(Top photo by Justin Marine | Wide Angle Youth Media)
Global warming will be costly and neighborhoods must do more
STORY BY: DAN NOVAK, KAITLYN HOPKINS, IAN ROUND AND SANDY BANISKY
September 3, 2019
Researchers know how cities can ease the impact of climate change. For starters, they can replace some concrete and asphalt with grass and trees, cover tar roofs with reflective white materials, remove the hard pavement that contributes to flooding and substitute permeable surfacing materials that let water drain through.
All those plans are expensive, but Baltimore Del. Robbyn Lewis says that cities no longer have the luxury of delay, no matter the politics, no matter the resistance from residents, no matter the cost — even in cash-poor Baltimore.
“Do we want to live,” she says, “or do we want to go extinct?”
Around the world, calls for action to address the climate crisis are becoming more urgent. Without bold action to combat global warming by 2030, the effects will be catastrophic, the United Nations has warned. July 2019 was the hottest month recorded on the planet.
To blunt the impact of climate change, officials have proposed dozens of changes, from creating more pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods to banning foam containers. But some neighborhoods, known as heat islands, will need added help because they already feel more of the harmful impact of global warming.
Heat islands tend to have more pavement and fewer trees to provide shade. The households have lower incomes, cope with more chronic illnesses and make more calls for emergency medical help. Planners say these problems are the result of decades of discriminatory legal and financial policies.
ROWHOUSES ARE HOT: HERE'S WHY
Rowhouses have been part of Baltimore for centuries, but they hold heat. A narrow design, thick building materials and few trees can make life inside a rowhouse with no air conditioning unbearable during the summer.
(Motion graphic by Amina Lampkin, Maris Medina and Krishnan Vasudevan; Music: “Curious Nature” by Ketsa, licensed from FreeMusicArchive.org.)
Baltimore’s Office of Sustainability acknowledges these problems in the introduction to the city’s sustainability plan:
“Baltimore’s history of deliberate racial segregation has positioned people in unhealthy and inequitable circumstances, deeply affecting the well-being of many of our residents—as well as the social, economic, and environmental well-being of our city,” the introduction to the plan reads.
City Hall has an uneven record on combating the problem.
Some members of the Baltimore City Council have fought for cleaner air and more mass transit. Last year, the city sued 26 oil companies seeking damages for climate change. Oil companies are fighting the suit.
In Baltimore, a law passed this year would force incinerators there to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions substantially. The operator of one of them called the requirements “unachievable.”
“Do we want to live, or do we want to go extinct?”
- Baltimore Del. Robbyn Lewis
But recently, the mayor and City Council president have missed opportunities to take clear stands on how to protect citizens from the worst of global warming.
One August afternoon, a surprise thunderstorm poured more than 5 inches of rain on downtown at rush hour, leaving cars stranded at a flooded intersection, with at least one driver calling for help from atop his vehicle’s roof.
When a reporter from The Daily Record asked Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young about the damage and climate change, Young said that he is not worried about more waterfront development. His office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Rising seas will put waterfront businesses and homes at greater risk.
Earlier this summer, City Council President Brandon M. Scott said in an interview with University of Maryland journalists that all city problems, from crime to education to global warming, are intertwined. A few weeks later, Scott released an agenda of 26 priorities for city government.
The list did not specifically mention climate change.
Setting goals
Real fixes will require major changes in how we live, in the fuel we use, the transportation we ride and the neighborhoods we inhabit.
Baltimore has set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent below 2007 levels by next year, in line with the Paris climate accords.
Other objectives included reducing energy use in buildings, increasing recycling, promoting solar and other renewable energy and urging development near transit stops to promote the use of buses and light rail.
The sustainability office’s 2016-2018 report says: city agencies are testing electric vehicles, the Port of Baltimore has reduced levels of greenhouse gas emissions and the city has signed a pledge supporting clean energy and tighter standards for car emissions with Climate Mayors, whose members are committed to policy changes that will fight climate change.
Finding the money to accomplish the goals is a problem, especially in a city where nearly 30% of households have incomes below $25,000.
Community collaboration
Sacoby Wilson is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park. He says too many people are not working to combat climate change because they think it’s a challenge for the future, not a crisis today. (Photo by Maris Medina | University of Maryland)
Sacoby Wilson, associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, said that the fight against climate change needs to come not just from government but from neighborhoods as well. Yet too many people, Wilson said, are not working on the problem because they think the issue is a challenge for the future, not a crisis today.
Discussions of global warming have tended to focus on melting glaciers and endangered polar bears … creating “a connection gap,” he said, for people living in cities.
“Polar bears, saving penguins — that’s not proximal,” Wilson said. “When you think about environmental change, you’ve got to make it proximal” by describing the impact it is having on nearly every aspect of neighborhood life, pocketbook issues from food to health to jobs. Then, he said, residents are more inclined to be a part of the solution.
Managers in the Baltimore Office of Sustainability agree, and the 2019 sustainability plan is based on collaboration with neighborhood residents. The plan was crafted through what it calls a “racial equity lens,” recognizing that some communities have fewer resources than others, a problem created by patterns of discrimination.
Baltimore's cooling centers
During periods of extreme heat, the Baltimore Health Department designates some government-owned buildings as cooling centers. When Baltimore’s health commissioner declared a Code Red emergency July 16-22, the city opened even more buildings to supplement the usual locations. The closest one to McElderry Park was about a mile away, on East Chase Street. The closest senior center cooling location, a half -mile away in the 2600 block of East Baltimore Street, was not open on the weekend.
BY AMINA LAMPKIN
Source: Baltimore City Health Department
Anne Draddy, who oversaw the 2019 update of the city’s sustainability plan, said, “It's a very intentional look to raise people up and support people who have historically not been supported as well as they could have.”
The report is an ambitious framework for the city to address change and social equity. The plan’s aspirations include adding more trees and urban farms, encouraging schools to teach environmental literacy and environmental justice, and increasing the use of renewable energy and electric cars.
“We need to shift from plan development to action.”
- Kristin Baja, Urban Sustainability Directors Network
Kristin Baja, a former climate resilience planner for Baltimore’s sustainability office who now works for the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, said plans are useful in providing city governments and residents with a work structure. But cities can sometimes get caught in a “cycle of plan development,” she said.
“We need to shift from plan development to action,” she said, “and these plans need to be actionable and they have to be actionable with a wide range of partners that are not just city government.”
Baltimore has released a series of plans since 2009 that deal with the overlapping issues of climate change, natural disaster preparedness and sustainability.
Urban Heat Island
Urban heat island describes the phenomenon of cities being hotter than surrounding rural areas.
- Vegetation provides shade and moisture through evapotranspiration. Because trees and plants have surfaces that can absorb water, they can release that absorbed water into the air, and cool the surrounding atmosphere.
- With less vegetation, surfaces like roofs, pavements and sidewalks absorb heat and do not put moisture back into the air. These surfaces also absorb more heat than soil or sand.
- Once all the heat is absorbed into the pavement, it is slowly released at night. The geometry of a city also matters. The proximity of buildings means heat cannot be efficiently and totally released at night, increasing the amount of time it takes for these surfaces to cool down.
- According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, ground surfaces in cities can be 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit warmer during the day and nine to 18 degrees warmer at night when compared to rural areas.
Source: “Reducing Urban Heat Islands: Compendium of Strategies,” United States Environmental Protection Agency
Around the country, cities have taken bold stands on climate. Boston’s goal is to achieve a net zero carbon footprint by 2050, meaning the city would have equal levels of carbon emission and reduction. Portland, Oregon, which was a leader on the issue with a climate action plan published in 1993, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.
According to the Sierra Club, seven states, Puerto Rico and 127 American cities including Cincinnati, Cleveland and St. Louis, have committed to generating 100% of their electricity from clean, renewable sources by 2050. None is in Maryland.
Volunteers renting jackhammers
Lewis, the state delegate, offers an example of volunteers doing for themselves.
She moved to a rowhouse north of Patterson Park in 2002, to a block that had two street trees.
Instead of waiting for the city to plant trees, Lewis and her neighbors made their own plans — building, she says, on the networks that community organizations and longtime residents had already created for improving the neighborhood.
The neighbors won grants from local nonprofits. They went to nurseries and big-box stores for trees. Then the neighbors got permits from the city, rented jackhammers and began breaking up the sidewalk. They carried the concrete chunks to rented dumpsters.
“We did everything,” Lewis said. “We were young. It was so much fun.”
On their first planting day, they had more than 20 volunteers. Eventually, they numbered about 300. Over the next few years, they had planted 400 trees in Southeast Baltimore. And her street now has trees, including fast-growing sweetgums, in front of nearly every rowhouse.
