Washtenaw County Resilience with Beth Gibbons

Today we speak with Beth Gibbons, Director of Washtenaw County’s Resilience Office and a long-time climate adaptation expert. Located in Southeast Michigan, Washtenaw County encompasses seven municipalities and is home to approximately 375,000 residents and the University of Michigan. Resiliency planning in this region addresses challenges such as extreme heat, wetter winters, and potential population growth.

We discuss planning for a broad spectrum of high-intensity storms, climate-driven migration and how to prepare for it, and climate resilience at the regional level.

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This is the last edition of Save the City for 2024. We wish you a relaxing holiday season and we’ll see you in the New Year!

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This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Save the City: What's your origin story? How did you start working in adaptation and resilience? 

Beth Gibbons: I started working in adaptation and resilience after finishing my graduate degree in Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. I worked on a project integrating climate data into decision-making for municipalities across the Great Lakes Region in the U.S. and Canada. Coming into adaptation work from the climate science side, I quickly found a need to use future and historical information to initiate conversations around adaptation and resilience. I also worked with communities to gather their stories, recognizing that people are experts in where they live. I understood where communities found existing infrastructure incongruent with current weather and changing conditions. That work generated meaningful climate information. 

I went on to work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and managed what’s now called the Climate Adaptation Partnership Program, helping to build equitable climate resilience in communities across the county. 

Then I became the inaugural Director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals and worked on professionalizing and standardizing the adaptation space. That was amazing, to have the opportunity to think about how to ensure a field of practice centers on people’s lived experiences and knowledge. 

Now I serve as the Director of Resilience for Washtenaw County, Michigan where I’ve lived for 15 years. When this position opened earlier this year, I felt it was a unique opportunity to take the work that I’ve been doing and focus on where I live.

STC: What's the scope of your work?  

Beth: It’s broad. I am building Washtenaw County’s Resiliency Office which did not exist before, so I’m in a position no one’s been in before. The scope of my role is adaptation, mitigation, and holistic climate resilience. Washtenaw County has ambitious mitigation goals, we’re seeking to be carbon neutral in county operations by 2030, and carbon neutral across the entire county by 2035. In addition to those goals, my office is implementing the ‘Resilient Washtenaw’ plan which has 45 actions that span eight strategic areas on mitigation and adaptation measures. 

STC: You can start by tackling the low-hanging fruit or addressing the most consequential adaptation strategies first - how do you prioritize the 45+ solutions you are implementing?

Beth: It’s a work in progress. We are figuring out what the low-hanging fruit is, and what challenges need to be worked on immediately because if we don’t, we’ll never reach our goals. 

It’s important in this community to have a clear plan of action around quantitative mitigation goals and to express how we expect to meet them. I’m working to understand what metrics we need to track as a county versus what’s already tracked and monitored by our partners. 

The Resilient Washtenaw Plan is driven by community engagement and their needs. We want to ensure our work is oriented to communities with the greatest social and economic vulnerability, for whom climate change is an exacerbating layer. Washtenaw County is the eighth most economically segregated county in the country. So we’re figuring out how to address climate impacts without burdening communities that are already overburdened.

STC: Some communities only have to plan for extreme heat, flooding or heavier rain/snowfall. In South East Michigan you have to plan for a broader spectrum of high-intensity storms. How do you prepare for that range?  

Beth: For us in the Midwest and the Great Lakes Region, the calling card of climate change is variability. We’re having hotter and hotter summers, we’re having icier winters. We have this dichotomy of less water when you need it, and more water when you don’t in terms of precipitation patterns. Making sure our infrastructure can accommodate a broader range of weather is important. 

We also have to communicate climate risk in a way that is not one-sided. Our region benefits from using language like, “climate change,” versus “global warming,” because the changes are dynamic here. 

Again, variability is at the crux of our climate conversations. We’re making sure that first responders, especially in hospitals, are prepared for that variability in treating people who have been exposed to extreme heat or cold. 

Almost a decade ago now, the first Climate Health Impact Report was published by the State of Michigan. It ranked the top five health threats in Michigan from climate change and the fifth threat was carbon monoxide toxicity. That’s because people running generators incorrectly is a risk in all seasons. It’s a risk during a cold winter, it’s a risk in the summer following severe storms. That’s a pervasive risk that boils down to variability.

STC: Cities like Buffalo, NY, and Duluth, MN brand themselves as climate havens, and many considered SE Michigan as a climate haven too - a place where people may move to reduce their exposure to high-intensity storms. However, there’s no consensus on how many people will relocate and where. How does that factor into your resiliency plans? 

Beth: It's hard because climate migration is still anecdotal. In the cases where we know where people are moving, they tend to be what I would call amenity migrants - people with a lot of resources and opportunities taking their time deciding where they are going to move because they’re avoiding risk.

Tens of millions of people live in areas that will be fully inundated with three feet of sea level rise and with the increasing severity of storms across the Southeast [of the United States], people will be pushed into motion.  

Climate migration work is secretly just good adaptation work. We start with how we take care of the people who live here now. It turns out, that if you want to take care of people who are going to come here, it means understanding the current land use patterns and figuring out what land use patterns you want to see. What systems do we have that work well? How do we want our public transportation system to work? I have not encountered a climate model yet that suggests things are going to change so dramatically that good planning and caring for people who are here now is going to lead us in a different direction than caring for the people who are going to move here.

I should also say, I don’t work on international migration, which is an entirely different topic. It’s far more developed and robust. Climate-induced migration in an international context is not nascent. It is studied, but so much about it is dictated by immigration policy. When I think of being a receiving community, I think about it in the context of domestic migration. In that context, we don’t have policies that allow people to move with freedom and dignity post-disaster. 

Right now our disaster policies keep people locked in places of risk. So if you have a loss (i.e., your house is flooded) you have to rebuild in that place of risk. I think there’s an opportunity in the future for us to create domestic policies that allow an individual to actively think about their resilience before disasters and recover in new locations.

We have to be mindful that climate adaptation work doesn’t just become wealth protection. We have to make sure adaptation advances equity, justice, and the communities most at risk.

STC: Your office works to foster climate action across SE Michigan, working with your neighboring counties. What does that look like? 

Beth: In Southeast Michigan, Detroit is the economic engine of this region. It’s the business center, it’s the cultural center, it’s the port, and it’s the shipping hub. Our transportation and water delivery systems are interconnected. As a region, we rise and fall together. Our climate impacts are the same. 

We're all looking at more severe storms, with no water when you need it and more water when you don't. The way that we've developed has reduced our wetlands over time and it’s impacting communities in horrible ways. 

These are shared challenges that we can address by learning from one another. A watershed is not interested in jurisdictional boundaries. We have an obligation to do this work as a whole region. 

Up from there, adaptation and resilience in Michigan is critical. The State of Michigan has done incredibly leading climate work. The Office of Climate and Energy and Governor Whitmer have been at the forefront of policy across the country. Michigan has received more Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dollars than any other state in the country, leading to a huge amount of activation around infrastructure for adaptation and resilience. 

I am looking forward to leveraging the resources we have in terms of people and knowledge - including tribes, our agricultural community, our cities, academics, and practitioners, and making sure we’re growing a climate economy in the state. It’s not us versus them, it’s not Detroit versus everybody. We can have a new climate economy and we can attract people here because it’s climate-safe. We can be the kind of climate haven that we want to be. 

STC: Are there other cities you admire in terms of how they're approaching climate resilience? 

Beth: There are a ton. I wouldn’t do this work if there weren’t a ton of communities I admire for how they are doing things. Here, the city of Ann Arbor is doing amazing work and is willing to be on the bleeding edge. They take risks, test things that might fail, and they have amazing leaders driving innovation. 

Santa Clara County has a great resilience program. I look to them as a model for what we need to do in Washtenaw County, in part because of the economic disparities that exist in Santa Clara. They also have San Jose which is on the leading edge and can make investments.    

I'm always looking at what Fort Lauderdale is doing, they’ve been at this work for so long. Jennifer Jurado, the Chief Resilience Officer, brings a quantitative-oriented mindset to how we understand risks and how we bring the business community along. 

Lightbulb Moments

My key takeaways from interviewing Beth.

• Resiliency is a cross-border issue; working with neighboring communities and thinking at the regional- and state levels just makes sense and is more impactful than operating in a vacuum

• It’s hard, if not impossible, to plan for future residents. Start your resiliency planning by addressing the needs of current residents until climate data suggests otherwise