Climate change is politically divisive. Public parks? Not so much. – Grist todayheadline

The spotlight

Two weeks ago, we wrote about the EXPLORE Act — an expansive piece of legislation aimed at expanding and improving outdoor access, which passed Congress unanimously in 2024. What the EXPLORE Act’s success seemed to show was that a love of nature transcends party lines, even in our current climate where just about everything feels politicized. That can translate into climate solutions everybody can get behind. In today’s newsletter, we’ll look at this on a community level, exploring how investing in neighborhood parks has transformed climate resilience in some at-risk areas — just one example of how a focus on parks, green spaces, and public amenities can lead to popular climate action. In a few weeks, we’ll take it all the way down to the personal level, with a look at how to proactively cultivate this connection to nature in (or rather, outside of) your own home.

“Climate change has become politically divisive,” Mike Bybee, senior director of federal relations at the Trust for Public Land, told me when we spoke a few weeks ago. “What’s not divisive are those impacts of things like flooding and fires and drought and heat.” Everyone agrees that the weather is changing, Bybee said — they can see that with their own eyes, in their own communities, whether it’s stronger and more frequent storms, floods, heat, or wildfires.

And, he said, the popularity of creating and preserving parks and outdoor spaces creates an opening for doing something about it. In the 2024 election, state and local ballot initiatives passed across the country, in both red and blue states, that supported building parks or restoring natural areas. In some cases, those initiatives even specifically mentioned climate resilience. “The work of protecting open space, creating parks and playgrounds that provide stormwater mitigation and rainwater runoff in the face of these storms — everyone agrees on that,” Bybee said.

Bybee and others at Trust for Public Land see that message in the success of these ballot measures, as well as national legislation like the EXPLORE Act and even the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, which included funding for park and restoration projects with a climate resilience aspect to them.

You might not think of parks as connected to mitigating the risks of extreme weather. Of course, green spaces have a broad positive effect when it comes to climate: Plant life sequesters carbon, helps clean the air, and reduces the urban heat island effect.

But parks can contribute to much more than that when they’re built as green infrastructure with climate resilience in mind. Green infrastructure is a general term for systems that either use or mimic nature to maximize natural benefits and minimize the effects of things like flooding, erosion, and pollution. It can include rain gardens, green roofs, living shorelines — even urban street trees may be considered part of green infrastructure.

Public parks, from large nature preserves down to neighborhood playgrounds, can include many different types of green infrastructure in their designs, tailored to the unique needs of specific locations and communities.

In the city of Atlanta, that has had a lot to do with water. In one example, a new park helped to make the city more drought resilient — Shirley Clarke Franklin Park, Atlanta’s largest green space, is a former quarry that was transformed into a 35-acre reservoir, shoring up the city’s water supply. In other areas, it’s an overabundance of water that’s the problem.

Vine City, a historically Black neighborhood in Atlanta, has long had problems with flooding. In 2002, heavy rains brought a flood combining stormwater and sewage that was so severe, it rendered 60 homes unlivable.

“There were houses where the first floor was completely submerged under the water,” said George Dusenbury, who at the time was leading the district office for Georgia Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. “People were out there in boats.”

Faced with the near certainty of continued flooding in the area, the city offered to purchase the most damaged homes, and residents accepted the deal to relocate. The city demolished those homes, and the 16-acre parcel of land — about seven city blocks — sat vacant for several years. “In the meantime, the community around the park continued to flood. We did not solve the problem,” Dusenbury said.

And residents wanted to see something done with the space that would benefit the surrounding community. “If you look at five city blocks of grass, people started saying, ‘We need a park here,’” Dusenbury recalled. In 2010, an Atlanta organization called Park Pride put forth a “green infrastructure vision” for the watershed that includes Vine City and two adjacent neighborhoods, informed by a yearlong public outreach process. The vision was to address recurring flooding in the area through a series of connected green spaces, and the empty lot — what would later become Rodney Cook Sr. Park — was one of them.

“I wouldn’t refer to it as a common city planning activity, but fortunately some really innovative leaders in the city and nonprofits saw the value in that,” said Jay Wozniak, a landscape architect and director of Trust for Public Land’s urban parks program in Georgia, who became the project manager for the site.

In 2016, the city of Atlanta brought in the Trust for Public Land to help raise funds for, design, and build a park on the vacant Vine City lot that would not only provide a recreation space for the community, but also mitigate its flooding. The organization, along with local partners and residents, broke ground a year later.

Designed in collaboration with the community, Rodney Cook Sr. Park features walking trails and bridges, a playground, a splash pad, climbing boulders, restrooms, and a public performance space. But what’s underneath is just as vital.

“When I talk about the park, I talk about it being like a layer cake — and the bottom layer is this green infrastructure,” said Dusenbury, who is now the Trust for Public Land’s Georgia state director. The core of that green infrastructure is a pond with an adjoining field, which sits at the park’s lowest point — a low point for the entire Vine City neighborhood — and doubles as a stormwater retention basin, able to hold around 9 million gallons of water and then slowly release it through specially engineered soil that helps to filter out pollutants as the water drains after a heavy rain.

Cook Park opened in 2021, and in recent years it has faced down extreme weather events.

“We got two 100-year floods in two years,” Dusenbury said.

The second of those floods was caused by Hurricane Helene, the deadly Category 4 storm that brought destruction across its path from Florida to Tennessee, and broke a record for rainfall in Atlanta. When those rains came, Cook Park went underwater — exactly as it was designed to.

Top to bottom: Cook Park on September 27, 2024, the day after Hurricane Helene arrived in Georgia, and the park three days later, on September 30. Jay Wozniak

“It was supposed to flood,” Dusenbury said. “Those walkways were supposed to be underwater. We have trees and vegetation that are planted to be flooded. We even have mulch that stays in place better when it gets flooded.” Within just a few days, the park had returned to its unsubmerged state, as the collected water slowly seeped through the specially engineered soil and made its way into the city’s stormwater system. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint just how much the park reduced flooding in the surrounding area during a specific event like this, local reports noted that there was very little flooding in the park’s immediate vicinity.

In another part of the city, Historic Fourth Ward Park, which was completed in 2012, boasts a 2-acre lake that also doubles as a stormwater retention basin. It, too, helped to protect surrounding communities from the worst impacts of Helene.

Atlanta isn’t alone in these types of efforts. Trust for Public Land integrates green infrastructure into almost all of its park projects, Dusenbury said, and other organizations and governments are doing the same. The city of Seattle, no stranger to rain, has considered green infrastructure a critical part of its stormwater management plans for over a decade, installing rain gardens in parks and medians and offering rebates for homeowners to put them in their yards. Boston, which appointed its first director of green infrastructure in 2022, recently broke ground on a park renovation project that will include both flood-resilient infrastructure as well as shade trees and water features that will help protect residents from the impacts of extreme heat.

“That being said, I still think we’re at the early stages of this becoming an overall best practice,” Dusenbury added.

One thing he would like more cities to recognize is that green infrastructure, in addition to being widely desirable, can also be incredibly cost-effective. “Too often, cities default to what they know, which is building a big pipe or building a cistern underground,” he said. Those types of targeted solutions can be costly — and they don’t offer the same benefits to the community that green spaces do. Dusenbury pointed to Historic Fourth Ward Park as an example: “The estimated cost of building the park was about $16 million. And the estimated cost of building a giant underground pipe to hold all the water and prevent the flooding was more than $20 million,” he said. The city was able to actually save money by choosing green infrastructure. “And then it has this wonderful 16-acre amenity that people can use.”

— Claire Elise Thompson

More exposure

A parting shot

An example of green infrastructure in a totally different setting — the San Diego Bay Native Oyster Living Shoreline Project is an effort to restore oyster reefs to a bay where they once flourished, using “reef balls” made out of a mixture of cement, rock, and oyster shells. The artificial reef, shown below, aims to reproduce a habitat that should act as a natural buffer against increasingly powerful waves that cause coastal erosion. The project is an alternative to conventional forms of “gray infrastructure,” like seawalls, that have in many cases exacerbated problems of habitat loss and erosion.

IMAGE CREDITS

Vision: Mia Torres / Grist

Spotlight: Jay Wozniak

Parting shot: Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images