Boston residents are already affected by extreme heat, rain, snow and flooding. These trends will likely continue. The City launched Climate Ready Boston to help Boston plan for the future impacts of climate change.
Climate Ready Boston is an ongoing initiative. We released a comprehensive study report in December 2016 that you can read below. We are now working with the community and other partners to advance our vision for a Climate Ready Boston.
Colleges and universities have a significant footprint in the City, as well as a particular set of sustainability challenges, including large-scale energy procurement and management, and resiliency planning for diverse communities of tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff.
Net Neutrality protections prevent Internet Service Providers from interfering with your Internet content. In November, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed to eliminate these protections — here’s our take on it. For more background, check out our introduction to Net Neutrality: http://bit.ly/2B80aQU
Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Marvin Odum, Houston’s chief recovery officer, about the city’s need for more federal aid since the region was hit by Hurricane Harvey.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
And here in Houston with me now is one of the reasons we actually came here. John Burnett, NPR’s Southwest correspondent. Hey, John.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: Welcome to Houston, Lulu. I’m glad we got you down here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I am glad to be here. And you’ve been urging us to cover Houston for a while. We’ll get to Harvey in a moment. But why, in your view, is the city important right now?
BURNETT: Well, I’m a native Texan. And for decades, Houston had labored under a stereotype of being this behemoth city filled with oil men, refinery workers and astronauts. And in the last decade, I think Houston has become the most interesting city in Texas and really the most misunderstood major city in America. It’s the fourth-largest.
Houston is now calling itself the most ethnically and racially diverse in America. As whites slip into a minority, Houston becomes a bellwether. This is what big American cities are going to look like going forward. But there’s something else going on here. Houston is trying hard to make itself a more livable city. It’s created these amazing urban parks like Hermann Park and Buffalo Bayou. And people are investing in the theater district and the museums.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And, of course, in the middle of that civic reinvention, Hurricane Harvey hit the area more than three months ago. And you can’t overstate how devastated Houston was by that storm.
BURNETT: It’s true. Harvey dumped 50 inches of rain – a year’s worth of rain in four days, more than 100,000 homes damaged. Thousands are still staying in hotels all over the region. Houston is exceptionally flat. The city’s nickname is the Bayou City. Its existence is premised on drainage. But three 500-year storms in three years have proved that something has gone wrong. These bayous that drain into Galveston Bay are just not getting the water out fast enough.
Maritime historian David Abulafia of the University of Cambridge presents his lecture, ”
Far-flung Neighbors: The Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé and the Portuguese Settlement of the Eastern Atlantic, 1420-1520,” This lecture is co-sponsored by the John Carter Brown Library and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.
Welcome to Transition Studies. To prosper for very much longer on the changing Earth humankind will need to move beyond its current fossil-fueled civilization toward one that is sustained on recycled materials and renewable energy. This is not a trivial shift. It will require a major transition in all aspects of our lives.
This weblog explores the transition to a sustainable future on our finite planet. It provides links to current news, key documents from government sources and non-governmental organizations, as well as video documentaries about climate change, environmental ethics and environmental justice concerns.
The links are listed here to be used in whatever manner they may be helpful in public information campaigns, course preparation, teaching, letter-writing, lectures, class presentations, policy discussions, article writing, civic or Congressional hearings and citizen action campaigns, etc. For further information on this blog see: About this weblog. and How to use this weblog.
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