Climate Change is Climbing Mount Dora (4)
With no leadership at the top, climate change mitigation is a local job (part 4 of 6)
So what’s being done about this advancing threat, and is the pace of change fast enough to prevent creating and then falling into the toxic maelstrom looming at the century’s edge?
If you live in Central Florida, there seems to be an odd disconnect between such growing threats and the pace of local development. How can so many people be moving to Florida when what isn’t flooded yet will become inhospitably hot and crowded?
Doing nothing about the threat is the default option, and it’s the worst one. If the world does nothing to wean itself from its addiction to fossil-fuels, global temperatures could rise by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 7.2 degrees fahrenheit) and cost the world up to 20% of its GDP dealing with massive populations on the move from flooded coastal areas. The longer we wait to start dealing with the problem, the more expensive it will become. Working toward sustainable living has high infrastructure costs in the short-term but is much cheaper than dealing with cascading consequences to come.
Yet despite that knowledge not being news to anyone, getting started seems the impossible part.
In my research, little has been done to address the problem of climate change at the state level since Rick Scott became governor in 2008. Paralysis set in when the Tea Party Republican famously banned the words “climate change” from official communications and dramatically cut the size and budget of the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. Many long-term DEP staffers have been laid off, so much so that the department can’t keep up with minimum regulatory duties. In 2015 Scott axed $750,000 out of the state budget for a pump on Miami Beach, saying in his veto messages that the money didn’t provide “a clear statewide return for the investment.” (Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, a Democrat, retorted, “The ocean is not Republican, and it’s not Democratic. It’s a non-partisan ocean, and all the ocean is going to do is rise.”)
The chill extends to Republican-controlled state legislature, where bills this year were approved allowing any citizen to challenge textbooks and instructional materials, including those that teach the science of evolution and global warming. And last month former Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, now running to replace Scott, has said that he wouldn’t risk Florida jobs by doing anything to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The aftermath of Hurricane Irma may do much to move the conversation quickly to the fore — mitigation should become a big budget issue in 2018 — but the anti-environmental tone at the top may not change until the next Florida governor sets up shop.
At the federal level, President Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt — a man who has expressed serious doubts about the human impact on climate change — has vigorously set out to seriously degrade the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment, agreeing to a budget proposal to cut the agency’s funding by 30 percent and pursued a blatantly pro-fossil fuel industry agenda. He has begun the process of abandoning the Clean Power Plan, taken aim at the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, lobbied to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, shut out neutral scientific advice, loaded key boards and positions with industry-friendly staff with serious conflicts of interest.
Pruitt has said that states should handle their own environmental protection programs — Florida stands to lose some $600 million in funds used over the past five years for various environmental programs — but Florida’s Republican legislature isn’t likely to do much to pitch in.
Nervous regional planners have had to take matters in to their own hands. In 2010, The Southeast Florida Climate Leadership Summit looked at Miami’s predicted sea level rise of 14 to 26 inches by 2060 and 31 to 61 inches by 2100 and formed a Regional Climate Action Plan for Miami-Dade, Broward, Monroe and Palm Beach Counties to coordinate mitigation and adaptation activities in an area which includes 6 million residents or 30 percent of the state’s population and some $2 trillion in infrastructure.
Acting as a regional advisory, the Compact provides a way for the four counties to jointly advocate for state and federal policies and funding, develop mitigation and adaptation strategies, mark progress and identify emerging issues. The Compact works with a growing number of federal, state, regional, municipal nonprofit, academic and private sector partners. The compact provides best practices for sustainable communities and transportation planning, water supply, management and infrastructure, natural systems, agriculture, energy and fuel, risk reduction and emergency management and public outreach. They have developed a Climate Action Plan of 110 recommendations for implementation over five years, including long-termin-emission reduction of 80 percent of 2010 levels by 2050.
They are working hard. 30 municipalities have joined the Compact and taken the climate action pledge. Surveys of all county roads are being made to determine how much roads will have to be elevated. Miami Beach is converting its old stormwater system to a pumped system at a cost of some $500 million. They are looking into ways to discourage development in low-lying areas and encourage construction in higher-elevation areas.
A number of coastal communities elsewhere in the state are also developing climate change mitigation and adaptation plans. Sarasota has just finished an assessment of 220 publicly-owned assets and their vulnerability to sea level rise, ranking them also for sensitivity to change and adaptivity costs. Along with the most visibly risky locations like Lido Beach, Bayfront Park Marina and the Ringling Causeway, stormwater faciilities are highly at risk and inadequate for handling increased tidal and storm activities. (For more details about Sarasota’s sustainability program, see sarasotagreencity.com.)
The Washington Post article about hurricane threats to Tampa Bay faulted local government for taking so few steps to address the rising danger, calling it “a case study in how American cities reluctantly prepare for the worst, even though signs of impacts from climate change abound all around.” By way of response, in late July the HIllsborough County Commission took up the discussion but bogged down when county commission chair Stacy White said that while he was willing to address the threat of rising sea levels, he was not about to discuss climate change. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in development is planned for downtown Tampa.
Last December, a group of sustainability and resiliency experts with the Urban Land Institute met with St. Petersburg city leaders to develop a more structured approach to dealing with climate change impacts. In the past, the city had focused on sustainability — waste reduction and smarter use of natural resources — but as a result of the meeting St. Petersburg has adopted a plan places greater emphasis on resiliency — how to prepare for and bounce back from the damage that could be caused by a climate-related disaster.
The plan identifies seven key strategies:
- Lead by example: resilient city decision making
- Adapt to thrive: shift from business as usual
- Harness opportunity: adapt to the changing environment
- Resilient living: create connected and strong neighborhoods
- Identify messengers: establish bold and strategic communications
- Collaboration: forge new partnerships
Included in the recommendations were hiring a cabinet-level Chief of Resilience Officer, providing education and technical assistance to small business, help homeowners and communities bounce back from climate change and storms and help network many organizations in the resilience effort.
A copy of the report can be read here.
Little Satellite Beach, population 10,000, is also on the list of 20 Florida cities with sustainability plans. In a 2011 report, Randy Parkinson, a geologist and administrator for the Space Coast Climate Change Initiative, outlined the nature of the challenge and the scope of work to be done.
“Coastal areas have historically been managed under the premise that sea-level rise is not significant,” he said, “and long-term shoreline change is zero (erosional shorelines can be stabilized by coastal construction.) Of course, neither of these assumptions are correct. There are very few policies at any level of government specifically designed to protect Florida’s coastal environments from flooding and erosion forecast to accompany climate change.”
“Yet,” he continues, “coastal flooding and erosion are predicted to increase concomitant with climate change. Thus a complete overhaul of planning and management policies and policies is required to properly prepare for what surely lies ahead.”
A study was then commissioned to analyze vulnerability in Satellite Beach to sea-level rise and suggest adaptation strategies. In 2016, a Sustainability Action Plan was approved focusing on five broad categories — built environment, land and water systems, energy and transportation, community outreach and quality of life. Over the coming years, the city of 10,000 will focus on things like water and energy consumption, low impact landscaping, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste generation, stormwater runoff and air quality.
One of Satellite Beach’s primary environmental assets is the Indian River Lagoon, home to 3,000 species of plants and animals. However, in recent decades the lagoon has seen significant environmental degradation due to over-population, septic and groundwater issues and excess fertilizer runoff. Satellite Beach’s sustainability program will significantly reduce these stresses on the lagoon and help prevent the spread of toxic algae blooms.
You can read Satellite Beach’s sustainabilty plan in detail here.
Cape Canaveral is America’s busiest spaceport, but situated just a quarter-mile from the Atlantic ocean, rising waters are fast eroding the beach, and the dunes which offered some protection from launch pads are disappearing, too. Some $32 billion dollars worth of space infrastructure at its varied facilities around the country. Storms have wreaked their damage, too. The Johnson Space Center is close to Galveston Bay near Houston and experienced significant flooding from Hurricane Harvey, and just two weeks later the Kennedy Space Center, still working on repairs from last year’s Hurricane Matthew, took a direct hit from Hurricane Irma.
NASA’s science arm has been one of the significant voices in climate change research, but that may change when House Republican member Jim Bridenstone of Oklahoma, President Trump’s pick to be the next head of NASA, takes over the helm. Bridenstone is all for space travel but is on record as a climate change skeptic.
Storms are ever an inspiration for change, but at Matt Hauer told me, floodwaters from storms eventually recede, though sea level rise is unchanging.
Without prompting from state and federal authorities, progress has elsewhere been slow in coastal communities. Florida statute mandates that communities which abut Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic waters must develop what is called a coastal zone management element for coastal development issues. About 195 local governments have them; and yet, as of November 2016, less than 15 percent of them explicitly mention or address sea level rise in their Comprehensive Plans (and 6 of those are in Southeast Florida). Conservative Pensacola refuses to address the issue, and the east cost cities of Edgewater, New Smyrna Beach and Flagler Beach haven’t begun the work, either.
Coastal communities which do not prepare for sea-level rise will have neither the resources nor wherewithal to deal with climate change when the sea is at their doorstep.
Up next: What Mount Dora needs to do
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
David Cohea edits the blog and Facebook page Mount Dora Topics and is director of Live Oak Collective, a Mount Dora, FL-based historic and environmental preservation community.
