Cape Organizations Agree to Address Climate Change Locally

HARWICH – Eleven diverse organizations ranging from the business community to the environmental lobby formally launched the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative Wednesday in Harwich.

They all committed to transparent, incremental and quantifiable measures to mitigate climate change.

Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown President and CEO Richard Delaney delivered the keynote speech at the Wequassett Resort, speaking about the state of the world’s oceans.

“We are really one of the hot spots in the world for climate change impacts,” he said.

Delaney attended the Paris Accord in December 2015, which brought together 196 presidents and prime ministers from around the world to sign a climate agreement with the goal of reducing plant-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Delaney said he attended the Paris Accords to make sure that the world’s oceans were well represented in the climate change discussions. He said it’s important to make the global solution a local solution as well.

Members of the new collaborative will take voluntary measures over the next several months to reduce their carbon footprint.

“We hope to use that basis to grow from 11 to as many organizations, entities of all ilk and manner that we can find on the Cape,” he said.

The new coalition will gather again within the year to evaluate what actions have been taken and what impacts they may have had on the environment.

Some of the initiatives may include putting up more solar panels and encouraging more employees to carpool to work.

Delaney said one of the messages from Paris is that climate change isn’t something that is only happening in other places and that it’s happening right here on Cape Cod.

“We’ll probably come together once every year to say to each other, ‘how are we doing, do we need to up our ante, what else can we do,'” said Delaney.

According to some studies, the oceans warming even more in the Gulf of Maine than any perhaps any other location in the world.

The founding members of the collaborative include the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, Cape Cod Commission, Cape Cod National Seashore, Cape Light Compact, Center for Coastal Studies, Friends of Pleasant Bay, Mass Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary, Pleasant Bay Alliance and Pleasant Bay Community Boating.

By MATT PITTA, CapeCod.com News Director