Boston Climate Resilience with Chris Osgood

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Save the City! The playbook for climate adaptation and resilience. This newsletter exists to open source innovative solutions you can apply to your community.

Our first conversation is with Chris Osgood, Director of Boston’s Office of Climate Resilience. An 18-year veteran of the Mayor’s Office, Chris takes an all-of-government approach to minimize the risks of coastal flooding and extreme heat. We discuss prioritizing climate solutions, public-private partnerships, and tracking resiliency goals.

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This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Save the City: What's your origin story? How did you become the Director of the Office of Climate Resilience for Boston?  

Chris Osgood: The strongest throughline of my work is that I love this city. I grew up here in Boston. After undergrad, I worked in New York City’s Parks Department. After graduating from business school, I got a fellowship to work for the then Mayor of Boston, Tom Menino. That was 18 years ago, and it’s been a wonderful 18 years.

I spent the first couple of years working on the basic city services that happen within the city and thinking about bringing new practices to support the folks filling potholes, fixing streetlights, and removing graffiti. That led to an opportunity to focus on our public works and transportation with a significant focus on the transformation of our streets from a mobility perspective. Looking at how we make streets safer for walkers and bikers, and how we make them reliable for folks taking public transit.

I’ve supported a number of infrastructure projects with a specific focus on accelerating the city's response to the threats that climate change presents. Increased coastal flooding, intense precipitation leading to stormwater challenges, and extreme heat. So, I have a great pleasure working in this office with a great group of folks focused on supporting this all-government effort in our climate response.  

Save the City: What is the scope of your work? 

Chris: It really is an all-of-government approach. The intent of the Office is not to centralize our response, it is to support the acceleration of work which is important to our constituents. Identifying key priorities and building alignment across a series of departments to do this work. This means externally being a front door for anybody who's got a question about the city's work or wants to partner with the city, and then leading the implementation of a set of really critical projects. 

Save the City: There are many solutions for climate adaptation- cooling centers, mobile air conditioning units, elevating the coastline,  etc. How do you prioritize what problems to address and which solutions to implement?

Chris: On heat, our strategy falls into two broad categories - relief during heat emergencies and broader cooling efforts. The foundation for both threads of work is mapping, which was done by the city to understand where urban heat islands are in Boston, and where extreme heat is most experienced by our constituents. In the first category, we are building a toolkit of projects and products that help constituents during extreme heat waves (defined as >90℉ for three consecutive days).

Last summer, we did things like expanding the number of misting tents, increasing the number of shade structures, and thinking about communications around cooling centers at our libraries, community centers, etc. A whole set of work led by our Parks Department focuses on expanding canopy cover. Not just about where we are planting trees, but an intentional effort to expand the quantity and quality of the tree maintenance that we're doing. The mayor has invested significantly in tree planting across the city, expanding our urban forester team, and building new career ladders for Boston residents to become urban foresters.

It starts with understanding where climate impacts are being experienced most acutely and consequently, what areas we should target. Same thing for coastal flooding. We have comprehensive mapping and modeling of Boston's coastline to understand the greatest near-term risks from coastal flooding. Some of those are places that experience flooding on sunny days today. In this area, there are three different strategies, all happening simultaneously but on different timelines.

So short-term, building flood barriers that help protect properties. In the medium term, we are doing a whole set of work around capital projects like raising Boston's coastline, whether it's a park, a road, or a harbor walk. Over the longer term, we are thinking about what infrastructure investments we need in order to protect against today’s storms, and to protect Boston residents and our communities for generations.

Save the City: Part of Boston’s coastline is privately owned. Is there a place for public-private partnerships in this work? 

Chris: Yes. There are three ways that collaboration happens. First, in places where the private sector is building. Second, where the private sector is collaborating with the government. And third, places where the private sector is funding. 

Where the private sector is funding, not only are developers required to elevate buildings, but they are also building a portion of district-scale flood protection that will guard the developers' property and the neighboring properties around it. So there’s a way in which private development is contributing to community resilience as a whole. 

The more common partnership is demonstrated in this example. We are leading a project in East Boston for a set of privately owned parcels. The flood path doesn’t just impact those property owners and those parcels, but it extends to one of our principal subway lines and tunnels. So the city has been stepping in to lead a public process and engagement with each of those property owners to think about infrastructure that we can put in place that provides a broader community benefit. 

Another example illustrates where there’s a degree of private investment to help move a project forward. The Boston Marine Park is owned by the Boston Planning Department and they are doing a resilience plan for that park. They’ve set up a structure so that when some resilient infrastructure is built, a portion of that funding gets fronted by the city, and then there’s reimbursement by some of the tenants. It’s a public-private partnership, but we are trying to collaborate with the community broadly.

Save the City: Part of your office's mandate is to ensure climate resilience measures are implemented quickly, equitably, and effectively. What systems do you have in place to verify that goal is met?  

Chris: We have a couple of systems in place - we present our strategies and progress publicly. We’ve got an implementation tracker specific to the coastal resilience work. We also have a ‘Green New Deal’ dashboard where we track our efforts around climate resilience, decarbonization, the energy transition, and some workforce goals that are part of this initiative. In October we announced an updated Climate Action Plan. That’s the document where we lay out what targets we are trying to hit, by what time frame, and have a public engagement process around drafting that list. 

We have a Climate Council, co-chaired by our Chief Climate Officer, the Head of the Environment Department, and the Director of the Green New Deal. They bring together all the city cabinet leads and make sure the Climate Action Plan is focused.

Save the City: How have you approached engaging internal and external tech stakeholders? 

Chris: In many ways, the Climate Council helps us engage internal stakeholders to facilitate climate planning. The council ensures we are making the right investments at the right time. Externally, we have the 2016 Climate Ready Boston plan that defined the challenges in front of us, and subsequent reports detail neighborhood transformation. Both reports are data-informed but community-driven.

Save the City: Are there software or planning tools that you want to shout out for being particularly helpful in your climate resilience work?

Chris: There are a couple that I would like to flag. The Massachusetts Coastal Flood Risk Model (MCFR) has been incredibly valuable from a coastal flooding perspective. We are partnering with a group called the Stone Living Lab to deploy sensors built by a company called Hohonu in areas where we see coastal flooding during extreme storms. These tools help us understand what is happening today and feed into longer-term forecasting models. 

We’ve also installed 30 new bus shelter roofs in corridors that experience extreme heat - it’s not climate tech but that work is guided by forecast models. This helps a parallel goal of the city to boost our public transit ridership. 

Save the City: Are there other cities either regionally, nationally, or globally that you admire in terms of how they're approaching climate resilience?    

Chris: We can learn from the work Phoenix is doing, for example, around extreme heat. New York has done a lot of work around coastal resilience and flood protection. Last week we hosted Professor Kongjian Yu, who has done a lot of work around sponge cities in China - reducing the amount of impermeable surfaces within the city so we can do a better job of handling stormwater.