In Atlanta, community organizations and community members have
committed to incorporate specific questions about climate resilience into their
community planning in the Lee Street Corridor by partnering more intentionally
with public health experts, ensuring that residents have healthier housing with
greater energy security, and that new trees planted in the neighborhood will be
able to withstand hotter climates with less predictable precipitation
patterns.
Communities are places of our cultures, our families, our
friends, our jobs and the things we hold dearest. They are home. While holding
space for the beautiful things in our lives, communities are simultaneously
under tremendous stress—with record development in many urban areas, concurrent
disinvestment in others, increased traffic and air pollution, aging
infrastructure, a lack of affordable and decent housing, and increased exposure
to climate change in the form of flooding, drought and extreme temperatures.
As people struggle with these stresses, the questions that
continuously come to mind are those of vulnerability and resilience.
What decisions need to be collectively made to withstand climate
change while centering climate justice and equity? How can solutions be
developed that underscore climate vulnerability and chart a new path on which
all people can be included?
The Strong, Prosperous, And Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC)
has focused on these questions and others through the development of the Rapid
Climate Vulnerability Assessment (RCVA)—the tool used by Los Angeles in its
work cited previously, as well as other SPARCC regions.
Its value is in assessing the vulnerability of people and
place—exploring the adverse effects of climate change, how it exacerbates and
intersects with challenges of health and equity and creates a pathway to
addressing those vulnerabilities. The process of using this tool is ideally
community-driven and allows community residents, leaders and local governments
to collectively plan for future change, potentially increasing the
effectiveness of every decision and every dollar spent. Addressing inequities
through vulnerability assessments allows people and communities to utilize
knowledge and data to be in a better position to withstand shocks and
stressors. In addition, the RCVA provides a basis for communities to work with
local organizations, public and private authorities, and local government to
take immediate action to transition to a climate resilient future.
Rapid Climate Vulnerability Assessment
The RCVA has been implemented in three of the six metro areas
that are part of SPARCC, led by NRDC, Enterprise Community Partners, the
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Low Income Investment Fund.
Here is how it works: The RCVA is a 3-step process that brings
community members together around local goals and priorities, including for
example, the update of a local planning effort or projects such as developing a
new grocery store or soccer field. Using readily available climate data and
local knowledge, RCVA participants consider how those decisions might be
affected by future climate change projections such as rising heat or sea level.
Then, considering both existing stresses relating to health,
equity or any other community priorities, and the effects of climate change,
they can see where these variables intersect—an exercise that helps them see
the ways people connect to nature and the environment, understanding that
climate change directly affects their lives in ways both small and large. Once
those initial links are made, community leaders can engage in a strategic session
to address vulnerabilities and solve for what the community cares about. That
leads to decisions about investment and revitalization that means the community
can better withstand the effects of climate change.
Recently, the climate team collaborated on an RCVA workshop in
Chicago led by Elevated Chicago, the local SPARCC partner. Elevated Chicago is
focused on promoting racial equity, prosperity, and resilience in Chicago
communities by using equitable transit-oriented development as the catalyst for
change. One focus of its work is centered on displacement, and its RCVA
prioritized ways to “ensure residents can remain and want to remain in their
communities.” The workshop focused on climate change interactions with health
and community equity, which we define as the sharing of community assets and
other development resources and investment in neighborhoods in a fair and
equitable way. Various connections were made throughout the day, including, for
example:
· Health: The Chicago region will face annual temperatures 5-9˚F higher by the end of
the 21st century and changing precipitation patterns resulting in both
higher risks of flash floods and extended dry periods. These changes would be
expected to increase heat-related illnesses and deaths, worsen air quality and
aggravate respiratory illness and asthma, exacerbate crime, cause the release
of contaminants from soils, and disrupt the food supply chain.
· Equity: Concentrated flood damage from heavy rainfall would hit
low-income families especially hard. CNT’s (Center for Neighborhood Technology)
Urban Flood risk data show the lowest income ZIP codes are disproportionately
impacted by urban flooding. In areas of Chicago, such as those near the
California Pink Line, residents have the highest percentage of impervious surface
area, leading to greater flood risk and air quality concerns.
·
Climate: The impacts
of ground-level ozone and other air pollutants, for example, are exacerbated by
high temperatures, which increases the frequency of red-air days (restricting
the use of outdoor space, and limiting outdoor activity), damages trees and
vegetation, threatens crops, and keeps tourists away, affecting jobs and
businesses.
The RCVA in Chicago revealed the need to explore potential air
quality hotspots, including generating improved and more localized data,
especially those related to poor air quality in residential neighborhoods with
already significant rates for asthma, especially childhood asthma. When you add
the simultaneous challenge of heat vulnerability from climate change, this
makes for an even bigger health concern. Proposed solutions included advocating
for requiring clean freight transportation best practices, planting hedges
around perimeters of new developments to improve air quality, requiring clean
air stipulations for new developments, advocating for community benefits, and
encouraging people to check the air quality before going outside for extended
periods of time.
As Marcella Bondie Kennan of CNT sees it, “Air emissions are a
major issue and need to think about how we can respond to that.”
Addressing inequities such as air quality is an important
objective of climate vulnerability assessments, allowing communities to utilize
knowledge and data to be in a stronger position to withstand shocks and
stressors of greater unpredictability.
Climate-Savvy Communities
Vulnerability assessments aren’t new. Those in the natural
resource world have been using them to document and adapt to climate change
events such as coral bleaching for over a decade. But such assessments at the
state, city and community level are just beginning, and their power is being
understood in such fields as urban forestry and in planning and design.
As the examples in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago
demonstrate, RCVAs provide a first step to taking ownership of local climate
change impacts by making breakthroughs in understanding and quantifying their
effects on the general population. This “rapid” version (often conducted in one
day) allows community leaders, stakeholders and residents to articulate the
climate vulnerability of development and revitalization projects and to gain
experience in thinking about climate change in their work. What makes community
RCVAs different and so valuable compared to city or regional authority-scale
assessments, is that they are local, cross-cutting, and grounded in every
aspect of community life.
As Lara Hansen, executive director of EcoAdapt and an architect
of these and other assessments, put it: “We want the SPARCC communities to design
solutions that are not at risk of having their shelf life cut short by climate
change. We want durable solutions that will last for decades to come, serving
all of the community.”
As we apply the RCVA across all six SPARCC sites, our knowledge,
and that of the communities in which we work, will grow. Ultimately, undergoing
an RCVA provides a collaborative basis for tackling climate adaptation in the
context of building social justice and community wealth. And, that’s the
point—to spread the fundamental reality that climate change affects our health,
our well-being, our economic opportunity, our social consciousness and
responsibility, and our future. We can do something about it, if we ask the
questions, then apply the data and also our values to designing
climate-informed solutions.
Cross-posting with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Strong, Prosperous, and Resilient Communities Challenge
Cross-posting with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Strong, Prosperous, and Resilient Communities Challenge