An Equity-focused Assessment of the City of Richmond’s RVAgreen 2050 Planning Process

Local climate action and sustainability initiatives are often critiqued for their inattention to issues of equity and justice. In response, an increasing number of cities are now attempting to respond to this critique by making equity a more explicit goal of their climate action plans: Richmond Virginia is among those cities. The City of Richmond\u27s Office of Sustainability committed to prioritizing equity in the RVAGreen 2050 plan by recognizing how Richmond’s history of racism and structural inequalities have exacerbated climate concerns for largely Black and Latinx communities and centering historically marginalized communities of color in the engagement process. Students in URSP 637 Sustainable Community Development were asked to provide an external evaluation of the RVAGreen 2050 planning process. This report summarizes the findings of this evaluation and highlights recommendations for how to improve equity-centered engagement processed moving forward

Cascading, interactive, and indirect effects of climate change on aquatic communities, habitats, and ecosystems

Climate-change is rapidly and intensively altering aquatic communities and habitats. While previous work has focused on direct effects of potential drivers, indirect and interactive effects on organisms and ecosystems have received less attention. Here, we give an overview of contributions to a special issue in Limnology and Oceanography that addresses this knowledge gap. Contributions covered diverse habitats, from polar to tropical regions, alpine streams to coral reefs. Several studies relied on time-series to identify indirect effects, thus emphasizing our need to maintain high-quality time-series data. Time-series are particularly crucial now that the pace of climate-change on aquatic-ecosystems is accelerating. Another common theme is the role of species-specific characteristics in physiology, behavior or genetics in aquatic ecosystem function. The addition of inter- and intra-specific variability to investigations of climate-change may be challenging particularly since ecosystem studies typically involve a large parameter space of environmental and biological variables across spatial and temporal scales. However, the results demonstrate that inclusion of species-specific dynamics, although challenging, can deliver mechanistic insights into aquatic ecosystem patterns and processes. Some contributions leverage habitat changes from disturbances or climate shifts to document capacity for resilience or recovery of pelagic and benthic communities. Jointly, the results in this special issue document fruitful approaches and provide urgent information needed for deciphering aquatic ecosystem responses to climate forcings. This information is foundational if we wish to tackle the combined effects of climate change and other human impacts with maximum efficacy and minimize unintended consequences for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning