KLA Perspectives

As many of us are gearing up for an extra long holiday weekend, it will be hard to leave “our work” at the office. I have been tracking the weather in my hometown of Boston as well as in a number of my client cities particularly in the Northeast, and it is hard to ignore the oppressive heat wave that is hitting the country (and, heck, the whole world) right now.

Meanwhile here in Massachusetts, about 70 cities and towns have just completed and sent in their final reports for a new state program called the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) program. Through the MVP process, cities and towns are engaging key stakeholders and the public to identify four key hazards, the assets that will be impacted by these hazards, and the solutions that can enhance their resilience to these hazards.

And right now one of those hazards is hard to escape: the heat. 

While conversations and news coverage of climate change impacts often focus on sea level rise or flooding due to more intense storm events, it is the sustained temperature increases that is our biggest enemy at this moment in time.

To this day one of the best taglines I’ve seen is “Local Action Moves the World.” That’s from ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability where I was the US Services Director from 2005-2009 and had the pleasure of working with hundreds of local governments across the nation. That line reflects the reality on the ground for a myriad of issues where progress is stymied at the national and international levels. None more so than climate change.

I might not be in Bonn this week for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) Conference of the Parties -- commonly known as COP 23 -- but I’m glad to see that mayors and other local government elected officials from around the globe will once again be there en masse to showcase the impact the local communities and leaders have on climate action.

The frequency and severity of flooding are on the rise in the age of climate change, and in no place is that more apparent than Houston -- a city that is watching Hurricane Harvey barrel towards it even as it still dries out from other heavy rains and flooding.

When you think about the arc of climate change awareness and action in this country, it’s hard not to put former Vice President Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” film -- which hit theaters back in 2006 and has “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” coming out August 4, 2017 -- among the most important events.

At KLA we’ve worked with dozens of cities and counties over the years on plans. Climate action plans. Adaptation plans. Sustainability plans. Energy master plans. And let me tell you, after the blood, sweat, tears and sheer hours that go into one of those plans, it can feel like the journey is over. But a plan is not a destination. It is, in fact, the starting point.

There’s nothing like hopping on to social media to see an empowering headline like “Climate change is happening now -- here’s eight things we can do to adapt to it” and then noticing the byline is one of your most esteemed colleagues. That was my much-needed jolt yesterday when I read the Guardian headline in my Facebook feed posted by the article’s author Missy Stults.

We do not really know what to expect from incoming President Trump as it relates to... well almost anything. But one thing we do know is that he has repeatedly professed not to believe in manmade climate change -- despite the clear science and the potentially dire consequences to his sprawling Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach from sea-level rise (my hometown paper The Boston Globe just did a great dive into that issue).

His Cabinet is shaping up to reflect those views, or worse. If confirmed, his head of the Department of Energy once famously forgot the name of the department and said he wanted to abolish it; his Secretary of State will have just stepped down after 4 decades at climate-change-denier ExxonMobil; and at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency would be a man who, in his capacity as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, has sued that very agency more than a dozen times.

Who lives in your city and what do they think about going “green”?