The UREx SRN’s Thaddeus Miller, a social scientist, and Mikhail Chester, an engineer, lay out six rules for investing in infrastructure during a time of ‘unprecedented’ weather events.
The UREx SRN’s Charles Redman talks with ASU Now about how to better prepare for events like Harvey and Irma and how the UREx network is developing tools to make cities more resilient.
One step towards making cities more resilient is to realize we cannot always predict what is to come. Therefore, we should move from fail-safe designs – which assume we know exactly what will happen – to safe-to-fail, which have multiple back-up plans.
One of the UREx SRN’s network cities – Hermosillo, Mexico – was highlighted by Hermosillo Mayor Manuel Ignacio Maloro Acosta during the first 2017 meeting of the National System of Climate Change. Maloro Acosta emphasized Hermosillo’s work with the UREx network and said that the city will be one of the most prepared in handling a changing climate.
Future Cities is a new podcast created by UREx graduate students and postdocs. We hope to use this podcast as a way to communicate our own research with a broader audience, to share stories from across the network, and highlight some of the challenges that cities face when planning for future extreme events.
We want this podcast to be accessible to a large audience and we will aim to have one third of our podcasts in Spanish since one third of our network cities are Spanish speaking.
Episodes that we already have in production cover a range of topics including innovation in cities, scenario workshops, and heatwaves in Hermosillo. We are always looking for new episode ideas, so please contact us if you have an idea or want to produce your own episode.
Featured on On Point, the UREx SRN’s Charles Redman speaks with host Tom Ashbrook about making Phoenix heat-ready for the years to come, considering equity when designing cities, and doing what is necessary to adapt and survive.
The heat dome that settled over the southwestern U.S. this week illustrates the importance of UREx’s work on heat. The southwest may not be a stranger to heat, but scientists agree that heatwaves are occurring more frequently and lasting longer. This week alone, 40+ flights have been grounded in Phoenix with the temperature reaching 119 degrees.
In The Next Era of Market Finance for Resilience, Joyce Coffee — President of Climate Resilience Consulting and UREx SRN Management Team member — helps cities find creative ways of funding resilience to climate change. Check it out, along with the entire blog — Meeting of the Minds — dedicated to bringing urban sustainability and technology leaders together around issues of environment, economy, technology, governance, society, resources, infrastructure, and mobility.
As with the best exchanges of ideas in higher education, the bi-annual National Adaptation Forum of the adaptation minded left me with more questions than answers. Four days, 100 people and over 60 sessions held the potential to solve my adaptation conundrums and unveil fresh areas to investigate. Here are five of the most challenging and exciting ideas gleaned from the three-day forum:
Managed Retreat
Anne Siders – social scientist, lawyer building adaptive governance solutions for climate change and a Stanford University Ph.D. candidate – cited Federal Emergency Management Administration data showing that over the past 17 years, over 1,000 communities in 40 cities have experienced managed retreat. See here.
Now, in a general sense, MR is the deliberate setting back of the existing line of defense to obtain engineering and/or environmental advantages. More specifically, MR is the deliberate moving landward of the existing line of sea defense to obtain engineering or environmental advantages. It often refers to moving roads and utilities landward in the face of shore retreat.
So, the puzzler: Why are we not considering managed retreat for (to pick one of hundreds of communities that are candidates) Hollywood, Calif.?
Mental trauma and climate change
Joe Hostler, an Environmental Protection Specialist with the Yurok Tribe Environmental Program in Northwest California, revealed the multigenerational trauma among salmon fishers from the collapse of the Chinook and Coho salmon fisheries along the Klamath River. It promises misery for four fishing tribes along the river. Already a suicide crisis has emerged among young men bereft because they can’t provide for their families. This, of course, indicates that climate change, a contributor to the lack of salmon, can trigger mental health issues.
The puzzler: What preventive measures must our public health systems adopt to prevent further suicides and mental health-related challenges?
Public health and climate change
Related to the mental health challenge, climate change is impacting public health – whether it’s concern that tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue to, say, Europe or North America or the impact of vanishing salmon on the lives of fishing tribes. This piece offered by a representative of PDQ Public Health, explores how health-related adaptation messages can inspire action.
The puzzler: How can the adaptation field piggyback on the general acceptability of public health advancing adaptation principles?
Water Risks
Raj Rajan, Ph.D., Ecolab’s RD&E vice president and Global Sustainability technical leader, offered a way to monetize water risks. And Trucost, the London company that estimates the hidden costs of companies’ unsustainable use of natural resources, has worked with industry to derive it. See here.
The puzzler: If major financial market influencers such as Trucost (now a part of Standard & Poor’s) are embracing ways to put a dollar value on risks to water, how can we increase the uptake in measures beyond carbon reduction for, say, green bond evaluation?
Adaptation and Build
Designers have many ways to conceive of adaptation in buildings and three different ways were presented. They included architects Perkins+Will’s RELi, presented by Senior Associate and architect Doug Pierce; Arup engineering consultants’ Weathershift, presented by Associate Principal Cole Roberts, and the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED resilience credits.
The puzzler: With these assets available, is it time to move to city ordinances to make resilient design required as standard?
I don’t intend to wait another two years for NAF 2019 to find answers to these questions. Thankfully, through experts in the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN), I have opportunities to work with practitioners and academics to create and encourage solutions.
“I was inspired by the UREx SRN Scenario Workshop we had in San Juan this past February 3rd to ruminate about the future of energy and food in Puerto Rico. I chose to take a decidedly qualitative approach to do so and have been working on a narrative for a future scenario.
I’ve tried to paint a picture of a resilient and adaptive Puerto Rico – I tried not to rely on any science fiction to create this future, and tried to keep it as plausible as possible. Set in the year 2080, the narrative describes a series of hypothetical (but possible) events, a set of proactive governance actions and policies, and citizen responses to those events and interventions. The narrative is based on expert-opinion and extrapolation of trends in energy markets, technology, and policy development, as well as recent events in Puerto Rico. It’s not necessarily what I think will happen, on the other hand I don’t believe that is it too utopian or naïve. A great number of details were left out. To be sure, the essay reflects my ideas and does not represent any official statements or views on the issue.”
On February 3rd, we held our first UREx SRN Scenarios Workshop in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Joining the San Juan City Team and the Scenarios Working Group were about 45 practitioners, including municipal planners, infrastructure and emergency managers, community and NGO leaders, academics, and designers (Fig. 1). I had no idea what to expect. To be perfectly honest, I was nervous about how we were going to manage such a diverse group of stakeholders and still get substantive work in co-producing future scenarios. To my surprise, not only did participants stayed engaged all the way to the end of the event, but they had a lot of fun with it! I know that many of you are also wondering what to expect of the scenario workshops in your respective cities, so I thought I share some reflections and suggestions to consider when designing these futures with our practitioners. I have yet to see the details of the scenarios that were produced from the different working tables (other than from the one table that I was working with), therefore my overall reflections here are only based on the various moments I observed (‘aha!’ moments if you will) that indicated to me that the workshop had an effect on the thinking and relationships of the stakeholders.
Charles Redman, co-director of the UREx SRN, speaks to Mark Brodie, of KJZZ 91.5, about building resilient infrastructure for our changing climate.
Redman talks about how the answers for one city may differ from that of another. In some cities, green roofs have been a wonderful solution, but they tend to work only in snow country since the buildings are constructed to handle heavier loads. This clearly does not apply in Phoenix, and it illustrates why we need to approach each city from a different angle.
Charles Redman, of the UREx SRN, speaks to KTAR news about the network and its plan to make cities, like Phoenix, more resilient towards heat.
Phoenix is known for its sweltering summer days and increasing daytime temperatures; however, its nighttime lows are increasing at an even more rapid pace. Redman explains that at some point we will cross a threshold of what people, plants, and animals can cope with, and it will come down to how we utilize our resources to find a solution.
UREx’s Charles Redman, Nancy Grimm, and Paul Coseo contribute to an ASU Now article about solutions to prepare cities, like Phoenix, for an even warmer future and how UREx, a solution-oriented project, plans to make a difference.
Most people in the valley would agree that everyone relies primarily on air conditioning as their line of defense against heat; however, as temperatures increase we need to consider and come up with other methods of mitigating the effects of heat, such as green roofs or heat-resistant asphalt.
The municipality of Hermosillo was elected to nine cities in the world that make up the Network for Urban Resilience and Sustainability Climate Change, according to its the mayor.
The UREx SRN’s Thaddeus Miller, a social scientist, and Mikhail Chester, an engineer, lay out six rules for investing in infrastructure during a time of ‘unprecedented’ weather events.
Charles Redman
