Flooding, housing, energy-efficiency rise to top of North Country residents’ climate concerns 

Those were some of the preliminary findings revealed at the Adirondack Climate Conference

By Mike Lynch

About three dozen presenters spoke about topics related to climate research and adaptations at the Adirondack Climate Conference Thursday at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake. 

Organized by Paul Smith’s College, Adirondack Research Consortium and The Wild Center, the gathering drew about 200 people.

Below are a few takeaways:

Initial findings from regional listening sessions

Adirondack Climate Outreach and Resilience Network (ACORN) has held 10 of 11 planned listening sessions over the past four months in the northern New York region. So far, the organization has heard from more than 300 participants from 60 towns and villages during the public meetings, conducted 90 focused stakeholder conversations, and had 270 responses to its online survey. 

During those dialogues, four major themes emerged, said Sunita Halasz, ACORN project coordinator and conference organizer:

• Floods are causing damage in communities, and installing appropriately sized culverts under roads – which are often costly for towns and counties – is one of the prime ways to alleviate some of the damage. “As you all know, extreme rainfall is a volume and a frequency that we haven’t experienced historically, and it comes at a great expense to property to roads to forestry and agriculture and tourism, which are all economic sectors that are so important to the North Country, as well as health and safety,” Halasz said. 

• Lack of seasonal predictability is causing disruptions in tourism, forestry and agriculture.
• A need for more rural voices in decision making at the state level. 
• The lack of affordable, climate-resilient housing is also a concern – “This is a huge topic no matter where you go, whether you’re in a tiny town or a larger city like Plattsburgh or Utica,” Halasz said. “People mentioned the aging of the housing stock, the need for upgrades like insulation and heat pumps, the lack of available contractors and reduced insurance coverage.”

The final listening session will take place April 6 at Paul Smith’s College. 

Following the information collection effort, ACORN will produce a report titled “The Rural Resilience Roadmap for the North Country.” It will outline “the challenges, strengths, and visions for our region, as well as the needed projects that will make us resilient together,” according to ACORN.

Assessing barriers for homeowners

A 39-page report, “North Country Regional Assessment and Barriers Analysis,” collected feedback and surveys from residents, contractors, small business owners and community stakeholders. Erin Griffin, who works for the Adirondack North Country Association and is director of the North Country Clean Energy Hub, gave an overview of an analysis that her organization worked for more than a year and released last October. 

One of the key observations from the report was that the North Country’s vast size and small population size is a defining trait of the region, containing 23% of the state’s area and just 2.26% of the state’s population. 

“We have a really dispersed population … and that just makes it challenging for people to access services,” Griffin said.

Among the barriers, opportunities and recommendations outlined in the report is the”critically small number of contractors available to complete home repairs and energy upgrades, participate in New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) programs, and build the region’s clean energy workforce.”

The document recommends supporting workforce development in schools to help bolster the industry and suggests that more public funding support is needed for existing energy efficient contractors.

It also suggested improving access to NYSERDA programs, including Empower, which aims to help low and moderate income families save money and implement energy efficient systems. 

The indirect impacts of climate change

Suzanna Randall, chief resiliency officer for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, talked about how the $4.2 billion Clean Water, Clean Air and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act includes $1.5 billion for climate change mitigation and $1.1 billion for restoration and flood risk reduction.

Amanda Stevens, a senior project manager at NYSERDA, gave an overview of the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment, a scientific evaluation of how climate change is impacting communities, infrastructure and ecosystems in New York. 

She discussed how climate change has a cascading impact on systems. 

“These are a series of connected impacts, where you have one independent impact leading to another one leading to another one,” she said. “You can kind of think about these as indirect impacts.”

For instance, if temperatures rise and allow hemlock wooly adelgid to thrive in areas which historically had a cold climate, the invasive could kill hemlocks that grow along streams home to cold-water fish such as brook trout. That in turn has an impact on fishing tourism.

Or a power outage could cause impacts in the health sector because some medical equipment can’t work without power.

She said when planning for the impacts, people need to think of all parts of the community that are being impacted and bring them together. 

“It’s really important that kind of going back to that cascading impact, saying that as we’re trying to plan for for climate change and impacts, that we think about these interconnections, and don’t just think about a single impact and try to focus on fixing that because there are other things that come from that that we need to be thinking about as well,” Stevens said.