Co-Conveners:

Susan Hanson, Clark University

Tom Wilbanks, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Rapporteur:

Lewis Gilbert, Columbia University

Wil Orr, Prescott University

Archivists:

Clara Kustra, University of New Hampshire

Ruth Pryor, Florida State University

One of the eight sectoral breakout groups during the U.S. Climate Forum, November 12-13, 1997, was labeled "Urban Activities." The charge to this group was to consider possible vulnerabilities and impacts to climate change and climate variability not only in U.S. cities but in the wide variety of places where people live. Among the eight sectoral groups, this was the only one specifically focused in a multidimensional way on people.

The objectives of the group discussion were to identify high-priority points, questions, and information needs to be addressed in a national assessment of climate change impacts and to invite ideas about the assessment process. Its principal output was a five-minute presentation at a Forum plenary session.

The group discussion was led by Prof. Susan Hanson of Clark University and Dr. Thomas J. Wilbanks of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dr. Lewis Gilbert of Columbia University and Wil Orr of Prescott College, AZ, formerly with the cities of Scottsdale and Tucson, served as rapporteurs. Clara Kustra of the University of New Hampshire was the group archivist.

The breakout group was attended by about 30 individuals from local government, state government, federal agencies, the private sector, and a variety of nongovernmental organizations. The discussion was quite lively, including active participation by virtually every attendee.

In the paragraphs that follow, the consensus of the group is summarized as to the current stresses and issues for U.S. cities and communities, how climate change and variability may exacerbate or ameliorate existing stresses, priority research and information needs, and coping options that might add resilience to climate change impacts in places where people live.

Stresses

After a rich discussion of a wide range of current stresses in urban areas and smaller communities, the group identified five stresses as particularly serious:

1. Spatial pattern of population and economic growth/urban form. Population and economic growth not only causes stresses on urban areas in the aggregate -- related to such issues as real estate development, growing service requirements, and waste disposal -- but these stresses are unevenly distributed within urban areas. As a result, such stresses as resource requirements, congestion, poverty, and insecurity tend to be concentrated in certain geographical areas that are of particular concern, and this concentration makes the stresses more acute. Some of these relatively focused stresses are great enough that any significant additional stress could be the trigger for serious disruptive events and impacts in those particular areas.

    

2. Equity/diversity issues. Stresses are also unevenly distributed among social categories in urban areas, often along such lines as income, age, race, and gender. In some cases, these kinds of diversity are also reflected in the spatial pattern of an urban area, but they need not be (e.g., gender). Such differences raise equity concerns, because they affect the vulnerability of people to impacts of climate change and their potential for coping with them; and they add stress and tension to the process of solving urban problems. As a result, impacts of climate change can be expected to lead to increased demands to shift funds to disadvantaged parts of urban areas.

    

3. Institutional/jurisdictional fragmentation. These stresses and others are heightened by the fact that urban areas and other living places are fragmented for decisionmaking, action, and accountability: divided into numerous different incorporated areas, school districts, water districts, utility service areas, etc.

    

4. Declining revenue base/federal devolution. At the city and community scale, social and environmental stresses of all kinds are being significantly magnified by the shrinkage in federal government budgets and programs, while local citizens remain resistant to paying more local taxes. Localities are facing increasing demands on already-limited local fiscal and human resources, and in many cases this means that services must be operated with a smaller margin for error and with a greater potential for citizen dissatisfaction.

    

5. Fixed/aging infrastructure/land uses. Meanwhile, in many cases a city/community's fixed infrastructure -- buildings, streets and bridges, water and sewer lines, and the like -- are aging while the capacity to invest in repair or replacement seems ever-smaller. Aging, weakened infrastructure will often be the first to fail under increased stresses from exreme weather events and other climate change impacts.

    

These stresses do not take the same form in every city and community, nor are they equally severe everywhere, but many of the places where people live across the country are under pressure from some combination of continuing growth, pervasive inequity, jurisdictional fragmentation, fiscal strains, and/or aging infrastructure.

Climate Change Impacts

Climate change and variability have the potential to interact with these stresses in an enormously large and complex set of ways. These impacts will vary from place to place and among different social groups, of course, but in general the greatest concerns at this point are:

1. Extreme weather events. If such extreme events as severe storms, floods, and fires become more frequent and/or more intense, cities and communities will be severely impacted: lives will be lost, property will be destroyed, activities will be disrupted, and economic and managerial resources will be strained. Recent examples from experience include El Niño-related heavy rainfall in western coastal areas and floods in the Mississippi and Red River valleys.

    

2. Sea level rise/storm surges. A rise in sea level of any significant extent, especially if it is combined with more severe storms, threatens massive damage and disruption for cities and communities in coastal areas, especially on the more gently-sloping Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The first impacts to be experienced will probably be increased storm-related flooding. Later, sea-front and other low-lying property and activities would eventually be threatened even without storms.

    

3. 2d and 3d order impacts. Human habitations and activities are unique among climate change impact concerns in the importance of indirect impacts: e.g., warming which affects urban air pollution which affects health which affects public service requirements which affects social harmony, or climate change which affects the economic competitiveness of other regions of the country and the world which affects local job creation and population migration into or out of the area. One indirect impact of particular concern is the effects on city life, local economies, and family budgets of climate change mitigation initiatives

    

4. Especially impacted segments of the population. As impacts of climate change are felt in urban areas, they will be felt most acutely by certain segments of the population, especially the poor, the elderly, the young, the least skilled, and the powerless -- those most dependent on public support.

    

5. Increased uncertainty/interruptions and opportunity costs. All of the above add up to increased demands on local institutions and infrastructures that are already in many cases strained. Increased uncertainty is itself an impact, with the potential to undermine decisiveness and public support, and increased frequency or severity of climate-related crises will present serious opportunity costs: i.e., other things that cities need to do that are excluded by having to pay the costs of climate change/variability impacts.

    

These potential impacts are serious indeed for the places where people live, directly related to human well-being, social harmony, and the quality of life. The probability of particular impacts on particular places remains highly uncertain, but it seems increasingly clear that the likelihood is greater of some disruptive impacts on most cities and communities than of no impacts whatsoever; and it is likely that if things go wrong people will blame "the government."

Information Needs

In many cases, the most pressing information needs call for research that has not yet been done; but, in order to be useful, the resulting information must be timely, locally relevant, and credible. Needs include:

1. Relationships between settlement patterns, emissions, impacts, and responses. Most of the carbon emissions in this country -- from industry, transportation, and energy production -- are triggered by meeting needs of people in urbanized areas, and most of the human impacts of both climate change itself and climate change mitigation will be felt by people in urbanized areas, where 80% of the U.S. population live. Meanwhile, it is clear that the pattern taken by settlement and urban growth -- including issues of jurisdiction -- can affect emissions, impacts, and responses. In other words, different spatial patterns of housing, employment, and transportation have different implications for climate change issues. Meanwhile, the coupling between global climate change and local environmental vitality is poorly understood; indeed, the most fundamental understandings of how human and physical environmental systems relate to each other are often lacking. Understanding these relationships better would be of considerable value in relating the nation's climate change response effort to other arenas of policymaking and action.

    

2. Better climatic and weather predictions. Clearly, responses by citizens and leaders of cities and communities will be shaped by the spatial and temporal resolution of climatic and weather predictions (and thus their local relevance), both short-term predictions of climatic variability and longer-term forecasts of impacts of climate change. Uncertainties need not be reduced to near zero to be useful, but better relatively-localized predictions are needed to inform discussions of vulnerabilities, coping strategies, and mitigation initiatives.

    

3. Vulnerabilities of urban inflows/outflows. Urban areas are absolutely dependent on linkages, including the constant inflow of material resources and the outflow of products and wastes. These lifelines are vulnerable to extreme weather events and other natural disasters, but this vulnerability is not well-understood. An example of a useful activity would be to trace the geographic linkages on which a major urban center depends and then to examine the vulnerability of those linkages to disruption from climate-related impacts.

    

4. Improving the understanding of 2d and 3d order impacts. Finally, the Achilles heel of any attempt to analyze the potential impacts of climate change and variability on cities and communities is the fact that the state of the art for considering 2d and 3d order impacts is painfully inadequate. This weakness undermines every assessment of climate change impacts, whether it be the current U.S. national assessment, the periodic IPCC assessments, or something else.

    

These items are only the tip of the iceberg, but they were considered the most salient by the participants in the breakout group.

Coping

Urban areas and other communities can add resilience in a number of ways, and the potential for such coping is impressive if the nation's cities and communities choose to make an effort that need not inflate their costs dramatically. The most important of the possible directions include:

1. Effective governance and institutions. First of all, any city or community that is well-governed and well-managed, that copes with other problems well, is in a better position to cope with climate change impacts. In particular, careful attention to emergency preparedness and long-range planning is highly desirable.

    

2. Community participation in assessments and response strategies. There are enormous opportunities to involve citizens in assessing vulnerabilities to impacts, coping strategies, and mitigation potentials, related both to citizen self-interest and to promoting an awareness of the common good. Improving structures and practices for such participation would not only enhance the capacity to cope with climate change impacts but, most likely, enhance effective governance and social harmony in other contexts as well.

    

3. Strategies to increase resiliency. Cities and communities would be well-advised to consider relatively low-cost strategies that increase their resiliency to any kind of potentially disruptive event. As one example, coastal cities could assure that new construction in areas vulnerable to sea-level rise impacts be engineered to stand up under such an impact. As another example, structures for coordinating actions among different jurisdictions could be strengthened.

    

4. Coping well will produce opportunities. A key part of the mix in advocating and assuring coping strategies is communicating the fact that coping will mean economic and sociopolitical opportunities for the cities and communities that do it best. Besides benefiting by handling climate change impacts better than others, if that should occur, most coping strategies will help a city or community to be better managed overall, more progressive and participative; and many have the potential to help local decisionmakers identify business opportunities in the more general national and global effort to mitigate and adapt to climate variability and change. Maybe most important overall, those communities that take the lead in coping will find themselves advantaged in a world endeavoring to reduce both GHG emissions and vulnerabilities, because their response to changing policy conditions will be cheaper and easier.

    

The group was bullish on coping, if effective information dissemination -- involving the emerging state of the art in communication technologies -- can be combined with a broadbased enfranchisement of the citizenry through participation in climate change assessments and policy discussions.

Summary

The Urban Activities breakout group concluded that America's cities and communities are in many cases severely stressed by a host of economic, social, political, and environmental problems and that they are vulnerable to seriously disruptive impacts from climate change and variability. Better information is urgently needed to inform discussions of these issues in cities and communities, but the prospects for coping are considerable if good information is effectively communicated to a wide range of participating stakeholders.