WASHINGTON, DC–Last week ten cities were honored today at the C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards ceremony, which recognizes the world's most inspiring and innovative cities taking major climate action. The fifth-annual awards ceremony took place at the North American Climate Summit in Chicago.

Washington DC was among the ten winning cities in a contest that selected 174 entries from 92 cities around the world. It shared the adaption plans and programs category, also called Cities4Tomorrow, with Wuhan, China.

The project was Climate Ready DC, for which the District's Department of Energy and Environment partnered with climate science and technical experts to assess the risks that climate change poses to infrastructure and public facilities. It ultimately identified 77 actions the District can take to reduce those risks.

GlobalSt.com caught up with Jon Penndorf, a principal in the Perkins+Will Washington, D.C., office that participated in creating the climate adaptation plan, to discuss those actions.

Seventy-seven is a lot of action items. How were they organized?

The categories are arranged around typologies and groups of resources, so transportation and utilities, buildings, communities, and then governance. Some of them are actions that require future study, or further study, sort of down-scaling some of the predictions based on weather patterns. But there were also suggestions for how to implement climate adaptation into existing frameworks in the District, like the DC comprehensive plan, the zoning code, and the building code.

What were some of the action items that you suggested for the District?

There's a big list, obviously, but we recommended things like investing in micro grids for energy independence and energy back-up services for neighborhoods. Water micro grids — for being able to capture and re-use stormwater on a scale greater than a building. Under the community connectivity category we looked at how to adequately message emergency preparation and things like that, to different categories of folks in the District — District resident, commuter, and tourists for example. This also included extending the messaging plan to people who may not have English as their first language.

And then we recommended different ways of trying to get the different DC agencies to work together to find funding for some of these projects, so that they can actually be implemented in the years going forward.

Are there any projects that could be implemented right away?

Well, some of them have been implemented already in some way, shape, or form. One of the recommendations was to create a leadership position or entity within the District government. We now have a chief resilience officer in place, and that's partially due to DC being accepted as one of the resilient cities from the Rockefeller Foundation. So that person is now in place. He sits in the city administrator's office. The mayor has also developed a resilience cabinet of counselors, advisors, and agency heads that are particularly important to talking about climate adaptation. So some of the framework has already started, which I think is great.

What about projects underway outside of the administrative development?

To my knowledge, they've also started the study of the Watts Branch Tributary, which is a tributary of the Anacostia River that comes into Northeast DC, but floods regularly, and there's a great risk of, with sea level rise, that area of the Anacostia watershed creating some risks for homeowners in that area. I believe the city's already started on that additional research, as well.

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