photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

Douglas County Sustainability Impact Analyst Jamie Hofling and Caribbean sociologist and disaster researcher Jenniffer Santos-Hernández speak at a panel at Haskell Indian Nations University on Thursday, November 14, 2024.

Climate work can be as big as helping an island recover from a catastrophic storm, or as local as helping people replace their windows and appliances with more efficient ones — but it’s always consequential, and there’s always much more that needs to be done.

That was the message at a panel discussion Thursday at a symposium at Haskell Indian Nations University on local and global efforts to address the climate crisis. The symposium was part of the Rising Voices, Changing Coasts initiative, which describes itself online as bringing together “university-trained scientists and Indigenous knowledge-holders to study the interactions between natural, human-built, and social systems in coastal populated environments.”

Rising Voices, Changing Coasts aims to foster collaboration between people at tribal colleges and universities like Haskell and larger public and private universities, including the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The afternoon panel discussion was titled “What Are We Doing Now?” and looked not just at local efforts to help Douglas County residents adapt to climate change, but also at projects far away, in Puerto Rico, that will help reconstruct the coastal landscape there. It featured two speakers, Caribbean sociologist and disaster researcher Jenniffer Santos-Hernández and Douglas County Sustainability Impact Analyst Jamie Hofling.

Hofling presented the county’s Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, which was adopted to mitigate the county’s greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

“We went out to the community and we did many different layers and levels of engagement with the community to really hear the voices and try to understand how people were already experiencing climate change,” Hofling said.

Based on data collected in 2021 and included in the plan, approximately 1.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming — were released into the atmosphere in Douglas County. The largest share of emissions came from residential energy use, accounting for 28%, followed closely by transportation at 27%. Commercial energy use was the third largest source, contributing 26% of the total emissions.

Hofling said that climate action and affordable housing were related, and the work in these areas can involve reducing the energy burden that people are dealing with and making housing more energy efficient. Things like switching out appliances or replacing windows can help here, Hofling said, but this can get expensive.

“This is something that we’re doing as a local government – trying to find ways to make these more accessible for our community,” Hofling said. “We’re also (working to) protect against the displacement, which we’re seeing a rising displacement of residents due to the rising cost of housing.”

People and where they live are also a big part of Santos-Hernández’s research. She said that in her research in Puerto Rico, she’s working on techniques to study how the coastal landscape has changed and the impact on populations there.

“(In Puerto Rico) we’ve been dealing with back to back disasters,” Santos-Hernández said.

There have been several climate disasters in Puerto Rico in the last several years, including two major hurricanes in 2017, Hurricane Irma, a category 5 storm, and Hurricane Maria, a category 4 hurricane. In addition, from 2014 to 2016 there was an extreme drought and a series of earthquakes from late 2019 to 2020.

“We’re also trying to understand how people are making sense of what they’re living through and how they perceive the hazards that they’re facing and some of the challenges that they encounter as they attempt to take protective actions,” Santos-Hernández said.

Santos-Hernández said that the socially accepted time for a recovery process is anywhere between 10 to 15 years, and there is still funding circulating to aid in recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which happened in 2005.

“We don’t have time for a 10-year or 15-year recovery process,” Santos-Hernández said. “So that’s why the delivery of emergency services and really thinking about how we do this is so important.”