Note: This is not a campaign pitch! It’s about her full-time job.

Emily Norton and Vernon Walker have an excellent article in Commonwealth Magazine about how communities can build climate change resiliency into their local geographies. It’s worth a look.  One quote:

Many of the most effective and inexpensive solutions to building climate resilience involve bringing nature back into our built environment. Such nature-based solutions include restoring urban tree canopy, restoring wetlands, daylighting buried streams, and installing “green infrastructure,” such as bioswales, rain gardens, and permeable pavers that absorb water, thereby reducing stormwater runoff and flooding and recharging aquifers. Not only do these solutions offer protection, they offer co-benefits of cleaner air, cleaner water, and the psychological benefit we all get from living in and around green space.

There is a growing concern in the financial community that municipal bonds that are issued can be of higher risk than generally assumed if key portions of a city’s or town’s infrastructure, revenue base, and the like might be subject to disruption by weather events and flooding. Norton and Walker offer a set of sensible solutions to these problems. As they note:

Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, here in the Northeast we will continue to face more intense storms, more frequent drought, and more extreme heat. And virtually no one is doing enough to protect people, property, and the natural world from these weather extremes. Just as climate activists are rising up to demand that governments move more quickly to transition off the fossil fuels that are warming our planet, so too should concerned citizens pressure local governments to act more quickly to invest in smart “climate resilience.”