 My name is Meg Gray. I'm the Science and Technology Librarian here at the library. And this is Jessica Burton, Executive Director of the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. And together we organized this series and we're going on our fourth year. One little housekeeping note is that there is a survey. So if you see it on your chair, librarians love data. So if you would fill it out and put it in the back, that would be great. And now I'm going to just talk a little bit about what she does. Thanks, Meg. Jess Burton with the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We're an organization based here in Portland that's focused on building partnerships between organizations, conservation organizations, and more for greater impact and to broaden the conversation of conservation, for conservation, about conservation. Our partnership with the library is a really good example of how we work in partnership. And this is one of my most favorite things of the work that I do, because Meg and I work together to find speakers and to bring in, you know, these topics. And it's wonderful to see people from all over come to these talks. We're working on our series for 2020. We have a few things on the list, but if anybody has an idea or something that they've been thinking about or know about, we'd be happy to hear about that. And tonight we're really excited to hear from Troy from the city of Portland. And we're super excited because he was here a year ago and talked about different things. It's the start of this. So it's really cool one year later. So next year we will also be back hearing the next iteration. So thank you. Thank you so much. Great. Thanks for that awesome welcome. And thanks to everybody for coming out tonight. As I said, I'm Troy Moon. I'm the sustainability coordinator for the city of Portland. And I've worked for the city for over 20 years, mostly in the environmental space, working on everything from recycling to working in parks and working in urban agriculture. So what I've been really impressed by is in the last few years we just really picked up momentum, really started to make a lot of progress on climate issues, particularly. So that's really, really gratifying. Being able to do a lot of projects that we kind of imagined for years that they're just finally getting them out. We really appreciate the support we're getting from the city manager and from our elected officials who are really taking sustainability and climate to heart. So tonight I'll talk a little bit about some of the impacts we are expecting from climate change. Some of the things we see coming down the pike. And then I'll talk about our one climate future, climate action planning process that we're engaged with the city of South Portland. And so just a little bit more about us. We have in Portland and South Portland, we both have two person sustainability offices. And so in Portland, myself and I have Ashley Krulik and say hi to Ashley. And in South Portland, our colleagues are Julia Rosenbach and Lucy Brennan. And so we collaborate on all kinds of different things because we have pretty much the same mission. Our goal is to promote a sustainable community now and in the future. And as you can tell, there's only two of us in each of our offices. So we can't possibly make our communities more sustainable just with four people. It really takes everybody in the community to make it sustainable. So we partner with folks like at the library. We work with community partners, friends of Casco Bay, Sierra Club, Portland Climate Action Team. Portland Society for Architecture is an amazing partner we work with. And we're starting to work with area businesses as well. So we've done One Climate Future presentations at Allagash Tasting Room and at Tandem Coffee at their bakery. So really we're trying to get out and involve everybody, everyone we can to be involved in talking about how we can make Portland more sustainable, build community resilience just through collaboration and getting everybody to know each other more. Some of the things that we work on together with South Portland, we both have the same goals. We have the same climate commitments. So we collaborate a lot. Everything on energy policy and implementation. So in the last legislative session, both Julie and I spent quite a lot of time in Augusta working mostly on solar policy but also on working to make Maine have a much more rigorous energy building code. So that takes some time. We're pleased that that's been pretty successful. Both cities have now upgraded their streetlights to LED. So we've gone away from the highly energy intensive high pressure sodium lights to very efficient LED lights that have basically reduced our... The city's electrical usage went down 8% since we switched to LED lights. So it's been a huge, huge help. We work on waste, solid waste issues, so recycling and composting. And we recently in the city of Portland banned plastic straws. So starting in April, you have a few months to get ready. No more straws after April. We have a pesticide ordinance in both cities. We've banned the use of synthetic pesticides. Portland and South Portland have the most restrictive pesticide ordinances in the country. So we're really setting the pace there. One thing that we're pretty excited about as well is energy benchmarking. You'll see later that the building sector is a huge contributor to the city of Portland's greenhouse gas emissions and we really don't know enough about how buildings, especially commercial buildings, are using energy. So starting in May of 2020, our first group of buildings will have to be reporting all of the energy and water that they use on an annual basis to our office. And we can start kind of looking at the data and to try to understand which buildings are inefficient and how can we target some technical assistance and programs at people who own buildings that can help make them more efficient, help them save money, but also help them reduce carbon emissions. And we're working really, really hard to attain our climate goals. And I mentioned both Portland and South Portland have the same climate goals. So our councils have committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. And we've also committed to run our cities on 100% renewable energy by 2040. But if you've been reading the news recently, you may have seen that both the councils in Portland and South Portland have declared a state of climate emergency. And really we have to credit youth activism for that. You can see this is a picture from the climate strike and this is the one in March. And then there was another one in September. So youth leadership on climate has been really, really important to really make sure that people, that it really stays on people's minds to make the elected officials and people in the administration really understand that young people particularly are very serious and very concerned about climate change. And so the youth leaders asked the city council to declare a climate emergency and then also to take steps to end fossil fuel use by 2030. So it's a steep bar, but youth argue that it's important that we make these steps now in order to have a climate where that their future can be better than it will be if we continue on the path we are now. So hats off to the youth climate leaders. And just kind of spend a little bit of time kind of digging into the climate impacts. Does anybody know who this guy is? James Hansen, that's right. And so this picture was taken in 1987 and he's testifying in front of the Congress and he's telling our government that it's pretty clear and we're certain that humans are causing climate change. Humans are causing the atmosphere to warm and it's because of burning fossil fuels. And he told us that in 1987. But since he gave his talk, we've seen emissions continue to increase. In fact, since 1987, we've burned more fossil fuels than we did in all the years prior to 1987. So we're completely going the wrong way. In fact, the last three years we've seen increases. This year worldwide we're expecting to see 36 billion tons of CO2 equivalent. So even though renewable energy is starting to take hold, energy use continues to expand around the world. And so we're just not seeing the reductions we need to see. So in Portland, we certainly are contributing. If you add up our total CO2 emissions, it's just a speck in the worldwide emissions, but we have to take care of our own house as well. We see the different sectors that contribute to our greenhouse gas emissions. Ultimately, it boils down to about 60% of our emissions come from the building sector. Residences and commercial buildings, which is different from the state, because we're more urban. Transportation accounts for the majority of the state's emissions, but buildings here in Portland, but transportation still counts for over 30% of emissions from Portland. So these are areas that we're going to be needing to do a lot of work for sure. Just to get into a little bit about some of the impacts we're expecting to see in the upcoming years, particularly if we don't take actions to reduce our emissions in the short term. The first one I want to mention, first I want to talk a little bit about scenarios, because some of the charts we'll see up in the future. And if you hear people talking about different sealable rise scenarios or climate change scenarios, these are the ones that are most common and certainly the ones that we use in our planning process. So it's called RCP 2.6, which is kind of a low emission scenario. That assumes that we are able to get our act together in the next year or so and start really dramatically reducing our emissions. You know, this would be if we were able to kind of meet the targets that the youth leaders have asked us to be and fossil fuel use by 2030. We could probably meet the 2.6 scenario, which still calls for a global temperature increase of about 2 degrees C, which you know, it's bad enough. But in terms of a planning horizon, we're kind of hoping that this, you know, the models we're looking at or we're planning towards for sealable rise are based on RCP 4.5, which is an intermediate scenario. That's assuming that we really start getting our act together soon and we can, you know, end emissions by 2050. And then after that maybe use carbon sequestration technology and start pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. And so if we're able to do that, we can maybe keep global temperature rise to like three degrees. But we're not on that track. We're on the RCP 8.5 track right now, which is the highest scenario. That's kind of business as usual. And if we go back to the graph showing, you know, carbon emissions, they're ramping up and up and up. That's the track we're on currently with 8.5. And if we keep doing that, if we don't get carbon under control until like 2100, we can look to see a global climate with, you know, temperature rise of, you know, five degrees C. So, and that's not a planet that we would recognize. So we're really, that's, you know, that's the worst case scenario at this point if we keep on that track. And just, so some of the things we talk about certainly as a coastal community, sea level rise is something that we think about a lot and it's kind of the, you know, because, you know, we see the ocean every day. So how much is it going to go up? You know, it's kind of up to us. If we look at this chart, you can see we're kind of at the inflection point where the lines start to diverge. So we can choose how high, you know, we, the global we, can make some decisions about how we react. And if we stay on the track we're on now, we can see the bright red line that goes up to the 2.5 meters to sea level rise by 2100. And we can imagine what that would look like and they've got some maps that can show you what it might look like if that happens. Or we can take some action and keep the sea level rise less. So we did a project a couple years ago called Bayside Adapts and we had some scientists look at all the recent data, the most current data available in terms of what we might expect for sea level rise. We mapped it onto, you know, onto Portland. We used all of our existing map data. And so they're telling us that we should commit to manage almost two feet of sea level rise by 2050. But we should, and we should also commit to manage over four feet by 2100. And that's, again, that's the intermediate scenario. That assumes that we kind of get our act together and then not too distant future and reduce emissions. But again, if we stay on that, you know, the business as usual trajectory, we should prepare to manage almost four feet of sea level rise by 2050 and over 11 by 2100. So again, I mentioned if we don't change our course, we're going to have a place that we don't recognize. And Portland with, you know, 11 feet of sea level rise is going to be a different place. In fact, if we look at the dark blue, that's the, you know, that's the 10 to 11 feet of sea level rise. And we can see that Bayside is no longer underwater. And all the things we like to go visit on commercial street are also underwater. So that's, you know, that's a different city that we currently have now. In fact, it's a city that people who, the Europeans who came to Portland, to Falmouth Neck back in the 1600s would have recognized because all the area that we see that covered in the blue is filled. It was filled in after starting, you know, in the colonial times on commercial street and after the great fire of 1866 in the Bayside area. So that's all been filled out and developed. Again, if we don't make some changes, the sea will reclaim what it had before. So Bayside, here's a picture of Bayside back in 2015. We had a rain event. We had almost six inches of rain in just a few hours. And it happened to fall at high tide. And so you probably know that in the Bayside area down near Whole Foods and down by U-Haul, even on a bright sunny day, if we have an astronomical high tide, they're standing water. So what happens is the sea level, you know, seas come up into the back cove and they come up the pipes and they spill out onto the street. So if we happen to have a rainfall, particularly very heavy rainfall, all the water is nowhere to go. It kind of ponds up. And in this particular case, we had cars floating down Franklin Street and, you know, no one could get around very much. But that's something we expect to see more of as time goes on. It's more heavy intense downpours. So in addition to sea level rise, we have to worry about more rain events that come with dramatic rain all at once. And so, you know, that wasn't a one-off case. Well, I mentioned that we have it all the time. So here's, I love our police department there, their Twitter account. So we have to barricade. Right now, like I mentioned, on sunny days we'll have flooding. So we can look at our tide chart and we know which days are going to have flooding. So the public works department has to go out and put barricades. And people get frustrated so our police are going to have a humorous approach to remind people that they shouldn't obey the barricades. But I mentioned that the heavy downpours are not a one-off thing. Just the year prior to the flooding in the Bayside, we had another, you know, heavy rainstorm and we had six inches of rain that fell just overnight. And everyone woke up in the morning and found that High Street had washed away because water was, you know, just coming down the hill so intensely that it washed it away. So all of the infrastructure that we have to manage water around the city is vulnerable to being overcharged and to just not being up to the task of handling the amount of heavy rain that we can expect in the future. And another thing, this is one of my least favorite things, is heat. I'm a main person. I grew up in Maine and I like cooler weather. So increasingly hot days, there's not something that I'm looking forward to. But as you probably know, last July was the hottest month on the history of the earth, not just in Maine, but around the world. And it's mentioned, it's all around the world. We can see in Europe, you know, Europe, Asia, Africa, India, Pakistan, and particularly the Arctic, are dramatically warmer than they were. This is a map from 2018. So the following year, 2019, was even worse. But you kind of note, if you look where, you know, up in the northeast U.S., we're under one of the red spots. The northeast is one of the rapidly warming parts of the planet. We've seen temperature, or average annual temperature in Maine has risen over three degrees in the past 100 years. And pretty much on any of the scenarios, the 2.6 or the 8.5, we're expecting Maine to, the temperature to increase another three degrees by 2050. That's kind of built into the cake. So even if we stop carbon emissions today, we'll probably still see three degrees of temperature increase by 2050. So that will certainly change the climate here in Portland. And as the years, as the decades go by, we're anticipating that we'll see our climate here be more of what you might see currently in like northern Alabama. So hot humid with kind of squeltering days. So while other parts of the world are seeing, you know, hot daily highs of like 130 degrees in the Middle East or in Pakistan, we're fortunate we won't be seeing heat that intense, but we can expect by 2050, we'll see 14 or more days that are over 90 degrees, many of them over 95 degrees. And by 2100, we could see the whole summer would be over 90 degrees. So not looking forward to that. So, but heat, you know, heat's not just in a nuisance. It's actually something that's really dangerous for a lot of people, particularly people with respiratory illnesses, elderly people, people who are on some sort of medications or also make them vulnerable to heat. So heat can actually be, you know, can cause a lot of heat related deaths. People who work on the outside have a challenging time. In fact, there's, you know, parts of the world now in India, Pakistan, parts of the Middle East. In the daytime, people, you know, in the summer when it's 130 degrees, you literally can't go outside and work because your body can't take that. So fortunately, we are not looking for that particularly, but you can see that around the country, even in the Northeast, we can expect to see more heat related illnesses and deaths. It has been, you know, around the world. Last year, you know, during July and France, during the heat wave, literally hundreds of people in western developed country with resources. You know, people still, people die from heat related, even in developed countries. So, you know, people who do have the resources. So if you're in a country that doesn't have, you know, the infrastructure or if you're in a state like Maine that has not used to heat, we don't have, most of our homes are old, a lot of people don't have air conditioning. So heat can be an issue. One of the things we need to be concerned about with heat to our elderly people are particularly vulnerable. So, and also people who are isolated. So elderly people who are isolated are at particular risk to the heat related illnesses. And in a state like Maine where it's rural, many seniors live, you know, miles and miles from neighbors. And so that's a concern that I think hopefully that people at the state level are starting to think about how do we deal with heat illnesses in rural parts of the state. So really climate change and as it how it affects us is really going to be a public health issue as much as anything. We think a lot about infrastructure and how do we keep the sea from rising, but how do we protect people? Because the work we're doing and becoming more climate resilient and to make Portland a sustainable community isn't about roads and bridges and seawalls. Those are all things that benefit people. So that's how we're thinking about climate change is a human people issue, community issue. So I was, you know, the summer I was asked to speak at the main public health association conference which I was really pleased that the health community was reaching out because they take it really seriously. So as I was kind of doing some work around it I realized how much good work the public health people are doing nationally. So they're going to be great allies and our public health department here in Portland is really excited to be part of climate action planning because we're going to see a lot more problematic things. For instance, vector-borne diseases, so ticks. When I was a kid growing up in Central Maine we didn't have ticks. There was no Lyme disease. No one was concerned about those things. Really there weren't any cases of Lyme disease in Maine until the late 80s. And then people started to be aware of it. But by 2014 it was very prevalent and certainly now you have to be very concerned about ticks and island communities, our island communities are particularly vulnerable. There's ticks all over the islands and so there's been more and more cases of Lyme disease in Portland and throughout Maine. So that's a concern. And ticks unfortunately they don't just carry Lyme anymore so we have to be concerned about a variety of different tick-borne illnesses. So that's going to continue to be a problem for us. And we've been fortunate in the Northeast not to have had problems with mosquito-borne illnesses but again with rising temperatures, more humidity, standing water from the heavy rainfalls that we can expect becomes prime mosquito breeding grounds. And so probably in the past we've heard a little bit about West Nile virus or Zika or Eastern equine encephalitis. Those are things that we can probably anticipate to become more of a problem and even some more exotic diseases could be a possibility but these ones certainly are the ones that we're most concerned about. And air quality, air quality certainly has been a big topic in the Portland and South Portland area with the fuel tanks but again as the climate warms we're going to see more issues with like pollen I don't know if people have allergies I do and so Maine actually is going to be an epicenter as the climate warms and we'll have more and more plants and tree species that put out a lot of pollen so people with allergies don't have much to look forward there. But also mold, again with more humidity they can anticipate more mold which is an air quality concern but also on hot, humid days you often hear about bad air quality days with ground level ozone so that's something that's a problem too again with high temperatures and ground level ozone so more days when you have to be careful when you're outside exercising or if you have respiratory problems to be concerned about so we're also worried about that. One thing that kind of been on our mind a great deal recently are climate refugees. If you look around we mentioned that there's heat all around the world and different places are experiencing a lot of difficulties. So in other parts of the world the climate impacts have been more significant certainly than they have been here in Maine. So if we see in the news we get visitors and we're getting people coming to Portland from different parts of the world and a lot of the more recent refugees who have come to Portland are from Central Africa and if you look at the map of Africa it's a bright red spot in the middle of that continent. It's experiencing some of the most dramatic impacts of climate change to date so it's getting hotter, serious problems with heavy rainfalls rising population and natural resources really being degraded so people are having a really hard time and Congo which is in the middle, the Democratic Republic of Congo they have a very large population. I think it's like 60 million people who live in Congo, quite a few people and the whole region is just experiencing some challenges but also another place that's been really wracked by climate impacts is Central America and Honduras and El Salvador they've been experiencing extreme hurricanes, extreme weather wind but also when they aren't being hit by this bad storms drought has been a serious problem so people's subsistence farmers and people trying to grow coffee or other crops have had experienced crop failures so it's been a real challenge we find on the southern border certainly people are trying to flee Central America and we're having certainly the crisis at the border there's a conflict around immigration that's certainly fueled by climate change just some numbers so in Sub-Saharan Africa which includes Central Africa by 2050 we're looking at 86 million refugees the World Bank predicts South Asia so India, Pakistan 40 million refugees by 2050 and Latin America so Central America and that doesn't even count Southeast Asia which has millions of people living in coastal cities that are extremely vulnerable to climate change so people are going to be moving as sea level rises and storms becoming more intense and heat becomes more of a problem people are going to be moving around a great deal so just the numbers from South Asia and Latin America basically that's 143 million people that the World Bank expects to be refugees, that's the population of Russia so if you can imagine everyone in Russia having to go somewhere else that's kind of the scale of the problem that the World Bank is anticipating just a little bit of context about Central Africa so there's a climate activist in Uganda Leah Numagorwa so she posted this on Twitter today she mentioned that they're hit by heavy rainfalls heavy rainfalls every few days this is a landslide near her home yesterday it rained for five hours and they had flash flooding and the video is amazing with the impact so the scale of what's happening in some of these countries that are being impacted is mind boggling so here's a picture of Portland from this summer the refugees who came and they lived in the Expo over the summer time well we were trying to find housing for people and it was very impressive and we're really pleased that the community came together to support the folks who came to the Expo and to support city staff by volunteering and providing financial assistance and so it was really great that the community came together to assist the refugees and we were able to find homes for everybody in time for the red class to begin their season and it's great that we were able to do so to take care of that issue but it really did tax the city's abilities to handle that so it was all hands on deck our social services department was really difficult, all the different departments came together and the community donated almost a million dollars to help support the effort but that was 350 people who came if we had 3,500 or 35,000 the scale of the problem would have been that much worse so as we move forward and we think about the impacts that we see globally and Portland being a very nice place to live with a pretty accommodating climate I think we should anticipate more people coming here and as we plan for a climate future we need to make sure we think about that certainly we already talk about affordable housing issues but unless we put some thought into this it could certainly be a worse problem than it is now and so like I mentioned earlier climate change has been something the city has been thinking about for some time so in 2007 the mayor at the time put together a task force called the mayor's sustainable Portland task force and they mentioned that climate change may be the greatest challenge to the city since the rebuilding after the great fire in some ways that's kind of a climate emergency declaration back in 2007 because when you pull the great fire card that's serious, in 1866 part of the city was destroyed by fire that's the way we need to think about this problem moving forward we're going to have challenges with sealable rise and heat and more folks coming to the area so what are we going to do, how do we address these problems and how do we try to make a positive outcome as we move into the future because the reason that we all live here in Portland because the quality of life is amazing it's a tremendous place to live, we have the Casco Bay and the mountains are a short ways away and it's a great place to be so as we think about planning for the future that's what we want to keep, how do we keep this quality of life things that make Portland and South Portland great as we address some really serious issues that we're going to have to face we decided to collaborate with our colleagues in South Portland and as far as we know we're the only two cities that are developing a joint climate action plan so we're going to have one plan for both cities because we realize that we could have the best climate action plan anywhere and they could have the best climate action plan but if they're not talking to each other if they're not referencing each other and actions we don't take don't build on what South Portland does and vice versa, it's not going to be effective we share too many, we share infrastructure and the people who live in Portland might work in South Portland and go to restaurants there and vice versa so we're really connected we're two separate cities but we're really dependent on each other so we're coming to work together and our goal is to again, that Portland and South Portland work to be inclusive, vibrant communities that provide opportunities for residents and businesses is to thrive in a changing climate so that's our mission with One Climate Future is how do we maintain what makes Portland and South Portland great in the face of the changing climate so we've been thinking about how do we take some actions to prevent some of the worst outcomes how do we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in the short term how do we manage analysis that we developed to think about what sectors do we need to work on to achieve 80% carbon reduction by 2050 so you can see that it takes everyone in the community to do this so the building sector is the blue part on the top that's new buildings and existing buildings there's a tiny little line in there that you can barely see so the city government can't do this ourselves we're just a tiny fraction of the wedge so we need lots of interventions we can thank Governor Mills for the big red stripe in the middle that's the 100% renewable portfolio standard so Governor Mills signed a bill last session that requires all the electricity in our main grid to be generated by renewable energy by 2050 and 30% renewable by 2030 so that makes Maine a real leader on climate a real leader on energy policy in the whole country so that was a tremendous achievement and solar is certainly going to play a big part in the future the bright yellow is local solar and so Governor also signed a number of bills that are going to really improve solar and help cities around the state do a lot better with solar in fact right now the city has a RFP out for up to 75% of our entire city's electrical load to be generated by solar power so we're really excited about that and so that would be about 24,000 megawatt hours of electricity so we're hoping to get some really great proposals to review so we can make some real progress towards being a solar powered city again so there's four plan elements that we're going to work on to achieve our climate goals so again I mentioned 60% of our missions in the greater Portland area are from buildings so we're going to work really hard to make sure we use energy efficiently and transition to renewable energy we also need to think really hard about land use because if we can have a denser city can generate reduces less carbon to have a denser city people don't have to travel around as much so the other key area the other 30% of missions we want to really get at is from transportation so we need to get people to take the bus ride the bikes walk to work and that's a lot easier to do in a denser development pattern so part of our goal is like in that part of that wedge analysis we need to get 50% of the people to take alternative forms of transportation other than cars by 2050 so we call it a 50% mode share so there's things we need to do to make it more convenient for people to ride the bus need more frequent service so people can rely that the bus will come when they need to catch it and not have to wait out in the rain for a long time so those are some areas we're going to be working really hard on waste reduction is also a really key area if you look back on the little pile of where carbon emissions from Portland comes from waste actually contributes very little to our local greenhouse gas emissions but it contributes significantly to emissions around the world so if you think about what the things that we recycle or throw in the trash here in Portland is 3% of our emissions but all the packaging, the manufacturing, the transportation the mining of natural resources are very very carbon intent so we're just on the very tail end of the emissions pipe so to speak so local carbon emissions aren't really affected by our solid waste but it makes a huge impact on the global scale so that's an important step and climate resilience too certainly we mentioned the seal of the rise is going to be a significant problem so we need to make sure that we're thinking about how do we develop the city in ways that are resilient to increasing flood water so right now we're working on what we're calling a climate resilience overlay zone so a new construction that would be built in areas that might be susceptible to seal of the rise in the future would have to be built to withstand being flooded on a regular basis so with concrete floor maybe parking or retail that could be moved if there's going to be a large storm event with the vital infrastructure, the mechanicals higher so they can't be damaged by water so we're thinking about what's the best way to make that happen is it incentives or is it strict regulation so working that through we've had a couple conversations with the planning board but that's going to be a pretty big topic because right now our planning department has a lot of really good tools to require resilient buildings so that's going to be a really important step moving forward but resilience isn't just infrastructure it's not just buildings and sea walls it's really how do we develop community resilience so how do we have an economy that can withstand shocks and disruptions so we need strong local businesses and we need strong community connections so one of the things that's great about Maine is people are friendly and so how do we make sure that we keep that kind of close knit feeling and how do we keep people engaged with each other and caring about their neighbors and being involved in neighborhood organizations and just being a strong part of the community so that seems like a soft element but really communities that have those connections are able to withstand shocks whether it be a storm or some other disaster much more effectively than people who don't have those associations so that's really an important part of the plan and public engagement is part of our plan we're really concerned about public engagement so that's why we do talks like this so we want people to learn some of the facts that we have we also want people to talk to your friends and neighbors and colleagues about civil rise and climate change and how it might affect some of the things that you're interested in so we've been doing some surveys as part of our outreach program and one thing that I was really excited to see is that almost 80% of people in Portland are very concerned about climate change that's after a good start there but I was even more excited to see that almost 70% of people in Portland who took the survey think that climate change will affect them personally because nationally people have a feeling that climate change will be a problem for somebody but not for them so it's really good to see that people in Portland and South Portland are aware that climate change is having impact on us already and it will have more impact moving forward so we're after a good start and so I think we appreciate the support we're getting because the public realizes that we're having a problem with climate change and again we've mentioned that we've had a lot of people in the Portland area now who have come from other countries so we wanted to make sure that our program is accessible to everybody so we've translated our materials into several languages other than English so we have Portuguese and Spanish, French and Arabic and so we've had some great community volunteers who are members of the different communities who speak some of these languages and volunteers and have been taking our materials back to their friends and neighbors and so we've actually been able to get good feedback from some people whose English isn't their first language so that's been really great. This summer we had a street team of young people who spent time in the parks and they went to community events and talked to members of the community about climate change, passed out some of our flyers, got people to take surveys. This fall we have one street team member who's doing some of the same things. She spent some time riding the Metro a couple weeks ago speaking to people who are riding the bus. Again, we're really trying to get out into speaking to people, not to just people who come to meetings or to lectures but people who are going about their daily lives and maybe don't have time to come to other things so we just wanted to get feedback from everybody. Our social media has been a really good platform for both Portland and South Portland so I certainly invite you to follow Sustainable Portland Main on Instagram. We try to keep people up to date with what we're doing and some tips about sustainability on our Instagram feed. We've been really happy to go to a lot of different special events. On the left we were at Parking Day this summer so we spent a day out next to Tommy's Park interacting with all the people coming out, sharing information about one climate future and both our offices got a chance to do a radio program with the Portland Radio Group so we talked about one climate future and so they broadcast the interview on all of the Portland radio group stations so country music fans and rock fans and everything in between had a chance to hear the interview which was great and I was surprised I was somewhere a few days ago and ran into someone who recognized my name and said oh I heard you on WPOR so country music fans were able to hear our talk as well. One thing that I think is really important about our outreach program particularly is that we've really been trying to make it decentralized as much as possible. So on our website oneclimatefuture.org we have a meeting in a box kit so anybody can do a one climate future talk so you can download some slides and some handouts and some information and you can do a one climate future talk at work or at your church or just with your neighbors and family and so that's been pretty successful. We've had quite a number of people doing those and actually we've had community volunteers who have taken it on the road for us so we had this a few weeks ago in October we had at Red Bank Village in South Portland one of the residents there organized two different meetings for all the residents in Red Bank and the ownership of the property was really helpful in helping her organize the meeting and so she had one in the morning and one at night to try to accommodate as many people as she could. We had we've had one climate future talks at yoga studios and community groups and neighborhood association meetings so it's really great and we're continuing to encourage people to get involved and do one climate future meetings. And just a quick note on our timeline so we started the one climate future program back. We hired our consulting team in January. We really started to launch it in March in May. We've been doing a lot of research. We did our climate hazard assessment and we did our greenhouse gas inventory. We've been out talking to the public kind of the rubber will hit the road I think after January so we've gotten our adaptation of climate hazard report done and we're starting to put together one of the strategies we want to implement so our third survey will be coming out very soon and that's going to be really important because we're trying to get feedback about what measures the city should be taking to make the community more resilient in the face of climate change so certainly encourage everyone to stay tuned to the oneclimatefuture.org website or follow us on Instagram so you can be kept up to speed about when that survey comes out because we really really want to get a lot of feedback about the actions that people think that Portland should take for climate change and then our final report will be due to the city council in June of 2020 and then the work will really begin. We'll have to implement the plan so again with the declaration of climate emergency we're going to try to do whatever we can to front load actions to reduce carbon emissions in the 2030 timeline so that's going to be an aggressive goal to achieve but we're really excited to be doing this work and I mentioned that I've been working with the city for over 20 years doing climate work but in the last few years it's just really exciting to be part of this. We're at an inflection point I think globally particularly on this issue and I feel really gratified to be in a position to be engaged in this work and I hope you will be too so thanks. Happy to take questions. Yes? I'm curious how you proceed the planning department from the data sector to really create requirements for new buildings and even existing buildings I've been architecting and I see every new project as an opportunity to really push the kind of agenda you're talking about but I don't see it in any way being enforceable yet and just as an example the whole large development is happening right down the street which actually starts at commercial street and works its way up to Spring Street I've seen the plans I can't say that I'm intimately familiar with them but from what I can see in those that's a large development for this city that's a very substantial area. I don't know if the flood mapping that you did actually includes some of that you know commercial street and the property but you know there's nothing in it that's pushing the envelope as far as I can tell in terms of water catchment, you know, green roofs, energy generation etc etc etc and I just you know it's a frustration that I don't see that the city is making the building of kind of demand type performance so I'm curious where you guys are going with all of this. Thanks for that question and the question roughly is what are the what's the planning, how's the planning department thinking about climate change and requirements around higher performing buildings and addressing vulnerabilities to flooding and sea level rise so that's a great question so I mentioned that we're starting to work on climate resilience overlay because up to now the planning department really hasn't had tools in the toolbox to enforce that to enforce anything stronger than the main building code so that's what we're working on now so we were active working at the state legislature to try to get the state to adopt a higher, the 2015 energy code to allow the city to adopt a stretch energy code and so we were successful on that so the stretch energy code will be developed with the main code board over the next several months so we'll be actively engaged in that but we'll continue to talk about this climate resilience overlay and how do we have either requirements or incentives to have those more resilient structures in areas that are susceptible so when some of the new construction you mentioned was in the permitting process, the planning department just didn't have the tools in their toolbox to require those types of performances but we're working on developing them now What efforts are being done to incentivize the EVs and hybrids? So having people transition away from fossil fuel vehicles certainly is going to be really a key so we have several EV charging stations currently but over the next several months we'll be installing 14 new charging stations so there'll be five locations with multiple chargers so there'll be Batco parking lot will have them, the little parking lot on Spring and High Street by Little Taphouse that's going to have some, Payson Park is getting some, the Jetport short term parking is going to get some, actually currently installing a bank of charge level so one charge is in the long term parking at the Jetport so we'll have five new locations I'm not sure if we'll get them built during the winter but by springtime we should have them all online and in terms of EVs there's incentives at the state level through Efficiency Main for EVs right now and certainly the tax credit is still current for EVs so if you purchase a new one that's true but if you purchase used vehicles yeah I know and used ones are by the way to go certainly even an old Nissan Leaf, first gen with 80 miles of range is still great for an around town car just driving around the Portland area if you're commuting so and a lot of times you can get those for relatively cheap but yeah those are certainly the area we'll be doing a lot more trying to get the word out and putting, I'm not sure the city will have funds to provide incentives for vehicles but certainly information and resources yeah I mean that's something, one of the areas we're going to have to intervene is in policy we can't do everything ourselves so I think we are fortunate that we have a governor in the legislature that's supportive of climate action right now certainly Governor Mills is positioning herself as a real champion amongst governors so some of those incentives and discounts on registration are really state level policies that we need to implement so I think we would be receptive to advocate for them certainly I've just started to read a few articles on the value of high quality very highly working on soil in sequestered carbon and I'm wondering if strategy around creating more open space that allows for more oil versus building a lot of buildings yeah I think carbon sequestration through planting is going to be really important so Portland we're the forest city so we do have, we have a lot of forest land inside the city you know Baxter Woods and all the land in the River Sanctuary and along Presum Scott River we have 1400 acres of open space in the city and so most of it's managed pretty loosely so it's not maintained intensively so that sequesters carbon so I think one of the things we want to do kind of is think about how much carbon are the open spaces sequestering we certainly need to build you know planting more trees is what we want to do as well so working with our harbor at the city parks and understanding that what the soil really means to be impoverished in order to do its job yeah certainly we are limited agriculture I think on a larger scale can be really important you know we don't have a lot of agricultural land here in Portland per se but we do have a pretty healthy urban farming scene the community garden program is pretty robust and we have the Mount Joy Orchard if you haven't had a chance to visit that it's on Mun Joy Hill which is right below right below the East End School really great volunteer run community orchard it's actually starting to have some fruit on the trees which is really great so I truly appreciate all the work you're doing right now and it's great you know of course you can't look back as I should started this in 1987 so we are we are moving forward that's how I'm just curious about your perspective on all the moving that's happening now and in the last couple of years on a commercial street in a marginal way it's great that we're coming up with some new standards hopefully that will be implemented and the planning board will be able to use but sometimes it strikes me as a cat's already out of the bag are we a little late we're going to be all the time space for any new buildings it's all being built up right now so how is this going to, maybe we can retrofit and we've lost a lot in the last five years or so by not capturing these new buildings on commercial streets in a marginal way that are all going to be flooded out by 2050? in some ways we can't go undo that so in the future I think there'll be some need to make those buildings be more energy efficient we don't currently have the tools to retroactively require people to increase the efficiency of their buildings well again they're already built so like I said we're working on tools the resilience overlay zone we have to go forward from where we are and we'll have to talk to the owners of those buildings to get them up to be more energy efficient yes we're going to have to if we want to achieve the climate goals we have we need all of the buildings in Portland to be more efficient and you had your hand up first you all have your hands full of your Portland and South Portland those of us who live in the community see my state of the fed we're kind of to speak to your point maybe we might be kind of off-center so I guess you've seen perhaps the river of traffic coming up to my time and I think in the morning it gets harder and harder to get down down from one same thing I'm sure some of the other lowways do you all time it all with any other groups that are coming to forward things in those areas in any way or can you just recommend so in terms of regional collaboration we do collaborate with other groups so there's the Greater Portland Council of Governments which is all the towns in the greater Portland area and members and that's they do regional transportation planning and the Greater Portland Metro system and so right now GP Cog and Metro working on a regional transit plan and there's really a lot of great ideas to make transit more effective for people who don't live in Portland and Metro has had a lot of success so the Breeze service that runs from Portland to Brunswick has been really well received in fact and it's chosen to become a member of Metro because they're finding their residents are really benefiting from the service now of course we have the Husky Line going from Portland to Gorham in partnership with the University of Southern Maine and then Metro talking if you talk to Greg Jordan who's the director of Metro he has a vision of having a bus rapid transit system that would run from like Bitterford to Brunswick so people could get on buses that were really quickly with few stops so they could really rely on that to get to work so that's kind of in the imagination stage at this point but that's the type of action we need to take certainly is getting people providing transit that's really convenient that people can make it part of their lives without having struggles and it was a question way back to you so first of all thanks for being here this is really fascinating and I'm really excited about what you guys are doing you mentioned how like youth organizing has impacted you so far and I'm wondering like what kind of role do you see for community organizing in general including youth organizing but also other groups that exist I'm thinking of I know the citizens climate lobby is sort of a one and two campaign but also a 350 I'm wondering if you see possible collaboration or how we might all work together yeah that's a great question so it's how do we continue to have youth involvement and I would say youth leadership on climate because some of us are getting older and by 2100 I'm not expecting to be around but youth have a large stake in the future and a lot of energy I think keeping the not so much the pressure but keeping climate action live in people's minds keeping it discussion that happens at the city council on a regular basis having conversations with everybody to be aware of the scale of what we're trying to do here talking to your local businesses having people adopt energy policies and energy practices and packaging policies that reduce waste and then just staying engaged with certainly happy to talk to any leaders, any youth leaders about how to be involved and what role do youth feel like they should play I think that's what do youth want to do and how do youth want to be involved I think that's important I want to listen to that as cities like ours are thinking about mitigation and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels do you know are there also ways that we can be thinking about making ourselves less hospitable to the fossil fuel industry like I'm thinking of global partners I've been following the emissions stories in the newspaper I know they're like a Fortune 500 company you know pretty much all their assets are predicated on continued extraction of fossil fuels and I wonder like how much is our tax base reliant on that and are we thinking about that kind of stuff that's a great question so one of the things in the climate emergency declaration was no new fossil fuel infrastructure it's interesting to think about in Portland per se our tax we don't have a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure in Portland but South Portland does so the oil tanks, oil storage tanks, what's the future if we move our goal is to become carbon neutral to stop using fossil fuels in Portland, South Portland and ultimately in the state so what is the future of those fuel tanks I mean unless the companies that own them are able to think about how to be involved in the energy economy without fossil fuels there maybe is not a place for them but you know certainly I think Portland would you know we have a port infrastructure here I would like to see Portland position itself to be a leader in offshore wind and renewable energy so maybe we can continue to be an energy port but not a fossil fuel port and I was talking to some other colleagues that other city staff share as well so and we have I'm Skip now with transportation of goods produced in the region can be transported to Europe through cargo containers so how do we develop that sort of trade but move away from the fossil fuel trade again if we are going to be serious about achieving our climate goals and the state is going to be serious about achieving its climate goals those facilities need to transition I want to ask a question about incentives for overdosing now eliminating fossil fuels from buildings which I think your graph shows 60% in Portland and what would the incentives look like to move toward that move all the way to 100% in the next 30 years so we are still certainly working on all the details I mean ultimately I think the goal is to be moving towards an electric fired economy so we can develop you know certainly heat pumps are a great solution for some types of infrastructure some buildings will benefit greatly so you know there is currently incentives through efficiency main and I expect that the incentives for that for heat pumps will even improve more than they are now but you know some you know heating larger buildings may have more of a challenge and so we will have to work closely with the building and design community and think about what technology is going to be the most effective for a commercial industrial process electrifying as much as we can and then look for a solution for what parts of the economy that can't be electrified whether that's hydrogen or some other type of fuel storage but it's going to be a difficult proposition no question but you know certainly electrification is certainly a huge step in the right direction especially since we will be having 100% renewable electricity by 2050 anything we can move on to the electrical grid as opposed to you know liquid fuel will be a benefit but I don't know what the incentives will look like yet certainly and we'll have to be some you know at least state level incentives and maybe at some point we can actually get some federal incentives as well because you know certainly the city won't have the financial resources to provide you know a lot of financial incentive to upgrade someone's building system but you know we can look for you know better policy at the state and federal level. So does that imply that since Governor Mills has made a commitment to this that she is assuming that the state will be funding incentives to the level that will accomplish this call I don't know I guess I mean sure answers I don't know the answer to that and I think you know right now the state is working they have the climate council that's coming together and they're working on the state climate action plan which is do I think in December and so I think we'll have some more answers at that point of what the governor has in mind. I think that you know in response to what you just passed there are a lot of cities who have already made it a requirement for new construction to conform to whether it's LEED or whether it's you know some other building standards so it's hard you know it's hard for me to hear you say that they don't have the tools in the toolbox yet because there's a lot of standards that are out there that would already you know commit the developers of buildings and you know it seems to me that a city of this size you know it's not building a ton of public buildings. A lot of cities like the city of Philadelphia, Chattanooga, Tennessee there are countless examples at this point New York City have all required a certain minimum standard for any of the buildings that are city buildings or state buildings but you know in a place like Portland where there are probably not too many of those that really would have a meaningful impact there certainly seems to me there could be a size you know benchmark and anything over 10,000 feet let's just say to throw out an example you know has a performance requirement and those tools exist I mean the city can really shift that burden to the people who are developing buildings without having to pay for themselves that could be a requirement Right I think that's what we're working to in the regulatory environment we've had to date the city hasn't been able to require performance to be greater than move back to the main uniform building code so in the last session we were able to get the state to allow cities to adopt a stretch code which I expect we will do There's a ton of other issues that are into work quality and there are a lot of things that are not just energy so I'm not sure why the city doesn't push it right well like I said it's in our we're starting that work should we have started earlier one might can argue that we should have started earlier but now we're starting that conversation we're starting to put wanting to put those tools in the toolbox and have started working with the planning board and the council on developing those so any other questions well great I appreciate everybody coming out tonight and stay tuned again follow us on Instagram, Sustainable Portland Main and onclimatefuture.org so thanks again