Back in the Bronze Age, when I was a graduate student, the American Economics Association invited me to present a paper at their annual meeting. At the time, being a nonconformist, I was struggling over whether or not to appear in a suit and tie. My Ph.D. adviser provided some excellent guidance. “I’m not going to tell you whether to wear a suit or not, but consider whether you want the audience to remember what you say or what you wear.” It was a helpful reminder that if one has a message to deliver, it is best to package it in a way that improves the chances that it will be received and understood. In the end, I wore the suit and tie, and I recorded a useful lesson in the sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle interplay of form and content.

From time to time, think tanks like the Lincoln Institute need to consider whether they are packaging content in a way that draws people to read and use it. Over the last year, we have taken a careful look at how we present and disseminate our research and policy analysis. We started in January 2015 with a newly reimagined Land Lines, designed to make the magazine more compelling to a broader audience. Our first redesigned issue featured a dramatic aerial photograph of the Colorado River Delta, where a “pulse flow” released from upstream dams in 2014 allowed water to flow down its dry old path to the Sea of Cortez for the first time in decades, stimulating efforts to restore the native ecosystem that had existed under different land use patterns in the river’s watershed. We also started hiring journalists to write compelling narratives that connected our research and policy analysis to the people whose lives would be improved by better land use practices.

The redesign of Land Lines and our Policy Focus Reports are a small part of a larger effort the Lincoln Institute is making to disseminate our formidable arsenal of research and ideas more widely. An ongoing public outreach effort, clear and crisp, will facilitate the impact we want our work to have on policy and on people. In August, we launched a multiyear campaign to promote municipal fiscal health as the foundation from which local governments can deliver the goods and services that define a high quality of life for residents. Our researchers, staff, and partners are working across disciplines to elevate this important issue, while building new, cross-cutting efforts to address climate change and resilience; developing state-of-the-art scenario planning tools; and probing the nexus of land policy and water, or of land use and transportation.

This month, we are taking another step to disseminate our ideas more effectively by introducing a new Lincoln Institute logo, tagline, and mission statement:

Finding answers in land: helping to solve global economic, social, and environmental challenges to improve the quality of life through creative approaches to the use, taxation, and stewardship of land.

The logo retains the Lincoln “L” within a symbolic outline of a land section, with a more modern, open design that invites new audiences to discover our work. The tagline and mission statement make explicit what has always been true: that good land policy can help address some of the most vexing global challenges, such as climate change or poverty and financial stress in the world’s cities.

We are not reinventing the Lincoln Institute, but aiming to introduce our work to broader audiences and to clarify the threads that connect seemingly disparate topics, such as the link between land conservation and climate change mitigation. Our “refresh” will culminate later this year, when we launch our redesigned website, with a format that allows us to convey new narratives about how land policy can shape a better future for billions of people.

This issue previews two important new books that upgrade our presentation of subjects we have been probing for decades. In A Good Tax, Joan Youngman makes a clear, strong case for the property tax—the most important and least understood source of revenue for local governments. This magisterial treatment of a difficult topic is rendered in lucid prose by the Lincoln Institute’s chair of Valuation and Taxation. The chapter on school finance, featured in this issue, defends the tax that people love to hate in service of a public good that defines the fortunes of future generations.

Nature and Cities—edited by George F. Thompson, Frederick R. Steiner, and Armando Carbonell, the Lincoln Institute’s chair of Planning and Urban Form—explores the economic, environmental, and public health benefits of ecological urban design and planning. With essays by New York City’s High Line designer James Corner and other leading landscape architects, planners, and architects around the world, Nature and Cities offers an erudite and visually captivating treatment of a topic that is urgent in the face of climate change and urban population growth.

As you will see, we will continue to serve our long-time partners and friends with rigorously researched and well-written content. But we also will expand the network of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners who will apply our research findings in ways that we can only imagine. Because in the end, our collective endeavor is to improve the lives of all who call this planet home. And we know that it all starts on land.

This feature is adapted from the introduction to Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, a compilation of essays and images by leading international landscape architects, architects, and planners, some of whose work is showcased here. The book is scheduled for publication in November 2016 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in association with the School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, and George F. Thompson Publishing.

Everything seems so clear from the air, where details do not get in the way. At an elevation of 33,000 feet (10,058 meters), we see the handiwork of our actions all over the ground below, as if the landscape were our reflecting mirror. As we know, landscapes do not lie; they are the embodiment of all that we do on Earth.

Some roads parallel rivers and valleys—no ingenuity there. Other roads converge into settlements like cattle paths leading to a water tank, or they may follow deer paths and other animal trails or topographic contours and soon resemble the organic majesty of a spider’s web. Picture El Greco’s (1541–1614) home town, Toledo, Spain, from the air: a kind of perfection in organic urban form.

Old North American prairie, largely untouched until two centuries ago, now bears rectangular grids of large-scale farms with no room for any vegetation besides the crops and a thin line of trees alongside riverine and creekside banks, looking like a token tithe to nature and wildlife. And 40-acre (16.1-hectare) center-pivot circles of  corn, soybeans, or alfalfa (the trifecta of corporate agriculture) look as if someone had tossed, in perfect symmetry, large half-dollars on the land. Resembling pavements of crops stretching as far as the eye can see, even from one state to another, all this handiwork is the result of a federal farm policy insanely out of balance with nature. No wonder the butterflies and countless other creatures and plants are struggling so mightily against such unnatural odds.

New sites of natural gas extraction have popped up so suddenly and pervasively that they now permeate much of the Great Plains and interior West of North America, as if enormous prairie dogs on steroids had  burrowed through these large swaths of land. It is Gulliver’s travels all over again. Meanwhile, open-pit mines generate impressive depressions in the ground, as if meteors had crashed from outer space. The pits’ glorious russet and red and golden and sand-colored hues contrast hard against surrounding terrain, as if the mines, too, were inscribed works of art, poor attempts at recreating a subterranean Roman coliseum or a mini-Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, the new and starkly white wind-powered turbines—some spanning 413 feet (126 meters) and towering 312 feet (85–95 meters) in the sky—appear as if a giant surgeon had administered stitches of varying lengths and shapes on the land and in the sea, even as untold numbers of birds die upon impact.

Towns and cities along the coasts cram hard against the adjacent sea, with few buffers to protect communities against a rising tide that likely will be at least three feet (.9 meter) higher a century from now. And the same condition holds true for those towns and cities that reside along rivers, large and small, that naturally want to ebb and flow like the tide, overrunning banks and streets alike from time to time. Even world-class cities such as Chicago, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto look like LEGO sets from above and bar graphs at eye-level, in which cars and trucks move about like busy ants, and trains slide like snakes along the concrete.

Deserts, long the forlorn outposts of biblical wilderness, are now bespeckled oases of new towns, cities, and resorts, each with homes nestled against aquamarine-blue swimming pools, as if pools are required for entrance into a neighborhood. Shimmering lakes are impounded by large-scale dams, the water evaporating into the dry, cloudless sky. A jigsaw puzzle of improbably green lawns is highlighted by extensive, even more preposterously verdant golf courses. One might believe that a new school of art called Landscape Cubism had gone awry on the land.

Yet there are the exceptional expanses of undeveloped land as well. Trails such as the Appalachian, Continental, Ice Age, Grande Randonnée, Greater Patagonian, Natchez, Pacific Crest, Te Araroa, and Tokai saunter along for great distances deep into the heart and soul of their respective countries. Forests stretch for thousands and thousands of square miles and kilometers, relieving a planet in dire need of new lungs in order to process the increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Still-intact watersheds and wetlands retain their natural place between land and water, providing incalculable value as a water supply for towns and cities downstream and as habitat for fisheries, insects, birds, and other wildlife. Contour farming thrives in harmony with the terrain and the life-giving principles of the Soil Conservation Act of 27 April 1935. And more cities boast integrated systems of parks, open spaces, and greenways, providing evidence that nature can return to the urban scene and enhance communities in biological and socioeconomic ways.[1]

The land tells us so much. And it is the role of landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and architecture to continue their pioneering ways, offering an ecological approach to the design, planning, and management of our varied landscapes—urban, suburban, rural, regional, social, and wild. It all begins on the ground, in nature and our communities, in the multiple ecologies and economies and cultures that encapsulate our home turf, wherever that may be. 

But, as we know, much of that ground is already urban, and that pervasive and expansive pattern of settlement by every account has no end in sight. So how can we do better? That scene and question are the focus of Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning. 

Even as land use may seem relatively clear and simple from the air, on the ground the picture grows more complicated, because of the unavoidable details. All aspects of life—human and natural intertwined, to varying degrees of success—appear before our very eyes, are heard by our ears, are felt by our skin and clothes by way of dew point, humidity, dry air, sunlight, evening breezes, and cool or warm temperatures. That is a lot of ground to comprehend, even within the limited scope of our senses.

Perhaps this view encompasses your backyard or city street; the one well from which you and your community draw water; a favorite gathering place; a beloved vacation spot; a scene ravaged by drought, flood, or fire; a place recovering from earthquake, cave-in, crime, or war. The imagination can transport us to any place we wish, but there is a bottom line to such inquiry. As you imagine or walk or ride or drive through that landscape around you, take it all in: every blade of grass that adorns your lawn or survives in the seam of a sidewalk; every field, common, or pasture that may be part of your everyday life; every hovel, condo, or mansion that gives you shelter; every tree, greenway, or park that embellishes your space; every economic entity and activity before you; every smell emanating from a bakery or foundry; every breath you take that, inevitably, is a respiratory cocktail of Earth’s natural elements (sand, pollen, and dust) and of all the human-induced chemicals too numerous to name.

Now that you have seen, heard, and felt that landscape, imagine that you are suddenly in charge of the scene. Your family, neighborhood, village, city,  region, and country are depending on you. First, to explain every aspect of what you perceive and to make some sense of it all—whether in a public setting or classroom or even corporate boardroom. And second, to envision, communicate, plan, and design improvements to what you see. Where would you begin? What would you do? Under what circumstances would or could you implement change? And how? Bottom-up or top-down? Diplomatically, democratically, or dictatorially? How will your vision, and its associated array of actions, be maintained, nurtured, and, perhaps, changed over time? And by whom and under what circumstances or authority?

This is the terrain that the landscape architect, architect, and planner inherit. So return to your “vision” of what your place wants to be, and consider a process by which change is sought and made through attention to three primary and overarching themes: the human need for clean water, ample and safe food, and humane shelter; the human need for economic well-being; and the natural need to take care of and heal the land, nature itself. How does one work with structure, purpose, and meaning to provide fulfillment, value, and public good? How does one add value to place, communities, cities, and regions by way of designs and plans that offer reprieve from single-purpose thinking and direct us to a sense of stewardship in its many manifestations? Importantly, how do we citizens, as part of increasingly large urban populations, reconnect with the natural world on which we are still dependent and become engaged in the benefits of ecology to biological and socioeconomic life?

Although nature is at the core of our being and every other life-form, plant, tree, soil, water, and rock on Earth, too often our human connections to nature take a backseat to all-too-prevalent interests of every kind that compete for social good and economic gain without the benefit of a land ethic, as espoused by Aldo Leopold.[2] When we look at the varied landscapes on the ground, questions arise as to how well we are actually doing as human beings in our care of this bountiful planet. 

If one travels far enough, long enough, one can still find longstanding human communities and cultures living intimately with the natural systems that surround them. Homes in the Amazon are still built on stilts to allow for the annual and seasonal fluctuations of the world’s second-longest river and world’s largest river basin. Homes in the American South have traditionally used the front and wraparound porch to offer shade and some relief from the noteworthy heat and humidity of the summer season, even as it allows for socialization from one neighbor’s house to another, as can be seen any day of the week in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where streets are lined by shotgun houses with shady front porches animated by conversation. Many Scandinavians still artfully use wood and the fine-art craft of notching to create some of the most energy-efficient cabin-homes anywhere, even as Nordic winters are among the most challenging on Earth. And, increasingly, LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) initiatives are helping transform the world’s new architecture into energy-efficient structures, from the geothermal-powered Aldo Leopold Center in Baraboo, Wisconsin, winner of a LEED Platinum Award, to the Shanghai Expo UBPA redevelopment, the first project outside North America to receive a LEED Neighborhood Development Platinum Award. 

Beyond LEED, landscape architects, planners, ecologists, and others designed the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES). Now administered by Green Building Certification Inc., SITES was envisioned as LEED for the outdoors. SITES was developed through pilot projects, including those undertaken by Andropogon, OLIN, and James Corner Field Operations. Pilot projects that received certifications include Andropogon’s Shoemaker Green on the University of Pennsylvania campus and the Phipps’ Center for Sustainable Landscapes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, OLIN’s Washington Canal Park in the District of Columbia, and James Corner Field Operations’ Woodland Discovery Playground at Shelby Farms in Memphis, Tennessee.

Yet with every passing generation that becomes ever more urban, the direct connections to nature and its bounties are reduced in spades. In too many cities around the world, nature is an afterthought. The following story is all too common:

Not very long ago, perhaps it was ten years or so, I read a piece in the newspaper that caught my attention: A boy from Harlem in New York City was being interviewed about his views on nature. He was quoted as saying that the blade of grass at his feet, the blade of grass that was emerging from a seam in the concrete sidewalk, was, to him, the embodiment of nature. It was all he needed from the natural world. Here was a sign of wildness along his city street, his home place. The blade of green grass, somehow managing to survive a half-mile away from Central Park to the south, provided that elementary presence of nature in the urban world that was his comfort zone.[3] 

Even in cities graced by larger representations of nature, these green spaces too often feel like isolated pockets for daily use or the occasional visitor, like small museums or zoos. This need not be the case; this need not be an unintended aspiration or consequence of ignorance of the multiple benefits that nature bestows when it is more fully integrated into the urban fabric of any town or city, whether in Jerusalem or Medellín or Stuttgart, Arkansas. We know how to do better. Landscape architects, architects, and planners have often led the way.

So how is it possible that towns, cities, and counties continue to ignore floodplains and sea level and willingly allow homeowners, developers, and resorts to build and rebuild in areas that contend regularly with chronic flooding and storm surges? How is it possible that a utility company can disobey the basics of common-sense planning and be permitted to construct a 564-mile (908-kilometers) natural gas pipeline on a route that will not only penetrate and divide critical habitat for rare and endangered species within existing national forests, but also overlay an area known for its extreme karst landscape and major sinkholes—thereby endangering the aquifer that lies beneath that path, a font of the greatest significance for the supply of fresh water for cities, towns, and farms throughout that region? How is it possible that mining companies are not required to close the loop and provide for the ecological restoration and reclamation of project areas as part of the economic deal? How is it possible that Rio de Janeiro was awarded the Games of the XXXI (Summer 2016) Olympiad with full knowledge that water events will be conducted in Guanabara Bay, in conditions at times equated with raw sewage? Obviously, those landscape players do not include the principles and practices of ecological design and planning as part of their respective worldview, and behold the consequences of their chosen ignorance and greed. 

The promise of ecological design and planning as it pertains to the health and welfare of our communities and cities everywhere is there for the taking, there for action, there for implementation, there for ongoing care. But too often we dismiss the obvious in how we citizens conceive of urban design and planning: we humans, by our very presence in nearly every sphere on Earth, are the essential players not only in the eternal dance with nature that is part of life and the human condition, but also the overall health and welfare of our home ground.

The essayists in Nature and Cities reveal that monumental work has been done and is ongoing in the ecological design and planning of our cities and communities at large. Because landscape architects, architects, and planners have done so repeatedly and throughout the world, we, as a society, can say with certainty that we know how to work collaboratively with all players to provide safe water, food, and shelter; reduce runoff into city streets; accommodate areas prone to flooding and storm surges; safely locate a utility corridor and design it in such a way that it becomes more than a single-purpose pathway for natural gas obtained by the unruly practice of fracking; design parking lots in commercial developments; provide citizens of the world’s cities with more than a sliver of grass in the seam of a sidewalk; restore and heal worn and contaminated sites; and provide joy and economic vitality through green design and infrastructure.

But even more progress needs to be achieved, no matter where we live, because the world is becoming more urban, and the consequences of climate change and of poverty, disease, conflict, and war are real. Once again, landscape architects, architects, and planners have been engaged historically in the process of understanding the natural world before us and its multiple manifestations on the ground, where details and interconnections matter. And, by way of their designs and plans, some of them centuries old, we have examples of finished work that has made this a better world. Landscape architects, architects, and planners have historically offered alternative visions to the failed practice of serendipity and single-purpose thinking that have, for too long, dominated the public and private view.

The contributing authors in Nature and Cities share real-life experiences and perspectives about where we can go in the future. They discuss and reveal their respective perspectives on the historical and contemporary practice of ecological design and planning in their own work and in the work of others. In many cases, this work involves award-winning and path-breaking designs and plans known throughout the world. And so reading their essays is an eye-opening experience, as we share and explore their thoughts about nature and cities, even as they offer reflective worldviews for design and planning. Collectively, the essays convey the great hope and promise of an ecological imperative in planning and urban design, of a tried-and-true approach by which nature and culture, science and art, come together in a united but creative and fluid way to make life better for all.

As is often the case, big projects, designs, and plans tend to dominate the professional view and the ability of design and planning to contribute toward this greater good. Historically, this has included a wide range of undertakings, as large as the design and construction of national parks and new cities, and as small as the private garden and urban mall. But, to most people, ecological design and planning remains an idea and approach not yet in the vernacular. That is where additional work needs to be done. And so here is another story of how far we can travel in but one generation, if landscape architects, architects, and planners are willing to seek work in new ways:

A woman from South Africa, a naturalized American citizen, was inspired by the healing powers of nature. She was well known and highly respected in the community where she lived. She was a quiet but steadfast leader in peeling back the built environment and integrating nature more fully into areas of everyday city life. Even after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she served the community and fellow cancer patients as if there would always be a tomorrow. When she died, she was remembered by a new serenity garden, adjacent to an existing park along a popular river. When the city organized a public dedication of the new park in her memory, an overflowing crowd of hundreds showed up on a hot, summer day.

The city manager was among the first to speak. Soon after welcoming everyone and conveying the purpose for the gathering, he began to share this message:

There is something called a “sense of place.” It is a term often hard to describe, but we certainly know a special place when we see it, be it a memorial garden such as this, an historic neighborhood or building or landscape, a community at large, or even a region. As public officials, we strive to cultivate a sense of place in many ways: by providing obvious services and an infrastructure intended to serve all, but also by making connections to the natural world. Even as we may live near one of the most popular and most visited national parks, we need nature to return to the city so that it becomes a daily experience, fully integrated into our fabric of being. Just as Anne-Marie would have wanted.[4]

We dare say that, 30 years ago, the phrase “sense of place” seemed like a pipe dream or even an illusion that had no place in our everyday lives, much less public policy. Yet today, as expressed by this 30-something city manager, the term has been fully realized and embraced. We even hear of teachers at every institutional level, proclaiming the need for and success of “place-based” education—place, of course, referring to the natural and human processes intertwined.

As the world becomes more urban, and even for those who remain tied to rural land, there is the need for “ecological design and planning” to be integrated into our collective being, into our everyday lives, in fundamental ways—just as a “sense of place” has so quickly taken hold during the preceding generation. Even as landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and architecture can continue to advance a “green” vision of a better world through specific projects, both great and small, public and private, it will require a move toward the vernacular, toward the common person, toward the common place, for that vision to be expressed, appreciated, accepted, and embraced more fully: to the point where ecological design and planning becomes an afterthought and, thus, an essential player in providing a healthy and healthful life for human beings and our compatriot life-forms. To heal Earth, our home ground, is to heal ourselves.

In many professional fields and human endeavors, a green vision for an ecological infrastructure has already been achieved. In places where this vision has been allowed to take hold, we see how an ecological approach fosters the necessary interplay between the biotic and abiotic. Establishing a watershed, for instance, as a primary unit of analysis, conservation, and concern has led to instructive work relating to combined sewer overflows (CSOs) within a hydrological system, offering citizens a safe and secure source of water. And it is easy to be impressed by the advances of rain gardens and reduced runoff and other creative solutions that mimic natural processes in biotic enrichment. The further integration of ecological, socioeconomic, and political capacities within specific communities and urban environments at large provides a tried-and-true pathway for landscape architects, architects, and planners to envision improvements at every scale and to implement them through community-based interaction and design.

Each author in Nature and Cities offers a sense of direction, purpose, and model for how landscape architecture, architecture, and planning can continue to move forward and be taken more seriously, to be engaged in community life at every scale and in every city and town in the world. This may well mean that a new generation of practitioners will need to explore pathways other than the traditional design and planning office and become instruments of enlightenment and change in occupations still very much in need of such care: notably, engineering, transportation, utilities, agriculture, resource industries, and commercial development—which, with too few exceptions, remain behind the times.

Imagine engineers embracing the tenets of ecological design and planning as they create roads, parking lots, interstates, impoundments, and other basic infrastructure. Imagine those engaged with municipal management as well as agricultural, industrial, transportation, and utility sectors abandoning single-purpose thinking and embracing something grander and more impactful in providing benefits than does a single endeavor. Imagine a young adult being able to swim in clean waters in Rio’s Guanabara Bay, a utility company finding a safe and not just the shortest path for the transfer of power and natural gas, a corporation building parking lots that percolate and repurpose runoff, a citizenry knowing that all human life begins and ends with nature, the source of all life. Imagine that.

George F. Thompson is the founder of George F. Thompson Publishing and the author and editor of seven books, including Ecological Design and Planning, with Frederick R. Steiner (John Wiley, 1997; 2007), and Landscape in America (Texas, 1995). Frederick R. Steiner is dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and holds the Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture. Armando Carbonell is chair of the department of Planning and Urban Form and a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Photograph by Iwan Baan, courtesy of James Corner Field Operations​

Nature and Cities Contributors

José M. Almiñana, Andropogon Associates, Philadelphia

Timothy Beatley, University of Virginia

James Corner, James Corner Field Operations, New York City, and the University of Pennsylvania

Susannah Drake, dland studio, Brooklyn

Carol Franklin, Andropogon Associates, Philadelphia

Kristina Hill, University of California-Berkeley

Nina-Marie Lister, Ryerson University

Elizabeth K. Meyer, University of Virginia

Forster Ndubisi, Texas A & M University

Laurie Olin, Olin, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the University of Pennsylvania

Kate Orff, SCAPE, New York City

Danilo Palazzo, University of Cincinnati (formerly Milan Polytechnic University)

Chris Reed, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Boston, and Harvard University

Anne W. Spirn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Charles Waldheim, Harvard University

Richard Weller, University of Pennsylvania

Kongjian Yu, Peking University and Turenscape, Beijing

References

[1] To which Yi-Fu Tuan, the world-renowned geographer responded, “Is it Andy Warhol who said that he is biased in favor of the city? Why? Well, one can find nature in the city, but one cannot find the city—not even a small token of it—in the midst of nature.” Personal email to George F. Thompson. October 23, 2015.

[2] Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

[3] Thompson, George F. 2010. “Our Place in the World: From Butte to Your Neck of the Woods.” Vernacular Architecture Forum. No. 123 (Spring 2010): 1 and 3–6; quoted 1.

[4] Thompson, George F. 2014. Notes at the official dedication of the Serenity Garden, Waynesboro, Virginia. June 2014. 

Across the globe, implementing the Paris climate agreement is expected to cost more than US$12 trillion over 25 years.

So it’s not surprising that much of the conversation since the agreement was finalized in December has been about climate finance. And one of the big topics in climate finance—particularly among city leaders—is “green bonds.”

But what exactly are green bonds, and why should local authorities care about them? Here’s a brief explanation of the major issues.

What Is a Green Bond?

A green bond is a type of debt instrument much like any other bond—except that the proceeds must be earmarked for projects that produce a positive environmental impact.

The first bonds marketed this way were issued by the European Investment Bank in 2007 and World Bank in 2008. Since then, other development banks, corporations, and governments have joined the trend. According to the Climate Bonds Initiative, a research group that tracks the market, total green-bond issuances shot up from US$3 billion in 2012 to about US$42 billion in 2015.

Local authorities represent a growing slice of this market. They see green bonds as one tool that could help pay for renewable energy, transit systems, and water infrastructure, among other things.

The U.S. state of Massachusetts sold the first municipal green bond in June of 2013, followed a few months later by the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. Other recent issuers include the city of Johannesburg; the transit authorities of New York City, Seattle, and London; and the water authority of Washington, DC.

Are Green Bonds Any Different Than Other Municipal Bonds?

Not really. The mechanics work the same as any other municipal bond issuance. The main difference is the environmental aims of whatever the city is using the bond proceeds to pay for.

In addition, green-bond issuers face some additional paperwork—essentially to prove to investors that their money is actually being used to benefit the environment.

To some degree, green bonds are a marketing tool. Labeling a bond that will pay for subway repairs as “green” makes it more appealing to investors. “The reality is a lot of cities are issuing green bonds, they’re just not calling them that,” says Jeremy Gorelick, who teaches municipal finance at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. city of Baltimore.

That may be true in advanced economies such as the United States, where a mature municipal-bond market has been functioning for more than a century. In the developing world, most cities are unable to issue bonds at all, and for a variety of reasons. In many countries, cities need to obtain legal authority from their national governments to issue a bond in the first place. They also have a lot of work to do in terms of establishing creditworthiness.

Gorelick, who is advising the city of Dakar, Senegal, on its efforts to issue its first municipal bond, recommends that cities in this situation not aim for the bond market right away. He says they can first try borrowing from central governments or their related municipal development funds before approaching development finance institutions for concessionary loans or commercial banks for market-rate debt. The idea is to build creditworthiness and the sort of transparent accounting that bond investors active in debt capital markets will demand.

Why Are Cities So Interested in Green Bonds?

There are many reasons. The key one is that investors really want green bonds in their portfolios right now. As a result, municipal issuers have seen sales of green bonds “oversubscribed”—a good problem for a city to have.

When Gothenburg issued its first green bonds in 2013, “we didn’t know if there would be any interest from investors,” says Magnus Borelius, Gothenburg’s head of treasury. Within 25 minutes, investors had placed €1.25 billion worth of orders—many times more than expected—and Gothenburg had to begin turning them away. “We were overwhelmed,” Borelius says.

Cities benefit from strong investor demand in a number of ways. Most important, it means they can attract new kinds of investors, diversifying the pool of people and institutions with an interest in their city. “It’s good to have a lot of investors know you have access to capital,” Borelius says. Since issuing green bonds, he adds,  “we’ve had increased contact with investors—they’re more interested in the city, and they’re coming to visit us.”

Strong investor demand “puts the issuer in an advantageous position,” says Lourdes Germán, a municipal finance expert with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Local authorities can use their leverage to increase the size of their offering, demand a longer payback period, or seek better pricing. While some cities have reported getting more favorable pricing on green bonds, Germán says issuers shouldn’t count on it. “It remains murky whether calling it ‘green’ gets better pricing,” she says.

What’s in It for Investors?

A growing number of investors want to see their money going toward environmentally sustainable projects. Some are motivated by the fight against climate change; others are simply hedging climate risks in their portfolios.

The result is that more pension funds and private-asset managers these days have some kind of mandate to think green. For example, last month, the Swedish public pension fund AP2 said it was allocating 1 percent of its €32 billion portfolio to green bonds. When you’re talking about huge institutional investors, commitments like this add up quickly.

On top of that, municipal bonds, at least in established markets like the U.S., are generally viewed as safe investments. So green bonds issued by cities are particularly desirable. “Institutional investors have a fiduciary duty and won’t invest in a product that won’t deliver a return,” says Justine Leigh-Bell, a senior manager at the Climate Bonds Initiative. “We have here an investment-grade product by blue-chip issuers where the risk is low.”

How Do You Know If a Bond Is “Green”?

There are no hard rules around that—which is a concern for both investors and environmentalists. However, the market for green bonds is evolving quickly, and some voluntary standards are emerging for issuers.

One, developed largely by large banks through the International Capital Market Association, is called the Green Bond Principles. Another was developed through the Climate Bonds Initiative and is known as the Climate Bonds Standard. The People’s Bank of China also recently released its own guidelines on green bonds.

Nobody has to use these standards, but there’s a strong push in the direction of doing so. “If I called my fire truck ‘green,’ investors might raise an eyebrow,” Germán says. “But it’s a two-sided market, so there’s some check and balance. An issuer will raise that money only if an investor believes it’s really for a green purpose.”

A growing number of municipal issuers are seeking out third-party opinions to validate their bonds’ “greenness.” That’s what Gothenburg does. The Swedish city also has created a “green bond framework” to be transparent with investors about what the city considers “green” and how it selects projects.

“It’s still early days in this market,” says Skye d’Almeida, who manages the sustainable infrastructure finance network for the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. “So it’s very important to avoid any ‘greenwashing’ scandals where cities say they issued a green bond and investors find out down the track that it wasn’t green. That would erode confidence in the market. So having some independent party verify and being very transparent about the use of the proceeds is something cities should be prepared to do.”

Does It Create a Lot of Extra Work or Cost for the City to Issue a Green Bond?

Some. Leigh-Bell puts the cost of an independent review at between US$10,000 andUS$50,000, depending on who is doing the review and other factors. That’s a rounding error on deals that are often valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Issuing green bonds can create extra work for city staff. Ahead of an issuance, there’s the need to scour the city’s capital investment plans for projects that qualify as green. Afterward, there’s work involved in tracking the use of proceeds and reporting that information to investors. According to d’Almeida, these jobs have the positive side effect of forcing people to work across their silos—finance staff must collaborate with transportation or environmental staff, for instance.

Borelius says that has been the case in Gothenburg. “The first question people ask me about green bonds is, ‘How much extra work is it?’” he says. “If you don’t put treasury people and sustainability people at the same table, it will be a lot of extra work. But if you’re issuing a green bond, you should have that in place.”

Johannesburg Mayor Mpho Parks Tau agrees that mobilizing around green bonds has paid organizational dividends. Asked recently if labeling bonds “green” is mostly about marketing, the mayor responded that the exercise has been useful for aligning local government as an institution around his environmental agenda. “We are able to say to the institution, actually, the bulk of our capital program is going to be about sustainability.”

Christopher Swope is managing editor of Citiscope.

Image credit: Dennis Tarnay, Jr. / Alamy

This article originally appeared at Citiscope.org. Citiscope is a nonprofit news outlet that covers innovations in cities around the world. More at Citiscope.org.

This article is adapted from Buy-in for Buyouts: The Case for Managed Retreat from Flood Zones, a Policy Focus Report to be published in September 2016 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in conjunction with Regional Plan Association.

Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy cost the New York metropolitan area an unprecedented number of lives and properties. In the span of 14 months, between August 2011 and October 2012, the storms killed 83 residents and caused $80 billion of damage in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. More than $60 billion in recovery funding was allocated to local governments, home owners, and facilitators to repair roads and seawalls; elevate, secure, or acquire buildings; restore dunes and wetlands; and reconstruct communities. 

The hurricanes generated a regional dialogue about how to prepare for and respond to extreme weather events. These conversations led to state-of-the-art, government-sponsored design competitions such as Rebuild by Design. And at the federal level, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) conducted the two-year, $19.5 million North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study, which focused on how to protect Northeast residents from hurricanes. 

Yet nearly five years later—after recovery efforts have been completed and appropriate programs implemented—many communities in the region still could not withstand the surge levels of another Sandy or the riverine flooding of another Irene. And by 2050, the number of residents vulnerable to flooding in the region will likely double to 2 million people, due to rising sea levels, the increasing frequency and magnitude of storms, and steady population growth. One third of the victims will be socially vulnerable. 

The Case for Buyouts

Rebuilding and restoring are the most common and popular adaptation tools for strengthening community resilience in the face of climate change, but the strategy that most effectively eliminates risk is managed retreat through the use of buyout programs. Yet, because of the social and political complexity of managed retreat, governments and communities across the United States have largely dismissed it as an adaptation strategy. 

Typically funded by federal or state dollars and managed at the state or county levels, buyout programs are designed to provide a mechanism for residents to sell their homes and move to safer locations if they no longer want to live in high-risk flood zones. New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut all employed buyout programs on a limited scale following Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy, but too often this approach was considered controversial even for the hardest hit areas.

Indeed, managed retreat poses considerable challenges. For home owners, the decision to leave a community can be traumatic, especially if adequate and affordable housing is hard to find nearby. For municipalities, the loss of tax revenue from bought-out properties can have a serious impact on the local budget. On a higher level, urban planning’s dubious history of relocating low-income communities, ostensibly for the greater good, stands as a reminder of how well-intentioned, even necessary measures such as managed retreat can have disproportionate negative impacts if they are not carefully considered in close consultation with residents. 

But if these problems are carefully considered during the design and implementation process, the benefits of buyouts can outweigh the risks. Unlike other adaptation measures, retreat is a one-time investment that requires no further action beyond providing relocation assistance to participants and protecting the natural landscape left behind. Managed retreat also has the potential to create synergies with other resilience and adaptation strategies. Since development is not permitted on acquired land, buyouts can be used to implement projects such as sea wall construction, wetlands restoration, and many other engineered and nature-based resilience measures. Residents can forge new beginnings on safer ground and help create public amenities by allowing for the acquisition of homes in flood-prone areas and restoration of the land to natural floodplain functions.

While the promise of buyouts is great—yielding 100 percent risk reduction, a greater return on public investment, and other benefits to communities and habitats—they have attracted only $750 million of the billions in federal aid allocated for resilience and recovery in the New York metropolitan region. The vast majority of recovery efforts have focused on more popular adaptation measures.

Buyouts in the New York Metropolitan Region

This article highlights the experience of three cities in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey that adopted buyout programs after suffering major property loss from Hurricane Irene or Superstorm Sandy. The case studies demonstrate that buyout programs are a useful tool for moving residents in flood zones out of harm’s way, but they also illustrate the limitations of current programs. 

Buyout Programs in the New York Region

NY Rising
New York State established the New York Rising Buyout and Acquisition Programs (NY Rising) in order to address the damage caused by hurricanes Irene and Sandy as well as Tropical Storm Lee between 2011 and 2013. In a handful of designated “enhanced buyout areas,” including Oakwood Beach on Staten Island, home owners were offered the pre-storm value of their homes, plus incentives for group participation to prevent the so-called “checkerboarding” of bought-out properties. 

Blue Acres
The Blue Acres program, run by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, predates hurricanes Irene and Sandy, but it has benefited from the funding made available after those storms. In recent years, the program has mainly targeted neighborhoods in Sayreville and Woodbridge, and identified individual properties or clusters of properties that experienced repetitive or severe repetitive losses.

Other Federally Funded Programs
In many cases, buyout programs are administered on the local level and funded largely through federal grant programs such as FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) and the USDA’s Emergency Watershed Protection Floodplain Easement Program (EWP-FPE). Typically, federal grants for buyouts require a local funding match of 25 percent.

Oakwood Beach, New York

Oakwood Beach is located on the central part of Staten Island’s South Shore. The lowest-lying portion of the neighborhood is situated next to the marshes of Great Kills Park. The most serious flood risks come from storm surge off the Raritan Bay and Lower New York Harbor. Additionally, sections of the neighborhood experience nuisance flooding following even modest rainfall. Along with the neighboring upland community of Oakwood, Oakwood Beach has a population of 22,000, and nearly 3,000 residents live in current FEMA Special Flood Hazard Zones. The number of people within high-risk flood zones is expected to increase nearly 150 percent, to 7,300 by 2050. 

Oakwood Beach is a middle-class community with a median annual household income of $89,000. The neighborhood is 31 percent low-to-moderate income, 16 percent nonwhite, and 69 percent owner-occupied. The neighborhood was largely developed in the 1960s and 1970s; nearly half its residents have lived in the community for more than 25 years. In general, the homes built closer to the water are smaller and cheaper than those located farther upland. Single-family homes dominate the neighborhood, but there are a handful of apartment buildings inland.

Hurricane Sandy severely impacted Oakwood Beach. The storm surge overtopped the boulevard that runs along the coast and damaged the berm between the neighborhood and the Atlantic Ocean. The surge inundation was exacerbated by the floodwaters trapped within the “bowl” topography of the South Shore (SIRR 2013). In Oakwood Beach, some homes were swept off their foundations; others were flattened. Staten Island as a whole was among the hardest hit areas, with 23 storm-related deaths in the borough (SIRR 2013; Koslov 2014). Prior to Sandy, Oakwood Beach withstood several other historic floods, including intense inundation from a nor’easter in 1992 and flooding from Hurricane Irene in 2011 (Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee 2015; Koslov 2014). After the 1992 storm, residents organized a Flood Victims’ Committee to petition for better flood protection from the state and federal government. Although the USACE somewhat addressed their concerns by constructing a berm, it was not completed until ten years after the nor’easter (Koslov 2014).

Building on their experience organizing for flood protection in the 1990s, Oakwood Beach residents moved quickly to plan their recovery after Hurricane Sandy. At an early community meeting devoted to immediate disaster response and aid, one organizer asked if residents would support a buyout program. Nearly all community members in attendance said yes. Residents then formed the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee, which began to draft an application for a state buyout. The committee conducted outreach to gauge interest and provided information to residents about what a buyout program might entail. The committee collected signatures from nearly all the neighborhood’s residents to indicate their interest (Lavey 2014). Additionally, committee members surveyed residents about where they felt safe living within the neighborhood, in order to generate maps of priority acquisition areas. 

This mapping effort is a powerful tool for communities organizing to receive buyouts. However, some populations that are considering buyouts are settling in marginal flood-prone areas because they have suffered government-imposed relocations and disinvestments in the past. If buyout program plans are not community-driven, they risk continuing this pattern of marginalization. As we observed in post-Katrina New Orleans, residents understandably opposed buyout programs proposed by outside planners who hadn’t consulted with the local population. By contrast, Oakwood Beach residents collaboratively created their own “green dot” maps to convey their goals for a buyout program and to confirm that they did not want redevelopment in their flood-prone area. 

The NY Rising Program heeded residents’ requests and launched a buyout program for Oakwood Beach. As of June 2015, nearly 99 percent of the neighborhood’s residents have participated. The state plans to purchase 326 properties, an acquisition process that will be completed in 2016. As of February 2015, the state owned 296 properties and had demolished 60 (Rush 2015; Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery 2015). 

The relative success of Oakwood Beach’s buyout program is not surprising considering the fiscal context. Factoring in the projected sea level rise by 2050, a single 100-year flood event could cause $216 million of damage across 1,837 properties, and 830 would have to be demolished. As summarized in table 1 (p. 32), a buyout of only those 830 properties would save community residents $817,000 per year in flood insurance premiums and an annualized average of $5.7 million in damages and dislocation costs. In terms of the potential costs to communities, Oakwood Beach benefits from being only one neighborhood in a very large city. The loss in tax revenue is quite negligible in the context of New York City’s $75 billion budget.

Wayne, New Jersey

Wayne is a township of 55,000 people in the outer ring of northern New Jersey suburbs. Twenty percent of households are low-to-moderate income, 20 percent of residents are nonwhite, and 80 percent are home owners. The town is landlocked but lies within the Passaic River Basin. Approximately 12 miles of Wayne’s western border is formed by the Pompton River, which has a history of flooding. Additionally, the township has several lakes and streams with development encroaching on flood zones. Approximately 5,400 people (nearly 10 percent of the total population) currently live in Special Flood Hazard Areas. Wayne is the wealthiest of the case studies, but the town has experienced the slowest property value growth since 2000. FEMA has provided $6.9 million in individual assistance to Wayne home owners since 2007, and 15 percent of registrants occupy repetitive-loss properties.

Wayne has experienced severe flooding since colonial times. The most severe flood to impact the entire Passaic River Basin occurred in 1903. Since then, several major floods have occurred each decade. Although the USACE began plans to reduce flooding in the Passaic River Basin in 1936, a comprehensive plan for the area has yet to be implemented.

The first buyouts in the Passaic River Basin began in 1995, after the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) formed its Blue Acres Program. They have continued through various funding sources, including NJDEP, FEMA, and open space taxes, in the case of municipalities in Morris County. However, Wayne was not included in the first round of buyouts through the Blue Acres Program in the late 1990s. As a result, municipal officials approached the state about funding the town, which led to several other programs. In 2005, the NJDEP and USACE identified the Hoffman Grove neighborhood in Wayne as a priority area for buyout funding (USACE 2005). A series of allocations since 2005, including additional funding after hurricanes Irene and Sandy, allowed for the purchase and removal of 96 homes in the Hoffman Grove neighborhood. FEMA was the primary source of funding for these purchases; the Blue Acres Program provided the nonfederal match. Despite these significant subsidies, news sources reported that “there is no immediate funding to buy and raze the houses that are left standing” (McGrath 2011). Nevertheless, all but 29 homes in this neighborhood have now been purchased and removed.

In May 2015, the USACE, together with NJDEP, released a follow-up to that 2005 study and identified 27 additional properties within Hoffman Grove as priorities for acquisition. Municipal officials in Wayne are now working to identify willing residents in order to move the program forward. Once these buyouts are complete, the entirety of the Hoffman Grove neighborhood will return to a floodplain.

The buyout programs in Wayne more closely resemble the FEMA buyout programs that began in the 1990s in response to the Great Flood of 1993, given Wayne’s vulnerability to seasonal and storm-related riverine flooding. Buyouts have undergone greater testing in riverine settings, leading to simpler program designs. Additionally, lower property values in inland riverine areas make it possible for buyout programs to purchase a greater number of homes. (Following disasters, property values of riverine flood properties are less resilient than coastal property values.)

The fiscal impact analysis for Wayne reveals that, after the acquisition of 96 Hoffman Grove properties, the township has a relatively small number of properties vulnerable to severe flooding compared to the other case studies. Even so, a 100-year flood event could still severely damage 127 homes, costing $25 million, as shown in table 1 (p. 32). It is worth noting that applying Wayne’s buyout program to the remaining most vulnerable properties may lead to an average of $840,000 in lost tax revenues per year. 

Milford, Connecticut

Milford is a coastal city of 52,000 people, midway between Bridgeport and New Haven on Long Island Sound. Milford has the longest coastline of any town in Connecticut (14 miles) plus two significant rivers, the Wepawaug and Housatonic, leaving residents vulnerable to both coastal and riparian flooding. Oceanfront property is one of Milford’s most prized amenities, and the town has more waterfront homes than any other case study in this article. Currently, there are 8,100 Milford residents in the 100-year flood zone, with a 26 percent increase projected by 2050. Milford also has the most repetitive-loss properties of any municipality in Connecticut. Since 2007, Milford residents have made up 20 percent of registrants in FEMA’s individual assistance program; FEMA awarded them $3.5 million. The town is 25 percent low-to-moderate income, 15 percent nonwhite, and overwhelmingly owner-occupied.

Milford’s own analysis confirmed the city’s extreme vulnerability. A Category 2 hurricane has the potential to inundate more than 2,000 properties, including 35 city facilities. More than 1,500 homes were damaged by Irene and Sandy, over 200 severely (Daley 2014). An excess of $60 million in flood insurance claims were paid to Milford residents in 2011 and 2012 (City of Milford 2015). A year after Sandy, entire streets and dozens of homes remained empty, while many others were elevated on piles and rebuilt. As in many areas damaged by Sandy, government funding came slowly, which retarded recovery (Zaretsky 2013). An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 homes in the city may still need to be elevated to satisfy building code requirements (Buffa 2013).

The primary strategies for combating flood risk in Milford have included beach nourishment projects, building retrofits and elevations, revetments, jetties, and groins. The city’s 2013 Hazard Mitigation Plan outlined over $14.4 million in flood mitigation projects, including elevating structures, protecting or upgrading critical infrastructure such as the wastewater treatment plant, and replenishing dunes (City of Milford 2013). The highest-priority projects were neighborhood drainage systems and catch basins. Due to lack of funding, however, many proposed projects either stalled or have not begun. 

The USACE evaluated the coastline of Milford for the North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study and found that the implementation of structural measures, like beach fill or dune projects, may be limited due to space constraints even in areas where these approaches might normally be most cost effective. If these measures are not applicable, flood proofing, and even acquisition and relocation, might be the most economical long-term strategies (USACE 2015). These challenges are shared by many highly developed areas along the eastern Atlantic coast. Buyouts can be difficult to secure in the short term, and structural solutions do not effectively reduce risk. 

Yet buyouts have received some attention from the city’s residents. FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant funds were used to buy several properties. Additionally, Milford has received $1.4 million from the USDA Floodplain Easement Program to buy at-risk properties (USDA n.d.). Despite available funding, however, the programs received only seven applicants in 2013. Furthermore, the city’s official position was “unenthusiastic” (Spiegel 2013). Milford stakeholders interviewed for this report cited concerns over the loss of the municipal tax base as the primary cause of resistance to buyouts, as coastal property owners pay the highest property taxes.

From the state’s perspective, Milford presented a promising case for a buyout program since many of the repetitive-loss properties were adjacent to the Silver Sands State Park, and acquired parcels could be incorporated into the park. Stakeholders indicated that positive alternative models for development are needed to encourage participation in buyout programs. The fiscal analysis performed for this study reveals that, while buyouts would impact property taxes, the effects would not be as severe as perceived by municipal officials. As a percentage of the most recent budget, buyouts of the most vulnerable properties would result in only a 1.36 percent loss in revenue, as indicated in table 1 (p. 32). 

Milford’s vulnerable properties have the highest average value among the case studies. Factoring in 2050 sea level rise projections, Milford’s most vulnerable homes—those that could suffer over 50 percent damage—could face $204 million in damage and dislocation costs over the next 100 years. Relocating home owners from just these properties that are most at risk could save $435,000 in annual flood insurance premiums. 

Conclusion

Buyout programs have long been avoided in public dialogue. Yet when weighed against the magnitude of risk faced by some U.S. coastal and riverine communities, they can be a viable and effective way to enable retreat from flood zones. As tools to preserve communities and strengthen resilience, they deserve serious consideration.

The three case studies highlight both the potential value of buyout programs and the political, social, and economic challenges of implementing them. Many factors contributed to the relative success of buyout participation in Oakwood Beach and Wayne and to the failure in Milford. The timing of the program, the level of program engagement with residents, the attachment to place, and the availability or lack of alternatives all played a role. In order to meet the needs of residents and municipalities, we must rethink the goals, strategies, and time frame of buyout programs, improve the administration of funding, reform the planning process, and design minimally disruptive programs. 

For an in-depth exploration of managed retreat in the New York metropolitan region, see the forthcoming Policy Focus Report, Buy-in for Buyouts: The Case for Managed Retreat from Flood Zones, to be published in September 2016 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in conjunction with Regional Plan Association.

Robert Freudenberg is director of Energy and Environment at Regional Plan Association (RPA), where Ellis Calvin is an associate planner in the same department. Laura Tolkoff is a former senior planner for Energy and Environment, and Dare Brawley is a former research analyst at RPA.

Photograph: Tom Pioppo/FEMA (2011)

References

Buffa, Denise. 2013. “Storm-Battered Shoreline Gets a Lift, One House at a Time.” Hartford Courant. August 3. http://articles.courant.com/2013-08-03/news/hc-houselifter-20130803_1_houses-milford-contractor-coastline.

City of Milford. 2015. “Flood Insurance Claims Paid to Milford Residents by Year.”

Daley, Beth. 2014. “Milford, East Haven Top Connecticut in Costly Flood-Prone Homes.” New Haven Register. March 21. http://www.nhregister.com/general-news/20140321/milfordeast-haven-top-connecticut-in-costly-flood-prone-homes.

Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. 2015. “Notice of Change of Use of Acquisition Properties by NY Rising.” New York.

Koslov, Liz. 2014. “Fighting for Retreat after Sandy: The Ocean Breeze Buyout Tent on Staten Island.” Metropolitics. April 23. http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Fighting-for-Retreat-afterSandy.html.

Lavey, Nate. 2014. “Retreat from the Water’s Edge.” The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hurricane-sandy-retreat-waters-edge.

McGrath, Matthew. 2011. “Hoffman Grove is More Wilderness than Neighborhood.” NorthJersey.com. December 30. http://www.northjersey.com/news/wayne-neighborhood-surrendering-to-the-river-1.276454.

Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee. 2015. “About Us.” http://foxbeach165.com/about-us/.

Rush, Elizabeth. 2015. “Leaving the Sea: Staten Islanders Experiment with Managed Retreat.” Urban Omnibus. http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/02/leaving-the-sea-staten-islanders-experiment-with-managed-retreat/.

Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR). 2013. “A Stronger, More Resilient New York.” City of New York. http://www.nyc.gov/html/sirr/html/report/report.shtml.

Spiegel, Jan Ellen. 2013. “Despite Storms, Few Coastal Homeowners are Open to Buyouts.” Connecticut Mirror. September 16. http://ctmirror.org/2013/09/16/despite-storms-few-coastalhomeowners-are-open-buyouts/.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). 2005. “Passaic River Floodway Buyout Study Limited Update: Final Report and Environmental Assessment.”

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 2015b. “North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study: Main Report.”

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). n.d. “Emergency Watershed Protection Program — Floodplain Easement Option.” http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail//?cid=nrcs143_008225.

Zaretsky, Mark. 2013. “1 Year After Superstorm Sandy, Recovery Moves Slowly on Connecticut Shore.” New Haven Register. October 26. http://www.nhregister.com/generalnews/20131026/1-year-after-super-storm-sandy-recovery-moves-slowly-on-connecticut-shore.

Climate-related impacts vary across regions, affecting communities economically, socially, and environmentally. While all regions of the United States are expected to experience temperature increases, the eight states located between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges are in a region forecast to be hard-hit by a variety of climate impacts that may expose vulnerabilities different from those in other U.S. regions. Western communities also face an uphill battle when attempting to plan for these future challenges.

Given the significant implications associated with a changing climate in the Intermountain West, this article takes a closer look at some innovations and tools designed to help communities plan and prepare for the uncertainty and risk attributed to a changing climate, and to increase community resilience.

The Intermountain West

Characterized by its scenic beauty, wide open spaces, abundant wildlife, mild climate, and countless recreational opportunities, the Intermountain West encompasses urban, rural, and amenity communities situated within large-scale intact open lands. The region’s eight mountain states—Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—are home to 22 million people, approximately 8 percent of the total U.S. population. Western cities are generally in arid or semi-arid environments, and although the footprints of some urban centers are large, the built environment of the major cities is decidedly dense and largely concentrated in megaregions such as the Arizona Sun Corridor and Colorado Front Range.

The vast expanses of open space between metropolitan centers have intrinsic economic, cultural, and biological value. More than half the region’s land is in public ownership and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (figure 1). In mountainous regions, some counties are 80 percent publicly owned, and in states like Arizona and Nevada the land is more than 90 percent publicly owned. Tribal lands make up a large part of the region, and state trust lands cover approximately 46 million acres in both rural and urban areas. One of the most extensive land uses in the region is agriculture, which includes ranching and other agricultural services.

Growth and Change

Over the past few decades, the West has experienced dramatic population growth as communities shift away from resource extractive industries such as agriculture, forestry, and mining and instead attract amenity-seeking retirees and telecommuters, as well as new professional businesses, tourism, construction, and consumer service industries (Winkler et al. 2007).

The high rate of urban growth has changed both the demographic and economic make-up of the West and also the allocation of resources. Land that was once used for grazing and agriculture has transitioned to residential and commercial uses. The proliferation of housing and industry requires the development of more energy and water resources to accommodate the growing population. Many western communities are dependent on the Colorado River, which serves the water supply needs of 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico. More than 70 percent of this water is used to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland. In addition to natural resource changes, the increase in growth has caused an expansion of housing in and near forests, an area known as the wildland urban interface, to take advantage of the West’s natural amenities.

However, the changes in the region are not only attributable to growth; the climate is also changing. Since the 1880s, scientists have been measuring the Earth’s surface temperature at thousands of locations, taking into account instrument deviations and local temperature factors such as urban heat islands. The analysis of this data shows that the Earth’s average temperature has increased by more than 1.4° over the past 100 years, with much of this increase experienced over the past 35 years, and it is evident that the temperature is continuing to rise.

Although the temperature changes appear to be marginal, they have significant impacts on local climate. For example, winters are now shorter and milder, snow and ice cover are decreasing, heat waves are becoming more frequent, and many plant and animal species are moving to cooler or higher altitudes to escape the warmer weather.

Although climate change is a highly complex issue that varies from region to region, the following impacts have been identified as overarching changes that will occur because of rising temperatures in the West:

• higher frequency of prolonged heat waves and drought;
• increased number and severity of forest fires;
• biodiversity changes, including the severity of disease outbreaks and other disturbances;
• prolonged and wider impacts of vector-borne disease; and
• damage to infrastructure due to unexpected and extreme weather events.

Changes are already in progress. There have been widespread temperature-related reductions in snowpack over the last 50 years, leading to changes in the seasonal timing of river runoff. Feng and Hu (2007) have demonstrated that the dates of peak snow accumulation and peak snowmelt runoff are occurring 10 to 40 days earlier than in previous years. The Colorado River is especially vulnerable, often receiving a large portion of its water from a hydrological system dependent on snowmelt precipitation from three basin states: Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

Precipitation patterns also are changing and becoming more variable. Drought is becoming more prolonged along with the frequency and intensity of heavy downpours. Large wildfires are more frequent, and the fire season is getting longer (figure 2). Wildfires burn twice as much land area each year as they did 40 years ago with a burn season two and half months longer than 40 years ago (Climate Central 2012).

As the climate becomes increasingly variable and shifts further and further from the relative stability experienced by humankind to date, the resulting changes will make communities more vulnerable and may put their health and livelihood at risk. Even one season of drought can have dramatic repercussions, notably higher basic food prices that put considerable strain on vulnerable populations including the elderly and financially disadvantaged. Increasing temperatures, prolonged drought, and incidences of wildfire and biodiversity changes due to migration of invasive species play a significant role in the accelerating transformation of the landscape. With so many effects felt at the community scale, local governments have an important role to play in planning for intensifying climate changes.

Planning for Change

Climate action occurs at multiple levels of governance and in a variety of different capacities. The federal government plays a significant role in responding to large-scale disasters that affect multiple states, such as the recent Hurricane Sandy. Regulatory federal actions that coincide with climate change, such as vehicle fuel efficiency standards or proposals for a national carbon tax, apply to the entire population. At the same time, state governments and regional groups are implementing regional strategies such as cap-and-trade systems and multijurisdictional transportation planning projects.

In terms of effective action on the ground, local governments are most suited to tackle local impacts and planning efforts relating to the issue of climate change. They are in a prime position to create comprehensive strategies that directly alter city functions to support mitigation and adaptation efforts. Local action plays an extensive role as city governments have direct authority over essential functions such as waste management, public transportation, public works, and facility management, as well as land use and zoning. For example, Boulder County recently adopted its Climate Change Preparedness Plan to help local residents and communities prepare for changing environmental conditions. This plan identifies local impacts, explores how these impacts will affect resource management, and outlines opportunities for adaptation planning.

The Context for Climate Planning in the West

Western Lands and Communities, a joint venture of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Sonoran Institute, has developed a large body of resources and reports to gain a better understanding of the needs and challenges facing western communities (Carter 2008; Richards 2009; Bark 2009; Metz and Below 2009). The seminal report, Planning for Climate Change in the West, identifies key barriers to implementing local climate action policies (Carter and Culp 2010). A review of these reports, along with interviews with western sustainability directors, revealed three key challenges associated with climate action:

• political context;
• communication of multiple values and beliefs; and
• lack of funding and resources.

Climate change can be a politically polarizing topic in the West. The clash of multiple viewpoints creates barriers in terms of building political support and conducting effective educational outreach, thus reducing the potential for civic engagement and limiting capacity for collective action in pursuit of common interests. Long-held cultural beliefs about limiting the role of government and protecting private property and citizens’ rights contribute to the resistance to zoning and other policies that would change land use patterns or regulate growth.

Without the backing of significant decision makers, such as the mayor or city manager, or strong support from the municipal council, moving climate action forward can be a difficult proposition. There are also internal communication obstacles in bringing different city departments together to discuss local climate change impacts and the best approach to work collaboratively to ensure that the programs and policies address the adverse impacts effectively.

With local governments scrambling to accommodate shortfalls related to the recent recession, cities lack the financial resources needed to invest in current climate action in order to avoid the high cost of future climate impacts. Often, communities discount future impacts, which place the burden and expense of climate planning (or inaction) onto future generations. Dealing with rapid population growth and fiscal pressures to provide infrastructure makes it increasingly difficult to obtain funding to underwrite climate planning. Even communities that adopt climate plans may encounter obstacles in implementing those plans. Some communities may be overwhelmed by the task of deciphering climate science, and many are unfamiliar with policies and actions necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Unlocking Climate Action in the West

While some local governments in the Intermountain West, such as Salt Lake City, Flagstaff, Tucson, Denver, Las Vegas and Boulder County, are making concerted and laudatory efforts to address climate change, they represent a small sampling of the region. Overall, the West is behind the curve on implementation efforts to adapt to climate change and create communities that are more resilient.

However, the West is feeling the heat, literally and figuratively. After a summer of record temperatures, raging wildfires, and crippling drought, a large and growing majority of Americans believe that global warming is affecting weather patterns. They understand that droughts and heat waves are becoming more common and the weather is becoming increasingly volatile (Leiserowitz 2012). One of the main challenges facing communities is how to integrate new information about the risks of climate change into existing planning frameworks in order to plan effectively for an uncertain future.

Tools for Change

To help address the challenges associated with climate action, there are many tools that western communities can use to guide community resilience. Organizations such as ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), and the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) provide information and trainings that offer sample policies and plans, peer networking opportunities, technical tools, and resources on vulnerability and risk. However, many of these organizations have a broad geographical focus and a target audience in large cities. It is important to address the needs of smaller communities that have political, fiscal, and resource constraints. In addition, there is a large need to better integrate climate adaptation policies into existing city departments and plans.

The Lincoln Institute and the Sonoran Institute are developing tools and resources that support efforts to plan and prepare for the ever-changing landscape of the West, including: information exchange and training; value setting planning tools; and anticipatory governance methods and tools. These tools offer promise for working in a variety of community types, including the underserved rural and amenity regions, and supplying the support and training that local planners need to integrate climate resilience planning holistically into current planning processes and encourage collaboration among multiple departments.

Information Exchange and Training

Communities often look to their peers that are similar in size, capacity, and geography to get a better understanding of planning efforts that will be successful in their own region. Local governments, institutions, and planning firms are encouraged to publicize their experiences so other communities can learn from their successes and missteps, and then modify and adapt their own plans as needed.

The Successful Communities Online Toolkit information exchange, also known as SCOTie, is an example of a tool that caters to western communities by encouraging the exchange of vital information in the form of best practice case studies and resources (figure 3). The case studies in SCOTie are organized by state, community type, and planning issue. To build and disseminate the toolkit’s case studies and resources, SCOTie partners with state chapters of the American Planning Association and nonprofit organizations working to build stronger, more resilient communities. Educational webinars like the Planning in the West adaptation series offer a way for communities to learn about climate-related planning and interact directly with representatives from model communities.

Value Setting Planning Tools

To move past political debates over climate science, tools are needed to facilitate collaborative planning efforts that include stakeholders with varying values and beliefs. Facilitating a process that focuses on engaging the public and finding common ground in moving forward with action to mitigate climate variability can neutralize the polarizing debates that are often stuck on the causes of climate change and scientific uncertainty.

Value setting is a particularly useful resource for informing management decisions where communities have to make tough decisions when resources are stressed by demand and climate variability. For example, in January 2012 the Sonoran Institute, the Morrison Institute, and the University of Arizona hosted the Watering the Sun Corridor pre-conference workshop where 100 participants saw presentations from experts, engaged in interactive discussions in small groups, and interacted collectively using live polling. Participants explored value tradeoffs between competing uses of water for urban development, agricultural production, and the environment in a water system stressed by drought induced by climate change. This collaborative, interactive format brought together stakeholders with many different viewpoints to gain a better understanding of collective values regarding the distribution of water in Arizona.

Anticipatory Governance Methods and Tools

As the future becomes less certain and more risky, traditional planning approaches that involve making educated predictions and developing plans and tools to reach that desired result will likely prove to be inadequate. Cities need tools to “anticipate and adapt” to change rather than “predict and plan” in order to better incorporate the uncertainties and complexities of future conditions (Quay 2010). Scenario planning is a technique that cities can use to think about climate impacts and develop ways to adapt to them. The use of scenarios can enable planners to grapple with complex issues, think about how trends and changes will play out across multiple scenarios, and plan for policy options that are robust under many future scenarios.

Western Lands and Communities is collaborating with partners including the Consensus Building Institute to develop coherent methodologies, identify driving forces of change, and develop educational tools to support community adaptation using scenario planning tools and techniques. Computer-based planning tools are valued because they help communities gain a better understanding of how particular planning ideas and strategies will shape their future. Building better plans that adapt to challenges like climate change will require communities to make decisions in the face of competing economic interests, different cultural values, and divergent views about property rights and the role of government.

Over the years, planning tools have evolved to help professional and citizen planners analyze and develop options and scenarios. Some tools are available commercially and others are free to the public, with varied user and output complexity. Although these tools are gaining traction, the current use of interactive planning tools is limited and faces a number of challenges. For example, the complex tasks of selecting a tool, collecting data, calibrating the tool, developing scenarios, and using the tool to assess various scenarios present significant barriers to many potential users. Western Lands and Communities is collaborating with tool developers to address the near and long-term challenges and expanding the use of scenario planning tools (Holway et al. 2012).

Conclusion

The Intermountain West is a complex region with changing demographics, rapid population growth, and increased economic and cultural diversity. Western Lands and Communities is working to develop and disseminate educational tools and methodologies that will help western communities plan holistically for climate change, build capacity for understanding risk and managing uncertainty in an inclusive manner, and engage communities of disparate stakeholders. To accomplish these ambitious goals, planners need effective tools to shape the future of their communities. We will continue to explore new approaches and methods for assisting planners in the effort to anticipate and adapt to change, engage communities in the effort to develop and adopt adaptation policies, and ultimately create more resilient communities that are prepared for the impacts of a changing climate.

About the Authors

Erika Mahoney is a program associate at Western Lands and Communities, the Lincoln Institute’s joint venture with the Sonoran Institute, where she develops planning tools, delivers trainings, and conducts research on local climate action efforts.

Hannah Oliver is a research associate at Western Lands and Communities, the Lincoln Institute’s joint venture with the Sonoran Institute, where she conducts research on local climate action efforts and assists with program development of the Successful Communities Online Toolkit information exchange (SCOTie).

References

Bark, R. H. 2009. Assessment of climate change impacts on local economies. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Carter, R. 2008. Land use planning and the changing climate of the West. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Carter, R., and S. Culp. 2010. Planning for climate change in the West. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Climate Central. 2012. The age of western wildfires. Princeton, NJ.

Feng, S., and Q, Hu. 2007. Changes in winter snowfall/precipitation ratio in the contiguous United States. Journal of Geophysical Research 112.

Holway, J., C. J. Gabbe, F. Hebbert, J. Lally, R. Matthews, and R. Quay. 2012. Opening access to scenario planning tools. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Leiserowitz, A. M.-R. 2012. Extreme weather and climate change in the American mind. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Metz, D., and C. Below. 2009. Local land use planning and climate change policy: Summary report from focus groups and interviews with local officials in the Intermountain West. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Quay, R. 2010. Anticipatory governance. Journal of the American Planning Association 76 (4): 496–511.

Richards, T. 2009. Driving climate change mitigation at multiple levels of governance in the West. Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Winkler, R., D. R. Field, A. E. Luloff, R. S. Krannich, and T. Williams. 2007. Social landscapes of the Inter-mountain West: A comparison of ‘Old West’ and ‘New West’ communities. Rural Sociology, 478–501.

Web Links

Western Lands and Communities: http://www.sonoraninstitute.org/where-we-work/westwide-research-tools/lincoln-sonoran-joint-venture.html

Successful Communities Online Toolkit information exchange (SCOTie): http://scotie.sonoraninstitute.org

Planning in the West webinars: http://www.sonoraninstitute.org/where-we-work/westwide-training-leadership/planning-in-the-west-webinars.html