House Science Subcommittee Issues Testimony From Foundation for Louisiana Climate Justice Program Director Russell

WASHINGTON, April 22 -- The House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Environment issued the following testimony by Liz Williams Russell, Climate Justice Program director at Foundation for Louisiana, as part of a video conference hearing entitled "Equity: the Case for a Federal Climate Service" on April 21, 2021:

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Thank you for the opportunity to testify regarding the need for a strengthened Federal role in addressing climate change. I want to encourage thoughtful investment and provision of authority for coordinated risk information and climate services that center the needs of the nation's most impacted communities while creating equitable and sustainable pathways to holistically address climate impacts. It is critical that we enhance and develop replicable and scalable approaches while building generational capacity for long term positive change.

I am the Climate Justice Program Director at Foundation for Louisiana (FFL). FFL was initially founded as the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation in the days following Hurricane Katrina, meant to be a philanthropic intermediary that could distribute resources on the ground to communities that are typically unreached by traditional philanthropy and by our institutional responses to disaster. The Foundation for Louisiana is a catalyst for justice. FFL invests in communities and ideas, builds partnerships, and transforms policies and systems for an equitable, stronger Louisiana.

Louisiana is on the frontlines of climate change and is necessarily developing solutions to address the climate crisis, both through climate adaptation and emissions mitigation measures. Due to the management and mismanagement of the Mississippi River and myriad human and natural causes, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s. Ongoing land loss and an increasing number of extreme weather events ensure that climate change is not a future scenario here. Since 2005, Louisiana has endured Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, Isaac, the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster, two extreme precipitation events, Laura, Delta, and Zeta, among other disasters. Every one of our 64 parishes has been under at least one if not four, five, or six federal flood declarations. Residents with resources are moving to areas they perceive as higher and safer grounds, shifting local tax revenue and influencing a vast manifestation of rippling climate impacts in our communities. (Appendix 1) Within areas losing population, amidst depreciating property values and loss of amenities, we see a decline in ability to maintain social services and lost capacity to invest in the maintenance of existing infrastructure that supports communities or mitigates risk, much less the revenue for completion of future investments to reduce increasing risk over time. In areas gaining population, schools and traffic swell while new development is permitted and expands without any regard for current and future sea level rise and flood risk projections. These are mere entry points into a dialogue of climate impacts already being faced by our communities.

At the Foundation for Louisiana, we approach climate justice strategically, through our values to achieve outcomes. We invest and act:

* to build people power by strengthening civic infrastructure and capacity,

* to advance just climate policies through analysis, recommendations, and advocacy that activate and strengthen resident leaders and communities, and

* to cultivate a new narrative by developing effective communications tools and strategies that energize statewide climate action.

(More information on our Climate Justice Program Strategy can be found at https://www.foundationforlouisiana.org/climate-justice/)

The 2017 update to Louisiana's Coastal Master (2017 CMP) developed by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) puts forward a multiple-lines-of-defense strategy for reducing flood risk to communities and economies throughout coastal Louisiana. The CMP's future scenario maps illustrate that over a fifty-year time horizon, the state stands to lose more land than can be rebuilt even with $50 billion in investments in protection and restoration. This reality has vast implications across sectors that have not yet begun planning for a future with a smaller land footprint. Louisiana has already taken steps to address these challenges by piloting innovative approaches for helping communities weather these transitions. Through the Louisiana's Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) program, the state's Office of Community Development-Disaster Recovery Unit and FFL partnered to facilitate inclusive community engagement processes to develop projects to help transition communities facing physical threats from land loss and climate change across a spectrum of "resettlement" to "receiving" communities. The learnings from these projects provide a strong foundation for developing more holistic, cross-sectoral strategies for addressing these challenges at a broader scale. (More information on the LA SAFE program can be found at lasafe.la.gov) Now, there is also an effort to improve outcomes for resilience through facilitated and improved cross-sector coordination to address climate impacts within the mission and administration of each state agency. I mention this array of work that has occurred and is ongoing at the state level because Louisiana has already invested decades of effort and billions of dollars in developing pathways to address the impacts of coastal and climate change. We provide, in many ways, a litmus test to investigate the effectiveness of projects, programs, and policies that could and should be part of a national deployment of resources for communities on the frontlines of our changing world.

Without strategic and intentional action, climate change and our institutional responses to it will exacerbate existing inequities solidified within our built environment and through the policies and practices that maintain and develop it.

Black, Indigenous, Communities of Color, and low-income communities are:

* More likely to live and work in places where toxic petrochemical and industrial facilities have been placed and continue to expand, emitting pollutants that shorten and impact the quality of life.

* More likely to live in areas where there is more flooding, often because of racialized real estate valuation, predatory land acquisition, and variances in infrastructural investment.

* More likely to receive inadequate infrastructure investment to mitigate risks and prevent disasters and then also more likely to experience delayed and insufficient response and recovery investments and resources during and after emergencies.

Drawing on my experiences and those of the communities that I and we serve in Louisiana, I believe specific items need to remain center of focus with the design and deployment of future Federal resources and actions.

Access to localized information and technical assistance varies dramatically across jurisdictions. This access is dependent on local revenue streams and socioeconomic conditions with a tendency to manifest institutionalized disparities as variances in local capacity to address challenges or create opportunities. To reduce the variances in localized technical assistance, the Federal government must develop pathways to prioritize and invest in the places that have seen systematic disinvestment and underinvestment - leveraging resources across all sectors impacted by the evolving and rippling climate crisis.

Localized information and tools presented to people already being or soon to be impacted by the levels of risk indicated by those tools can fall unheard for several reasons. Under resourced communities have less financial capacity to adapt or address the risks that are often revealed by said tools. Each time a seemingly helpful government official or entity shows up to share depictions and projections of a given existential crisis, residents and constituencies without the financial means to address those calamities can often feel increasingly helpless. Communities may feel powerless with increased exposure to information regarding their own vulnerability to a predicted hazard when there is no pathway indicated or provided through which they might address a given risk. Often, this unclear or impossible route to attend to a risk or impact presents as apparent community apathy or indifference to the actual risk or hazard discussed. In actuality, what are those under resourced residents supposed to do to surmount the challenge? The Federal government should take steps to ensure any information regarding climate hazards that is brought to constituents or local decisionmakers is presented alongside tangible pathways to tackle the risks indicated by the information or tool, including identifying which government entity at which level of government provides the appropriate pathway to mitigate said risk.

With the notorious image of a government official who arrives communicating some version of "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," even the most well-intentioned bureaucrat still generates distrust from communities that have, for decades and generations, seen commitments from government dissolve, benefit the neighborhood up the road, catalyze rewards for those who move in later, or actively bring harm to their communities. Thus, pathways to address change need to be institutionalized in a way that establishes and grows trust in government over time. Ensure that federal practices, including projects that will evolve through adaptive management and in concert with evolving environmental circumstances, illustrate government follow through. Government officials and investments need to visibly "do what they say they were going to do." Typically, state and federal efforts are operationalized by the staff of government contractors or researchers from elsewhere. These individuals and entities usually have minimal responsibility regarding the effectiveness of given work in a community over time or little concern regarding whether the actual benefits will be experienced by the people in that place. As activities expand in an area, planning fatigue and confusion abound regarding where the last folks went after they came into a community with calls for interviews, grant funding, and requests for time and energy from residents. There is a lack of consistency amongst research, activities, planning, and implementation efforts that start and stop within a given impacted area. Moreover, private entities procure handsome contracts to complete work in alignment with Federal and state deliverables for funding with very little impetus or accountability for seeing long term positive outcomes in a community. Unless those organizations are based in or have a long-term commitment to a place, they are unlikely to center the needs of the people there.

Created by the Foundation for Louisiana, LEAD (Leadership Education Advocacy Development) the Coast is a comprehensive leadership, education, and advocacy development program designed to equip the resident leaders of Louisiana with tools they need for effective civic engagement to address coastal and climate change. The program is designed to empower community leaders through shared learning sessions that enable residents to connect their own personal experience to technical information; to understand pathways by which decision making occurs; to consider past, present, and future intersections of climate change impacts to communities; and to develop networks through which to build power across Louisiana. This program creates space for community leaders to meet and learn from others, share their stories, and connect their personal, local knowledge and expertise regarding coastal and climate change and environmental justice to actionable pathways to address the impacts experienced in their communities.

Building on the lessons learned through FFL's Together Initiative founded in 2008, LEAD the Coast was launched in 2016 and revamped in 2019 in partnership with nine grantee partners. While facilitating over 70 meetings with people across six Louisiana parishes to draft community envisioned and prioritized plans for LA SAFE in 2017, one constant message received was that frontline communities do not want people not representative of them trying to control their community actions and reactions around tough topics like climate. For far too long, they've felt under- and misrepresented by individuals who come in and either judge their decision making or attempt to act on their behalf. This frustration sparked the idea to deepen the effectiveness of the program by partnering with our community-based organization (CBO) grantees to host cohorts of LEAD the Coast in parishes across Louisiana.

As of today, the program has had 6 cohorts across 10 parishes and more than 125 graduates. LEAD the Coast continues to deepen relationships and work toward an expanded network with its Inaugural LTC Fellowship Class in 2020 and ongoing coast-wide expansion. The majority of program participants have been from Communities of Color, and more specifically Black and Indigenous communities, and the program continues to influence progress in diversifying coastal and climate leadership so that communities most impacted are more appropriately represented in decision-making. The program would not be possible without deep trust and relationships that continue to be established and deepened to ensure that our institutions are accountable to the communities they serve.

Part of the Federal role should be to utilize and develop funding mechanisms to invest in the capacity of local people and institutions most impacted by climate change. Develop and grow practices that center the expertise of the people most impacted as leaders, designers, and decision makers to cultivate innovative and sustained responses for generational challenges. Support networks of local people to develop regional relationship infrastructure that lends to decision making influence to demand and advance adaptive and positive change in those areas over time.

Further, Federal agencies can better serve communities that have faced historic and ongoing disinvestment and underinvestment by removing discriminatory metrics in valuation tools for project prioritization, removing barriers to resources that are embedded within policies and procedures, prioritizing intentional investment in communities that have been harmed by the implementation of previous government practices, and requiring meaningful participation across all infrastructural, development, and investment decision processes. When considering siting of future investments to reduce risk and improve adaptive capacity for communities, many Federal agencies predominately utilize cost benefit analyses that rely heavily on racialized real estate valuation practices which improperly tip the scales regarding who experiences the costs and the benefits. These calculation processes Inherently prioritize investments to mitigate risk and of adaptation and resilience measures to wealthier, typically whiter, communities which have received decades and generations of sustained infrastructure investment that already ensure that they fare better in the face of acute and chronic disasters. Using detailed analysis and surgical precision, replace metrics that, however unintentionally, exacerbate the existing imbalance of government resource distribution. Develop metrics that prioritize the communities that have experienced decades and generations of disinvestment and underinvestment. More information can be found in appendices 2 and 3.

Federal climate services can better bridge information gaps by developing ways to incorporate anecdotal personal experiences of ongoing climate impacts at scale, environmental harm and change, and traditional ecological knowledge. Federal climate services can also bridge these gaps by developing iterative communication and coordination practices between the agencies that reveal and project ongoing environmental change, those that work to address those impacts across environmental fields, and those that typically don't consider themselves environmental such as housing and development, transportation, education, economy and jobs, and public health.

For example, the aforementioned LA SAFE program allocated federal dollars to provide expanded support to address mental health care needs in a parish with extensive ongoing land loss and increased trauma to residents from repeated disaster events. With the stress of recovering and rebuilding after multiple storms, ongoing outward migration, and the closure or disappearance of facilities and services, Plaquemines Parish experienced an uptick in suicide rates and a surge in demand for mental healthcare services. Still, coastal and climate change had been considered a primarily environmental challenge. At the time, the Louisiana Department of Health was not monitoring health impacts or considering evolving programmatic needs in alignment with acute and chronic climate impacts at an institutional level. Perhaps more accessible, the agency is only beginning to consider how to invest in existing and future asset management with an analysis of climate event vulnerability and projected land loss. The state agency charged with visualizing and addressing current and future coastal land loss and flood risk has not been systematically collaborating with the department that administers healthcare services for residents. The requirement for coordination and collaboration is apparent in this example for state government and could also be pursued through Federal leadership, funding, and accountability.

For an additional example of a sector typically viewed as non-environmental with substantial impacts from climate change, economic opportunity and development are being influenced by environmental shifts and should help to catalyze inclusive adaptation practices. Many residents of south Louisiana that evacuated for Hurricane Katrina to end up displaced for weeks, months, or years came back to find that their employer had since supplanted their job with other labor, typically a working person from elsewhere.

Thus, we need to design Federal practices and policies with a consideration for relationships between job access and business development and ongoing climate impacts. People with resources are more financially able to recover from disaster or to adapt over time. Ongoing climate induced migration is also influenced by economic opportunity and the availability of "good jobs" in each community. Thus, inclusive economic development could be coordinated with an understanding of current and projected climate risk, prioritizing investments to ensure inclusive and affordable growth and economic opportunity in areas poised to remain high and dry (or insert a relevant climate impact benefit here). Moreover, as we invest in projects to help communities adapt and mitigate risk, Federal funding practices can ensure that those projects include resources for the development of working people, small business support, and accessible procurement policies so that the resources can also leverage inclusive economic opportunity in the areas receiving investment. The design of these resources and practices can intentionally prioritize communities that have historically been left out of economic opportunity and catalyze pathways to build wealth in underserved and marginalized communities to advance equitable economic opportunity in the face of climate change.

Expanding and developing pathways to incorporate the many scales of change into our understandings of risk and climate impacts is critical to developing a more comprehensive Federal response to climate change. Understanding the nuances in capacity of local and state government is also vital to the effectiveness of any tool or the impact of Federal programs and policies over time. We can also leverage resources to catalyze inclusive economic opportunity in areas receiving investments to mitigate and address evolving climate risks, enhancing the capacity of residents and communities to adapt over time.

Importantly, improving direct communication, coordination, and collaboration between data, science, and modeling entities and those who provide services to communities and local and state government via Federal investment will be crucial to effective climate response. Logistically, the Federal role will also include the development of a sophisticated architecture of staffing, funding, and decision-making authority for that response over time. A convening and coordinating body with the capacity and authority to develop iterative future modeling expertise between agencies is required to tackle the disconnected production of data and tools and the siloed nature of emerging and evolving climate work. Agencies most familiar with climate change and impacts don't systematically engage with agencies whose assets, current and future programming, and future needs or investment decisions might be relevant. Thus, the need for iterative and cyclical communication, coordination, and collaboration between data and services development and deployment is apparent. Improved coordination should be facilitated - and staffed and resourced - in a way that is recurrent at key intervals and ongoing so that tools and modeling capacity can advance with evolving experience of impacts on the ground to meet the challenge and even get ahead of projected future impacts.

To close, I would like to acknowledge that I am from New Orleans and my family is spread across south Louisiana. My deep roots here engender a passion and a commitment to defend and champion the places I love - the ongoing and evolving impacts are real, personal, and vast while the stories of past, present, and future give us the clarity and strength to advance outcomes towards a more healthy, just, and vibrant future. My family knew how high the water rose in Katrina because my great grandmother's "Sweet-N-Low" packets were stuck to the wall amidst leaves and storm debris, inches from the ceiling.

The molded, soggy scrapbooks are forever seared into my memory. In Louisiana, residents from across the political spectrum acknowledge and appreciate ongoing climate change and the effects it brings; still, few Americans understand or are grappling with the depth and breadth of climate impacts to everything we care about. Climate change is not a future scenario here, across our country, or around the world. I want to encourage you to do everything in your power to advance efforts and investments that treat your constituents with dignity and acknowledge the humanity in all of us. I appreciate this opportunity to articulate and underscore the need for a strengthened, coordinated Federal role and response as we interpret and address the many facets of the climate crisis. Thank you for your time, consideration, and ongoing work.

The attachments can be viewed at: https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Russell%20Testimony1.pdf