The Time is Right For a Climate Resilient Infrastructure Plan
By: Matthew R Sanders
Tags: Infrastructure, Urban Planning, Climate Action, Politics

The Chicago River is an engineering marvel that made the Midwest’s greatest city healthier, happier, and more accessible. Why are we waiting to make similar investments across the country?

As an MBA candidate last fall, fresh off the heels of a summer spent applying business strategies and financial lenses to clean energy, clean transportation, and environmental issues across the Midwest, I received permission to go completely off-script and add a graduate engineering program elective to my course load. The course focused on the design and implementation of systems that could make cities more sustainable — in the climate challenge-meeting sense of the word, not the green-washing sense. These intertwined thoughts flesh out a series of reflections on pressing issues and policies facing cities as they rise to meet the scourge of climate change, which were required for the class.

They were written before the COVID-19 pandemic; nevertheless, the climate crisis has not abated, and in the long-term, maintaining effective, resilient urban systems will be a prerequisite to mitigating climate change. In other words, the demise of the urban center has been greatly exaggerated.

The first step in addressing any problem is acknowledging the problem exists. Cities and municipalities, especially in the United States, have had to pursue climate action plans and sustainability efforts longer than states or the federal government out of necessity. City governments do not have the luxury of debating the political merits of recognizing climate realities. Moreover, they cannot, as both higher strata of government are wont to do, make the argument that fighting climate change is not on the table because it would be a waste of their budget because social efficiency is extremely low. That is, they cannot embrace the false choice that combating climate change affects only a small amount of their constituents and is therefore a boondoggle.

No, cities must act — have had to act — sooner and longer than states and national governments because there is no one else to whom the buck can be passed. Either cities take action to address shoreline erosion and flooding that threatens neighborhoods, or property is damaged and residents’ lives are at risk. They either find ways to provide mass public transportation between disconnected neighborhoods so residents of every socioeconomic status can access work, education, recreation, and other interests, or train tracks corrode into overgrown trip hazards and roadways continue to falter under the constant weight of rush hour traffic with smog hanging low over the skyline. And as the world’s urban population continues to explode, cities will continue to find themselves on the frontlines of climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Recognizing the Problem, Prescribing the Wrong Solution

Climate Action Plans or “Insert City Name Here” Vision 2050 plans are the municipal sustainability answer du jour right now. That does not make them good roadmaps for city planning and strategic planning initiatives; rather, they can often feel like theoretical exercises or justifications for doing something else entirely. Namely, this mismatched set of priorities and published proposals stems from a misunderstanding of what making a city ‘Sustainable’ truly means — contrasted with the noxious use of ‘Smart’ city — which is crucial because the distinctions can lead to city-sponsored greenwashing and policies that inhibit progress towards resilience (or mitigation) instead of encouraging it.

Many city leaders are striving to create plans and strategies for addressing the implications climate change poses for their municipalities. Nevertheless, all too often specific policies are implemented piecemeal. Cities are expanding publicly accessible charging stations to encourage faster adoption of electric vehicles. They are implementing community solar projects that reduce a town’s dependence on natural gas or coal to power local businesses. Others airdrop in a single rapid bus-transit route as the spine of a hypothetical future mass transit system. Coastal cities are innovating ways to prevent flooding from higher sea levels and stronger storms while reinforcing the deep-water ports critical to effectively importing and exporting goods around the world. Still others are implementing congestion pricing and road usage charges that incentivize walking, biking, and utilizing mass transit to move around the city instead of exacerbating transportation emissions by solo car commuters. And finally, some cities are banning plastics in efforts to reduce waste.

But few locales intertwine these objectives into a cohesive plan and then actively enforce legislation that backs up these goals. Regrettably, the ones that do often struggle to find the political will to keep up with the long-term goals across multiple administrations, newly elected officials, and the need to address immediate crises. Climate action plans are often unveiled with great fanfare and in-depth design concepts that speak to high-browed ambitions, but receive little follow through on the part of city officials. And while they struggle to fully implement sustainability goals and actions beyond simple steps, there is a parallel path many cities follow that seems to evoke the same amount of enthusiasm: transforming metro areas into ‘smart cities.’

Let’s be clear: the two are not synonymous. ‘Smart Cities’ expand technologies that modernize city functions previously performed in traditional ways; ‘Sustainable Cities’ implement strategies that transform entire systems into climate-resilient lines of service. Replacing toxin-spewing old diesel-engine buses and train cars for mass transit systems with newer, more efficient diesel-engine powered vehicles, or ones powered by propane or compressed natural gas may be more economical, but it also has enough tangential impacts on some sustainability goals in climate action plans that metropolises can squint to equate the two. The same goes for improving or introducing citywide WiFi, 5G, and expanded data services that can support everything from citywide cameras to transit tracking to autonomous vehicles — again pursuits with obliquely climate-related benefits.

This makes it easy for places like Columbus, Ohio, to loudly tout their status as winners of a ‘smart city’ competition while slowing their completion of sustainable goals that are less palatable to state or federal officials. For political reasons, officials are often less apt to support climate change-specific plans. But truly pushing a city into the future, to create urban spaces resilient to new challenges or positioned to mitigate existing climate catastrophes, requires a blending of smart and sustainable initiatives that reinforce one another and are pursued by leaders from different political backgrounds over a multi-decade horizon. For example: expanded monitoring of sewer systems to better conserve water and pinpoint drainage problems improves the efficiency of public works employees and restore service faster, while also acting as an easy ‘win’ in the implementation of climate action plans. Baseball currently suffers from the pursuit of three true outcomes; everyone just wants to hit home runs. Sometimes cities need to just hit singles and doubles. Otherwise, sustainability will stay elusive and cities will remain, for lack of a better antonym, ‘dumb.’

During a fellowship with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, I spent considerable time analyzing the progress of cities across the Midwest in accomplishing their climate action plans. Having robust frameworks for these plans is a good first step, but it is imperative for cities across the spectrum of politics, built environments, populations, and natural topography to pursue goals that are attainable, have a reasonable time horizon, can be easily measured, and encourage cooperation between public and private stakeholders in their communities. Whether it is Ann Arbor or Milwaukee, Columbus or West Palm Beach, municipalities are addressing the areas of climate change as best they can. Good faith efforts only go so far, though; this is a national problem in need of national leadership, and the catalyst for expanding it is already in place — or rather, the catalysts: cities have been and will continue being those sparks of ingenuity and sustainable problem-solving because states and the federal government demurred in years past. Igniting those sparks requires spurring greater collaboration and cooperation between cities on what initiatives and programs work or do not work; once that is commonplace and not the exception, mobilizing for greater action at the state and national level will only get easier.

How to Grow and How Not to Grow

The consequences of urban growth without these considerations is manifested in sprawl that accelerated erosion along shores, bulldozed unique habitats and ecosystems, and threatened to eradicate species large and small. Cities mark the hubs of industry whose power plants and ports, factories and freeways, contributed the highest concentrations of greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere. Counterintuitively, however, cities also represent our best hope as green engines driving the sustainable economy of the future.

Growth — especially in urban areas — can be insatiable. As more and more people in more and more countries flock to cities, the need to house, feed, employ, and care for these new urbanites demands that cities expand their housing stock, their supply lines, and their infrastructure. And while most cities have permitting processes and plans for city development, this guidance may in some places be ignored or hand-waved away as an inconvenience that inhibits growth.

The consequences of such decisions may not manifest immediately, but they frequently become apparent at the most inopportune time; with hundreds of millions of city dwellers living in coastal areas, those times often coincide with water-based natural disasters like hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, and in some cases, drought. In many instances, residents have mere days’ notice to evacuate or take other precautions to protect their property and their belongings despite living in dangerous areas without being required to possess insurance or other risk mitigations. The true damage done by these natural storms and violent weather events has its roots in misguided decisions made years earlier in the planning process, and current residents are left in the crosshairs.

Human decisions to authorize construction of entire neighborhoods in flood plains may have seemed a low-risk development decision twenty-five years hence, when the odds of 500-year floods matched the implied frequency in their name. But continuing to presume these events will be few and far between straddles the line between willful ignorance and logical fallacy. Continuing to allow these sorts of city planning decisions invites greater damage to property and to lives. Is the benefit of expanding urban areas worth the rebuilding cost and potential migration of people to other regions?

This can have long-term deleterious effects on the economic vitality of the cities choosing to build in flood plains and other low-lying areas. During my naval service, I managed the day-to-day operation of multiple bases in the D.C. region (including disaster response, emergency management, and implementing public works projects). On a daily basis, the Captain I reported to implored us to ‘Make the first pass count,’ a sage leadership tenet at all levels of government. We could not afford to rework decisions or jobs that provided crucial services to tenants that relied on us. The same holds true for cities: they cannot afford to get development plans and construction approvals wrong, especially in coastal areas, because having to rework them after a disaster could be exorbitantly expensive in lives and property reconstruction. In places like Houston, it is too late to take this to heart — they have already been materially affected by this problem — but many other cities have a chance to reevaluate previous decisions before disaster befalls them.

Sometimes, our well-intentioned man-made solutions to these problems can only shift the risk to a new threat. The Army Corps of Engineers has produced astounding feats of technological construction. But the willingness to ignore the externalities of building dams and levees up and down rivers (e.g., the prospects of dangerous water level rises upstream that don’t directly affect the city building the barrier) contorts the Corps’ talents and puts other Americans in danger. It also means that the Corps of Engineers and other groups will be called upon to rebuild the dams and levees post-disaster — and in another display of short-sightedness, to do so in grander and grander fashion.

There is a better way, however. Man-made exacerbations can be replaced with man-made solutions with proper education, long-term horizon planning, and acknowledgement that insatiable growth is not necessary. The narrative can be changed, but it requires tremendous courage on the part of civic leaders and public servants to resist the short-term ‘win’ of green-lighting developments in flood-prone areas or mistaking the construction of levees and dams that distort natural features as ‘infrastructure improvements.’ Instead, human action can be taken to increase coastal softening, to build resilient cities with urban plans for coastal cities that balance the need to have beachfront access and drive tourism with safely protecting not just current residents, but future generations of city-dwellers that will likely have to deal with both rising sea levels and stronger and stronger water-borne natural disasters.

Reframing the City for Its People, Not Its Vehicles

Who is infrastructure for? It’s certainly not for inanimate objects; it should be designed to best serve the people that use it. One of my favorite adages is that “Every city resident is a pedestrian at some point in the day.” This fundamental fact about urban living illustrates the ‘chicken or the egg’ nature debates around urban planning, infrastructure investment, and which modes of transportation we encourage. Walkable and bikeable communities should be designed — because of the pedestrian needs of every resident — but they should also be demanded as a matter of city dwelling culture. Yet this implementation varies wildly from city to city; decades of messaging, lobbying, advertising, and expectation-setting warped peoples’ understanding of what urban culture should be and how cities are designed. Once again, this is an opportunity for strong national signaling and leadership that helps in the uphill battle against the inertia of urban areas laid out to facilitate car-centric living — but the battle can be worth it. Incorporating walkable and bikeable communities into cities today is the urban planning embodiment of the classic Steve Jobs quote: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Because of this conundrum, inducing cities to expand, or in the worst case create from scratch, truly walkable communities may have to result from design until the cognitive recognition that they embody real urbane culture sticks. Living on blocks and in neighborhoods that are pedestrian-centric, not devoted to facilitating vehicular traffic, is unlikely to happen overnight. Sure, individuals may opt into walking and talking mass transit and biking to and from work; to go to the grocery; to visit friends or tourist attractions. But the declines in ridership of major city transit systems is well-documented, ubiquitous enough that modest increases in year-over-year ridership in New York City and Washington, D.C. garnered national headlines in 2019. COVID-19 safety restrictions and an emphasis on social distancing have coupled with increased ridesharing options that actually make vehicular congestion worse in cities at precisely the moment when the long-term reduction of vehicular traffic should be the priority of urban planners.

Changing these practices may take intentional design decisions at first, but like any other cultural movement, small and incremental changes in disparate cities should not be viewed as a detriment or warning that the movement is waning, faltering; in fact, it should be the opposite. Small design changes — lower speed limits, introducing bikeshare programs — can snowball into complete streets that treat pedestrians as equal to drivers and cyclists, streets designed with plantings and islands, and more equitable access for all residents. The point being: victories do not have to look like 500 superblocks taking over a city. But it can certainly be given a jolt with renewed investment and guidance at the federal level that elevates sustainable options like public transit to the pedestal highways and personal vehicle transportation have jealously guarded since post-World War II.

Renewing the culture of walkability and living in cities without relying on driving to and from destinations, therefore, may end up in the near-term being caused by design since as a culture (especially in America) the concept of ‘freedom’ is inextricably linked to the personally-owned vehicle. Fighting that embedded yearning to get in a car and just…go may seem a fool’s errand, but policy can nudge us in the other direction, at least those in urban environs where ‘going’ doesn’t have to be all that far and reachable on foot or by bike or by bus or by train.

After all, much of municipal government’s power derives from their ability to influence everything from business development to zoning to public transportation; all serve a role in facilitating more walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. Ultimately, chasing this ideal walkable and bikeable city should not be consigned to the realm of wishful thinking or to being a flight of fancy held by passionate advocates. It can fundamentally improve well-being, health, and happiness in neighborhoods and communities in every city, across the country.

‘Everything in Moderation’ Goes for the Planet, Too

I remain bullish on the effect cities can have in efforts to prevent unmitigated climate disaster. It’s the little things, like Chicago schools partnering with a non-profit to measure the air quality in neighborhoods across all 77 neighborhoods so those patterns could be used to identify and correlate areas suffering from higher rates of illness and student absence from school; to highlight how much of a difference hybrid or electric buses can have along bus routes keeping students and commuters alike healthier; to help the city justify relocating schools away from areas that might cause more harm to children than good. These are all things well within the scope of what a single city can do to move its local environment in a more sustainable direction, but they are not the only endeavors.

There’s a concept called Earth Overshoot Day — that point in the calendar year when humans through industry, globalization, and energy consumption have used up all of the Earth’s resources that should be sufficient for sustaining life throughout the entire year. It continues to move earlier in the year at just the time when we, as a species, should be crafting solutions that push us back nearer to using up all the resources as near to New Year’s Eve as possible. Instead, regrettably, we need to acknowledge that while Global Earth Overshoot Day may be around August 1, the political will and leadership to address the challenges surrounding overshoot (and climate change more broadly) are the equivalent of a New Year’s Resolution: it lasts just long enough for a week-long conference with other heads of state in Paris or Kyoto, but whenever following through requires sacrifice or perseverance, the resolve evaporates.

How does this manifest? The EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook best illustrates this in depicting the projection for sources of electricity production through to 2050. Even as leaders in major industries and at the highest levels of government espoused concern about climate change, decried the continued use of fossil fuels, and reiterated their commitments to the Paris Climate Accord, no meaningful long-term actions have been taken. As the EIA reports, over half of electricity is likely to be provided by natural gas or coal by 2050 — not even considering industrial and transportation uses — a reality that does not square with the stringent guidance needed to curb global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius. The disparity is starkest next to Dr. Johan Rockström’s pathway to deep decarbonization, which requires our carbon emissions to precipitously drop between 2020 and 2050; that roadmap creates a dangerously large scissor graph when overlapped with the rise in natural gas consumption and staunch refusal to eliminate coal.

As utilities continue to expand their natural gas sourcing and lock themselves into at least partial dependence on fossil fuels until 2050, the lack of momentum to sharply cut carbon emissions will necessitate technology changes that can overcome human inertia towards making no substantive changes. But that’s the point: technology solutions to climate change may be necessary, but they’re not a panacea. They’re a symptom of the larger lack of political will to implement policy changes and demand worldwide sacrifices to achieve climate change resilience goals. This becomes a Catch-22, however: these transformative technology developments and innovations will likely be so expensive that no single company will undertake them, meaning spurring that invention will also require policy prescriptions and political will to fund more research and development — possibly while paired with ending government subsidies for fossil fuel exploration. And if these efforts on the energy-creation side of the ledger are a fool’s hope, that leaves reform and renewal of our transportation infrastructure into a climate resilient national backbone the only viable option to climate mitigation leadership.

Granted, the EIA report looks at United States trends, but as the world’s largest economy and arguably the most influential country globally, the United States refusing to lead on climate change action would depress action by allies and competitors alike. Even as anecdotes about specific companies or countries making wholesale changes proliferate (buying fleets of electric transit buses for their cities, companies sourcing all of their energy from renewable sources, etc.), this could be seen from a more skeptical point of view as high-concept greenwashing. Or, worse, as a conceit that cities, smaller countries, and most companies have little influence to create broad market trends and spark the peak-and-fall of carbon emissions laid out in Rockström’s roadmap.

This should not be viewed as a doom-and-gloom diagnosis of current American climate policy (or lack thereof). Without a doubt, there is much left to be desired. Smaller movements to address climate change at a local or company level are necessary to lay the groundwork for action at the national level. Cities across the Midwest are developing, implementing, and following through on those climate action plans I mentioned earlier. Sure, some plans become exercises in consultant-produced shiny objects done more for signaling than as a true overarching strategy (the local government equivalent of greenwashing), many are actively expanding acquisition of electric vehicles for municipal fleets or ensuring that, whether through additive renewable energy resources or renewable energy credits, municipal energy is not sourced from fossil fuels. These are good steps! But progress is not uniform, and whether it is setting renewable portfolio standards on a national scale or achieving substantive, climate resilient infrastructure, it will be persistent political courage and will that determines our success in combating climate change.