'We all live here': Kent residents share thoughts on how city can combat climate change

Proactive solutions to climate change have been a part of Kent's history for decades. On Thursday, that tradition continued.

In the basement of the city's fire department, residents met with representatives of KERAMIDA Inc., a global environmental health safety and sustainability services firm hired by the city to help craft a climate action and response plan.

The purpose of the meeting was simple: to give residents a voice in helping to craft the city's climate action plan.

"When you adopt a climate action plan," said Nick McCreary, senior sustainability manager with KERAMIDA, "you are preparing yourself for a changing world, to ensure that Kent can thrive in what is going to be a changing world, whether it's climatic or regulatory."

A climate action plan, he explained, is a map that communities or organizations can use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The 2015 Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, is an example of such a plan — a plan that, in 2021, the Kent City Council supported through a resolution.

"We're here in Kent this week to gain an understanding of what the community wants, and what the culture of the community is, before we make any recommendations at all. This is your community, and we're not coming in here to tell you what to do," McCreary said.

KERAMIDA's representatives — Amber Greaney, Emilee Brown, Maddy Williams, and McCreary — guided the assembled crowd through four exercises designed to elicit input from Kent residents about how the firm should create the plan.

Residents broke up into four groups and the four KERAMIDA representatives went to each group, rotating in 15-minute intervals, to ask them:

• What social equity and environmental issues exist within the Kent community that have the greatest need and/or attention from the climate action plan efforts?

• What roadblocks have historically prevented or slowed progress?

• What initiatives should KERAMIDA and the city of Kent take into consideration for reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

• What climate-related mitigation strategies or actions have been successful and unsuccessful to date?

More:'A whole new focus': Kent State, city to jointly hire staffer focused on the environment

More:Editorial: How farmers could fight climate change (and make a profit)

"With this specific scope of work," McCreary said, "we are looking to reduce greenhouse gases from Kent."

Greenhouse gases — methane and carbon dioxide, for example — are the driving force behind human-caused climate change, which is why they're targeting them for reduction.

Before issuing a request for qualifications for firms to build the climate action plan, the city conducted a greenhouse gas inventory. According to its findings, the largest emitters of these harmful gases are the generation of commercial and residential energy through the burning of fossil fuels.

Transportation, agriculture, and wastewater management also contribute a percentage to Kent's greenhouse gas emissions.

"When you combust coal or natural gas, that combustion process actually emits methane and CO2, and therefore contributes to climate change," McCreary said.

What Kent residents had to say

For an hour, KERAMIDA's representatives rotated through the crowd to gather residents' input.

Ideas ranged from utilizing water recycling and rain barrels as a mitigation initiative to building a better recordkeeping process for student organizations dedicated to environmental concerns in order to pass along knowledge from one group of students to another as turnover naturally occurs at Kent State.

By the end of the exercise, the representatives had 16 poster boards full of ideas from residents about how KERAMIDA should approach crafting Kent's climate action plan.

Risks and opportunities

As the effects of climate change become rapidly more pronounced, so too do the risks.

Periods of heavier rainfall causing flooding followed by long droughts will affect the ability of the crop-producing Midwest, Ohio included, to grow viable crops. McCreary pointed out that this can cause an increase in instances of food insecurity.

An increase in energy and gas prices resulting from regulatory changes made in an attempt to mitigate climate change also will have an effect on systems not built with those changes in mind.

"But there's also opportunities when you're addressing climate change," McCreary said.

Job growth is one such opportunity. Solar panel installation and manufacturing is one area that could see increased demand for workers.

"There are opportunities to relieve traffic congestion by switching to multilevel transportation," McCreary said.

One of the biggest opportunities is the chance for the city to lower the risk of health problems for Kent residents.

"While greenhouse gases and air pollutants are different, they come from the same source, so by reducing greenhouse gases we're actually reducing air pollutants, which is a major cause of premature death globally," McCreary said.

'We all share the same space'

Anna Berry and Kathryn Burns are Environmental Studies majors at Kent State University and interns at the college's Office of Sustainability.

Berry said it felt great to be able to help steer the city in a greener direction by talking with the firm hired to craft the climate action plan.

"I feel like a lot of people say, 'Oh, the younger generation doesn't really care,' " Burns said. "but I just wanted to show that I care about these issues."

Judy Nelson was a member of the city's sustainability commission from 2016 to 2019 and currently serves on the City of Kent Climate Action Plan Ad Hoc Committee.

"I've seen that council has grown more receptive to the things that we've been working on," Nelson said. There have consistently been council members concerned about sustainability, she said, but it feels like more council members have come around to the idea.

Living in a city that's willing to engage their residents in being part of the solution to a problem is exciting, she said.

She said it's important that this plan work as a beacon for other communities interested in doing something similar.

"When we were looking at how to craft a climate action plan," Nelson said, "we looked at other communities. We looked at Oberlin and Athens. And so, we would like to be Oberlin and Athens, where other communities are looking to say, 'What did Kent do?' "

Lifelong Kent resident Sally Burnell said it's important that people work together across all boundaries — whether it be generational, age, socioeconomic, or professional — to address the shifting climate.

"We all live here," she said. "We all share the same space. We may as well work together to overcome the things we need to overcome to mitigate climate change."

Contact reporter Derek Kreider at DKreider@Gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Kent residents give input to firm hired to craft climate action plan