Climate Resilience

Galen Nelson
Okay, great. Well, I guess we will get started. I want to welcome my guests Marta Vicarelli and Maya Mansfield, and we will learn a little bit more about them in a moment, and everyone joining at MassCEC today and beyond. We are really excited about this still relatively new MassCEC Speaker Series, where we are highlighting experts, practitioners, and pioneers from a variety of existing and emerging climate tech sectors and disciplines, as well as subject matter experts who can provide insights into broader economic, social, and technological dynamics shaping our industry.

Galen Nelson
Today we are going to talk about climate resilience. I am happy to welcome again, Maya Mansfield, who leads resilience efforts at the Mass Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and Marta Vicarelli, an economics professor at UMass Amherst, who focuses on nature-based solutions among other climate adaptation and resilience fields of research. But before we jump to Maya and Marta, I am going to, as I always do in this speaker series, briefly set the table for our discussion today.

Galen Nelson
Within the context of climate policy, programming, and climate action, mitigation efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions get most of the attention, perhaps appropriately. But cities and states are increasingly focused on climate resilience, which essentially describes a community\'s ability to prepare for and recover from climate-related impacts. Maya and Marta may offer some more nuanced definitions. Confusing matters, the lines between climate resilience and climate adaptation, our efforts to cope with a changing climate, are increasingly blurred, and we will get into that a little bit today as well.

Galen Nelson
Here at the Mass Clean Energy Center, we first became interested in energy resilience shortly after Hurricane Sandy decimated New York City and caused widespread power outages across our region in multiple states. Leveraging some Mass-based microgrid technology prowess, we launched a microgrid market study. We supported microgrid feasibility studies. We discussed microgrid regulatory frameworks with our partners at the DPU. We funded some energy resilience projects at a variety of public and private critical facilities. Energy resilience investments and related infrastructure respond to a very specific hazard, electric power interruption. But we know that climate change increases risk for a wide variety of hazards, from sea level rise to extreme weather and heat events, inland flooding, which is increasingly getting a lot of attention.

Galen Nelson
While we have here in the commonwealth very ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets and ambitious climate mitigation efforts, what are we doing to prepare ourselves for and bounce back from climate related disasters? How will we pay for resilience? Should we add wildfires to the list of hazards we must prepare for here in Massachusetts? In addition to physical infrastructure that could protect us from climate-related hazards, expanded culverts, sea walls, and so on, cooling centers, should we be investing more in nature-based solutions, which we will learn about a little bit more today? We are going to dig into these issues with Maya and Marta. Again, thank you to you both for joining today. I am really excited about this discussion. For the audience, as always, please feel free to drop questions into the Q&A, and we will do our best to address those toward the end of the discussion. Welcome to you both. Let us start with you, Maya. If you could please briefly introduce yourself and let us start with some basics. What is resilience, and how is it different from adaptation? As I noted, how are the boundaries between these concepts blurring? Also, what are we protecting against? What do we need to be resilient against? What does that hazard landscape look like here in the state?

Mia Mansfield
Thanks, Galen. Thanks for inviting me today. I am really excited to be here along with Marta, to share some of what we are focused on and thinking about and doing at EEA on this hugely important and wide-ranging issue. My name is Maya Mansfield. I am the Assistant Secretary for Resilience at EEA. I work under Secretary Catherine Antos on her team and Secretary Tepper. If you could please go to the next slide, I have a few pulled together here.

Mia Mansfield
In terms of what is adaptation and resilience, I agree these terms mean a lot of things to different people. Between adaptation and resilience, there is definitely blurring between them. This definition here is what we use at the Resilient Mass Plan and MVP. The parts of it that are really sort of important to me are that we are looking at the built environment, but also social resiliency, resiliency of the natural environment as well. We are thinking about how we are anticipating, coping with, and rebounding stronger from hazards. It is about not just the recovery, but the continuous adaptation and the continuous building of capacity and building stronger and more connected communities, organizations, and systems to react to these events that are changing, and that have a chronic nature to them, and an acute, specific event nature to them.

Mia Mansfield
I sort of prefer adaptation because it connotes more of that transition and that process that people in society have always gone through. Some people think of adaptation as the process of getting somewhere and resilience as the outcome. But I think this work is so much about the process and the transition and not really reaching a steady state.

Galen Nelson
It is fair to say that there are measures that provide both benefits.

Mia Mansfield
Of course. If you can go to the next slide, in terms of the other part of your question, what are we preparing for? This is largely probably familiar information to everyone. This is from our Resilient Mass Plan. Generally, we are expecting things to get wetter, hotter, and stormier. In this image right here, the climate of Massachusetts is shifting down towards a mid-Atlantic climate, even closer to a southern climate later in the century. Days above 90 degrees are increasing. We know all of this, vulnerable communities, environmental justice communities are much more vulnerable to all of these impacts. In terms of precipitation, we are going to be seeing more variable and reduced rainfall overall, but when it is raining, it is more intense and duration is longer.

Mia Mansfield
In terms of flooding, increases in sea level rise, and the property and infrastructure damage that will result over the century. If we could go to the next slide, what do all these hazards mean for Massachusetts? That was the core question driving us to develop the Massachusetts Climate Assessment. If you have not read it, highly recommended. Kudos to the team at Industrial Economics that helped us put this together. It is a really interesting report that takes these hazards and evaluates this range of issues across these five sectors across seven different regions in the state by three different factors. What is the magnitude of the consequence of that impact? What is the disproportionality of who is actually exposed to that impact? Then what is the gap in action at the state and local level at the time to identify these priority issue areas to really help us focus our assessments and our actions around them? As you can see, they range. There are so many topics here. There are so many challenges and issues from health effects of heat to damage to buildings and infrastructure, to our natural environment and degradation of different ecosystems, to the reduction in state revenues or the increased reliance on different government services, to the economic impacts we will face across the state. There is certainly a lot to do. We are working to better understand and create these frameworks so that we can focus our work and be more strategic and try to move the needle on these issues, especially with the focus on vulnerable communities and who are most and first impacted. I think with that, I will turn it back to you.

Galen Nelson
Thanks, Maya. That is pretty overwhelming, actually, just the expansiveness and the extent of the challenge. Now that we have a better handle on that, at least at a high level, what the challenge landscape looks like, let us turn to you, Marta. Let us talk a little bit about solutions, which my understanding tend to be bucketed into two big categories, man-made and nature-based solutions. I know that you have focused a lot of your attention and have developed expertise around nature-based solutions. Let us talk about those a bit. What are some of the advantages of nature-based solutions versus man-made solutions? Perhaps you could touch on what are some of the more innovative nature-based solutions as well.

Marta Vicarelli
Thank you. Just to briefly introduce myself, I am an assistant professor of economics and public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I also work a lot with the School of Earth and Sustainability. As you can see from the top right of this slide, I am also a scholar at the European Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, which is based in Venice, Italy. My research focuses on environmental economics, but I am particularly interested in nature-based solutions. Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
What are nature-based solutions? This is just a quick overview from the World Bank. Nature-based solutions are ecosystem-based interventions. You can think about wetlands, coral reefs, forest reforestation and forested areas. I wanted to share with you a definition just to contextualize. This is a worldwide definition that was presented, introduced by the United Nations Environment Assembly. You see in the definition just below, NBS as actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use, and manage different types of ecosystems, natural or modified, terrestrial, freshwater, coastal, marine. An additional component in this is that these solutions have to address social, economic, and environmental challenges in an effective and adaptive way, and in correspondence also to what Mia was saying before, simultaneously provide human well-being, ecosystem services, resilience, and biodiversity benefits. I wanted to give you a very quick overview of the status of nature-based solutions right now in the world and an outlook in answer to your question, Galen, on are they effective? Are they cost effective? Where are they helpful? Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
We are going to answer these two questions very briefly. One big challenge when you think about nature-based solutions is that because of the nature of these interventions, which include ecosystem-based elements, the evidence is scattered across a very large literature. It is very difficult to identify scientific evidence. Next slide. However, over time in the past twenty years, there has been a growth in scientific literature investigating these types of interventions. There is always an uptick after major international agreements, like after climate agreements in Paris, 2021, COP 21. Sorry, 2015 COP 21. Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
I brought here for you two articles that show evidence of nature-based solutions. The one on the left-hand side is a global review trying to assess whether nature-based solutions are effective for climate change adaptation. The answer was yes, and they found substantial, significant evidence worldwide. On the right-hand side, you have another global review published in Nature Sustainability to which I participated, that tried to assess whether nature-based solutions are effective for ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction. You can think the left and the right of this slide are essentially trends. Climate change adaptation to changing climate trends, and on the right-hand side, nature-based solutions in response to extreme events. Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
Because of this growing evidence, there has been growing interest in international framework agreements and regional and national policies in relation to nature-based solutions. You can probably identify the last one on the right-hand side. In 2022, the White House published the Roadmap for the Expansion of Nature-based Solutions. Next slide. In answer to your question, Galen, about effectiveness, efficiency of nature-based solutions, we found in our study published in 2024, so this is another review, in our 2024 study we found that nature-based solutions are cost effective. In this map, this map represents the observations collected as part of our study. Yellow indicates nature-based interventions that were found cost effective in the scientific literature that we collected for the study, and blue indicates nature-based solutions that were sometimes cost effective. We essentially found, next slide, that 71% of studies found nature-based solutions cost effective, and 24% found them cost effective under certain circumstances. No study found nature-based solutions not cost effective. Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
We also, in answer to your point about nature-based solutions versus engineering-based solutions, found that 39% of the studies in our database compared nature-based and engineering-based solutions. When you think about engineering-based solutions, they are strategies that do not include any nature-based element essentially. In this comparison, 65% of studies found that nature-based solutions were more cost effective than engineering-based solutions, and 26% found them more cost effective under certain circumstances. Again, no study found that nature-based solutions were less cost effective than engineering-based solutions.

Marta Vicarelli
Why is that, and is it surprising? Can we go to the next slide, please? Oh, actually, I left this here in case you share slides, because this shows the breakdown for different types of nature-based solutions in terms of cost effectiveness. You can actually see which ones were found cost effective across different types of ecosystems. Next slide, please. We are not surprised by the fact that nature-based solutions are very cost effective because they bring many benefits. They bring protective services. When you think about protective services, you can think about disaster risk reduction, but they also provide other regulating services. For example, carbon capture and sequestration, pollution mitigation, heat regulation. You were mentioning before, Maya, heat wave impacts. Nature-based solutions and urban forests can provide relief in this light. They also provide additional services like provisioning services, meaning provision of food, livestock, fodder, fuelwood, and even genetic resources and biotechnological resources. Then cultural services, recreational services, but even spiritual services in some cases. The challenge, however, is to measure all these benefits. That is a different type of conversation. When benefits are measured automatically, nature-based solutions emerge as very cost-effective strategies. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
One observation that I wanted to share is that nature-based solutions should always be based in biodiversity. When you think about nature-based solutions, do not think about a monocultural intervention, but think about an intervention that reflects the geoecological conditions of the area. Next slide, please. This is just an observation about the fact that nature-based solutions are primarily funded by the public sector, as probably many of those familiar with nature-based solutions have already guessed. This is maybe for a conversation later about what does it take to upscale nature-based solutions? We need to face funding and financing strategies. Thank you. Next slide. It is back to you.

Galen Nelson
Thank you, Marta. That is very interesting, because my sense is that there is, perhaps I have only picked up on this, but perhaps a bias toward engineered or man-made solutions. I am not surprised to see the cost effectiveness data for nature-based solutions as well as all of the additional positive externalities and benefits. The data are really compelling. It makes me think there is a longer, you cannot, some do not mature instantly. It takes years for a tree to grow. You can install a culvert in a matter of months or weeks, but the benefits seem pretty clear.

Marta Vicarelli
I just wanted to also mention something else, which is that, of course, there is a possibility for hybrid interventions. In fact, these are emerging very strongly. I wanted to mention a few resources. I would be happy to share these additional resources. Maybe at the end I can show a slide with a QR code, and people can go there and access all this. We had just in January a National Academies Practice Forum on Nature-based Solutions that brought together engineers and ecologists and practitioners from different disciplines. It is also important to point out the fantastic network of Engineering with Nature in the US. Our nature-based solutions incorporate also engineering elements. There are a lot of resources that I would be happy to share, including resources from the World Bank, the European Union. There is actually a lot happening at the interface between engineering and nature. I do not see them as competing strategies anymore. I see them actually as complementary strategies.

Galen Nelson
That is great. I realize, too, and this is, we could have an entirely additional conversation about the workforce, but I do not think we have time for that today. That would perhaps be an exciting follow-up. Maya, let us pivot back to you. Thank you, Marta. We talked about cost effectiveness, but that still involves the word cost. How do we think about financing resilience? How is the state set up to tackle resilience? How does EEA partner with other communities to understand challenges and solutions? What does that interface look like with the broader community?

Mia Mansfield
Good question. I have been at the state for the last six years, and during that time I really experienced the explosion of the focus on this topic, on climate in general. For me, resiliency, there has been a huge expansion institutionally, and also financially, focusing on this challenge at the state level, and especially at the local level. I am very proud to be part of that. Here is the team that is behind it at EEA.

Mia Mansfield
I think there have been a few different, really important changes in the last few years. Under Governor Healey, the establishment of the Climate Office and the Climate Chief, and the executive order establishing those, was really a day one foundational mandate around climate and around looking at it from a whole government perspective. My boss, Catherine Antos\'s position, is a new one, Secretary of Decarbonization and Resilience. Resilience is a north star of EEA, one of our core goals that the agency is focused on. Our team, the adaptation team, has grown over the last six years from around two and a half people when I started to sixteen at this point. We are still hiring. That is amazing. We have a new Office of Climate Science. We have established the Resilient Mass Action Team, which is our interagency team that is implementing the Resilient Mass Plan and meets regularly. The Resilient Mass Plan was launched and then sort of rebranded. We have been working the last year and a half almost on implementation. The funding for local work through MVP has doubled in the last year. Our \$52.4 million in funding was sort of the largest ever. The amount of funding for state implementation has also increased significantly.

Mia Mansfield
There have been some new advisory boards, and really a focus with this administration is ensuring that we are partnering with subject matter experts and local partners and people who are in the field and experiencing these impacts and can really vet ideas and share feedback and help direct priorities. Two groups that have been established in our team over the last few years, the Community Climate Advisory Council, which is run by Oleander Stone, and our Climate Science Advisory Panel, run by Edwin Sumargo and the Climate Science team. These are two really important groups that meet regularly to advise us on making sure we are using the best available information. We understand what is going on in the field. We understand the experience of municipalities and partners. We are developing tools and programs that are responsive to those. Next slide, please.

Mia Mansfield
Just a look into what our team actually looks like at EEA, the people in that picture on the previous slide. We are set up to accomplish our core goals in terms of resiliency. Those are one, making sure that the state is working from and has the best available data around climate hazards and impacts, and that it is understandable and accessible by state staff and also local partners. That we are implementing our state plan, and that we are building capacity at the local level with our municipal and community partners to identify, cultivate projects, and get those projects funded and implemented. Sorry, my screen just went away. All right, we are back. The groups in that space underneath the Adaptation and Resiliency Team here, we have our resiliency policy team. We are hiring right now a Director of Resiliency and Finance to help us really build out our resilience funding and finance work that I will speak to a little bit later. The Office of Climate Science, as I mentioned, this is a new team as of the last year and a half, three climate scientists who are working with agencies, municipalities, federal partners on building out the data that we have at the state level, and then MVP as well, which is really our first and our flagship program around resiliency. That is an exceptional team of folks that are really constantly working to evolve this program to ensure we are meeting the needs that we are hearing about.

Galen Nelson
If you are not aware, just sorry to interrupt for those who are not aware, that is the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program that Maya just referenced.

Mia Mansfield
Yes. I mentioned the Resilient Mass Action Team. That is where we work across agencies on a range of actions and projects beyond EEA\'s work. EEA is probably 75% of the plan, but there are some core actions across government. That stretches from working with Housing Livable Communities on resiliency and public housing authorities, to Department of Public Health on heat alert and heat related outreach programs, to Labor and Workforce Development on their work in terms of public sector outdoor workers, the MBTA and MassDOT across their system. There is so much going on, and there are climate resiliency related work roles in all of these agencies at this point, which is really exciting and important. On the next slide, I just had a quick shout out to MVP. This is really the heart of a lot of our work. We are very proud that the entire state is engaged in the program. We have been able to fund almost \$200 million in funding over the last five to seven years of the program. We are very proud of the team that has all been there from day one and continues to be. We are very proud of this MVP 2.0 program, which was our take in the last year of resetting the MVP program after this first five years to say, okay, what has changed in five years? What do we now know? How do we better center equity and environmental justice into this program? That we are bringing together a more representative group from communities to understand the core issues and impacts and vulnerabilities facing the community and identify those priorities to move forward, and also receive some upfront funding in order to just start a project right away. We are seeing new projects emerge from that program already. Now we are trying to work on how we continue to fund and finance all of this really critical work that is emerging from the local level. I think I will pause there and maybe get more into the finance space next.

Galen Nelson
Yeah, thanks. That is a wonderful overview. It is more than I was aware of. It is really impressive. Marta, back to you. Now we have a sense of all the various efforts that the state is undertaking to engage communities around resilience. But I also know from our first conversation months ago, when I first began to learn about you and your work, that you shared some very interesting information about the engagement you have had with communities. I would love for you to touch on that for a moment. What did you learn about communities and how they are thinking about resilience?

Marta Vicarelli
The background for this is that at the University of Massachusetts, and please consider all the campuses involved, we were wondering what was the status in terms of climate impacts experienced and possible strategies that municipalities were hoping or already adopting, hoping to implement or already adopting. We published a report and an article, and you see them here on the right-hand side. I just wanted to show you some highlights from this. This project started in 2021, and it was our baseline. We are building on this trying to collect data every two, three years. We collected another round of data in 2023 that focused on transportation infrastructure. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
The effort started as part of the Northeast Center for Coastal Resilience. I just wanted to leave this slide here in case our audience wants to go back and learn more about it. It includes all campuses and faculty from different disciplines. The goal is really to be able to develop actionable science and to be able to support the public sector and the private sector with a focus on the blue economy. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
This project, in particular, was developed with the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which has been our partner throughout, especially in data and survey dissemination. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
The purpose, as I said, is to create a comprehensive outlook and baseline, so that we at the university level can build on it progressively, create a time series of indicators. Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
For the data collection, we wanted to collect data on climate change hazards and impact, resilience strategies, barriers encountered, and data needs. Particularly, the data needs were particularly important for us, so that we could figure out how to provide this data, how to collect and provide this data in the future. We disseminated the survey to 351 municipalities, to all municipalities. We got data from 111 municipalities. All counties and planning regions were represented in the survey. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
These are our municipalities. Just to have a quick outlook. Next slide, please. So, impacts first. Next slide.

Marta Vicarelli
99% of respondents have already observed the impacts of climate change in their municipalities based on the survey. That was a big number for us. We also were able to learn a little bit more about the type of impacts. This results equal what Maya was describing before in the wonderful Massachusetts Assessment on Climate Change. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
We found impacts on wastewater management and habitat degradation. Looking at this graphic, dark blue means strongly affected, lighter blue might be affected, and teal is not affected, and yellow means we anticipate impacts in the future. This is just to give you a general sense. I am going to go a little bit quick on the slides on impact because we already had an overview from Mia. But essentially, there is what has already been said. Here you just find a lot of detail in terms of the impacts that were reported by municipal officials. Also, in case you are wondering who answered the survey, the respondents were municipal officials, members of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, primarily mayors, sustainability managers, town managers, etc. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
These are infrastructural impacts. As you can see in the amount of blue, just even looking at the colors, you see that there are substantial reported impacts on infrastructure from damage to dams or sea walls to disconnected roads and also damage to ports and coastal and transportation infrastructure. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
In terms of economic impacts, we started observing some interesting patterns related to real estate. You can see here, first of all, overall additional cost related to disaster response. This type of survey was also accompanied by focus groups, and often respondents who were associated with the Department of Public Works indicated that Department of Public Works funds are essentially all devoted to trying to respond to disaster. You can see also a decrease in housing availability, reported difficulty obtaining home and building insurance. Also, if you see a little bit below here, decrease in property values due to climate change risk. This is creating overall a climate of housing insecurity. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
Strategies, trying to be positive. I have to say, our team was super impressed by how active municipalities are in trying to find solutions. In this graphic and the following, dark blue means that the strategy has already been adopted, and pink means they would like to adopt it. You can see that it is basically complementary. Either they have already adopted the strategy, or they are hoping to adopt the strategy. This is for climate resilience planning, and you can see as a testament to the efficacy of the MVP program that performing vulnerability assessment is basically 86% and growing as a percentage. There is a lot of activity. This is just to give you a general picture. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
This is actually the parallelism between engineering-based strategies and nature-based strategies. This slide is about engineering-based strategy. You see that 65% of municipalities have already adopted tidal barriers, sea walls; 61% has adopted wet flood proofing strategies, also improvements or expansion of wastewater systems, improvement or expansion of stormwater drainage. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
Now you are going to see the percentages for nature-based solutions. Can I actually ask you to look at the percentages in blue? Here we start from 81%. This is the nature-based solutions. Then go back one slide for a second, 65%. Municipalities are already very active on nature-based solutions. Can you go back to the next slide, please? You can see that land conservation stands out at the top, but also nature-based solutions to mitigate and prevent erosion, nature-based solutions to prevent flooding, to improve stormwater management, to reduce heat island effects. These are all strategies that have either already been adopted or municipalities hope to adopt. Next slide, please.

Galen Nelson
This is very encouraging.

Marta Vicarelli
Yes. I think people are honestly considering the challenges that they encounter. The challenges are essentially resources. We are going to see here in terms of barriers, the barriers that there are resource barriers, coordination and governance barriers, and information. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
In terms of resources, we were really impressed when we got these results. Essentially, 91% of towns indicated that they lack municipal staffing capacity. But if you look at cities, which are just below here, 85% of cities indicated having staffing capacity concerns. Resilience and climate change are very complex issues, require a lot of resources, not only in terms of financial resources, but also in terms of human capital. This is an indication that we need to be aggressive. Other issues identified are challenges identifying funding sources and lack of grant writing capacity; lack of grant writing capacity still connected with staffing capacity. At the end of the day, we particularly found more challenges in terms of grant writing capacity in small municipalities with limited budgets and limited staff. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
Municipalities encounter some challenges in terms of coordinating efforts within their municipalities and across municipalities. However, large efforts have already been undertaken in terms of trying to achieve intermunicipal coordination, so regional coordination among municipalities. That is, of course, a challenge. Coordination is always a challenge. That emerged also in our survey. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
We were particularly interested in data and information resources that maybe we could provide as a university. Something that stood out, I actually just invite you to look on the left-hand side at the beginning of the categories. It is always lack of technical expertise for something, essentially lack of technical expertise to assess fiscal and economic impacts, or technical expertise in natural resource management on climate change hazards and impacts. We, going back to what you were mentioning before again, which was workforce development, we probably need to boost our human capital to be able to provide assistance. Some efforts are already in place. We know that the City of Boston has been developing the fantastic Workforce Development Alliance to address climate change and boost resilience. Something that was interesting for us, if you look down here, insufficient high resolution local data. This was an interesting point for us to think about what we can do to help. This is honestly an open call. If you have ideas about how we can help, let us know, because we really want to support in any possible way. We found that the data most urgently needed to accelerate resilience include economic evaluation of local climate change impacts. It is really the resolution of local climate change impacts that needs to be boosted. Next slide, please.

Marta Vicarelli
You can skip this slide. It is just a summary of what I already mentioned. This is just a confirmation of what I said before, in terms of information and data needs. You can move to the next slide. It is just restating what I said. Economic valuation of climate change impacts is the most important. Many municipalities also reported local CO2 emissions data as an important type of data that they needed, probably because it is a requirement as part of certain grants, so they were trying to acquire that type of data. There are other types of data that emerge as important, particularly when thinking about how to intervene. Public health information is also another factor. Maybe we can talk about it when we think about indicators, also for assessing progress in resilience. I am done with this. Thank you.

Galen Nelson
Great, thanks, Marta. We touched on it a bit earlier, Maya, on the financing end of this. I know you and I talked about this years ago. Let us get into that a bit. What unique challenges does resilience finance present? I know, for example, with mitigation finance, at least you can leverage, you are either generating revenue typically, or you are reducing energy costs, and that can help support the project pro forma. But with resilience investments, despite the fact that they may be cost effective, there are often no immediate financial benefits, and they are difficult to measure. They accrue to multiple parties. It is a tougher challenge. I would love to hear you talk about how you are beginning to approach this challenge.

Mia Mansfield
Yeah, it is a huge challenge, and probably one of the biggest focuses of our work these days. I think there are two main components to it. One is really addressing some of the challenges that Marta was just talking about around capacity, because without that, we are never going to have the projects and the work that is needed to fund and finance. We need those projects to be identified and cultivated and planned and designed, all the steps of the process before we are getting to a project ready to implement. Building that capacity at the local level is a foundational part of what we are trying to focus on. We are hearing very much the same issues that Marta is raising around municipalities lacking the capacity to do this work, and then struggling with complex applications and opportunities. The funding challenges of there not being enough or not spanning fiscal years or being capped too low, grant programs being too competitive and smaller towns not being able to access them at all, federal funding being uncertain or nonexistent. With all of this, we have really been focused through MVP and with some partners on developing a capacity building strategy that is really focused on simplifying and streamlining the grant process, increasing access for smaller and less resource towns, and then providing more clear direction on what it means to build resiliency at the local level, and not having everyone need to reinvent that wheel. Some of the main solutions or projects under development in that space are, this year with the MVP grant that is open right now, really having a carve out and a set aside for rural and small communities, dedicated funding, reduced match, different forms of reimbursement to try and address some access issues.

Mia Mansfield
We are looking at how to develop a resilience regional capacity program to support regional entities in working with towns on projects and also on regional projects that would benefit multiple towns. We have been working with MAPC and PVPC, the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission and MAPC, of course, to develop a resiliency playbook that will be out in the coming months that we are really excited about. That brings together a lot of expertise from around the state to really develop an interactive tool for certain kinds of towns dealing with certain kinds of issues and certain kinds of priorities, really how to move forward. What are those recommended projects and best practices? Within those projects, how do we have more examples of scopes of work and budgets and partnerships, and all the components of those projects that would be competitive to move forward in an application. Another piece of this is the Climate One Stop that we have been working on for a while now, and hope to pilot starting in the grant rounds next year, where we are bringing together a lot of our resiliency grant programs into one common application to streamline that for municipalities.

Mia Mansfield
The capacity building space is one very important foundation. Then if you go to the next slide, please, the second piece is, as we are building this pipeline of projects of all kinds, how are we ensuring we have the funding and financing system set up to scale and meet the need that we are already seeing and that we are going to be seeing over the coming years? Because our grant programs are already oversubscribed and competitive. This has been a project that has been underway for almost a year now, in partnership with the Climate Office, with Administration and Finance, with MassDOT to look at these three pieces. How are we increasing resources for resiliency? How are we stretching dollars further and looking at financing mechanisms beyond grant programs, or in coordination with grant programs to stretch funding over time? Then where are we looking at the institutions where this funding and financing is happening and expanding familiar and successful authorities for resiliency, or looking at new ones that might be needed? As part of this, we are just setting out on an assessment of estimating the value of resiliency as well and looking at research that has gone on around the country and in different states. Looking at, how do you really measure the value of loss avoidance, and things that resiliency projects do provide, and the benefits that Marta had laid out as well. How are other places starting to generate and assess and attribute value to all of those really crucial benefits of these projects? None of this has a clear solution. It is not a very straightforward project. But there are options, and there is emerging work out there. This is an area that we are really focused on. This report is going to be coming out in the coming months. We are hiring the Resiliency Finance Director to help us have the capacity to really give this a life and move this forward. This has been a huge focus of our work the last year.

Galen Nelson
Thanks, Maya, that is great. I know we are running a little short on time. I am going to try and focus on just a handful of issues before we move to some audience questions. In the realm of regs, maybe you could just speak to this very quickly, Maya. What is the intersection between, a lot of the climate impacts impact the built environment. Is there a connection between our building code and related regs and our resilience policy?

Mia Mansfield
Yeah. We could get to the next slide. This has also been an area of emerging focus. It is directed in our plans and by the Climate Chief to really focus here. We have seen the events. MAPC did an incredible report recently, looking at a 2010 flood event, and how 96% of the claims for damages were outside of the floodplain. We know that the maps that we are using are not seeing the full picture, and the impacts are changing. This is an area that we have had some projects through FEMA and that are going to be continuing on, looking at the role of building codes and how to integrate resiliency more strongly and specifically in the building code, both in terms of flooding and heat. We are working more closely with the BBRS on the next edition of the building code, which they are just setting out to start developing the 11th edition. We have our own resiliency tool that is meant to generate climate exposure analysis and recommendations for design at the project level. How do we get more people using this tool, but also expand how it is working? Then working through our Office of Climate Science on new inland flood maps and models for the state, recognizing that the historic maps are not giving us the right information that we need. How do we have more up to date and advanced inland flood maps and flood maps for the entire state? We already have this for the coast, and we are using it in a lot of different ways. But how do we have this across the state? A really core issue.

Galen Nelson
That is great. Thanks, Maya. It is worth just observing for folks that there are a lot of strategies that really can provide substantial mitigation and resilience benefits. Here, I think, passive house is a great example, right? Where you have a really high performing building envelope that reduces emissions for that building, but you also have a shelter in place opportunity with a structure that can remain warm or cool over days in case of a long duration grid failure. There are a lot of opportunities to make investments or to change regulatory structures that provide both mitigation and resilience benefits.

Mia Mansfield
Exactly. Yep.

Galen Nelson
Why do we not just flip quickly to metrics? Maybe we could turn back to you, Marta. We always want to know that we are making the right investments. How do we measure success in the realm of resilience? What do resilience metrics look like?

Marta Vicarelli
Yeah, that is a very difficult question. I think maybe Mia has, this is Mia\'s slide, and she has certainly metrics used at the state level. I can maybe add a consideration. If you want to go first, Mia, then I can add a few considerations based on some of our findings and some observations related to nature-based solutions, if there is interest and time.

Mia Mansfield
Sure. I will go quickly, and maybe if you can click one more time, I think the rest of that diagram may show up. Okay, cool. Metrics, another area we have been really focused on and thinking about. Yes, we have these plans that lay out these issues, and we have a statewide action strategy and an action tracker. But how are we ensuring that we are moving in the right direction, and we are directing our funding and attention where we need to be, and where that attention might be not enough? How do we track our progress more specifically? How do we better define, in doing that, what are our goals and what are we trying to move forward under this big umbrella of resiliency? I just wanted to mention this project that recently wrapped up where we took the impacts from the climate assessment; we translated them into goals for the state. Here is an example in yellow. For example, the health effects from extreme heat was a priority impact. It is a goal that people are safe and healthy during extreme heat events. We identified the indicators of what we want to see happening, increasing access to cool spaces. We have strategies already from our plans that connect in. But then these specific metrics around, for example, percent of population with public outdoor recreation opportunities for cooling within a half mile of home. Identifying these metrics that we started to track in the 2024 Climate Report Card that came out in January, and that will have a fuller set and dashboard by the 2025 one is our goal. This is exactly what we set out to do, have a more clear framework of what it means for the state to be advancing resiliency, and how do we track that in a more defined way moving forward.

Galen Nelson
Thanks, Maya.

Marta Vicarelli
Maybe I can share some thoughts based on our conversations with some municipal officials. First of all, I would like to say that I feel very fortunate to live in Massachusetts because we have super smart and efficient people working in the public sector. This slide is just evidence of this. But at the same time, I am realizing that we have so much work ahead of us all the time. Let us not be discouraged by this. Let us take it as okay, we are going in the right direction.

Marta Vicarelli
Something that we noticed and I wanted to share is that when we asked the municipalities if they could identify populations that were more at risk in their municipality, they provided a list of a category ranking of groups that could be more affected. My slide did not come through for some reason. Do not worry, I can summarize it for you. In the first report, 94% of respondents indicated elderly residents as very vulnerable to climate impact, followed by people with disabilities and low-income residents. But when we asked municipalities if they were able to use any indicator in assessing progress or success in their strategies at the municipal level, less than 30% of municipalities indicated having access to employment statistics or food security metrics or health statistics or housing security statistics. Less than 7% of municipalities have this data disaggregated by race and ethnicity, for example. We realized that from the point of view, this is like us thinking like academics for a second, we realized that it would be valuable if we were able to provide this data. But it is very challenging to provide data at the very low resolution. It seems that when thinking about how do we amplify resilience efforts at the very local level, it requires planning, and planning requires data. Apparently, there is a little bit that are constrained at the local level. Maybe that data is available, but municipalities do not know where to find it, or the data is not necessarily available. These are just some thoughts. Honestly, we are still exploring this aspect, but it seems to be a challenge for planning.

Galen Nelson
Great. Thank you. I do want to turn to just a couple of questions that we have in the Q&A. I know that we had a few more slides we wanted to get to, and perhaps we will. But one here from someone who is tuned in wondering how property insurance or property insurance companies are engaged in this work. Maya and I, both participated in the, I think, very well-done climate insurance event that was pulled together by the City of Boston, the Green Ribbon Commission, and the Climate Chief\'s Climate Office. Love to hear you just quickly reflect on that. I think it is encouraging, but I think there is a ways to go before we see the mainstream insurers becoming engaged in a very serious way in this issue with widespread and relevant products.

Mia Mansfield
Yeah, it is definitely an area that there is a lot of interest in conversations and really appreciate the Green Ribbon Commission facilitating a lot of those. At the state, we followed up on many of those conversations because we do have so much shared mutual interests with the insurance community around risk reduction and community risk reduction and how to fund and implement these larger scale projects that can reduce risk at a greater level than at the household level. Then the disconnect between that work and how insurance policies work. It is definitely a really complicated and interesting space, with opportunities for a lot of partnerships. Our new Commissioner of Insurance at the state, Commissioner Caljouw, is right in the center of it. He really gets this, and he is really focused on climate risk. I think we will be seeing a lot more there.

Galen Nelson
Given that data has come up so much in this conversation today, everything, I think we heard from insurers that day was that they could really benefit from much more data and much more granular data regarding climate impacts. That has come up multiple times here. At least we share some of the same objectives regarding what are some of the necessary next steps to take to begin to formulate those products.

Marta Vicarelli
May I just mention something? I do not know how to share the link because it did not come through in the slides, but if you are going to make the slides available, there has been also a resilience and insurance event on Friday, Climate Adaptation Forum, that was very interesting, and it is recorded and should be available. The other thing, the UMass system is organizing a series of Sustainable Solutions Lectures. The focus was resilience and the private sector. I am organizing it, so I encourage you to give it a go. We actually had very good presentations focused on insurance and resilience.

Galen Nelson
We only have one minute left. I am just going to do a rapid-fire question to you both. Quick reactions, or you can decline to answer. We clearly heard from you, Maya, and I was impressed. I thought I was aware of a good deal of our resilience work, but not aware of all of it. It is really impressive. Thank you for everything you have done and your leadership. There is always room for improvement. If you could call out maybe one example of a resilience or adaptation policy framework that you think that we should be exploring either as a state or as a region, or that cities should be exploring. If either of you have thoughts about that, love to hear it. Where do we need to look next to our game even more?

Mia Mansfield
The first thing that came to mind for me was truly figuring out how to mainstream this climate informed decision making into the current investments and work that we are doing. I think we are cultivating and trying to fund a lot of new projects. But there are so many existing investments and everything that the municipalities and the state are already doing. How are those connections being made within transportation and schools and just everything? The mainstreaming of this decision making, I think, is huge. Also, the focus on heat. I feel like that is really key. It is centrally about people. It is about equity. It is about under resourced communities, environmental justice communities. I think that focus, really elevating to where the work has been on the flooding space has been so important, and so much more to do there as well, but really increasing that focus as well.

Galen Nelson
Great answer. Thanks.

Marta Vicarelli
I completely support that. I think anything we can do to catalyze the process because we are in a hurry, actually. Human capital development, technical expertise, if we can boost it in any possible way, workforce development is very important to implement the strategies and to basically design these strategies at the local level, and exploring any possible partnership with the private sector as well to support financing, especially in the next four years. I think the next few years are going to be tough. We need to work together as much as possible. From academia, I give you my full availability and support.

Galen Nelson
I cannot imagine why you would say that. Thank you both on that note. Thank you both. This has been really wonderful. I learned a lot. We could have kept talking, I think, for hours. Thanks to everyone who tuned in. Really appreciate your time and glad that you are now connected. Thanks again. It has been great. Really appreciate it.

Mia Mansfield
Thank you so much.

Marta Vicarelli
Thank you. Nice to see you.

Galen Nelson
Take care.