Maximize a budget to get a lot done

Your lovin' give me a thrill
But your lovin' don't pay my bill.
Now gimme money 

That's what I want!

– The Beatles

Money is what most of us want. Recent hardships call for a different tune, so could old fashioned cooperation leverage a city budget better?
The Beatles’ hometown proved it. Liverpool, England offers frugal budgets everywhere a guide.

The headline “Our City, Our Planet,” is shorthand for Liverpool’s push during 2009 to engage the public in improving town’s environmental sustainability. During the Year of the Environment the City of Liverpool hosted more than 900 events with environmental themes.  Flower and vegetable shows, bird box making, compost giveaways, a bike tour between churches (Cycle4Faith), and “Zen and the Art of the Wildflower,” were among formal programs.  The public events were not lectures about the carbon cycle, so much as community bicycling and mushroom gathering. Mini-grants of around 500-1000£ were awarded to improve neighborhoods around environmental themes: citizens created hundreds of hanging flower baskets, cleaned up their streets, and practiced EcoYoga. Response to the call for grant applications so overwhelmed staff a new position was created to liaise with the public.

City staff scoured department budgets for existing funds upon which Year of the Environment could piggyback. Staff time, marketing, webdesign, surveys, city clean ups all came from reallocating existing budget and employee priorities.  The total budget for the year of programming was £1.03; more than £85,000 of in-kind contributions were contributed. The Chamber of Commerce, various neighborhood organizations, the Art Council and wider Liverpool Community Network underwrote other pieces of the Year.
“To know that we were running alongside other people for a year was helpful,” said Christine Darbyshire, of Liverpool City Council, on the value of officially naming 2009 the Year of the Environment. As well, the year-long focus provided “an opportunity to accelerate our collective progress toward becoming a low carbon city,” according to official documents.

Partnership included:
–    The Green Ambassador program featured schools, businesses and citizens publically committed to personal change
–    A first-time event called the Green Power Forum brought architects, builders, real estate professionals together for a training on green building and renewable energy.
–    November’s £120 per plate annual Chamber of Commerce gala featured Marks & Spencer chief executive Sir Stuart Rose as a guest speaker. M&S, a household brand in Britain, has pledged 100 commitments to become carbon neutral, send no waste to the landfill and improve sustainable sourcing.
–    The Liverpool Echo newspaper wrote a weekly feature about green activities in the City.

Unfortunately, some Liverpool neighborhoods  suffered from multiple indicators of deprivation with low employment, poor health and a degraded physical infrastructure. In light of this, referencing environment in terms of sustainability or more compost would neglect residents’ more pressing need: cleanliness and beauty.
Thus, Liverpool focused on basics: all major supermarkets were tasked with collecting abandoned grocery carts blighting the City. Neighborhood clean ups were held. Seven new bike cycling routes were added in an initiative called “Cycle Speke,” to provide access to employment for residents of this historically poor corner of Liverpool. The Art Council Cultural Investment Program produced a film called “Mend and Make Do” wherein people “explore, remember and relearn skills of a bygone era when recycling was something all did naturally.”

To understand the context of Liverpool’s initiatives, know that the City had long suffered a reputation as a poor city, with high crime rates and antisocial behavior. Unemployment was among the highest in the UK during the 1980s. But regeneration abounds. The European Capital of Culture was bestowed on Liverpool in 2008. Large wind turbines, recently erected, grace the coastline. The most common comment heard is, “You won’t believe how much town has changed!”

The City hopes visitors and investors could be drawn to Liverpool as an environmental showcase, forgetting the image of a brawling and rusty port. “We think the environmental strengths of the city and its natural resources will ultimately be how the city turns itself around” said Darbyshire.

Year of the Environment site:
http://www.ourcityourplanet.org.uk/

How can land use planning save lives and property? Reduce risk of natural hazards by making a map

Practically speaking, what does climate change look like?
In many cases, natural catastrophes.

However, good planning can reduce the expensive and dangerous effects of large floods, high stormwater, increased tornados, rockfalls, avalanches, mudslides, and treefall across roadways.

The Swiss Federal Office of Spatial Planning has responded to increasingly frequent natural hazards with planning:  Switzerland mandated that each of its 3,000 municipalities draft a comprehensive natural hazard map.

The maps identify where potential risks like rockslides, or floods might occur. The data comes from both professional hydrologists, engineers, and through historical news accounts of past disasters. Even elderly residents were solicited for their memories about past avalanches or floods. With this data, decision makers and planners can employ a risk assessment matrix, which charts the intensity of the effect vs. probability of the risk within given zones in a community.

The cost to develop a natural hazard map is shared 40-40-20, with the Swiss federal government and Cantons (Swiss states) each paying 40%, and towns covering the last 20% of the costs to prepare the hazard maps. The timeline for researching and drafting the natural hazard maps runs from 2009-2011. So far more than 60% of communities have finished. Towns who fail to complete the maps may face fines.

What does a natural hazard map look like? Color-coded zones indicate where mudslides, rockfall, avalanches or floods are likely within the community. Identifying the zones forms the rationale behind discouraging development in sensitive areas (though property owners still have final say), or even authorizing municipal planners to deny building permits in areas of high risk to human life.

The maps start a town conversation about emergency response. Bern, Switzerland experienced deadly floods in 2004 when the Rhine River overflowed its banks. Now Bern has an emergency system in place to alert citizens living at the banks, via text message, that a flash flood is impending.

The village of Pontresina constructed a massive rock wall to protect the road and village property from frequent rockfall that results from melting permafrost. Other mountain towns installed traffic lights on sensors to stop traffic when rockfall occurs. Nationwide, Switzerland prioritized educating planners and design professionals (architects, builders, engineers) about natural hazards. Professionals can then mediate landowners’ concerns and prevent problems before they occur.

The also Swiss launched PLANAT. This is a natural hazard working group and website resource that provides tactics to respond to the host of natural disasters induced by climate change. Available in English:
http://www.planat.ch/index.php?userhash=120494600&l=e&nav=1,1,1,1

Another natural hazards platform is operated by the Alpine Convention:
http://www.alpconv.org/theconvention/conv06_WG_c_en.htm

Global scale:
Because of the claims burden natural hazards pose to insurance companies is so large, unstable climatic conditions are expensive. Munich RE opened a “NatCat” or Natural Catastrophe division in 1979, and penned a report warning the industry of the risk exposure posed by climate change.

In 2009, the total number of destructive natural hazards recorded was above the long term average: 850 natural catastophies occured, whereas 770 events reflect the ten year average. Approximately 75,000 deaths per year are attributed to weather-related natural hazards. “In particular, the trend towards an increase in weather-related catastrophes continues, whilst there has fundamentally been no change in the risk of geophysical events such as earthquakes", said Prof. Peter Höppe, Head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research department.
http://www.munichre.com/en/media_relations/press_releases/2009/2009_12_29_press_release.aspx

Gareth Thomas, the British International Development Minister backed by a recent Oxfam study,  said that by 2015 the number of people who will need to be rescued from natural catastrophes “will rise by more than 100 million as more hurricanes, typhoons, floods and mudslides triggered by climate change add to the toll caused by earthquakes and manmade disasters.” (“Un Will Struggle To Cope with Tide of Natural Disasters, Warns Minister” Guardian, March 29th  2010.)

Specific mitigation measures could  include:
·    Physical protection directly on individual buildings
·    Avalanche Control
·    Building rockfall protection nets, mountain flood locks or protective shelters
·    Disseminating instructions to the public: how to secure an oil tank and prevent explosions, evacuating the home or office promptly
·    Developing a hydrogeological basis for land-use planning and watershed management
·    Improving the financing of flood warning systems, and therefore broaden their implementation
·    Altering the town building code for heightened electrical security in case of floods
·    Ensuring that sloped driveways or access roads can be passed by emergency response vehicles
·    Increasing the setback from a ridgeline for new homes or buildings