By Anthony Flint, February 1, 2023

By Anthony Flint, March 17, 2023

In Cincinnati lately, good fortune extends well beyond the Bengals, the city’s football team, which has consistently been making the playoffs. The population is growing after years of decline, companies are increasingly interested thanks to its strategic location, and there’s even talk of southwestern Ohio becoming a climate haven.

But any resurgence in a postindustrial legacy city comes with downsides, as newly elected Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval has been discovering: the potential displacement of established residents, and affordability that can vanish all too quickly.

One of Pureval’s first moves was to collaborate with the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority to buy nearly 200 rental properties in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, outbidding more than a dozen institutional investors that have been snapping up homes to rent them out for high profits. That sent an important signal, Pureval said in an interview for the Land Matters podcast: transitioning neighborhoods will be protected from the worst outcomes of market forces in play in Cincinnati.

“These out-of-town institutional investors … have no interest, frankly, in the wellbeing of Cincinnati or their tenants, buying up cheap single-family homes, not doing anything to invest in them, but overnight doubling or tripling the rents,” he said, noting a parallel effort to enforce code violations at many properties. “If you’re going to exercise predatory behavior in our community, well, we’re not going to stand for it, and we’re coming after you.”

Pureval, the half-Indian, half-Tibetan son of first-generation Americans, said affordability and displacement were his biggest concerns as Cincinnati—along with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other cities hard hit by steep declines in manufacturing and population—gets a fresh look as a desirable location. Cincinnati scored in the top 10 of cities least impacted by heat, drought, and sea-level rise in a recent Moody’s report.

“Right now, we are living through, in real-time, a paradigm shift,” spurred on by the pandemic and concerns about climate change, he said. “The way we live, work, and play is just completely changing. Remote work is … altering our economy and lifestyle throughout the entire country but particularly here in the Midwest. What I am convinced of due to this paradigm shift is because of climate change, because of the rising cost of living on the coast, there will be an inward migration.”

But, he said, “We have to preserve the families and the legacy communities that have been here, in the first place. No city in the country has figured out a way to grow without displacing. The market factors, the economic factors are so profound and so hard to influence, and the city’s resources are so limited. It’s really, really difficult.”

Joining a chorus of others all around the U.S., Pureval also said he supports reforming zoning and addressing other regulatory barriers that hinder multi-family housing and mixed-use and transit-oriented development.

An edited version of this interview will appear in print and online as part of the Mayor’s Desk series, our interviews with innovative chief executives of cities from around the world.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The show in its entirety can also be viewed as a video at the Lincoln Institute’s YouTube channel.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval. Credit: © Amanda Rossmann – USA TODAY NETWORK.

By Anthony Flint, April 17, 2023

By many accounts, Costa Rica has been a unique Central American success story—“a beacon of Enlightenment” and “a world leader in democratic, sustainable, and inclusive economic growth,” according to the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz.

A nation of about 5 million people roughly the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica has been punching above its weight particularly in the realm of sustainability and climate action: a pioneer in eco-tourism; successful in getting nearly all of its power from renewable sources, including an enterprising use of hydro; and a leader in fighting deforestation and conserving land with its carbon-soaking rainforests.

The Land Matters podcast welcomed two special guests recently who know a thing or two about this country: Carlos Alvarado Quesada and Claudia Dobles Camargo, the former President and First Lady of Costa Rica. They are both in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area this year—she is a Loeb Fellow, part of a mid-career fellowship program based at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and he is a visiting professor of practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Also in the studio was Enrique Silva, vice president of programs at the Lincoln Institute, who oversees the organization’s research and activities globally, and has years of experience in and familiarity with Latin America.

The conversation, recorded at the Podcast Garage in Allston after a visit by the couple to the Lincoln Institute, included reflections on leadership and climate action, and what it’s been like to take a year to decompress after an eventful time in office, from 2018 to 2022.

Costa Rica has much to show the world when it comes to the implementation of targeted sustainability practices, Quesada said. “We’re not saying people have to do exactly the same [as we did], but we can say it’s possible, and it’s been done in a model that actually creates well-being and economic growth,” he said. “Back in the day, people would say it’s impossible—‘if you’re going to create protected areas, you’re going to destroy the economy.’ It turned out to be the other way around, it actually propelled the economy.”

After seeing big successes in the countryside, the interventions have turned to urban areas. “Costa Rica has done such an amazing job in nature-based solutions, not so much on urban sustainability,” said Dobles, noting the ambitious National Decarbonization Plan she launched with Quesada, which aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. “In order to decarbonize, we really needed to focus also on our urban agenda.”

A big task was reinvigorating public transit, starting with a new electric train that would have spanned the city of San Jose. Quesada’s successor shelved the $1.5 billion project, demonstrating the common mismatch between long-term projects and limited time in office. A pilot project to electrify buses was implemented, however, to rave reviews. The couple says they are hopeful the train will be revived.

“I know that this is eventually going to happen. Sometimes you have political setbacks,” said Quesada. “Your administration cannot own throughout time what’s going to happen, but you can plant positive seeds.”

Costa Rica has been nothing if not creative in addressing the many dilemmas inherent in climate action. Open-ore mining is banned, for example, but entrepreneurs figured out a way to extract lithium from recycled batteries.

“That’s very linked to the discussion of the just energy transition, where the jobs are going to come from, where the exports are going to come from. While there’s a huge opportunity for many developing countries which are rich and are endowed with minerals and metals . . . we need to address those complexities,” said Quesada.

Dobles added, “When we talk about decarbonization, we cannot exclude from that conversation, the inequality conversation. This is supposed to provide our possibilities of survival as humankind, but also it’s a possibility for a new type of social and economic development and growth.”

Reflecting on being in the land of Harvard, MIT, and Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, Dobles said she has been immersed in “the whole academic ecosystem that is happening here . . . just to be, again, in academia, sometimes just to receive information, not having the pressure of having the answers . . . . It’s been wonderful.”

“Being a head of state for four years of a country, it’s an experience that I’m currently unpacking still,” said Quesada. “I’m doing a little bit of writing on that, but you get to reflect a lot, because it’s a period of time you live very intensely. In our case, we were not only working with decarbonization, with the projects we mentioned, we [were also working] with the fiscal sustainability of the country. We had COVID. We had [the legalization of same-sex marriage].

“We tend to train ourselves for things that are outside of us, like methods, tools, knowledge,” he said. “There’s a part of it that has to do with training ourselves, our feelings, our habits, our framing, our thinking . . . to address those hard challenges.”

Carlos Alvarado Quesada served as the 48th President of the Republic of Costa Rica from 2018 to 2022, when his constitutionally limited term ended. He won the 2022 Planetary Leadership Award from the National Geographic Society for his actions to protect the ocean, and was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders from around the world. Before entering politics, he worked for Procter and Gamble, Latin America.

Claudia Dobles Camargo is an architect with extensive experience in urban mobility, affordable and social housing, community engagement, climate change, and fair transition. As First Lady, she was co-leader of the Costa Rica National Decarbonization Plan. Her architecture degree is from the University of Costa Rica, and she also studied in Japan, concentrating on a sustainable approach to architecture.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: San José, Costa Rica. Credit: Gianfranco Vivi via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

By Anthony Flint, August 3, 2023

Record-breaking heat, out-of-control wildfires, and eye-stinging smoke have made the impacts of climate change inescapable for millions of people this summer.

Heat, drought, high winds, and conditions on the ground are all making wildfires more intense, longer lasting, and more destructive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which notes that big wildfires require a number of factors to align, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris.

Containing the blazes is mostly a matter of land use management, says Canadian science journalist Edward Struzik, author of Firestorm: How Wildlife Will Shape Our Future and Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire, on this latest episode of the Land Matters podcast. The continual threat of fires also requires resilience-building techniques similar to those deployed to fend off floods and sea-level rise. “We have to learn to live with wildfire and the smoke that comes from wildfire. This isn’t going to go away,” said Struzik, a fellow at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. “There’s a number of different ways that we can handle it. . . . We can do more prescribed burning where it’s appropriate. We can restore our wetlands, which would create natural buffers on the landscape. We can invest in science that provides firefighters with better tools and predicts where fire is likely to burn.”

Wildfires have become bigger, more intense, longer lasting, and more destructive for several reasons. Fires have long been nature’s way of regenerating forests, but Struzik blames the current situation on land management practices dating back to at least the 19th century: farmers burning and slashing their land, and mining companies doing the same, just to get at the mineral resources underground. The draining of wetlands took away potentially fire-stopping buffers. “If you think about it, a firefighter’s best friend really is a wetland, a swamp, a bog, a fen, a marsh,” Struzik said.

“Once [a fire] hits a wetland, it really doesn’t have anything to burn because things are just too wet and moist. We’ve essentially eliminated all those natural fire barriers over time and it’s bigger than an area the size of California. Fire now basically has its own way once it gets going.”

After the establishment of the Forest Service, the policy of prescribed or controlled burns attempted to mimic nature, but the practice became politically risky because many fires deliberately set veer out of control. Much of today’s wilderness has become a worst-case-scenario mix of dense, older forests, with abundant dry fuel on the forest floor due to high temperatures—all subject to the cascading effects of high winds, blazing heat, and fire-induced storms featuring dry lightning.

“Wildfire can actually create its own thunderstorm because of the amount of heat and vapor that it sucks up . . . and it rises up just like what would happen normally in a thunderstorm, and you get what they call a dirty thunderstorm that almost never produces any rain, but shoots out lightning,” Struzik said. “A great example of this was the Fort McMurray fire in the oil sands of Northern Alberta in 2016, where . . . the fires created their own thunderstorm and shot out lightning 20 miles in advance of the fire front. That’s how much energy there was, and [it] created a cluster of fires 20 miles away from the front of the fire. Firefighters at that time were thinking, ‘How do you manage this?’”

“They have their prediction scenarios or forecasting scenarios, but when you have a thunderstorm created by a wildfire, and it’s shooting out lighting 20 miles away, you’ve got a new rule book coming into play, and everybody’s adjusting to this. Also, I think that the other big thing for them is that you can no longer put people on the ground or in the air in a situation like that because it’s essentially like a small to moderate size volcano that’s blowing up. That’s how much energy there is.”

Wildfires allow forests to thin out, spread seeds, and spur regrowth that provides food and habitat for wildlife. But many of those benefits are obliviated in today’s megafires, which burn so intensely they destroy the nutrients deep in the ground, leaving behind a desert-like landscape where nothing regrows. In addition, the degraded forest loses its ability to soak up moisture and keep the soil stable, resulting in disastrous post-fire floods. Without trees to help absorb heavy rainfall, water rushes straight to rivers.

“Say a fire tears through the mountainsides in Colorado, which has happened a number of times. . . . You have all that ash, all that carbon on the ground,” Struzik said. “The thunderstorm comes in—and we are having more extreme thunderstorms for a variety of reasons and record heavy rainfalls in these spots—and it sweeps through, and then it just collects all that carbon and soot, puts it into the river, and actually threatens our drinking water supplies.

“There’s a great example of this in Waterton Lakes National Park on the Montana border. There’s a waterfall that most tourists come to see called Cameron Falls. A year after the fire following a thunderstorm, that crystal-clear mountain water that descended over the falls turned absolutely black,” he added.

The apocalyptic scenarios and feedback loops are almost certain to continue. And many of the near-term solutions lie in land.

“We’re using 20th-century strategies to deal with the 21st-century paradigm for which we’re not prepared,” Struzik said. “We’ve got to start thinking about other strategies. We’ve got to invest a lot more in science and predicting where these fires are likely to start . . . [with] a better understanding of the landscape. Where are the refugia from fires? Those areas that are unlikely to burn—or those areas that will slow or stop a fire— we should start looking at those areas from a conservation point of view, [to] protect those areas so that we don’t lose these natural barriers.”

Edward Struzik has been writing about scientific and environmental issues for more than 30 years and completed both the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy and the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship. His 2015 book, Future Arctic, focuses on climate change in the Canadian Arctic and its impacts on the rest of the world. He is on the board of directors for the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, a citizens’ organization dedicated to the long-term environmental and social well-being of northern Canada and its peoples.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Forest fire, Penticton, BC, Canada. Credit:  cfarish via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

By Anthony Flint, October 31, 2023

Water in the West—one of the most enduring and confounding stories of human settlement anywhere around the world.

Jim Holway, who retired as director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy this summer, has spent more than 40 years helping to solve the puzzle of ensuring sustainable water resources in this increasingly arid region. In the latest Land Matters podcast, he describes the challenges ahead, and the kind of leadership—and serious, good-faith negotiation—it will take to establish a more secure water future.

With some places having their water restricted, and big reservoirs like Lake Mead drawing down to historically low levels, it has become increasingly clear that water from the Colorado River—distributed to nine states in the US and Mexico through a series of agreements and amendments hammered out since the 1920s—is no longer enough to meet the demands of a fast-growing population.

How did the region get to this point? “I’d say it was a combination of optimism, beginning with allocating more water [than would be available], and then it was just ignoring science for political reasons,” said Holway. “If I want to get my water project approved, it’s going to be a lot easier if I can convince people there’s enough water left for their project too. Even once we should have known better, we acted like we didn’t know better.”

The water allocations now have a structural deficit, Holway said, that is clear throughout the year-to-year ups and downs of drought and sufficient snowpack. Climate change is intensifying everything.

“We designed a hydrologic system for a physical reality that is changing on us, and the change in the level of heat is driving the system. More evaporation and more demand for agriculture, more demand in urban use—that heat is actually a more significant factor than precipitation. Whereas there is a lot of uncertainty about what the future precipitation changes will be in the Southwest, it’s very clear that it’s going to be hotter.”

While politicians debate climate science, Holway says, water and land managers know they have no choice but to prepare for the uncertain future that climate change will bring: “Droughts that cause inadequate supplies for historic uses, floods that exceed the infrastructure we’ve built to handle flooding, wildfires of much greater intensity and size, urban areas that are getting increasingly hot and leading to crisis situations in the middle of the summer—this is the reality of our future, and we need to adapt to deal with it.”

Building the capacity of local communities to integrate land use planning and the management of water resources has been the calling card of the Babbitt Center under Holway’s tenure, including using scenario planning techniques to map out future supply and demand conditions. Importantly, agriculture—which uses approximately three-quarters of Colorado River water—has increasingly been at the table, Holway said.

When asked to look to the future, Holway said, “It’s important for anyone doing this kind of work to find some way to sustain themselves. I suspect the thing that makes me most optimistic is when I look at the 20- and 30-year-olds getting involved . . . it seems that they really have an understanding of the challenges they’re inheriting.”

One of those challenges is developing the capacity to work together as a civilization to address water shortages in a more serious and straightforward manner, he said.

“When societies fail, it may look like it’s because of a flood, a drought, disease, or warfare. However, societies have survived those challenges before. Why do they not survive the next one? Typically, what we find is they have lost the ability to govern themselves.

“To me, that is where my main pessimism comes from. It isn’t our water challenge. It’s, will we come together? Will we make the necessary decisions we need to govern ourselves? That is our biggest challenge, and it’s what we’re doing particularly badly at the moment.”

Water, Holway said, “perhaps will help us rediscover our ability to come together and make collaborative decisions. There are very few things that humans see as critical to their survival [more than] a good water supply. That’s pretty clear and pretty compelling. Let’s hope it’s part of our path forward.”

Jim Holway served as director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy from its founding in 2017 until late 2023. He was elected to the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, directed the Western Lands and Communities program with the Sonoran Institute, and served as a professor of practice in sustainability at Arizona State University and assistant director at the Arizona Department of Water Resources. He has degrees from Cornell University and the University of North Carolina, and was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Jim Holway, founding director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Credit: Courtesy image.

By Anthony Flint, February 6, 2024

Some 150 heads of state, 195 countries, and a total of 85,000 participants engaged in the COP28 global climate summit in Dubai in December, which concluded with an appeal to triple renewable energy capacity and combat methane emissions, a goal to halt deforestation by 2030, an outline for a loss and damage fund, and the launch of a global stocktake to keep track of how nations are doing reducing carbon emissions.

Most of the headlines referred to a call at the close of COP28 for all nations to be focused on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Many had hoped for stronger language calling for the phasing out of oil and gas on a stricter timetable – and of course there was the fact that the summit itself was hosted by a region whose economy is fundamentally based on extracting and exporting fossil fuels. But it was the first time a COP declaration has specifically identified fossil fuels.

All of that could be fairly characterized as progress in the face of a planetary emergency. Still, 2023 was the hottest year on record, and current emissions are on track for a world that is 2.5 degrees warmer, well above the 1.5 degree Celsius goal set in the Paris Accords – the major international agreement to come out of the COP21 summit in 2015. Missing that target has contributed to more skepticism about COP, and the pledges and non-binding declarations that have followed, including some dashed hopes after COP26 in Glasgow two years ago.

Are these big summits what the world should be looking to? Are they designed to accomplish anything more than to keep the parties talking, taking stock, and keeping score on commitments? To break down the proceedings – and to consider progress that was made on other fronts, including land use and urban issues – this episode of the Land Matters podcast is devoted to a roundtable discussion with four Lincoln Institute staff members who were in Dubai: Amy Cotter and Patrick Welch from the climate strategies team, Anaclaudia Rossbach, who runs the Latin America program, and John Farner, the director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

“I gain a lot of encouragement from the prevailing understanding that these are systems and we can’t seek a single silver-bullet solution—we must embrace a multiplicity of solutions across different levels of government,” says Cotter. “But there’s both no time to waste and no single solution. The recognition of that, I hope, will break through analysis paralysis and finger-pointing.”

The next Conference of the Parties summit, COP29, will be hosted in December of this year in Azerbaijan, another petroleum state.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters  on  Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: A sculpture at COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Amy Cotter.