Part Three: TV6 Investigates communities addressing climate change in Upper Michigan - WLUC

Part Three: TV6 Investigates communities addressing climate change in Upper Michigan

MARQUETTE, Mich. (WLUC) - TV6 continues to investigate climate change, its impact on Upper Michigan, and what communities are doing to address it.

So far, we’ve learned from the meteorologists and researchers keeping the closest eyes on climate change and the impacts it has on Upper Michigan.

We’ve also heard from the MSU Extension scientists… who are watching the effects of climate change on U-P agriculture.

But what are community leaders and environmental organizations doing to help flip the

script *on climate change?

In the final part of our investigation, we met with the Marquette city planner and zoning administrator, as well as a task force addressing the issue and bringing other groups together to help.

“This isn’t something minor,” says David Stensaas, Marquette city planner and zoning administrator. “This isn’t like we are trying to take care of knapweed that’s invaded. That’s just the leading tip of what we are seeing.”

Rising Lake Superior temperatures, eroding beach shoreline and an issue we can’t immediately see: outdated energy efficiency on roads and in buildings, the web of climate change impacts can be seen in cities like Marquette.

It’s an issue Marquette city planner and zoning administrator David Stensaas says is a focus of not only city commissioners… but himself.

“We’ve seen changes already with the climate,” Stensaas says. “One thing to note is that the USDA, Department of Agriculture, classifies locations based on their plant hardiness so these are climatic zones. We are at climatic zone 5 right now. They are predicting by the end of the century that we’ll have moved into climate zone 8, which is where unbelievably northern central Georgia is right now.”

Stensaas says his department is always trying to balance codes with how they will impact the community with benefits… particularly in environmental-friendly initiatives.

“There’s no one or two or ten solutions to this,” Stensaas says. “There’s 100,000 solutions. The city has got to look at our infrastructure impacts and that is one of the things that our climate adaptation and vulnerability study produced in 2013 did was assess our vulnerability to greater storm surge and increased flood levels.”

Enter the city’s Master Plan, a policy guide designed to help Marquette create an ideal path for its community’s future, recently revised and under continuous revision even now to begin including climate change.

“The revision to the Master Plan we’re doing now is going to highlight climate issues on just about every topic in the plan, from demographics and housing to land use, transportation, economic development, coastal resources, our public health and go back to development requirements,” Stensaas says.

One requirement: increasing the amount of landscaping that is required on a property so the city can capture more stormwater.

Also, Stensaas says the city is looking into ways to protect Marquette’s existing tree canopy, working it into development regulations in the next few years.

Another project on the horizon: increasing bus transit routes to lower our usage of cars and deterioration of pavement.

“We’ve got a 30 minute transit route planned for the city,” Stensaas says. “We’ve been trying to do that for a while but I think it is more promising that we’ll get something done in the next five years.”

“We build up our environment,” says Emily Leach, Marquette County senior planner. “It’s what we do as humans. We live here, we love it. Sometimes, we love it to death.”

City planners are not alone.

Emily Leach is not only a senior planner for the county but she is the chair of the Marquette County Climate Adaptation Task Force, working to bring more organizations together as partners against climate change.

“We try to work with our project partners to encourage each other to do projects,” Leach says. “That is the key factor in any project going well: you create this base foundation of people and then, from there, build up and actually get the work done. Any plan is only as good as the implementation of it.”

…Like replanting native plants around the courthouse earlier in June or the long-planned and ongoing efforts to restore Lakeshore Boulevard along Lake Superior.

“With all of the federal funding coming down the pipe right now, we need to strategically get the county in the position to have a best plan forward, to understand how we can reduce our energy usage,” Leach says.

“The Lakeshore Boulevard relocation project is a great example of what the environment can throw at us and how we can respond to it,” Stensaas says.

Leach says that’s a big bullet-point on the task force’s to-do list, make buildings throughout Marquette more up to city code when it comes to how efficiently they use energy.

“We will be doing an energy audit of county facilities and then figure out what we need to do with our facilities to minimize our emissions and tighten up our buildings,” Leach says. “This courthouse was built in 1902. The annex was built in the 1970s. There are a lot of updates we can do specially here at the courthouse complex but also our other county facilities, as well.”

As for a timeframe, Leach says this is planned for “the near future,” along with doing a full analysis on electric vehicle infrastructure like charging stations in the city.

And don’t forget about the Superior Watershed Partnership.

Program manager Tyler Penrod says they are working alongside the task force in the form of the Great Lakes Climate Corps, with six-plus crews already planting more than 80,000 trees and 130,000 native species of wildflowers and other plants across more than 2,700 acres of public land.

“Marquette really has become a shining example to the country and has brought in a lot of that money to help adapt to the challenges that we are facing here with climate change,” Penrod says.

“The climate is changing in the UP,” Leach says. “We don’t necessarily really know what to expect and that’s what we are trying to plan for is the unknown.”

All of the experts you’ve heard from over the last three days all agree that the effort to both fully understand climate change’s impact on the area and address the concerns it raises is just getting started.

Leach adds other projects in the works involve taking a closer look at car charging stations across the county, while Stensaas says solar power is also a major factor being taken into multiple forms of consideration in the city, moving forward.

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