Climate change summit aiming to prompt action at local level

New Haven - Representatives of about 50 cities and towns gathered at Yale University Saturday to receive encouragement, advice and support for local efforts to respond to the effects of climate change in their communities.

"For the most part, (state and federal) government decisions don't change everyday behavior," Amey Marrella, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection, told the approximately 125 local officials at the daylong Municipal Summit on Climate Change. "But at the local level, you can ignite the spark. You can have a direct impact at the local level."

Sponsored by the Governor's Steering Committee on Climate Change, the DEP, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the event drew professional municipal planners, elected officials and volunteers who sit on boards and agencies working on climate-change issues. Among eastern Connecticut towns in attendance were Canterbury, Essex, Westbrook, East Haddam, Norwich and Groton, which has a climate-change task force state officials hope will be a model for other communities. Zell Steever, chairman of the Groton task force, gave a presentation on the task force's work thus far during one of the workshop sessions.

The task force has been meeting for the past year, and last month received a $198,000 grant it will use to accomplish three goals, Steever said. It will assess all town buildings' energy use; calculate the carbon footprint of the entire town; develop an action plan to help the town adapt to climate change effects; and retrofit the library and one school building to be energy efficient as an educational tool for the community.

"We need to do both sustainable development and disaster management," he said. "This is not about trying to figure out a way of engineering our way out of the problem."

Effective communications about climate change, several summit speakers said, will be the key to getting the public's buy-in to programs to reduce the use of fossil fuels, increase use of mass transportation and foster land-use policies that take rising sea levels into account. It's a mistake, said Jim Motavalli, an environmental writer and speaker from Fairfield, to believe the public will be engaged by seeing a lot of graphs and data showing the impact of climate change on glacier melt, sea level, precipitation and temperature patterns.

"The way most scientists communicate climate science is largely opaque to the American people," he said. "Charts do not reach people."

Instead, he advised local officials to focus on specifics in their communities, such as the beach communities most vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise and storm surges.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, described the findings of recent research on public perception of climate change. There are six groups, ranging from "the alarmed" (18 percent) who are very concerned, to "the dismissive" (7 percent), who think climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

"They are small but very motivated," he said, to undercut anyone who advocates actions in response to climate change.

In between the two groups at the extremes are those who are concerned but see climate change as a "distant problem." Leiserowitz labeled the other three groups as: unsure; disengaged; doubtful.

Despite the wide variation, he said, his research found common ground among all the groups, and he urged the local officials to tailor their message to what most everyone can agree on. Regardless of whether someone believes climate change is a real problem caused by humans, they can see benefit in taking steps that reduce energy use, encourage consumption of locally grown foods, improve public health with cleaner air and prevent flood-prone areas from being developed.

"All like the idea of investing more resources in alternative fuels, incentives for efficient cars," he said.

Moving away from the use of fossil fuels, said Stewart Hudson, president of the Tremaine Foundation, is also about saving money through efficiency, making communities more livable and an act of patriotism that will make America stronger economically and more secure.

"What this issue is really about is business as usual in America in energy use that leaves us vulnerable," he said. "The U.S. sends $350 billion overseas (to import fossil fuels), and of the 10 nations that are the world's largest oil exporters, only two are democracies."

j.benson@theday.com