**Beyond Climate Ready? A History of Seattle Public Utilities' Ongoing Evolution from Environmental and Climate Risk Management to Integrated Sustainability**

**Ann Grodnik-Nagle 1,\*, Ashima Sukhdev 1, Jason Vogel <sup>2</sup> and Charles Herrick <sup>3</sup>**


**\*** Correspondence: ann.grodnik-nagle@seattle.gov

**Abstract:** Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) is a municipal water supply, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste management utility in Seattle, Washington. This utility has explored the impacts of climate change and supported climate adaptation work since 1997. Faced with threats such as sea level rise, drought, wildfires, and extreme precipitation events, SPU has worked to "mainstream" climate science throughout its strategic planning, capital investments, management, operations, staffing, institutional culture, and more. This paper provides a descriptive, chronologically ordered account of how SPU's climate-change-related work has evolved to become an aspect of a broader social and environmental sustainability orientation, aimed at resilience against climate impacts, but also towards improving greenhouse gas emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, water and waste circularity, green infrastructure, ecosystem and species stewardship, green and blue workforce development, affordability, an intergenerational perspective, and environmental justice. We frame this transition as a movement from a core focus on risk management toward a proactive and integrated mode of sustainable operations. While SPU's journey has been enabled by a co-productive approach to climate services, we speculate on how this model can be broadened and diversified to help SPU pursue their goal of becoming a sustainable organization. It is our hope that this paper sparks reflection and discussion within the climate services community, amongst utilities, municipalities, and policy entrepreneurs that are interested in sustainability.

**Keywords:** sustainability; public utilities; resilience; climate change; climate adaptation; seattle; climate services; water utility; waste utility

### **1. Introduction**

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) is a public utility serving the Seattle, Washington, metropolitan area and its surrounding communities. With service deliveries of water supply, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste services, it is important to understand that climate change first emerged as an unconnected issue in each of these service areas at different times and for different reasons. SPU first addressed climate change within water supply planning in 1997, following a series of extreme rainfall events and droughts between the mid-1980's and mid-1990's. Following that, SPU addressed climate change in its drainage and wastewater line of business in the wake of urban flooding and extreme rain events in 2006 and 2007. SPU's work in solid waste management has long been guided by environmental considerations, with a specific analysis conducted in the early 2000s around the potential of effective waste management systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, amongst other financial and environmental benefits.

While each of these stories could be told in isolation, the staff at SPU are increasingly seeing that these stories are not separate. This leads to a more complicated story, one in which it is helpful to understand the standpoint of SPU's leadership and staff, what they

**Citation:** Grodnik-Nagle, A.; Sukhdev, A.; Vogel, J.; Herrick, C. Beyond Climate Ready? A History of Seattle Public Utilities' Ongoing Evolution from Environmental and Climate Risk Management to Integrated Sustainability. *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 4977. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su15064977

Academic Editors: Genovaite˙ Liobikiene and Mohammad ˙ Aslam Khan Khalil

Received: 26 January 2023 Revised: 28 February 2023 Accepted: 2 March 2023 Published: 10 March 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

view as their future direction, and the kinds of assistance that they will need to realize their commitment to sustainability. The utility's early climate-change-related work is now one aspect of a broader effort to foster sustainable utility operations and management, a portfolio of activity, that, in addition to addressing climate impacts, includes greenhouse gas emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, water and waste circularity, green infrastructure, continuity of service during weather emergencies, ecosystem and species stewardship, green and blue workforce development, affordability, an intergenerational perspective, and environmental justice.

We believe that our story can be characterized as an evolution from a risk management viewpoint to a commitment to a broader and more inclusive set of factors, which are organized under the concept of sustainability. While SPU retains focused climate and environmental risk management strategies and protocols within its lines of business, it is striving toward a proactive, utility-wide approach to sustainability and adaptive management. This evolution includes a concerted effort to look beyond being "climate ready" or understanding climate impacts, and modifying utility strategic planning, capital investments, and operations and maintenance to account for the changing climate conditions. SPU's commitment to social and environmental sustainability and resilience is taking a more integrated, holistic approach by addressing the root causes of problems, often across multiple service areas, to realize conventional utility objectives such as affordability, service reliability, and service equity, while also pursuing new objectives such as racial equity, addressing displacement pressure, population growth, economic and environmental injustice, environmental stewardship, greenhouse gas reduction commitments, and the mitigating experiences of repeated climate impacts. The Director of Corporate Policy and Planning at SPU, Danielle Purnell, reflected that SPU's transformation is about a "restorative balance in our relationship with the planet and with people. It is a re-remembering that everything is connected, and we must work together within our means. Climate science provides clarity about some of the fundamental conditions requiring restoration if we are to ensure sustainability".

As emphasized in the final section of this paper, SPU is by no means "finished" with the difficult work of transforming our strategic orientation, capital investments, management, operations, staffing, and institutional culture, but we have moved far enough that the rough contours of our desired future state and required support can be discerned. We hope that SPU's evolution will provide grist for the climate services community to use for reflecting on its own forward-looking priorities, as well as a precedent that is useful for peer utilities, municipalities, and policy entrepreneurs that are interested in sustainability.

The remainder of this paper is organized into six sections. First, we describe our technical approach (Section 2), followed by a short background on SPU (Section 3). We then describe SPU's history with environmental and climate risk management (Section 4) and then expand into a summary description of SPU's efforts to take a more proactive and integrated approach to achieving sustainable operations across all aspects of our service portfolio (Section 5). The paper concludes with two discussions: the first explores SPU's need for and use of technical and scientific information that falls outside of the purview of traditional utility operational know-how (Section 6), followed by a discussion of the ongoing challenges and implications of this information for the climate services community (Section 7).

### **2. Technical Approach**

This paper is an interpretive, mixed methods study of an American utility—Seattle Public Utilities. This paper is written to highlight SPU's historical evolution, with major sub-sections framed as narrative chronologies. The research integrates: (1) participant observation [1] with (2) outputs from several third-party assessments and evaluations; (3) a review of utility archival materials, including planning documents, technical memoranda, commissioned research reports and internal analyses, capital project application and approval documents, internal policy statements, and regulatory documentation (e.g., Consent

Decree); and (4) semi-structured, in-depth interviews with SPU staff working on different facets of sustainability, climate science, policy, and planning, between 1993 and the present.


### **3. SPU Background**

Established in 1997 by consolidating the Water Department with the Solid Waste, Drainage, and Wastewater Utilities Departments, Seattle Public Utilities provides drinking water to 1.5 million retail customers and 19 neighboring utility wholesale customers throughout the region, and provides drinking water, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste services directly to residents and businesses within the city of Seattle. SPU has organized these four essential services into three lines of business: water supply, drainage and wastewater, and solid waste (see Figure 1). SPU has about 1400 employees. The utility manages two mountain watersheds, the Cedar River watershed, and the South Fork Tolt River watershed. Its system includes almost 200 miles of water transmission pipelines, 1680 miles of water distribution main, 1400 miles of in-city sanitary and combined sewer mainlines, over 480 miles of drainage pipes, and two major garbage and recycling transfer stations that process an estimated 750,000 tons of garbage, recycling, and organic waste each year. SPU operates a fleet of 606 vehicles, including 73 construction vehicles, and contracts with providers for garbage, organics, and recycling collection. With operating revenues of over \$1.4 billion per year, SPU is considered a relatively large U.S. utility, and is uncommon in its consolidated water supply, drainage, wastewater, and solid waste services, which allow it to have a broad purview over Seattle's resource management, environmental services, and pollution issues.


**Figure 1.** SPU operates three main lines of business, providing four essential services to Seattle residents and businesses.

In addition to customer-facing essential services, SPU provides the Seattle area with a diverse portfolio of critical services. While most SPU customers equate the utility's operations with traditional, high-visibility service streams, such as trash pick-up and the reliable delivery of safe, potable water, the reality is much more complicated, and includes operational priorities that are as diverse as managing wildland forests, salmon stewardship, urban tree planting programs, water and waste educational programs, pollution source control, graffiti removal, and recreational vehicle wastewater pump-out services.

The breadth of SPU's core and corollary services provides a backdrop for the variety and range of SPU's climate and sustainability risks and opportunities. The utility's interface with climate change, in terms of its impacts and contributions, is varied and multi-sectoral. Figures 2 and 3 provide an overview of SPU's understanding of climate change, and its relationship to SPU's management and operations.


**Figure 2.** Climate impacts on SPU's system [17–23].


**Figure 3.** SPU's contributions to and opportunities to mitigate climate change.

### **4. SPU's History as a Risk Management Utility**

Seattle Public Utilities has been working to characterize and address climate change and environmental stewardship issues since its establishment in 1997. We characterize SPU's management of environmental externalities and emergent climate risks in this earlier period as a risk management orientation. From a risk management viewpoint, distinct impacts (e.g., drought) are seen as threats to the stability of the existing and established utility services (e.g., the provision of reliable, affordable drinking water). In addition, environmental externalities (e.g., waste and pollution) are largely managed "downstream" (reactively), as opposed to "upstream" (preventatively). Such risks are typically addressed within a single line of business and are reactive within nature—two characteristics that are very different from the more integrated and adaptive sustainability standpoint are described in Section 5.

We focus our discussion in this section on the evolution of climate risk and environmental externality management at SPU. Notably, the risks that were associated with climate change were only one risk factor, among others, that were driving progress at SPU. Within water supply, other environmental externalities, such as salmon habitat protection, were critically important. Within drainage and wastewater, other environmental issues, such as improving surface water quality, were compelling and regulated. Within solid waste management, many environmental drivers (beyond greenhouse gas emissions) and financial considerations were taken into account when promoting recycling and composting programs for the city.

SPU's risk management work continues as an important effort under the current sustainability orientation described in Section 5. However, SPU is striving for risk management to apply across all of SPU's lines of business to treat the threats and opportunities in a more integrated and holistic fashion [24]. As such, the narrative of each line of business below does not have a clean break between the past and the present, nor is it intended to be comprehensive. Rather, each narrative provides background on the climate risk and environmental externality management activities at SPU that allows us to describe their evolution into a sustainability orientation in Section 5.

### *4.1. Water Supply*

Following a series of extreme rainfall events and droughts between the mid-1980 s and mid-1990 s, SPU embarked upon an effort to characterize its climate-related exposures and risks, and to address its vulnerabilities. Early climate-related work was spurred on by the projection of a strong El Niño in 1997–1998, and an analysis of the city records to assess the historical water supply in El-Niño-like years [25]. SPU's first climate change study, in 2002, was carried out in partnership with the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group (CIG) to develop analysis techniques to help SPU's water supply planning staff and decision makers incorporate global climate change information into local long-range water supply planning processes. (Chinn, A., 1 September 2022, personal interview; [26]).

The concept of using climate services—relying on forward-looking projections of changing climate conditions—took root at SPU in their water line of business in the late 1990 s and early 2000 s [27–29]. This was before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projection forecasting and the science behind the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) patterns of climate variability were well established. As a result of these early efforts to understand hydrologic systems' changes and impacts and the implications of ENSO, the utility began an effort to integrate climate-related risks across all levels of its operations—an effort that continues to this day.

By the mid-2000 s, SPU staff and leadership began to understand that climate change might affect SPU's ability to meet its water supply mission. However, there was a gap between the level and type of climate change information that water managers needed, and the level and type of the information that was being disseminated by the scientific community. Consequently, a considerable effort was put into building relationships to share this information about climate change and its impacts on water resources. Much of this activity was reflected in a two-year (2004–2006) study, jointly sponsored by the American Water Works Association Research Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which included a case study that characterized SPU's efforts to use climate science to inform water supply planning [30,31].

SPU continued to partner with CIG, nearby water utilities in Everett and Tacoma, and stakeholders in King County, and in 2007, developed downscaled climatological data for the Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett water utilities. The utilities ran this climate information through their own system models to generate the 2009 water outlook, which provided a long-range view of the future water demand in this three-county region [7,32,33].

Shortly after a January 2007 Water Utility Climate Change Summit, attended by more than 200 water and wastewater utility executives, SPU worked with several other United States water utilities to form the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), a selffunded and collaborative effort to provide leadership on the climate change issues affecting the country's water supply agencies. This organization is now composed of 12 water providers nation-wide that supply water for more than 50 million people. The WUCA collaboration has funded its own research agenda to provide context-specific information on climate change and how to integrate that information into the utility decision making for SPU and its sister agencies. The WUCA launch built a bridge that is sustained to this day for the collaboration and information sharing between water utilities and the climate services community. WUCA-sponsored studies (see https://www.wucaonline. org/publications/ (accessed on 3 January 2023)) have provided important groundwork for SPU progress on integrating the climate into both planning and operations, as well as into capital project delivery.

In 2015, in partnership with WUCA and Oregon State University's Climate Impacts Research Consortium, SPU carried out a climate modeling effort, known as the Pilot Utility Modeling Applications (PUMA) Project. This effort, which created a set of 40 scenarios that were downscaled to several point locations in SPU's watersheds, fed into SPU's hydrology model and utility system model, in order to enable the utility to consider the future water supply under a range of conditions [8,11,12]. This work focused on SPU's system vulnerabilities instead of projecting reductions in supply, and shifted the focus from attempting to predict the future to considering adaptation measures to reduce any vulnerabilities. The results from this effort informed SPU's 2019 Water System Plan (see the Overview of SPU's Climate Change Approach in [34]).

SPU is currently working with CIG and King County to study the potential changes in the flood regime of major King County rivers due to climate change. Additionally, SPU is collaborating with scientists and west coast utility managers to improve the forecast tools and strategies for dealing with atmospheric rivers, which are anticipated to increase in frequency and intensity with climate change. Lastly, SPU is working to refine our supply and demand forecasting, and update our portfolio of options for improving the climate resilience of the water supply system.

SPU's Watershed Management Division, also within SPU's water line of business, has undertaken a climate-driven analysis and action beyond the issues of water supply, particularly in relation to wildfire risks, adaptive forest restoration, and watershed management [35]. The forest management plans for the Cedar River and South Fork Tolt

River Municipal Watersheds focus on forest restoration and climate adaptation in Seattle's two mountain-source watersheds. The watersheds group is also partnering with other organizations to pilot climate adaptive forest restoration, testing reforestation in the Tolt River watershed, with trees sourced from more southern regions where current climates are similar to the projected climates in western Washington later this century [36]. The current development of the Wildfire Risk Analysis focuses on planning for a climate-driven shift in fire regime and the potential impacts on drinking water quality and supply. SPU is collaborating with the US Forest Service and the US Geological Survey to collect ash samples and monitor the post-fire hydrology and water quality impacts from the 2022 Bolt Creek and Loch Katrine fires in the western Cascade Mountains, which will be used to improve the modeling analyses of the potential wildfire impacts on water supply, if a fire were to occur in one of SPU's supply watersheds.

### *4.2. Drainage and Wastewater*

The integration of climate impacts into SPU's drainage and wastewater business started later than it did for water supply. The interest in climate change within SPU's drainage and wastewater planning began in the wake of severe urban flooding caused by extreme rain events in 2006 and 2007. These events triggered a significant investment in natural flood management strategies, including floodable open space in Madison Valley, and floodplain reconnection projects, such as Meadowbrook Pond.

The city experienced more extreme storms from 2012 through to 2017, and during that period, Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) control projects were overflowing due to their insufficient control volume. The sizing decisions that had been made in 2009 based upon historic rainfall resulted in infrastructure constructed in 2012–2013 that had insufficient volume for the storms. Because of this, the utility's CSO program began considering climate change in its analysis of reduction strategies. This action first shows up in SPU's 2015 Long Term Control Plan (LTCP), which is the fifth CSO planning effort undertaken by SPU [37]. The LTCP was one volume of the city's comprehensive reduction strategy for CSOs and stormwater pollutants. The LTCP, which runs through to 2035, was driven by a regulatory obligation to reduce the CSOs in Seattle's water bodies and was developed under SPU's Consent Decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The LTCP applied a 6% scaling factor to historic rainfall to mimic climate-perturbed rainfall projections, providing an "upper bound" for the control volume values [37]. Following the initial implementation of the Long-Term Control Plan in 2015, SPU's CSO program and systems maintenance staff continued to contend with extreme precipitation events and changing rainfall patterns. This challenge suggested that the sizing approach included in the 2015 plan did not amount to an "upper bound" for designing the infrastructure control volumes, which led to a renewed effort that focused on predicting and modeling future precipitation.

SPU staff updated the rainfall records used for establishing capital infrastructure sizing and included a climate-perturbed data set that used outputs from statistically downscaled global climate models [38]. Project modeling using the climate-perturbed rainfall data led to the utility's first major upsizing decision based on future precipitation projections. This upsizing happened for SPU's largest-ever infrastructure project: a 2.7-mile stormwater storage tunnel, known as the Ship Canal Water Quality Tunnel, which was designed to prevent 75 million gallons of stormwater and sewer pollution, annually, in Lake Union and the Ship Canal. The tunnel was upsized to accommodate future extreme precipitation and to provide more operational flexibility during highly localized extreme rainstorms. SPU chose to increase the planned 14 diameter tunnel to 18 10", increasing the project's storage volume from 16.1 million gallons to 29.6 million gallons [6].

SPU's work to develop climate-perturbed intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves led to additional climate risk management within their drainage and wastewater line of business. Sea level rise guidance was developed for drainage and wastewater capital projects in 2017 [39]. Shortly after the climate-perturbed IDF curves were developed, SPU's integrated drainage and wastewater planning effort, Shape Our Water, used these projections to assess the future capacity impacts upon SPU's drainage and wastewater conveyance systems. SPU's planning team also assessed the risks of inundation due to extreme storm events citywide, and again for creek watersheds specifically. Finally, they used sea level rise (SLR) projections to assess the SPU system risks due to SLR inundation [20,40,41]. These analyses, which embed climate uncertainty, inform the utility's 50-year drainage and wastewater system plan.

### *4.3. Solid Waste Management*

In 1987, Seattle faced a waste management crisis. The city's last two remaining landfills, closed in 1983 and 1986, had been designated by EPA as Superfund sites and would cost more than \$90 million to remediate and make environmentally safe. Seattle began hauling garbage to the King County landfill, which increased Seattle's garbage disposal costs and led to an 82 percent increase in solid waste customer rates. SPU's predecessor agency responded to public concerns and used the crisis to design and launch a waste reduction, compost, and recycling program.

Seattle's first solid waste plan was the 1989 Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan, On the Road to Recovery. In 1998, Seattle prepared its second Solid Waste Management Plan, On the Path to Sustainability. Seattle's 1998 Solid Waste Plan incorporated and began to operationalize the concepts of zero waste, waste prevention, sustainability, and product stewardship, that continue today to drive SPU's approach to solid waste management [42].

Climate change mitigation has become an increasingly important part of SPU's materials management story. The solid waste line of business' understanding of the climate benefits of waste prevention emerged early and has evolved over time. In 2004, as part of the Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Amendment, SPU commissioned a consultant to estimate the environmental, human health, and economic benefits of recycling, including the impact of increased recycling (and the use of recycled materials in manufacturing), the reduced landfilling of organic materials, and waste prevention on greenhouse gas emissions [43].

The 2004 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Amendment included language indicating that "recycling programs could be an important element in the City's global warming solutions". The role that materials management could play in mitigating climate change was again recognized in the 2011 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Revision, acknowledging that "solid waste management as a cornerstone strategy in climate protection plans". When the city of Seattle's Climate Action Plan was released in 2013, it included actions around "Waste Reduction & Product Stewardship," and shared the results of a consumption-based emissions inventory conducted by King County. These early plans laid the groundwork for SPU's recent increased focus on "upstream" waste prevention and addressing of consumption-based emissions, as reflected in the 2022 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Update.

### **5. SPU's Broader Vision of Sustainability**

The last decade of climate impacts experienced by Seattle—as well as the global context of environmental and public health inequities—have resulted in an accelerated effort to pursue a more holistic approach to social and environmental sustainability across SPU, particularly since 2017. Building on SPU's experience in climate and environmental risk management, as outlined in Section 4, there has been broad recognition that: (1) the urgency behind climate change impacts and global inequity requires a markedly different and accelerated approach toward action, (2) SPU will accomplish more on multiple fronts by striving for integrated, holistic utility services and adaptive management strategies across its operational service streams, and (3) this new approach must involve a focus "upstream" on solving the interconnected, systemic root causes of environmental externalities, as opposed to reacting to "downstream" risks or vulnerabilities.

In other words, SPU has begun to understand limitations of focusing predominantly on narrowly scoped problems and single-purpose solutions associated with the "risk management orientation," or looking at sustainability issues in a siloed manner. SPU began a process to pursue a mission of holistic environmental and social sustainability, where it engages in complex, inter-connected challenges with multi-benefit, multi-partner solutions. SPU sees this sustainability mission as both a social and environmental commitment. It includes managing the risks associated with climate impacts and other environmental externalities, but also includes commitments to environmental justice, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, water and waste circularity, green infrastructure, ecosystem and species stewardship, green and blue workforce development, and affordability.

This adaptive, integrated focus on sustainability can be seen today across four levels of organizational activity: (1) strategic planning, (2) capital investments and pilot innovation programs, (3) staffing, employee engagement, and culture, and (4) partnerships, collaboration, and alignment. SPU is working to establish an integrated sustainability approach in each of these areas. This section illustrates how the utility is prioritizing multiple benefits and contrasts the actions being taken within SPU today to its past efforts.

### *5.1. Strategic Planning*

Sustainability principles are becoming institutionalized through SPU's major planning initiatives. These planning efforts define the sustainability priorities for the utility in the near- and long-term. We address the overarching SPU strategic business plan, which covers all three lines of business, and reflect on a selection of business plans in turn. The key observation here is that these strategic planning efforts are evolving from a risk management orientation towards a new sustainability orientation, which adopts a more integrated, holistic approach to social and environmental concerns, as well as climate resilience that addresses the root causes of problems, often across service areas and lines of business.

### 5.1.1. SPU 2021–2026 Strategic Business Plan

The development of SPU's 2021–2026 Strategic Business Plan was the utility-wide turning point that first brought its individual lines of businesses together to galvanize the utility's shared commitments to affordability, equity, and resilience [44]. While the turning points from the risk management approach to a proactive focus on sustainability for each service area were unique, and pre-dated 2021, the Strategic Business Plan acted as a culmination and acknowledgement of these shifts across the entire organization.

The plan provides a roadmap for the utility to meet the needs of customers and communities and establishes a rate path for six years. It also defines SPU's utility-wide vision as "Community Centered, One Water, Zero Waste," illustrating the multi-faceted goals to which SPU and the broader Seattle community aspire. It represents a shift from the prior business plan (which had been the first to mention climate change). In that plan, climate action was tied in a siloed way to expanding the implementation of green stormwater infrastructure and water supply system improvements [45]. The 2021–2026 plan goes beyond a risk management approach, with objectives being framed in terms of environmental justice, adaptation, and mitigation for water and waste. Its key commitments include adaptive management within water supply and stormwater management, sea level rise adaptation planning that supports anti-displacement goals, and a consumptionbased emissions inventory to assess the impact that SPU's solid waste management and waste prevention programs have on community-wide emissions. The need to assure affordability, service reliability, and service equity across all three lines of business in the face of weather extremes and changing climatic conditions, population growth, economic and environmental injustice, and increasingly stringent regulations, is persistent throughout the plan.

### 5.1.2. Shape Our Water

Shape Our Water is SPU's integrated system plan to guide the utility's next 50 years of investments in its drainage and wastewater systems. Climate change vulnerability reduction is a key driver for Shape Our Water, along with population growth, affordability, and equity. Previous drainage or wastewater system planning efforts were conducted in relative isolation, and the primary foci included regulatory compliance, levels of services, and financial constraints. Shape Our Water represents a shift toward utility planning that focuses on the value of the investments that are made from both a community benefit and environmental benefit perspective.

Community visioning and technical analyses provide the foundation for this planning effort. The analysis stage of Shape Our Water occurred from 2018–2021 and was focused on identifying and prioritizing existing and future risks and opportunities citywide, including future climate change and growth impacts. The Shape Our Water team assessed a range of drainage and wastewater challenges, including flooding, sewer overflows, creek and shoreline health, water quality, and the sustainable operation and management of drainage and wastewater systems over time. For the first time, SPU assessed the citywide impacts of extreme storm events and sea level rise on drainage and wastewater systems, as well as on Seattle's communities. Finally, SPU assessed the community context through studies that highlighted Seattle's current racial inequities within health, wealth, and environmental quality.

The Community Vision for Shape Our Water was co-developed with community members, and hinges on an equitable, resilient, and community-centered infrastructure. SPU's community visioning process adopted a community-centered approach that illustrates the utility's evolution toward a sustainability-focused organization. From 2019–2021, the Shape Our Water team used pandemic-responsive engagement strategies to create a shared vision for SPU's infrastructure investment with the communities that SPU serves. The engagement strategies created space for community partners to share their enthusiasm, knowledge, lived experience, talent, and inspiration. The insights gained through this engagement process were distilled into the Community Vision for Shape Our Water [46].

This vision, together with the foundational analysis, will drive the next 50 years of drainage and wastewater infrastructure. In the next stage of Shape Our Water, SPU will brainstorm solutions for Seattle's future challenges. These solutions will build upon the ideas that arose during the visioning—from efficient resource use and reuse, like stormwater harvesting, to expanding the partnerships that support skill-building and job opportunities. The highest-value long-term and short-term solutions will be identified and included in the Shape Our Water plan. Throughout the next steps in planning, SPU will continue to create opportunities to co-create and evaluate future solutions with community-based organizations, other city departments, government agencies, and tribal governments.

### 5.1.3. 2022. Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Update

The 2022 Solid Waste Comprehensive Plan Update, "Moving Upstream to Zero Waste", built on a foundation of leading policies in the solid waste management space, this time with a renewed and increased focus on waste prevention strategies that would advance SPU's Zero Waste goals and accelerate the transition to a circular economy. SPU is required to develop a comprehensive solid waste management plan and update it every six years. This plan provides a roadmap for how Seattle will manage and finance its solid waste services and facilities, and projects the system management needs over 20 years. The plan describes how the city handles, collects, processes, and disposes of Seattle's waste. It also describes current waste prevention, recycling, and composting programs, and SPU's progress towards its solid waste goals.

The 2022 Plan Update prioritizes waste prevention within solid waste management to eliminate waste and toxics, prevent pollution, conserve natural resources, and to reduce carbon emissions, while recognizing the role that SPU plays in addressing the communitywide emissions associated with the production and consumption of goods and food. This

increased focus on preventing waste and toxins "upstream" is an effort to maximize the environmental and public health impacts of Seattle's solid waste and hazardous materials management system. The plan update represents a shift in SPU's approach, with an understanding that we must look upstream of SPU's traditional purview of "managing" waste, to partnering with others and preventing it in the first place. With this "upstream" focus, SPU is attempting to address the mitigation of climate change and environmental and public health pollution prevention through effective material management.

### *5.2. Capital Investments and Pilot Innovation Programs*

SPU expends approximately \$1.4 billion dollars a year on its operations, maintenance, and system expansion and upgrades. SPU's infrastructure and system improvement investments are designed with a multi-decadal service life. SPU is working to deliver capital projects that incorporate climate mitigation and adaptation opportunities, and that contribute to social and environmental sustainability for years to come through their design and procurement choices.

SPU's capital projects are required to demonstrate that climate change has been considered as an aspect of their design, construction, and planned operation. This began with the 2014 addition of climate change considerations into SPU's capital improvement program review process, known as Stage Gates [15,39]. Initially, the climate change component of Stage Gates was seen as cumbersome and difficult to implement due to a lack of guidance or actionable steps for the project teams. In some cases, it was criticized as more of a "box-checking" exercise than a critical review of the opportunities to reduce GHG emissions or to design flexible, climate-adaptive solutions. Since climate-perturbed rainfall data sets and localized SLR projections have become available, teams have been able to use these tools to evaluate the climate risks for various project alternatives. SPU continues to develop its approaches to further embed climate resilience, climate mitigation, and broader sustainability objectives into project Stage Gates and its decision making.

Over the last ten years, many of SPU's capital projects have taken on sustainabilityfocused metrics and outcomes, and the utility has begun funding pilot innovations that allow for the learning and testing of new approaches. This shift is due to several supporting factors:


Below, we describe a small sample of SPU's pilot innovation programs to illustrate the various ways that we are pursuing our sustainability vision, often across lines of business.

### 5.2.1. Green Stormwater Infrastructure for Climate Resilience and Community Wealth Building

SPU's green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) program is illustrative of the utility's actions towards proactive climate resilience and natural solutions. SPU began this work in 1999 with a green street retrofit project [47], and began working in close partnership with King County in 2010 to deliver the RainWise program. In 2013, SPU and the city of Seattle's elected officials passed a policy to make GSI the preferred method of managing stormwater citywide, and set a reach target to manage 700 million gallons of stormwater runoff annually with GSI investments (such as bioretention, rain gardens, urban forestry, and pervious pavement), in order to improve water quality, manage flooding, reduce regulatory costs, build resilient infrastructure, and invest in nature-based, urban carbon sinks [48]. Thanks to an array of programs such as those highlighted below, Seattle appears to be on track to meet this 700 million gallons target by 2025 [49].

### 5.2.2. RainCity Partnerships

While SPU has long promoted and invested in GSI for its multiple benefits, the utility is now seeking ways to explicitly prioritize these benefits in Seattle's black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. RainCity is a 5-year, \$15 million pilot program, focused on larger-scale GSI projects and riparian area restoration. The program includes required performance metrics for both water quality outcomes (e.g., the area of impervious surface managed and the area of riparian area restored) and community-identified benefits (e.g., the percentage of local hires, small business mentorship and subcontracting, 40% women- and minority-owned business contracting targets, and metrics for communityinitiated, community-led projects). If the pilot proves successful, the utility is poised to invest \$100 million over 20 years to generate stormwater management and wealth-building outcomes [50]. RainCity is new for the utility, not because of "what" project types it is delivering, but because of "how" it is being planned and operated. RainCity is SPU's first foray into utilizing a community-based public–private partnership, which has been promoted by the U.S. EPA and the Washington State Department of Commerce, as a contract mechanism that focuses on improving water quality, as well as a community's quality of life and opportunities [51]. Mami Hara, SPU's General Manager leading up to the launch of RainCity, underscored the intention of programs like this, "As we look to the future, we are intent upon demonstrating how job creation, workforce development, and community wealth building can fruitfully intersect with our missions of environmental enhancement and reliable, equitable service" [52].

### 5.2.3. Natural Drainage System (NDS) Partnering

SPU's 2016–2025 NDS Partnering Program is a multi-year capital improvement program that is focused on providing significant water quality improvements to Seattle's three major creek watersheds: Longfellow, Piper's, and Thornton Creeks, by managing roadway runoff. The program designs and constructs multi-block, roadside natural drainage systems—primarily vegetated bioretention systems that are located on the public right-ofway planting strip or shoulder—that filter and manage the stormwater runoff and improve neighborhoods with street trees, traffic calming, and, in some cases, new sidewalks or pedestrian walkways. To deliver holistic projects, SPU partners closely with the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture 1% for the Arts Program, and the King County Flood Control District, as well as with a wide variety of community-based organizations. Since its inception, this program has delivered projects in all three major creek watersheds and has integrated a range of public art and pedestrian infrastructure improvements [53,54].

### 5.2.4. South Park Water Quality Facility

This facility is a stormwater quality facility in Seattle's South Park neighborhood that will treat the stormwater from the surrounding industrial roads so that it is clean before it is pumped into the adjacent Duwamish River. This is a second example of SPU's efforts to embrace community-led infrastructure planning, and is described in more detail in Section 5.4, as an example of philanthropic and community-based organization partnerships. The facility is part of an effort to provide equitable development and environmental justice for a historically underserved, overburdened community, as prioritized in the City of Seattle's Duwamish Valley Action Plan [55].

Like the Natural Drainage Systems Partnering and RainCity partnerships, the goals of this facility include conventional stormwater quality improvement metrics, but also community benefit metrics that are defined by the adjacent residential and business communities, and which will tie to community wealth building and sea level rise adaptation. It is an example of the utility aspiring to use its water quality investments as anchor investments, which are designed to anchor additional community investments to benefit current businesses and residents. While stormwater quality improvement is a priority in this neighborhood, so is community-owned space, affordable housing, and local career pathways for youth. SPU is working to partner with public and private entities in the development of this water quality project, so that the final outcomes of the SPU's investment will span beyond just stormwater quality improvement.

### 5.2.5. On-Site Non-Potable Water Reuse

Because of its relatively abundant water supply, Seattle has been slow to embrace water reuse. SPU is now laying the groundwork to support voluntary action by the private sector to advance a more widespread adoption of on-site non-potable water reuse systems, enabling the utility to recapture, clean, and reuse water within the footprint of one or more buildings. In 2021, the Washington State Legislature passed a bill requiring the Department of Health to develop statewide rules for the use of on-site non-potable water reuse systems, and SPU is preparing to work with other public sector agencies and private sector partners to advance this work, once the rules are finalized. SPU is also an active member of the U.S. Water Alliance National Blue Ribbon Commission for Onsite Non Potable Water Systems. The Commission develops tools based on the best management practices and current science to support the advancement of on-site non-potable water systems. This initiative marks the beginning of a broader conversation on water reuse at SPU, which will connect the work of all the water-relevant lines of businesses and view drinking water supply, drainage, and wastewater as part of an integrated system.

### 5.2.6. Promoting Multi-Benefits of Composting

Composting organic materials, such as yard and food waste, recycles them into a beneficial soil amendment and imitates the natural processes of decay and regeneration. However, when organic materials such as food and yard waste are landfilled, they produce large amounts of methane as they decompose in this anaerobic environment. Composting organic materials avoids these potent greenhouse gas emissions, and the finished composted organic material is a critical tool for sustainability because of its many environmental benefits. Compost supports the restoration of soil health, stormwater management through improved infiltration, biofiltration, erosion control, water conservation, and soil carbon sequestration. Moreover, compost supports healthy plant growth in urban landscapes and agricultural sites alike. To gain these broader environmental benefits, it is critical to ensure that the compost is good quality, free of harmful chemical and physical contaminants, and widely used. SPU requires residents and businesses to participate in organics recycling programs (it is illegal to place food and yard waste in the garbage in Seattle), and SPU creates programs to encourage the use of compost. SPU works collaboratively with King County and other agencies across Washington state to develop compost markets, including the expansion from landscaping practices into agriculture (encouraging the compost created from Seattle's organic waste to be used in regional agriculture). In recognition of the interconnected nature of this work, SPU has created a Landscape and Organics Resource Conservation Planner and Program Lead position, which works for both its solid waste and drainage and wastewater lines of business. This position is a hub for sustainability work, "connected with the water conservation team, the urban forestry staff, and Green Stormwater Infrastructure staff" [Kurtz, K., 1 September 2022 personal interview]. The initiative is also a part of SPU's broader efforts to create nature-based carbon sinks, alongside green infrastructure investments, the forest management of SPU's 100,000 acres of watershed, and investments into urban forestry programs such as Trees for Seattle.

### 5.2.7. Sustainable Energy Management

SPU has created a Sustainable Energy Management Program to coordinate SPU's greenhouse gas reduction and energy management efforts across all three lines of business. This program aims to manage utility-wide energy use and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions throughout its operations, contracting, construction projects, and service delivery [56]. The program has three goals: (1) achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, (2) encourage energy efficiency and awareness, and (3) generate renewable energy. In pursuit of these goals, SPU is conducting an operational greenhouse gas inventory and a supply chain greenhouse gas inventory, has developed building and fleet electrification strategies, and is taking part in energy efficiency programs. SPU is also exploring ways to generate its own renewable energy, using sources within the utility's existing infrastructure through pilot projects. The North Transfer Station, for example, was the first SPU facility to install solar panels in 2016, with the potential to generate enough electricity to power up to 130 homes. SPU is also exploring the installation of its first in-line hydropower generation station at the Lake Forest Park Reservoir, which would take advantage of the excess pressure in our water distribution network to generate as much as 700,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually. These carbon-free sources of electricity can not only help to offset the operating costs within the utility's facilities, but could also provide a pathway to help offset some of the most carbon-intensive electricity in our emissions profile. SPU plans to build upon the results of these pilot projects to prioritize new renewable energy generation opportunities throughout the utility's infrastructure.

### *5.3. Staffing, Employee Engagement, and Climate-Aware Culture*

SPU is building on its long history of staff-led climate initiatives, and as sustainability emerges as a guiding vision for the utility, that work is being highlighted and celebrated in a more prominent way. Andrew Lee, SPU's General Manager and Chief Executive Officer, serves as the environmental justice chair for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, and has made a "holistic approach a priority, out of necessity, because challenges and impacts are coming at us so fast" [Lee, A., 30 August 2022 personal interview]. However, this commitment to sustainability has deep support from SPU staff, as the organizational culture shifts toward the connectivity, coordination, and orchestration of efforts, with a focus on intergenerational planning. We include two examples of this staff culture shift below.

### 5.3.1. All Utility Staff Are Climate Practitioners

In 2006, SPU hired its first climate program manager and established a Climate Resiliency Group to help the utility to understand its exposure and sensitivity to climate change, and to build its capacity to adapt. When this group was formalized, it was widely seen as a separate enterprise from the daily decision making of the utility's strategic planning, capital investments, operations, and maintenance,. While this group still exists and is co-led by a climate adaptation policy lead, alongside a climate mitigation and circular economy policy lead, it is no longer seen as separate or as an add-on: the group's focus is to embed climate science and sustainability into strategic planning, capital investments, operations, and maintenance. As climate science has been mainstreamed, the mantle of "climate staff" has spread beyond this team to include staff from all lines of business and all branches. Reflecting this trend, SPU's Climate Community of Practice has emerged as an internal force for climate-related work. Acting as a locus of climate-related activity, this group of nearly 100 staff gather quarterly to learn, share information, and build collaborative partnerships [8,50,57]. This community of practice does not focus solely on the impacts of climate change, but on the broader set of issues entrained in our sustainability-oriented utility.

### 5.3.2. Frontline Staff Are Precipitation First Responders

Climate planning has historically been the work of desk-bound, science- and policyfocused staff. However, water utility crew staff, including those who perform system

maintenance and operations in the field, are experiencing climate impacts firsthand, and are SPU's "precipitation first responders". These crew members have relevant, experiential knowledge about precipitation risks that is often not communicated and integrated into the utility's strategic planning and implementation activities. SPU partnered with the University of Minnesota to survey 115 frontline staff in the drainage and wastewater and water lines of business about their experience with rain, and their thoughts on priority adaptation investments for the utility. These frontline staff experience climate change impacts on a daily basis, and anticipate the need to take actions around communication, infrastructure/facilities, equipment, and workforce capacity. Throughout this survey, and throughout additional related initiatives that are focused on building a better connection between frontline staff and leadership, SPU is learning that intra-utility communication and worker engagement is a critical strategy for mainstreaming adaptation and sustainable operations [58].

### *5.4. Partnerships, Collaboration, and Alignment*

Sustainability is showing up in the networks and collaborations that the utility prioritizes and invests in. SPU benefits from and builds upon collaboration with scientific-, peer-, and community-based partners throughout all three lines of business.

### 5.4.1. Philanthropic and Community Organization Partnerships

In 2018, SPU was awarded a \$200,000 Connect Capital grant from the Center for Community Investment (CCI). This grant brought value to the utility beyond financial support: it seeded an effort to leverage the SPU's drainage and wastewater investments in Seattle's South Park neighborhood to drive the planning and investment in sea level rise adaptation and anti-displacement policies [59]. South Park is a majority people of color community in South Seattle's Duwamish Valley that has a documented average life expectancy of thirteen years less than other less diverse, wealthier neighborhoods in Seattle. It suffers from poor air quality due to nearby highways and freight traffic, chronic flooding, and a dearth of green space. It is also the area in Seattle that is most vulnerable to sea level rise, due to its low elevation, flat topography, and adjacency to the tidally influenced Duwamish River [60]. The CCI grant work ultimately led to a subsequent climate cities equity grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the city of Seattle to develop a resilience district in the Duwamish Valley to implement these adaptation and anti-displacement goals [61,62].

In 2018, SPU was at the beginning of a three-project suite of drainage and wastewater investments in the neighborhood, including road improvements and conveyance, a pump station, and a water quality facility. This grant-funded effort to leverage these projects for a broader community benefit illustrates SPU's transition to a sustainability focus, which is due to how the development strategy has evolved: the original climate-focused emphasis upon drainage infrastructure, as described in the Stults et al., 2016 case study, was in elevating the South Park pump station to ensure that it would continue to function alongside the rising seas in the adjacent Duwamish River. As SPU's sustainability vision evolved, the focus of the project shifted from asset protection to using the investment as an anchor to address community-identified challenges such as displacement pressure and future sea-level-rise-related flooding.

These grant-funded efforts have fostered a collaboration between SPU, the Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC), and the Seattle Foundation. This collaboration is remarkable because DRCC and SPU sit on opposing sides of the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Cleanup, where the city of Seattle is a liable party and DRCC is a community advocacy and technical advisory group. It is intended to provide a platform for the long-term sea level rise adaptation strategies that will ultimately be integrated into the design for the water quality facility, while also addressing the long-standing needs of the local community.

### 5.4.2. Tribal Partnerships

SPU has worked with indigenous peoples on salmon recovery, the preservation and repatriation of cultural resources, sediment cleanups, land access for cultural practices, and permanent artworks for the Ship Canal Water Quality Project. Water to support fisheries is key to maintaining indigenous communities, as is their access to protected natural lands for the hunting and gathering of food and medicine to sustain their cultural practices and community health. For example, the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe (MIT) has access to the Cedar River Municipal Watershed under their reserved treaty rights to hunt and gather. SPU continues to work with the MIT on fisheries and forest management to ensure that these resources are available, and plans to work with other local and regional tribes on similar sustainable management challenges in the future.

### 5.4.3. Collaborating with Private Sector Partners for Waste Prevention

SPU is engaging in public–private partnerships to encourage waste prevention in the areas of food and packaging, recognizing the critical role of the private sector in the development of a circular economy. As a signatory of the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment, SPU is collaborating with grocery retailers and manufacturers in an effort to reduce the food that goes to the garbage across the west coast by 50% by 2030. In addition, SPU is partnering with businesses and nonprofits to improve how edible, unsold food gets diverted from organics or garbage streams and donated to those who need it in the Seattle area. SPU has also formed a public–private partnership (Reuse Seattle) to create a standardized, city-wide reusable food and beverage container system. This system was piloted in 2022 in over 10 participating entertainment venues, including the Woodland Park Zoo, Paramount Theatre, and The Showbox. The goal is to make food and beverage container reuse scalable and affordable for customers, businesses, and the city. Greenhouse gas emissions reduction, solid waste diversion, and economic development are among the drivers for these programs.

### 5.4.4. Impact Investment in Waste and Water

In 2021, SPU launched an impact investment pilot program, Seeds of Resilience, to invest in and to incubate the water- and waste-related businesses that advance the community resiliency, circular economy, and green job opportunities for underrepresented communities. This program directs \$600,000 annually into private sector endeavors that help SPU to achieve its waste and water management goals. In addition to helping advance SPU's mission of better managing waste and water, these investments grow Seattle's green economy, deliver environmental benefits, and expand equity and opportunity. With mixed funding from all three lines of business, the program can invest in projects and activities that cross the traditional utility service silos, addressing waste and water issues in an integrated manner. One of the first projects funded by Seeds of Resilience is aimed at increasing the access to and demand for water cisterns on residential properties, by finding ways to make captured rainwater more easily usable inside the home, in order to lower drinking water bills [63].

### 5.4.5. Intersectional Peer Networks

SPU staff are heavily engaged in a number of peer networks, including the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), the US Water Alliance, the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), the Evergreen Chapter of the Solid Waste Association of North America, C40 Cities, Water Environment Foundation, and the West Coast Climate & Materials Management Forum. SPU has benefitted from modeling scenario planning projects and other thought leadership collaborations with these organizations, and is now working with them to integrate One Water and Zero Waste principles, community leadership and engagement, and equity into planning and operations.

SPU's founding membership in WUCA has been productive, and WUCA's trajectory has mirrored the utility's evolving focus on sustainability. WUCA was formed in 2007 to provide leadership and collaboration on the climate change issues affecting the country's water agencies. SPU's membership bolstered the utility's early efforts to mainstream climate science and downscale the climate models for western Washington applicability. Today, SPU is building out its environmental justice efforts as a part of WUCA's water equity workgroup and is learning from peer utilities about how best to plan for sea level rise and inventory, and how to reduce operational and supply chain greenhouse gas emissions. The US Water Alliance and NACWA's Environmental Justice committee are also valued partners for the utility.

### **6. SPU, Sustainable Operations, and New Questions for the Climate Services Community**

As illustrated above, SPU is evolving from a risk management mode of operation toward a sustainability orientation. This evolution includes looking beyond being "climate ready" and modifying utility strategic planning, capital investments, operations, and maintenance to account for the changing climate conditions. SPU's commitment to social and environmental sustainability is taking a more integrated, holistic approach by addressing the root causes of problems, often across business lines, to realize conventional utility objectives such as affordability, service reliability, and service equity, while also pursuing new objectives such as racial equity, anti-displacement policies, environmental justice and stewardship, and climate mitigation commitments.

Given this juncture in planning and operations, we wonder if the climate services enterprise can also evolve into a more technically diversified, value-driven, and integrated realm of activity, something that more closely matches the operational commitments of SPU and other utilities. Below, we illustrate three examples, out of a much larger universe of newly relevant questions, of how this is playing out today, and outline the new types of questions being posed:


work with utilities and municipalities to develop scenarios, models, or other tools that reflect this fundamental commitment to communities-in-place?

(3) Holistic and standardized approaches to accounting for greenhouse gas emissions and sinks: Like many utilities and companies, SPU has begun to track its operational greenhouse gas emissions [56]. Additionally, while SPU has adopted a protocol for tracking these emissions, significant uncertainties remain with respect to the emission tracking methodologies. Additionally, there is no correlative protocol for tracking carbon sinks. This is important because SPU's carbon story is broader than the emissions inventory that we currently maintain. How can we accurately measure, track, and account for the carbon sinks that we maintain in our watershed forests, in our urban forests and vegetation, and in our soils? In addition, SPU is uniquely positioned as a solid waste management service provider to have a significant impact on the community-wide GHG emissions related to the production and consumption of goods and food. How can this broader carbon impacts story be tied into our existing climate and emissions story and tracking?

### **7. Moving from Climate Resilience to Sustainable Operations: Ongoing Challenges and Observations**

Although this paper has been framed as a series of promising developments, the authors are under no illusion that SPU's transformation to sustainable operations is a foregone conclusion. As conceptualized by a range of professional experts and academic researchers, meaningful sustainability will be disruptive of current practices and pathways, and can be expected to radically alter incumbent technological regimes, institutional structures, and organizational culture [67–71]. At any scale and in any context, sustainability is a wicked problem fraught with challenges [72,73]. The challenges facing SPU include, but are likely not limited to, the following.

Going forward, SPU will continue to focus on building momentum at all levels of the organization around sustainability, resilience, and climate preparedness. This will include supporting and educating executives, management, and field staff about the need to make decisions that are robust under current and future climates. Overlaying a sustainability orientation on top of departments that were—and to some extent, remain—driven by a traditional mindset of linear problem solving is an organizational and cultural challenge, but also a personnel and staffing issue. It is clear that staff can experience frustration because of a lack of definition and a sense of occupational scope creep [71,74,75]. For example, SPU still struggles with competing priorities in its project delivery, as extensive and meaningful community engagement can prolong and complicate the project scope, schedule, and budget. In addition, having to assess the sustainability considerations of new projects (e.g., the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a capital investment) requires a new skillset, and this work may often be seen as a trade-off for expedient project delivery or budget limitations. SPU remains challenged by the need to help staff effectively address the uncertainties associated with climate change and other projections of future conditions. Staff feel pressured "to take the median or to take one of the scenarios we are using and base all decisions on that scenario" [13]. In the case of capital improvement funding, project managers want to know what range of temperature, precipitation, or sea level rise they are expected to plan for [13]. Because of this, SPU continues to work on techniques to help its staff become more comfortable with this uncertainty and to be able to make informed judgements regarding which future projections to privilege in their planning exercises. According to Paul Fleming, SPU's former Climate Resiliency Group manager, the goal remains "to understand and embrace uncertainty so that you can make informed decisions that are robust under multiple futures" [8].

Another set of challenges to the achievement of sustainable operations can arise due to organizational structure. In the context of a large water and waste system, structural demarcations can act to impede the recognition and deployment of cross-disciplinary, integrated solutions to environmental-, resilience-, and sustainability-related problems. So-called "siloing" within agencies or among departments can frustrate even concerted top-down efforts to impose change upon an organization [71,76,77]. As an organization, SPU is not—and likely will never be—a monolith. Champions of sustainability within SPU recognize that changes will accrue slowly and that the issues that arise among and between branches and divisions must continue to be navigated with care.

It is undeniable that tensions exist—and will continue to exist—between the future goals for sustainable operations and service affordability in the present day. The rising cost of service delivery is a vexing challenge faced by utility and municipal leadership. With basic service provision already too expensive for some residents and customers, the question of how to finance new, sustainability-related practices and technologies is critical. Clearly, economic downturns and utility-scale financial issues could disrupt the achievement of SPU's sustainability initiatives.

Another potential chokepoint in SPU's transition toward sustainable operations involves the development of rigorous yet practically applicable metrics to help evaluate the utility efforts to reduce vulnerability and increase resiliency and sustainability. According to James Rufo-Hill, a former SPU meteorologist and climate science advisor, SPU needs to improve its efforts to document and monitor the effectiveness of its operations, decision making, and planning processes [8]. Without such metrics, SPU will be less able to provide robust analyses that demonstrate whether and how its efforts have increased sustainability and reduced the utility's vulnerability to climate change. The development and operational implementation of benchmarks and metrics is important to the long-term viability of SPU sustainability initiatives.

As demonstrated in this essay, the enterprise of climate services has positioned SPU to be better prepared for and more resilient against the present and future impacts of extreme weather, climate variability, and climate change. In other words, climate services were—and are—crucial to SPU's evolution as a risk management utility. As illustrated above, SPU still has a need for scientific and informational expertise beyond the capabilities of its current utility staff to make progress as a sustainability-oriented utility. It stands to reason that climate services can and will continue to play a vital role and help organizations like SPU, as they work to move beyond the goal of climate resilience to pursue the broader objective of social and environmental sustainability. Climate resilience and sustainability share important characteristics. They both require:


However, the SPU experience also suggests that climate resilience and sustainability differ in ways that may necessitate changes in emphasis, or perhaps even basic alterations to the co-productive model.

As articulated by Dilling and Lemos [78], the co-production of knowledge refers to the contribution of multiple knowledge sources and capacities from different stakeholders, spanning the science–society interface with the goal of jointly creating knowledge and information to inform decision making. In general terms, the quest for sustainable modes of operation entails a multi-generational perspective and integrates economic vitality, social equity, and environmental stewardship. Studies of sustainability are necessarily multidisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and inter-organizational. As recognized by Cvitanovic et al. [79], the practitioners implementing sustainability programs "do not necessarily consider scientific information to be more important than other knowledge..." [80]. They recognize that sustainability initiatives involve a mix of scientific characterization and projection, technological and engineering applications, professional standards and expectations, and clearly articulated commitments to value-based objectives. Furthermore, sustainability

seems to be place-based and circumstantially specific [72] and is sometimes characterized as a societal process of learning and creation.

Based on this, we observe the following:


Climate change represents a clear challenge to efforts to forge a sustainable future. In our view, the effort to develop and apply climate services is—or at least ought to be—part of the larger enterprise of sustainable development.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.G.-N., A.S., J.V. and C.H.; methodology, A.G.-N., A.S., J.V. and C.H.; investigation, A.G.-N., A.S., J.V. and C.H.; writing—original draft preparation, A.G.-N., A.S., J.V. and C.H.; writing—review and editing, A.G.-N., A.S., J.V. and C.H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Partial funding for this work was provided through a budget proviso from the Washington State legislature that supports the Climate Impacts Group "to conduct data

modeling and provide technical assistance on climate impact analysis to Washington communities, businesses, and governments".

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** Authors Ann Grodnik-Nagle and Ashima Sukhdev are both employed by Seattle Public Utilities.

### **Appendix A**

**Table A1.** List of seattle public utilities staff who contributed to this article.


### **Appendix B. SPU Staff Interview Questions—30 August and 1 September 2022**

### *Appendix B.1. Background*

As a contribution to a special issue of the journal Sustainability, SPU staff are preparing an interpretive history of the Utility's approach to climate change adaptation over the last two decades. A draft of this manuscript is attached for your review. It is our observation that SPU has evolved from an early emphasis on managing externalities and risks as they emerged and in a siloed manner and shifted toward a broader focus across all aspects of climate adaptation and mitigation that is part of a more integrated, strategic, and proactive focus on sustainability across operational service streams. We seek your critical reaction to this perspective. Please review the draft manuscript and consider the questions below prior to our scheduled discussion.

### *Appendix B.2. SPU Staff Interview Questions*

Appendix B.2.1. SPU's Purpose


Appendix B.2.2. SPU's early climate/sustainability work


### Appendix B.2.3. SPU & climate services


### *Appendix B.3. Notes on Methodology and Interview Protocol*

To ensure authenticity, the author team developed a preliminary narrative of the SPU experience drawing on participatory involvement, evaluation reports, and archival sources, and then solicited direct feedback from professional staff involved in SPU's climate resilience and sustainability management, operations, and research as far back as 1993. We conducted four semi structured group interviews (1–4 interviewees per group) with a total of nine individuals. Interviewees include individuals involved in all three of SPUs lines of business as well as management and leadership, and core technical staff who have focused on climate impacts and resilience over the past three decades. Although guided by this questionnaire document, interview subjects were permitted to linger and focus on topics of particular interest. Once this manuscript was drafted, interviewees and additional staff were encouraged to review the draft and provide critical feedback to ensure that our account is consistent with the lived experience of key participants

### **References**


**Disclaimer/Publisher's Note:** The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

**Werner Krauß**

Artec Sustainability Research Center, University of Bremen, Enrique-Schmidt-Straße 7, 28334 Bremen, Germany; wkrauss@uni-bremen.de

**Abstract:** This article addresses the appropriate place for and design of climate services drawing upon a case study of three different forms of climate service delivery in a coastal landscape in Northern Germany. Each of these forms addresses different audiences and provides different types of knowledge about climate change and a different orientation toward policy support. The threepart case study includes a regional, a municipal and a social climate service. Drawing upon this comparative, case-based research, I develop the idea of 'slowing down climate services', based on the 'slow science manifesto' introduced by the science philosopher Isabelle Stengers, by postnormal science and by political ecology as suggested by Bruno Latour. How does climate change become a matter of concern? Slowing down climate services means following the social life of scientific facts, engaging with the public and exploring ways to improve democratic and place-based decision making. I argue that there is an urgent need to overcome the big science orientation of climate services and to add what Stengers calls 'public intelligence', the integration of a sense of place and of the social, cultural, political and other performative aspects of climate change in specific landscapes.

**Keywords:** slow science; postnormal science; political ecology; matters of concern

### **1. Introduction**

Climate services provide climate data and information on global, national, regional and local scales, and many areas are already well-served. In regions such as Northern Germany, for example, there is a dense infrastructure of climate services. Stakeholders, decision makers, the media and ordinary citizens have access to science-based information about changes in climate [1]. However, data derived from models or empirical observation alone do not provide solutions for complex climate-related problems or roadmaps for the decarbonization of societies. There is an increasing demand for active engagement with stakeholders and decision makers in communities, for taking into account the complexities and uncertainties of climate change and for including a wider range of voices and actors. Research programs such as Horizon Europe, the Joint Program Initiative (JPI) and especially the European Research Areas for Climate Services (ERA4CS) encourage research on policy support and the co-development of climate services. This article results from my participation as a social anthropologist in two of these European projects, 'Co-development of place-based climate services for action' (CoCliServ 2017–2021) (http://cocliserv.cearc.fr/ (accessed on 4 April 2023)) and a recently started project about the standardization of climate services and policy support, 'climateurope2' (2022–2027) (https://climateurope2.eu/ (accessed on 4 April 2023)). This change in perspective, from the production of data for climate services to participant observation—the main anthropological method—is the starting point of this article. For whom is climate change a matter of concern, how does climate change come to matter [2], and what does this mean for the practice of climate services?

The shift from providing scientific evidence of climate change and climate risks, which was the main task of climate science for a long time, to actually dealing with climaterelated problems on the ground includes an important epistemological aspect. It is not

**Citation:** Krauß, W. Slowing Down Climate Services: Climate Change as a Matter of Concern. *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 6458. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su15086458

Academic Editors: Susan Clayton, Charles Herrick, Jason Vogel and Glen Anderson

Received: 15 November 2022 Revised: 3 April 2023 Accepted: 5 April 2023 Published: 11 April 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

data and information alone that is needed but knowledge about the land, the people and their heritage and the political ecology of climate-related problems [3]. In this article, I present elements for a more inclusive and participatory approach, based on longtime ethnographic research in the coastal landscapes of Northern Germany. The theoretical umbrella for my approach is 'slow science', a concept promoted by the science philosopher Isabelle Stengers [4], with its constituent parts based on premises from political ecology and postnormal science. Slow science asks for a more reflective and deliberative approach to scientific research, to engage in dialogue with the public and to develop a sense for the geo-social constitution of the respective locations. Climate change always happens somewhere, in some place, and there is a difference between results gained from a model or a set of data and the actual changes caused by climate in the real world [5].

Postnormal science is a concept introduced by Silvio Funtowicz and Jeremy Ravetz [6], and it indicates situations and cases that cannot be solved by 'normal' science. Municipalities, stakeholders or decision makers have to take action despite uncertain knowledge, financial risks and value conflicts. Both concepts, slow science and postnormal science, rest on the assumption that climate is not only a scientific fact but a matter of concern. This distinction goes back to Bruno Latour's [7,8] conception of political ecology. He challenged the separation of science on the one side and society, law or politics on the other, and he shifted attention to the assemblies of actors that are involved in any given issue where climate data come to matter. This shift from climate as a matter of fact—which played an important role in providing evidence of human impact on climate change and was challenged by climate skeptics [7]—to climate as a matter of concern implies a shift from model and information to practice and collaboration. In this article, I argue for slowing down climate services and closely reconsidering, analyzing and also imagining new forms of provider (climate services) and user (all kinds of public actors) encounters in order to develop new and more effective forms of climate protection.

As an empirical basis for my argument, I discuss three different forms of climate service delivery in a coastal landscape in Northern Germany. Each addresses different audiences, provides different forms of knowledge about climate change and offers different forms of policy support. The three-part case study includes (1) a regional setting in which a science-based climate service provides climate data and information for Northern Germany; (2) a 'social climate service' [9], consisting of an emergent, loosely organized group of citizens, which aims to bring climate-related problems into the public sphere, to put pressure on politics and to promote climate-friendly practices; and (3) a municipal setting in which government managers develop place-based climate and energy plans to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to climate change impacts. Each of these different forms of climate service application has its own history, which in turn informs its approach to climate change. At a very basic level, the purpose of this article is to step aside and reflect upon climate services as a social practice.

### *Climate Services as an Object of Research: Background and Methods*

During my extended fieldwork in Northern Germany, I both observed and initiated various encounters between different climate service providers and the public [10]. In this first part of the article, I will provide some background concerning my research, followed by epistemological reflections on the concepts of slow science, postnormal science and political ecology. In the main parts, I will provide descriptions and vignettes of these encounters and discuss them accordingly. Maybe more than figures and tables, anecdotal depictions are a method to keep the heterogeneity, complexity and messiness of real-life situations alive.

My starting point in the research about the co-development of climate services was my interest in 'narratives of change', in the role that climate and weather and its changes play in all kinds of past and present narratives, including those of climate services [11]. In this context, I practiced the ethnographic method of participant observation in the strict sense of the term: I both observed and initiated communication and interaction between climate services and the public. In current anthropology, participant observation has turned into the co-design of research and para-anthropology, which is a more precise terminology. Both co-design and para-anthropology entail active collaboration with local partners for a shared matter of concern and are methods that have evolved as a result of the increasing integration of anthropology in inter- and transdisciplinary research projects [12]. In the first part of the CoCliServ project, I worked with the 'North German Coastal and Climate Office', a regional climate service from the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht and partner in the CoCliServ project. Together, we organized a workshop with local and regional decision makers, stakeholders and concerned citizens. In the second part of the project, I engaged with local climate activists, with whom I co-developed a citizen's initiative. During this time, I also followed the successive implementation of municipal climate protection managers in this area, an initiative by the German government. Altogether, the coastal landscape of Northern Germany provides a dense and diverse network of climate services. It reflects the European and German efforts to initiate a transformation of society toward decarbonization. However, recent surveys of this process show that there is no plausibility that Germany will reach its ambitious climate goals with current measures [13,14]. At the same time, these surveys highlight the role of social movements and public pressure on politics for a successful transition toward decarbonization. As a consequence, climate services have to expand their scope and situate themselves in a highly politicized and complex environment, and they have to follow the communal life of facts [2], too, in order to make an impact.

Global climate discourse, from the IPCC to climate services and everyday talk, is science-based, managerial and technology-oriented [15]. For climate services, this raises many difficult questions. Climate services are based on the premise that appropriately configured data and information about climate will enable better political decisions. However, commentaries in Nature or Science concede that there is no undisturbed transfer of knowledge [16]. This is especially true when the knowledge base is uncertain, stakes are high, morals are included and action is urgent—which is the situation for postnormal science as defined by Funtowicz and Ravetz [6]. Climate services and decision makers alike have to deal with these 'postnormal' situations, and there is a need for experimenting with different forms of interaction with local or regional actors. It is a long way from providing data and information to the co-development of climate services for action. One of the main preconditions is to understand climate science and climate services as part of an assemblage of actors concerned with climate change. In a regional setting such as the coastal landscapes of Northern Germany, climate services have to deal with administrations, municipalities, dike and sluice organizations, various forms of stakeholders, farmers and NGOs, and most of them are climate-literate [10]. In order to make a meaningful and especially place-based contribution, climate services have to go beyond the mere purveying of data derived from models and observation. This challenge demands a certain level of introspection and self-reflection, as well as a sense of place, the geo-social formation of the coastal landscapes and the actual political constellations [17].

The science philosopher Isabelle Stengers discusses in her book 'Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science' [4] the example of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). On the one hand, genetic modification was praised as the solution for poverty and hunger in the world, while on the other hand, there was significant protest of field scientists, local farmers and environmental groups. Stengers illustrates how the laboratory conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced have little to do with 'those situations we are confronted with as citizens' ([4], p. 2f). As a consequence, she argues that political ecology has 'to put the sciences into politics, but without reducing them to politics. This requires fully developing, around each issue, the primordial question: who can talk of what, be the spokesperson of what, represent what, object in the name of what?' ([4], p. 148).

Stengers suggests slowing down science, engaging in a debate with the 'public intelligence' ([4], p. 14) and integrating additional aspects of reality, instead of only opting for science-based technological solutions for all problems. Conway [18] defines the concept of

public intelligence as a collective phenomenon, 'an intelligently distributed and contested arrangement of roles, defined by the agents themselves'. This can also be understood as a call for climate services to engage with a wider range of users, defined as those segments of society that understand climate change as a matter of public concern. In order to do so, climate services have to leave the comfort zone of science and confront climate change as a political object. This implies the virtue of self-reflection, of their own role in the field and in society.

At the same time, climate service providers are professionalizing and becoming competitors in a contested knowledge market. Either they have to professionally compete for third-party funds, or they are private consultant agencies developing a new market segment in cooperation with insurance companies and other interested parties. This tendency is also reflected in science-based climate discourse and its terminology. In official documents from the IPCC to regional climate services, neo-liberal concepts, such as innovation, markets, growth, providers, users, decision makers, stakeholders and others, are commonplace [19]. Everything is pressed into the narrow imagery of a market terminology with the result that climate services become agents for market expansion. In many climate service programs, including the IPCC, there is little focus on the need for climate protection, for care and well-being, or emphasis on the catastrophic situation we are in [19]. The reduction of climate to numbers and statistics does not help; numbers have agency, too, they frame the perception of climate, and in doing so, the solutions are designed accordingly [20]. The political, economic and social causes of climate change are turned into technical problems which supposedly will be solved by engineering, by technical solutions for adaptation and mitigation. The call to 'follow the science', popularized by Fridays for Future, has a flipside, which is the strong belief in the 'general authority' [18] of science. Stengers [4] argues sarcastically that the public is supposed to trust in science, 'but they have to know how to wait, and understand that scientists owe it to themselves to remain deaf to any noisy or anxious demands', and that people should not 'be urged to get involved in questions they are not, in any case, capable of understanding'.

In the context of European governance strategies, climate services are understood as competitors in an emerging knowledge market, and there is hardly any mention of climate protection or care for the environment. The European Green Deal is easily depicted as a Janus-faced strategy that either serves to develop new—climate-friendly—markets or serves to change the system of growth and depletion of natural resources. In between are the municipalities, landscapes and nations that have to make decisions about how to proceed into the future. For them, there is more at stake than only markets and statistics; landscapes are also life-worlds, where people interact with geo-social conditions which were formed over a long time and materialize in everyday activities, the sense of place, identities and customary laws [21,22]. This is where social anthropology and interdisciplinary landscape studies intersect with the concept of slow science.

The term 'slow science' has roots in the 'slow food' movement, which originated in Italy as a form of regional protest against the standardization of food [23]. The slowfood movement emphasized regional identity and the singularity of the geo-history of European landscapes and their people. For slow-food protagonists, the acquisition and preparation of food is a matter of concern. This provides support for Stengers' argument that 'matters of concern' have to be taken as seriously as 'matters of fact'. Slow science means here not only the quality control of the scientific process but also the integration of what Stengers ([4], p. 14) calls 'public intelligence'. Scientific facts have a social life, they travel through landscapes and households, and they change global and municipal policies as well as individual ways of life. In reference to the slow-food movement, Stengers asks for 'connoisseurs of science' who act as 'agents of resistance against a scientific knowledge that pretends it has general authority; they partake in the production of what Donna Haraway calls 'situated knowledges" ([4], p. 19). This is where the concept of slowing down climate services comes in: climate services are privileged to coproduce these situated knowledges and to instigate climate action, as demanded in the European calls for the co-development

of climate services for action. In my participation in two of these European projects, I put this call for action into practice, as an anthropological observer, as a participant and as an instigator of climate service action.

### **2. Regional Climate Service**

In the ERA4CS project about 'the co-development of place-based climate services for action', I worked together with one of our project partners, the North German Coastal and Climate Office. This climate service is the outreach of the Helmholtz Center of Geesthacht (now Hereon), and its service includes the Hamburg area and Northern Germany. It serves as a contact point between climate science and the public, and one of its main tasks is to provide an overview on regional climate change in Northern Germany, serving interested citizens, scientists, educators, economic actors, public authorities, media, civil society organizations and political officials [24,25].

For several months, we practiced a division of labor; while the Climate Office documented existing climate services in the coastal area, I interviewed mayors, administrators, representatives of NGOs, farmers and other stakeholders. We realized early that there was a qualitative difference between the information provided by climate services and the narratives that I collected in the field. One example involved the extreme weather events during our research period in this area, namely an unusually warm, dark and wet winter, followed by a drought in the summer. For the climate services in this area, this was a matter of statistical interest (sometimes followed by general warnings), while for my interlocutors, these changes occurred as an aspect of their daily 'weatherworld' ([26], p. 120). During the winter, the fields were inundated by water, and the farmers had difficulties applying manure, while in the summer, many had to sell cattle because of a lack of feed, which became exceptionally expensive in the international market [10].

Finally, we organized a public workshop in the coastal village of Dangast and invited about 30 persons, chosen from our field sites. In the invitation, we asked for 'the regional effects of climate change and for possible answers, from the world climate council, the IPCC, to the municipal council, from climate research to local knowledge' (translation by the author). As our goal, we wanted to start a conversation among diverse members of the public and asked what it takes to make the region climate-friendly and fit for the future.

The organization of the workshop reflected our division of labor: the first part was organized by the Climate Office and the second part by me, an anthropologist from the university. The two parts could not have been more different: in the first half, the moderator of the Climate Office presented data about global and regional climate change, followed by an intensive Q&A section. In the second part, I organized a discussion among our guests. While the first part was orderly and quiet, the second part was like a marketplace, loud and chatty with people moving around in groups. Like a mirror ball, these different settings reflected our different backgrounds and origins and also the different conclusions we drew from this event.

### *2.1. A Regional Climate Service in Action*

When I arrived at the venue maybe an hour before the workshop started, the climate service team was already there. They had prepared the room like a theatre: in front of the chairs for the audience, there was a lectern, framed by two standing posters. The photos on the posters displayed a dramatic scene, with a research vessel cutting through the waves of a stormy sea. In the center of the poster there was the logo of the Helmholtz Research Center and the motto '*erkennen, verstehen, handeln*' (identify, understand, act). On a table next to the desk, there were two computers for public use, introduced as 'web tools' where people could navigate climate scenarios. Everyone entering the room could not help but be aware of the scientific authority of Helmholtz research, of big science.

The workshop started with a presentation by the moderator of the climate service. She outlined how climate changed globally, followed by an outlook into the future. The forecast effects of emission reduction and mitigation were presented in the form of model outputs based on IPCC findings and data, showing the different scenarios from worst- to best-case. The data for the regional development, which were mostly derived from empirical research, attracted the greatest attention from the audience. There has been a 0.8 degree rise in temperature since 1961, the beginning of apple blossom starts two to three weeks earlier (while late frost remains unchanged), and there are now more heat days (from 1–2 to 4–5). Rainfall in the summer remains fluctuating, while winter becomes warmer and wetter, sea level rise (20 cm) conforms with global tendencies, with an increased threat of more and higher storm surges. As a result, the moderator stated that the North German coastline is one of the hot spots of climate change in Germany.

The presentation lasted maybe 30 min, and it left the audience in a state of shock. The confrontation of the global scenario with data from the region made climate change real, in an uncomfortable way. Climate change is not somewhere out there, but in front of our own doorsteps, as one discussant stated. In the following discussion, people expressed concern with discrepancies in climate discourse and politics. As one of the first questions, the moderator was asked how she perceives the discrepancy between existing knowledge about climate change and the less-than-adequate political action. Another aspect was the discrepancy between knowledge about mitigation technology and its lack of implementation. There was also a discussion about the gap between knowledge about climate change and actual consumer behavior, a discrepancy that was attributed to the powerful marketing strategies of the industry. In the meandering discussion, the issue was raised of which strategy might be best for the farmers to bring the livestock through a drought, organic or conventional farming. The moderator put great efforts to maintain a neutral position, as with other controversial issues that were raised. She insisted on the neutrality of climate services, as she summarized in her report:

'Thus, a place based climate service for action implies that the role of science needs to be neutral. Rather than supporting a particular favoured action, science can support decision-making processes by analysing how certain decisions, compared to others, may initiate specific changes and impact developments' ([25], p. 53).

For the climate service, the job was done, followed by the anthropological part. The second part of the workshop was dedicated to the question of what it takes to achieve a climate-friendly regional future. One of the main goals was to bring together different actors who normally do not meet or engage in discussions, such as a mayor and a member of an NGO, a priest and a farmer or a student and a coastal manager. We carefully organized an incremental discussion with random groups of four, who in the end, presented their conclusions to the plenary. After the strict discipline of a Q&A discussion in the first part, here people discussed freely their ideas in various constellations.

As a result, there were dozens of cards with keywords on the whiteboard, which we tried to group into themes such as mobility, energy, water management, consumption, habitation, land use and agriculture. The response to the exercise was lively and appreciative. In conversations at the end, people pointed out that they learned a lot during the afternoon and that they hoped for a follow-up workshop to discuss things in more detail. The workshop was considered a first step, and we promised to send feedback and to organize a second step, which unfortunately never happened, at least in this constellation and due to the different understandings of the public role of a climate service.

### *2.2. Discussion: Regional Climate Services*

In the evaluation of events, we came to different conclusions. For the North German Coastal and Climate Office, the purpose of the discussion was to identify knowledge gaps and information needs, while I looked for possibilities to expand the range of climate change issues and to motivate the audience for further collaborations. We had different understandings of 'matters of concern', and thus we followed different epistemologies. In the first part, the Climate Office confirmed the separation between scientific facts on the one side and local matters of concern on the other, in a hierarchical way. The result was the identification of further knowledge needs and information gaps, which now can be added

to the already existing corpus of place-based climate knowledge. From this perspective, the workshop served as a venue for performing the general authority of climate science. The slogan of 'identify, understand, act', displayed on the posters, left the public in a position where they have little choice but to trust the science and wait until it presents the solution, as Stengers puts it. The public is left in a state of helplessness: either they confirm the power of science, or they are viewed as biased, ideological and non-objective. The main mantra of the climate service is that science and politics have to remain neatly separated: once and again, the moderator of the Climate Office stated that it is up to politics to decide what to do. Both the public and politics are left in a double bind: if they make a decision, they are at risk that the decision will easily be dismissed as 'non-scientific' or not up to scientific standards; if they ask science what to do, they are told that it is up to political decision makers. Due to our different interpretations of the event, our cooperation ended here. We did not agree on a common evaluation for the audience, nor did we manage to stage a follow-up event. There were other obstacles, too: the partners from the Climate Office did not even share the recordings of the event with me, due to new data policies of the Helmholtz Center. They had already enough material for their project deliverable and moved on, while I stayed for the rest of the project in the region. This kind of sad story unfortunately is common in projects and is a tribute to the permanent pressure in a research landscape, where the duration of projects is short and dependency on third-party funding is high. However, serendipity is an important feature in life and in anthropological fieldwork [27] and so did not disappoint me. The experimental co-development of climate services, together with 'the public', found its continuation in another place, a few months later.

### **3. Social Climate Services**

In November 2019, I organized a follow-up workshop in the neighboring district of Ammerland. The initiative came from an environmental activist, who had already participated in the previous workshop in Dangast, and she wanted to carry the format of public participation to her district. The workshop was held in November 2018, and this time, 'the co-development of place-based climate services for action' was successful. As a result of the workshop, we founded a citizen's initiative, the 'Klimamarkt Ammerland' (climate market). It is a loosely organized group of concerned citizens, whose goal is to bring climate change into the public sphere, put pressure on politics and help turn Ammerland into a climate-friendly district.

The term 'social climate services' was coined by Bremer et al. [9] in their article 'Recognizing the social functions of climate services in Bergen, Norway', where they propose 'a field of 'social climate services' that configures relationships between scientists and social actors, built on technologies of humility, for enriching the ongoing culturally and politically charged debates and practices around climatic change in informal institutional settings' ([9], p. 1).

I use the term social climate service for the purpose of this article, even though the members of the Klimamarkt would never do so. In everyday German, the term 'service' is associated with institutions such as banks, administrations or public transport—institutions where citizens are turned into 'consumers' or 'clients'. The Klimamarkt identifies as a public forum, a network, a multiplier or perhaps even—though we did not discuss that yet—as diplomats between science, the public and the landscape of Ammerland. The Klimamarkt has no preconceived agenda, and there are hardly any strategic debates. In my terms, as the participant anthropologist, we organize public performances of climate change as a matter of concern. For press releases, brochures or public communication, we use, in variations, the following text module:

'The Climate Market Ammerland was launched at the end of 2019 to express concern about climate change in Ammerland. Ideas for a climate-friendly Ammerland from the areas of energy, mobility, food and agriculture, land use, water, construction and renovation and health were collected by concerned citizens. Together, projects are now being initiated that will help avoid CO2 and prepare the communities in Ammerland for the effects of

climate change. The Klimamarkt Ammerland is independent, autonomous and open to everyone. It is a public forum to initiate debates and initiatives in order to make a difference. The Klimamarkt wants to help shape a sustainable Ammerland.' (https: //klimamarkt-ammerland.de/ (accessed on 4 April 2023)).

Currently, the Klimamarkt consists of a core group of seven people, most members are engaged in environmental organizations and other forms of public life. We fit maybe in the category of public intelligence as suggested by Stengers [4]: we are able to read and understand scientific assessments, some have a long career in environmental activism, and some of us are specialized in certain areas such as biology or, in my case, in environmental anthropology, and we are widely connected, in Ammerland and in climate research, from Scientists4Future to local activism of all kinds.

### *3.1. A Social Climate Service in Action*

From the first workshop in 2019 until today, the Klimamarkt developed a series of activities. While the terminology of climate services is borrowed from the neoliberal market economy, the term Klimamarkt reminds of a farmers' market, a public place where different people meet and exchange the produce of the soil as well as news and gossip. The idea of the Klimamarkt is to bring climate change into the marketplace, or into the public sphere, as a matter of concern. Our trademark is the organization of climate markets in the literal sense of the term.

### 3.1.1. Climate Market #1

The structure of our first 'Klimamarkt' was similar to the workshop in Dangast which I described in Section 2. We publicly invited people to the workshop, and about sixty of them attended. There was one main difference in the staging of the workshop: there was no official climate service involved. The climate data set about global and regional developments is publicly available, so we presented it ourselves as an introduction. For the public discussion, we posed the question 'How does a climate friendly Ammerland look like in 2030?' We organized this conversation along seven main topics: energy, water, land use, health, mobility, food and construction. We staged whiteboards and encouraged the audience to walk around and fill in cards and pin them down. At each of the stands, there were lively discussions. In the end, the seven stands presented the results to the public. Many issues were addressed, from sustainable household management to the circulation, distribution and consumption of regional products, from communal gardening and the conception of heat islands as protection from heat waves to the rewetting of the moors and the fight against a new Autobahn which is supposed to cross the local moorlands. Despite the concrete measures and proposed actions, the event was an exercise in reclaiming the public sphere and facilitating civic engagement. The Klimamarkt brought the climate problem into the public sphere, in the marketplace where opinions, no matter how qualified, can be expressed. Climate as a matter of public concern goes far beyond the reduction of climate to its physical and chemical composition; it is an exercise in democratizing climate.

### 3.1.2. Climate Market #2

The second climate market was staged as a result of collective confusion and emotional upheaval. In the summer of 2020, forest fires in California, Southern Europe and Germany made the news, COVID-19 brought public life to a halt, and the new IPCC report was published with dire projections for the future. Many people were concerned about this culmination of bad news, and so were we. How to deal with such a situation? We spontaneously organized another public Klimamarkt. Maybe 20 or more people met in an old barn; many of them engaged in care activities in schools and public institutions, others were environmental activists and concerned citizens, there were a couple of mothers with recent-born babies, and the district administrator made her appearance, too. We did not necessarily discuss possible solutions or activities. Instead, we tried to situate ourselves in a world where climate change was not merely a statistical construct but a lived

reality. Instead of using words for a final statement, we formed a human exclamation mark and sent the photo to a regional newspaper, where it was published. Climate change as a public concern includes emotions, and the Klimamarkt served as a place where these feelings could be responsibly expressed, before people returned again to their families and to their jobs in the kindergarten, the school or the administration. It is not only individual well-being that matters; climate as a matter of concern means taking care of people and the environment. The Klimamarkt served to embody this sense of place and care, a sense that informs this kind of social climate services for action.

### 3.1.3. Climate Market #3

The title of the third climate market was 'Climate (protection) needs to be downto-earth' (Klimaschutz braucht Bodenhaftung). We invited twenty different private or communal initiatives to exhibit their work in an old railway station which now serves as a community center. Among the presenters were local bee-keepers, a bicycle organization, environmental educators, a repair shop, a one-world shop, collectives presenting their herb garden or their communal gardening, an initiative of retired citizens who drove electric busses to maintain public transportation in the countryside, a clothes swap initiative, regenerative energy collectives, municipal climate managers and others. There was a café and folk music, and the public enjoyed strolling through this emergent venue of climate-friendly alternatives on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The district administrator took the stage and delivered a welcome speech, in which she outlined her program to turn Ammerland into a climate-friendly district. Our goal was to present activities that represented sustainable and climate-friendly forms of living, consuming and producing. It was a playful and friendly atmosphere that invited people to think about climate change without being indoctrinated or educated. As a motto served a quote from the anthropologist Margret Mead that it only takes a handful of people to change the world. In retrospect, this was again an epistemological exercise in alternative market metaphors; metaphors of care, exchange, circulation and sustainability were performed and subtly replaced the usual neoliberal terminology of innovation, management, stakeholder, participation or growth. From an anthropological perspective, we performed what it means to be 'down to earth' in the sense of Bruno Latour's manifesto for 'Politics in the new climate regime' [28]. Recently, soil has become a prominent feature in research about the effects of climate change and life in the Anthropocene. In Ammerland, there is a surprising variety of lifestyles and activities that practice a down-to-earth mentality in the literal sense of the term. Our third climate market brought these human resources into the public sphere with the intention to create networks and cross-connections for sustainable and climate-friendly forms of land use.

### 3.1.4. Mixed Activities

Before the national elections in 2021 and the elections in Lower Saxony in 2022, we organized public debates with the political candidates, we made a workshop about water management and webinars about agriculture, which all were well attended. We organized an art competition 'Dem Ammerland ein Gesicht geben' (Give the Ammerland a face), and currently we have a call for a writing contest, 'Klimageschichten aus dem Ammerland' (Climate stories from the Ammerland). These activities make climate real, bring it into everyday life and give climate a face, a history and make it part of our life. Most of all, we have managed to become a household name in the area and an address for networking. The non-partisan nature of the Klimamarkt, its support by the head of the district and municipal climate managers, the public events and the networking activities make it indeed a social climate service.

### *3.2. Discussion: Social Climate Services*

Following the work of Bremer et al. [9] about citizen science, I dubbed the Klimamarkt as a social climate service. The Klimamarkt discusses the coastal landscape in terms of categories such as energy, water, land use, etc., and it adds a sense of place which is not covered

by the algorithms of top-down climate software tools. Besides its networking activities, the Klimamarkt emphasizes the performative foundations of our climate interactions and creates its own vernacular climate narrative. In the opening remarks of the first Klimamarkt, we argued that climate is more than statistics and highlighted the importance of bringing climate into democracy. The second Klimamarkt was dedicated to climate change as a reality that has no precedence and is emotionally frightening. The third Klimamarkt was literally place-based and down-to-earth. The exhibition of alternative forms of life and care expanded the scope of climate service activities into the public and social sphere. These performative acts provide an additional meaning to Stengers' 'public intelligence', understood as an emergent, community-based effort with situated knowledges at disposal. A citizen's initiative such as the Klimamarkt serves well as an occasional mediator, as a networker, diplomat and producer of new forms of climate knowledge and, importantly, as a productive counterpart to institutionalized climate services, such as municipal climate managers in the next example. It is also important to keep in mind that the Klimamarkt is not an established institution or NGO. The website is only updated occasionally, activities depend on the individual time schedules and ideas of its members, and they are voluntary and spontaneous. From an informed everyday perspective, the activists of the Klimamarkt address many aspects of the long-term and also immediate effects of climate change which are not captured in official discourse. The goal is not only to include climate change into existing political and administrative structures but also to challenge the current forms of decision making in order to make democracy fit for climate change.

### **4. Municipal Climate Managers**

The implementation of a municipal climate (protection) manager program is a recent development in the national climate service market and in Northern Germany. The main task of a climate manager is to produce an integrated climate protection plan in order to translate international and national climate goals into municipal practice. A governmental program, the National Climate Initiative (https://www.klimaschutz.de/de/ (accessed on 4 April 2023)), promotes municipal climate protection projects, such as plans for emission reduction, renewable energies or the production of communal energy and climate balances. The program is quite successful; by the end of 2019, 3650 municipalities had employed a climate manager [29]. The focus on this new form of climate service goes hand-in-hand with my current and ongoing participation in the Horizon project about the standardization of climate services. What can actually be standardized, and where are the limits of standardization? In the following, I will present a first description of this kind of service.

During my research, I interviewed several climate managers and followed their activities in two municipalities. There is a shift in perspective from the model of regional climate service to this form of municipal planning activity. It is a shift from the provision of climate data and information to the actual design of municipal planning and politics. Municipal climate managers introduce a new matter of concern, climate, into the municipal agenda, and they do so in the form of a standardized procedure.

The implementation of the program is highly contested in many places. For example, I followed discussions in the municipality of Varel, in the district of Friesland, where the majority of the local council vehemently argued against 'another administration', another 'bureaucratic nuisance' or a 'green paper tiger' expected to cost a lot of money in the long run. Others considered climate managers as agents of the 'green ideological agenda', and the mayor proudly argued that their municipality already does a lot for climate protection and is not in need of special advisory services. NGOs, concerned citizens and the local Agenda 20 group campaigned for several years for the implementation of a climate manager, until finally a young graduate from a nearby university was hired. In other municipalities and districts, the process went more smoothly; climate managers were welcomed and served as a sign that climate change is a matter of municipal concern.

In my interviews, several climate managers complained about how difficult it is to find their place in the hierarchy of the municipal administration. As one recently installed manager puts it, 'When you are fresh out of university, you first have to build a reputation. For a start, they gave me a small room under the rooftop, which I had to share with the nature conservation representative'. Communal politics more often than not are based on established networks between an administration, personal and/or party affiliations and representatives of various public interests, and it can be difficult to establish new issues on the political agenda. Climate managers have to start from scratch in a political and administrative environment with a long tradition and well-established hierarchies. In any case, statistics and general opinion suggest that the implementation of climate managers is a valuable program.

### *4.1. Standardization of Municipal Climate Services*

In 2019, the municipal council of Edewecht in the district of Ammerland decided to hire a climate manager. Between January 2020 and June 2022, this climate manager produced an integrated climate protection plan for the municipality, involving the participation of local actors and the following criteria:

'The climate protection concept serves the municipality of Edewecht as a strategic basis for decision-making and a planning aid for its climate protection activities. With the help of the climate protection concept and the climate protection management, climate protection is sustainably anchored in the municipality as a cross-sectional task. These (tasks) include the analysis of the climate protection situation, the calculation of a municipal energy and greenhouse balance according to the territorial principle, the determination of potentials for the generation and utilization of renewable energies and energy efficiency, the calculation of a climate protection scenario until 2050, the development of strategies to increase the climate protection potentials and the derivation of prioritized fields of action'. [30], p. VIII (Translation by the author)

The production of the climate plan is supported and guided by a software program called 'Der Klimaschutzplaner' [31], which offers guidance in climate monitoring. This software is standardized and certificated by BISKO, a systematic communal greenhouse gas emission balancing tool provided by the Federal Environment Agency. It offers guidance regarding energy use in the municipality, provides optional paths and enables comparability with other municipalities in Germany.

The six main fields of action covered in the final report of the climate protection plan are (1) construction, sanitization and heat transition, (2) renewable energies, (3) mobility, (4) education, advisory and participation, (5) climate adaptation and emission sinks and (6) a climate neutral administration. The final plan provides detailed insight into the infrastructure of the municipality, identifies the main sources of emissions and discusses potential sinks and other details. To create and track accountability, there are in-built controlling mechanisms and incentives such as the 'Edewecht climate bonus' for the transition toward climate-friendly housing.

There were several workshops with local actors, including young people. Due to the pandemic, the workshops were mostly online. Additionally, there were online tools such as a map of the municipality, where the public could write comments, share impressions and make suggestions. An online portal provides access to resources for use by individual households, for spatial planning, communal energy saving and so on. The mayor and especially green politicians and activists considered the completion of the plan a great success.

### *4.2. Discussion: Municipal Climate Managers*

Municipal climate services narrow the scope of climate services and intervene in municipal politics. They do so on the basis of a standardized process, which is accountable and calculable and enables various forms of control. The fragility of these plans is obvious: the implementation of the suggested measures to reduce the climate impact is not binding, even after the approval of the municipal council. At least, this is my latest information. It seems to be indeed a question of standards and liabilities, what is binding and what is optional. This means that each of the suggested measures has to be debated, leaving it unclear what might be lost along the way and what is actually implemented. In terms of making use of public intelligence, it is a double-edged tool; because the framework is based on scientific calculations, the goals are reduced to technical and economic possibilities within the jurisdiction. Many potentially relevant factors fall outside their scope, such as major transport systems, economic processes and the management of territory, as well as infrastructure and buildings that are in private hands. Thus, the climate protection plan is reduced to a narrow window of opportunity for municipal politics. There is public participation, but it is channeled and constrained by the conditions of the standardized procedure and its technical framing. However, within this framework, climate indeed becomes part of the political agenda, the administration, spatial planning and communal life.

In the course of the current EU project 'climateurope2', I will bring together municipal climate managers, the Klimamarkt, selected stakeholders, administrators and local politicians in order to discuss what actually is and should be standardized, what is not and should not be standardized and what it takes to assure trust, transparency and the implementation of climate proposals and projects. To establish those encounters, it takes long-term research, and it takes time. Most climate services work in the rhythm of shortterm projects, and it is another serendipity that this research can be stretched over two project terms.

### **5. Conclusions: Slowing Down Climate Services**

In Northern Germany, like in many other regions in Europe, many people are what I call climate-literate. Climate services are needed to downscale global data and to provide long-term empirical observations about local changes in temperature, sea level or the frequency of extreme weather events. There is a dense infrastructure, and many administrations have their own experts and routines to gain relevant climate data. In the public sphere, scientific facts about climate change are framed as a matter of public concern and, as such, gain their own social life. The close relation of climate services to climate science makes them prone to call the public to order, to return to the science of climate. In this article, I argue that it is time to change direction and engage with the manifold performances of climate change in public life.

Slowing down climate services means situating climate science within the complex reality of the geo-social landscapes where climate change actually happens. It means overcoming the reduction of climate to statistics, of service to information and of solutions to technology. It implies a willingness to move beyond simple co-production exercises and the immersion of climate data, information and tools within the performative arenas of local life-worlds. Ideally, slow climate services take their time to explore the many contours of climate change in the everyday world, to link the insights from the laboratory with the experiences in the field, the statistics with the sense of place. Last but not least, slow climate services carefully situate themselves in the respective landscape instead of viewing it from above; place-based climate protection is based on partial knowledges, and science is one among other actors whose concerns are as meaningful as scientific facts. Slow sciences slowly follow the social life of climate data and how they come to matter in public life.

In this article, I portrayed three different forms of climate services that are active in the same area. Each type of climate service provides different contours: there is the statistical view of regional climate services, the applied statistics and planning of local climate services and finally the encompassing view obtained through social climate services. Slowing down climate services means wandering from one perspective to the other, back and forth, in order to get a more complete picture of what climate services can and should do. We should keep in mind that current climate politics and climate services are far from decarbonizing society within the goals set by the Paris Treaty, and thus it takes the reflection of current practices and courage to test new forms of climate activism, inside and outside of established institutions.

**Funding:** This project has received funding from the German Ministry for Education and Research BMBF, grant agreement FK 01LS1701B (ERA4CS project Co-development of place-based climate services for action CoCliServ) and from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 101056933 (project Climateurope2).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

### **References**


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