A More Resilient Future

Last week, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh released his “Resilient Boston Harbor” plan to protect Boston from the impending effects of climate change. The plan draws heavily from the city’s climate action plan, Imagine Boston 2030 and a series of 2070 flood maps, signaling a strong movement towards adaptation-minded efforts. Though Resilient Boston is a potentially costly project, the plan is an important series of initiatives that will begin to address the climate impacts we see today and those of future generations.

Climate change is real. We see the effects of a fluctuating climate every day—from increased severity in storms, to changing weather patterns, to elevated indices for wildfire. In Boston, the effects of climate change are expected to manifest as sea levels rise and stormwaters flood the area. The degree to which governments are able to curb their greenhouse gas emissions in the near future will predict the extent to which preparation for climate change is necessary. We applaud Boston for being proactive in producing a plan to address the changes to our climate that we know are coming.

In conjunction with the City’s mitigation goals, the resilience efforts promoted in the plan present a good starting point. They address the localized effects of climate change in a manner that is both effective and productive for maintaining and ameliorating Boston residents’ quality of life.

However, while we commend Boston for its efforts, we believe the city can do even better going forward. Importantly, climate science is an extremely dynamic field that changes every day. Therefore, while the initiatives offered by the plan address the projected effects of climate change we can predict now, we hope this document can be easily amended to future developments within the field.

We also hope that Boston will continue to prioritize equity as a chief concern in its climate planning. Though climate change will affect everyone, it is proven to have differential effects on groups of income levels, ages, races, and other identity factors. As Boston pioneers a more resilient future, we hope that the City will not only consider the most vulnerable populations in their climate planning efforts, but also foreground them.

Additionally, although the Resilient Boston Harbor initiative was outlined by the City of Boston, we believe Harvard should also play a large role in climate planning efforts. Climate change will affect every facet of human society, and it is a responsibility of the University, and other private and public institutions across the Boston area, to aid in climate planning efforts. Harvard already has an ambitious climate action plan, however, it is largely centered on mitigation efforts to stem the University’s direct effect on greenhouse gas emissions.

The University, as one of the richest and most influential institutions in the world, should not only devote itself to climate science, but also to adaptation planning. Harvard is a central part of the Boston-Cambridge community and cannot ignore its impact on the surrounding community. Therefore, it should actively aid, both financially and in terms of planning, resilience efforts initiated in the area. While this will require both intellectual and fiscal resources, it is important to note that Harvard’s sustained preeminence is contingent upon a world that does not fall prey to climate change at large.

We commend Boston’s efforts in creating a community more resilient to climate change as outlined by the Resilient Boston Harbor Plan. However, we urge the City to prioritize the most vulnerable communities in the area in its planning efforts, both as the plan stands now, and as it develops. We further call on Harvard to play a more active role than just producing scholarship and enacting its mitigation plan by taking the lead as a university institution envisioning adaptation as an integral component to its sustained operations.

This staff editorial is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.