Denver—Rochelle Owen, being Canadian, explained a problem facing Dalhousie University in terms of meters
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Denver—Rochelle Owen, being Canadian, explained a problem facing Dalhousie University in terms of meters: 500, to be exact. Parts of the university, where she is sustainability director, are only 500 meters from the Atlantic Ocean off Halifax, Nova Scotia.
In coming years, that shoreline might be much closer.
While other sustainability directors were here at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement for Sustainability in Higher Education to talk about how to stop climate change, Ms. Owen gave a presentation focused on how her university will have to adapt to it. If the predictions of climate scientists are correct, everyone will have to grapple with more-extreme weather patterns years in the future. Colleges, which tend to plan decades in advance, should be working now to figure out how to deal with those problems as a basic risk-management strategy.
Ms. Owen laid out what Dalhousie has done so far. The impacts of climate change could be wide-ranging, affecting not just sea level but also water resources, agriculture, heat waves, and other conditions. Plenty of studies and predictions look at the future on a national scale, but few do so with a local focus. She and her colleagues had to come up with their own.
They studied the scientific literature and the climate models for 2030, 2050, and 2080. The literature and models suggested that Halifax would be hotter and wetter than it is now, with around 12 percent more precipitation, which could come in intense bursts.
Those weather changes, Ms. Owen said, could make Dalhousie more vulnerable to repetitive freeze-and-thaw cycles, ice storms, hurricanes, heavy snow loads, heat waves, and flooding—and the university may have to adjust its building and planning to deal with those vulnerabilities.
For example, she said, Dalhousie found that it had no “pantry plan,” which might be a problem if extreme weather knocked out transportation to the campus. The university might also have to reconsider the material it uses on the outside of its buildings in a climate that has more freezing and thawing events.
At the same time, she said, some green-building features that were unaffordable in the past might have more value under the adaptation plan. Rainwater cisterns, for example: Halifax now gets plenty of water, but if weather patterns change to cause more droughts, cisterns might be a hedge against future costs and risks.
