More than 60 attendees pondered ways to cope with possible future climate trauma when the Terre Haute Sustainability Commission hosted a sustainability workshop Wednesday at the Terre Haute Convention Center. Those in attendance broke up into groups and discussed strategies to confront poor air quality, flooding risks, decreased supplies of power and water and impacts on agriculture and mental health. In the afternoon, they presented their results to the entire audience.
The Sustainability Commission, overseen by Terre Haute City Planner Maitri Desai, partnered with the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute, which dispatched its McKinney Climate Fellow Maisie Westerfield to work with Desai and moderate the workshop. Westerfield also led a similar workshop in October.
“The first identified climate vulnerabilities that Terre Haute is experiencing or will experience,” Westerfield said. Wednesday’s found its participants developing strategies to resist those hazards and create more resilience.
“They’re taking this multi-faceted issue and breaking it down to its bare bones and coming up with actions for the city or nonprofits or businesses to take into the future with them,” Westerfield said.
This workshop focused on resilience, the capacity to withstand or recover from difficulties. The next step is mitigation — reducing the severity, seriousness or painfulness of those difficulties.
Westerfield will compile all of the information gathered into a climate resilience plan that she will submit to IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute and the Geos Institute, an Oregon-based environmental consultant that will “make sure everything makes sense and is feasible and equitable,” she said.
It will then return to the local commission, which will submit a draft to the City Council and eventually make available to the public.
“Once we get this plan done, we’ll be eligible for more federal and state-level funding,” Desai said. “It’s a bigger umbrella — now that the city is prepared and has this plan, we can be eligible under certain activities to actually implement it. That’s another goal by doing this plan.”
Westerfield characterized the participants’ input as “incredible. … Everybody here is so knowledgeable and so passionate, it’s so infectious. We have experts in nearly every field here, so to see that collaboration manifest on paper like this has been so incredible and inspiring to see.”
Among the strategies offered by participants, Westerfield said, “A common thread that I’ve seen is a focus on tree cover. It makes sense, given how invested Terre Haute is in its parks and its natural landscape. I’ve seen in every single group that they really care about trees and that’s a great way to become resilient to climate change. It’s going to be a great strategy moving forward.”
Desai pronounced herself pleased with Westerfield’s work.
“The IU cohort partnership worked out really well and she does all the technical assistance and their research, they review the work she does,” she said. “That partnership really works well. Our city doesn’t have all the resources that we need in the government, so this kind of partnership works really well. We see the results. She does all the work vs. me doing everything.”
Terre Haute’s Sustainability Commission was voted into existence by the City Council in August of 2021 after an ecologically minded group of young people called the EARTHlings approached councilman Todd Nation about the idea.
The EARTHlings were inspired to form through Jim Poyser’s Indianapolis- based Earth Charter Indiana, which is dedicated to addressing climate change.
After the workshop, Nation said, “This is exactly the kind of effort I envisioned when we got the Sustainabiity Commission going and everything I hoped for. I look around this room and see the representatives of government, the representatives of educational institutions, the expertise that’s embodied in this room, the nonprofits and other community groups. … I am delighted we got so many people to participate and lend their effort and their expertise.”
Poyser, who also attended the workshop, said, “Sometimes you see a waning of interest — you’ve heard about it and think your work is done.
“In Terre Haute, they’re clearly not just remaining, they’re committed to it and they’re growing the numbers of people who want to have a voice,” Poyser said.
He added, “Their process in how committed they are is one of the best in the entire state. Everybody’s all in. We’ll see great plans and great actions from Terre Haute that other cities will look to.”
Climate scientists are warning that the planet is nearing an endgame in regards to preventing climate change from becoming deadly, with some saying it’s already too late.
Westerfield said, “I would say that there is absolutely still hope. This will be in our report too, but reduced emissions projections for climate change show that the changes won’t be as drastic as climate scientists predicts if we choose to mitigate our emissions.
“This is our first step — this is resilience planning. This whole process is thinking if these things are going to happen, how do we become resilient? The next step in the process would be mitigation.
“This work needs to continue happening,” she concluded.