Elisabeth M. Hamin

Barriers to Municipal Climate Adaptation: Examples From Coastal Massachusetts' Smaller Cities and Towns

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Many global cities are making good progress on climate adaptation. There is less information, however, on climate adaptation among smaller cities and towns: Are their approaches similar when undertaking adaptation? Do the barriers they face mirror those of large cities? In this study, we undertake fine-grained empirical research on the perceptions of 18 municipal planners in 14 coastal cities and towns in Massachusetts; our findings are thus limited to planners’ perceptions of efforts and barriers in one region of the United States. These communities are very early in the uptake of climate adaptation policies and use a range of approaches when they do begin adaptation, including planning, mainstreaming, or addressing current hazards. The planners interviewed reported that barriers to adaptation actions tend to be interconnected; for example, the strength of private property interests often limits local political leadership on the issue. Without such leadership, it is difficult for planners to allocate time and/or money to adaptation activities. It is also challenging to gain support from local residents for climate adaptation action, while a lack of accepted technical data complicates efforts. Takeaway for practice: In coastal Massachusetts, and perhaps elsewhere, local residents, planners, and their municipal bodies, as well as the states, must act in multiple ways to encourage the development of meaningful climate adaptation action in smaller cities and towns.

Implementing Growth Management The Community Preservation Act

State-led growth management has been criticized as inflexible in addressing the range of situations that communities face. A second issue is that while many of the goals of smart growth can be achieved through regulation, others require funding for implementation. In 2000, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed legislation called the Community Preservation Act (CPA), an experiment in enabling communities to tax themselves to implement growth management/smart growth actions at the local level. This article examines that act as to whether it demonstrates flexibility in its application across communities in the state, analyzed according to sub/urban to rural character. The act is found to appeal to a wide range of communities for overlapping but also divergent reasons and provides a flexible method to aid communities in implementing a limited set of smart growth goals.

Windows of Opportunity: Addressing Climate Uncertainty Through Adaptation Plan Implementation

There is a pressing need for municipalities and regions to create urban form suited to current as well as future climates, but adaptation planning uptake has been slow. This is particularly unfortunate because patterns of urban form interact with climate change in ways that can reduce, or intensify, the impact of overall global change. Uncertainty regarding the timing and magnitude of climate change is a significant barrier to implementing adaptation planning. Focusing on implementation of adaptation and phasing of policy reduces this barrier. It removes time as a decision marker, instead arguing for an initial comprehensive plan to prevent maladaptive policy choices, implemented incrementally after testing the micro-climate outcomes of previous interventions. Policies begin with no-regrets decisions that reduce the long-term need for more intensive adaptive actions and generate immediate policy benefits, while gradually enabling transformative infrastructure and design responses to increased climate impacts. Global and local indicators assume a larger role in the process, to evaluate when tipping points are in sight. We use case studies from two exemplary municipal plans to demonstrate this methods usefulness. While framed for urban planning, the approach is applicable to natural resource managers and others who must plan with uncertainty.

Reading (Conservation Subdivision) Plans

This article argues that literary theory, exemplified by an approach authored by Seymour Mandelbaum in 1990, when adapted assists in understanding the complex process of translating land-use bylaw into project design. Literary theory thus addresses the recent resurgence in planning interest in design. The technique is used to follow the implementation of one particular design idea (conservation subdivision design) as legislated in one particular place (Amherst, Massachusetts) and applied to one particular residential development. The substantive analysis demonstrates that conservation subdivision design, at least in this case, fails to achieve some of the theorized ideal goals, and instead achieves different outcomes. Sources for distortion are theorized, and the application of literary theory to planning process is discussed.

The Experience of New Planning Faculty

The new faculty experience in planning is a transition and training period in which the new scholar begins to master the many tasks that are required in academic life. The authors investigated the quality and characteristics of the first two years of the new planning faculty experience through review of existing literature and analysis of original research. The findings indicate that many new professors in planning do not know what to expect and are generally not well prepared to assume their new roles. In particular, many new faculty were not trained in pedagogy or experienced in teaching, and so almost all of their first years are taken up with becoming reasonably proficient in their teaching.

Understanding the Role of Planners in Wildfire Preparedness and Mitigation

As wildfires affect more residential areas across the United States, the need for collaboration between land managers, federal agencies, neighbours, and local governments has become more pressing especially in the context of the wildland-urban interface. Previous research has not focused much on land-use planners’ role in wildfire mitigation. This paper provides information on how land-use planners can assist communities in learning to live with wildfire risk through planning, preparedness, and mitigation efforts in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Based on interviews with land-use planners, forest planners, and local emergency management officials, we identified a range of tools that could be used for improving wildfire preparedness and mitigation initiatives in the WUI, but also found that planners felt that they lacked the regulatory authority to use these tenaciously. The paper also identifies a range of possible actions that would contribute towards safer building practices in the interface communities.

Reconceptualizing the Role of Infrastructure in Resilience

The Sustainable Adaptive Gradients in the Coastal Environment (SAGE) research collaboration network is composed of U.S., Caribbean, and European engineers, geoscientists, ecologists, social scientists, planners, and policy makers. The goal of SAGE is to establish international, cross-disciplinary networks of researchers working on resilient coastal infrastructure (gray, green, and cultural), with a focus on understanding how varying coastal characteristics contribute toward resilient adaptation strategies (funded under National Science Foundation grant ICER-1338767).

Mainstreaming Climate in the Classroom: Teaching Climate Change Planning

Climate change planning, both mitigation (reducing greenhouse gasses) and adaptation (designing built environments for changed climate conditions), is an area of emerging importance in both planning practice and education. This research examines the uptake of climate issues in planning education programs primarily in the US, and compares course content to leading climate change planning practice and research concepts. Studio and seminar courses are emerging in various universities, and are addressing many of the key research concepts for mitigation and adaptation. Beyond stand-alone classes, the article argues the need to mainstream climate considerations in core planning curricula. Modeling this pedagogy will encourage our students to normalize climate considerations as they enter the profession.

The Green Infrastructure Transect: An Organizational Framework for Mainstreaming Adaptation Planning Policies

When considering the range of spatial planning actions that cities can take to adapt to climate change, many of them fall under the conceptual umbrella of green infrastructure (GI). GI has been defined as the spatial planning of landscape systems at multiple scales and within varying contexts to provide open space, safeguard natural systems, protect agricultural lands, and ensure ecological integrity for cultural, social, and ecosystem benefits (Benedict and McMahon, Renew Resour J 20:12–17, 2002, Green infrastructure: linking landscape and communities. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2006; Ahern, Cities of the future. IWA Publishing, London, 2008). While the traditional definition of GI refers to areas of land that are least intervened by human action, in this expanded definition, we are deliberately including areas that are engineered to mimic natural processes and which provide cost-effective ecosystem services.

Space for Adapting: Reconciling Adaptation and Mitigation in Local Climate Change Plans

Amid the complexity of actually planning for adaptation and mitigation in cities, spatial form matters. Denser urban environments generally have lower per capita emissions because they enable transit and more efficient heating. At the same time, a larger green infrastructure can be beneficial to adaptation, as it provides room for urban greening, storm and flood water management, and treatment of other ill-effects of climate change. City plans need to reconcile both goals to be fully climate resilient, but to date, there has not been an empirical evaluation on whether the adaptation policies cities are choosing create conflict with mitigative goals. To address this, we undertake a content analysis of policies in 11 major adaptation plans and explore the implications of these for mitigative potential in the urban form. Overall, we found that many of these policies do not require dedication of new space and likely have little effect on mitigation. For those that require more space, we suggest ways this can be managed to still facilitate mitigation. Examples include repurposing automobile roads into green infrastructure and using coastal retreat and habitat corridors to transfer development to more transit-friendly urban areas. We see a virtuous circle emerging where mitigation and adaptation work together at the city scale to create more desirable cities.