Climate summit pushes need to mitigate

By Danny Villalobos
Staff Writer

The Sustainability Literacy Task Force hosted its first climate summit on March 28 to educate about the effects of climate change and how to mitigate it.

“We can’t get rid of climate change,” said Emily Thompson, a WCC professor and head coordinator of the Sustainability Literacy Task Force. “All we can do now is learn how to lessen its effect and mitigate it.”

The summit was divided into three sessions, each with three speakers.

“The speakers were picked on the idea that it shouldn’t just be science instructors,” said professor Smita Malpani, a co-organizer along with Thompson. “Each panel had a different [speaker] that would talk about how they integrate sustainability into their field.”

According to both Malpani and Thompson, the idea for The Climate Summit came a week after the climate reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Oct. 7.

If the global temperature increases more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the result will be irreversible, the IPCC report said. To prevent a global warming of 1.5 degrees will require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, according to the IPCC report.

The window of time to make these changes is smaller than previously thought. The IPCC reports that we now have only until the year 2030.

“We thought before the report we would have until 2050 to be a carbon neutral school, but after it was revealed… it was much dire than we thought,” said Thompson.

The purpose of the summit is to educate students, staff, faculty and community members about the causes and effects of climate change and how to mitigate these effects.

“There are a lot of people on campus that don’t believe [climate change] is happening,” said Malpani. “But it’s not about a matter of believing or not; we have the data and the science.”

One of the speakers, Melissa Stults, the sustainability and innovations manager for the city of Ann Arbor, presented how the effects of climate change will affect the city.

Future problems that will affect the city of Ann Arbor include flooding, inequality, and public health problems according Sults.

“The city has been built to maintain a certain amount of flooding,” said Stults. “But the amount of precipitation will overflood parts of the city.”

The amount of rainwater that Ann Arbor gets in a year could fill the Michigan Stadium 117 times, compared to 30 years ago when that number was 94, according to Stults.

The flooding that Ann Arbor will experience could be an economic disruptor, but despite this Ann Arbor is one of the safest places to live in regards to climate change according to Stults.

“People are coming to Ann Arbor and they’ll keep coming, so we have to find a way to build better housing in the city,” said Stults.

Other speakers spoke about integrating sustainability efforts within various fields and cultures. Music professor Michael Naylor spoke about Native American culture and its connection to sustainable living and the connections between capitalism and global warming.

The speakers were chosen to represent not only the science fields, but also included instructors of arts and humanities.

“We are all in this together,” said Thompson. “It affects people in many fields.”

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