Which city will win the climate change preparation smackdown?
Editor's note: What's the best way to adapt to our rapidly warming world? That's the question journalist Mark Hertsgaard asks in his new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. The following article is the second of a two-part adaptation about how American cities are preparing for global warming. Part 1, "Why Seattle Will Stay Dry When Your City Floods," detailed the efforts of Ron Sims, King County, Washington's forward-thinking former chief executive, to ready greater Seattle for climate change.
As a brawny commercial giant and the hub of America's transportation network, Chicago could hardly be more different from the leafy, liberal Pacific Northwest Seattle. But nowhere has Seattle visionary Ron Sims' climate-change adaptation message had greater influence than in Chicago.
According to Sadhu Johnston, who served as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's point person on climate change, Chicago's main champion of adaptation was the mayor himself. About a month after Johnston joined the mayor's staff in 2006, Daley sent him a note asking, How is climate change going to affect Chicago? "I had to respond that I didn't really know," said Johnston. We went back and forth on it a while and finally decided we had to pull in some serious science." So Johnston and a commissioned a report.
But more extreme heat is no small matter: Chicago is already very hot and muggy in summer. By the year 2100, said Johnston, Chicago could experience 30 days a year when the temperature exceeds 100°F (40°C), compared to three days a year currently; on 70 days a year, the temperature will exceed 90°F (35°C), compared to 12 to 15 currently.
"We've started to map this stuff," Johnston told me, unfolding a series of detailed city maps on a worktable in his City Hall office. The first map showed so-called urban heat islands—parts of the city where temperatures were markedly higher than elsewhere. A second map charted density of tree cover. When Johnston overlaid the second map on the first, the areas of low tree density often overlapped with the areas of high temperatures. "In the past, we planted trees in an ad hoc manner," he told me. "Now we're going to target the urban heat islands, which often"—now he overlaid a third map on the first two—"are areas populated by lower-income people, who tend to be more at risk from heat waves.
Little did Johnston know that some of the federal assistance would come from none other than Ron Sims. Although Sims had backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries, President Obama chose him in early 2009 to be the deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In accepting the No. 2 post at the $39 billion agency, Sims said he looked forward to helping America "prepare for the age of global warming," adding, "Success can only come if we transform our major metropolitan areas." He soon showed what he had in mind. In June 2009, HUD joined with the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency to announce a Partnership for Sustainable Communities, an initiative that closely parallels policies Sims had championed in King County.
True, announcing a policy in Washington is just the beginning of making it happen on the ground across the country. But the Partnership for Sustainable Communities represents a 180-degree shift in direction for the federal government. If Sims and his new colleagues can make good on their promises, they may inspire the tsunami of adaptation he yearned for, after all.
Richard Daley was not the only US big-city mayor following in Sims's footsteps. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City actually was slightly ahead of Daley in launching a comprehensive climate action plan. In a speech he delivered on Earth Day, 2007, to hundreds of government, business, and community leaders at the American Museum of Natural History, Bloomberg declared that coping with climate change was imperative to New York's future. As a coastal city, he pointed out, New York was particularly threatened by "rising sea levels and intensifying storms." Climate change would also worsen New York's already ferocious summertime heat and humidity and stress its water and energy supplies. Bloomberg urged facing these problems "not in the future, not when it's too late, but right now." Toward that end, his speech outlined a long-term sustainability plan for the city, a plan he called PlaNYC.
One of the most expensive proposals in PlaNYC was the investment it proposed to make in the aging system of aqueducts and tunnels that bring New York its water. The vast majority of New York's water originates in the Catskill and Delaware River watersheds, hundreds of miles away. Two massive tunnels deliver this water to the city. But neither tunnel had been inspected for more than 50 years; authorities literally had no idea what shape they were in. What they did know was that a failure in either tunnel would leave millions of New Yorkers without water. They also knew that climate change would increase the stress on the water system, because the northeast of the United States was projected to experience more volatile rainfall in the years to come, and this would produce larger pulses of water pouring through the tunnels. PlaNYC's solution was to urge the completion of the long-planned but always-postponed Water Tunnel No.r 3. Completing the tunnel would cost billions, but it would enable temporary closure of Water Tunnels 1 and 2 so engineers could inspect and modernize them. This was an investment the city could not afford not to make, Bloomberg argued.
Completing Water Tunnel No. 3 illustrates how adaptation is a win-win proposition, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University and the chief science adviser on New York's plan. Under Rosenzweig's leadership, New York City had established what she called "a local version of the IPCC" to provide ongoing scientific advice to decision makers in both the public and the private sectors as they refined and implemented the vision of PlaNYC. Like the IPCC, the New York City Panel on Climate Change was composed of experts from a wide range of physical and social sciences; it issued its first report in February 2009.
Reflecting the uncertainty that plagues most analyses of potential impacts of climate change, Rosenzweig and her colleagues decided to devise two separate projections for future sea level rise: a standard projection and a so-called "Rapid Ice Melt Scenario" projection. Their standard projection concludes that New York must prepare for 7 to 12 inches of sea-level rise by 2050 and 12 to 23 inches by 2080—a considerable but manageable amount. But if, as James Hansen and some other leading climate scientists feared, the earth's polar ice melts at a rapid rate in the years ahead, the Rapid Ice Melt scenario will tell New York infrastructure managers that they could experience 19 to 29 inches of sea-level rise by 2050 and 41 to 55 inches by 2080—a much more challenging scenario.
To rectify the problem, the city has begun deploying an aerial technology known as LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). Airplanes are flown over the city's landmass and a special laser pulse is sent to earth that measures a given area's elevation much more precisely than the technologies that inform flood maps compiled by the United States government's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Nevertheless, mitigation remained the Bloomberg administration's top climate priority, and its officials made no apologies for that. "I'll be honest: I fully support adaptation, but I want it to have a lower profile in order to keep the pressure on for aggressive mitigation," said Rohit Aggarwala, the director of the city's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability and the mayor's point person on PlaNYC.
But mitigation has proven a difficult struggle for New York City. One reason is the state government, which in 2008 voted down Bloomberg's proposal for congestion pricing after the New York City Council had approved it. That defeat in turn undermined Bloomberg's proposed expansion of mass transit, which was to be financed in part by congestion fees. The state government had also declined the city's request for a sixfold increase in energy efficiency funding. "Changing the carbon footprint of a city as big as New York is like changing the direction of a supertanker," Aggarwala told me.
He seemed more optimistic the last time I interviewed him, in April 2010. New York's electricity consumption per capita had finally fallen in 2008, the most recent data that was available. On the adaptation side of the challenge, a new power plant being built in Sunset Park was being elevated four feet above its original design level to cope with sea level rise. The Parks Department was planting only trees that could manage the heat and precipitation conditions anticipated in the future.