 The good news, and I want to give you one piece of good news before I go into this slide that I want you to remember through the rest of this talk Listen to this really carefully 60 to 70 percent of the GNP of the entire Country of the Netherlands is produced below sea level 60 percent of the population in the Netherlands lives below sea level and has done so for about 800 years so just sort of keep that in mind, okay? As a hopeful piece Budra's was my predecessor here at the aquarium and it's thanks to him that the aquarium is looking so wonderful these days and I wanted him to stay on with me, but he said no so he is now a senior advisor on private chain and the Bonne Foundation here in Boston and He is really good update for us of the predictions of impacts of climate change On the waterfront over the next several decades. I've actually been working on this topic quite a long time I wrote my master's thesis in 1975 in graduate school on how to manage Development on barrier islands in the face of the dynamics of the oceans and shifting sands and seas so I've worked on this topic for a very long time. My first or second job was working for the coastal zone management program in the Commonwealth here of Massachusetts and I Authored all of the sections of that plan that dealt with coastal hazards and risk So I've kind of come back full circle Somebody introduced me a few weeks ago as having worked on climate change so long That the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere increased 90 during my time frame it went from 310 parts per million to 400 parts per million. So that's a very long time period but I've been involved in in the last several years starting when I was in Jellies job here at the aquarium on the Green Ribbon Commission in Boston and this is a really interesting group It's rather unique and cities in the United States. It's about 30 or 35 CEOs from the private sector many of them in the development world and the real estate world here in Boston many of them big property owners in the city It also includes the heads of some of the major hospitals for example mass general and partners health care The presidents of BU senior executives from Harvard MIT And a couple of nonprofit representatives all of whom are working in partnership with the city to make our city greener So there's a there's a twin focus one is on Mitigating emissions of carbon primarily looking at the building and property sector here in Boston And more recently trying to figure out what the topic which the topic of my talk tonight is on How do we protect our city in the faces of the great changes coming ahead from climate change? So you can read the blurb up there, but the longer the short of it is how do we save Boston? So we don't have to move to Springfield And you'll see why at just a few minutes a little bit of a history lesson Boston is approaching its 400th anniversary in 2030 This is a map from 1775 and I want you to imprint this on your brain because we're going to come back to it a little bit later But I'll I'll show you a snapshot of it later, but we were built on a hill I think as everybody knows Beacon Hill We're here partly because it was a very deep harbor Partly because it was the closest US port to Europe, but also very much because it was well protected From the arm and the elbow of Cape Cod and also from 34 Harbor Islands That are now a national park off our shores Over time it was filled quite dramatically You can 1630 1880 and then from to the present So you'll recognize the back bay and South Boston down here back bay up here and you know the harbor is a lot narrower than it was 400 years ago And then of course today we have very much a booming waterfront Downtown South Boston now East Boston and Dorchester a lot of things happening all over the city I look out my window in the north end and there are cranes Everywhere and if you spend any time at all in the seaport South Boston district We've built something like 1415 million square feet of office space in the last three years and another 15 million feet are coming For the first time in about 20 years. I have seen there is a church under construction Can you see it right here in South Boston? They're moving one of the older Catholic churches. I Swear to God the purpose of this church is to pray that we'll never have the flood And that will become clear in a few minutes Boston faces some special vulnerabilities even though it's reasonably well protected The sea has already risen about a foot over the last 80 to 90 years Partly because the city has subsided because it was built on fill but also because as water warms It expands so if you heat up the oceans as we have done the water expands and it rises And if you melt glaciers and melt the ice caps in the Greenland in our Antarctica More that all that water goes into the oceans and it begins to rise We're in a in a sort of main trajectory for Lots of hurricanes, but very fortunately because we're so well protected and because hurricanes spin counterclockwise We've had a lot of near misses and Boston has escaped many many times major damage from hurricanes partly also because we have a very Significant tidal cycle, you know every day the tide goes up and down somewhere between 9 and 11 12 feet And if the hurricane comes through at low tide, we are spared as is what happened when Sandy hit New York That was a low tide here. We do have northeasters though, which is potentially a bigger problem partly because they usually last longer a big northeaster can linger over Boston one two sometimes three days and therefore go through very You know a large number of tidal cycles during that period and can hit us at high tide So in some ways northeasters are a bigger Problem major challenge and I'm going to come back in more detail on some of these major challenges for the future Are sea level rise if you walk along the harbor particularly around the aquarium or harbor towers or in the north end And even now out into South Boston, you'll find we have about a foot sometimes maybe two feet of freeboard You know the distance between the highest high tide and the land so we don't have a lot of slack We don't have a lot of margin of error, you know going forward in the future Heat is going to be another issue here in Boston less so in the on the waterfront where you get the coastal breezes But in the interior parts of the city And that could be very much of a problem for some of the more disadvantaged populations in the city And I'll come back to that and then the third issue is more intense Precipitation if you've noticed the puddles are deeper in Boston Your shoes are wearing out more rapidly you buy more and more umbrellas. We now get 21 percent more Water in precipitation in Boston than we did 50 years ago So we're already seeing quite a lot of change and I'm not going to go into that topic But it's another another challenge for the for the future All of this of course is happening in a city where we have a lot of difficulty with our infrastructure Whether it's the water and sewer system whether it's some of the barriers and structures that are already in place to protect the city and environments or as we're all very familiar with the unfortunate state of the MBTA Which you know not even thinking about What we might have to do to make it more resilient to the kinds of things we're going to talk about tonight But already needs six or seven billion dollars to get it in in good working order The good news and I want to give you one piece of good news before I go into this slide that I want you to remember through the rest of this talk Listen to this really carefully 60 to 70 percent of the GNP of the entire Country of the Netherlands is produced below sea level 60 percent of the population in the Netherlands lives below sea level and has done so for about 800 years So just sort of keep that in mind. Okay? As a hopeful piece so The other good news is that there is a lot of work already being done on being done on this subject in the city of Boston In some ways far ahead of other cities in the United States many of the public agencies who Manage our infrastructure whether it's highways or transit or sewers or water systems or Communications infrastructure have already started to focus on this issue and been doing Vulnerability assessments to look at to examine what the risks to their infrastructure are So in some ways, you know, we've got a good head start on that, which is very good There have been a number of design competitions in the last two or three years Starting to look at how to face this challenge and you know, what might we have to do differently going forward? I see David Arnold is here. He lives in the building behind me on the screen, which is the Prince building over in the north end which was one of the architectural guinea pigs for an Interesting design competition to see how you might redesign that building to withstand floods in the future Another one is in South Boston The particular structure in the upper left happens to be on the site where GE is going to locate their New World headquarters And this was an idea for figuring out a way to make that part of town more resilient But as we began to look at this and trying to figure out how to organize this very large study That's now underway We realized first of all there was a need to update the projections of exactly or try to be a little bit more Precise about what is actually going to happen to Boston as our climate changes There's a lot of anecdotes worst case this best case that over the last several years There were a lot of maps that were done to kind of illustrate different scenarios But we thought there was a real need to put a really good scientific team together to analyze my more carefully Particularly now that the science has improved quite dramatically in the last few years to try to figure out What's going to what's really going to happen. So I'll come back to a piece of that Then you have all these agencies who have done all these vulnerability assessments But we thought there was a real need to kind of pull those all together get them on one map You know paint a clearer picture of where the problems might be and particularly begin to look at how could we solve several problems? You know with one stone or one expenditure or one capital project rather than looking at everything piecemeal We want to identify the high-risk areas through the city more on a neighborhood or sort of regional scale Rather than the design competitions which focused on individual buildings one of the criticisms of those design competitions was that you could Protect a building against flooding, but if it's all flooded all around it It becomes an island that you can't get to so what's the point? So we need to look at a bigger scale And then we really want to focus on developing solutions because this is a problem You know we've got this part of the city's biggest and most valuable tax bases along the waterfront And it's creates a lot of jobs. It's really important to the economy here in Boston We really don't want to pick it up and move it west So we need to focus on solutions and see what we can do about this really challenging problem So we the Green Ribbon Commission in partnership with the city has put this project together It has four phases The first is to get clear about the climate impacts coming in the decades ahead The second is to synthesize all the vulnerability assessments Third is to come up with some solution strategies for each of the major neighborhoods that will be affected in Boston And then the fourth is to pull that all together in a final report and kind of a roadmap for The years ahead and then there will be a second phase to this project which will go into some of those areas in more detail We've put a really interesting team together led by the city of Boston in partnership with the Green Ribbon Commission UMass Boston is coordinating all the scientific work around the climate projections H&R H RNA, which is a planning and economic firm in New York did a lot of work post sandy in New York They're kind of running the consultant team and then we brought on Arcadis, which is a Dutch engineering firm They know how to put their finger in the dyke with lots of experience in in the Netherlands Which we thought would be very useful and then Sasaki is a planning and architecture firm from Watertown more of a local firm, so we have a really great team There are three different advisory groups working on this a large group of about 40 scientists that helped with the climate projections There's an infrastructure advisory group of all of the agencies who work on this problem who for the first time are in the same room Talking about this problem, and then there's a community engagement or advisory group as well So I'm going to get to the prettier pictures in a minute But that I wanted to sort of understand how this whole thing is coming together when we organized this lecture about six months ago I thought we were going to be at the end of the vulnerability assessment But it's taken a little bit longer and a little more complicated So we're kind of in the middle of that vulnerability assessment So I'm actually going to show you a few tables that don't have any data in them yet But I want to give you the picture of of what we're trying to do So let's start quickly with a science piece This is being led as I mentioned by UMass Boston with what we call the Boston research advisory group Which includes scientists from MIT, Tufts, Harvard, BU, UMass Amherst and several other schools Some of them outside of our region I assume here everybody has learned about climate through some or another education program here at the New England Aquarium I assume everybody could turn to their neighbor and explain it to them But you know just in case you can't our problem is creating this layer of gases in the atmosphere Of which carbon dioxide is the principal constituent which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels Whether it's in automobiles or power plants or energy that's used to heat and cool or electrify buildings That creates this blanket of carbon dioxide gases in the atmosphere And then depending on how serious the world decides to get post Paris We might Mitigate and eliminate a lot of that carbon over time or we might only moderately do that Or we might fail miserably and continue on the trajectory that we're coming on that we're currently on Which would release a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. So What the challenge there is that sort of forecasting how the climate might change Depends on what we do about those emissions trajectory. So when you see a lot of uncertainty It's not necessarily because the science isn't unclear But some of the ranges are because we don't know how successful we're going to be in cutting the carbon emissions to the atmosphere Does that make sense because you'll see how see how that comes back And then you know, how does that play out in Boston in in terms of more heat in terms of increased precipitation In terms of greater amounts of sea level rise in Boston Harbor I'm mostly going to focus on the latter primarily because the first two aren't as advanced yet in terms of the work that we're We're doing but a little bit look at how our climate might change in terms of summer temperatures We're basically going to be like Virginia or Washington, DC If not even a little warmer than that by the end of the century some people might like that a lot The first frost already comes seven to ten days later in the fall and the last frost maybe not this year Comes seven to ten days earlier in the spring So we're already seeing a lot of change our winters with the exception of last year are more mild But the really important thing to understand is heat stress and how that might affect elderly people in Boston Children in Boston people with asthma or other kind of medical problems So the public health officials tend to really want to look at number of days over 90 number of days over 95 Number of days over a hundred and as you can see there's quite a broad range in what might happen there But we're definitely going to see some change And then what I'm going to focus mostly and we looked at three different trajectories of climate of carbon emissions and you might just think of this as the 2.6 is very serious cuts in carbon emissions The 4.5 is moderately successful in cutting carbon and the 8.5 is not very successful at all Continuing on the trajectory that we're now on and you can see that leads you to a very broad range of predictions of How much the sea will rise by the end of this century? This is the most complicated and the most important table in this report that will be coming out It's actually going to be finished just next week or the week after And I'm not going to dare try to go into explain it in detail It's a four-dimensional matrix that we're trying to show and on one piece of paper and need some good graphics to explain it The there are two important or three important things here There's so much inertia in the ocean now because it's already warmed and because we're now seeing an acceleration of the melting of Greenland Antarctica That there's a certain amount of sea level rise that is now Inevitable over say the next 20 to 30 years So by you know by 2050 we are now quite likely to see The harbor rise somewhere between 8 and 18 inches And if you remember what I said earlier if you walk along the harbor We've got about a foot foot and a half maybe two feet in many places You can begin to see that we're gonna have a very serious problem Beyond 2050 the ultimate sea level rise depends on very much of what we do to mitigate those carbon emissions The worst case it could be as much as seven and a half feet by the end of this century, which would really be you know that would be That would fill this well right here quite easily because I know that the entrance to the IMAX theater is within just a couple of feet of The level of the harbor so you can might think about that bubbles would be coming out of my mouth as we speak here Another way to sort of look at this is by about 20 60 or 20 70 There's a better than 50% chance that will at least have two feet of sea level rise and those not these numbers And it's I'm sorry. It is hard to understand the same This is much more precise than anything that we've seen in the last several years And part of the reason for that is we now understand some large Physical oceanographic and chemical processes that just five years ago. We didn't understand the most important one and just think about how Profound and dramatic this is there's now so much ice melting off of Greenland and Off of Antarctica that we are changing the mass of those two continents in a way that their Gravitational attraction is decreasing So here to for those big land masses have pulled water towards them As the ice falls off and melts into the sea not only does it raise the level of the sea with all that water But it the gravitational attraction weakens around those two big land masses So you would think okay if Greenland is less effective in pulling water north that would be good for Boston However, Antarctica is the the gravitational attraction there is also weakening It used to pull our poor water south pull water south and that water is now going north and Because Antarctica is much bigger than Greenland We kind of lose out more water is going to go north than it is south Which is one of the reasons that the northeast is going to feel more pronounced sea level rise Then most of the rest of the world there are other reasons to deal with a Gulf Stream and other factors But so when you see global averages of sea level rise of X to Y feet Just think about we're probably going to experience more of that here and if you take that and couple couple it with the storm situation or the storm regime here in Boston, which is actually there is no evidence yet to Determine whether or not we're going to have more hurricanes or more Or stronger hurricanes or whether we're going to have more nor easters or stronger nor easters We just don't know that yet and I'll come back to that. Yeah, quick question Can you just tell me what our CP stands for it's in every table? I Can tell you what the 2.6 and the 4.5 and the and the 8.8 That's watts per square meter of heating. I'm trying to remember. That's why I hesitate it for a second So anybody here can help me on that it'll come to me before we finish But sorry about that. It's it's a standard term used in all the IPCC government reports and and so on but But what it measures is watts per per square meter the amount of heating from those gases in the atmosphere number RCP just stands for Amount of emissions just think of it that way. I can't remember what the what the terminology is This chart is also really complicated But the point is Even if the storm regime doesn't change even if the hurricanes don't get more intense or more frequent And even if the same thing happens in nor-easter if the seas rise the kind of levels I talked about earlier The kind of storm that now has a 1% chance of occurring in Boston could soon have a 10% chance of occurring Soon after that have a 20 to 30% chance of occurring and by the end of this century be something that might occur at high tide Several times a month several times a week or even almost daily That is a very city very different city than what we know of today Just remember two-thirds of the GNP of the Netherlands is produced below the level of the sea The other impacts that I'm going to get to the maps in the second which tell a much better story than these charts The other impacts we're looking at is precipitation as I mentioned. We're already getting more intense rainfall That raises a real challenge for drainage think of every gutter in the city every downspout All those puddles you walk in around the city Where's that water going to go and where's it going to go particularly if the harbor is higher and it can't flow downhill anymore big problem We will integrate the freshwater flooding problem with the saltwater flooding problem and use that to identify the Critical or vulnerable areas in the city and then as I mentioned We're also looking at the storm frequency and intensity, but our scientist group has concluded for the moment based on what we know We can't forecast any change in that So what are we going to do with all this information? We've divided the city up into these focus areas. I don't know how well any of you know Boston Harbor But this is the main harbor right here the main shipping channel goes out this way This is deer Island where the treatment plant is Long Island Where there used to be a bridge across here where there no longer is a bridge Charles down is here East Boston here Logan Airport there South Boston here So we'll come back to these charts So what does it look like if we add nine inches of sea level rise say between now and 2040 2050 in that range and we have the same kind of flood we have Previously a hundred year flood which is the same flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any year This is the amount of flooding that you would see in downtown Boston The storm of record is the blizzard of 1978. That was the last 1% storm to hit Boston pretty hard in February so then add three feet of sea level rise Houston we have a problem If you can look at Boston in this particular map a Great deal of the city would be flooded in a storm That you know of that magnitude of this if the harbor were three feet higher than it is today So what we're doing? I don't know if you can read the the code or the index on the side of this map But there are about 20 different assets infrastructure buildings even homes fire stations police stations hospitals Every important sort of thing you can imagine the city that we are mapping and putting on these maps that show these flood risks So we can determine what really will be vulnerable over time And then we will paint different scenarios different amounts of sea level rise to try to determine Where the biggest risks are does that make sense? so this is Downtown Boston and then if you remember the chart I showed earlier on of what we looked like 40 years ago You can see I don't have this point. I'll do it the red here, which is Beacon Hill and the hook is the north end where I live See the hook and Beacon Hill so Back to the future Big question mark all of those white buildings are historic houses or structures or Buildings that could qualify for such and you can see them, you know Very much clustered in Beacon Hill the north end and at back bay for obvious reasons This is east Boston Across the harbor from us where there has not yet been the kind of development that we've now see in south Boston a very vulnerable neighborhood This is what they call the greenway right here, which is a new green park somewhat like the greenway on our side of the city over here Unfortunately, there is a low spot right here where it meets the harbor that can let a lot of water in and flooding Again, this is what it would look like with three feet of sea level rise And then south Boston the seaport area where I think I mentioned earlier we've had something like 10 or 15 million square feet of developed of office in and Residential buildings develop in just the last three years and where another 10 to 15 million square feet is going to be developed in The next couple of years is really right in the center of one of the most vulnerable areas in the city But the real problem is if the harbor raises two or three feet, then you can see the entire area becomes quite vulnerable and With all of that development taking place It's pretty hard for me to see Really any solution for this area we can come back to and talk about other than some kind of structure or barrier around at least some parts of it to try to keep the water out many decades from now Does anybody know where GE is going to locate on this map? right there If you can see it right in the four-point channel Yeah, this land is all owned by Gillette and there's two buildings that they've bought and I Guess are gonna lease from the BRA and then their facility will be here GE being the green company It is I think there's an opportunity for them to do something really creative and visionary here Perhaps set an example for what the rest of the Boston waterfront could be doing Presumably their lawyers have checked the maps and and know where they're gonna locate so there was questions somewhere back there Yeah Yes Cambridge did a big vulnerability study somewhat like this and we're actually working very closely with them to sort of look at This together regionally the Charles River and the Mystic are a whole different set of flooding problems from what I'm talking about today And then finally does anybody remember where the Olympics were gonna be? This is the this is the three-foot map of White It Circle Which is right down in here? The good news is I think the city was very much aware of the vulnerability there And we're gonna use that opportunity to make the Olympics an example of how to you know build resilient structures Going forward in the future So just another quick look at this problem of heat stress you remember those graphs of it getting very much warmer We'll have more days over 90 95 and even a hundred so what we're mapping here is our you know Where are the hot spots currently in the city? And who might be vulnerable the heat stress going forward in the future So this is a very different map from what I showed earlier obviously it's away from the ocean So it's warmer and each of those black dots. I think represent a hundred and eighty people So you can see where they cluster whether they're children whether they're older adults people like me over 25 or other people who have medical problems or disabilities or a low income or might have trouble getting to a shelter or You know whatever so this will be another focal point for The solutions roadmap we want to want to develop So that's kind of where we are from here We're going to complete what we call these asset inventories of those 20 different kinds of categories of things that could be Affected by the changing climate we are actually going to quantify the economic value of each and every building in these zones You can do that getting census data data from the assessor's office assessor's office other data from the BRA that's quite current So we'll be able to put a price tag on what's at risk in the city of Boston We're also getting a lot of data on the infrastructure from the various agencies who operate our roads sewers water systems Communication systems etc We will zero in on the major areas in the city that will be most vulnerable Integrate what we call the social vulnerability. That's the heat stress and there'll be similar maps Resulting from flooding and then try to identify what we call critical resiliency focus areas where we need to develop solutions going forward This is one of these tables that we haven't filled in the blanks yet But just to give you an idea how complex this is going to be on the left are all different kinds of Residential and commercial structures and then in the middle we will you know of the rest of the columns We will look at different scenarios of sea level rise and try to quantify The economic value of what might be at risk not just in terms of the value of the property But if there's business interruption etc, and there are remarkably good modeling programs that have been used Particularly in the aftermath of hurricanes in other cities around the United States that can be used for this purpose another example here of Education housing health and safety facilities and so on All of that is going to be inventory to then put back on these maps to try to get a really clear picture of what's at risk a really complicated project and What's really unique in Boston and actually feel quite good about it is we're doing this in advance of the storms This is what usually happens after Katrina, you know or after Sandy We're trying to get ahead of the curve and Boston is quite unique San Francisco is now doing something similar They of course have a lot of experience dealing with earthquakes And you know have similar kinds of different problems, but similar ways of dealing with it So the last phase which will be in June and July We will be looking at some solution strategies for each of the vulnerable areas in the city This is something that you want to have some very key principles in mind as we go forward First is how can we achieve multiple benefits? You know, we don't want to just make this particular sewer line safer or this particular highway or this particular set of buildings Maybe we can look at doing the whole neighborhood and get a bigger bang for the buck by working on it collectively So that's that's a key point We want to think about what are the natural building cycles when buildings are renovated or infrastructure is upgraded Is it every 10 years 20 years or 30 years and based on that timeline? What do you need to think about in terms of what you might have to do when and how can you build a resilient strategy in with the Capital upgrades that are going to happen anyway, so think of it this way if we're going to spend six billion dollars to fix the tee Over the next decade or two decades. How can we do that in a way that we also make it resilient at the same time? Which might mean putting all kinds of structures that could rise up around all the subway entrances to keep the water out Doing all kinds of things with the electrical systems that power the tee to make them resilient, etc. etc etc there has to be a lot more Engagement of the population as we go forward and then you want to work in layers to come on come up with strategies that Can take a sort of layered approach and that might look Graphically or try to explain it graphically with these four schematics on the left It may be that you have to build some kind of protective barrier around a whole neighborhood That might be what we call a gray structure Which would be typical engineering and concrete or it might be a green structure which mimics the way nature might attenuate or Diminish the risk of a major storm or a flood damaging a part of the city You want to make sure that the infrastructure inside that zone is as resilient as possible You want to make sure certainly that any new buildings that are being built take certain measures into account? And I'll come back to that in a second Certainly as we build new buildings going forward in this city now that we know a lot more We really need to think about making them as resilient as possible, so we don't exacerbate The risks that we already have And then there is a whole educational component to build awareness around these issues And I think one of the most interesting challenges here most of the agencies because it's their responsibility to think this way We'll think about how do we prepare for the next storm? How do we make sure we get through it in okay shape? And how do we make sure we recover as quickly as we can and I think that's the way a lot of people Engaged this problem because they think about Katrina or Sandy or whatever But we may have a very very different problem where the seas are rising a couple inches or several inches every decade And at some point we look out our window at the waterfront and the high tide every day is flooding That's a very different problem than the typical sort of prepare for the next storm We're going to deal with that with a whole different set of maps in this project to kind of see what sort of picture that paints and Then I'm pretty much near the end here So again, you know looking at different layers of solution strategies from you know Protecting a whole neighborhood to making sure the infrastructure within that neighborhood is resilient Make sure any new buildings are built properly and put programs in place so that we can renovate old buildings And then really prepare everybody for these changes that are coming you need capital projects to do that You need incentives to create best-packed practices to stimulate the private sector to do the right thing You may need regulations at some point in a kind of different governance system than than what we have today You're going to need a lot of financing That's very difficult because the money for this tends to flow in this country after a storm for recovery New York right now has a I think it's a billion six Dollars and they're building a big structure around lower Manhattan. That's partially green and partially gray to protect the city The good news is we haven't had the storm so we're not eligible for that kind of funding So we've got to be creative and find it in other ways and then just some examples the Picture on the left shows something called an aquafence Which is lying now in the basement or a storeroom somewhere in Atlantic Wharf Just a couple hundred yards from here owned by Boston properties. They will deploy that if there is a major storm surge You know if threatening their new building and I think we're going to see that a lot of other Owners in the south Boston seaport area will probably employ similar kinds of system in my picture there of those new buildings in South Boston in the seaport area Which is in a very vulnerable zone many of them have in these new buildings have designed them in a way So their critical infrastructure is on upper floors What you don't want is your main electrical switching pattern for the whole building in the basement The aquarium actually had that and we moved it upstairs Just before I got here about ten years ago It was kind of not a good idea to put that in the basement of a building with a lot of tanks where salt water leaks all the time But that got moved up. It was rather expensive And it now I think helps protect the building and the whole aquarium against this kind of problem Some of the new buildings in the South Boston have installed a four foot knee wall around the perimeter of their building Which will help flood proof the building in case there is a storm surge Some of the more creative ones are actually making their first floor ceiling height 1214 feet rather than 8 to 10 feet so that if they actually have to raise the level of the first floor They'll have some space to do that Partly because of the regulations and partly because of good common sense Nobody puts inhabited Structures are in Inhabitable units on the first floor in these kinds of areas anybody who's going to live there has to live upstairs So first floors are being made more flexible Thinking that they may have to adapt some way in the future. This is not happening everywhere There are a few good examples of that Unfortunately, most of the buildings that were permitted in the South Boston were permitted 10 or 15 years ago Before we knew as much as we now do about this problem East Boston is quite different where a lot of the buildings over there are now just going through the permitting process Excuse me and some of the developers there are actually elevating the buildings 12 or 14 feet That raises a whole another challenging set of questions What if some buildings are are built or designed at grade level and the guy next door or the woman next door puts it up? 12 feet how do you connect them with a harbor walk or sidewalk? How do you meet ADA requirements, etc? And that's going to be an interesting challenge going forward How could we use green infrastructure and here in East Boston? I think we have a really great opportunity if we if we move on it fairly quickly We could be putting great parks along the waterfront which could act as buffers to absorb Storm surge at least for the next several decades We can have much bigger swaths of open space Which would be really great for that part of the city and for all of us if we could do that That will require a very different way of thinking about how we design our waterfront than what we've done previously And then you can take a look at Miami and Miami is this is in a state where you have a governor Who says this is not a problem and you have a Senator who was running for president who said climate is not a problem, but you have an enlightened mayor in Miami Who gets it and has experienced it so any new streets that they build in Miami are now three feet higher If you can look at this photo it creates an interesting problem though you now go down steps into your living room rather than up And what they are doing now in these whole blocks that are created inside these elevated streets They install a massive pumping system so they can get the water out in the event that there is a flood Miami is even way more vulnerable than we are here in Boston and they're going to have you know acute problems going forward But they're trying some some interesting ideas And then there's the granddaddy solution of all which is actually an idea that was proposed back in the late 80s To address this problem in Boston and that would be to build a series of dykes and locks and other kinds of protective barriers out in the harbor That's dear Island where the treatment plan is this is Long Island. So you would put a set of locks Here and then where the Long Island bridge was another another set of system and locks here. I Actually think and you know, I'm probably the strongest environmentalist in the room And I've been working on these problems for 40 years, but we may get to a point where we actually have to look at Something like this. I Think the really challenging part and somebody has to look at the engineering And we may at least be able to do some of this in this project The first thing you want to be sure of is the water is just not going to run around through Bell Isle March and Marsh You know through Revere and with her to the north or around through Hull and Hingham or Quincy to the south And you know, you really got to get the topography right one of the challenges of the Charles River Dam For example, if you go look at that a lot of people say well, why don't we make it bigger? The problem is because everything around it is low and the water would just go around the dam The second question is we spent six billion dollars cleaning up the water in Boston Harbor Do we really want to stop tidal action and what would that do to the harbor which has now become a huge environmental recreational and economic amenity here in Boston Commercial shipping how would they respond to this idea etc etc is One of the most interesting ironies and we were talking about this at lunch today is that The state and the federal government are about to spend 300 million dollars to make the main shipping channel You can't see my pointer right out through the outer harbor Make it 50 feet deep. It's about 41 now. So they're going to deepen the harbor 20 to 25 percent What does that do to the height of the structure you might need 70 years from now to close it off? Really interesting question I'm hopeful that we never have to get to this solution, but I can pretty much guarantee you there will be a debate over it at some point Many of the developers that we work with I think kind of rightly asked the question Why should I do all this to my building if in fact the city or the state ultimately might do something like this That would protect all of us. Well, I Don't know that we want to wait to find out the answer to that question. That's the short answer There's a lot of things we could do to make our buildings more resilient, you know To protect them in the near term particularly because we don't yet know whether that worst case is really going to happen The other thing to really think about is we kind of bound all the studies that are done or limit them by thinking ahead to 2100 what happens after 2100 is another really big question if we really don't turn this big climate problem around So then just thinking about the future and I promise this is my last slide What sort of governance changes might we need to address this problem? You know is the current regulatory system adequate or not Is there enough coordination amongst the various public agencies that address this problem to really address it in the kind of way We need to going forward as I mentioned earlier how we're going to finance these solutions What are the kinds of ecological impacts that might result from any a number of different measures? What sort of political commitment is needed if you're the mayor now and we're fortunate to have a mayor who wants Who supports this study and has actually helped leading it? But what benefit does he have if there's a big storm 40 years from now in the city as well protected? Is anybody going to remember that it was Mayor Walsh, you know that was wise enough 40 years ago to do that So it's a political challenge and many of the developers and the property owners are planning to sell their buildings in three To five years, and this is not something that they really want to hear about I think we're fortunate to have a number of really enlightened developers in real estate people in the city Who hold on to their properties for a long time and have a long time horizon? Many of them like Boston properties or beacon capital also owned properties in the lower end of Manhattan and Experienced what a storm like Sandy can do so they tend to have a longer time horizon But that commitment to act is a really challenging thing The public hasn't really been engaged very much in this project yet But as we get to the solution strategies, and then there's going to be a phase two We're going to look very much in more detail There has to be a great deal of public engagements through workshops awareness building etc to particularly talk about solutions Last slide you can go to the website which was just came on board last week where all of this information will be mounted over the next several weeks climate ready Dot Boston dot gov Thanks very much And just remember 65% of the GNP of the Netherlands is produced below sea level So I guess we have time for questions It's almost no chance that in 2050 that we won't see at least nine inches of seed levels Yeah, right that that's a good that's Yeah, I think what I said I think what the chart shows is that they're and again thinking about these emissions trajectory and you know some uncertainty in the science There's a like there's a pretty good likelihood probably better than 50% Maybe as much as two out of three chance that we'll see eight to 18 inches by 2015 2050 so I think the eight inches is pretty much of a Pretty certain thing That's right and the scientists working on our project think that we're going to start to see You know, I showed a chart early on of the sea level rise over the last 80 or 90 years in the Boston Harbor I think we're going to start to see that head up More sharply just in the next few years The for those of you who are familiar with any of the aquariums, you know, fisheries or whale or Agriculture agriculture aquaculture problems in the Gulf of Maine. You may know the Gulf of Maine was four degrees warmer than normal Last summer, so there's a big change that we're now seeing right here in the Gulf of Maine The projections are based on the IPCC reports or the current reports that came out in March that yeah, I think Those are the big global circulation models They're called and you know those were extrapolated down But what we've built into this is a lot more local science and a lot more local modeling To represent what's going to happen in our area more specifically So and the problem with the IPCC work is it's three or four or five years at a date You know you put two hundred two thousand five hundred scientists together and assemble all the papers and edit it and so on and so forth It takes a good deal of time So this work represents much more recent science And the gentleman on our the scientists on our team from UMass Amherst who has led the sea level work is the Scientist you've been reading about the New York Times over the last couple of months who have put all the new studies out So we're we're quite contemporary Reducing the impacts of climate change is there any work that you're aware of Aimed at reversing Change like actually making it better as opposed to slowing the is there a big vacuum that can suck carbon out of the atmosphere Yeah I mean there's obviously a lot of work going on in the Boston globally and you know across the country to reduce emissions to try to Tamp it down. I think you're asking a different question. Can we actually reverse it? Yes, I think people are looking at that The term is geoengineering I Think is it's still quite primitive at this point and the scale that would be needed is just so immense You start to think about the large energy that would energy requirements for doing something like that What might be the adverse effects? You know one idea is that you sprinkle Particles in the clouds in the lower atmosphere which might reflect some of the heat What other problem might that cause? So that tends to be pretty complex, but certainly excuse me a fair amount of people are looking at such I don't think we know the answer to that yet, you know the Dutch are really interesting You know the first reaction here is to retreat or abandon land or try to make the buildings more resilient the Dutch have a Of a whole different way to think about that built up over 800 years. They think about well Maybe there's new development that we should put Right in harm's way and do it in a way that it would protect itself and also protect everything behind it Not just a barrier, but even a little mini city and I'm actually leading a trip We're taking 25 government officials and business leaders to Amsterdam Rotterdam Copenhagen and Malmo in Sweden in mid-June to look precisely at these kinds of things How do you create economic value that also can increase the resilience of the city? It's very different than thinking about just pack up and move So I think there's a whole you know spectrum of solutions that we're gonna have to look at I've seen other ideas of building artificial islands around the harbor even off the end of the aquarium here that You know could provide great new park space could protect what's behind them And you know maybe diminish the possibility of damage, etc. It's been sacrosanct And I'm one of the biggest proponents of don't ever fill Boston Harbor anymore than it already is maybe we have to rethink that Going forward also, I just like to have you keep in mind, you know the barrier barrier reef that we now protect harbor Boston with that could be that new city that you're talking about that, right? One of the one of the other keys and I we're not really looking at the harbor islands because the city's boundary Unfortunately ends before you get out to really out to the islands But the islands are one of our principal lines of defense and many of the islands are eroding So one of the obvious things to do is to replenish the sand and you know the Even some of the gravel that's being eroded from those islands so they can provide a better defense for the city That might be a use of that 300 million dollar dredging project to put that sand in places in the island where it would help protect Boston Unfortunately just this morning. I was supposed to have a two-hour meeting with the resiliency officer from Miami We're going to start that conversation. She unfortunately had to leave last night So we didn't get to meet this morning, but there is an active conversation amongst some of these cities There are a number of groups the Rockefeller Foundation Has funded what they call a chief resiliency officer now in 40 cities around the world including Boston Dr. Martin here in Boston who started about six months ago works for the mayor and city hall is very much focused on this Problem and they have a lot of dialogue back and forth amongst their colleagues and other cities The sea level rise folks working on this project very much took that into account and I'm not an oceanographer So I'm not if I can't even remember RCP. I'm not going to try to explain the Gulf Stream to you but apparently it is Its pattern is changing as water rises. I would expect to affect the napons at Charles and mystic rivers Is there work going on to look at kind of how far these storm fridges would go up those rivers? There is there's something that Mayor Walsh helped start called the Metro mayors coalition, which has I think it's 15 cities and towns You know Jason to Boston that are now working together on this problem They're going to make use of this big study because a lot of what we've done is completely applicable to those areas because they're they're quite close by When you got to the slide about the Barrier around the Struck me that there was something sort of comfortable about that because historically it seems like That would be something that the Army Corps of Engineers would do And I'm just curious as you're kind of wading through all of this what to you seems like The biggest challenge or what seems like like a Fundamental shift that might have to happen mentioned government. Yeah I think the biggest shift that has to start happening is we have to start thinking of these different neighborhoods as districts as You know and in some cities around the world they now have eco districts where everything in that part of town is really green Not just one building but everything and I think we have to adopt that thinking here Whether it's South Boston or downtown where we are here or East Boston or Charlestown We have to think about it as a district-wide problem that needs a district-wide Solution it sounds obvious, but we actually don't do things that way here in Boston Every building is permitted in a very piecemeal way And we have to start thinking about this more broadly the good news is the city has started this imagine Boston 2030 project which is the first time the city has done city-wide master planning in 50 years This project is very much locked at the hip to that effort So all this work will inform decisions about that So if a major priority that comes out of that 2030 planning process is we need more affordable housing Which definitely will be a major priority. You want to be sure you overlay the Vulnerability maps with that so you determine where you might build that housing or where you shouldn't or if you are gonna build it How to make it as resilient as possible So hopefully those will come together in a good way Good question actually Mastport is probably one of the most advanced public agencies working on this They have done a very similar mapping exercise to all their facilities out at Mastport They've actually drawn lines on a lot of the buildings and a lot of the critical infrastructure Whether it's electrical substations or switching stations to kind of figure out what they need to do and they've already I think Allocated close to 40 million dollars to start making a lot of their facilities more resilient The role of Logan Airport in a major flood is really quite interesting. We kind of think of it Oh, we got to keep the airport up and running for all our commercial flights You know to get to New York Chicago or whatever the actual most important role for Logan Airport is to get the military in here if we need it for Evacuation or medical purposes during a major storm or a terrorist act or any kind of major emergency So they have a whole plan just focused on how do you keep the airport open for those purposes never mind How do you keep it for it's sort of normal routine economic functions? They also have the luxury of having their own wallet in their own purse strings So they have funding that they can immediately deploy which they are to to this problem. Thank you very much There's one part of the expedition Angola that was very very difficult It was you know, the water was moving fast the river was very narrow. It was very windy Everything was capsizing. It was cold and wet and you know, everybody it was much harder than everyone is Expecting so everyone is really kind of bummed out and spirits were low