Bellingham, Whatcom see this wake-up call in U.N. climate change report
A major United Nations-backed climate change report released last week served as an acute reminder that Whatcom County’s local governments need to double down on preparing for the consequences of an ever-warming world.
“We still have to reduce our emissions, but this report shows we need to think about ‘How do we live on the landscape in a climate-resilient fashion?’” said Chris Elder, senior planner at Whatcom County Public Works. ”We will be responding to disaster after disaster.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of more than 200 scientists from around the world, reported an alarming trajectory for our planet: Humans have undoubtedly caused global warming, recent changes to the climate are unprecedented in thousands of years and there is no region on earth to hide from the worsening impacts. The scientists agreed that even with significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions, the planet will likely exceed within 20 to 30 years the 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming from pre-industrial temperatures that international leaders sought to avoid in signing the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Once the earth surpasses 1.5 Celsius degrees of warming, climate disasters will become increasingly common and stark. Widespread heatwaves, like the ones the Pacific Northwest saw this past summer, will blast the planet, exposing about 14 percent of the global population to extreme heat events at least once every five years, according to NASA. Floods, sea-level rise, drought and wildfires will also worsen.
“In the Pacific Northwest, we get this idea that we are a haven from climate change. We have ample rainfall, it’s lush, it’s green. That’s just not true anymore,” said Anja Semanco, digital engagement manager at Bellingham-based environmental nonprofit RE Sources. She pointed to the overlapping heat wave and wildfire smoke that slammed the county last week as evidence — both heat events and wildfire risk are made more frequent and severe by climate change.
“It’s this fine balance of trying to make sure we don’t surpass emissions further than we have to and being realistic that we will surpass benchmarks,” Semanco said. “How can we protect and empower our community so we are not living a climate catastrophe lifestyle?”
Acting quickly
Particularly in light of this new report, climate change appears overwhelming, but local governments like Bellingham and Whatcom County have a critical role to play in a warming future, Elder said. They are the ones who will be charged with preparing communities to deal with climate disasters.
The climate change report found that human activity has warmed the climate at a rate unprecedented in the last 2,000 years. Global mean sea-level rise since 1900 moved faster than it has during any century in at least the past 3,000 years, and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were higher in 2019 than at any point in at least the last 2 million years. These numbers highlight the need for Bellingham to pick up the pace in implementation of its Climate Protection Action Plan, last updated in 2018, said Mayor Seth Fleetwood.
“We have a robust, responsible plan,” Fleetwood said. “The most fundamental observation from the report is the fact that we have to actively accelerate the rate of our implementation.”
That means the city needs to hire more staff and dedicate more “productive hours” to climate change action, he said.
Similar actions need to be taken by Whatcom County, Elder said. The county is currently considering the creation of an Office of Climate Action in its draft Climate Action Plan, but questions remain on where funding for the office would come from.
Climate adaption, or preparing communities to cope with the impacts of a warming planet, is an increasingly critical component of both city and county plans, as it becomes clear that we are locked into a certain degree of climate disasters. Bellingham is currently drafting a climate adaptation strategy, which Fleetwood hopes will be ready for review by the community and City Council this fall.
At the county level, there is a need for better management of areas at particularly high risk of climate impacts, including shorelines, floodplains and wildfire-prone forests, Elder said.
“We do have development on the shoreline or the floodplain or the wildfire zone,” he said. “If we do have those climate impacts, we are not well-prepared.”
The county has significant development in forest ecosystems that are at increasing risk of wildfire, he said, and officials need to meet the challenge of preparing those areas to mitigate risk while respecting private property rights. The climate change report, he said, also heightens the urgency to handle the conflict between agriculture and tribes regarding water rights in the Nooksack River Basin, as water availability is expected to become more and more strained in coming years.
The county needs updated vulnerability assessments, which allow the government to see which areas are at the greatest risk, he said. A consultant was hired to conduct “very high-level” climate vulnerability assessment of four areas of the county over a year ago, but these assessments need to be done again at a more granular level, Elder said.
“At this point, it’s not even fully clear on which structures are most vulnerable,” he said. “Are we expecting 2 feet of sea-level rise over the next 30 years, or is it 8 or 10 feet?”
Elder said the climate science summary completed by the county in 2020 is likely an undershot, with warming rates increasing even more than available science indicated a few years ago. But despite the intergovernmental panel report’s underscoring of the urgency of climate change, Elder worries some county leaders are still unwilling to take the swift action needed to respond to worsening climate disasters.
“I would hope this would light a fire under the policymakers’ seats. But I’m unclear,” Elder said. “We have some councilors still skeptical about climate change and impacts. They still have concerns about using words like facts and science.”
This story was originally published August 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This story was corrected on Aug. 17, 2021, to reflect that projected global warming is 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
