New Orleans lies on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Rising temperatures and sea levels mean the city will experience some of the impacts long before other places — in many ways it already is.
One potential solution lies in green infrastructure.
Green infrastructure is a broad term that describes a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features, designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services — while also enhancing biodiversity. These networks improve the quality of the environment, the condition and connectivity of natural areas, and improve people’s health and quality of life.
“Green infrastructure also fosters biodiverse ecosystems, which play a crucial role in climate change resilience. They can absorb and store significant amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas contributing to climate change,” said Dana Eness, executive director at the Urban Conservancy. “Protecting and restoring biodiversity in New Orleans can contribute to mitigating climate change effects and improving the city’s overall resilience to its impacts.”
Since its founding in 2001, the Urban Conservancy has promoted sustainable solutions to New Orleans’ distinct land use needs through community and K-12 education and neighborhood-level engagement.
While hopes are to help mitigate some of the larger aspects of climate change, many of the solutions are much more immediate and practical — like storm-water management.
“By reducing the volume of water our pumping system must manage, particularly in the first hour of a rain event, we can drastically reduce our city’s collective carbon emissions,” Eness said. “Through the implementation of nature-based solutions, we enable water to soak in where it falls, reducing the amount of water that makes it into our streets, catch basins, and ultimately our pumping systems.”
Eness said New Orleans has committed, at least on paper, to addressing climate change. She pointed to a sentence that appears in bold font early in the city’s 2022 update of its climate action plan, “Net Zero by 2050: A Priority List for Climate Action in New Orleans.” It reads: “Now is the time for New Orleans to accelerate our action on the climate crisis and create opportunities in the new economy for our city.”
Another organization working in the city’s green sector is Green Coast Enterprises, which was founded in 2007, a time when a focus on green and sustainable real estate development was a fringe idea. While Green Coast is best known for its real estate development projects, most of the company’s work is helping other building owners to be more energy and water efficient. The company has provided energy management services to charter schools, affordable housing developers, and directly to the City of New Orleans for over a decade.
For CEO Jackie Dadakis, it’s not just a niche service. It’s a long-term solution. “Thinking about how to make our built environment more energy and water efficient is an important part of how we make it affordable to live here long term,” she said.
Dadakis stresses sustainability is a gradual process and counts the new energy efficiency building code that went into effect on July 1 this year as a win.
“Now every new building and substantial renovation will be achieving substantial savings for occupants,” she said. “You layer this with investments making our buildings stronger in the face of hurricanes and we will see insurance costs and utility bills coming down together.”
Dana Eness
Executive Director
The Urban Conservancy
“Significant challenges to scaling up nature-based solutions remain, and one of the biggest challenges is a general lack of awareness of what exactly nature-based solutions are and how they can address common problems, like urban flooding and extreme heat. Researchers estimate that nature-based solutions — when well-designed and managed — can cost-effectively provide over one-third of the climate mitigation needed to stabilize warming to below two degrees Celsius by 2030.”
Jackie Dadakis
CEO
Green Coast Enterprises
“We continue to make important investments in our sewerage and water boards systems and the Entergy grid. I want to see us continue to prioritize investments that make those systems more resilient, like micro grids to ensure power stays on at key nodes during major storms.”
Did you know? According to an Oct. 28, 2021 article from the World Resources Institute, ecosystem restoration creates 3.7 times as many jobs as oil and gas production per dollar.
