A Better City’s Comments on the MA Climate Change Assessment
November 30, 2022
WRITTEN BY: ISABELLA GAMBILL, SENIOR POLICY ADVISOR ON CLIMATE, ENERGY, & RESILIENCE
In November, the Resilient Massachusetts Action Team (RMAT) released the draft Massachusetts Climate Change Assessment (Assessment), which was a culmination of RMAT’s work and ongoing collaboration across state agencies around the State Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Plan (SHMCAP). The Assessment released by RMAT is intended to highlight the most urgent and extreme climate threats facing the Commonwealth state-wide, while also sharing what additional climate threats impact specific regions within the Commonwealth. A Better City participated in a series of stakeholder engagement meetings in 2021 and 2022 that helped to inform the draft Assessment, and we are grateful to notice that the State has since incorporated our comments around elevating extreme heat as a core and urgent climate threat statewide. In addition to our verbal comments offered at stakeholder meetings, A Better City also submitted written comments to the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) in the Baker Administration on November 16, 2022.
In addition to considering climate risks at a state- and sub-regional level in Massachusetts, the Assessment also considers climate threats by sector, and it is important to note that the sectors included are different than those associated with the Global Warming Solutions Act and Implementation Advisory Committee. The Assessment highlights climate threats across the human sector, the infrastructure sector, the natural environment sector, the governance sector, and the economic sector. A Better City’s comments offered cross-sector recommendations in response to the Executive Summary, as well as sector-specific recommendations and regional recommendations. For our cross-cutting comments, ABC emphasized: regional approaches to resilience governance, finance, and implementation; supporting public-private partnerships; clarifying impact on climate funding; promoting alignment across parallel adaptation policies; considering cumulative impacts and compounding threats; and incorporating equity and climate justice.
For human sector comments, ABC agreed with extreme heat being listed as an extreme and urgent threat statewide and recommended to further clarify how heat disproportionately impacts environmental justice communities and communities of color worst and first. We also suggested addressing compounding and cumulative impacts in hot spot communities, incorporating social isolation as a threat, expanding the quantification of heat-related costs, and incorporating regional extreme heat preparedness. In our infrastructure sector comments, we reiterated earlier recommendations to emphasize grid cleanliness, reliability, resilience, affordability, and needed capacity upgrades to support electrified buildings and transportation. We also recommended integrating resilience planning across multiple climate threats (ex. Addressing threats of flooding, heat, wind, and other damage in our buildings all at once), and considering drought impacts to the built environment. For the natural environment, we recommended greater specificity on climate threat by land type, as well as integrating the recommendations from Boston’s 20-Year Urban Forest Plan at the state-level to improve tree equity and public-private partnerships. For the governance sector, we recommended establishing a state-level Resilience Commission, working with regional partners, and considering the hidden inequities of climate migration. Finally, in the economic sector, we urged the State to incorporate the existing loss of labor productivity and associated costs during heat wave events, rather than only considering future costs. In response to regional findings, ABC recommended including cross-regional findings and threats for implementation, as well as incorporating findings from municipal climate preparedness programs.
For any questions on the MA Climate Change Assessment or A Better City’s comments, please contact Isabella Gambill.
