The Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission’s Environment Committee is getting the region’s environmentalists organized and focused.
At its Aug. 7 meeting, Kathy Sipple of Earth Charter Indiana offered her help in improving communication between local environmental groups through the Northwest Indiana Region Resilience banner.
Sipple sees this as “connecting grass tops more than the grassroots people in the community,” she said.
The NWI Region Resilience program, begun in 2020, helped build a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, but local groups might not know about it, much less how to access it.
Local groups are blossoming after Michigan City’s Sustainability Commission led the way, Sipple said. Just this year, Valparaiso created an environmental advisory board. Chesterton started a sustainability commission a few months ago. Highland has a neighbors organization.
“I’m just trying to archive, celebrate, curate some of the people in your communities,” so others know how to get involved, Sipple said.
She’s willing to provide administrative support for the effort. “I don’t think I need to be an expert in all of these. My expertise lies more in networking and knowing who to bring in,” Sipple said.
The regional climate action plan needs attention. “To get this embedded in communities, it takes local support and local involvement,” she said.
“When people just get nominated, they come onto a board and they don’t know that these documents exist or where to find them,” she said. That’s where she comes in.
“My target audience for this is really these emergent groups,” Sipple said.
“A lot of this is new and emergent. I’m just looking for the patterns so we can be successful,” Sipple said.
“We can just get better at sharing what has already (been) done. It took a lot of work,” she said.
At the same meeting, NIRPC natural resources planner Jennifer Birchfield led the committee through an exercise aimed at establishing priorities for the Comprehensive Climate Action Plan for Greater Chicago, being worked on by NIRPC, the Mayors Caucus and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.
The plan covers 9.5 million people across 13 counties. LaPorte County wasn’t originally included, but it’s a part of NIRPC and is now part of the plan, Birchfield said.
“The goal is to outline how we can reach net zero emissions by 2050,” with interim targets between now and then, she said.
The plan looks at actions individuals can take, but especially what governments can do.
It will build on NIRPC’s Climate Action NWI work, NWI 2050, greenhouse gas emissions inventory and similar efforts to bring it all together into a single plan.
Participants discussed things like how climate change has already begun to affect their community, including through record floods, extreme heat, additional air quality alerts, less shelf ice during winter and more.
Sipple noted weather has affected her fruit trees. “Farmers depending on this, it’s really hard to manage, especially on a larger scale,” she said.
Less shelf ice can lead to increased shoreline erosion.
Another discussion focused on how climate change impacts residents’ ability to live comfortably. That includes financial burdens from flood repair and mitigation, increased costs for air conditioning, health impacts from heat discouraging outside exercise, smoke from wildfires worsening air quality, tree damage from severe storms and more.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
