to read the tea leaves. The final choice, plan-driven retreat, is the only one that allows the community some degree of sovereignty in the matter, deliberating about the direction of retreat, the means of financing it, and ways of mitigating financial consequences for those involved. The problem is finding articulate, visionary leadership that can lead the community to its moment of truth.

Jim Schwab

The Need for Resilient Infrastructure

This summer, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is at last rolling out its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, and its first Notice of Funding Opportunity will likely be issued in September. In July, FEMA is airing a series of five weekly webinars to introduce BRIC to communities and state officials around the nation. BRIC is the practical result of provisions in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, passed by Congress in 2018, to create a secure funding stream for what was formerly the Pre-Disaster Mitigation program. I plan to discuss all that in coming weeks on this blog.

But the personal impact on me was to remind me to attend to an egregious oversight on my part that began earlier this year with the release by the American Planning Association (APA) of a new Planning Advisory Service Report, Planning for Resilient Infrastructure. I read it, attended to some other business in Texas and Nebraska in late February and early March, and along came the coronavirus, upending most of my existing personal and professional plans and refocusing my attention. But it is time for me to give this report the attention it deserves.

First, there is the question of why it deserves attention. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which funded the project led by the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), which partnered with APA, chose their joint proposal in funding the first round of projects under its Coastal Resilience Grants Program in 2016. As Jeffrey Payne, director of NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, states in his preface, “Tomorrow isn’t what it used to be. Increasingly, coastal conditions include all the risks of the past, but risks that are amplified by a changing climate, rising seas, and more rapidly fluctuating Great Lakes.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved with ASFPM executive director Chad Berginnis in co-authoring the proposal for this project in the summer of 2015. (After I left APA, ASFPM hired me back as a consultant in later stages of the effort to help refine and focus the PAS Report.) Our intent was both simple and bold. Local governments spend tens of billions of dollars annually on the construction and maintenance of various kinds of infrastructure. Much of that infrastructure, related to essential services including water, wastewater, and transportation, is subject to the impacts of climate change. While, as Payne goes on to state, this is true away from the coast as well, some of those impacts are particularly significant and noticeable in coastal states and communities. In short, a great deal of taxpayer money is at stake regarding the ability of that infrastructure to withstand future climate conditions and natural disasters. Planning for greatly increased resilience is a recipe for improved fiscal stability. This holds true even if, as planned by statute, a greater share of that funding for hazard mitigation projects comes from FEMA through BRIC. Taxpayers are taxpayers, whether the money used is federal, state, or local.

All that said, the serious work of completing the work fell to Joseph DeAngelis at APA, now the manager of the APA Hazards Planning Center, and Haley Briel, a research specialist for the Flood Science Center at ASFPM, along with Michael Lauer, a planning consultant with deep experience in growth management programs in southeastern coastal states.

Global average sea level rise from 1880 to the present, based on tide gauges and satellite measurements (US EPA). Reuse courtesy of APA.

Their collaborative report addresses the most significant issues of infrastructure resilience. Particularly in areas subject to coastal storms, these involve not just the impacts of major disasters but the everyday nuisance impacts of flooding because of high tides atop sea level rise that already are yielding closed streets and parks and flooded basements. Urban flooding has become a “thing” where the term never used to be heard. They include a small table with projections by the U.S. Global Change Research Program showing ranges of sea level rise between 0.5 and 1.2 feet by 2050, and 1 to 4 feet by 2100. Of course, these are rough ranges in part because various geological conditions, such as erosion or glacial rebound, cause different results from one region to another, although most of the East Coast faces serious problems over the coming century. A major part of the problem is that sea level rise amplifies the impact of high tides in storms, leading to increased flooding and erosion that is already evident in low-lying cities like Norfolk, Virginia, or Miami. The authors note that, “Over the last half-century alone, with just one to three inches of average sea level rise, daily high-tide flooding has become up to 10 times more frequent” in American coastal communities. Even in Midwestern communities, including those along the Great Lakes, problems result from climate-driven increases in high-precipitation storms that frequently overwhelm stormwater drainage systems built in an earlier era based on other, less challenging, assumptions.

Storm surge heights are cumulatively based on the mean sea level, the height of the tide, and the high volume of water pushed toward the shore by coastal storms (National Hurricane Center). Reuse courtesy of APA.

It is natural that a planning document is going to assert a role for planners in addressing these problems. The role the report asserts is entirely logical, starting with “assessing long-term infrastructure needs and understanding future risks to infrastructure assets.” Equally logical, however, is that the report builds upon prior APA literature to outline the need for coordinated action through the plan-making process to integrate climate risk into local plans as a means of “capturing the future conditions to which existing infrastructure and any planned infrastructure projects will be subjected.” Put simply, if the local planning process does not identify those risks and provide clear recommendations for creating resilient infrastructure, it is not likely to materialize in any coherent and consistent fashion. The third chapter outlines a step-by-step approach (see illustrations below) for developing an inventory of local infrastructure, identifying risks, and moving toward an effective plan for adaptation.

The process for conducting an infrastructure vulnerability assessment (Joseph DeAngelis). Reuse courtesy of APA for both diagrams.

 

 

 

 

 

A project or asset’s vulnerability to flood impacts is a product of its exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (Joseph DeAngelis).

Later, the report provides some examples of what such consistent planning for resilient infrastructure may look like. Its case study of San Francisco’s approach to assessing sea-level-rise impacts outlines how the Sea Level Rise Committee of the city’s Capital Planning Committee (CPC), a body responsible for overseeing capital investments for infrastructure, recommended using the upper end of estimates from a National Research Council report for the West Coast. These were fed into a CPC guidance document for assessing vulnerability and supporting adaptation to sea level rise, a primary outcome of climate change. Without engaging the full details here, the bottom line is that the City and County of San Francisco was working from a single play book for climate adaptation of project life cycles for future infrastructure. Capital planning could thus proceed in a more standardized manner based on common assumptions. The report also uses an extensive example from Toledo, Ohio, the site of one of two pilot projects supported by the ASFPM/APA project. Toledo, sitting on the shores of Lake Erie, has suffered from stormwater flooding and is approaching the problem with a mixture of green infrastructure and analysis of social vulnerability in affected neighborhoods. The report elsewhere delves into questions and methods of documenting and addressing environmental justice and social and racial inequities in environmental protection through appropriate local capital planning projects.

Both cases highlight the value for local planners of establishing credible data sources, which often rest within federal agencies such as NOAA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But, as one chapter illustrates, these can include experienced national nonprofits as well, such as Climate Central. Unquestionably, however, the best single assemblage of data and tools is NOAA’s own Digital Coast website. Planners can access additional high-quality resources on climate through other NOAA programs such as the Regional Climate Centers, located at a series of universities across the nation, and the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments, where RISA staff work directly with climate scientists to communicate the science to the public and local officials.

Just as important as understanding where to find the proper data and tools, however, is a knowledge of best practices in local capital improvements planning, the development of effective standards, guidelines, and regulations for creating resilient infrastructure, and, finally, the best means for financing such long-term investments in infrastructure, especially with an eye to climate resilience. Each of these three topics is covered in separate chapters in the second half of the report.

View of part of the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy, February 2013.

Ultimately, the real challenge for local planners is overcoming a natural discomfort with the inherent uncertainties in planning for infrastructure that must withstand the impacts of climate change within a range of assumptions that, in part, depend on federal and even international action to mitigate rising global temperatures as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. Planners, and the communities they serve, must adjust to those uncertainties and the inherent complexities they embody. Planning, however, has always been a speculative enterprise riddled by uncertainties, yet cities have embraced assumptions about population growth, demographic change, and economic scenarios that have often been equally uncertain, for none of us has a crystal ball. What we do know, however, is the direction of existing and accelerating trends, and climate change is no myth. We are ultimately better off, and will better invest public resources, by anticipating climate change with the best projections available, so that our communities are not overwhelmed by future storms, sea level rise, and storm surge. We cannot say we did not see it coming. We can only hope to say we used a wise approach based on the best data available to avoid catastrophe for ourselves and future generations in the communities we serve.

Jim Schwab

 

Climate News from Florida and California

Warning to readers: This is not my usual single-focus essay. It is a collage of news from two coastal states with an assortment of serious natural hazards challenges—Florida and California. In recent years, their politics has tended to diverge widely, but perhaps we are seeing a welcome convergence to some degree around climate issues. It is about time: Both face severe and unrelenting challenges, and there is little time to waste in identifying and implementing effective solutions.

Let’s start with Florida.

For starters, they are getting significant help from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an organization that has long performed great work in preserving open space and researching the values of green infrastructure. For years, I have heard about the merits of coastal mangroves in mitigating hazards such as storm surge and coastal erosion. Recently, TNC employed an insurance industry catastrophe model to quantity the economic benefits of mangrove forests for reducing coastal storm damages in Collier County, and from Hurricane Irma, which struck parts of Florida in 2017. For those unfamiliar with the area, Collier County is in southwest Florida running from Naples on the Gulf of Mexico coast east into the Big Cypress Nature Preserve, which lies just north of Everglades National Park.

To quote the TNC website, “Many areas in the county received over $1 million in benefits every year in flood damage reduction benefits due to the mangroves in front of them.” Moreover, “Mangroves averted $1.5 billion in storm damages, amounting to a 25% savings in counties that have mangroves. They also protected more than 626,000 people across Florida.” You can access the full report, Valuing the Flood Risk Reduction Benefits of Florida’s Mangroves, here.

While TNC could be expected to take climate change and natural hazards seriously, Florida Republican officials are another matter. It is thus heartwarming to learn in a new Associated Press article that first-term Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped turn the page, along with some Republican lawmakers, on the climate denial that prevailed under his predecessor and now current U.S. Senator, Rick Scott. It also appears that Sen. Marco Rubio has joined a bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus launched in October. While one should not expect the sort of wholehearted embrace of climate issues that one sees among progressive Democrats, that is not necessary for one to appreciate the value of a return to a bipartisan approach to an issue where Republican support (and connection to reality) has in recent years been woefully lacking, especially under President Trump. Shifting public perceptions have driven political change in both California and Florida, and it is about time. Southern Florida has been awash in nuisance flooding driven by sea level rise, and pollution has threatened the environmental viability of the Everglades. If Republicans are finding a need to appeal to voters through climate action, that is, on balance, a far better thing for the political system than a hyper-partisan battle of acceptance of reality versus denial. It is also not surprising that two highly vulnerable states with major natural hazard threats would be in the forefront.

Of course, California under former Gov. Jerry Brown went all in on confronting climate change, in part because of the motivating impact of increasingly frequent and violent wildfires and lengthening wildfire seasons. If anything, current Gov. Gavin Newsom may be picking up the pace, but it is worth nothing that even former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has long acknowledged climate change and advocated effective state and federal action in response. But let me keep this post short and to the point. I recently taped some introductory material for new additions to the American Planning Association’s Resilience Roundtable podcast series, for which I will soon be moderating several new installments to be released in the coming year. But two new podcasts involve interviews by Prof. William Siembieda of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, with planners from Butte County. The first is already available, in which he discusses the impact and recovery from the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of the city of Paradise, with senior planner Dan Breedon. The second interview will appear on the Resilience Roundtable page soon.

Jim Schwab

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

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

 

Summarizing the major points from a densely factual book like Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, by Edward Struzik (Island Press, 2018), is about as challenging as understanding precisely what is happening in the midst of a rapidly moving massive wildfire. While California is not the focus of Struzik’s book, I might note that confronting such fires in November, such as we have seen on the news in recent weeks, ought to prod more interest in the recent National Climate Assessment and similar climate change science. The wildfire season most decidedly used to be shorter in California, a point Gov. Jerry Brown has made repeatedly. Put more bluntly, it is time to drop the political knee-jerk reactions and study the findings.

Horse Fire at Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2016. Photo from Wikipedia

In Firestorm, Struzik takes us north, much farther north. He starts his story by focusing on the utterly hellish nightmare of the May 2016 scene surrounding Fort McMurray, Alberta, during what became known as the Horse Fire, or among firefighters simply as “The Beast.” People with moderately long news memories may recall following this fire for several days and nights on television, as the fire swept through an area dominated by oil sands development, the heart of Canada’s energy sector. As Struzik notes, megafires (defined as exceeding 100,000 acres in size) are nothing new or unusual in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Three fires bigger than The Beast had occurred in Canada since 1950.

Not so long ago in human history, however, the consequences would have seemed less catastrophic because of the lack of large human settlements in the area, which is not to say that such fires would not have affected native villages and smaller towns. But energy development has brought urban development, and Fort McMurray in 2016 was a city of 88,000 people. As the wildfire attacked and surged through the area, generating massive confusion, it destroyed an estimated 2,800 homes and buildings, burned nearly 1.5 million acres, and produced nearly $9 billion in total losses, including predicted insurance losses of $3.77 billion. The book does not state whether these are U.S. or Canadian dollars (worth about 10 percent less), but I am assuming U.S. given its publication in the states. Either way, it is a massive impact. It is certainly a staggering economic impact on a province like Alberta, home to such facilities as the Imperial Oil plant, which according to Struzik produces 220,000 barrels per day of the bitumen that helps fuel Canadian energy exports.

Much of Struzik’s book, which often starts chapters with quotes from Dante’s Inferno, tours us through the ground-level experience of the fire in and around Fort McMurray in early May 2016. We follow police who worry about family members evacuating, police who work door to door warning people to evacuate, hospital workers preparing for incoming casualties, and highways filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic including people in SUVs abandoning their vehicles in ditches after running out of gas, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ensuring that such people found alternative rides to safe destinations. Air tankers fly low over the fire to drop their loads of retardant, and helicopters scoop water from nearby lakes in 180-gallon buckets to disperse as strategically as possible. Wildfire response is no less sophisticated or expensive than in the U.S., although Struzik notes some Canadian pride in protecting firefighter safety and eschewing the “hotshot” approach that can lead to heroic but tragic deaths. He paints a realistic but deeply troubling portrait of the human elements of confronting a massive wildfire.

RCMP responding to wildfire in northern British Columbia. Photo from RCMP website

If such fires in the far north are not new, then what, if anything, is the impact of climate change? As has been pointed out many times, it is folly to link any one event directly to climate change, tempting though it may be for many people. The reality is more profound and concerning. Since the 1970s, in Canada, the area burned has doubled, with the prediction that it may double again by mid-century and possibly triple by 2100. In short, the connection to climate change is not any one fire, a natural phenomenon in a fire-adapted environment, but in increased frequency.

Ashes and devastation after the fire at Fort McMurray. From RCMP website

As California has learned, that frequency can also be abetted by a longer fire season, itself a product of climate change. Struzik explains the fire triangle, a combination of heat, dryness or low humidity, and oxygen. On May 3, 2016, the temperature around Fort McMurray was 91°F. The humidity was only 13 percent. For those unfamiliar with the boreal forest, it may be surprising to learn that such temperatures are not entirely unusual in the summer, even in Alaska, with much longer days than in southern latitudes, just as winter brings deeper freezes and very short days. It is a climate of extremes. But climate change is warming the far north faster than almost anywhere else, producing the loss of polar ice caps and the melting of glaciers. Montana, Struzik says, may see average temperatures rise by 5° F., and Montana has major wildfire issues already. Melting ice caps and glaciers are factors in sea level rise, which in turn affects major cities like New York and Miami much farther south, but Struzik notes that we are all connected in other ways to the fate of the northern forest. In a major wildfire like that in Alberta, air quality has been shown to suffer in places like Chicago because of the upper atmospheric drift of ashes and pollution. Northern Alberta may seem a world away, but it will never be distant enough to have no impact below the border.

Personally, I find the science behind all this intriguing, at all levels. Most people, for instance, may not know the origin of the term “firestorm,” which grew out of the cataclysmic 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which took more than 1,500 lives, the deadliest in American history. The term refers to the behavior of lightning storms in pyrocumulonimbus clouds (aka pyroCBs), which involve an updraft “that sucks smoke, ash, burning materials, and water vapor” high into the sky. As these cool, they perform like classic thunder clouds. But a chemical reaction forestalls any rainfall, allowing the lightning strikes to stoke and expand the fire. The phenomenon remains a mystery and subject of intense study for meteorologists. It is also obviously terrifying and deadly for those beneath it.

Ultimately, in such a book, the question is what we are going to do about the problem. Both the U.S. and Canada have struggled to find appropriate ways to fund wildfire response and suppression, although it is clear also that more money needs to be directed to mitigation and preparation. Firefighting by itself is a completely futile approach. Struzik emphasizes a need in both nations to invest more in scientific research and in developing a “holistic plan” to deal with wildfires when they occur. The price of not developing a better approach, he says, includes the loss of clean water, of birds and animals who will lose their habitat as the problem intensifies, and the loss of jobs afforded by the forest environment. That research must inevitably account for the impacts of humanly generated climate change in coming decades, a task that should never be underestimated because, as one scientist notes in Struzik’s last chapter, keeping up with climate literature is like “drinking from a fire hose,” a curious metaphor in light of the problem. We must also be realistic. Nature has always provided for natural recovery because fire is a natural phenomenon, but it is the pattern of recovery that may change significantly in a changing natural environment.

Jim Schwab

The Predictable Impact of Florence

Flooding in Rosewood in Horry County, SC, September 24, 2018 (All photos by Allison Hardin with exceptions of FEMA photo from Hurricane Floyd and Charlotte image.)

It has been a few weeks of drought on this blog, but just the opposite in North Carolina, where Hurricane Florence dropped up to 30 inches of rain in some locations, and floods migrated downstream via numerous rivers to swamp cities both inland and near the coast. Now, Hurricane Michael threatens to compound the damage as it migrates northeast from its powerful Category 4 assault on the Florida Panhandle, with storm surges up to 14 feet in areas just east of the eye, which made landfall near Panama City.

The blog drought was the result of both a bit of writer’s block, mostly induced by a busy schedule that included two conference trips over the past three weeks, combined with a bit of fatigue and a few significant diversions of my personal time. But that may be okay. My intent was to write about the recent hurricane along the East Coast, and sometimes letting the subject ferment in the mind results in a more thorough and insightful perspective. I hope that is the result here.

Storms never happen in a vacuum. In a world with relatively few uninhabited places, their impact is the result more of patterns of human development and the legacy of past choices in land use and building practices than of the storm itself, which is, after all, simply a natural and very predictable event. Hurricanes were part of the natural cycle on this earth long before humans took over the planet (or thought they did).

Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina

But they appear to be getting worse, and climate change, most of it almost surely attributable to human activity, is an increasingly evident factor. Meteorologist Ken Kunkel, affiliated both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University, stated that Florence produced more rain than any other storm in the last 70 years except for Hurricane Harvey last year. According to Kunkel, five weather stations over an area of 14,000 square miles in the Carolinas recorded an average of 17.5 inches. Harvey’s average was 25.6 inches. By comparison, Chicago averages about 37 inches for an entire year. Such heightened precipitation levels are in line with expected impacts of climate change.

What became obvious to me early on was that Florence would rehash a certain amount of unfortunate North Carolina history regarding feedlot agriculture. I am familiar with that history because 20 years ago I authored a Planning Advisory Service Report (#482) for the American Planning Association, titled Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (In that same year, APA also published PAS 483/484, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, for which I was the lead author and project manager.) I want to emphasize that what happened in North Carolina was not unusual. Nationwide, many states have laws dating to the 1950s that exempt all or most agricultural operations from county zoning ordinances. Most of these were intended to create a friendly regulatory environment for family farms, and they were often followed by other “right-to-farm” laws designed to shield farmers using conventional farming methods from nuisance lawsuits. Only later, as the large feedlots known also by the acronym “CAFO” became widespread, did it become clear that such exemptions, by then fiercely defended by industry groups, became giant loopholes for the detrimental environmental impacts of such operations. This story has been repeated in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and numerous other states.

In North Carolina in 1991, State Senator Wendell Murphy, who owned a direct interest in the growing Murphy Family Farms, engineered passage of a law widening the state’s exemptions to include CAFOs. Within two years, as I noted in the report, North Carolina’s hog population shot up from 2.8 million to 4.6 million. Today, the number is at least 9 million. A public backlash at the impacts of CAFOs resulted in a new law in 1997 that included a moratorium on new waste lagoons, but by then, although the hogs were firmly ensconced in a growing number of feedlots, the figurative horse was out of the barn. Many counties in eastern North Carolina, where the industry was concentrated, were slow or reluctant to use their newly regained powers. In any case, various large operators were effectively already grandfathered into continued existence. Today, consolidation within the industry has left Smithfield Foods in possession of most of the business in North Carolina, yet Smithfield itself was acquired by the Chinese-owned WH Group several years ago.

Grenville, NC, September 24, 1999 — The livestock loss and potential health hazard to Eastern North Carolina is huge. Here volunteers have towed in dead and floating cattle from a nearby ranch at Pactolus, NC (just North of Greenville), trying to remove them as fast as possible to lower the potential health hazards associated.
Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo

Along came Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The low-lying plains of eastern North Carolina, always vulnerable to flooding, were deeply awash, but worse, filled with millions of pigs and poultry and their excrement in manure lagoons. Hurricane Dennis just weeks earlier had dumped 15 inches of rain on the region, and Floyd dumped even more in some areas. The Tar and Neuse Rivers, among others, badly overflowed their banks and inundated numerous farms. More than 110,000 hog carcasses, and more than 1 million chicken and turkey carcasses, floated downriver while waste lagoons were breached, creating a stench-filled public health disaster only partly solved when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency brought in huge incinerators to burn carcasses, though most animals were buried. It was a fiasco that did not have to happen at the scale on which it occurred.

Fast forward to this year and Hurricane Florence, presuming a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the 1999 disaster as well as later storms. As Emily Moon notes in the Pacific Standard, North Carolina has had opportunities over the past 20 years to introduce serious regulatory change, but various factors foiled those chances, and North Carolina remains the nation’s second-largest hog producer, having pushed aside every state but Iowa. The industry has evolved, but the problem remains. The state has bought out 46 operations since 1999 and shut down their lagoons, but the vast majority remain in operation. The numbers changed in Florence—more than 3 million chickens and 5,500 hogs dead and afloat in the flood waters—but the devastation rooted in CAFO practices continued. Coal ash landfills associated with power stations added to the environmental impacts. And the beat goes on, in a part of the state heavily populated by African-Americans, many too poor and powerless to challenge the system effectively without outside help.

I mention all this aside from the obvious human tragedies of lost lives, ruined homes, and prolonged power outages affecting some 740,000 homes and businesses.

Flooding at Arrowhead Development in Myrtle Beach, SC, September 26, 2018

Still, there are significant lessons available from Hurricane Florence outside the realm of mass production of poultry and hogs, and I want to offer a positive note. One is that, while only about 35 percent of properties at risk of flooding in North Carolina have flood insurance, which is available from the National Flood Insurance Program, neighboring South Carolina ranked second in the nation with 65 percent coverage. While I do not know all the details behind that sizable difference, it seems to me there is surely something to be learned from a comparison of these results and how they were achieved. They come in the context of a “moonshot” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to double flood insurance coverage nationally by 2022. That will happen when South Carolina becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes we can use these events to push in the right direction. Texas, for instance, has added 145,000 new flood insurance policies in effect since Hurricane Harvey; the question will be whether the new awareness wears off as memory of Harvey fades, or whether the state can solidify those gains. For that matter, can the states in the Southeast—the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—leverage the lessons of Florence and Michael to push in the same direction?

Hidden Valley drainage restoration project, Charlotte, NC. Image courtesy of Tim Trautman.

Recently, Bloomberg Business News offered an example within North Carolina of how differently floodplains could be managed by highlighting the case of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I worked for several years in a series of training workshops on flood resilience with Tim Trautman, the manager for the engineering and mitigation program for Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, so I am familiar with their intriguing story. The county for many years has used a stormwater utility fee on property owners to fund its own hazard mitigation program, using the money to buy out flood-prone properties and increase open space in its floodplains. The result has been a significant reduction in flood-prone land and buildings. The question is not whether Charlotte is successful, but what state and federal programs and authorities can do to encourage and support such efforts and make them more commonplace.

Every serious disaster offers lessons and opportunities, and I am not attempting here to pick on North Carolina alone. Other states face their own challenges; Iowa, for one, is undergoing a somewhat muted debate about the impact of its own farm practices on downstream flooding and water quality, in part as an outgrowth of the 2008 floods. What is important is that we use these windows of opportunity, the “teachable moments,” as they are sometimes known, to initiate the changes that are surely needed for the long term in creating more resilient, environmentally healthy communities. What we do not need is a natural disaster version of Groundhog Day.

Jim Schwab