“…we need to explore the intersections between the current pandemic, the associated economic crash, and the other crises we face. This refocusing of efforts is especially important in the area of climate action.”
By Brett Ken Cairn, Senior Policy Advisor for Climate & Resilience, City of Boulder, and Director of the Urban Drawdown Initiative
We are living in an age of significant challenges.
Even before the devastatingly paired impacts of the COVID-19 virus and the resulting economic system shut down, we faced a host of other existential threats – climate change, mass extinction of species, and extreme economic and social inequities just to name a few. Substantial public and private resources had been directed to address these other threats. However, with the new context of a global pandemic and economic crash, millions of people are exposed to immediate and urgent survival concerns including many community members in Boulder. Public resources are now being prioritized to try and address these immediate needs.
Getting through and evolving beyond these challenges requires that we simultaneously meet the urgent health, economic stability, and physical security needs arising because of these crises and address the causes that have created them. To do so, we need to explore the intersections between the current pandemic, the associated economic crash, and the other crises we face. This refocusing of efforts is especially important in the area of climate action.
In the coming weeks, both the city and other organizations will bring forward a range of initiatives designed to address these urgent and immediate needs while also keeping the work going towards these more foundational system changes.
In our living environment, we expect efforts to address local food insecurity through building the capacity for local agriculture – both urban and rural – will be an important focus. We should be supporting local farmers and ranchers who are experimenting with new approaches to land regeneration that will build resilience to growing climate extremes. Finally, we need to prepare for climate impacts by accelerating the planting of urban forests as critical shade providers and rural/working land trees as wind and erosion breaks.
In the built environment, we need to double down on the transition to a clean and renewable energy system. This includes rapidly expanding transportation and building electrification, creating more distributed solar and wind energy development, and upgrading our deeply vulnerable electricity distribution systems. All of these actions together could create hundreds to thousands of jobs.
It is time to retire old ways that no longer serve us. The many different fossil fuel facilities – old power plants, refineries, and outdated distribution infrastructure need to be decommissioned and remediated. This work is already bonded and plans filed (somewhere). Now is the time to update those plans, accelerate their implementation, and put people to work doing that clean-up – in part so we aren’t left holding the bag when the plants are no longer financially viable and the companies walk away leaving insufficient funding to clean up their mess.
Please visit the following links for American Prospect and Where Our New World Begins.
Now is the time to think boldly and to act locally. There is much to be done.
