My friend had an outdoor wedding this past weekend. It was lovely. We were rained on, but compared with the weather in the area earlier that week—extreme flooding, tornadoes—we were very lucky.
Anne Stephenson
A rainy graduation day has always been a planning concern for campus administrators, but that worry pales beside the challenges posed by extreme weather events. As our climate changes and extreme weather becomes more common, the way we think about the campus environment must change. Many environmentalists have been hesitant to talk about adapting to the new climate for fear of detracting from efforts to mitigate global warming. But despite those efforts, the climate has changed and will change more.
Chronicle posts from earlier this week documented the flooding at the University of Iowa. This problem is not unique to the Midwest—flood zones are shifting and the 100-year-flood level has changed in most parts of the country. What’s more, the climate zones for which our buildings were designed are shifting too, and many of our campus buildings will need to be retrofitted with heating and air-conditioning systems equipped to meet warmer falls and springs. As the cost of heating and cooling buildings increases, will the cost of trees and windows that open seem more reasonable?
Extreme weather will tax existing campus infrastructures, and administrators will be forced to spend more money on sidewalk and asphalt repair, building repair, and storm-water mitigation, to name a few items. Our campuses must be better equipped to withstand droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and more frequent 100-degree days. As flooding and drought become more commonplace, will water management (storm, gray, and ground) become an affordable approach to preventing the former and dealing with the latter?
As an undergraduate, I attended Mount Holyoke College, which has arguably the most beautiful campus in the country. Our most important traditions were outdoor events: singing while canoing, parading with the laurel chain, the obligatory streaking, etc. The landscape architects and campus gardeners at Mount Holyoke had the responsibility of supporting these traditions and keeping our college beautifully landscaped, but now their challenge is even greater as the plant species chosen for our campus move with the climate zone. Flowers, plants, and trees are blooming earlier, which complicates planning for the ultimate outdoor campus event—graduation.
When the Olmsted Brothers laid out Mount Holyoke’s upper and lower lakes in the middle of the 19th century, they could not have anticipated the alternating bouts of flooding and drought that are projected for the 21st. The same cannot be said of present-day campus planners. Contemporary building and landscape design must be adaptable to a climate that may be very different in 10 or 20 years, and we must be prepared for our outdoor spaces to look different than they have in the past.
Surely Mount Holyoke’s green will continue to be the focus of campus events, but planning for increased shade and improved drainage will be crucial. Every college now needs to look at its buildings and open spaces with a realistic view toward gauging and preparing for the shifting climate patterns ahead. —Anne Stephenson
Anne Stephenson, the Buildings & Grounds guest blogger for June, is campus-outreach coordinator at Clean Air—Cool Planet, a science-based, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to finding and promoting solutions to global warming. You can read her previous posts here and here.
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