Climate change data collected, shared for enhanced usefulness

Climate change planning tools are more important than ever, says Tora Johnson, chair of the University of Maine at Machias (UMM) Division of Environmental and Biological Sciences and director and associate professor of the Global Information System (GIS) Lab and Service Center. "The crucial thing is that the environment is changing." She adds, "It is real and measurable and having pretty significant impact on daily life." She lists industries in Maine that include forestry and the fisheries. "It touches every sector, and some of the highest impacts are along the coast, seeing rising sea levels."
For property owners Downeast, whether industrial, small business or homeowner, there are tools being gathered to help assess property risk from climate change now and moving into the future. Municipalities are also in the mix, with state, county and local infrastructure such as roads, utilities and communication towers, wells, water and wastewater treatment systems, and healthcare and emergency management all needing planning resources.
As an example of climate change planning, Johnson notes that in the last decade there have been four major floods in downtown Machias, events that are supposed to happen once every 100 years. "This is a major change, and it's happening more regularly." She adds, "We need to think about how to be resilient in the future." Because of the flooding and the research and tools available to the town, Machias "is proactively considering changes to the downtown." Considerations include the Machias dike, which the Maine Department of Transportation has on its reconstruction list, and how to envision and protect the downtown to preserve and enhance its beauty, resiliency and economic viability. "If they don't, the dike will be destroyed and the majority of the town could be impacted" by a major storm and flood event, Johnson says.
Johnson hears from homeowners as well. One such property owner has seen their coastal property suffer from storm related erosion every year, and every year the municipality dumps some rock in the eroded area. Dumping rock or creating a seawall is not always a long term solution because it often leads to erosion worsening either at the site or near the site, depending on how it's done. While Johnson and the GIS lab are not there to tell people what to do, they can offer suggestions.
The GIS lab and UMM, Sunrise County Economic Council (SCEC) and others are partnering to create a dashboard of climate change resources on the SCEC website. SCEC Director of Community Development Jennifer Peters explains that there are resources already created by the lab, by the no-longer-operating Washington County Council of Governments (WCCOG) and more that are being linked or relocated to the website.
The plan for the community development dashboard came about when SCEC participated in a municipal data workshop hosted by the Community Caring Collaborative and the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. One comment struck home. "We have no data except what we get from Tora [Johnson]," Peters relays municipal leaders as saying. It was clear that information needed to be harvested from the WCCOG site and others, consolidated to one and prioritized, updated and archived depending on its current usefulness.
Accurate data is critical to comprehensive plan creation and updating, for demographic tracking of changes, for indicators of health, for infrastructure planning and renovations and more. SCEC is working to create individual community profiles that will link to relevant data sets. In addition, Peters notes, all the climate change mapping tools at the GIS lab will be linked to the SCEC site. Peters expects the SCEC Community Development web page to be up and running by early July. "It won't be fully populated by any means, but it will be started."

Community partnerships
A program that goes hand in hand with the SCEC community development and climate change planning resources is the Community Resilience Partnership, a state driven initiative to help communities meet the state's climate resiliency goals. SCEC is considered a service provider for the program and works with communities selected for participation. "Service providers can assist with enrollment status, help with the checklist, facilitate meetings, help with the applications" and more, Peters explains. So far SCEC has begun working with three communities, with three more in the pipeline. The benefits, she explains, are well suited to Washington County's small communities. Most, if not all, she points out, do not have dedicated economic development staff, much less the staff capacity for climate change resilience planning.
As an example of the benefits to the Community Resilience Partnership, Peters turns to the Town of Machias. The town has been awarded $50,000 to be used for a master plan for the dike, the salt marsh and river walk and more, "so that they can more fully plan the dike and the downtown area." The Town of Whiting, she adds, will be doing a complete floodplain checklist and community wide communications system, which will include an early warning system and an evacuation plan. Evacuation plans are becoming increasingly important, and while in some parts of the country this might be because of wildfire, in coastal Maine it's because of the increase in the impact of storms and flood damage. In 2021 a storm caused parts of Roque Bluffs and Machiasport to be cut off because of road damage, she points out. Reliable date is critical for property owners, municipalities, county emergency management and others to use for planning purposes. "I've been really learning about that importance," Peters says.
Johnson says, "There's a lot of opportunity for us and communities in the future and our economy if we plan now. The impact of climate changes will be less. But it we don't plan, things will happen and we will have to react, and that is inevitably more expensive" and more disruptive.
For more information visit machias.edu/gis service center and in July visit the community development site at www.sunrisecounty.org. For more information about the Community Resilience Partnership, visit the www.maine.gov site and follow the Top Initiatives and Climate Change links.