With climate change increasingly acting as a wildcard, preparing for and mitigating its effects is becoming more challenging.
But according to Oliver Sellers-Garcia, Boston’s first Green New Deal director and special advisor to Mayor Wu on climate action, Boston is evolving to meet the moment.
In Boston, where projections forecast up to 90 days of 90-degree temperatures and a three-foot rise in sea levels by 2070, Sellers-Garcia emphasized that Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration is taking action at the municipal level to build resilience against the unpredictable impacts of climate change.
“In the past, we were chasing only reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and limiting our contribution to climate change,” Sellers-Garcia said. “Now, we’re focusing on livability—in simple terms, health, quality of life, jobs, and justice. We’re thinking of how our investments and priorities focus on bringing to the forefront the communities that have been back of the line at other moments of big social transformations.”
Sellers-Garcia spoke at Boston College’s Jane Jacobs and Climate Readiness in Boston conference on Saturday, named in honor of the renowned author and urban activist.
While government bureaucracy is often slow moving, Sellers-Garcia believes it has the capacity to drive large-scale change. The Wu administration is working to retool city agencies to align with ambitious climate goals, he said.
“I’d say one of the biggest things that we’ve done is really to find ways that different agencies can find their part of the climate agenda that they are best able to deliver and build capacity, help plans, figure out goals to shoot for,” he said.
Sellers-Garcia said he is spearheading efforts to ensure that climate action directly benefits Bostonians in their day-to-day lives. One example he discussed is the city’s recent rollout of curbside electric vehicle charging stations, designed to accelerate the transition away from gas-powered cars.
“We started deploying curbside charging stations to help accelerate the transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles in a way that gets ahead of where the industry is sort of naturally drifting to,” Sellers-Garcia said. “We are a city where we estimate under 50 percent of registered cars have an off-street place to park, so if you’re actually going to charge it at home, you’re not going to be able to do that on property and so we’re trying to meet that need.”
Climate resilience isn’t just about infrastructure—it’s also about ensuring that city institutions are prepared for the challenges ahead, according to Sellers-Garcia. An initiative that Sellers-Garcia has been working on is transforming Boston’s Office of Emergency Management into an organization that places climate at the center of its preparedness efforts.
“[We’ve worked] to transform our Office of Emergency Management from a disaster response and threat recovery organization to one that is centering climate as one of the key preparedness components of what they’re doing, and this summer, we really enabled them to do much more work on heat resilience,” Sellers-Garcia said.
Rather than relying on sweeping individual solutions, Sellers-Garcia emphasized that implementing a series of incremental changes will eventually create a Boston that is resilient to climate change.
“All these little things affect us very much—probably not the main thing you think of when you think of climate change or even heat stress, but this is how you get climate action into your everyday life and get ahead of some of the things that could be a greater crisis,” Sellers-Garcia said.
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