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Interview
On DC’s history with tackling climate issues…
Brendan.
Around 2006, the city was passing a number of pieces of environmental legislation, including the Green Building Act followed by the Clean and Affordable Energy Act in 2008, which started to expand into energy efficiency and benchmarking and buildings.
The climate issues in the city had certainly surfaced by 2007 and 2008. DDOE's first climate-related work was mostly mitigation-focused. There wasn't really a legislative mandate for that; we mostly did it out of the program, based on public interest - and because it was the right thing to do. Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments was also having a very active discussion about climate across the region in 2006-2008. It has just been building from there.
The adaptation side has taken off significantly in the last two or three years. We're now at a point where we're actually doing climate adaptation-focused work, including technical analysis and a lot of interagency coordination. We're having a lot of conversations about engagement and communication on climate. We'll also be kicking off more public engagement and advisory groups. We're having more and more coordination and sharing of practices across cities in the U.S. and North America, and globally through some of the city networks such as the C40 Climate Leadership group.
On progress toward mitigating the impacts of climate change in DC…
Brendan.
We're not on the path yet to be ready for any of the impacts in the timeframe that the changes are expected to come. We're trying to quickly get on a path to be ready. If you look across flood protection, storm surge issues, intense precipitation and flooding, the resilience of our energy systems - I think we're contemplating all of those. To some extent, we're in a similar position on all of them.
If we are further along on addressing one impact in particular (and not necessarily because we set out to do it for adaptation, but because of other programs) it would be mitigating the heat island effect. The city is doing a lot of work on green roofs and cool roofs, which are already in the building code. We haven't solved the heat island problem, but there's a lot of work happening on the ground already.
Kate.
In the other areas (flooding, storm surge protection, grid reliability), we're still identifying the vulnerabilities and coming up with the strategies. With the urban heat island effect, you already know what you need to do, and those things have so many co-benefits, including stormwater retention. We're already taking those actions and just need to connect them to our strategy around climate adaptation in a more direct way.
On the energy facilities side, we started with an agreement with Pepco around undergrounding power lines, but then there's the question of what's the next step to improve the resilience of our energy system. That’s when we start looking at things like microgrids and how they can contribute. There's a question of scale and how can we really make that into a resource in terms of improving our resiliency.
Brendan.
Post-Sandy, we probably feel further behind related to the storm surge threat. We're not yet prepared for a Sandy-level storm, but there are a lot of conversations happening very quickly. Some agencies are already jump ing ahead – e.g., DC Water is raising levees. People are starting to take action even as the assessment and planning is happening.
We're basically a built city, with buildings and transportation infrastructure. We need to first figure out what to do (and we know some of it already - improvements and retrofit opportunities for buildings, guidelines for new construction). We've already improved a bit with the building code, the green code, etc., but we need to keep going from there. It's a numbers game. If you look independently at our green roof square footage, it's higher than other cities, but it's still only a small percentage of the total amount of roof area. Figuring out how to get existing buildings and neighborhoods to be resilient and prepared is a lot of work, and some of that will literally take decades. I think we're not doing everything we should, but we're starting to look at analysis of specific flood threats to buildings across the city.
Kate.
A lot of this work is coordinated not only among DC agencies, but also a lot with federal government agencies, regional councils of governments, and other partners. There's a lot of work that's already happening, so we're challenging ourselves to (as much as possible) build on what has already been started, to ensure that we take the next steps toward actually implementing some of the great recommendations that have come out of all the various initiatives.
On communicating about climate change…
Brendan.
We're looking now to increase our outreach to advocacy groups and the general public. We have some efforts in the city that have been pretty interesting. Resilient DC, managed out of the Department of Health with the Rand Corporation, has been focused on community engagement. There's actual work happening around that, but we have a long way to go in terms of actually taking those initial efforts and ramping them up to the level of having people engaged consistently across communities in the city and be ready and resilient.
Kate.
We're part of a project (funded by the National Science Foundation) called the Climate and Urban Systems Partnership. In DC, the project is coordinated by the National Geographic Society. The goal of the project is to bring together the NGO community, government agencies, and community-focused organizations to discuss how best to communicate climate issues, including the science, impacts, and what we can do about it. We’re recognizing the need to better communicate at the local level.
There are three other cities that have projects funded through the same grant - Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York - and there's some sharing of experiences and practices across cities. We’ve talked about how to best visualize climate change data on the local level and which messages are going to resonate with which audience. For example, we discussed how to better communicate climate change to low income communities in a way that makes it an issue that matters to them, and that gives them agency to do something about it.
The Partnership group includes folks who might not be thinking about the work they've been doing as directly related to climate change, but they are doing work on clean water and trees and green space, and it’s all related. We've done webinars with cities all over the world – for example, Tokyo and Melbourne - about our new stormwater regulations and our new stormwater credit trading system (which is a market-based mechanism that actually raises money to help pay for more green infrastructure). There's been a lot of interest about that from the climate adaptation community. C40 has the Cool Cities network, which gives awards, and some of those awards have been focused on stormwater practices. Those awards have gone a long way to connecting (within our own agency) the work that our stormwater folks are doing to our climate work. It’s a very visible way to make that connection.
On DC’s new stormwater regulations…
Brendan.
We put out a new set of regulations a little over a year ago, and they're phasing in. It was a significant change for us in that it forces new construction and projects involving substantial renovations to move toward retaining and managing stormwater on-site through reuse, green roof capture, or other actions. They are performance-based standards, so it says you have to manage the 95th percentile storm on your site. If the site is just terrible for green infrastructure for one reason or another, there's an opportunity to meet part of the on-site stormwater treatment requirement with off-site green space and through a credit trading market. It’s similar to air pollution credit trading or carbon trading. As far as we know, it's the only instance of that in the U.S., or anywhere.
Kate.
One of the things we heard from our stormwater folks was that they needed to know what the 95th percentile storm was going to look like 20 years from now, rather than what the 20 year storm would be today. It's not an automatic thing to adjust to the new 95th percentile standards, and would require a process to update.
On barriers and opportunities…
Brendan.
Money's undoubtedly a barrier, but I think we also have an information barrier right now, and that's what we're trying to work on with all of our consultant partners. We're figuring out the level of risk, the stress areas, where we are most vulnerable, and then we're prioritizing. Then you'll run into the money question. We're trying to find innovative ways to finance things.
Kate.
One element unique to the DC area, which can be a barrier but also be an opportunity on the funding side, is the level of federal coordination needed. There are a lot of vulnerable areas in the city [PDF], including federal properties, and there is coordination that needs to happen to protect those areas. Recognizing that national treasures like the National Mall and the Smithsonian could be at a risk from flooding can help bring people to the table for discussions and for funding. The coordination is a barrier due to the amount of people that need to be involved, but can also be an opportunity.
Brendan.
We don't really have a choice when it comes to that level of protection. We're literally surrounded by the Feds. They're on the shorelines, and they have the levee system. We have to work with them to figure things out, and they know that. That being said, I'd add that the federal bureaucracy process is a barrier. They'll tell you that and we'll tell you that. To actually see things move from recognition of a problem and assessment of the threat or vulnerability to prioritization and then actually enacting it through the National Park Service or Army Corps of Engineers - it can take a long time. District government stuff can take a long time, too, but some of the federal processes are really time consuming.
You gain a lot of respect for people in the federal system who are trying to move this type of issues. Especially with something like Sandy, which was effectively a near miss for us. Whether you're the Smithsonian, Defense Department, Park Service, or any federal group with assets to protect, they all - we all - need to make changes, and ideally make them very quickly to be protected in case another storm track comes around. That's the race. To get the changes made before the events happen.
On the need for data and tools...
Brendan.
We have a contract in place now, to produce an adaptation plan. Data and other needs are definitely a focus. We think we may have to spend some more money to fill some gaps on data that we thought was available but isn't. I think we've got a decent handle on it. At this point, we're looking at the data that we have and the latest and greatest projections across the areas of concern. We're moving toward getting what we need, but for professionals in markets that don't have data (and can't pay to get it), there are still significant gaps.
Federal agencies – EPA, USGCRP, NOAA – have a number of folks trying to figure out how we can provide data, from the government side, and there are foundations (Kresge, Rockefeller) that are trying to push data through and make it more widely accessible. There's a lot of progress there.
Kate.
There are gaps in the data on the climate change projections, but DC is lucky that we have pretty robust spatial database, so we're not having to do a lot of spatial analysis in areas of vulnerability, as some cities might have to do. We have a lot of that data, and we share a lot of it publicly. It's just an issue of getting all that data in one place and then figuring out how to use it. There's so much out there, so figuring out what's the best, what's most relevant - it's easy to be overwhelmed by it all.
On “turning a moving ship”...
Brendan.
We have a lot of projects moving forward, development-wise. There are questions about how quickly we should be trying to implement new, more adaptive, more protective standards. But you can only move the system so fast. Even if some other city has realized, “Oh, we can build roads in this new way and it’s more adaptive and resilient and cooler,” we can't just turn on a dime and start doing it that way. Building construction and codes and educating a community and professionals across all these disciplines takes a long time.
There are things already we'd like to be doing, so you start turning the ship as you're moving, trying to redirect because we kind of know we can be doing things better across so many of these areas (how we're using energy, and how we're building our energy systems, buildings, and roads). We already know there are better ways to do all those things from a climate adaptation perspective, and some of them are better from an economic perspective, too. The trick is balancing how quickly you can move what and how you prioritize changing the system or funding new efforts.
One example is microgrids. They are new, potentially more efficient systems - local generation that's more reliable and not going to go down with long-term transmission problems. But, our regulatory environment is just not set up for that. Or, rather, the first question is whether there might be some way we can do it now, to prove that it works, and then how can we break down the barriers to make sure that it can be used more widely in the future and figure out how that's going to happen. We need to move there and it's some combination of legislation and orders from the public service commission and changes in regulation and then industry and financiers figuring out how the new system works and how we're going to pay for it.
On their vision for a resilient DC...
Kate.
I had a lot of friends living in NYC during Sandy, and I think about what would happen if a storm like that were to hit DC. I'd hope that we have the microgrid set up so we could keep the hospitals running, we'd have protections in place to minimize flooding, and our transportation system would be able to get up and running again very quickly. We wouldn't be in a situation where we had widespread power outages for days and a transportation system that was offline for as long as we saw in NYC. I heard lots of amazing stories coming out of New York of people staying with friends in parts of the city that did have power, and community charging stations popping up in places that had generators, and all of these human assets that came out of it as well.
Brendan.
One version of that resilient city would be that it really is a more self-sufficient, locally-supportive city for power, but also for food. One that's not left stranded and helpless by a catastrophe, like New Orleans with Katrina. Sometime, there'll be a storm that gets us anyway, that exceeds the protective measures that we've planned. You have to start looking at urban food production and extensive expansion of solar power and geothermal power. The city could really start to wean itself off of importing everything and therefore being reliant on long-distance connections for everything from food to power. There's a lot of talk about local economy and locavores/localism. That's one vision of an adaptive community that is more resilient and also fundamentally changes the way the city operates.
-
Find out more about DDOE on their website: http://green.dc.gov/
On DC’s history with tackling climate issues…
Brendan.
Around 2006, the city was passing a number of pieces of environmental legislation, including the Green Building Act followed by the Clean and Affordable Energy Act in 2008, which started to expand into energy efficiency and benchmarking and buildings.
The climate issues in the city had certainly surfaced by 2007 and 2008. DDOE's first climate-related work was mostly mitigation-focused. There wasn't really a legislative mandate for that; we mostly did it out of the program, based on public interest - and because it was the right thing to do. Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments was also having a very active discussion about climate across the region in 2006-2008. It has just been building from there.
The adaptation side has taken off significantly in the last two or three years. We're now at a point where we're actually doing climate adaptation-focused work, including technical analysis and a lot of interagency coordination. We're having a lot of conversations about engagement and communication on climate. We'll also be kicking off more public engagement and advisory groups. We're having more and more coordination and sharing of practices across cities in the U.S. and North America, and globally through some of the city networks such as the C40 Climate Leadership group.
On progress toward mitigating the impacts of climate change in DC…
Brendan.
We're not on the path yet to be ready for any of the impacts in the timeframe that the changes are expected to come. We're trying to quickly get on a path to be ready. If you look across flood protection, storm surge issues, intense precipitation and flooding, the resilience of our energy systems - I think we're contemplating all of those. To some extent, we're in a similar position on all of them.
If we are further along on addressing one impact in particular (and not necessarily because we set out to do it for adaptation, but because of other programs) it would be mitigating the heat island effect. The city is doing a lot of work on green roofs and cool roofs, which are already in the building code. We haven't solved the heat island problem, but there's a lot of work happening on the ground already.
Kate.
In the other areas (flooding, storm surge protection, grid reliability), we're still identifying the vulnerabilities and coming up with the strategies. With the urban heat island effect, you already know what you need to do, and those things have so many co-benefits, including stormwater retention. We're already taking those actions and just need to connect them to our strategy around climate adaptation in a more direct way.
On the energy facilities side, we started with an agreement with Pepco around undergrounding power lines, but then there's the question of what's the next step to improve the resilience of our energy system. That’s when we start looking at things like microgrids and how they can contribute. There's a question of scale and how can we really make that into a resource in terms of improving our resiliency.
Brendan.
Post-Sandy, we probably feel further behind related to the storm surge threat. We're not yet prepared for a Sandy-level storm, but there are a lot of conversations happening very quickly. Some agencies are already jump ing ahead – e.g., DC Water is raising levees. People are starting to take action even as the assessment and planning is happening.
We're basically a built city, with buildings and transportation infrastructure. We need to first figure out what to do (and we know some of it already - improvements and retrofit opportunities for buildings, guidelines for new construction). We've already improved a bit with the building code, the green code, etc., but we need to keep going from there. It's a numbers game. If you look independently at our green roof square footage, it's higher than other cities, but it's still only a small percentage of the total amount of roof area. Figuring out how to get existing buildings and neighborhoods to be resilient and prepared is a lot of work, and some of that will literally take decades. I think we're not doing everything we should, but we're starting to look at analysis of specific flood threats to buildings across the city.
Kate.
A lot of this work is coordinated not only among DC agencies, but also a lot with federal government agencies, regional councils of governments, and other partners. There's a lot of work that's already happening, so we're challenging ourselves to (as much as possible) build on what has already been started, to ensure that we take the next steps toward actually implementing some of the great recommendations that have come out of all the various initiatives.
On communicating about climate change…
Brendan.
We're looking now to increase our outreach to advocacy groups and the general public. We have some efforts in the city that have been pretty interesting. Resilient DC, managed out of the Department of Health with the Rand Corporation, has been focused on community engagement. There's actual work happening around that, but we have a long way to go in terms of actually taking those initial efforts and ramping them up to the level of having people engaged consistently across communities in the city and be ready and resilient.
Kate.
We're part of a project (funded by the National Science Foundation) called the Climate and Urban Systems Partnership. In DC, the project is coordinated by the National Geographic Society. The goal of the project is to bring together the NGO community, government agencies, and community-focused organizations to discuss how best to communicate climate issues, including the science, impacts, and what we can do about it. We’re recognizing the need to better communicate at the local level.
There are three other cities that have projects funded through the same grant - Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York - and there's some sharing of experiences and practices across cities. We’ve talked about how to best visualize climate change data on the local level and which messages are going to resonate with which audience. For example, we discussed how to better communicate climate change to low income communities in a way that makes it an issue that matters to them, and that gives them agency to do something about it.
The Partnership group includes folks who might not be thinking about the work they've been doing as directly related to climate change, but they are doing work on clean water and trees and green space, and it’s all related. We've done webinars with cities all over the world – for example, Tokyo and Melbourne - about our new stormwater regulations and our new stormwater credit trading system (which is a market-based mechanism that actually raises money to help pay for more green infrastructure). There's been a lot of interest about that from the climate adaptation community. C40 has the Cool Cities network, which gives awards, and some of those awards have been focused on stormwater practices. Those awards have gone a long way to connecting (within our own agency) the work that our stormwater folks are doing to our climate work. It’s a very visible way to make that connection.
On DC’s new stormwater regulations…
Brendan.
We put out a new set of regulations a little over a year ago, and they're phasing in. It was a significant change for us in that it forces new construction and projects involving substantial renovations to move toward retaining and managing stormwater on-site through reuse, green roof capture, or other actions. They are performance-based standards, so it says you have to manage the 95th percentile storm on your site. If the site is just terrible for green infrastructure for one reason or another, there's an opportunity to meet part of the on-site stormwater treatment requirement with off-site green space and through a credit trading market. It’s similar to air pollution credit trading or carbon trading. As far as we know, it's the only instance of that in the U.S., or anywhere.
Kate.
One of the things we heard from our stormwater folks was that they needed to know what the 95th percentile storm was going to look like 20 years from now, rather than what the 20 year storm would be today. It's not an automatic thing to adjust to the new 95th percentile standards, and would require a process to update.
On barriers and opportunities…
Brendan.
Money's undoubtedly a barrier, but I think we also have an information barrier right now, and that's what we're trying to work on with all of our consultant partners. We're figuring out the level of risk, the stress areas, where we are most vulnerable, and then we're prioritizing. Then you'll run into the money question. We're trying to find innovative ways to finance things.
Kate.
One element unique to the DC area, which can be a barrier but also be an opportunity on the funding side, is the level of federal coordination needed. There are a lot of vulnerable areas in the city [PDF], including federal properties, and there is coordination that needs to happen to protect those areas. Recognizing that national treasures like the National Mall and the Smithsonian could be at a risk from flooding can help bring people to the table for discussions and for funding. The coordination is a barrier due to the amount of people that need to be involved, but can also be an opportunity.
Brendan.
We don't really have a choice when it comes to that level of protection. We're literally surrounded by the Feds. They're on the shorelines, and they have the levee system. We have to work with them to figure things out, and they know that. That being said, I'd add that the federal bureaucracy process is a barrier. They'll tell you that and we'll tell you that. To actually see things move from recognition of a problem and assessment of the threat or vulnerability to prioritization and then actually enacting it through the National Park Service or Army Corps of Engineers - it can take a long time. District government stuff can take a long time, too, but some of the federal processes are really time consuming.
You gain a lot of respect for people in the federal system who are trying to move this type of issues. Especially with something like Sandy, which was effectively a near miss for us. Whether you're the Smithsonian, Defense Department, Park Service, or any federal group with assets to protect, they all - we all - need to make changes, and ideally make them very quickly to be protected in case another storm track comes around. That's the race. To get the changes made before the events happen.
On the need for data and tools...
Brendan.
We have a contract in place now, to produce an adaptation plan. Data and other needs are definitely a focus. We think we may have to spend some more money to fill some gaps on data that we thought was available but isn't. I think we've got a decent handle on it. At this point, we're looking at the data that we have and the latest and greatest projections across the areas of concern. We're moving toward getting what we need, but for professionals in markets that don't have data (and can't pay to get it), there are still significant gaps.
Federal agencies – EPA, USGCRP, NOAA – have a number of folks trying to figure out how we can provide data, from the government side, and there are foundations (Kresge, Rockefeller) that are trying to push data through and make it more widely accessible. There's a lot of progress there.
Kate.
There are gaps in the data on the climate change projections, but DC is lucky that we have pretty robust spatial database, so we're not having to do a lot of spatial analysis in areas of vulnerability, as some cities might have to do. We have a lot of that data, and we share a lot of it publicly. It's just an issue of getting all that data in one place and then figuring out how to use it. There's so much out there, so figuring out what's the best, what's most relevant - it's easy to be overwhelmed by it all.
On “turning a moving ship”...
Brendan.
We have a lot of projects moving forward, development-wise. There are questions about how quickly we should be trying to implement new, more adaptive, more protective standards. But you can only move the system so fast. Even if some other city has realized, “Oh, we can build roads in this new way and it’s more adaptive and resilient and cooler,” we can't just turn on a dime and start doing it that way. Building construction and codes and educating a community and professionals across all these disciplines takes a long time.
There are things already we'd like to be doing, so you start turning the ship as you're moving, trying to redirect because we kind of know we can be doing things better across so many of these areas (how we're using energy, and how we're building our energy systems, buildings, and roads). We already know there are better ways to do all those things from a climate adaptation perspective, and some of them are better from an economic perspective, too. The trick is balancing how quickly you can move what and how you prioritize changing the system or funding new efforts.
One example is microgrids. They are new, potentially more efficient systems - local generation that's more reliable and not going to go down with long-term transmission problems. But, our regulatory environment is just not set up for that. Or, rather, the first question is whether there might be some way we can do it now, to prove that it works, and then how can we break down the barriers to make sure that it can be used more widely in the future and figure out how that's going to happen. We need to move there and it's some combination of legislation and orders from the public service commission and changes in regulation and then industry and financiers figuring out how the new system works and how we're going to pay for it.
On their vision for a resilient DC...
Kate.
I had a lot of friends living in NYC during Sandy, and I think about what would happen if a storm like that were to hit DC. I'd hope that we have the microgrid set up so we could keep the hospitals running, we'd have protections in place to minimize flooding, and our transportation system would be able to get up and running again very quickly. We wouldn't be in a situation where we had widespread power outages for days and a transportation system that was offline for as long as we saw in NYC. I heard lots of amazing stories coming out of New York of people staying with friends in parts of the city that did have power, and community charging stations popping up in places that had generators, and all of these human assets that came out of it as well.
Brendan.
One version of that resilient city would be that it really is a more self-sufficient, locally-supportive city for power, but also for food. One that's not left stranded and helpless by a catastrophe, like New Orleans with Katrina. Sometime, there'll be a storm that gets us anyway, that exceeds the protective measures that we've planned. You have to start looking at urban food production and extensive expansion of solar power and geothermal power. The city could really start to wean itself off of importing everything and therefore being reliant on long-distance connections for everything from food to power. There's a lot of talk about local economy and locavores/localism. That's one vision of an adaptive community that is more resilient and also fundamentally changes the way the city operates.
-
Find out more about DDOE on their website: http://green.dc.gov/