This time, we caught up with Claire Bonham-Carter, vice president of sustainability and resilience in our Buildings + Places business line in the U.S. West region, to understand her journey and experiences across all four ArchTam career paths.

Hi Claire. What do you do for ArchTam?

I lead ArchTam’s Global Center of Excellence for Sustainability and Resilience for the Buildings + Places business line and am ESG Technical Lead for the U.S. West Region. I help clients understand why, where and when they should integrate low carbon, equitable and resilience thinking into their projects.

Give us a summary about how you got here.

Communication of science has always been important to me. My first job was at the Science Museum in London where I produced educational shows and exhibitions on topics from solar power to the history of bicycles, nuclear fusion and fake photography. My career at ArchTam started in London with legacy firm Faber Maunsell in 2001, working with local, regional and national governments on sustainable design and construction solutions with a focus on renewable energy. I worked on the first-ever UK Government technical planning policy guidance on climate change, and even made the case for ArchTam to undertake its first carbon footprint calculation back in the mid-2000s.

In 2007, I moved to the ArchTam San Francisco office, having fallen in love with the city during a work trip. There, I established a climate action planning practice and was soon promoted to principal, director for sustainable development. My focus shifted to climate adaptation in around 2011 as clients realized climate change was happening and broader city resilience was introduced with the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) program.

I was part of ArchTam’s inaugural ESG Global Council and helped to develop our Sustainable Legacies strategy which was launched in April 2021. While my primary responsibilities fall within the technical excellence career path, I wear many hats and my role frequently encompasses parts of other paths, such as managing and directing projects, developing and leading teams, and winning work.

What was a career defining moment for you?

ArchTam’s work with 100RC came about through a conversation with the head of the very new 100RC organization at a C40 Mayors Forum in Johannesburg. I talked to him about the sustainability and climate work we were doing and shared some stories about my own personal resilience getting held up by Colombian guerrilla freedom fighters in the early 90s. From that connection, 100RC tried us out on a few cities and we essentially built the plane while we were flying it with the 100RC staff. It really forced me to learn about other elements of resilience beyond climate. Due to an amazing ArchTam team around the world, we ultimately worked on 34 of the 100 cities in the network between 2014-2019.

What’s something you’re proud of?

Always looking to innovate and push the boundaries with our projects. Surrounded by a great team, we look to develop new tools or methods to problem solve for clients. The team is small, but our reach is mighty—my team’s sustainability and resilience project examples are used by teams in proposals across the world.

A recent, personal event I am proud of was riding my bike over 500 miles from London to Glasgow over six days through wind, rain and rainbows to raise awareness for climate action. The destination was the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) where I represented ArchTam and our work on several panels with clients.

What advice do you have for people who want to chart their careers?

Take advantage of innovation programs and put forward your ideas. Collaborate with colleagues on competitions and volunteering, join local industry chapters or organizations, attend networking events (in and outside your company).

If not this path, what would have been your career plan B?

I am an avid rock climber and spend as many weekends climbing as I can in Yosemite National Park. I would have been a rock climber living out of my van.

Claire Bonham-Carter Career-Path

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Inspired by teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who set sail in 2019 for New York from Plymouth, UK, in a racing yacht so that her journey to attend a climate change summit was carbon neutral, I’m cycling 475 miles to Glasgow from London for the COP26 conference. Accompanied by my nephew, ArchTam colleagues and around 130 other riders, we’ll be cycling approximately 70 miles (110 kilometers) per day for seven days as part of #RidetheChange, an event designed to build climate action awareness.

Like Greta, our ambition for this ride extends way beyond the carbon we’ll be saving. Primarily, we want to influence decision makers to be bolder in making climate commitments in Glasgow, but also to inspire others to take action to reduce their own carbon footprint. Instead of asking people to sponsor us with money, all riders have a Do Nation page to raise support through climate action pledges. These include commitments to eat less meat, to switch to a green energy supplier, turn off the lights, ditch disposable cups, make meals with friends and use the dishwasher at night. We ask supporters to make changes to their lifestyle for two months, with the hope of creating lasting sustainable habits.  The most important part of this is to stimulate more conversation and understanding around the need for urgent climate action and to make political leaders aware that they will not remain in power if they do nothing.

Of course, Greta isn’t the only young person inspiring us oldies to do more to protect the earth.  Working with community youth as part of ArchTam’s consulting projects is key to ensure long term engagement and implementation.  As part of a recent sea level rise vulnerability and adaptation project we did in the San Francisco Bay Area, we worked with a local community-based organization to run a three-week training course on climate change for cohorts of youth, African Americans, Hispanics and Pacific Islanders so that the training could be culturally and linguistically specific.  Many of the youth hadn’t visited the Bayshore and were excited to understand the relationship between sea level and ground water rise, and the flooding of their streets during high tides. Their passion for ecological solutions to this flooding was inspiring.

Along the route I’m also going to be listening to what Toby Roads, my 24-year-old nephew, has to say. He works for Sustrans, a walking and cycling charity organization and as we were sorting out important details like rain jackets and overshoes in preparation for the ride, he said, “I’m passionate about encouraging sustainable transport. As part of my day job, I run school event days. Hopefully my personal experience will help to inspire students to get on their bikes, especially for short journeys. Most importantly though I get to hang out with my aunt!”

As a rather competitive person, I have big ambitions for this ride. I might not be the fastest on my rental bike but as I set off for Glasgow, I’m currently in second place on the pledge leaderboard, having amassed 225 pledges. Collectively, Ride the Change cyclists have gathered 3,266 pledges, saving 120,166 kilograms of carbon dioxide. That’s equivalent to 1,083 flights from Glasgow to Amsterdam. I’m hoping my lovely ArchTam colleagues and friends – and any other readers of this blog! –  will power me to the head of the pack.  Please choose a pledge here!

PS:  For this ride, I’ll be in bike specific gear, including very padded shorts, but normally you’ll find me in everyday clothes. In fact, I made a short film a few years ago to encourage women to bike in whatever outfit they need at their destination – high heels and dresses included. Check it out at www.stylishspokes.com 

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Sudden shocks in cities can cause significant damage or disruption and chronic stresses can weaken the fabric of a city over time. In terms of stresses there can be high unemployment, lack of affordable housing, youth violence, civil unrest and income inequality. A city won’t be resilient unless it has talked to its residents to understand why some of these things are happening, in order to find a solution. A sustainable neighborhood becomes a resilient one though if designed to respond to these challenges. Neighborhoods need to be in a position to do this. Cities can’t be resilient on their own, and while cities should be leaders in building resilience, the neighborhoods within the cities must be able to support them.

Urban resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow despite the chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. That is a lot to tackle. All of this goes into the 100 Resilient Cities definition of a resilient city — one that can survive and thrive no matter what challenges it faces. The Rockefeller Foundation launched the 100 Resilient Cities program in 2013 to help 100 cities around the world achieve urban resilience. They are now working in 49 countries in 27 languages. The key aspect of this program is to provide funding to hire a chief resilience officer to lead resilience building efforts in the city.

100 Resilient Cities provides the city support — through their staff and consultants like ArchTam — to develop a resilience building strategy.  This process helps the city understand the threats it’s facing; it’s capability to address those threats; and what it needs to do to bridge that gap. ArchTam is lucky enough to be working with over 30 of the cities in the network, carrying out a resilience assessment and developing a resilience strategy.

The first step in developing a resilience strategy is to undertake a preliminary resilience assessment in order to understand all the challenges and risks that a city faces, and where those challenges are most geographically acute. This process allows cities to understand where shocks and stresses might be co-dependent, so that any one solution or action can provide multiple benefits.

Most, if not all, of the cities that ArchTam have worked with under the 100 Resilient Cities processes have gained a deeper understanding of what they know and, more importantly, what they don’t know about their vulnerabilities. A lot of this comes from an extensive amount of stakeholder engagement and collaboration, especially with the community, but also across all departments of cities, regional agencies and with utilities. This program gives the cities the ability to look more thoroughly at the interdependencies between departments and issues, which is an opportunity they might not have had before.

All of these steps have relevance to the concept of sustainable communities — from getting appropriate input into city decision making, to supporting more affordable housing and facilitating people to stay through adapting to sea level rise. Key issues of resilience need to be tackled and supported at multiple scales through different levels of government policy and programs from the national level down to the local level. The challenge to us urbanists is to consider how our projects should be helping cities take on their biggest challenges.

The post What makes a resilient neighborhood? appeared first on Blog.

The resilience strategy formulated by the City of Oakland, California focuses, among other things, on how the City government interacts with its diverse communities, including those of color. Facing a history of community distrust in government, Oakland Chief Resilience Officer Kiran Jain (above) initiated a process with community activists and leaders and city staff to better align objectives in a constructive, participatory way. With a housing affordability crisis in full swing, the City wants to help these communities stay rooted in Oakland.

Chief Resilience Officer is an impressive yet amorphous title and one held by less than 100 people globally (a number that is thankfully rising). Given that city resilience covers everything from housing affordability and racial equity (social resilience), to income inequality and industry collapse (economic resilience), to droughts and sea level rise (environmental resilience), it can be hard to figure out what the ideal background for a CRO is. Personally, I think Kiran has it. She blends an understanding of Oakland city government (she worked for seven years in the attorney’s office) with creativity and desire for change (she was a founding team member of San Francisco public finance start-up Neighborly). Mayor Libby Schaaf recognized this unique combination and asked her to come back to Oakland to bring Resilient Oakland to the finish line.

Being resilient is about changing the way you do business, the way you think about the world, connecting dots, and leaping out of silos. Kiran embraced that. She was bursting with ideas, and it was a riot to go to her office for our weekly working session. We covered the walls with flip charts and post-its of ideas, figured out the connections and points of intervention, and narrowed down to what could actually be successful. It was exciting to hear the ideas she had uncovered from colleagues during the week that she thought could be elevated by the 100RC program. She convened a number of meetings with staff from across the city, those focused on economic development, housing, green infrastructure, workforce development, community participation, sea level rise, rent control, and more. She asked staff what their vision was for a resilient Oakland and how they could best help achieve it.

Resilient Oakland brings together existing ideas, enhances some, reinvigorates others, and starts afresh with new ones. The strategy was launched in October 2016. This year, Kiran will work with her colleagues and the community to put all the ideas into action.

Read Resilient Oakland here.

The post Resilient Oakland: It Takes a Town to Thrive appeared first on Blog.

Did you know that February 2016 was the warmest month ever recorded, beating the one-month old record set in January 2016?

My team works to try and reduce human impact on the world’s climate caused by extensive burning of fossil fuels, agricultural practices and deforestation, as well as to adapt to the now inevitable impacts.

Luckily, I’m a glass-half-full kind of person, or I’d have given up long ago.

Work has always been a central part of my life, and I’m fortunate to have found interesting, inspiring and challenging jobs that have kept me busy and fulfilled. At the London Science Museum I produced shows on topics from solar power to the history of bicycles and fake photography and consulted with diverse museums on exhibitions, such as “The Science of Beauty” with London’s National Portrait Gallery. There, I also learned to effectively explain complex issues, including genetic disorders, nuclear fusion and climate change, to the public. I remain great friends with many of my Science Museum colleagues to this day, and we regularly catch up when I’m in London. Jobs like this, I’ve found, are full of the kinds of people you want to spend your time with.

While I’m told by some that I work too hard (not everyone appreciates my work-life balance), I play hard too — rock climbing in Yosemite, back-country skiing in Tahoe and trail running in the Marin Headlands. When I’m not working or spending time outdoors, I’m building relationships with organizations like CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Program, which has led to interesting trips all over the world meeting people dedicated to trying to solve the problem of climate change and adapt to the effects that we are seeing all around us.

My career at ArchTam started in London with legacy firm FaberMaunsell. There, I worked with local, regional and national governments on sustainable design and construction solutions with a focus on renewable energy, eventually working on the first-ever UK Government technical planning policy guidance on climate change. I even made the case for ArchTam to undertake its first carbon footprint calculation back in the mid-2000s. Sure, I worked hard, but it was all cool stuff.

What has benefitted me, I think, is my belief that I can. I’ve always been attracted to strong role models, like my grandmother (who taught me self-sufficiency by showing me how to grow my own food) and Marie Curie (a Polish-born French chemist and physicist who won two Nobel prizes in the early 20th century), so even when I was the only girl in my science A-level classes, the possibility that I couldn’t do what the boys could do never crossed my mind — it just served to reinforce my understanding that I was their equal.

Today, my success is deeply tied to my passion for the cause and faith in the work we are doing. Please help make sure that all the projects you do for ArchTam minimize the impact they have on the planet and do your best to make them adaptive for the future.

We must act now — we have a planet to save!

Claire Bonham Carter, a principal with ArchTam’s Buildings + Places business line, is a specialist in climate mitigation and adaptation planning with more than 18 years of experience for public- and private-sector clients. She manages ArchTam’s partnerships with the CDP Global Cities program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Program, overseeing the 16 global cities ArchTam works with.
LinkedIn: Claire Bonham Carter

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This was an art installation by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing – it was eerie, beautiful, terrifying. A visceral and powerful reminder of why the work all the negotiators were doing during COP 21 is so desperately important.

Paris was unusually warm for the time of year (well it is the hottest year on record…again…) and the ice was visibly dripping even around midnight, which is when we visited. It should be freezing.

The ice blocks themselves were all incredibly different in density and texture – some dense and opaque almost like chalk, and others filled with bubbles and lesions, with a transparency of a couple of inches. They were all breathtaking.

Visit http://icewatchparis.com/ for more details, and for the carbon footprint calculation they did for bringing the ice to Paris, and yes they offset it.

Claire Bonham-Carter is a director of sustainable development for ArchTam.

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In my last post on Friday about Climate-KIC, I mentioned the importance of entrepreneurs and technology in achieving those goals. But while technology is part of the solution, it is not the only one.  Mayors from around the world are continuing to step up to be the greenest in their region, or state, or country, and this requires them to put in place significant policies and programs to change the way their city works. From building energy benchmarking ordinances, to bike and electric car share schemes, to energy conservation incentive programs, cities can play a powerful role in changing the behavior of their residents and businesses.

As of Saturday this week, around 400 mayors had confirmed their commitment to carbon reduction by signing on to the Compact of Mayors, which commits them to developing a greenhouse gas inventory (also known as a carbon footprint) and to setting a carbon reduction target. It is not just the big, well-known cities with the far reaching targets; an event at the ICLEI cities pavilion in the Green Zone included the Mayor from Sonderberg, a small city in Denmark of 75,000 people that has a set a goal of being carbon neutral by 2025. There are many more small cities in the world than large, and having leadership at this level is incredibly powerful.

What is needed to help cities make progress towards these targets in what will be a very critical next five years (as 2020 is a horizon year for many cities)? This is also one of the points being debated this week during the final negotiations – whether INDCs should be revisited before 2030 – as the current suite of INDCs will only keep the global GHG emission trajectory to 2.7-5.0 °Celsius by the end of this century, and not below 2°C, as requested by the IPCC to ensure a climate-safe future for all people.

ArchTam co-hosted a convening with the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) on Sunday to discuss this very question. The meeting was attended by large philanthropic organizations such as CIFF, the Oak Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Ford Foundation, ClimateWorks, the Kresge Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, who have all recognized the importance of cities in fighting global climate change, and given their limited resources (compared to government budgets or the private sector), want to understand with as much precision as possible what they should be funding. Many of them are already funding climate action. Organizations that are representing important networks of cities were in the room – the C40, CDP, the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, and ICLEI, as well as NGO’s like ITDP, Transit Centre, and Institute for Sustainable Communities.

(Right to left) Josh Sawislak, ArchTam; Hank Dittmar, consultant to NRDC; Shelley Poticha, NRDC Urban Solutions; Shirley Rodrigues, CIFF.

Many mentioned the power of convening city representatives for best practice sharing and problem solving (and good healthy competition), both at a mayoral level (such as C40) and a staff level (USDN and 100 Resilient Cities). C40 referenced recent research that indicated that 30% of the climate action carried out by their cities was the direct result of collaboration. All recognized the need to be focused on the human aspect of climate change and prioritize climate actions that benefit people and advance social equity.

The Stockholm Environment Institute has recently released research funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies identifying the mitigation measures by region that have the most potential for carbon reduction.

The funders also commented on the need for NGOs to collaborate on strategy and activities and bring a unified set of recommendations to philanthropy with a very specific request for the top three priority actions for the next five years to really move the needle. The next five years is critical, whatever happens this week in the negotiating room.

Claire Bonham-Carter is a director of sustainable development for ArchTam.

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Innovations presented ranged from an all-electric helicopter that one day will be pilotless, to an idea for ride-sharing for local authorities that have a limited transit service but many people doing the same point-to-point journey, to carbon sequestration technology that is much more efficient than the competition. During a panel discussion, James Close from the World Bank Group noted that the 185 countries that have committed to a reduction target (an INDC  or ‘intended nationally determined contribution’) are going to need help in working out how to get there, and this is a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs. Climate-KIC is hoping that some of the 400 startups they have supported will be successful with this massive carbon reduction ambition.

A 15-minute walk on hard cobbles in high heels between events and hotels is hard on the feet. Luckily the Paris Velib bikeshare scheme, which has an amazing 20,000 bikes in 1,800 stations, positioned every 300 metres, turns that trek into a delightful ride – often along separated, raised bike lanes (below). Amanda Eaken of the Natural Resources Defense Council and I happily rode those bikes from our hotel, close to Gare du Nord, to Le Grand Palais for the Climate-KIC event, navigating the cobbles, bike lanes, crazy Paris traffic, and the Champs-Elysees in a 30-minute ride.

Time was saved from not getting caught up in the congestion, and we got a fantastic sight-seeing tour past magnificent churches, narrow streets and crowded bars. Eight euros buys a seven-day pass and limitless free 30-minute rides, and I have been using a bike to regularly (in conjunction with a train) to get between my hotel, Le Bouget, and other centrally located events.

Claire Bonham-Carter is a director of sustainable development for ArchTam.

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ArchTam is a key strategy partner for the 100 Resilient Cities’ program – working with their leadership team to help develop the process that each of the cities will follow to develop their resiliency strategy as well as working directly with a number of the 32 cities in the first cohort of the program, including Christchurch, Melbourne, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Rome, Bangkok and Quito.

Above: ArchTam’s Carlo Castelli on a panel with Dr. Judith Rodin, Rockefeller Foundation, Giovanni Caudo, City of Rome, and Alessandro Coppola, City of Rome’s Chief Resiliency Officer. Below: ArchTam’s T. Luke Young facilitates a group at Quito’s kick-off workshop.

Although the issues in each city may vary, there are common themes, challenges and opportunities for each CRO, not least dealing with the fact that this is a brand new position for most if not all of the city governments with no precedents to follow and often no staff for direct support. This also gives the CROs a clean slate to cut across departmental silos, perhaps find new allies and connect them to others, ask pertinent questions, and above all identify co-benefits of different strategies to help demonstrate the value of the resiliency lens. CROs need to take advantage of their current ‘informal’ powers to resolve resiliency challenges that transcend borders and boundaries.

The World Bank estimates that $57 trillion dollars will be invested in infrastructure through 2030, and there is an incredible opportunity to make sure that this infrastructure is conceived, designed and built in a better way that incorporates resiliency and provides long-term return on investment.

Such infrastructure investments should further community as well as physical or environmentally resiliency (so that a new elevated road say doesn’t bisect a community or a new drainage regime move a flooding problem from one place to another).

Left: a participant at Rome’s kick-off workshop

Finding co-benefits for resiliency strategies is key. For example, any adaptation strategy implemented to protect against a future event or impact should provide some tangible benefit now; for instance, well-designed green infrastructure to deal with stormwater run-off in urban environments can enhance the public realm for pedestrians and raise property values for building owners or developers. Dealing with electricity grid infrastructure reliability may provide crime reduction benefits through consistent street lighting. Any effort to improve community cohesion and communication, whatever the issue, will help a community become better prepared in the face of a shock or stress.

One of the biggest challenges for these cities in solving their resiliency issues is having the data to understand what they should tackle first and how to engage their communities in the process. In recognition of this, 100 Resilient Cities is also facilitating access to a wide array of platform partners, from data manipulators Palentir, to reinsurance giant Swiss Re, to social media convenor Ushahidi, to procurement changer CityMart, to help give the cities a helping hand, and help transform the market for all the other cities out there that also have critical resiliency challenges.

San Francisco’s “Perceptions of Resilience” workshop

See if your city is one of the first 100 Resilient Cities. Why resilient cities? Overview of the rationale behind the program, featuring Michael Nolan, ArchTam. See the Bay Area’s 100 Resilient Cities kick-off workshop, which I participated in.

Claire Bonham-Carter (claire.bonham-carter@archtam.com) is director of sustainable development, Design + Planning, ArchTam in San Francisco.

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“In Johannesburg, bus rapid transit (BRT) represents a lot more than it does in most cities. In most cities it is an effective technique for getting residents to and from work faster with fewer carbon emissions during congested rush hours, a technique that was spearheaded in Curitiba, Brazil, and now copied in cities worldwide.

“While decreasing gridlock and improving air quality are welcome co-benefits for most cities, the BRT is fulfilling a much deeper, more powerful, even healing role for Johannesburg.

“A primary driver for Parks Tau, the city’s mayor, for developing the Rea Vaya BRT is to address the legacy of apartheid planning. He calls the BRT lines “corridors of freedom” to emphasise their role in re-stitching separated parts of the city back together, providing a physical means to overcome apartheid era barriers caused by physical space. Transit-orientated development around the Rea Vaya stops are providing new homes, and importantly local day-to-day amenities for communities that once had none and leading to the social integration that is the face of the new Johannesburg.

“This is just one of many incredible stories heard at the C40 Mayor’s Summit that took place in Johannesburg on 5-6 February. The summit brought together mayors, or their deputies, their chiefs of staff, their sustainability directors and environmental aides to the biannual meeting of megacities taking action against climate change. The primary role of the C40 is to facilitate cities to learn from and be inspired by each other on how to reduce their contribution to climate change.”

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Claire Bonham-Carter (claire.bonham-carter@archtam.com), director of sustainable development, Design + Planning, ArchTam, has led the company’s effort to help deliver the CDP cities global report the past two years. At the summit she delivered individual-city-tailored reports to officials from the cities that participated in the global report, as pictured above.

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