Building Resilience 2019: How Cleveland is Leading the Way in Planning for Climate Change

by Katrina Holland

How will the climate crisis reshape U.S. cities? What are cities doing to improve resilience and adapt to the climate crisis? What social and infrastructural changes will be required?

To explore the answers to these questions, I boarded a Megabus to Cleveland last November, to attend Building Resilience 2019, a conference dedicated to preparing our cities for climate change. This first-of-its-kind conference was organized by the International Living Future Institute, the Resilient Design Institute, and BuildingGreen.

Matt Gray, the Chief of Sustainability in Cleveland, Ohio, welcomes attendees of the Building Resilience 2019 Conference in November, 2019. Photo: Alex Wilson

Cleveland’s Chief of Sustainability Matt Gray spoke in depth about the city’s Climate Change Action Plan. Gray’s presentation provided a glimpse into how a rust-belt city is tackling environmental planning on what was the 50th anniversary of the last time the city’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire—an event that helped to launch the nation’s environmental movement. I got the chance to hear thirteen different speakers—including architects, physicists, designers, engineers, urban planners, doctors, and political figures—and chatted with dozens of attendees and speakers.

Mark Chambers, the Chief Sustainability Officer for New York City, presenting at Building Resilience 2019. Photo: Alex Wilson

The motivation for this conference lies in the fact that cities will be forced to transform rapidly in the coming years in order to meet drastic changes in both environmental and demographic factors. According to a study by the Environmental Justice Foundation, more than 26 million people had already been displaced by extreme weather events as of 2009, and that number will continue to grow, eventually leading to a complete geographical redistribution of the Earth’s human population. Some cities will double in population size while others will disappear entirely.

In 2017, Hurricane Maria ripped through Puerto Rico at 155 miles per hour, leaving nearly 3,000 people dead and most of the island’s infrastructure destroyed. A study released by Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies showed that in the following year, an estimated 160,000 people moved to the United States mainland—and that is the impact of just one extreme weather event.

Amy Macdonald, P.E., of Thornton Tomasetti, and Jeff Geisinger, AIA of Utile presenting on flood resilience at the conference. Photo: Alex Wilson

Sea levels are rising, too; if water levels were to rise three more meters, it would put Fort Lauderdale and Miami underwater. Coastal residents and businesses could be forced to relocate, and they’ll be looking inland to minimize environmental risk and the potential for freshwater insecurity.

Target initiatives at Sustainable Cleveland. Source: www.SustainableCleveland.org.

Rust-belt cities as safe havens from climate change

The cities that act as havens from rising sea levels, tropical storms, and earthquakes—likely midwestern cities—will need to have certain infrastructure in place to accommodate larger populations, harsher storms, and extreme temperatures. At BuildingResilience19, speakers discussed how Cleveland plans on accommodating its current and future residents in the face of the climate crisis.

Safe from coastal storms, on the margin of one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, lies Cleveland. Every other home in Cleveland is vacant—a scar left from The Great Recession in 2008 and the consequential housing market collapse. But this scar became a blessing for buyers on a budget.

Houses have begun to fill with residents seeking refuge from climate crises. Cleveland’s Director of Sustainability, Matt Gray, predicted that lakeside, cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Buffalo will serve as environmental havens, attracting the majority of climate refugees. This impending rapid city growth is calling urban planners to rethink how they structure our cities.

Nick Rajkovich, Ph.D., AIA, of the University of Buffalo, laying out key priorities for the conference. Photo: Alex Wilson

Addressing “passive survivability”

During the BuildingResilience19 conference, Alex Wilson of the The Resilient Design Institute (RDI) described how Hurricane Katrina in 2005 influenced his thinking about resilience. In the days following the superstorm, temperatures in the New Orleans Superdome rose to 105° F. The Superdome was supposed to serve as a shelter, but instead presented its own set of health hazards, such as heat stroke, sanitation, and dehydration.

Because of its dependence on mechanical systems operating on electricity, the Superdome became a heat trap without power, killing two people. Wilson realized that for a building to safely serve as a haven from the climate crisis, it must offer “passive survivability,” a term he coined to describe “a building’s ability to maintain critical life-support conditions if services such as power, heating fuel, or water are lost.”

For example, a hurricane recovery shelter with passive survivability would ideally accomplish the following :

Remain cool without power through natural ventilation, strategic choice of building materials, air stratification, or sun-blocking window shades.
Stay lit without power through daylighting, renewable energy sources, and/or backup battery storage.
Provide potable water reserves, either stored onsite or from captured and filtered rainwater.

Katrina Holland, of Northwestern University, and Candace Pearson, of BuildingGreen, catching up at the conference. Photo: Alex Wilson

A focus on resilience

BuildingResiliance19 offered a critical opportunity for institutions like RDI to come together with professionals from all across the United States from various fields. Architects and engineers exchanged knowledge with politicians and social workers. Just about every person who attended the conference brought to it a unique expertise.

Today, Cleveland is rethinking its structures—both social and physical—for the second time in 10 years. The first occasion, in 2009, led to the introduction of the Cleveland Climate Action Plan: the overarching goal to reduce Cleveland’s carbon footprint by 80% by the year 2050 (Cleveland Climate Action Plan).

According to Cleveland’s mayor, Frank Jackson, the plan has funded 50 community-led projects, paved 70 miles of bike paths, and successfully reduced carbon emissions while growing the economy. Back in 2009, Cleveland’s population was declining. Jobs were disappearing left and right, and then Lebron left the Browns, shattering Cleveland’s collective identity. Today, Cleveland is in a very different situation: its population is increasing, and the current climate refugee crisis is bound to catalyze further growth.

Cleveland, Ohio is well-positioned to accept climate refugees from coastal areas of the U.S. as sea level rise progresses in the coming decades. Photo: Alex Wilson

BuildingResiliance19 gave me hope in our country’s ability to adapt to the climate crisis. Cities are preparing for major structural changes, and they aren’t doing it alone— they are drawing on expertise from a variety of fields in order to design safer, greener infrastructure that will truly act as a safe-haven for future generations.

By including experts from different sectors—like economists and sociologists—in the conversation, cities can make these drastic changes without stunting economic growth. Thanks to conferences like this, professionals can introduce each other to new strategies, such as passive survivability, and new criteria that will be helpful for the collaborative effort they are embarking upon.

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Katrina Holland is a summer intern at the Resilient Design Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont. In November 2019, as a junior at Northwestern University, she attended the BuildingResilience19 Conference in Cleveland, and in this article she offers her observations and insights from the conference. This is reprinted, with modest edits, from In Our Nature Magazine, a student-run publication of Northwestern University.

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.