As Cambridge and nearby communities brace for extreme heat and flooding, researcher and journalist Courtney Humphries argues that the region’s patchwork political landscape is a major obstacle to climate action. Her new book, “Climate Change and the Future of Boston” (Anthem Press), looks at the city’s 400-year-old history of development, and how that shapes the region’s climate future. Humphries studies urban environmental governance and has taught at Boston College and Smith College.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
You describe Boston’s metro area as one of the most politically fragmented in the country. What does that mean in planning for a regional climate emergency?
Boston is a very small city in a larger metropolis. So when we’re thinking about reducing greenhouse gas emissions or adapting to climate change, a lot of what really matters is at the metropolitan scale.
But because this metropolis is broken up into all of these little cities and towns, they each have their own government, their own goals, their own climate action plans. They have really different budgets. That becomes a real problem when you’re thinking about how to coordinate [a plan for a climate crisis].
How did Greater Boston get so fragmented?
Boston developed very early in our nation’s history, and eventually developed infrastructure and created a municipal water system. In the 19th century, a lot of communities ended up being absorbed by Boston or joining Boston because they wanted access to those city services.
Others really resisted and wanted to keep their independence — communities saying, no, we don’t want to be part of this growing city, which had a lot of immigration, a lot of population growth. Instead, there’s just this series of independent communities. That’s just a different way of governing than in a lot of other areas, especially cities that emerged later.
Even though this book is about climate change, I really spend a lot of time looking at history and thinking about the city’s development. Sometimes we talk about climate change and climate action as if it’s all looking towards the future. As we see more climate impacts in urban areas, a lot of times, it’s a reaction between the weather and the climate — but also how the city developed and what decisions were made in the past.
How vulnerable is Cambridge in this fragmented system?
Cambridge is very highly developed. It already faces a lot of urban heat. We’re facing a future where, by the end of the century, much of the summer could be in the 90s. Cambridge is an area where equity is really important, because some people have air conditioning and can manage when there’s a strong heat wave and others can’t.
Cambridge isn’t exposed to sea-level rise at the same level as Boston. When you look at flood projections over time in Cambridge, for a while, it’s not so bad. But there’s catastrophic flooding later in the century. Cambridge depends on dams that exist outside the city, on the Charles River and the Mystic River. And so if those dams become overtopped by storms in the future, you start to see really strong flooding in Cambridge.
Cambridge is a really good example of a city that really needs to be working with people regionally, because it depends on constructing or adapting infrastructure that’s outside of the city.
You’ve written about how some communities around Boston didn’t want to get absorbed into a city dominated by a large immigrant population. Does that legacy affect how communities in Greater Boston work together now on climate change?
One of the things that’s really important now is thinking about social inequities across the metro area, which is really hard to address. Cities like Boston and Cambridge have become incredibly expensive. And people have been forced to move out of those cities. So there’s a lot of social and racial inequality when you look across the whole metro area. That means that different cities have different vulnerabilities. They also have different abilities to address the problem.
How do you get communities to work together in a way that creates more equity if they see themselves as self-contained units? How do we make sure that it’s not just the most well-resourced cities and towns that are able to adapt to climate change?
What regional planning for climate change exists so far?
We have the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a really important actor in trying to have a metropolitan-level system of planning and to think about climate resilience and climate change mitigation. But they’re a planning body; they don’t make laws. Of course, there are things that take place at the state level that are really important. But state government is going to be less focused on the metro area.
We have these three river watersheds, which have agencies that manage things like water pollution into the Neponset and the Charles and the Mystic rivers. What’s come out of that is things like the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, which has been trying to address some of these broader climate issues across all the different cities and towns in the Mystic River watershed.
The Boston and Cambridge areas have this really strong educational infrastructure. We have a lot of strengths in people who really care about climate change and leadership.
What are the real challenges of working in a region with great income inequality, and people getting priced out of many towns?
If we are working towards making cities and towns more resilient, who are they going to be resilient for? All the efforts we put into, for instance, creating housing that is more energy efficient and creating more flood-protective neighborhoods, if that is only making it more expensive to live there, then you’re really protecting this increasingly elite group of people.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.