Goldilocks Zone Resilience against Climate Change
By Nancy Aird
Not too Hot, not too Cold, and not too Extreme climates are becoming points when choosing location for homes and businesses. Weather specifically happens over a period of hours or days, while climate influences show over years. Earth’s climate is showing increasing heat swings worldwide i.e., graphs convey the entire top 15 of 16 warmest years on record that have occurred since 2000. Climate related heat swings project more common, more severe, longer lasting days of heat influencing more deaths, illness, droughts, extreme environmental pattern disruption (hurricane, tornado, cyclone, wildfire/smoke, flooding, sea level rise, atmospheric river storms). Climate change impacts 3 major ways: greenhouse gases (GHG) levels, impacts of flooding/sea level rise, and increase wildfires/smoke intensity. Climate Commitment Act (CCA) targets reducing GHS by standards for clean fuel and zero-emission vehicles, but even considers emissions caused by food waste.
De Graff-van Dinther (https://www.wildrumpusbooks.com/book/9783030575397) and Ovink proposed 5 Capacities of Resilience for Urban Areas: threshold, coping, recovery, adaptive and transformative in the book Climate Resilient Urban Areas: Governance, Design and Development in Coastal Delta Cities. Change also needs “capacity to adapt to the effects of climate change and the ability to transform the entire urban system.”
The Washington State Urban and Community Forestry Program is promoting reestablishing trees to fight “Urban heat islands” where higher temperatures are caused by less shade and moisture, and trapped heat as vegetation is removed by urban development.
For more information, visit these resources:
https://climate.washington.edu/