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Courtney Humphries, "Climate Change and the Future of Boston" (Anthem Press, 2026)
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Books Network
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Courtney Humphries about her book titled Climate Change and the Future of Boston published by anthem Press in 2026. Now this is a pretty straightforward title. It tells us exactly what we're going to be talking about today. And this is an important topic because like many cities around the world, Boston is facing right now already and in the future quite a number of significant impacts from climate change. Right. Boston is a coastal city, for one thing, and that could have quite a large impact. And this is something that Boston, it turns out, as we're going to discuss, is aware of as a city and is already taking steps to deal with things now and is kind of looking ahead to what could be done. And so this is both kind of a case study of a particular place, but one that probably has some interesting implications that go well beyond Boston as well. So we have a bunch of things to talk about in terms of the present, the future, and of course, how we got here in the past too. So, Courtney, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Miranda, could you start us off please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, why focus on Boston, for one, in the context of climate change?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Right. So this book comes out of a long standing personal and professional interest in Boston actually as a city. I have actually been Boston resident for a long time. The first part of my career I worked as a science journalist. So I guess my title would be I'm a writer. I'm also an environmental social scientist and an educator. But I started my career as a journalist and I found myself often drawn to writing stories about Boston. It's planning, history, and especially a lot of local environmental issues such as climate change. And then about 10 years ago, I was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at mit, which allowed me to really it's a nine month program. It allowed me to immerse myself in an academic environment and take courses on things like climate change, urban planning, urban ecology, and that experiment. That experience led me to take a detour and I went back to school and got my PhD in environmental science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where there's really a strong focus on transdisciplinary environmental research and really understanding the local impacts of climate change and engaging directly with some local stakeholders. So my dissertation looked specifically at Boston's waterfront, both the history of shoreline management and decision making, contemporary decision making around resilience and adaptation in the face of sea level rise. So this project came out of that, but the book was actually the project sort of came to me. The book was conceived of as a project that grew out of the Urban Climate Change Research Network based at Columbia University, which has a highly interdisciplinary group of researchers around the world that work together to assess the research on how urban areas are responding to climate change. As part of that, they've collected a lot of case studies about specific issues in different cities. The idea of this book was to expand that case study approach to look very deeply at the dynamics of climate action in a specific city, both to understand those dynamics better and then hopefully to allow for more comparisons across cities. So my approach. So in some ways, the book had somewhat of a set structure, but my approach is influenced by my own research, which has emphasized how urban histories and the development pathways of cities impact a city's risks and also its overall adaptive capacity in a changing climate.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for that backstory. It's always interesting to hear kind of how projects develop very often from kind of multiple strands coming together. Now, obviously, I mentioned a little bit in the introduction around the impacts of climate change, potentially for Boston. But as you mentioned in your introduction, you know way more about the city than I do. So can you give us a sense of. Of the ways in which climate change might impact the city?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, and so, I mean, one thing is that, you know, climate change is Boston is already experiencing climate change. Right. So it's in Massachusetts, which is the, I think, the third fastest warming state in the country. It's right at the edge of the Gulf of Maine, which has seen some of the fastest warming ocean temperatures. So Boston's temperatures since about 1970 have already risen over a degree Celsius. The sea levels have risen about 8 inches, and it's been getting more precipitation, maybe about 3 inches, I think, average, more. But we expect with climate change, as we see accelerating impacts, all of those things will become more extreme. So, for instance, especially with in scenarios where we see high levels of global greenhouse gas emissions, even a modest increase in global average temperatures could have a big impact on the temperature extremes in Boston. So to the point where a good part of the summer might see highs over, well, 90 degrees Fahrenheit is what we would say here. But with Boston's humidity, that makes life pretty difficult. That's considered a heat wave in Boston. And then, as you mentioned, Boston is also highly vulnerable to future sea level rise. So the city could see quite a bit of sea level rise by the end of the century. And because of that, you could see high tide flooding over half the days of the year in parts of the city. You can see large areas of the city that would be impacted by a coastal storm, a major coastal storm. And you also would see probably some more precipitation, but more importantly, the precipitation events could become more intense. So that would lead to more stormwater flooding and river flooding. So all of these things kind of combine to create some significant potential risks. Whereas a lot of the climate change we've seen so far has been fairly manageable. This would actually stress a lot of the systems of the city.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. It is important to remember, as you've mentioned, that it's not just potential flooding.
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Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's lots of other things that are even apparent now. What does this mean then? If we combine this with the kind of urban histories you were mentioning as being so intriguing about Boston. Right. So if we're talking about kind of urban infrastructure or demographics, like how does sort of the present day danger and risk interact with the things that are already there?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Right. So I think Boston is influenced by its development history both in terms of the risks it faces and its ability to really enact climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. So my, my approach in analyzing Boston's background is to take a systems perspective. So I'm thinking about urban areas as social, ecological, technological systems or sets. This is a way of thinking about the cities as not only having all these social processes taking place, but being embedded within larger ecologies and a larger environment. Then the technology, particularly built infrastructure, is often something that mediates the relationships, the social and ecological relationships. Viewed in this way, the urban system is really always evolving based on how these different dimensions of the city are interacting. For example, historically, socioeconomic changes and population growth in cities leads to increasing environmental pollution, which then has a negative social impact or public health impact. And so then the city develops new pollution management infrastructure or policies to manage pollution, along with governance systems to oversee that. And so later, when there are new environmental pressures like climate change, they're interacting with this whole system state that's already developed, including some path dependencies that might have been created from the earlier infrastructure and institutions. So a city's adaptation pathway in the future is not just a blank slate. Right. It's always shaped by its past decisions. And so in Boston, one of the ways that Boston's climate risks are shaped by its infrastructural history. One of the clearest examples, I think, is that the city created thousands of acres of new land in its coastal wetlands. And this is something that is common to a lot of coastal cities. But in Boston, Boston really took it to an extreme with the thousands of acres that it created. And these are not just industrial or marginal lands. They are large areas of the downtown. And some of the most economically and socially important areas of the city. So we now have a lot of low lying areas that are highly vulnerable to flooding with sea level rise and storm surges. And then I also point out ways that Boston's development history creates kind of an uneven landscape of risk, which is a common feature of cities. So different cycles of urbanization or suburban movement throughout history creates disparities in urban tree canopy and impervious surfaces, for instance, which then leaves some areas more vulnerable to extreme heat. So in Boston, you know, tree canopy does not neatly align with things like income, which it does more in certain cities. But a city led analysis found a correlation between urban heat and a past history of redlining in neighborhoods. So and because Boston also has a high degree of income inequality, you know, there are lower income populations that are much less likely to have air conditioning and be able to adapt to heat. So that's an example of how the social and economic history also interacts with climate to produce risk and different kinds of risk for different people. And then finally, one of the things I emphasize in the book is that the political development of Boston's metro area results in Boston being actually a very small city in a pretty large metropolis. So the whole Boston area has dozens of cities and towns that are all different and all have different municipal governments. And this patchwork aspect of Boston's metro area is important for climate change because it makes it challenging to do integrated planning for things like land use or decarbonization or climate adaptation. So those are just some of the examples of the ways that I connect historical development to some of the contemporary challenges.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful to understand because of course, as you said, these risks don't just sort of apply to everyone exactly the same.
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Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
We have to take into account what was there before in terms then of as well, the other aspect of history that's important to this. How has Boston's approach to these potential climate issues kind of evolved over time as well? Right. Again, we're not starting from scratch right this second. What has been the history to kind of get to this point of approach?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, and we're now a good, I'd say couple decades into a period when climate change became a dedicated agenda of municipal governments in the United States, at least in cities that are fairly liberal politically like Boston. And before that there was obviously a lot of concern about the environment, about pollution issues, and even about sustainability. But the overall awareness of climate change and the need for cities at the local level to respond is still is. You know, It's I mean, 20 years is maybe a long time, but it's also, you know, it's short in the overall, you know, evolution of policy in the city. So in the book, I make the case that Boston offers a nice picture of how urban climate action has evolved, because Boston, as you know, even though its leadership has varied, I think in how progressive it is, it's consistently democratic. There's never really been a question that climate change is real or that it's an important policy focus. And because of that, you can see in Boston's evolution a portrait in what being at the forefront of municipal climate action means. And so Boston's first climate action plan came out in 2007. And so I spent some time in the book. You know, they've updated that climate action plan. There's new ones that come out every few years. And so I spent some time looking at that evolution. And, you know, a few things that come out of that is that you see, you know, climate change becomes gradually accepted and normalized as part of the urban agenda and is something that cities should be acting on, not just global government. And at first, climate action was really kind of piecemeal and focused on making things a little bit better and more efficient and also coming up with innovative policy experiments that the city could easily enact without needing a lot of consensus or, say, state action. And then, especially after the Paris agreement and cities began adopting these specific emissions goals aligned with it, cities like Boston really step up their monitoring and accounting of emissions. And so climate action becomes more comprehensive and more quantitative. And then another thing I see is a changing role of residents and other stakeholders. So Boston's early climate action plans focused more on the city government as the agent of change. It was a little more technocratic, and it gradually evolved to create more deliberate efforts to involve residents in climate issues. And recently, it's evolved further to focus more on environmental justice and social equity. So it's not only acknowledging that residents should be involved, but that the decision making can impact them. And there could be negative impacts to climate action. So the need to address social and racial inequalities has to be considered alongside those environmental issues. And today, the city government is really part of this whole ecosystem, I think, of stakeholders working on the same issues. So that's also. The city's role is also a little different. And then I think a final point is that Boston is gradually getting more comfortable taking a regulatory approach to climate issues. So an example is with buildings, which are the lion's share of Boston's greenhouse gas emissions. But the city also has a very powerful real estate sector that can push back on efforts to require more regulation around energy. So in the 2010s, Boston enacted a policy to promote LEED certification and new buildings, but that it didn't really require it, and so it didn't necessarily have a lot of teeth. And then gradually you saw that changing where Boston created a law that required reporting of emissions in large buildings, and then finally a few years ago, it passed one of the most stringent regulations requiring large buildings to now reduce emissions to NET 0 by 2050. So those are just some of the ways that even, even a city that's kind of at the forefront of climate action, you can see that climate action is getting deeper and broader and it's really needing to make more stringent regulatory efforts to actually meet those emissions goals that the city has set.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Okay, that's really helpful to understand and especially as you mentioned, kind of the importance of the municipal government there. And who are some of the other key actors in all of this and what do they do?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, so I think, you know, I'll back up and say that I think around a decade or so ago, maybe 10 to 15 years, there was a surge of attention to city governments and Particularly mayors as climate champions, as people who are going to kind of save the world with, with their local action. And I think it's true that the government of the city is really important, and having champions is very important in driving urban climate action. But at the same time, the reality is much more complex. So scholars of urban climate governance often emphasize this multi level governance. So not just government, but governance and Boston really depends on different levels of government. It depends a lot on what's happening in the state context, both in terms of funding for climate and state level laws and regulations. Of course, it depends on federal funding, which is something that cities now are dealing with, a lack of federal funding for climate. And it also depends on the state for, say, public transportation. So the public transportation system in Boston has been in a crisis recently, in part because state funding has not kept up with the needs for it. So that limits the ability of the city to promote the use of public transportation and reduce transportation emissions. And then within the city, there's this very active and interested network of businesses and nonprofits and universities and citizens groups that help drive the city's agenda. The city depends on a lot of philanthropic funding for its initiatives, and citizens help determine which efforts succeed or not. So there's a lot of tensions, particularly around certain issues like housing and transportation. But I also feel that this ecosystem in Boston around climate action is one of the city's key strengths, because it means there are a lot of people working on this in a very networked way.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely seems like any sort of policy is more likely to happen when it's not just one person pushing it forward, Right?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Absolutely. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Everything sort of really needs a network. So what has this sort of network done? Done? Obviously there's a bunch of plans sort of in place, but what kinds of actions are we talking about so far?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, so in terms of climate change mitigation, Boston has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions over time. Not all of that is because of actions taken at the municipal level. Sometimes it's just broader changes, like the greening of the electricity grid and across the whole state. But it has enacted some important policies. So for instance, I mentioned buildings, they account for 70% of emissions, and a large part of that is a relatively small number of very large buildings, such as hospitals and institutional buildings, which Boston has a lot of. And so the city first enacted a law called Berto Building Emissions Reduction Ordinance that required major buildings to monitor and report their energy and water use. And then more recently, it was updated to actually require these buildings to reduce their emissions. To net zero by 2050. And so that's been a big effort again, by a lot of people to get that law passed. And the city estimates that if buildings comply with it, about 5% of buildings in the city could reduce the emissions by nearly 40%. So that's one kind of policy win that I think Boston has had. And in terms of sea level rise, which is another of the big areas where there's been an extensive planning process under a program called Climate Ready Boston, and it's gone into different neighborhoods and really tried to think about coastal infrastructure that could be created to protect areas that are vulnerable to flooding. And that's an area where there's some progress implementing resiliency measures. For instance, the city created a zoning overlay that basically maps to the 2050 floodplain of a major coastal storm. And so rather than just following the. The floodplain today, this creates a way to regulate buildings in that future floodplain. So that's been a good area of progress. And there have been some projects to redesign parks and install deployable flood walls and some of these vulnerable areas. But I would say a lot of other projects have been slow or have stalled. And I'd say the city is definitely behind its targets. And coastal resilience, even though it has had some success.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's always a kind of tricky thing to assess the impact and success sort of in the middle of, I suppose.
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, there's more plans going forward. So what do those sort of plans or opportunities or challenges look like ahead?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, so going forward, Boston has some challenges in terms of both mitigation, adaptation and I think also addressing equity issues in relation to climate. So Boston has been, you know, as I mentioned, it's lowered its greenhouse gas emissions over time, but it's still kind of falling short of its goals. That would set it on a path to become a carbon neutral city by 2050. And, you know, I think it's still, for instance, the, you know, the law I mentioned around buildings, large buildings, it's also still important to meet, you know, to actually become carbon neutral. It's going to have to address the smaller buildings and all the, you know, it's a historic city, it has an older building stock, and that's a thornier problem. You know, how to get into all those buildings and perhaps retrofit them to be more energy efficient is just a different kind of problem than trying to regulate a small group of large institutional buildings. So that's a challenge in terms of adaptation. One example would be, is really transitioning from all the planning that the city has been doing. It's been very forward thinking, addressing sea level rise. But transitioning from planning to implementation is a challenge, especially given potentially limited federal funding in the near future for big infrastructure projects and climate work generally. So how does the city actually finance the kinds of coastal projects it would like to enact to protect the waterfront? And also how does it change some of the regulatory processes to make adaptation possible? So for instance, a lot of people in Boston would really like to create more nature based shoreline features, you know, like living seawalls, rather than building, building up, you know, building seawalls, bigger seawells, because Boston has already has a very heavily hardened shoreline. But regulatory issues make it hard to create some of those nature based features. And it often requires, requires putting a lot of fill into the water, for instance, to create things that are green. And so that's been a challenge. And I think adaptation generally is hard. When you think about areas that have different landowners or that might even cross jurisdictional boundaries with other cities, how to coordinate those processes is a challenge. So I think that's something that a lot of people are working on right now. And then in terms of extreme heat, I think, you know, that's where one of the biggest issues to me is equity. And there's large areas of the population, as I mentioned, that are, you know, more exposed to urban heat islands. And some of those areas are quite wealthy neighborhoods in the downtown, some of them are lower income areas or, you know, these dense urban neighborhoods where people can't necessarily afford air conditioning. So how to ensure some kind of equity in adaptation, I think is a big challenge. But I would really love to see a lot of stronger effort towards programs that do that and also that combine adaptation and mitigation in the built environment. So making homes more energy efficient in a way that, you know, also improves their temperature control, or supporting community led programs for solar or geothermal energy. So I think that to me that's some of the mitigation challenges. And then I'd say some of the challenges for the city, especially in relation to social equity, are not things that are directly about climate, but they really interact with climate issues. So Boston is an expensive city. It's become very unaffordable in recent years. A lot of people have moved out of the city or are planning to do so. And that, you know, the. It helps the city economically to be able to hire all these people working on climate in the city or to afford to do some of the programs. It's been proposing or that it's been enacting. But the possibility is that all of these adaptation and mitigation efforts are only going to benefit an increasingly wealthy white and elite population as the population of Boston changes. So I think that maintaining housing affordability and economic diversity is actually as critical to Boston's future as some of these other issues, because the city has suffered a lot of economic ups and downs over its history, and it's always benefited by having a diverse workforce that can adjust and flourish, you know, under changing conditions.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, those are a bunch of things that are very important to keep in mind, some of which might seem kind of on the face of it, like, oh, that's definitely about climate, and some maybe not, but are still clearly related to it.
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, they're all intersecting in a lot of ways, which sometimes makes it hard, I think, to think about addressing. It's not just climate is not just sort of overlaid across. Across, you know, all these issues. It's interacting with all of them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, that's true not just in Boston. Right. So what are some of the key things that you think other cities might be able to learn from this analysis?
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Yeah, well, definitely, you know, I think there has been, and it's changing, but I think there has been an aspect of urban climate planning where that has viewed climate as just this add on. Right. Something that gets added on to an existing urban agenda. And I think so. I think certainly from this case study showing the ways that climate integrates and interacts with all of these other social and economic issues is something that I would love to come out of. This from the historical study of Boston. You know, I'm hoping that it encourages researchers and practitioners to view climate change adaptation and mitigation as part of this broader evolution of cities. And I think to actually make transformational change, urban governments really need to think about changing historical institutions and processes that make it hard to adapt, you know, like certain kinds of regulations or certain kinds of institutional practices. A lot of governments have been trying to address climate justice and to integrate social and environmental issues around climate. And I think Boston offers a great model for how a city is doing that. And I don't think it necessarily needs to be done under a Green New Deal platform, which is what Boston's current municipal government has. But there are some generalizable strategies in terms of integrating climate into the administration of the government in a very deep way and addressing social, economic, and environmental issues in an integrated way. For instance, just as an example, Boston has started a youth climate corps that offers a paid fellowship for young people who want to train in green careers and they contribute to things like green infrastructure projects around the city. So just it's thinking about how you can address social, economic and environmental issues. At the same time, I think Boston's been a good model for that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is this something you're continuing to work on then? Obviously Boston is going to continue to care about these sorts of issues. I don't know if there's anything on your desk related or not you want to give us a sneak preview of.
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Dr. Courtney Humphries
Well, I'm continuing to follow Boston's decision making, particularly around the coastal issues, around sea level rise. I'm following a lot of projects and where the responses go. But now that I've done this deep dive into Boston, I'm also really interested in broadening to other places. So not just looking at Boston, for instance, I'm very interested in how decisions like regulatory and planning decisions are made around urban coastlines for coastal resilience. I've been researching that in the San Francisco Bay area. And then beyond my research, I'm also reconnecting with my role as a public writer and a journalist. You know, I'm spending more time writing for the public about urban environmental issues. I just started a substack publication recently called the Nature we make. And my goal is really to take this systems level approach to thinking about urban areas down to the level of everyday experience. So not just on this high level view of urban systems, but thinking about how people can connect with the built in natural environment and urban areas in a better way. And this is something I bring into my teaching as well. So I think with both teaching and research and writing, I'm very interested in how cities can really forge new ways of interacting with the natural environment through their infrastructure, through their social processes, through their decision making. And that's really my, my larger, my larger goals.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, those certainly seem like interesting things to investigate, so best of luck with that and of course, thank you listeners. In the meantime, while you are off exploring, other cities can read about this one that you've written a book about. The book is titled Climate Change and the Future of Boston, published by Anthem Press in 2026. Courtney, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [36:51]
Dr. Courtney Humphries
Thank you so much for having me.
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