The Huron River Watershed Council (HRWC) and partners are using a $77,000 grant to help Ann Arbor and four other Midwest cities prepare for climate change in a pilot program intended to be extended throughout the country.
The Urban Sustainability Directors Network's (USDN) Innovation Fund awarded the grant to the Great Lakes Climate Adaptation Network (GLCAN), a regional network of the USDN that includes Ann Arbor among its member cities. Throughout 2017, HRWC will use the bulk of the grant to provide staff for the project in Ann Arbor as well as Dearborn; Bloomington, Ill.; Indianapolis; and Cleveland.
Under the program, the cities and GLCAN will develop vulnerability assessments for use in city planning and budgeting, and to prepare for climate impacts such as high heat days or floods.
Many projects around the country focus on stopping global warming, but Rebecca Esselman, watershed planner with HRWC, says climate change is already a reality and can't be discounted during the planning process.
"Even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, we'd still have a climate on a trajectory to change pretty significantly," she says. "We can't not prepare for that future. It doesn't mean we've accepted climate change."
Cities are currently doing vulnerability assessments for various reasons, such as whether water supplies or infrastructure like roads and dams are vulnerable. However, these efforts typically do not consider climate change factors that will either introduce new vulnerabilities or make existing ones worse.
"If you have aging dams and climate change produces an extreme rain event, then you end up with a bigger problem than you originally thought you had," Esselman says.
Historical trends and projections for the future provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will help participating cities create an adaptable template for cities to assess climate-related vulnerabilities.
Esselman says the pilot is taking place in medium-sized Great Lakes cities because the Great Lakes region has shared climate threats, and because small-to-medium cities often don't have the same resources as larger cities.
"Larger cities have climate action plans and are working on this already, but smaller cities don't always have the capacity to do this, so we're coming up with something that works for those size cities," she says.
Once the tool is tested in Great Lakes cities, it can be adapted to other medium-sized communities throughout the U.S., adjusting for a different set of climate factors.
Sarah Rigg is a freelance writer and editor in Ypsilanti Township. You may reach her at sarahrigg1@gmail.com.
Ann Arbor flooding image courtesy of GLISA.
Enjoy this story?
Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.