The City of Oberlin’s Climate Action Plan, which is currently in draft form, finished its public review phase on Jan. 24. It is expected to be published in a completed form in the near future after review by City Council, with community feedback being taken into account.
The plan aims to reduce the City’s carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 and enable Oberlin to become a “climate positive community” by 2050, meaning that the City would have negative emissions. Although Oberlin has instituted various climate action plans since 2011, this specific five-year plan is notable for being the first to focus on climate adaptation and resiliency, or the ability for the community to adapt to the already-occurring effects of climate change, as well as increasing its focus on social equity in the plan’s implementation and feedback process.
In order to reduce carbon emissions, the plan outlines a variety of initiatives. Some of the high-priority projects for the City include continuing to power and insulate homes with the assistance of the local nonprofit Providing Oberlin With Efficiency Responsibly, as well as developing community-scale solar projects to provide energy to residents.
Specific new climate adaptation measures included in the plan are the planting of new trees to provide more shade and improve Oberlin’s air and water quality, as well as the addition of backup power systems at the wastewater plant and fire stations. The plan also emphasizes continued investment in and support for expanding cooling resources, which serve to shelter people from the effects of heat during increasingly warm summers.
Cindy Frantz, the vice president of POWER and professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies, noted that while planting trees would not be the most impactful thing the City would pursue in terms of carbon removal, trees are still an important component of the climate resilience plan.
“The truth is that it is gonna be a lot hotter in 30 years, and if we plant trees now, they will have a tremendous impact on our local microclimate,” she said. “And if we plant them 30 years from now, they’re not gonna do as much.”
However, she also noted the need to continue focusing on limiting carbon emissions.
“Is [planting trees] the most impactful thing?” Frantz said. “No, I think the most impactful thing is helping businesses transition away from fossil fuels.”
The plan also recommends the development of an “eco-industrial park,” which refers to the industrial park that is planned to be built on 211 acres of land that the City annexed in 2022 from Pittsfield Township. Although the plan emphasizes making the industrial park environmentally friendly, the development was one of the main points that residents responded negatively to during the period of public review.
Linda Arbogast, the sustainability coordinator for the City of Oberlin, noted that there were a large number of comments voicing concerns about the industrial park. She noted that some of the criticism was focused on the fact that a gas line would have to be built out to the park.
“There does have to be gas there; otherwise we would be limiting ourselves to customers and potentially not fill the space, which would really hurt the City economically,” she said. “But we did take a lot of those comments into consideration in developing … this vision of an eco-friendly industrial park.”
Social equity is also a strong theme within the plan. The feedback process for the draft placed emphasis on diversity and inclusion by asking how the plan could take into account the needs of disadvantaged populations.
“There are all these sorts of inherent environmental justice issues in terms of who’s bearing the impacts of climate change,” Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology and member of the CAP Steering Committee John Petersen, OC ’88, said. “I don’t think it’s the case that people didn’t previously care about these issues. I think it just became a whole lot more relevant when we started to think about … adaptation and being resilient and disproportionate impacts of climate change.”
Petersen suggested that the subsidization of heat pumps in low-income households would be a way for the plan to take such considerations into account.
Although the Climate Action Plan is a product of the City government, officials have emphasized that community action and cooperation will be most important in meeting the plan’s goals.
“[There are] many entities throughout the Oberlin community, the College, Kendal, businesses, [and] the public schools that have roles to play in this plan. … We have just started a community green team,” Arbogast said.
The entire text of the draft plan can be found on the City of Oberlin’s website.
