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.

What Working With SJC Means To Me - #HG Opportunity For You To Support Our Work 👍

Today is #HudsonGives! Please join me in raising funds for @SustainableJC ‘s award winning program, our Trees & Trash Action Campaign to restore @JerseyCity’s #TreeCanopy. Your contribution will make an impact — whether you donate $5 or $500 — and will support our work this season! https://bit.ly/sjc-hudsongives-2023

Submitted by Ron Peterbridge / Board Member, Sustainable Jersey City

Two years ago, I joined this wonderful nonprofit, Sustainable Jersey City, aka SJC.  Now as a Board Member I want to share my story of what SJC means to me. 

Making A Difference . . .

Being part of SJC allows me to challenge my biases, working with people of different backgrounds and beliefs, and to pursue my passion to help others burdened by social inequity that live with a constant threat to their health from environmental issues that we can collectively solve if we are willing to take up the greater cause. We can no longer ignore the effects of climate change and the fact that we are not blameless as the human race.   We can see the loss of life and habitable environment everywhere in the world from the constant increase in forest fires, drought, flooding and severe storm events.  Whether you have been directly affected or not, we need to take responsibility to reverse these problems that threaten so many lives.  We can no longer turn away from those less fortunate that live in the areas that are not climate resilient, and it will eventually affect us all. 

Calling On You !

I would like to call on you to pick up the charge, make the change to practice more sustainable ways, and demand this from the companies whose products we consume, to protect our planet and provide everyone with an opportunity to access the same benefits we enjoy to have a safe, healthy and secure way of life.  This is SJC’s charge. 

We continue to reach many more people in need, providing them a voice to understand how they can self-advocate for both environmental and social justice .  SJC brings all stakeholders to the table to make change happen in an equitable way for all. We continue to generate community awareness through educational programs and activate Citizen Scientists to plant and care for more trees and much more. 

Our goal is to reduce the impact from extreme heat, pollution, and flooding in places like the underserved community of Jersey City, while teaming with like minded partners in the surrounding region.  SJC has developed bold commitments from the local government and we are building community trust and support working with local underserved community leaders.  Please help us make a difference and give whatever your heart feels is right, since every dollar we receive both large and small helps give us the opportunity to continue to serve local communities.  Whether you live outside Jersey City, follow our story at  https://www.sustainablejc.org/ and become a supporter of providing equitable change that combats systemic inequality in our country.

#sustainable #jerseycity @sustainablejc #healthierjc #hudsonGives #trees #treeCanopyRestoration

NYC Tutoring Contributes to a Greener Jersey City by Providing Free Translation Services

Jersey City is ranked the second most diverse city in the United States, according to WalletHub’s latest diversity report. It also ranks #2 in linguistic diversity across the country.

Education is at the core of Sustainable Jersey City’s efforts and we’ve been working to expand our reach by generating content in more languages. To that end, we have partnered with NYC Tutoring to translate content and better serve our multilingual communities.

During the pandemic, Jersey City residents enjoyed a brief period of significant reductions in air pollution and found respite from lockdowns in our green spaces — a trend we see continuing in the coming months. As our communities found their green thumbs and started to look into living more sustainable lifestyles, including caring for their Street Trees, SJC took this opportunity to bring them into the fold with expanded language capabilities. We’re grateful to  NYC Tutoring and its language tutors, who offered pro bono translations to ensure that our residents have all the support they need in making Jersey City a greener, more sustainable place to live and work.

“The preservation of the environment is an issue that touches us all,” says Luke Palder, Co-founder of NYC Tutoring.“Sustainable Jersey City is working toward a noble mission of a greener, more sustainable Jersey City, and we’re proud to help in any way we can.”

NYC Tutoring provides personalized tutoring services in a wide range of subjects including SAT prep for students in the New York Metropolitan area and Northeastern New Jersey, including Jersey City. With the support of NYC Tutoring, we are working on efficiently promoting awareness of our programs and educating individuals in major languages such as Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese,  among others. 

Sustainable Jersey City would like to thank Luke Palder and his NYC Tutoring team for their outstanding efforts. We hope to continue our mission to create a greener Jersey City for us all, regardless of language.

Looking back at a decade of service — and forward to our next ten years !

For SJC’s 10-year anniversary, SJC Founder Debra Italiano and Founding Advisor Ashwani Vasishth look back at SJC’s origins, and a decade of making Jersey City a greener, more sustainable place to live and work. 

What led you two to found an organization like SJC? 

ASHWANI: I came to Ramapo College of New Jersey in Mahwah, Bergen County, as an Associate Professor of Sustainability in 2009. All my work to this point had been in an urban setting, specifically, Los Angeles. So, I looked around me for a distinctly urban context to situate my participatory research work, and my gaze fell to Jersey City. I happened to collaborate with Debra on a Washington Park project.

Deb was one of the very few individuals I had encountered in my decades of work in sustainability who thought natively in a systems perspective. She understood the importance of taking a multi-perspective and participatory approach to depicting any given reality.  

DEBRA: I was a Board Member of Washington Park Association when I collaborated with Ashwani on our award-winning Green Infrastructure (GI) project — stormwater management and flooding mitigation using a permaculture approach. After our collaboration, Ashwani and I started to explore opportunities for sustainability projects that had interconnecting systems solutions and a balanced ecological approach across social, environmental and economic considerations. 

We both agreed that Jersey City hadn’t quite caught the sustainability wave despite its proximity to NYC, which was buzzing with sustainability-focused activity. We met with a number of community organizations to share our vision for more such innovative demonstration projects, gained their input, and attracted about a dozen other people interested to work on the initiative. 

ASHWANI: We felt that Jersey City was awash with non-profit organizations, all working in their own turf-constrained and parochial way on narrow slices of the world. We knew that:

• We wanted a city-wide focus for Jersey City  

• We wanted to take an explicitly systems-oriented approach to urban sustainability

• And we wanted to start at the grassroots and work outward from there

 So, we did.  And SJC was born.  The rest, as they say, is history — and historic for us.

What values does SJC hold at its core? 

DEBRA: Collaboration and teamwork, both within our organization and with individuals and organizations outside of SJC, is one of our core values. We believe in the motto “Better Together”. This value allows us to accomplish quite a bit, as we leverage expertise and resources across the city. We always look for multiple community stakeholders that could benefit from our project work, and we never go into a grant proposal without at least one other stakeholder group involved.

ASHWANI: We take a “distributed leadership” approach to how we operate. The organization is made up of a constellation of people who are managing projects and teams independently, yet functioning as part of an integrated set of teams across the organization. It seems to work very well for us.

DEBRA: We are a learning community and constantly look to evolve our understanding of the myriad scientific, academic, market-related, governmental and specialized fields of practice within the sustainability and resiliency movement. We are always educating ourselves within SJC, and make every effort to share this knowledge with our volunteers and the public via our digital communications platforms, our annual flagship Certificate Program In Urban Sustainability, and even at our social events.

How has SJC’s volunteer base evolved over the years?

ASHWANI: The only reason the two of us have managed to get to where we are is because of an amazing and astoundingly diverse and talented group of Jersey City residents, who, over the years, have come to play with us on the perpetually evolving stage that is SJC. You have to understand that running a volunteer organization is a very heavy lift. Most smart people have full lives, and there is a limit to how much time they can give. Initially, our volunteer leaders would burn out within six months. But we have learned to work differently. Folks still come and go — life happens to all of us — but our leadership participation is way more stable than it was in the early days.

DEBRA: We have four tiers of membership within SJC — Honorary Charter Members, Volunteer Team Members, Core Team Leads, and Board Members.  We also have a lot of advisors, and I’d say that we have arrived at a high level of skilled key people who are guiding SJC at both the project level and organizational level. We are blessed with a cadre of really smart and experienced people who are interested in making Jersey City a more sustainable and resilient place to live and work, and everyone teams together really well.

What have been significant challenges that SJC overcame?  

DEBRA: For many years we focused on small but impactful demonstration projects and were not able to scale our activities, primarily due to the lack of funding. Now that we have incorporated as a non-profit, we have been able to seek funding and access tools to ramp up our activities to citywide efforts such as launching research studies and leveraging educational projects into campaigns with institutional partners. This is a huge challenge we have overcome, and we’re looking forward to scaling up our projects and campaigns to serve Jersey City even better.

Another challenge we have, that we are working on but have not yet overcome, is managing a large virtual volunteer network and making sure everyone has a positive experience while getting work done. We have set goals to tackle a variety of value-added programs for our volunteer network over the next year, and I’m confident that SJC will remain a preferred volunteer experience in Jersey City.

ASHWANI: One of the most significant tensions we have had to deal with is fairly well established in urban planning theory — the tension between conventional top-down, expertise-led and bureaucratic planning and a more diverse and robust bottom-up and middle-out participatory planning. There is much to be said for educated expertise, and the average public citizen rarely has the time or opportunity to think through the nuances and complications so inherent in most city and community planning issues.

But a savvy, stakeholder-based model of participatory planning offers an alternative to thoughtless public participation. Most professional planners — who usually are trained in planning theory but not in participatory decision making — think of “public participation” as either an exercise that informs the public about decisions that are being made (perhaps with opportunities for “feedback”), or as a talk session that is actually geared to simply persuading the public that what is being done is the right thing. For us, participatory grassroots planning is something that gives stakeholders the opportunity to make actual and meaningful decisions. We’re working on bridging this divide through more public partnerships, and extensive community education.

What was the most memorable SJC campaign or project in these past 10 years? 

DEBRA: For me, it was the permaculture project in Washington Park. It saw 250,000 gallons diverted from our sewer system annually, and eventually led to the origins of SJC as an organization. To this day Green Infrastructure — be it building-related (Green Roofs and Green Walls), Streetscapes (Rain Gardens and Bioswales) or Trees — remains one of SJC’s three primary focus areas, alongside Emissions Reduction and Waste Streams.  

ASHWANI: As an educator, the most remarkable campaign for me is the Urban Sustainability Certificate Program we offer each year in the spring, where we engage residents at a deeper level on Jersey City’s sustainability issues and solutions at play. For SJC, and residents, I think the most impactful campaign is the Tree mapping census — or the ‘We Can’t Manage What We Don’t Measure!’ campaign for Tree Canopy restoration. 

What’s your vision for SJC in its next decade?

DEBRA: As a homegrown non-profit, I think we are tasked with bringing in the best thought leaders to help us educate, engage and empower community stakeholders to become civic stakeholders-in-action. SJC can offer technical advisory and program leadership, but there needs to be a mobilization of the public on behalf of the neighborhoods we live in. SJC is a catalyst organization, but I would really like to see neighborhoods and citywide organizations embrace a collaborative focus, and self-organize around progressive citizen-led initiatives like participatory planning and participatory budgeting as a new addition to governance in the city — sounds like a referendum to me!

ASHWANI: I think I would like to see three things happen within the next ten years:

• That SJC develops a robust and durable relationship with many of the agencies within the city of Jersey City

• That SJC moves closer to a truly decentralized leadership model that was the founding image of the organization (read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations)

• That SJC gets more and more effective at onboarding, managing and retaining volunteers

Anything you’d like to say to all our supporters, volunteers and partners? 

ASHWANI: You’ve been the reason for our success. Stick with us, keep coming back.  And tell us what we ought to do differently.

DEBRA: Thank you, thank you for all your support! At every turn, there was always a question about how best to contribute with activity that would forward the momentum in Jersey City, given the urgency of climate change. What we have found is that community stakeholders have been very responsive to partnering with us, in action and in learning, so we can all be part of a ramping up of progressive solutions and best practices. I would say we are finally ‘on the move’, and I salute the many, many people getting into the canoe and rowing with us!

The Future of Work: Have You Updated Your Skills For Remote Work ?

Opportunity For Sustainable JC Folks To Consider Job Market Trends With This Second Post Of A Short Series On The Future Of Work And Acquiring New Tech Skills As We Transition In The Age Of COVID !

Submitted by Artur Meyster, Guest Blogger / Founder of Career Karma

After everything that happened this year with the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work is probably here to stay. Even if you don’t decide to become a permanent remote worker, you will probably have to do it a few days a week. These are the skills you will need to be successful in the future of work.

Strong Communication

For remote workers, strong communication is an essential skill to have. Some people may think it is not that important because you are working from home and not around your team. But that is the reason why communication is more important in remote work than in traditional office environments.

Remote workers have to over-communicate with their team because they are all working in different locations. They have to constantly make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to their responsibilities and deadlines. Also, communication isn’t only words—we use body language, expressions, and tone to complement what we say.

When you are communicating through email or a phone call, you have to figure out the message without the help of several components. Thus, remote workers have to be strong communicators to transmit the messages the way they mean with only words. 

Self-discipline

Another skill that only people who already have worked remotely before know is self-discipline. Doing your job even when you don’t have a manager breathing down your neck requires a lot of discipline. 

When working remotely, you know you can cheat the system if you want by spending the day doing other stuff instead of working. That’s why you have to be self-motivated, disciplined, and independent enough to be responsible and do your job even when you don’t have anyone supervising you all the time. However, remote working isn’t for everyone. Some people have a harder time finding that motivation. One of the things you can do is to set up a home office where you can shut yourself off from all distractions. 

Digital Literacy

When you start working remotely, having digital literacy is a must. Digital literacy is when you are familiar with technology like different devices, digital platforms, and tools. Working remotely requires professionals to use different digital tools like computers, smartphones, various programs, and platforms like videoconferencing or document collaboration.

So, if you’ve always had a hard time using technology and digital tools, you should work on this skill right now. You can find many online courses that will teach you the basics in the most common programs. 

For example, the most common tools used nowadays are video conferencing tools like Zoom or Skype, Google Docs and Sheets, and the Microsoft Office package. Knowing how to use email is also important for communication, and for using other tools. In addition, at least the basics on how to do Internet research will be helpful for any other doubt you have in your day-to-day life.

Basic Troubleshooting

Average US workers waste 22 minutes per day dealing with IT issues. Now with remote working, when employees need IT support they probably lose a little more time because the support is also remote. Knowing some basic troubleshooting will help you a lot to optimize time during the day.

Knowing how to do Internet research is a complementary skill to troubleshooting. If you have basic knowledge of how computers work and how to solve basic issues you will be able to follow tutorials and instructions found online. You can go even further and learn more than basic skills. You can learn a programming language, or study an operating system or hardware. This will help you solve many problems you will encounter.

Time Management

Finally, but not less important, you will need to be excellent with time management to be a remote worker. Knowing how to organize your time is essential not only to meet all your work deadlines but to disconnect from work when it’s over. Sometimes, remote workers struggle to disconnect from work and set time apart for their own lives. Time management will help you have enough time for all aspects of your life.

In Summary

To be an excellent remote worker you will need to have your skillset ready. You can take some time to learn or improve the skills you don’t have. You need strong communication, self-discipline, digital literacy, basic troubleshooting, and time management. Make sure you are prepared for the future of work and the new normal after the pandemic.

#sustainable #jerseycity @sustainablejc #futurework #newtechskills @CareerKarmaApp @Career_Karma