By Julie Wormser, MyRWA Senior Policy Advisor
A good three decades ago, the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies (they were neither) had a breakout earworm of a song called “If I had a Million Dollars.” They dreamed of building a tree fort, buying a car and some nice furniture, and maybe getting a llama.
What would you do with a million dollars? How about $100 million? If our efforts are successful, we’ll be able to find out what Massachusetts’ 351 cities and towns could do with $100 million per year in funding for local projects to protect their people and places from storms, flooding, drought, and extreme temperatures. This is MyRWA’s top legislative priority over the next few years.
The Massachusetts Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) grant program provides about $20 million per year for communities to plan for and construct projects to help them prepare for climate change-driven extreme weather events. Though that sounds like a lot, it doesn’t stretch very far in addressing the needs of the Commonwealth’s seven million residents.
MyRWA has joined with about a dozen other regional non-profits to create the Massachusetts MVP Coalition, with the single goal of increasing MVP funding to $100 million per year in the next Environmental Bond Bill. Such robust funding will help more farmers manage drought, more coastal communities create elevated waterfront parks, more small cities welcome climate refugees, more urban neighborhoods build shady sprinkler parks, and more towns expand wetland areas to absorb intense rainfall.
Climate change is going to change our communities in ways we’re only now beginning to realize. It’s going to be different. If we work together, it doesn’t have to be worse. When we make investments to protect our most vulnerable people and places from flood, heat, and storm damage, we can also bring people together and make our communities more livable, beautiful, and equitable.
In the five years since MyRWA helped launch the Resilient Mystic Collaborative with municipal and non-profit partners, we’ve been able to raise over $30 million for projects to keep people and places safe from extreme weather. The MVP program has been critical to our ability to understand our regional climate risks, learn to meaningfully engage with very low-income residents and workers, and fund wonderfully creative, effective solutions. In a time of history that’s too full of bad news, there is an awful lot of good news to celebrate in our watershed.
