Next Monday, hundreds of people from around the state are expected to converge in Madison. Their focus is to come up with solutions to climate change.
Climate Fast Forward 2022, put together by the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts & Letters, aims to take stock of Wisconsin’s progress towards mitigating and adapting to climate change since 2019. That’s when the Academy held its last climate conference.
The upcoming day-long gathering will be looking at climate action through various tracks, including green jobs, natural and working landscape, and the built environment.
Deneine Powell and Matt Dannenberg are among those who will be adding their expertise to the conference.
Powell, FUSE Corps executive fellow with the city of Milwaukee’s Environmental Collaboration Office, will be co-leading the climate justice community resilience conversation.
“We have societal, we have political and cultural divides that prevent us from working collectively on climate solutions. I think that this track is going to provide the tools and resources to try to overcome some of those barriers so that we can focus on mitigation, adaption and creating resilience in our communities given the current climate crisis,” Powell says.
Dannenberg, tribal liaison for the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, will be delivering a keynote speech at the conference.
“I want to pick up on the momentum that’s been created here in Wisconsin with the Action Plan On Climate and now utilizing the new Bipartisan Infrastructure Law money, $62 billion was allocated to the Department of Energy as well as the Inflation Reduction Act which creates some amazing mechanisms for these dollars to be utilized,” Dannenberg says. “Tribal governments will be able to accept direct payments from the Department of Treasury to extend our loan guarantee program to tribes from $2 billion to $20 billion.”
He calls their combined impact a game changer in advancing clean energy infrastructure.
Dannenberg, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, says he’s also pleased the conference will fold in traditional perspective on the environment.
“It’s going to be great to have such a focus of this event, with the Academy being intentional about having tribes at the table and bringing that indigenous ecological knowledge to the forefront…so that we have that lens as we’re putting forward the action steps,” Dannenberg says.
Both Powell and Dannenberg say climate-action momentum is building.
Dannenberg points to a Department of Energy partnership with the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa after massive flooding hit the region in 2010s.
“One particularly bad flood washed out some really crucial roads and actually cut off key medical supplies for elders in the community. They were helicoptering tribal elders and medicines in and out. And so the Department of Energy just completed phase one of the project...so we have microgrid battery storage and some solar that is connected to tribal headquarters and some key infrastructure on the reservation, including the clinic,” Dannenberg says.
Deneine Powell points to a project of an organization called Groundwork USA in cities around the country, including Milwaukee.
"[It's] called the Climate Safe Neighborhood Project. There's 22 communities throughout the United States that have projects that show how they can impact climate in their communities; how they can adapt, they can mitigate and they can create resilience for the communities," Powell says.
She believes collective action will lead to collective impact.
“Once we start to hear the stories of other communities and how we can apply that to our own, it just creates more opportunities, more solutions to help us work through this time with the climate crisis,” Powell says.
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