New Research: Measuring Zoning's Impact on Climate Resilience
Over the past several years there has been a remarkable uptick in policy conversations about zoning. It is a topic that is near to my urban planning heart but not typically the stuff of political debate, or at least outside the walls of the local city council meeting or planning commission. All that has changed, mostly because of the organizing work of the so-called YIMBYs, housing advocates who focus on zoning as a key barrier to increasing housing supply (and thus keeping prices artificially high).
Less has been said about zoning as it relates to climate resilience, which is odd given how central exposure is to determining climate risk. Put simply, where we build stuff matters as much as what/how we build it, yet topics like building codes have always dominated conversations about the built environment and hazards. Planners have long argued that land use regulations like zoning are a key to reducing disaster losses, but they are a small group. Land use remains one of the least utilized strategies for hazard mitigation and there are precious few studies that directly link jurisdictions’ zoning decisions to their overall hazard exposure, or document how zoning might enable (or impede) adaptation of the built environment to climate change.
We set out to develop a technical approach to measuring the relationships between a community’s zoning, its housing, and climate risk. All of the details are in a new research brief just published, Zoned Into Risk? Toward a Climate-Resilient Development Index for Housing. We are excited about the results and eager to continue refining the method and developing on-the-ground supports for communities that want to leverage their zoning code to build resilience.
Great observations. Some of the old guard in the scientific community is ignorant, as you have stated , location can be vitally important as certain zones are certainly more fragile and lead to more serious impacts on climate.
This is 100% true in the Arctic and Subarctic, home to not only one of the most climatologically sensitive zones regarding human impacts but also the location of the Northern Hemisphere's largest quantities of fresh water. Many rivers up there for thousands of years were flowing freely 24 x 7 and in the early 1950s into the late 1980s had their flows abruptly ceased and were transformed into impounded reservoirs for hydroelectric generation. Do think the scientific community took note of this?
it's always common scientific consensus that Co2 is the likely the largest factor in global warming models. This particular attitude, the scientific community holds near and dear, and protects it at any cost! So much of on the ground observations, are often lumped into just "climate change", even if it is clear there's been years of localized severe human impacts in zones that historically were never altered or tampered with for thousands of years.
And these localized impacts happen to be situated in the most climate sensitive regions of our planet one might think that the scientific community might take notice?
I find it difficult to not see scientists stepping up to point out the radical hydrological impacts that have been and STILL ARE clearly forced by the human manipulation, regimentation, and blocking natural free flowing rivers into the Arctic Ocean. Construction of huge dams upon the major rivers systems of our planet.
If only the old scientific community would come down to Earth and follow the on the ground clues and evidence when it comes to climate models.
There are very specific causes for human illness
We run a fever, well the planet is running a fever too, and it is not stopping. And why is it not cooling down even with all the mitigation practices over the last decades? Because we are not treating a significant forcing factor which does have something to do with Co2 sequestration but it is only one portion of the many planetary spheres that continue to be mis-diagnosed by the Science"experts". Maybe it's time to look at our planet with the same lense we look at human health.
Our Planet: Person or Living Entity?
It’s time to consider our Earth as a living, breathing being possessing systems that keep it running smoothly and in good health. We now have to face the fact that the temperature of the planet is increasing. and as in other living beings this signals that something is happening out of the “normal functioning range”.
Scientists and 75% of the population call this climate change.
We can also say the earth has a fever, and its not going down.
When we humans have a prolonged fever we see a doctor. We test our fluids, our breathing, our blood pressure and our blood for toxic and nutritional levels.
Our cardiovascular system - heart, arteries, veins and capillaries - supply us with nutrients, circulate oxygen from our lungs, and cleanse our kidneys and liver. In short, this system keeps us alive.
Earth, as a living, breathing being, has a similar cardiovascular system in play - a system that is not functioning within “normal range”.
In the Earth’s cardiovascular system, we can think of the oceans and atmosphere as its heart and lungs, large rivers its arteries, smaller rivers and streams, wetlands and bogs its veins and capillaries sending nutrients to its extremities.
Terrestrial ecosystem provide sustenance: nutrition, oxygen, and a home to living beings. Land is connected to the waterways providing food and life to aquatic species that travel, breed and participate in the lifecycle of the Earth. and those avenues of support are severely clogged, (similar to cardiovascular disease in humans) by large hydroelectric dams: mega-dams.
Mega-dams are creating clots in the world’s circulatory system, not only retaining water for electricity generation, and prohibiting passage of the nutrients which the marine ecosystem needs to live and thrive.
The damming of rivers is one of mankind’s most significant modifications to the worlds cardiovascular system impacting the flow of water and associated materials from land to sea. Included in these nutrients are nutritional elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, required by all life on Earth, and silicon, which is required by diatoms, the plankton that account for the largest percentage of biological productivity in the oceans.
Diatoms in the oceans sequester more Co2 than all the rainforests of the planet [1]
Prior to the mid 20th century many of the larger rivers had been functioning normally. Rivers have always been the main nutritional delivery system for the smallest microscopic living things in the oceans: diatoms (plankton), which feed the largest of marine mammals the Blue Whale.
The estuaries, bays, and Continental Shelf flood each spring and during stormy periods, feeding the earth with rich nutritional sediments from erosion. Through the late 1950s into the 1980s many of the major rivers and waterways that emptied into the Northern Hemisphere oceans had large dams constructed that obstructed the natural flows containing much of the nutritional requirements of marine life.
Dams and flow regulation on rivers weaken the force of these upwelling ocean currents so fewer nutrients are available. The marine food chain is very dependent on diatoms, and their populations are declining rapidly; the world’s ocean fisheries are also in decline. 1.
Strict flow regimens caused by hydroelectric dams in the subarctic regions: Here many of the Northern Hemisphere's largest rivers used to exist but now 95% of the water stagnates in sea-size impoundments for 6 months of the summer and continues melting the permafrost. long hours in the sun has led to excessive humidity and added greater amounts of methane rich fresh water to these dam reservoirs, insuring a now much much larger volume of and now warmer water to be discharged all winter-long. This is not only warming these regions in the winter but sending this much larger volume and warmer fresh water into the bays and Arctic Ocean region. This is occurring with many of the former rivers from Siberia to labrador
Many other species, also important for carbon sequestration, are starving because of the nutrients withheld by river impoundments. NASA has indicated diatom populations are diminishing by about one percent per year. This equates to a significant increase in CO2 levels, because CO2 removal by diatoms is not occurring at the same rate before dams.
River obstruction and impoundment cuts off much of the nutrient flow to all marine life, stockpiling it behind dams, decomposing (emitting methane) and accelerating global warming. Clearly out of the historical normal range, the planet’s coronary arteries are now severely compromised.
Like cardiovascular disease in humans, deprivation of this ‘blood supply’ results in the starvation of aquatic life and with it the decline of livable terrestrial habitat.
Unfortunately the earth does not have a primary care physician who would recommend surgery to remove these blockages, freeing up the blood supply allowing the patient to recover. It is up to us, the tenants, to take the helm and choose not to invest in damming up its cardiovascular system.
We need to live with, not on, the earth and allow it to recover from our antiquated energy generation practices, which are doing what may be irreparable harm.
Divest from mega-dams. Remove the blockages that are continuing to damage our climate by preventing nutritional flow, thawing the permafrost and destroying habitats for all living things, land and sea.
Let’s allow the Earth to heal itself by freeing up the natural flow of river waters.
1. Maavara, T., Akbarzadeh, Z.,& Van Cappellen, P. (2020). Global dam‐driven changes to riverine N:P:Si ratios delivered to the coastal ocean. Geophysical Research Letters, 47, e2020GL088288.
https://doi.org/ 10.1029/2020GL088288