To the editor:
Four years ago this month, what meteorologists called “Frankenstorm Sandy” took 159 lives and cost the U.S. economy $68 billion. At its outer edges, Sandy was a thousand miles wide. Today, 85 percent of Massachusetts’ 6.7 million residents live within 50 miles of the Bay State’s 1,500 mile coastline. It should not take a superstorm to wake up Massachusetts to the realities of climate change and its weather on steroids—but it may.
Next year, 2,000 business and political leaders will converge on Boston for the world’s seventh major climate summit. This conference is being held in a city that is two-thirds tidal fill and one of the most vulnerable in the world in terms of climate change induced sea level rise.
State lawmakers can showcase our resiliency by passing America’s first climate change preparedness legislation. Moved by the Senate to the House four times and left on the cutting room floor of this year’s energy conference committee, this legislation would prepare Massachusetts for the big impacts of climate change such as stronger storms, intense heat, and accelerated sea level rise.
A coalition of 46 engineering and architectural firms, business and environmental organizations, state and local governments and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has let Beacon Hill know we need climate change legislation and we need it now. They know that Massachusetts is vulnerable and we need a plan—a plan that shows us how to lessen storm impacts to our built and natural environments and then demonstrates how to use both to protect us.
Specifically, we need a plan that assesses the vulnerability of the Commonwealth’s electrical grid, buildings, roads, airports, dams, water supplies and sewage plants and then recommends how to strengthen them. We need a plan that recognizes the protective value of our beaches, wetlands, forests and rivers, and then explains how to use their natural features to buffer people from the impacts of stronger storms. Most importantly, we need a plan that identifies our most vulnerable human populations, especially the poor, isolated and elderly, and determines how best to insulate them from the ravages of superstorms.
Although the governor recently took a first step by issuing an executive order to his agencies to prepare for climate change, his directive has no authority beyond his administration and its four-year term. What the Commonwealth needs is a long-term plan required by legislative statute that matches the long-term impacts of climate change.
Industries that understand what needs to be done are insurance and real estate. They know we need to mitigate the impacts of climate change to avoid skyrocketing costs and risks. They’re using NOAA models that forecast a six-foot rise in oceans by 2100. To this writer, that’s a long way off, but my two-year old grandson will be 86 in 2100—well within a healthy male’s life expectancy.
The Insurance Journal recently reported on a project “to create climate change indices that reflect an actuarial perspective, to create an index that measures changes in climate extremes, use indices to inform the insurance industry and the public, and promote the actuarial profession by contributing statistically to the climate change debate…”
In August, Zillow reported that NOAA’s projected sea level rise would sink 62,069 Massachusetts homes representing 3.1 percent of the state’s housing stock equaling $51.2 billion—almost half of that is in Greater Boston.
Since Sandy, our conversations about climate change have changed. The current challenge is not so much about saving the planet from heat-trapping gases as it is about saving us from a warming planet. Adaptation to climate change is not throwing in the towel but rather facing the realities of living with, coping with, and adapting to its effects.
With so much carbon pollution already in the air and our traditional fossil fuel energy production and use patterns locked in, we have no choice but to live with and plan for its consequences.
Last year was the hottest ever and NOAA forecasts this year will be hotter. Be it higher seas and coastal erosion, more frequent and severe droughts and flooding, or just plain weird weather, it’s time for Massachusetts to plan for what was previously the unexpected and manage what is now the unavoidable.
Sincerely,
Jack Clark
Director of Public Policy and Government Relations for Mass Audubon; co-chair of the Massachusetts Climate Change Adaptation Coalition
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