The virtual panel of Climate Ready Boston on Thursday, October 29 released two reports offering coastal resilience solutions, with the most recent one targeting Downtown Boston and North End, and the other: Dorchester. The reports further developed and specified the City of Boston’s strategies to realize its vision of a resilient Boston harbor and confronting climate change. In the reports, the Climate Ready Boston team outlined a roadmap for near- and long-term solutions to defend coastal flooding, stressing the importance of the public-private collaboration between stakeholders.
“Climate change is about people,” Christopher Cook, Boston’s Chief of Environment, Energy, and Open Space, said on the panel. “Who are the people in these neighborhoods? Where do they work? How do they get to that work? Where do they live? At the end of the day, the reason we’re doing this work is to protect the people and to protect the neighborhoods that they live in.”
“It’s only through a collaborative effort, through partnership that we’re actually going to implement any of these solutions,” Cook said, adding that they have been analyzing neighborhoods block by block and conducting conversations with owners of private and public entities.
The four core resilience strategies presented in the CRS report for Downtown Boston and North End include expanded open space, harbor walk enhancements, more offshore elements, and the addition of spines.
Existing open space — for example, Langone Park and Puopolo Playground — are undergoing new projects. One such project will elevate the parks’ back edge to defend against 21 inches of the sea level rise, explained Peyton Siler Jones, a Climate Resilience Program coordinator, during the panel. The $15.3 million project, which will expand recreational opportunities, is anticipated to be completed in late fall.
Offshore elements refer to the solution of using ecological systems at the water’s edge to reduce the wave action and provide environmental co-benefits, Jones stated. According to “Coastal Resilience Solutions for Downtown and North End,” spines are linear elements such as roadways and bike paths that elevate the landscape and prevent floodwater.
Faced with climate change, people are expecting and currently experiencing four core changes in their daily life: hotter days, increased precipitation, sea-level rise, and more frequent and fiercer coastal storms.
For Chinatown residents, in particular, Jones and Zoe Davis, another Climate Resilience Project coordinator, provided some information and suggestions on how they can become better adapted for climate change as individuals and small business owners.
The first thing you could do is look at your physical location and figure out the climate vulnerability around there, Jones said. In general, the projected 40-inch sea level by 2070 could lead to flooding across most of South Boston to the Chinatown neighborhood, according to the report of “Coastal Resilience Solutions for South Boston,” released in 2018.
“If there’s a small business owner in Chinatown, who’s not totally sure if their building is vulnerable to climate change in the long term, reaching out to Zoe or me, and we can connect that business owner with resources,” Jones added.
She and Davis also encouraged people to talk about climate change in the community and disperse related information to each other. Davis introduced a citywide program called Greenovate Boston Leaders. By signing up for the program, residents can get related training on leading the community’s conversation around climate change.
“It essentially is a program to help Boston residents equip themselves with the information and tools that they need to help their community be climate-prepared,” Davis said. “Whether it’s just information on what the city is doing with regards to climate, or helping residents organize initiatives in their own neighborhoods.”
Climate change is not all about doom and gloom as it presents in some press coverages, “it can be, but in Boston, we really see it as an opportunity,” Jones said. “All the climate action that the mayor is leading, and that the city of Boston is engaging in, is full of opportunities to make everyone’s lives better.”
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