City of Santa Barbara, CA Succession Program
    Recognizing that there will be a major turnover in management in the next five to ten years, the City's Executive Management Team explored several strategies to plan for the continuation of a high performance organization through a commitment to sustained initiatives that engage outside the box thinking to attract, develop, and retain needed talent in the City of Santa Barbara.

    In the end, the team produced six strategies which form the City’s “Succession Program.”

Involving Citizens in Adapting to Climate Change

Climate change presents a unique set of circumstances. It is an issue that is unprecedented in its scope and the severity of its outcomes. Local government managers have never had to face this kind of emergency situation. However, local governments are organizationally structured to address the hazards and disasters presented by the changing climate. Emergency preparedness is not new to local governments, and just as in good emergency planning, planning for climate impacts involves bringing stakeholders together.

Climate change is also unique in that it is both global and local in its impacts. We rely on global data and information about impacts in other areas of the world, but at the same time, local government managers must apply this global information on a local scale and understand the wider implications of the changing climate on their own communities.

For example, local government managers must help their communities see the relevance of what happens in other areas of the world to their own security and well-being. Understanding global climate change means more than being apprised of what is happening in other countries and responding with traditional humanitarian aid. It also means that we need to determine how the plight of Bangladesh climate refugees may directly impact our own security and well-being.

The U.S. National Intelligence Council has made these connections in several reports. One of the most recent, published in December 2008, titled Global Trends 2025, analyzes how adverse impacts on water resources and food supplies may destabilize national governments of developing countries and could lead to millions of climate refugees and wars over scarce resources.

The solutions to climate change can also have widespread and sometimes unanticipated implications. We have seen, for example, the interconnectedness of food supplies to the development of alternatives to fossil fuels. In 2008, when the United States and a few other Western countries committed to using corn-based biofuels, it created a backlash when grain prices escalated and caused shortages in developing countries around the world.

City and county administrators and local elected officials should bring citizens together to discuss the broad implications of climate change as well as the local impacts, and they should solicit citizen input. Several traditional methods of citizen involvement can work well for this issue.

Study circles are designed to bring members of a community together to deliberate about an issue in an open and democratic forum. This process—which is valued as much for itself as for the actual content of the discussion—emphasizes identifying participants’ values and perceptions about a particular issue. No specific outcome is desired other than the participants’ deepened understanding of an issue; however, the experience can lead to individual participants or the group taking action after the study circle ends. The study circle can be a highly effective tool in the case of a complex topic such as climate change, which can be an intimidating issue. For more information about study circles, see Everyday Democracy’s online resources.

Public listenings are formats that bring citizens together to converse with each other about a community issue while local officials observe and listen. This can be an empowering experience for citizens given the enormity of the climate problem. It is also is also helpful for local officials to gauge citizens’ understanding of and feelings about climate change.

Public forums are similar to town hall meetings in which the public is invited to hear about and discuss an issue of importance to the community. An excellent example of this type of citizen outreach occurred on October 2, 2007, when the Olympia, Washington, city council sponsored a forum on climate change for its citizens. The two-hour event featured expert speakers discussing the urgency of climate change and the impacts on the region. In addition, the forum program brochure was designed to inform the public about why climate change adaptation was important to address.

Public-private collaborations are joint ventures that bring together stakeholders in the private and public sector to work as a team. Climate change adaptation and mitigation projects can make effective collaborative experiences.

You may also want to try the following:

  • Involve local meteorologists and universities in a public education program about local climate impacts.
  • Provide regular climate impact updates to your city council and county legislatures.
  • Inform your staff of the social and human dimensions of climate change, especially the effects of posttraumatic stress disorder in severe situations, food scarcity, water shortages, and other potential consequences of climate change.
  • Consider creating a Climate Change Hub using the Canadian model. Hubs offer public education workshops, serve as a clearinghouse of climate change information, and sponsor public-education outreach projects on the topic of climate change. For an excellent example of a Climate Change Hub, see the New Brunswick Hub Web site at http://www.nbhub.org.
  • Involve local youth in climate action projects. A unique and successful organization for youth that you may want to imitate in your community is Ecoclubes International. Ecoclubes are organizations of children and young adults who design and implement local campaigns to make people aware of climate change and other related issues, such as water management and urban forestry. The Ecoclubes coordinate their activities with other local organizations using community involvement processes. For more information, see http://ecoclubes.opus.org.pl.

The issue of climate change is too large to leave out the public. It touches everyone in some way and will have a profound effect on people’s quality of life. The issue is a complex challenge that will benefit from everyone’s creative input to develop timely and successful solutions.

The full IQ Report, Adapting to Climate Change: Strategies for Local Government, is written by Mary L. Walsh, a former city manager and currently the director of the Climate Change Learning and Information Center. She also teaches at Suffolk University and the New School for Social Research on the topic of climate change and public policy.