After Vermont Governor Phil Scott and state Treasurer Mike Pieciak announced a plan to develop a state Resilience Implementation Strategy in January, the Agency of Natural Resources held virtual meetings this week to launch the initiative and receive input on how Vermonters define climate resiliency.
The virtual forum brought state and local officials, residents and advocates together to discuss what resilience is and how the state should prepare and respond to the impacts of climate change.
Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore told participants that a primary motivation for the new Resilience Implementation Strategy is last summer’s floods that caused a series of environmental disasters.
“Vermont is already engaged in quite a number of different resilience activities,” Moore noted. “But there isn’t yet an organizing document and strategy that brings those pieces together under the umbrella of resilience in the face of changing climate and helps articulate priorities and better understand the most strategic investments we can make and make soonest.”
Treasurer Pieciak said he is involved in formulating the resilience strategy because climate change is among the biggest challenges to the state’s economy.
“Climate change has been continually costing us more and more. It’s happening more frequently. It’s happening in a more severe way,” Pieciak said. “So as we project out we know that these things are going to potentially get worse and cost us even more. So we have to also be thinking about how do we make our communities, our economy, our families, our towns more resilient to this changing climate. And if we do it in a way that is strategic like this effort is engaged in, then we can make smart investments that will let us get ahead of some of those catastrophic events and some of those catastrophic costs that are associated with them.”
Breakout groups discussed what priorities should be included in the proposed strategy.
Several individuals, including Bristol Town Administrator Valerie Capels, emphasized the state’s need for agricultural resiliency.
“I think we’ve seen over and over again different flood events, not just flooding, different events in general,” said Capels. “Whether it’s freezing, flooding, drought, all kinds of things really pose a threat to our food systems. And so to the extent that we can diversify our agricultural economy, where and how products are produced and just being mindful of those threats.”
South Burlington resident and University of Vermont researcher Mona Tolba reported that her breakout group feels the state is only using stopgap measures to address climate change impacts.
“They are not fixing actually the real problems,” said Tolba. “What we know is the bottom of the river is just filled with rocks and stuff like this. This needs to be changed because we have to work on the root causes of the flood. And also we talked about the state has to work on the infrastructure and do actually the stuff. They have to remove all the debris from the bottom of these rivers and also the waste systems and the, I’m not sure what the name of it is, but all these holes in the roads that take off this extra water. This is not working properly.”
The state plans to complete the Resilience Implementation Strategy plan by July 1st, 2025.
