THE UPHEAVAL of federal support for climate change work could not have come at a worse time. Communities across Massachusetts and the US are generally under-prepared to handle the current impacts of climate change, let alone the far greater challenges projected for the years ahead. 

Here in New England, where rates of heavy rainfall have increased by approximately 60 percent since the mid-20th century, frequent flooding threatens neighborhoods and cities. Stormwater systems are unable to deal with the increased frequency and intensity of deluge rainstorms. Other socioecological systems essential to community well-being, including food, housing, energy, waste management, and drinking water, are also vulnerable. In areas experiencing more frequent extreme storms or wildfires, insurance is becoming both harder to obtain and significantly more expensive. This unavailability or unaffordability of insurance threatens the stability of real estate markets. Even before a catastrophic storm hits, communities are already experiencing the impacts of climate change through increased property risk and the potential instability of tax revenues. 

The future of Massachusetts and New England depends on reconsidering regulation that stifles innovative nature-based design and projects and scaling up effective adaptation to accelerating climate change. Effective adaptation will require system agility — the forward-leaning ability to adapt continuously to changing conditions. 

Massachusetts and neighboring states have been taking positive steps. Over the past decade, best-practice resilience planning incorporated powerful analytical tools to understand both climate change threats and the full scope of vulnerabilities, particularly those worsened by social inequities like poverty and racial disparities. 

By integrating climate impacts such as sea-level rise and extreme rainfall with social vulnerability assessments and nature-based risk reduction strategies, communities can secure a thriving future grounded in greater equity and health for both people and the environment.  

In coastal Massachusetts communities such as Wellfleet, Nantucket, and Plum Island accelerating shoreline loss is taking homes and threatening vital infrastructure and high value natural habitat. Massachusetts is giving our 78 coastal communities extra funding to develop risk-based coastal resilience plans. Using advanced modeling tools developed from the explosive growth of information technologies, these plans assess risks to valuable habitats, critical infrastructure, and community recreational assets. Informed by data sensing and analytical tools, the strategic placement of near-shore, habitat-friendly structures can slow erosion rates and create opportunities to avoid using hard structures that deflect energy and cause erosion elsewhere. The design process requires getting extensive site-specific data and most recently developed with the aid of artificial intelligence. 

But, implementing these projects requires working within the existing outmoded environmental management system that was not built to address the accelerating impacts of climate change. Procedural overload — multiple reviews, siloed rules, and an overly risk-averse perspective — undermine timely progress. For example, innovative nature-based measures like floating wetlands or naturalized reef structures that can reduce the wave energy on a shoreline face regulatory burden that is often higher than what is required for sea walls and other more traditional but more destructive alternatives. It took years for regulators to embrace green infrastructure as the better way to address stormwater pollution. Communities don’t have years for coastal regulators to embrace nature-based strategies to address coastal erosion that threatens vital infrastructure and habitat.   

In the face of accelerating climate change, the scale and scope of resilience work is growing far beyond what policy makers in the late 20th century thought possible. The general risk of not acting at the needed scale far surpasses the downside risk of any single action negatively impacting an ecosystem.  Eventually a fundamental rethinking of the environmental management system is crucial for building the resilience necessary to thrive in the coming years. 

Unfortunately, redesigning the national environmental management system is unrealistic in this political environment. But there is way forward. Community-based public-private partnerships are a tested approach to scale the level of projects needed to meet an environmental challenge.  

The ingredients for this partnership model start with a long-term source of revenue.  The second ingredient is a planning framework that defines the scope of what must be done. The next ingredient is a local or regional government that creates a partnership with private firm and an engagement program that effectively recruits the input of stakeholders.  With the promise of a large number of green infrastructure projects, the firm procures the needed design and build services at a scale necessary to meet the performance goals defined in the planning and permit framework. Most importantly the firm takes on the legal responsibility for achieving the goals of the program.    

Like the challenge to build green infrastructure at scale to address stormwater pollution and flooding, using the extensive resilience planning work to create nature-based infrastructure to address community resilience challenges is a problem of scale and implementation speed. Community-based public-private partnerships offer a solution that has been endorsed by the EPA and is available to states and local governments.  However, these partnerships will only work if regulators rethink how they regulate nature-based work. 

Climate change is progressing rapidly and unpredictably. An environmental management system that does not acknowledge this urgency does not effectively serve governments or their citizens. By adopting a systemic approach to resilience planning and aligning our environmental management programs with the urgency of the climate crisis, we can better prepare for and mitigate its impacts. 

Curt Spalding is the former regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and executive director of Save The Bay in Rhode Island. He joined Norwood-headquartered GZA GeoEnvironmental Inc. as senior consultant in 2023.