RETHINKING CLIMATE ADAPTATION

FIRESIDE CHAT: GALEN TREUER & ALEX HARRIS

Sea level rise and a hotter ocean are worsening the impacts of natural disasters. Alex Harris and Galen Treuer discuss the need to try new approaches and what might work to allow us to continue to live and thrive in this home we have built on low-lying porous bedrock.

Alex Harris: Miami-Dade County’s Extreme Heat Action Plan talks a lot about how we handle extreme heat and breaks down who’s affected and what we can do, including tree planting, changing policy regulations, and putting more money into programs that renovate, cool, and fix substandard housing. I want to talk to you about how that approach to problems, specifically Miami-Dade County, can look at climate. How do you think we’re looking at it now, and how does that need to shift?

Galen Treuer: I work with the private sector every day. I talk to businesses and folks in academia who want these innovations. I’ve been listening to them and trying to help them. One of the major things they need is to place their stuff in the ground and try it out. But we’re a huge county with 2.8 million people and vastly different access to resources.

AH: How do you breach that? As reporters, we’re taught to be more skeptical. Tech has a lot of beautiful, gorgeous visions of the future and promises it can make. How do you ground it from the great ideas to the reality of what local governments have the budgets and need for?

GT: When I talk about climate tech, it’s not just software, and it’s not just digital. One key climate tech that we have is bringing more plants and living things into the city. That is technology, knowing how to keep those plants alive with 200 mph wind. There’s a way you prune the trees and give them enough roots, but that’s a certain kind of technology, and it’s different from a digital twin, but your digital twin could be linked to that tree and help them do that work. Another piece of technology is the emergency response and how we do mutual aid. All of these are related to climate tech.

AH: Tell me more about what you mean by creating sandboxes. What kind of regulations would be lifted, stretched, or experimented with?

GT: Some of it could be construction techniques, like new materials. There are folks here who want to use wood. In MiamiDade County, since Hurricane Andrew, we’ve been eliminating the use of wood in construction because it wasn’t deemed safe. But new forms of wood, crosslaminated timber, can be used structurally.

AH: It’s hard for the community to grasp innovation as a concept. You need to build and show things. And if that involves creating these regulatory sandboxes, maybe that gets us more buy-in because, as anyone in government knows, getting buy-in from your constituents can be tough.

GT: Many small startups or established companies are trying to get into new spaces. They need the regulators to see it. They’ve usually already done one to two real commercial deployments, but those were usually at a loss, and now they want to get across. That’s what a lot of the support the accelerators for climate tech are looking at.

AH: What are investors looking for in South Florida when they’re looking at climate tech? What are the topics or solutions that are grabbing them right now?

GT: Tech investment in South Florida hasn’t focused on climate. We’re not a hub for it yet. We’re ahead of the curve on adaptation. If we do it, the return on investment is very clearly positive in Miami-Dade County. We have studies that show it could be up to 9-to-1 returns with discount rates for adaptation and using new materials for construction and making construction cheaper, lighter, and more sustainable.

AH: When I think about climate adaptation, a lot of the cash comes from the federal government, but you cannot do it alone. You must have the private sector. But the public sector’s role is just to build that safety rail—don’t build here because it’s dangerous. Don’t build with plywood anymore because it’s dangerous. But you can do anything else you want. These are the minimum standards for public safety. That’s when I think of the private sector going above and beyond. But I sometimes don’t see it doing that.

GT: That’s where we need the regulatory space. If we don’t talk about climate justice, we’re not grounded in what’s happening in Miami. Because it’s an unequal community, and the threat is unequal. Mayor Levine Cava talks about the four E’s: environment, economy, equity, and engagement. We need to make sure the climate solutions are affordable and not just for the wealthy. Affordability will drive it into the marketplace. We also need to ensure that it’s health-oriented and that it makes your home and community healthier.

Dr. Galen Treuer leads Climate Tech and Economic Innovation for MiamiDade County. He works with the private sector to pursue the county’s climate resilience goals and catalyze regional investment in blue, green, and climate technology that works for everyone by bringing together a network of entrepreneurs, investors, businesses, academics, and community leaders. Treuer has worked on climate policy and solutions for over 10 years and holds a Ph.D. in environmental science and policy from the University of Miami and a B.A. in economics from Oberlin College.

AH: Those sorts of incentives are really helpful because as much as it’s great to say, here’s our free board, which is the extra space you get to build voluntarily higher than the base flood elevation set by the Florida building code or municipality, the vast majority of what we have and need to upgrade and turn over, either by tearing down and rebuilding or renovating in place, is older stock.

GT: We have over 100,000 buildings. We looked at and identified that in our Climate Action Strategy.

AH: Obviously, one of the best ways to do that is to get someone new efficient airconditioning, get them the weatherization seals, new windows, maybe even a new roof or doors, whatever you can get them to lower their skyrocketing power bills while also cutting the county’s energy use and, therefore, cutting our greenhouse gases. There are so many benefits to weatherizing your house. People aren’t accessing the free government resources to make them healthier, whole, and more financially stable because they’re just swamped with bad contracting. That’s where there’s an opportunity for technological solutions. You build the processes better so that when people go out to rewire their houses, they don’t call their cousins. They instead get it financed through an approved member of the constructing team.

GT: We must work on all these layers, and technology will slide its way into them. What’s amazing is we have journalists who are looking at it. We have the private sector looking at it. We have the academics, and we have government folks that are trying to make it happen.

Alex Harris is the lead climate change reporter for the Miami Herald’s climate team, which covers how South Florida communities are adapting to the warming world. Her beat also includes environmental issues and hurricanes. She attended the University of Florida.