Chapter Eleven – Section 4: Climate and Health
Practical Application: Book Activity
Practical Application
Setting the Scene
Climate adaptation and resilience were not recognized as pressing issues for the community of Blacksburg, Virginia. The current leading climate concern, the rising sea level did not seem relevant to the city, which is located more than 300 miles from the nearest coastline. However, when Carol Davis was hired as Blacksburg, Virginia’s Sustainability Manager, she set out to develop the town’s 2016 Climate Action Plan (PDF), which led to the town being a leader for climate resilience.
The city passed its new Climate Action Plan around the same time as the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. This global alliance dedicated to climate leadership at the local level was spurring communities to develop mitigation strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation strategies to make our communities more resilient in a changing climate. Using the plan as a starting point, Blacksburg worked to answer this charge.
Carol quickly found that best practices and tools to assess climate vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience were harder to locate for non-coastal communities. She was able to pull from
- the Climate Explorer, a visualization tool that provides graphs and maps of historical and projected climate variables for the contiguous United States at the county level
- key findings from the Fourth National Climate Assessment
- Temperate tool, which provided a concrete, guided process to help her make sense of the data and evaluate the degree to which each potential climate hazard could impact an array of critical community systems
Using these tools, she determined 13 key temperature and precipitation metrics that would be most relevant to Blacksburg. Each of these metrics pointed to potential areas of vulnerability that Blacksburg might need to address.
To further explore which climate metrics might have the greatest adverse impact on the community and bring a variety of experience and expertise to the project, Carol convened a Climate Vulnerability Advisory Team of experts from a variety of disciplines. The team was primarily composed of faculty from the Blacksburg-located Virginia Tech. Members of the Advisory Team provided input on invasive plants, climate trends and ecological processes, energy systems and society, surface water hydrology, extreme weather conditions, climate modeling, food system resiliency, heat stress and public health, transportation, and land use planning, stormwater engineering, climate adaptation planning, water systems and security, civil engineering, hazard mitigation planning, and forest dynamics. This team:
- helped her interpret the best-available climate data and modeling,
- provided critical knowledge on how those changes might specifically impact Blacksburg, and
- provided input on potential adaptation policies that could help Blacksburg deal with new conditions.
With these tool