How Individual Choices Can Drive Climate Action

It may already be too late to avoid many of the effects of climate change.

Extreme weather like heatwaves, droughts, and flooding across New Jersey and around the world are becoming more frequent. Water scarcity and crop failures will not be rare events in the future but ongoing realities. These changes will shape the way we live and the choices we make every day.

So what can be done? There are no easy short term solutions, especially in a capitalistic system, but small individual actions can add up and influence larger systemic shifts. When people change the way they purchase, consume and support businesses, it can pressure companies to adopt more responsible practices.

Alternative clean energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal power can help reduce long term harm. Still, individuals hold significant influence through the choices they make in the marketplace. Supporting companies that protect the planet, and avoiding those that do not, sends a powerful message.

While large corporations and the fossil fuel industry play an outsized role in driving climate change, everyone can contribute by aligning their spending with their values. Below are practical actions individuals can take.

How Individuals Can Make a Difference

1) Buy only what you need

Every new purchase adds to future waste. Overconsumption is a major contributor to landfill pollution. Before buying something, take a moment to separate needs from wants, especially around moments like Black Friday which are designed to encourage wanton spending. Consider whether the item adds short term satisfaction or long term value. 

2) Make products last longer

Choose items that are durable and repairable. A small repair can extend the life of clothing and household goods. Learning simple fixes, such as sewing small tears, helps reduce unnecessary waste. Check out Jersey City’s repair cafe which offers free repairs on several items 

3) Share items with others

Sharing helps communities thrive. If you have items you rarely use, such as garden tools, recreational equipment or unopened food, share them with neighbors or community groups. This reduces collective consumption and brings people together.

4) Purchase used goods

Many used items are in excellent condition and do not belong in the trash. Clothing is a good example. Producing new garments requires large amounts of water and energy. Buying secondhand saves resources and prevents harmful chemicals from entering the environment. Find your local Buy Nothing group to access pre-loved goods in your neighborhood. 

5) Choose more sustainable alternatives

Sustainability has become a marketing term, so take time to research brands you buy from. Review company websites, look at their stated values and supply chain practices and verify claims with independent reviews. There is no perfect answer, but find what fits within your sustainability beliefs and make choices accordingly. 

Businesses that ignore customers’ expectations eventually lose support. When people direct their money toward companies that prioritize sustainability, they help move the market toward practices that benefit the planet.

By collectively aligning our spending with our values, we can encourage meaningful change and help build a more sustainable future for everyone.

Suhas Vittal is an event coordinator for Sustainable JC. He was born and raised in Jersey City, NJ, and is a graduate of NJCU, where he received his undergraduate degree in public relations and marketing. He is passionate about educating and encouraging others to care about the environment and to make sustainable lifestyle choices. 

Rain Gardens: Where Beauty Meets Sustainability

By Erin Brown

Imagine this: You’re driving down Bergen Ave, going to your favorite coffee shop, and along the side of the road, you notice near the curb an area of plants and flowers blowing in the wind. These small gardens along the road, while they are beautiful, serve a bigger purpose. They’re not your average garden; these are rain gardens and are an impactful way to integrate green infrastructure into the local community. But what are rain gardens? 

A rain garden, as the Groundwater Foundation defines as “ a garden of native shrubs, perennials, and flowers planted in a small depression, which is generally formed on a natural slope. It is designed to temporarily hold and soak in rainwater runoff that flows from roofs, driveways, patios, or lawns. Rain gardens are effective in removing up to 90% of nutrients and chemicals and up to 80% of sediments from the rainwater runoff. Compared to a conventional lawn, rain gardens allow for 30% more water to soak into the ground.” 

Rainwater runoff can be a problem, especially if you’re living in a city prone to flooding, like Jersey City. Every time it rains, water runs off impermeable surfaces, such as roofs or driveways, collecting pollutants like dirt, fertilizer, chemicals, oil, garbage, and bacteria along the way. The pollutant-laden water enters storm drains untreated and flows directly to nearby streams and ponds. The US EPA estimates that pollutants carried by rainwater runoff account for 70% of all water pollution.

The rain garden process acts as a filter,  like a water filter you have at home. It collects the rain water runoff, allowing it to be filtered by vegetation and trickle into the soil, recharging ground water aquifers and improving water quality by filtering out the pollutants. To learn more about how a rain garden works, watch this video.

In addition to helping with water quality, rain gardens have a additional benefits, such as: 

• Beautifying neighborhoods

• Preserving native vegetation

• Providing localized stormwater and flood control

• Attracting beneficial birds, butterflies, and insects

• Ease of maintenance after establishment

To really get the most out of a rain garden it is important for us collectively to do our part to maintain and protect it. As an everyday person what we can do is not throw trash or litter into the rain garden and refrain from having pets relieve themselves in the rain garden. The acid from pet urine can be harmful to plants, especially if new plants are trying to grow.

Rain Gardens are a simple and effective way of integrating green infrastructure and are a tool to make Jersey City more resilient against the effects of climate change, heavy rainfall being one of them. To make our city more climate resilient, we need a city-wide rain garden campaign. Here at SJC, based on Jersey City being a medium-sized city, our goal is to install 11,000 rain gardens throughout the city. 

Learn more about Jersey City’s Green Infrastructure and SJC Rain Garden + Art Campaign, and show your nearest rain garden some love the next time you’re around one!

Erin Brown is a board member with Sustainable JC and Print Production Project Manager at an advertising agency in NYC.

The Coolest Summer of Our Lives?

In the August of 2022, the Scientific American printed a piece by Andrea Thompson, titled:

This Hot Summer Is One of the Coolest of the Rest of Our Lives

If the doomsayers are correct, this may be a perpetually renewable statement, good each year into the foreseeable future. Of course, this prediction rests on the assumption with which many conventional economists hedge all their forecasts—ceteris paribus aka ‘All other things being equal’.

But we can know, if we choose, that this does not work in a world where evolution is a principle of life, and where our futures are always affected by our communal choices and actions. We can choose to be fatalistic, fold our hands, and wait passively for our worst nightmares to unfold. Or we can, collectively, make different choices.

I say, ceteris paribus, based on science and common sense, that humanity is headed for disaster. But the good news is that it’s far from a done deal.

Irrespective of our beliefs on climate change impacts, global mean temperatures are rising, and many weather phenomena are oscillating to new extremes of lows and highs but tending inexorably toward increased warming.

We’ve long known that there is a phenomenon we call Urban Heat Islands.  The argument here has long been that urban areas have more heat absorbing surfaces (buildings and roads made of materials like pavement, asphalt, concrete and other bituminous mixtures), less heat reflective skyward surfaces, and less cooling by evapotranspiration (from trees and vegetation).  While the countryside is—on average—2 to 4 degrees cooler than cities.  And studies have shown that highly developed areas can be 15°F to 20°F hotter in the afternoon than neighboring vegetated areas. 

Global mean temperature rise, and the Urban Heat Island phenomena (ambient temperatures) are two distinct streams of planetary processes. Synergistically, both these phenomena increase the levels of heat stress to which residents of Jersey City are subjected. Risks to our health and wellness, and a variety of quality of life factors lower the overall effectiveness of our collective human performance. Severe environmental and economic impacts, e.g., increased energy consumption driving higher greenhouse gas emissions, are baked into the extreme heat equation.

There is no reason to assume that this trend will stabilize—let alone reverse—any time soon. So, the instrumental and pragmatic question is, "What can we (individually and as a community) do to deflect the consequences of the most likely rising trend in ambient temperatures ?”

Many of these mitigations are reasonably well understood. Plant more native shade trees, orient our building developments orientation to reduce the heat load on buildings [e.g., more awnings, fenestration, painting upward facing roof surfaces white], and so on.

But is there more we need to know to be truly sapient?

I believe most of the problems we, as a community, actually care about are better addressed at the system level and am known to be more a proponent for the now resonant call for “System Change, Not Climate Change…!” I take the position that addressing our climate crisis requires more than just technological or individual behavioral changes and believe the root causes to be dealt with are economic and social propensities driven by profit and unsustainable consumption patterns. Therefore, my position is that we must be willing to undertake systemic change if we are to avoid disaster.

And as regards this growing debacle of these two intertwined heat trends, there are things we ought to know so we can make informed and collective choices.

In that light, the World Resources Institute recently put out two web pages that are worth reading:

• Cities Are Heating Up. Better Infrastructure Can Cool Them Down

• Urban Heat and Passive Cooling

These pages are a very compact summarization of a huge body of research, over the past half-century, and a useful go-to tool for inquiring minds. Ultimately, providing policymakers and urban planners with the data, tools and insights to cool down cities is an effective way forward to impact systems change to combat climate change. 

Ashwani Vasishth is a board member with Sustainable JC and a retired Professor of Sustainability at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Sustainably Speaking: Climate Change—What lies ahead for NJ and Jersey City?

Will we let climate change continue unchecked or will we work together for a safer, more sustainable future?

The first step to solving a crisis is accepting it—and at this point, we all know climate change isn’t some distant, hypothetical threat. It’s here. It’s happening. And it’s reshaping life as we know it. It is now time to understand the extent of the problem and how it affects us. Sustainable JC, an environmental education nonprofit, invited Dr. David Robinson, New Jersey State Climatologist, to provide insight on climate change in New Jersey and what to expect going forward. His findings? Stark, urgent, and impossible to ignore.

New Jersey Climate: Past and Current
New Jersey’s weather and climate variability suggest it is susceptible to flooding, wildfires, drought, thunderstorms, snowstorms, and hurricanes. Dr Robinson, also a professor at Rutgers University, shared compelling data and statistics indicating that climate patterns have altered for the worse in the state. Notably:

• Since 1984-2024, precipitation has gone up by 5.03’’ (with a trend of 12.03” /100 years)

• In the same period, temperatures have risen 3.3° F (with a trend of 7.7° F /100 years)

• 15 of the 20 warmest years have occurred since 2001; 19 of 20 since1990

What can we expect going forward?

We will have to brace for extreme weather events, including storms, drought, and high temperatures.

Projected Temperature Change
New Jersey has already experienced significant warming, especially since 1980. Our future depends on emission levels.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, temperatures could increase dramatically, exceeding 12°F above pre-1900 levels by 2100.
If emissions are reduced, the temperature rise could be more moderate, potentially staying below 6°F above pre-1900 levels by 2100.

Projected Sea Level Rise

The sea level rise since 200, factoring in the worst and most likely scenarios, projects a 50% chance of about 4-5 feet of sea level rise by 2100. The worst-case scenario (95%) suggests up to 12-14 feet by 2150. Rising sea levels can be catastrophic for Jersey City and other coastal communities.

Precipitation

We expect steady or increasing precipitation with more frequent storms, such as the 2-year and 10-year, 24-hour storms. These storms are expected to see increases in precipitation intensity, on average, of 5% to 15% across the state by the end of the century. Rain events have become more frequent and more severe. This, combined with projected sea level rise, can cause severe flooding in Jersey City.

What can be done about it?

Climate change mitigation requires a multi-pronged approach, which can be addressed by:

1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants

2. Increasing public awareness and engaging individuals, organizations, institutions, businesses/industry, and governments to implement sustainable lifestyle, workplace, and policy and legislation changes 

3. Enhancing society’s resilience to climate change

Dr Robinson said an interesting thing - “Climate is what we expect, and weather is what we get.” Right now, what we “expect” and what we’re “getting” converge in dangerous ways.

What can we as individuals do to mitigate climate change? And, importantly, what are we doing to help adapt our lifestyles to the rapidly escalating new realities of climate change impacts, given that the boat has already sailed?

Next Step Forward: Join our next Salon.