CLEVELAND, Ohio – People love to bash Cleveland for its weather - and the winters here can indeed be brutal - but a little lake effect snow is nothing compared to the climate crises other parts of the country have been enduring. We might just be the lucky ones.
Massive wildfires are scorching California, sending plumes of smoke wafting across many states.
Drought in much of West has led to water restrictions on some of the 40 million users who depend on the severely depleted Colorado River, with more far-reaching limitations likely on the way.
Hurricane Ida, a major Category 4 storm, blew apart much of southern Louisiana before its remnants drenched a swath of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, shutting down the New York City subway and drowning several people in their basements.
Oh, and for those complaining about 90-degree days in Cleveland each summer, consider that Portland hit a record 116 degrees in June, topping the all-time highs in Dallas and New Orleans.
“Welcome to Ohio, we’re climatically boring,” said Ned Hill, professor of economic development at Ohio State University.
The risk of severe climate hazards and natural disasters in many regions of the United States stands in sharp contrast to Greater Cleveland and the rest of the Great Lakes where hurricanes, drought, earthquakes and the like pose little concern.
“It’s actually something that kind of creeped into my head when I was playing golf the other day,” said Matt Barkett, an executive with the Cleveland public relations firm Dix & Eaton.
Barkett, who used to live in Denver, said he and the others in his foursome felt blessed to be outdoors on such a beautiful day, given what hardships others were experiencing.
“I mean these drought problems are really frightening,” he said.
Indeed, the abundance of fresh water stored in the Great Lakes must seem like a shimmering oasis to the water-starved regions of the country.
Hill actually coined the phrase “climatically boring” for the Cleveland area in the 1990s when he taught at Cleveland State University and he and Ziona Austrian, then the school’s director of the center for economic development, discovered a thriving computer services cluster that had quietly moved into the Richfield area.
The businesses were providing backroom IT operations for insurance firms in New York and wanted to minimize the chance of weather-related disruptions.
“We don’t have earthquakes. Tornadoes are in the southern part of the state. ...” Hill said. “And the people know how to get to work in the snow.”
The U.S. Drought Monitor is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Making climate a business asset for Ohio
Today, several organizations are trying to capitalize on Cleveland’s relatively boring climate.
The Cuyahoga County Department of Sustainability along with the Cleveland Water Alliance and the Energy Policy Center at Cleveland State are developing something tentatively called the “climate risk for business tool” that would highlight the weather-related advantages of northeast Ohio.
“Businesses are definitely focusing more on the value of being in a climate benign environment and how that can affect their bottom line,” said Mark Henning, research associate at the Energy Policy Center at Cleveland State.
The goal is to create a database that will allow businesses to plug in any location in the country and determine their climate risk and the associated costs.
“If you’re paying for hurricane insurance how much are you paying compared to zero here?” said Ebie Holst, director of clusters and innovation at the water alliance.
Those kinds of assessments already exist but they are scattershot and located behind the paywalls of credit-rating companies, Foley said. “We’re going to have to put something together and then test it out with people.”
Holst said one Northeast Ohio company has already volunteered to pilot the tool “to be able to look at their costs of operating in different locations.”
Foley said he hopes to have a program ready for testing by spring of 2022 and that the Cleveland Foundation is expected to decide soon whether to contribute $100,000 to the effort.
Once developed, the tool could be used to fortify Northeast Ohio’s business attraction efforts, which have already coalesced to some degree around the region’s water resources.
In this instance, the county and Water Alliance teamed with the Greater Cleveland Partnership to launch a rigorous study of those industries most likely to be concerned about water security, identifying some 900 companies they should be talking to, said Bryan Stubbs, president and executive director of the Water Alliance.
“We have fresh water and we have updated capacity,” Stubbs said, “That’s the other big issue here.”
That list has been narrowed initially to slightly more than 100, all related to the chemical industry, who might have reason to locate operations in the Cleveland area.
“It’s one of our clear differentiated assets that we have to take advantage of every way,” said Baiju Shah, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, both as a resource for attracting businesses and job as well as a provider of recreation.
The value of Lake Erie
While water is clearly an asset to Northeast Ohio, “it’s way more nuanced than I think a lot of people understand,” said Bill Koehler, chief executive officer of Team NEO, a regional economic development arm of JobsOhio.
Lake Erie offers up a lot of water, he said, but if it’s to be bottled or used in food processing the additional treatments could be cost prohibitive. There’s also a question of access.
And while climate risk in general can be a factor in where a firm makes an investment, it may not be enough to uproot a company from, say, California, where it has an established workforce and supply chain.
“I mean, when companies look to make a significant investment, the decision is about generating ROI, their return on investment, as quickly as they can with the more certainty over time,” he said.
Still, the idea of Cleveland as a climate haven is catching on. National publications are playing it up, including the all-important Site Selection magazine, which trumpeted the area’s ample water resources in an article no doubt read by the very people helping to steer businesses to one place or another.
And an article in Fast Company, which bills itself as “the world’s leading progressive business media brand,” focuses on the prospect of Cleveland other Great Lakes cities becoming meccas for climate refugees.
It asks whether proposed federal investments in green infrastructure should be directed to the still-growing Sunbelt or “to more resilient regions where people might move someday.”
This map from JobsOhio shows how Ohio is an area of low risk for natural disasters.
‘Let’s make the Great Lakes great again’
“If it’s indeed the latter, let’s make the Great Lakes great again,” the article states. “Not only is the region projected to avoid the most egregious climate impacts, but it also possesses an abundance of affordable housing, room to grow, and a commitment to equity and sustainability.”
At the Cleveland Foundation, these are the kind of questions that Stephen Love ponders every day as program manager for environmental initiatives. He believes Cleveland’s weather does differentiate it from other cities.
Northeast Ohio is positioned to take advantage of its climate resiliency, he said, but only if it maintains that resiliency by reducing its carbon footprint and preserving the quality of its assets, including Lake Erie, which continues to be threatened by harmful algal blooms in the western basin.
It also means being prepared over the next several decades for what could be an onslaught of climate refugees, including those of little means fleeing areas where climate hazards have made living untenable.
One thing is for sure, the concern has the attention of those looking to preserve the wealth they already have.
Popular in board rooms these days is the concept of “ESG,” which stands for environmental, social and governance. Investors are demanding that companies factor in the threat of climate risk on future performance of the company, Shah said.
“It’s like exponential growth in awareness because of the ESG movement,” he said.
JobsOhio, the quasi-private economic development arm of the state government, is aware of the growing desire of companies to limit their climate risk and addresses the state’s advantages on its website.
“The market differentiates sites based on important factors such as abundant water and the low risk of natural disasters, JobsOhio spokesman Matt Englehart said in an email. “Ohio is strongly positioned with both, and we world with our partners to emphasize this advantage to potential job creators.”
Furthermore, he said, “Ohio’s low risk of natural disasters is particularly attractive to companies seeking to make a high capital investment, such as in data centers, lithium ion batteries and energy.”
Or as Hill would say, come to Ohio, where it’s climatically boring.
Previous coverage
Why do Rust Belt rivals Cleveland and Pittsburgh have diverging economies?
How did this summer’s weather in Cleveland compare to past years?
Ashtabula River removed from list of environmentally degraded areas in the Great Lakes region
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