Turning Climate Information into Action for Stormwater Management in the Mid-Atlantic Region

Transcript

Krista Romita Grocholski, Physical Scientist, RAND Corporation

[Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments] MARISA is one of several regional consortia that are funded through NOAA's climate program office. We're the team that supports the mid-Atlantic region, so that's Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Delaware, Pennsylvania, and the portions of New York and West Virginia that are within the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Our goal is to bring climate science to decisionmakers and to residents and other individuals in our region so that they can actually make climate-informed decisions. When we started Marissa, back in 2016, one of the first things we did was engage in an extensive listening tour to try to figure out what were the issues that were most important to folks in the region and where we could help. One of the issues that came up repeatedly was that of stormwater, particularly urban stormwater management.

Michelle Miro, Information Scientist, RAND Corporation

Flooding is one of the most costly natural disasters in the United States.

Krista Romita Grocholski

There have been extreme precipitation events that have caused significant flooding and occasionally fatalities and other injuries each season since 2018.

Michelle Miro

Projections of future climate show that these types of events are only going to get more frequent and potentially more severe. To protect communities, businesses and cities from these types of disasters in the future, communities of all resource levels need to adapt to future climate change. This means making plans, making infrastructure design and changing operations to consider not just the climate of the past, but the climate of the future.

Krista Romita Grocholski

We spoke with stormwater managers, engineers, consultants, and local government officials.

Michelle Miro

Nearly everyone we spoke with identified three key information needs to operationalizing climate information in their work.

Krista Romita Grocholski

Folks said that they needed practical guidance, educational materials, and case studies.

Michelle Miro

Stormwater managers need practical guidance to be able to select from a range of future precipitation projections. These projections include data from different time periods, from different global climate models and different scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions. And selecting a value from this range of projections is important for knowing what number to assign to design of a bridge, for what number to integrate into a stormwater plan, or what number to present to a policymaker.

Krista Romita Grocholski

In terms of educational materials, in addition to focusing on engineers, they also need materials that help them describe this information to their constituents, residents, policymakers and decisionmakers that they need to get on board with these these new changes.

Michelle Miro

The third thing stormwater managers identified were case studies. What they really wanted were examples of other communities, of other cities, of leaders in the field who are already adapting to climate change and who have overcome some of the barriers that they are trying to overcome in their own communities.

Krista Romita Grocholski

We're hearing at the local level that it's hard to take a new approach, do a new thing, usually because they're resource constrained, personnel constrained. So having some kind of case study to point to, "This is a methodology that works."

Michelle Miro

We also developed a set of recommendations for the applied research community for how to directly support the information needs that came out of our work.

Krista Romita Grocholski

First is to have increased funding to create these kind of materials that I outlined in our findings: practical guidance, the educational materials, and the case studies.

Michelle Miro

The second recommendation is for researchers themselves, and that's to employ rigorous co-production processes in the development of any of the educational materials or guidance documents to ensure the way they're formatted, the way they're communicated, and the content they have can integrate directly into existing processes, can speak the language of stormwater managers, and can be as actionable as possible for their needs. The final recommendation we have is around direct support for communities. While some stormwater managers we spoke with have the capacity to directly integrate the educational materials and guidance documents that applied researchers could provide, other communities don't have that.

Krista Romita Grocholski

And so direct support to these communities to learn and absorb this information and figure out how they're going to make their communities more resilient is needed as well.

Michelle Miro

Adapting stormwater infrastructure to changing climate conditions is crucial for effective management, but doing so requires more than just changing numbers and engineering design calculations. It means understanding future climate projections, making decisions on those projections, and communicating those decisions to the public and policymakers.

Krista Romita Grocholski

Creating climate resilient stormwater infrastructure is crucial for the survival of these communities, and this is something that we can do, this is something that we can help with, and there's no reason that we shouldn't.