Pardee Center Co-hosts Panel on BU’s Contributions to Boston’s Climate Initiatives
The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future co-hosted a panel discussion on Thursday, February 22, highlighting the role played by Boston University researchers in two of the city of Boston’s signature climate initiatives: Climate Ready Boston and the Boston Climate Action Plan. The event, co-hosted by Initiative on Cities (IOC), the Pardee Center, the Institute for Sustainable Energy (ISE), and sustainability@BU, was moderated by Pardee Center Director Anthony Janetos and featured Carl Spector, the Commissioner of the Environment for the City of Boston, and BU Earth & Environment Professors Cutler Cleveland, Lucy Hutyra, and Bruce Anderson.
After Prof. Janetos set the stage, Spector provided an overview of the city of Boston’s progress and ongoing efforts to combat climate change. He discussed the city’s ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050, and the need to determine exactly how that might be achieved.
The city released its first Climate Action Plan in 2011 and has set a near-term goal to reduce carbon emissions 25 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The next update to the Climate Action Plan will be released within the next two years, in which an interim 2030 goal is expected to be announced.
The city has also taken action on climate adaptation with the publication of the Climate Ready Boston report last December. Spector explained the three components of that report: updated projections for sea level rise, precipitation, and temperature; a more detailed analysis of vulnerability; and a set of recommendations for increasing preparedness in the next 30 years.
Prof. Cleveland discussed the climate mitigation modeling work that he and ISE Director Peter Fox-Penner are leading for the city. Their models quantify a combination of technologies and policies across several sectors (transportation, electric power generation, buildings, and waste) to determine the costs and trade-offs of reducing emissions. This work will help the city identify various possible paths toward carbon neutrality by 2050.
Prof. Hutyra explored the challenges of comparing cities’ reported carbon emissions with scientific measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Cities are responsible for an estimated 40-70 percent of fossil fuel emissions, but it is extremely difficult to make accurate calculations about the scale of urban emissions. Hutyra explained that carbon dioxide measured in the atmosphere combines both anthropogenic sources (e.g., power plants and tail pipe emissions, etc.) and biological sources (e.g. naturally occurring emissions from soils and plants), while air is also constantly moving around in space. This makes it impossible to reconcile cities’ reported data, which excludes biological sources, with scientific observations, and therefore very difficult to accurately measure cities’ progress toward emissions reduction goals. Nevertheless, Hutyra believes that this is an area of research where cities, including Boston, have an opportunity to lead.
Finally, Prof. Anderson explained his work as part of the Boston Research Advisory Group (BRAG), which looked at the risks the city faces in coming decades. His research found that sea level was “more likely than not” to rise at least three feet by 2100. Anderson combined sea level rise projections with storm projections, and found that a 100 year storm (like Superstorm Sandy) with three feet of sea level rise would inundate 20 percent of Boston’s land area and cause about $1.39 billion of financial damage (in today’s dollars). Furthermore, a flooding event causing approximately $137 million would be expected to occur once a month in the next century. Anderson concluded by urging a coordinated effort to model, measure, and manage this looming crisis, and cited the need for an increasing number of environmental researchers in future generations to tackle the challenge.