Vivek Shandas - Collaborating for Climate Equity: Researcher–Practitioner Partnerships in the Americas

Dana Hellman & Vivek Shandas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208723-1

Climate change is widely considered as one of the greatest challenges to human survivorship, especially among those who have less access to and control over resources and support. Effects of a warming planet on our social fabric, economic prosperity, ecological stability, and the publics health have been areas of intensive study for decades. The extant literature largely points to several climate-induced modifiers and mechanisms that affect the lives and livelihoods of urban populations, including altered temperatures, extremes of precipitation (floods and droughts), air pollution, and infectious diseases. Extreme events, such as hurricanes, flooding, droughts, wildfires, and heat waves, are immediate and local ways that people experience climate change, and urban areas are particularly vulnerable to such events, given their location, concentration of people, and increasingly complex and interdependent infrastructures. The mounting fatalities and costs associated with extreme events are not just an indication of failures in built infrastructure, but highlight the inadequacy of institutions, resources, and information systems to prepare for and respond to extremes.

In urban areas, municipal managers, county and city councils, public agencies, and community members increasingly recognize that extant structures and past practices no longer keep urban residents out of harms way. The 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest was akin to a previous event of almost identical magnitude and duration that struck Chicago 26 years earlier, and yet, the fatalities and infrastructure failures point to the fact that little was learned from earlier events. Other events such as hurricanes and flooding also occur repeatedly in cities around the world, and similar patterns of adaptation inaction underscore the lack of commitment to a coordinated and informed response. With many of the most populous and fast-growing cities worldwide located along coasts, urban climate managers are rapidly exploring solutions to prevent costly and life-threatening impacts of sea level rise that are increasingly evident around the world. Yet others are located in water-scarce regions, such as the North American West, which are subject to extreme drought and heat events (Karl et al., 2009; IPCC, 2012, 2014). Compounding these vulnerabilities is the growth of the worlds urban population, which the United Nations Population Program expects to double in the next generation.

The impacts of climate change are not born equally across urban populations. While urban heat is the most life threatening, floods and sea level rise arguably pose the greatest threat to built infrastructure. Evidence from around the world suggests that those who are below the poverty level, communities of color, immigrant communities, isolated, older adults, and others who have been historically marginalized are most at risk to extreme heat and consistent flooding (Reid et al., 2012; Watts et al., 2018; Voelkel et al., 2018; Chang et al., 2021). The consequences of exposure to these events are worsening, and recent studies suggest that by 2070, upward of three billion people will no longer be able to live in areas where humans have resided for the past 6,000 years (Xu et al., 2020). Even today, as much higher resolution descriptions of extreme events emerge, we observe that marginalized communities have greater exposure and, in terms of finding refuge from urban heat, are also four times as likely to be far from public health agency-sponsored cooling resources or have personal air conditioning systems (Voelkel et al., 2018). Existing studies help to define the concept of climate equity by situating race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status as key factors that disproportionately expose some urban residents to the discriminating effects of extreme events. The lack of adequate resources within these populations to mitigate or adapt to the adverse effects of a changing climate further exemplifies the importance of supporting actions that are centered in historic injustices.

Climate models and historical weather data suggest that urban communities will continue to witness increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme heat in the coming decades (NOAA, 2018).

On the basis of a preponderance of evidence, practitioners face critical decisions about what strategies will be most effective for reducing exposure to and impacts from extreme climate-induced events. Arguably, those in the public sector are also responsible for safe-guarding those most vulnerable to the inequitable impacts of climate change. As costs mount, revenues waver, and calls for climate action become increasingly urgent, the need to meet competing demands can seem insurmountable for municipal managers. When evaluating expenditures on climate change versus other municipal program expenditures (e.g., public housing, schools, transit) some studies indicate woefully inadequate support for the extent of adaptation actions needed (Bachner et al., 2019). At the same time, other studies indicate that the longer municipal actions are postponed the greater the overall cost born to society. An alternative that we explore in this book is the ability for multi-solving climate issues with other municipal challenges by coordinating across multiple agencies, engaging researchers, and finding opportunities to integrate climate actions into diverse and agenda-driven agency policies.

Through a series of case studies that span the Western hemisphere, this book explores the hypothesis that a coordinated response for immediate climate action requires the coming together of municipal managers and climate researchers. By integrating the emerging science about the distributional effects of climate change along with municipal policy levers for enabling actions, cities and regions can co-produce response plans that aim to ground action in science and center those communities that have the lowest amount of coping capacity. We specifically ask two questions: (1) What lessons can we find about the collaborative process from these case studies, and what findings apply specifically to climate collaborations? (2) How can integrative climate-relevant research conceivably enhance outcomes on the ground when merged with practitioner action?

The purpose of this book is not to dive deeply into the theory of collaboration, nor to extoll its perceived virtues. A robust body of literature on collaborative work from business management to grassroots social action to public health and environmental justice exists elsewhere, and we are writing this text from the now-common standpoint that collaboration is a promising avenue toward climate equity and resilience. However, for conceptual setup, this section includes key background details on collaborative processes generally, as well as their promise for the field of climate adaptation and resilience. Our subsequent case studies go beyond theory and potential to what we refer to as lived collaboration; that is, the practical manifestation of the foundational concepts discussed in this section. The contents of this book emphasize a particular variety of collaboration, which we argue is worthy of further study: that between climate researchers and practitioners.

Existing literature on collaboration encompasses multiple varieties, including collaboration across sectors, with local communities, between governments, or between researchers and practitioners (AL-Tabbaa et al., 2014; Black et al., 2003; Nyden & Wiewel, 1992; Pavlish & Pharris, 2012; Wagner, 1997). In most cases, the underlying justification for collaboration is that siloed approaches to complex topics do not produce favorable, creative, or effective results (Coaffee & Clarke, 2015). Two (or three or four or ten) heads are better than one, so to speak, as collaborators from different backgrounds can provide unique insights and resources, while also representing potentially marginal experiences. This latter point is particularly meaningful in community-based collaborative research, wherein researchers provide community members a voice and a role in research projects that include or affect them (Harrington et al., 2019). In terms of researcherpractitioner collaboration, the end goal is typically articulated in terms of closing a gap between the two sides; reconciling functionally distinct but potentially compatible perspectives on everything from mathematics education and computer science to healthcare and social work (Bartunek, 2007; Belli, 2010).