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Monroe County’s Department of Environmental Services last month held its first public meeting, as part of the initial phase in developing the county’s Climate Adaptation Resiliency Plan. CARP aims to identify and address vulnerabilities in the community because of climate change.
In coordination with the Department of Public Health and the consulting team from Highland Planning, the Department of Environmental Health presented an overview of the plan before breaking into groups and taking public input.
CARP is a complementary plan meant to advance the county’s Climate Action Plan. It was developed last year, focusing on individual impact rather than overall environmental impact.
The implementation of the Climate Action Plan focuses on reducing output and mitigating climate change, with changes to infrastructure such as energy benchmarking and greenhouse gas emissions. CARP focuses on adapting to climate change.
The meeting ended with residents from Rochester and the surrounding suburbs, including Chili and Fairport, providing input by identifying vulnerability hazards of climate events like flooding, extreme heat, severe storms, and severe winter storms.
Residents identified restricted access to resources and a lack of access to water or protected areas in public places, such as parks and bus stops, from severe heat. An increase in flooding from rain has hindered car and bike travel, according to residents.
Maithilee Das Lappin, project consultant for CARP, says a vulnerability assessment is necessary for developing solutions.
“Adaptive capacity is what tools and resources we already have in the county that help us with that,” Das Lappin explains. “Adaptive capacity is those resources and those avenues that we have to help us mitigate that hazard.”
Residents voiced a desire for more community services in accessible, welcoming places, similar to the Connected Communities Neighborhood Hub and public libraries that offer support kits.
Madison Quinn, sustainability coordinator for Monroe County, pointed to some of the county’s most vulnerable populations including young children and adults with health problems who might be susceptible to extreme heat and other impacts of climate change.
“We want to be aware of these vulnerabilities so that we can have a comprehensive approach to address and reduce those vulnerabilities to be more adaptive to climate change,” she adds. “It’s how do we make our systems more resilient so that the effect of climate change is less on us as individuals.”
The department plans to implement a community engagement plan to identify community partners and residents for input. It will be hosting additional in-person and online meetings and will ask residents to complete a survey identifying community vulnerabilities.
The county Adaptation and Resiliency Plan is set to be developed by summer 2026.
Emmely Eli Texcucano is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and member of the Oasis Project’s second cohort.
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Carbon dioxide is essential for life on earth through the science of photosynthesis which many of us learned in junior high school. Green plant life thrives on carbon dioxide and produces oxygen which sustains life on earth. In addition, green plant life is Earth’s major contributor of food and hundreds of products like lumber. Any one who rejects the value of carbon dioxide may be an “anti science troll”. According to some experts there may a danger in reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
How do you define “climate change?” Are you saying it is all or much of “climate change” is human caused? how much of climate is natural? How much tax money is spent on “climate change?”. How much of a difference so far have climate change efforts made? It has been talked about for a long time far as I remember.
The internet has almost untold sites where climatology scientists explain matters and answer questions such as yours. The trick is to stay away from the conspiracy nuts, the anti-science trolls and anyone who believes the bilge pumped by Donald Trump.
Trump has zero to nothing to do with any aspect of “climate change.” Just like Biden before him, he is meeting with and listening to actual climatologists and other members of the scientific community to question the “severity” of the problem (if, in fact there is one) and what steps he and others in his administration can do to further investigate the actual causes, or, if in fact, there are any seriously deleterious problems caused by human carbon emissions that we as a nation can mitigate.
And if one really wants to label something as “bilge” – then I would suggest one look closely at what has been stated or claimed for any number of years now by people who aren’t even in the climate industry itself – who’s funding what – what organizations are involved – and what the true facts are – rather than the inconclusive data that is, more often than not, cherry-picked by “scientists” who have a funding/political/radical environmental agenda, rather than an actual scientific and true data agenda. Start there.