A road map for climate solutions

By MELISSA EVERETT
Posted 1/15/25

Most of us like to live in a healthy environment and feel a sense of control in our lives. To support both those goals, a group of Hudson Valley grassroots leaders have come together and created the …

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A road map for climate solutions

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Most of us like to live in a healthy environment and feel a sense of control in our lives. To support both those goals, a group of Hudson Valley grassroots leaders have come together and created the Regional Climate Action Road Map and Tool Kit (Road Map) to help communities turn the corner out of the climate crisis. It is a comprehensive, plain-English resource guide to help communities and the entire region to stop contributing to climate change as well as learning new ways to make our neighborhoods climate-safe. A labor of love by over 90 volunteers, the effort was coordinated by Sustainable Hudson Valley as a way of generating positive vision as we were all emerging from the COVID pandemic. Now it is available as a platform for education, planning and creative problem-solving in the Hudson Valley and Catskills too. The kit is available at www.hvclimateroadmap.org.

Clean energy: acceleration through coordination

New York is committed to getting 70% of its power from renewable sources by 2030, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of farms, forests, or historic districts. The Road Map documents planning tools for identifying sites on parking lots, landfills, commercial rooftops and highway rights-of-way. But many of these sites lack adequate electric grid capacity. This leads to costly interconnection charges and long delays, or to creating pressure to develop solar on farmlands. Our volunteers came up with an audacious alternative: they made a connection with Central Hudson’s grid engineering team and got a dialogue going to identify ways that the utility might be able to help, such as allowing developers to cost-share the fees. These conversations are quite exploratory, but they may help all of us one day to say, “Renewable energy? Yes in my back yard.”

Besides electric power, heating and cooling buildings, and transportation are the other biggest sources of heat-trapping gases. New York has provided billions of dollars to make solar panels and heat pumps, electric vehicles and charging accessible for us all, and to pay major chunks of the costs of transit and school bus electrification. For these benefits to be useful, they have to be understood. To make home energy improvements easy to get done right, the partner organizations, the regional Clean Energy Hub and New Yorkers for Clean Power are developing plentiful resources including workshops, case studies—even free energy coaching services (really). 

Natural solutions: Farms, forests, land, water

Healthy forests, farms and open space are nature’s top climate solution. That is because plants absorb CO2 directly, and they retain water, cooling their surroundings. Food produced locally reduces the need to truck what we eat from afar. The Road Map points to new ways of maximizing those benefits, like agri-voltaics—integrating solar panels with crops and grazing, as Cornell Agri-Tech in Ulster County, NY is demonstrating on plots with rows of fruit trees and solar panels. Private landowners can be a major force in protecting the web of life from climate stresses by planting (beautiful) pollinator gardens. Farmers can also regenerate their soil in ways that improve crop yields by using soil enhancements like biochar and rock dust which store carbon dioxide for hundreds of years. Rural communities are already innovation hubs, just take a look at your county Cornell Cooperative Extension Service.

Maybe a surprise: Materials?

And here’s a climate solution that not everyone has thought about: stuff! Consumer products, building materials, textiles, packaging, food scraps—everything that turns into waste—is a pollution source. Waste management, symbolized by those five mpg diesel trucks carrying our garbage to the Seneca Falls landfill, is fully 12% of our regional climate pollution. And it’s an impact we can change. 

Ground glass can fill in trails or added as a pozzolan for low-carbon concrete. Upcycled fashion is a fast-growing field and textiles can be remanufactured into insulation among other things. Buildings can be taken apart, freeing up bricks, glass, tiles and much more for reuse (as New York City’s economic development office is beginning to fund in a demonstration project, taking apart a former CUNY medical school and reusing much of the material to create the Kips Bay Science Park and Research Campus (SPARC). The Road Map calls for strategic planning to shift our materials management systems into circular mode, and planning is underway. Watch this space for further coverage of this unexpected creative domain. 

Melissa Everett, Ph.D. is founding executive director of Sustainable Hudson Valley (www.sustainhv.org), an organization that combines systems thinking with people power to tackle climate change. When not being an earnest agent of transformation, she is into long-distance swimming, paddleboarding, wimpy skiing and fanatical cooking. 

road map, clean energy, climate, change, solutions

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