Against the backdrop of a looming “super El Niño” that will intensify heat waves this summer, a local foundation pulled together a roundtable of groups on Wednesday to talk about how Greater Boston prepares for a boiling change in climate.
“I’ll just state the obvious. Our worsening climate crisis is creating more intense, more frequent and longer bouts of extreme heat in Massachusetts,” said Antonio Caban, who convened the informal group for a Climate Resilience Program of the Barr Foundation, a charitable foundation awarding around $35 million annually toward local climate change solutions.
“We’re holding this during our first major heat event,” Caban said, referring to the calendar year. “Temperatures yesterday reached 97. I know my car said 102 – wild for the middle of May.”
Groundwork Somerville was represented in the roundtable, along with organizations serving Cambridge and Somerville such as the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and Mystic River Watershed Association. The super El Niño phenomenon brought brief mentions at the start and end of the talk, and mainly because it ties in with participating organizations’ other work. “El Niño brings more than just heat,” said Jodi Valenta, of the Trust for Public Land. But it means “absorption and cooling is really essential.”
In El Niño years, the Pacific Ocean warms, which affects weather patterns around the world. In a super El Niño year when trapped greenhouse gases warming the Earth have already wrought significant change to the climate, experts warn of searing heat and powerful rainfall, wildfires, floods and droughts – massive disruptions that can affect agriculture and water supplies worldwide, hitting economies already struggling from war and other blows to supply chains. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction sees trouble especially for corn, rice and wheat production across Asia and Australia.
The power of a super El Niño means less warning when truly bad weather arrives, said Tatiana Begault of the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health in comments about “what we call a no-notice event.”
It also amplifies those events, such as for hurricanes, forcing a change in scale. “What was previously considered to be a Category 1 or a Category 2 of an impact, we’re redefining. In reality it will be a Category 3 or a Category 4,” Begault said. (The higher the category the worse, so Begault is saying winds of 111 to 156 mph may become the bottom of a scale that usually starts at 74 mph.) “The preparedness aspect needs to take precedence.”
Resilience hubs and block parties
It was this aspect that got Cambridge a shoutout from Sharon Ron of the MAPC, despite no Cambridge organization taking part in the roundtable.
Cambridge is seeing the start of building Resilience Hubs – neighborhood centers that would welcome residents in any kind of public emergency – with the Cambridge Community Center in Riverside.
What got Ron’s attention, though, was something that seemed more benign: “Cambridge has been doing this block party initiative where they’re waiving the fees for block parties and offering all this type of city support,” Ron said. The idea is to break down social isolation and get people to know their neighbors. The subtext is of “a public health campaign to increase social resilience, but it’s just being billed as it’s fun.”
Ron also credited arts and culture work such as “Now Is Still Here,” environmentally themed theater coming to the Somerville Community Growing Center from Friday through Sunday.
Doing the groundwork
Groundwork Somerville, which says it is trying to cultivate the next generation of environmental leaders and create a greener, more equitable Somerville, emphasized its work in East Somerville, an area isolated from other parts of the city by highways and suffering from a lack of trees and other nature.
Because the city is along the Mystic River, home to the densest concentration of environmentally vulnerable residents in New England, it became part of a 2020 study called Wicked Hot Mystic run by the Mystic River Watershed Association, MAPC and the Museum of Science.
“Environmental justice” communities such as Somerville are expected to experience heat-related death rates up to 28 percent higher than a statewide average, as the 80-volunteer mapping study found that urban heat islands in cities including Somerville “could be up to 10 degrees hotter than cooler parts of our watershed,” said Nasser Brahim, of the watershed association.
That’s why Groundwork Somerville considers the planting of 31 trees at the Mystic Apartments and East Somerville Community School one of its “big wins” this spring, said the organization’s Kenzie Ballard.
Somerville resiliency
It’s also working with the watershed association on building a resiliency advisory group along Broadway, where “there’s already multiple community-based organizations and city spaces informally working together for climate resiliency.”
As in Cambridge at the Riverside-area community center, “we can all respond more quickly and efficiently during emergencies and periods of disruption, whether that be climate related or otherwise,” Ballard said.
Team members at Groundwork Somerville also continue to collect hyperlocal climate data – heat, air quality and noise – in East Somerville to guide work such as tree planting and reshaping street redesigns, Ballard said.
Window screens and bus shelters
There would be plenty of work to do even without a super El Niño bearing down. A survey last year of 1,500 school buildings by the Massachusetts School Building Authority found almost half had either no cooling or less than half of their space served by air conditioning, Ron said. “Extreme heat events that once fell squarely during summer break are now arriving earlier into the spring and stretching out into the fall,” she said. That makes heat “a health threat to students and staff, and younger children are particularly vulnerable.” Some of the MAPC’s most practical small grants are to buy and install air conditioning in high-need spaces – or just to replace broken and damaged window screens to allow teachers to open windows on really hot days.
“They couldn’t, because there were no screens, which is crazy,” Ron said.
The Mystic River Watershed Association has an equally basic mission in building shaded bus shelters, but it is coupled with a grander one of providing weather-focused educational materials to cities and towns. That’s in recognition, Brahim said, that there’s a “disconnect where residents have high expectations that local government will tell them what to do to keep safe during extreme weather. In reality, municipalities have limited capacity.”
Kalia Barnett, of Barr’s Climate Resilience Program, said the foundation wanted to support local solutions around both physical and social infrastructure. “We know that we need a more comprehensive extreme-heat strategy to really prepare communities,” she said. “We need that heat strategy to be ambitious. We need it to be statewide, and really rethink all aspects of our society, our neighborhoods, our housing, our schools, our transit systems.”
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