Rooted Resilience Work
May 2024 Newsletter Introduction
How do we hold climate work at a time when climate impacts are occurring with increased frequency and severity throughout the world?
This is a defining question for this moment within climate activism, advocacy, and solutions. It is a question that we explore daily at A Climate to Thrive as we consider how best to be effective and serve our communities.
January’s back-to-back storm surge events alerted many to the importance of climate resilience work: work focused on building local capacity to face climate-related impacts. Resilience work takes many different forms: it can look as specific as planning for a local warming & cooling center (otherwise known as a resilience hub) that will stay powered during prolonged outages and it can also look as broad as building local networks of relationships and knowledge so that our community is better prepared to support itself in the face of climate impacts.
At A Climate to Thrive, we seek to ground our resilience work in data, which is why we were so enthusiastic to support the Town of Tremont in receiving a vulnerability assessment through the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and are equally enthusiastic as Mount Desert and Southwest Harbor prepare for their own assessments (all funded through the Maine Community Resilience Partnership). These assessments provide essential data that help identify points of greatest vulnerability, whether related to infrastructure, the local economy, essential services, or vulnerable populations. With this information in-hand, we can be more proactive in planning projects and seeking funding. While the words associated with this work can also be associated with feelings of alarm (words like vulnerable, extreme impacts, and many others), the informed planning taking place actually sets up our local community to better avoid panicked scenarios of reacting to unanticipated impacts. We are so grateful to be able to work with local partners like the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and the Island Institute in helping our communities take this proactive stance.
We also seek to ground our resilience work in the areas in which climate mitigation intersects with increased resilience. While climate impacts are now assured, the severity of those impacts still depends greatly on actions taken today. The great news is that many of the activities we can undertake to mitigate climate change - for example, reducing emissions - also build local resilience, particularly when those activities are undertaken with a community-driven approach. By building out locally-owned renewable energy resources, we also strengthen our local distribution grid and have the opportunity to build multiple local resilience hubs. By increasing local climate leadership and knowledge, we build a capable network engaged in proactive planning that can take advantage of funding opportunities and help implement projects.
This newsletter spotlights multiple upcoming events, each of which focuses on exactly this integration of climate resilience and mitigation. Community input is one of the most essential aspects needed to ensure that this work is successful. Each of these upcoming events is focused on community input and empowerment, and I look forward to seeing many of you over the coming weeks, whether at the MDI Resilience Dialogue on May 13th, the vote for Tremont’s Community Resilience Plan on May 14th, the Homeowner Solar & Overcoming Barriers events on May 16th (in-person) and May 22nd (virtual), or the Resilience Hub & Peer-to-Peer Check-in Network listening sessions for the Town of Mount Desert (June 6th) and Tremont (June 13th). Details on all events are included below.
This work of building local resilience while continuing to mitigate climate change feels very similar to my experience of loving my children and this world in this time. I’m consistently blown away by the complexity of feeling so much love at a time of such great uncertainty. Sometimes, it feels like an impossible challenge. And yet, whether in the many gifts of the return of spring, in the wonder I see daily on my children’s faces, or in the excited, collaborative energy I experience at ACTT events, such as the recent resilience planning exercise we facilitated for the Town of Southwest Harbor, I am daily reminded of the rewards for staying engaged despite the at-time overwhelming complexity of this moment.