BAR HARBOR — The town’s Task Force on Climate Emergency met on Monday with scientists from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland to discuss an upcoming community resilience training program and to hear more about what a vulnerability assessment for the town could look like.
GMRI researchers Hannah Baranes and Steph Sun joined the task force meeting over Zoom.
Bar Harbor will be working with GMRI this fall on community resilience training, a process that involves a series of workshops on what it takes to build a climate change resilient community.
The training will begin with a “planning forward workshop” that will focus on strategy and the development of skills and knowledge needed to plan for climate change impacts.
Next up will be the “resource workshop,” which is a collaborative effort involving members of Mount Desert Island towns.
Lastly, the town will engage in the “resilience planning workshop” – a space to reflect and discuss the priorities of the community and to decide how best to implement a plan.
“Community resilience training is really to have sort of a values-based discussion as a key part of the climate action and resilience planning process while also developing community of practice,” explained Sun.
Another service that GMRI can help municipalities with is a vulnerability assessment, which Baranes and Sun explained to the task force. The goal of a vulnerability assessment is to combine findings from scientific data on risks presented by climate change, with social data gathered from community members.
A vulnerability assessment will outline specific needs of the community and how those needs factor into the climate challenges the community faces. Tremont is currently working with GMRI and A Climate to Thrive on a vulnerability assessment.
“The first part is sort of the science piece to better understand what the risks actually are, and then tied to that is a public engagement piece that really asks community members to identify what it is that’s important to them in town, and sort of what the value of the things that might be at risk are,” Sun said, explaining a vulnerability assessment. “That primarily is looking at flood risk and sea level rise, but it brings in factors of social vulnerability.”
“It seems like social vulnerability and public engagement are two things that we haven’t done,” said Ruth Poland, chair of the task force.
The focus up to this point has been on the impacts that climate change could have on infrastructure and what can be done to mitigate those risks.
Baranes and Sun explained that, based on their findings, sea level rise is not Bar Harbor’s biggest climate change threat. Except in a few places, the steep coastlines of the town make it resilient to rising seas.
However, one exception, were it to be affected, would impact all of MDI. The bridge from Trenton is in an area that lacks the steep coastline found elsewhere in town and is at risk of future flooding from rising sea levels. The bridge has caught the attention of the Maine Department of Transportation, which is already working to monitor potential flooding on the bridge and road.
“[MDOT is] developing a model that will give kind of a much better sense for how it might be impacted,” Baranes said.
According to Baranes and Sun, other climate change risks that Bar Harbor could face are things like saltwater intrusion, rising temperatures and the arrival of invasive species. A few of the biggest issues – already being felt to some degree – are the frequency and severity of storms and the problems that come from an excess of rain.
“I think one of the things that we see in Bar Harbor sometimes is like these big rain events causing flooding interior on the island,” said Comprehensive Planning Committee member and ACTT board member Misha Mytar.
“That particular factor [frequency and intensity of storms] has been a leading cause of our $50 million infrastructure bond to deal with combined sewage overflow,” added Town Council Vice Chair Gary Friedmann, who serves as the council representative on the task force.
After meeting with Baranes and Sun, the task force decided that the town would not undergo a vulnerability assessment with GMRI until after the community resilience training in the fall.
Additionally, task force members discussed whether they should be a task force at all or if they should pursue a more permanent status as a committee.
The idea of merging with the town’s Conservation Commission was raised since the commission often has difficulty getting quorums for meetings and could use additional members.
“Our kind of initial goals were to get a sustainability coordinator, write a climate action plan, get an energy benchmarking data system started, and we’ve kind of done those things, we’re still following through on some, finishing them up,” said Poland. “How might we set up a more permanent vision?”
“I wonder whether there should be, like, some kind of merger there,” added Friedmann, noting the overlap the two have.
The task force finished the meeting with officer elections, during Poland, Vice Chair Tobin Peacock and secretary Jennifer Crandall were all unanimously reelected to their positions.
