By Kara Holsopple for The Allegheny Front
Pennsylvanians are already feeling the effects of climate change, like more extreme weather, and the trends are only going to continue. A new statewide effort is looking to create a network to help communities face the challenges ahead. It’s called Prepare PA.
Jacqueline O’Connor is a Professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, acting director of the Penn State Climate Consortium, and the leader of Prepare PA. Peter Buck is the Director of Education at Sustain Penn State and serves as the education team lead for Prepare PA.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with them recently about this new initiative.
Kara Holsopple: What is Prepare PA? What’s your elevator pitch?
Jacqueline O’Connor: A commonwealth-wide initiative to build partners for a resilient Pennsylvania. It was born out of a network that was developed by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. They had started this initiative several years ago, and the folks at DEP saw the potential for this getting much larger than I think that they could handle internally.
So a couple years ago, they put out a call for proposals asking for somebody to host the network. At Penn State, we obviously do a lot of work in the research space, but being a land grant institution, this idea of serving the Commonwealth, reaching out to partners across the Commonwealth is really in our DNA. A lot of the things that the DEP wanted to see originally, we were already doing in some form or another.
Kara Holsopple: When you say resiliency, what do you mean by that?
Jacqueline O’Connor: Climate change is driving a lot of changes in the state of Pennsylvania. I think one of the things we talk about a lot is flooding — being able to handle the environmental changes, the health changes that come with some of these things. So resiliency is really about creating programs and structures such that your community can not just survive these changes, but thrive in a rapidly changing and highly uncertain environment.
Peter Buck: When we look across the impacts that are coming to the state from the combination of changing and rising temperatures, more weather extremes, even things that happen in other parts of North America that then come across the boundaries of Pennsylvania, wildfire smoke, for example, vector-borne disease, there are all different kinds of impacts that we have to respond to and adapt to.
Those require connection; they require high levels of communication. So it’s really important for us that we understand resilience not just as something that is like riveted into a bridge so that it is stronger, but also the connectivity of organizations, so that if we get a power outage that people are more prepared to respond to that in a way that is not panic.
We’re looking at how different populations are affected differently in the services that our society, our government, our economy, our businesses are providing to them are able to deliver them so that people can thrive.
Kara Holsopple: Jacqueline, you mentioned that DEP recognized that you all were already doing some of the things that they had envisioned. Can you just give me a couple of examples?
Jacqueline O’Connor: One of the things that Penn State was already doing that DEP wanted to see out of the network was hosting a yearly climate summit. At Penn State, we’ve been hosting the Climate Solution Symposium every May for the past several years. In the past, it’s been more research-focused, bringing together researchers and our partners from outside the university and sharing knowledge. But moving forward, it will have much more of a Pennsylvania flavor.
For a lot of the data services, they were very interested [in] having a one-stop shop for municipalities and businesses where they could go to find reliable science-based data and tools to help with climate resilience planning. We’ve got a lot of folks at Penn State who are already active in that area.
This network is not Penn State doing stuff for the Commonwealth. It’s folks from the Commonwealth coming together, just facilitated by the fact that we have the infrastructure at Penn State to do this type of work.
Kara Holsopple: Who are the members of this network, and who are the members you hope to attract?
Jacqueline O’Connor: So right now we don’t have any official members. We have four regional meetings happening around the state in the next month or so where we will be recruiting members. Members could be anyone. It could be individuals. It could be municipal governments. It can be companies or nonprofits. We’re really looking for folks who are interested in building their resilience and building their connections across the state.
Peter Buck: I want to add something to the educational programming. The program that we run here, the Local Climate Action Program, is a partnership with the DEP already and ICLEI USA, which is the United States branch of the NGO that manages the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Local Government and Municipal Authority Interest Group.
So we already have worked with, in our fourth year now, jurisdictions with a combined population of 2.1 million people. That’s a sixth of the population of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We provide all of them with greenhouse gas inventories and climate planning services that are catered to that individual community.
So, we are already engaged with lots of government partners. There are NGOs and businesses who have already been a part of it; energy services companies, advocacy organizations, other universities actually in Pennsylvania and in other states. So the network for government and local government is already kind of here. We’re very well connected to it.
Kara Holsopple: You mentioned hosting some meetings around Pennsylvania this and next month. What will be covered there? What will people learn, or what will they be contributing?
Jacqueline O’Connor: I think the goal is twofold. The first is to do what I think the network is going to be best at — just bring folks together. We know that people and companies and organizations across the state already have a lot of really useful knowledge. If we share that knowledge and work on these issues together, we will be stronger.
The second goal is to introduce them to the structure of Prepare PA and then ask them what they would like us to prioritize in the first year.
Kara Holsopple: How are your goals aligned with the state’s climate initiatives,and also in the absence of federal climate policy?
Peter Buck: If you look at the state’s priority and comprehensive climate action plans, they have 2030 targets and then 2050 targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. [Those targets] are 50 to 52% by 2030, and then net zero by 2050. In a state that is historically in the top five for greenhouse gas emissions in the country, with as much fossil fuel infrastructure, transportation and heavy industry as we have, those are very difficult goals. Now, those are the state’s goals.
Prepare PA is an organization to support a network. We don’t necessarily have those goals per se, but we are an enabling organization. We have to have programs that assist both the Commonwealth government to do that, but then all of the actors that are within it.
So what we are going to do and already are doing is providing the connection space, that capacity building space and the ability to build ambition, focus, and shared projects so that we can achieve those goals across sectors: industry, transportation, agriculture, forestry. Then, in the resilience space, the connections to empower individuals, families, and communities for public health purposes.
[For example], the Department of Transportation, which has to deal with all kinds of climate impacts —it’s not just a DOT. Metropolitan planning organizations and townships have roads, and they have to deal with these impacts as well. The connective tissue that we’re enabling will get stronger over time, and those connections will become faster and just better adept at doing the things that they need to do.
The federal situation is the federal situation. [The U.S. has] withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. The United States withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We’re not going to do anything about that. We’re not the president. We are not Congress. We aren’t here to lobby.
But we can empower people to make better decisions, investments, and spend their time on the things that they know are important. So that’s what we’re going to do.
Peter Buck is education team lead for Prepare PA and Jacqueline O’Connor is its leader. She’s also the acting director of the Penn State Climate Consortium.
Registration for the remainder of the regional meetings ends March 18:
- State College — Penn State University Park, Wed., March 18
- Harrisburg — Penn State Harrisburg, Wed., March 25
- Pittsburgh — Franco Harris Pittsburgh Center, Wed., April 1
- Scranton — Penn State Fullers Overlook, Wed., April 8