Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change

Shannon Van Zandt, Jaimie Hicks Masterson, Galen D. Newman, Michelle Annette Meyer

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780128155752
• eBook ISBN: 9780128155769
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science

Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change is a guide to successfully integrating science into urban, regional, and coastal planning activities to build truly sustainable communities that can withstand climate change. It calls for a shift in academic researchers' traditional thinking by working across disciplines to solve complex societal and environmental problems, focusing on the real-world human impacts of climate change, and providing an overview of how science can be used to advocate for institutional change.Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change appeals to a wide variety of audiences, including university administrators looking to create and sustain interdisciplinary research groups, community and state officials, non-profit and community advocates, and community organizers seeking guidance for generating and growing meaningful, productive relationships with university researchers to support change in their communities.- Focuses on the process of building a successful, active partnership between climate change researchers and climate resilience professionals- Provides case studies of university-community partnerships in building climate resilience- Includes interviews and contributors from a wide variety of disciplines engaged in climate resilience partnerships

Part I

Discovery

• Chapter 1: Introduction: our global story
• Chapter 2: A case for engaged research and practice
• Chapter 3: Resilience is Rawlsian
• Chapter 4: Origin of the Institute for Sustainable Communities
• Chapter 5: Discovery initiatives
• Chapter 6: Breaking down the walls: challenges and lessons learned in interdisciplinary research

Chapter 1

Introduction: our global story

Jaimie Hicks Masterson^a

Shannon Van Zandt^b
a Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA
^b Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline

• A community
• A university
• Organization of the book
• A partnership
• References

“When you know their stories, you grow strength from their survival.”

Sam Collins III, City of Hitchcock, Texas resident

This is the story of community-university partnerships. It is the story of place and of people. It is a story of survival and urgency. It is the story of local knowledge and empirically driven science.

A community

Once I heard a local Houstonian chuckle and say, “smells like money,” referring to the toxic fumes of the refineries along either side of Highway 225, the major highway along “the Houston Ship Channel” connecting the port areas to downtown. Fenceline communities and those vulnerable to hazards do not chuckle at this sentiment.

Instead of “snow days,” Houston schools are more likely to temporarily close from “flood days.” These flood events might not make the national news because they are not always named events like Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Houstonians know all too well the devastation of tropical cyclones and bake the colloquial “hurricane cookies” (or “hurricane cake”) when a hurricane is in the Gulf of Mexico.

If Texans embody the independent, rugged spirit of the nation, Houstonians embody that of Texas. Houston is gritty and tough. Houstonians are tougher and fiercely independent. They possess a rugged spirit that do not give up.

In fact, Houstonians deal with pollution, environmental injustice, hurricanes, storm surge, and ever constant flooding. This place has toxic industries adjacent to neighborhoods and schools-which are also primarily communities of color on the city’s historic East End. Houston has 4600 energy-related companies, refines 14% of the the nation’s petroleum, and produces 44% of the nation’s chemicals (Greater Houston Partnership, 2019). Houston air quality regularly exceeds healthy ozone levels and is ranked among the most ozone-polluted cities in the United States (American Lung Association, 2019). A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel had a 56% greater chance of contracting leukemia than children living 10 or more miles away. The residents within the Manchester/Harrisburg neighborhood in East End Houston along the Ship Channel bear some of the highest cumulative cancer risk among all of Harris County (Linder, Marko, & Sexton, 2008).

Flooding in Houston makes up most of the whole state’s losses, and the city’s flooding issues have become a bear weather of impacts to come for other urban areas under increased climate change impacts. As for flooding, between 1996 and 2007 Houston had $1.1 billion of the $1.8 billion in insured flood losses for all of Texas. Predictions show that the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events will only increase due to climate change. Climate change is expected to increase the annual probability of Houston receiving large-scale rainfall events from once in every 2000 years to once in every 100 years by 2081-2100 (Emanuel, 2017). While annual precipitation is expected to remain about the same over the next 100 years, the variability-more extremely wet days and extremely dry periods-will increase (Li, Li, Wang, & Quiring, 2019). Events like Hurricane Harvey, and the floods (e.g., Tax Day Flood and Memorial Day Flood of 2016, among others) in the years preceding Harvey, will be a new normal for the city.

The problems described are not a neighborhood problem, or just a Houston problem, but a global problem. Since 1880, the earth has warmed 1°C (1.8°F). With current carbon-emitting trends, by 2100 the earth will warm by 4°C (or 7.2°F). Because of these grave numbers, in April of 2016, 175 of the 196 world countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by curbing the impacts to only 2°C (3.6°F). The Paris Agreement set the record for the highest number of countries to sign an international agreement, and the highest emitters, -such as the United States, China, India, and the EU, all committed to lessening the impacts of climate change, although the United States ceased participation in 2017.

Many cities within the United States continue their commitments to this agreement and other environmental and resilience goals, in hopes of addressing some of these challenges. City-led initiatives and neighborhood-level resilience efforts can promote grassroots and equitable practices that compliment national efforts or fill a void in national leadership. Houston is a microcosm of global trends and problems. Houston happens to be a living laboratory to understand these complex problems and how cities and neighborhoods can develop just resilience practices for the future.

A way to establish and grow resilience locally is through k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Discovery
• Part II: Process for Creating Citizen-Engaged Science
• Appendix
• Index