Science Friday - Degrees of Change: Sponge Cities and Pocket Prairies. April 26, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: April 26, 2019

Climate change is happening—now we need to deal with it. Degrees of Change, a new series of hour-long radio specials from Science Friday, explores the problem of climate change and how we as a planet are adapting to it. In this first chapter, SciFri looks at how climate change affects water systems. This year, there were record downpours in the American Midwest that washed out levees and caused catastrophic flooding. Meanwhile, California is recovering from a seven year-long drought that led to water shortages across the state. Cities are starting to rethink their water futures and how they can make their communities more resilient. Here are two examples of how cities around the world are adapting to their climate change future. The ‘Sponge Cities’ Of China In China, more people are leaving the countryside and moving into big cities. Shenzhen in the south has gone from a city of 50,000 people to over 13 million in just three decades. This rapid urbanization has led to more construction, more concrete, and entire landscapes that have been paved over. Mix that with stronger storms driven to climate change, and the stage is set for future water disasters. To combat this, the Chinese government started the “Sponge Cities” program in 2014, which calls for cities to soak up and reuse 70% of their rainwater. Journalist Erica Gies and Chris Zevenbergen, flood risk management expert, talks about the pedestrian bridges, green roofs and terraced urban landscapes that architects and engineers are designing to build resiliency and what needs to be done to expand these ideas to the rest of the country. The ‘Pocket Prairies’ Of Houston In 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit some areas of Houston with nearly four feet of rain, causing widespread flooding throughout the city. As the city rebuilds, “pocket prairies” are among the tools being used to manage future flooding. These patches of native prairie grass can be planted anywhere—in front yards, traffic medians, parking lots, vacant lots, and between city buildings—and high quality prairie habitat can hold up to nine inches of rainwater during a storm, reducing the likelihood of catastrophic floods. “At a neighborhood level, they can manage the ‘flash’ part of ‘flash floods,’” says Laura Huffman, Texas regional director of The Nature Conservancy. Plus, pocket prairies provide additional benefits, she says. As rainwater seeps into soil, it pre-treats chemicals in the rain, helping to keep them out of the water supply. In this conversation, Gies and Huffman explain the benefits of pocket prairies and other green infrastructure. The Climate Effects Of A Heated Campaign Season The Democratic presidential primary field is vast—where do the candidates stand on climate issues? Scott Waldman, White House reporter with Climatewire and E&E News, joins Ira to talk about how 2020 presidential campaigns are addressing climate change, plus other climate-related stories of the week—from Facebook's plans to fact-check hot button issues like climate change to a new study that attempts to put a price tag on the effects of Arctic melting.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Climate change is happening, and we need to deal with it now. So this week, we begin our new series, Degrees of Change. In the months ahead, we will explore the challenges of a changing climate and how we as a planet and a people are adapting. It is an ambitious effort, and here's how we're going to tackle it. Scientists studying climate change firsthand will alert us to the changes they see. journalists in your neighborhood will share with us the actions and reactions to climate change

where you live. Politicians will inform us how they will lead the country to cope with rising oceans, floods and fires, displaced people, disrupted food. You know the list. Of course, climate change impacts communities differently. You may have a flood, someone else, a drought, and that's why we'll look to you to help direct our coverage. What have you done to reduce your contribution to climate change or to adapt? Is your community tackling the problem head on or struggling to take action? Tell us, become part of the story. Here's how you can do that.

Visit sciencefriady.com slash degrees of change and let us know. That's sciencefriiday.com slash degrees of change. So let us begin right at the top with the gatekeepers, the decision makers, the controllers of the purse string. the politicians. Joining me now is Scott Waldman. He's a White House reporter with Energy and Environment News and Climate Wire, and he's based in Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. You're welcome. Well, Congress is in recess this week, and it was last week, so not tons of news there, but there are some new developments with the candidates for president, with Joe Biden

declaring any other candidates. That's right. And this week was a big week in terms of them setting a goal for climate policy. CNN had five town halls the other day, and all the candidates are starting to get a little bit more specific with their plans. We have a number of candidates that have signed on for the Green New Deal, others that are a little more vague or squishy around the edges as to whether or not they'd sign on with the Green New Deal, which, of course, is the sweeping plan proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to deal with climate change and also health care and other issues.

So we're starting to see not just politicians commit to that, but actually come out with some specifics on what they're going to do to address what is increasingly seen by voters as a top issue. And that's an interesting thing because just two years ago you could hardly hear a word being asked of politicians or politicians even mentioning climate change. No, that's exactly right. And those of us that have covered this issue for a while for a few years, you know, we were constantly saying this is just unprecedented to have this. level of attention to climate change in places like Iowa with Democratic voters there. Its polling is one of the top two issues along with health care. That is something that I don't think anybody expected. We have Jay Inslee, Governor Jay Inslee, former governor from Washington State, who is basically

running his whole campaign looking at climate as a top priority. So this just was, like you said, just not even something that was fathomable a few years ago, I think across three debates, Hillary Clinton was not even asked about climate change, but certainly, especially in these Democratic debates, you can expect we're going to hear a lot about it. And as you say, they each one of them, can you go through some of their positions on some of the candidates? Sure. This is some of what they outlined this week. So Elizabeth Warren, she was calling for a moratorium on oil drilling on federal lands. Kamala Harris wants a policy to deal with future water shortages.

Bernie Sanders, once he's focusing on jobs that might be lost in the fossil fuel industry, and he wants to create a plan that would help those fossil fuel industry workers find new jobs in the new economy, centered on clean energy and other type of occupations that are expected to grow, grow, as we wind down coal production and other jobs that have existed for decades. Amy Klobuchar, she wants to basically support some of the Obama administration's major climate policies, bring back some of those that the Trump administration has been working to kill off. And Pete Buttigieg, who's the youngest of all of the five candidates that were there this week on CNN, he's 37 years old.

He is sort of looking at climate as this broad existential fight. He hasn't really put forward many specific policy plans yet, but I expect he'll do that soon. It's his generation that that has to live in the future. Exactly. We are borrowing from our children. Let's turn to the White House a few weeks ago. We talked about a new White House committee to discuss climate issues. Where does that stand now?

Well, it's still moving forward. I mean, obviously this has received a tremendous amount of criticism, not least of which is from a lot of retired military leaders and national security experts from both parties that have served both Democratic and Republican presidents. So the committee from what I'm hearing and others are hearing is still moving forward. It's still being formed. It hasn't been killed off or viewed as a bad idea within the White House at this point. One of the new developments in it is that they've been recruiting and working with a former nuclear expert, Paul Robinson, who during the Cold War was key to some of the nuclear talks and winding down nuclear buildup with Russia. He's with the Soviet Union, I should say. He's a physicist.

He does not have a degree in climate science. but he would have tremendous sway over this panel. And again, we don't know the members have reported and others have that we've heard some of the names and they're some of the familiar climate skeptic scientists that have legitimate academic credentials, but nonetheless have very different findings from the vast, vast majority of the field since virtually all climate scientists, you know, have concluded long ago that humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace through burning fossil fuels. If you were going to choose a nuclear physicist, you'd think you'd at least pick one who knows something about nuclear reactors as an alternative, you know?

That's what I think that's also where some of the skepticism that this will be a fair panel comes in from the general public. Some of these folks are known for attacking climate science for years. And if sort of the person leading the show himself is not a climate expert, we're not sure where it could go. He does not really have much of a public record on climate at all. So it's unclear exactly what direction he'll take things in. Let's move on a bit. You have a big story this week on Facebook. What's a climate and energy guy like you doing writing about Facebook?

Well, that's a great question. And Facebook, of course, has become deservedly so notorious for just as a tremendous source of misinformation in this country. Obviously, the Russian government used it to exploit Americans' appetite for misinformation, apparently, as well as some of the political divisions in the country. So Facebook is partnering. They have a series of partners that they use for fact-checking. And some of these partners are the Associated Press, Politifact, both of which are, of course, Pulitzer Prize winners.

But they also have recently, just the other week, signed on the Daily Caller's fact-checking operation, which is called Check Your Fact. The Daily Caller is known for having climate coverage that really just tends to play up doubt and uncertainty and just routinely attack. consensus science reports and in quotes, you know, the very small number of, again, researchers with legitimate academic credentials that question climate science as if they were a counterweight to a report that 300 scientists worked towards. So this group, Check Your Fact, could potentially have the power to downplay stories on Facebook

that are produced by, say, my organization, E&E News or the New York Times or CNN that cover report fairly, talk to experts. If Check Your Fact is not like the way it's reported, they have the power to potentially downplay that in your news feed, which means those type of articles would be shared less. They wouldn't be seen by that many people. And it's unclear if the users of Facebook would even know that that has been happening. Facebook would not answer any of my questions when I reach out to them. You'd think with all the pressure on Facebook now to be more, you know, accountable, that they would seek to do something differently about Yes, one would think, and I know there's a senior executive at Facebook that is sort of conservative-minded, and he recruited Daily Caller and check your fact to come in and do this.

So it's unclear where it will lead, but certainly many folks are very troubled that this could lead to greater information around climate change at a time when the threat is becoming more and more clear. Let's go to the last point. This is in climate science. There's a new study out this week, trying to do something. asking for a long time, and that has put a price tag on climate change. This one puts a price tag on Arctic ice. Yeah, and you raise a good point. We really don't get enough, I think, of the understanding of the economic hit that

climate change could lead to. And certainly the study, which says 70 trillion in damages could result as a result of Arctic warming, certainly drew a lot of, you know, raised a lot of eyebrows. I think that basically the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and you have permafrost thawing there. You have less albedo, which is reflectivity of snow, which means the ground is absorbing more heat, which warms it quicker. So in other words, the Arctic sort of sets itself into this dangerous feedback loop

where it just warms quicker and quicker. And this study sort of got at the fact that we don't really know what that alone will do to climate change around the world. We're talking about increased sea level rise around the world. We're talking about, you know, if it's going to worsen climate change, what's coming out of the Arctic around the world, you're talking about droughts in Africa, deadly heat waves in places like India. I mean, that has a tremendous economic hit.

I mean, some folks have said that the study, if anything, is being too conservative when it looks at the cost. Because you always hear that critics of climate change or of a green tax on carbon. Oh, it's going to cost us too much. but here you actually finally have a price tag on not doing anything. That's right. I wrote about a couple weeks ago.

There's only one group that has put a price tag on the Green New Deal, and they're saying it'll cost $93 trillion, but that group is connected to a web of dark money and fossil fuel companies, and there's a lot of doubt about whether that $93 trillion the conservatives have used to go after the Green Deal has any validity. So $70 trillion is a pretty big number on itself. It certainly is. Thank you very much for taking. second time to be with this today, Scott.

Thanks so much for having. Scott Waldman is a White House reporter with Energy and Environment News and Climate Wayer, and he's based in Washington, D.C. We're going to take a break and continue. When we come back, look at the way cities around the world are designing for change with concepts like sponge cities and pocket prairies, and we need your help.

We are trying to understand how you feel about climate change. So take a short survey we'll use to make our climate change coverage more relevant to you. Here's the survey. Go to Science Friday.com slash climate survey. Science Friday.com slash climate survey. We'll be back with more degrees of change after this break. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. In case you've just joined us, we're kicking off our ongoing series degrees of change and examining how we as a planet and a people are meeting the challenge of a changing climate. And water. Water is where we are seeing dramatic. effects of climate change. This year, record downpours in the Midwest, washed out levees, causing catastrophic floods, while in California a seven-year drought ended with an atmospheric

river of water, literally falling from the sky. Cities are starting to rethink their water futures and how they can make their communities more resilient. And it's a completely different mindset from what we've been doing for centuries. Like instead of trying to hold back the floods, they are welcoming the water, finding ways to turn it into a fresh, valuable resource. Engineers are looking toward nature for inspiration, replacing dams and pipes with green roofs, learning how the natural landscape wisely handles the water. And my next guest is here to walk us through all of this. Erica Geyes is an independent journalist based out of Victoria, British Columbia.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Now, when it comes to water management, the idea has been to contain water, as I say, usually right, by building up dams and levees, but you say that cities are now seeing water as a resource rather than a nuisance. Yeah, that's right. There are a lot of problems with the kind of gray infrastructure that we've used for the last couple hundred years, this effort to control water. And the biggest one is that it breaks the natural water cycle. So, you know, it cuts rivers off from their floodplains, and it tends to increase water use. So, like, a dam actually increases demand.

So a lot of our, quote-unquote, solutions have kind of counterintuitive problems associated with them. And urban sprawl is a big cause of both flooding and water shortages because it prevents the water from absorbing into the ground and going down into the aquifer like it would have done naturally. Yeah, there's parking lots and sidewalks and things like that. What do you see is the way out? What is the green infrastructure that could help us get out of that problem? Right. Well, we're starting to see this in cities around the world.

Like you mentioned, green roofs. There are things like bioswales, which are kind of lower elevation little gullies that are typically planted with water-loving plants, pavement that's permeable that the water can pass through. But a lot of it is also looking at kind of trying to see beneath our cities because we have creeks that have been put into sewers and we have wetlands that have been filled with dirt and paved over.

And the thing is the water still wants to go to these places. So the extent to which we can re-reve-weigh, recover or reclaim or uncover these natural waterways can help a lot because we're allowing water to do what it wants to do. Let's talk about some of the success stories and projects that are going on. There's something called the Spong City program. It's a national plan in China. What are they trying to do?

How are they doing it? What are their goals? Well, China has a bunch of water problems that has massive urban. flooding. Between 2011 and 2014, 62% of its cities flooded. And, you know, China's had this massive urbanization over the last few decades, and they've sort of built their cities the way Western development did with all the same kinds of river channelization and pavement, and they're seeing the problems with that. And China, despite it getting a monsoon, is actually a pretty dry country, So water scarcity is a problem in more than half of its cities, and more than 400 cities rely almost exclusively on groundwater, pumping groundwater, which also causes the land to sink.

So the urbanization has caused both a lot of flooding and water shortages. And of course, China also notoriously has a lot of pollution problems with water. And the president, Xi Jinping, has made the environment one of his three pillars. of government. And so when he learned about Sponge Cities, he made it a national priority. And in 2014, he created, well, initially 16 and then 30 pilot cities. And their goal was to take a 10-acre area and make that capture 70% of the stormwater that hits it. Let me bring in a guest who knows a lot about that.

that it was based in Europe. As you'd say, one of the places that is leading this type of thinking about water is in China, where there's a river of humanity flowing to the cities, for example. Shenzhen in the south has gone from a city of 50,000 people to over 13 million, and that's just in three decades. The countryside has been paved over, mixed that with bigger storms due to climate change, and that predicts future water disasters. and as you say, China is trying something new called Sponge Cities

and trying to find a way to soak up and reuse 70% of the rainwater in these cities. Chris Zevenbergen is a professor of urban flood risk management at the Delft Institute for Water Education in Delft in the Netherlands. Welcome to Science Friday. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. We heard how Erica was explaining how Sponge City's idea is working, Give us a little bit more of the details. How is it different than, say, the green infrastructure ideas that we hear about in the U.S.?

Now, I think what Eric just said was correct. It's a very, I would say, comprehensive plan of President C to transform the cities into spanned cities. And it goes a bit beyond, say, the installation of low-impact development, which we have in the U.S., Rainwater systems which control peak runoff and store and purify rainwater. It's also about upgrading the traditional drainage systems to the standard level. It's also install or reintroduce the canals and water bodies and multifunctional storage facilities. So it's more concept than a technology. Earlier this week, we talked to Kong Giannu.

He's a landscape architect based out of Beijing and founder of Turinscape, a company that is building many of these projects. And this is what he said about why the Sponge City's concept is important in China. We are facing some serious survival issues such as flood, drought, pollution. It's something about our survival. because we are suffering from the previous urban development models. These are really interesting. We have some pictures linked up on our website at Science Friday.com, Erica. This is a very different type of project than we're used to hearing about,

please paint us a little radio picture of what they look like. Yeah, well, Kong Jiang Yu has a vision that is creating a path for water or like recreating the natural path for water, not just at the scale of a little project, but at the scale of a city or a watershed or even the entire country of China. So he's really looking at trying to recreate the natural water cycle. And so some of his projects are ambitious.

And one that I visited while I was there was in a Beijing excerpt called Daqshing, and it's called Yongshing River Park. and basically the river there had already been put into a concrete channel, and the government recognized that as the area developed, that flooding was going to become a bigger problem. And so they hired TurenScape to do this project, and basically they removed the concrete so the sides of the river were dirt once again,

and they widened it so that it could hold more water. And then they planted a lot of little sedges to hold the earth, in place. And then the dirt that they excavated, they made into a berm, sort of dividing the widened river into two channels. And one of them will have the river flowing. And the other one will be during the dry season filled with partially cleaned effluent from a sewage treatment plant. And wetland plants in that pool will clean the water further and then allow it to filter down into the aquifers. And then during the monsoon, that extra channel will be reserved for the extra floodwaters and the sewage will just be treated industrially.

Chris Evan Bergen, you know, one of the criticisms of people who get flooded out is that they continue to rebuild in a floodplain. Isn't that a bigger solution? If you want the water to naturally go where it wants to go, isn't a solution not to build in the floodplain? That's, of course, the right thing to do, but also, in countries like the Netherlands where we have low-laying floodplains. We have a lack of space.

And so there's enormous pressure on those areas to get built and developed. So it is inevitable that also the low-laying areas in China will get urbanized. But we see that there are also concepts which allow, say, that floodwater, will enter into the urban areas without having real damage. An example is, for instance, in Hamburg, where we have on a floodplain, an urban area which can deal with seven meter of fluctuating water level. So I think we can also adapt our cities to floods much more than we were used to. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there.

And China is what we see in China, for instance, urban agriculture, which is now being promoted in Kunshan. And I've seen there green areas where these citizens can use those green areas for urban agriculture purposes. So there are a lot of combinations possible where you see that floodplains can be used to allow floodwater to come in, but also to urbanize it. We have concept of floating houses. We have amphibious housing. We have floating greenhouses.

So there's a lot possible. And China is really exploring also those opportunities. And one of the advantages of allowing the water to come in, and you want to reuse, as you say, 70% of the rainwater, that will clean it. As it percolates back down into the soil, it will be cleansed by the environment, will it not? Yeah, that's right.

And one of the things that is kind of crazy is, like, a lot of places are importing water or desalinating water. At the same time, they're rushing this stormwater out of the city as fast as possible. So, you know, it's an underused resource that we're basically throwing away at this point. I have another clip from a landscape architect, Kanye Niu. He talks about if the mindset of it, to build is really moving towards this direction in China. It's changing, at least from the leadership. Gradually, we are changing the code system also.

But that takes a long time because of the interest conflict between different groups of academia, of engineering, and of business. But at the same time, many of the concrete wall are being removed by some cities because the mayors understand and they now adapt this idea. So I think we are very promising. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios, talking about our new series on climate change. But China is unique in this sense that because there's no opposition to the leader in China. If he wants to do something, you can just say let's spend the money on it.

Isn't that true, Chris? Yeah, that's true. And that is also an advantage. which if we see, for instance, in Western countries to really get the plans flying and to get sort of inclusive process to, then it takes quite some time. But in China, we have no time. The demand for housing is huge. So everything is going in a haste.

And of course, the counter side of that is that there is no time to reflect. on mistakes and to piloting new technologies and to really learn from that and to upscale it. Everything is going in a huge pace. And that is one advantage, of course, is that the change, the transformation goes fast, but the counter side is that we make mistakes. And in those designs, imperfections will be there undoubtedly. and they cannot be corrected slowly because everything is going so fast. So that is a bit what I want to say about this, yeah.

Yeah, no, and I'm saying that in a sense it's their loss, but it's, Erica, it's the rest of the world's gain because they watch this experiment going on in China. Yeah, exactly. I think that's true. And Kong Jiang Yu is part of a government advisement group that is trying to teach practitioners in China to be mindful that, you know, these water problems are common across the world, but every area has unique geology, climate, soil. And so as you says, each one is a unique patient.

And so that's something that I think China will need to be mindful of as it goes forward. And, Erica, how other countries adapt to this? Can they adopt what the Chinese are doing? I think they can. I think so far the projects in most other countries have been significantly smaller scale. But, you know, it's not just smarter water management and less expensive. It can also be a climate mitigation solution. You know, wetlands store 40 times more CO2 than forests.

and both conservation of wetlands and forests are a key part of this nature-based water management. And a recent report found that these natural climate solutions can actually help us meet 37% of the climate target for Paris of keeping the world warming to two degrees. So you can leverage on this. And yet they're only getting 2.5% of public climate financing. Wow, that's very interesting. I want to thank you, Dr. Zevenbergen, for being with us, because Zevenbergin is a professor of Verbrid and Flood Risk Management at the Delft Institute for Water Education in Delft, the Netherlands.

Thank you for taking and staying up late to be with us today. Thank you, thank you. We're going to take a break. Journalist Derek Geis is going to stay with us after the break and talk about how these new ideas about managing water are happening in the United States. We're going to talk about what you can do right in your own backyard. We'll start off by talk.

talking about Houston. Houston is on a forefront of water management. We'll talk about it and stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. kicking off our degrees of change series about how communities around the world are adapting to climate change. And we want to know what's happening in your community. Are there plans to boost your city's resilience against floods, fires, heat waves, and storms? or are things moving a little more slowly? We want to hear about it either way. Go to ScienceFriety.com slash degrees of change.

ScienceFrily.com slash degrees of change to share our story. This hour, if you want to discuss our degrees of change series, you can give us a call 844-724-8255. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. And we're going to become a little more local now from moving a little around the world from China, and we're going to talk about in our first episode

about how cities are going green. We're talking about putting back grasslands and wetlands and green roofs to be more flood and stormproof. And one example, a good example, is deep in the heart of Texas in Houston. We're so-called pocket prairies dot the city. What's a pocket prairie? Well, here to tell us is Laura Huffman, Texas Regional Director for the Nature Conservancy in Austin.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Still with us is Erica Gai, a journalist based out of Victoria, British Columbia. Laura, okay, what is a pocket prairie? So picture a pocket prairie as a very small-scale sponge. You were just talking about sponge cities in China. This can be your front yard, your backyard, it can be a vacant lot in a neighborhood or a parking lot. And imagine that you take all that concrete out and replace it with healthy soils and native plants.

and in this case, you then have a pocket prairie. And how effective is a pocket prairie in dealing with the water, let's say? You know, they can be pretty amazing neighborhood-level solutions to solving floodwaters. And one of the reasons we really like this movement in Houston is, first of all, it gives people something that they can do. Second of all, these pocket prairies, we absolutely know that they will hold more water than the average lawn. The average lawn will retain about a half inch of water, and pocket prairies can hold as much as nine inches of rainfall. So they are better at absorbing and holding rainwater.

They are local solutions, and they can scale up to a citywide solution. Nine inches. Nine inches of rainwater. That's amazing. That could take care of a hurricane when it comes ashore, right? Give me an idea of what you have to plant, to make it a pocket prairie. I'm listening, maybe in Texas or some other places. How do I do that?

How do you do that? Well, in this particular area in Houston, you'd be planting things like blue bonnets, wild indigo, sunflowers, native milkweed, which, by the way, butterflies love. So not only will these pocket prairies help you with managing rainfall, they're also wonderful for increasing urban biodiversity. And, of course, one of the reasons we like it is because it allows people to connect to nature in their own neighborhoods. and the way that these work as the root systems are so much deeper and more effective that they really create picture channels underground and holes that absorb water, and it literally would turn your front or backyard into a sponge. So how many pocket prairies are there in Houston?

They're about 50 right now, and if you can imagine a situation, Houston's one of the largest cities in America. There are over 6 million people, and if everyone that owned a lawn or every business that had a lawn, in front of it would convert that lawn to a pocket prairie, you could have a pretty effective system of rainwater catchment. So you basically have to find out in your neighborhood what's good to plant there because you'll be different than Houston. You do, but there are lots of nurseries all over the state and all over the country that

can help you understand what the native species are so you could turn your front and your backyard into whatever ecosystem happens to be appropriate for where you live. It's a lot more useful, a lot easier, and a lot more environmentally sound than just mowing your lawn every week, right? Well, absolutely. For those of you that don't like mowing your lawn, this is a money solution. And if you do want to keep your lawn, we recommend that you mow it less frequently and leave the clippings on the ground. That's an idea. Erica, guys, in the bayou down around Louisiana and Texas, there is this idea of beautiful ditches.

What is that? Well, Houston has had a lot of development, and, you know, it's sprawled over a massive area because it has a very pro-development attitude. And, in fact, these pocket prairies are what, or pothole prairies are what Houston used to be before all this development. And so with every new apartment building that's built, there's a stormwater requirement where the apartment needs to, the developer needs to build basically like a big stormwater runoff. off tank. But increasingly they're using bios whales, which are what I was talking about earlier, which are lower-lying land that is then, you know, planted with water-loving plants. And so that can be a way to capture the water. And the developers like it because homebuyers like it, because it's more beautiful than a stormwater tank underground that they don't see.

Interesting. One of the cities really leading the way in the U.S. is Philadelphia. They're creating something called green acres to deal with a stormwater runoff, right? That's right. So, you know, in Houston, the main problem is flooding. In Philadelphia and other cities in the Midwest and Northeast, they have a problem called combined sewer overflows. And that's because traditionally they would capture the stormwater and then run it through the sewer, which sounds like a good idea because then you're cleaning it a little bit before you're discharging it to the river. But the problem is that sometimes the storms are too big and these systems overflow and then you have untreated sewage going into the river.

So in the last decade or so, the EPA has been cracking down on this and requiring cities to do something to address it. And of course, you know, they can build more gray infrastructure to treat it and some cities have done that. But Philadelphia realized that it would save money if it really expanded green stormwater infrastructure, which is the, kinds of projects that we're talking about. So when I was there a couple of months ago, like at the zoo, they have this big parking lot, but they've created bioswales all along, like between the street and the parking lot. So typically, you know, the street is kind of bent and then the water goes into the storm drain, but this funnels the water into the bioswale and holds it and creates this little habitat.

And then they had another bigger project I saw called Indian Creek, which had long, ago been buried in a sewer pipe. And, you know, the problem with that is the sewer pipe has a set capacity. So when you reach that capacity, it can't handle anymore. So instead, they've moved the creek back up to the surface and put it in this public park where people and wildlife can enjoy it and where it has room to spread out if the waters rise. And Laura, of course, pocket prairies will cleanse the water that runs through it, too, won't it? It sure will, because those healthy natural soils and those native plants can help remove

some of the pollutants, which can be a really big problem when you're experiencing a flood, and you've got all of the oil and pollutants that are associated with urban development. So they can be very effective little treatment plants. Now, I understand that the Texas legislature is thinking about a state flood recovery fund, which would include more funding for green infrastructure. Yeah, sure would. The legislature is still in session, so we've got a little ways to go, but the bill is doing quite well.

And really what this is recognizing is that we're going to experience more frequent and more intense storms because of climate change. And so how we rethink recovering from these disasters is essential. And the thinking at the legislature is we've got to rebuild with resilience so that the next time this happens, we are in better shape. And it's everything from pocket prairies to great big regional open spaces. And of course, there is a role for traditional infrastructure. but I agree even that can be smarter traditional infrastructure. A tweet coming in from, I've already started the process of converting a chunk of my front lawn into bee-friendly mix of local flowering plants. I didn't even think about the positive benefit of mowing less, except for just having to mow less.

Let's go to the phones to, is it Tina in Long Island. Hi, Tina. Hey, thanks for taking my question. I love this concept. And in many communities, I mean, here in Long Island, we don't have very sizable lawns a lot of the time. And we have to deal with neighbors, which is a big point. But in these semi-urban environments, a lot of us are also dealing with. When you let your run go more wild like that, you have a lot of issues regarding mice and rats and bugs, mosquitoes.

So I wonder if there's a way to get your neighbors on board. and way to avoid the troublesome side of the vermin issues. Laura, any answer to that? Yeah, that can be an issue. I think one thing is making sure that you are, in fact, dealing with some native plant materials. I think that can help with that issue. It also just takes a little while for these ideas

to normalize in a neighborhood. You now have people that are going around looking at the front yards that have native prairies in them in Houston and places like that. And because you may not have access to that many front yards, Think about schoolyards. These make excellent places to have native landscapes. Think about parking lots, the land that sits under utility lines, which is often just mowed and not biodiverse. You can work this concept in a lot of different ways in your community.

Erica, the cities are already paved over and built up. So how do you find space for water in a big urban city? Well, you can use things like green roofs and permeable pavement, but there's also a fair bit. You know, we tend to think of our cities as static, but in fact, a lot of change happens. Buildings tend to turn over in about 50 years or in a place like China 15 years. So that's one solution, and a lot of places are setting regulations like California regarding new developments. So if you have a new building going in, then you have certain stormwater or landscaping requirements. And then there's also disasters, you know, when people flood options to buy them out of the floodplain and recover that area for water.

So you change building codes about how you build any new structures, what has to be included with them. That's right. And I just wanted to say one more thing about this. idea of attitudes changing. I mean, you see that in the West with Ziriscape, which is the use of low water plants or native desert plants in place of lawns. And, you know, at first, that was an idea that people thought was weird, but now it's something that people really embrace as a sign of their local area. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. It's our degrees of change series.

We're talking about water usage, what to do with all that rainwater, how to make new uses of it. And also, I imagine, and it's not just people in their lawns and their homes, that there are different changes in farming and agricultural uses, correct? Yeah, that's right. California has really been a leader in this.

You know, it has to be because it has such a giant agricultural industry and has always suffered from droughts and flood. But this last big drought in the earlier part of this decade really caused some rethink. And climate change is a big factor in that because historically about a third of California's water was in the Sierra Nevada snowpack, and it would sort of melt slowly into the spring and summer. And as temperatures warm, that is no longer going to be a resource that we can count on. And also the winter storms are getting a lot bigger.

You mentioned the atmospheric rivers. You know, one of those can contain as much flow as the Mississippi River. So these are really vast, vast dumps of water. So the challenge is to try to capture that water and save it. But unfortunately, California has dammed most rivers. So reservoirs, additional reservoirs are not an opportunity. And so people are looking to store that water underground. And there's a lot of space underground because during the drought, farmers pumped a lot of water out of the aquifers.

But then the challenge is, like, you know, where do you put it? And there's a couple of different ways to do that that scientists are looking at. You know, one is soil considerations? Is it clay soil? Is it sandy soil? What is the land being used for? Is it conservation land? Is it farmland?

How can we do that to make sure it doesn't interfere with crops? And then one thing that's really exciting are these things called paleo channels, which are ice age channels underneath the surface of the Central Valley that are quite porous because they filled up with gravel. And so if we can find where those are and put water on top, we can get the water underground very quickly. Wow, that is interesting. Before we go, we said, as part of our series, one of the things we're going to talk about is doing some of the little things, something our listeners might think about doing to get involved. and we already mentioned something that I just want to go over again,

and that is changing the way your lawn grows, right? They're making possibly apocoprary there, or don't mow it every week, and let it grow a little longer and leave the clippings there. Anything else that comes to mind that our lizards might do on their own? Well, I'd add to that list, definitely ditch the fertilizers and the pesticides. So if you're going to keep your lawn in place,

mow it less frequently, water it less frequently, leave the grass clippings after you mow and get rid of the fertilizers and pesticides and then just start growing your prairie or whatever ecosystem is appropriate where you live. Once you've done that, you've become a demonstration project. So take that show on the road and start talking to your schools and your churches and your local businesses to start growing prairies in front of or in back of their buildings. These also make wonderful opportunities for children to connect to nature and to really understand the many values that nature brings to a community.

It's biodiversity. You can have butterfly gardens. And then they can also see that nature is an amazing way of helping in times of crisis, like when there's a storm. Well, this is a great kickoff to our degrees of change series. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Laura Huffman, Texas Regional Director for the Nature Conservancy. She's in Austin. Erica Gey's a journalist based out of Victoria, British Clems.

Columbia, who's working on a book proposal about ecological water management. Well, let's know when you're kind of published there. Thanks, I will. Thank you both for your taking time to be with us today. Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Thank you. Just to let everybody know, we're going to be running radio specials every month on how your

community and others around the world are adapting to climate change, sending you news about policy and legislation to. Join us. Share your story. Let us know what you think by going to ScienceFriety.com slash degrees of change. Science Friday.com slash degrees of change. You can sign up for our degrees of change newsletter there too. Charles Berkwist is our director, our senior producer Christopher Antaliyata.

Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. We had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe. And thanks to our digital managing editor, Brandon Ector, for all the extra help this week. We are active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. Every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.