Planning for Philly's longterm forecast: destructive floods, deadly heat

A decade ago, Philadelphia had a 5 percent recycling rate, and the only environmental issue ever to come up in municipal elections was parking. So success seemed improbable when Christine Knapp began calling for the next mayor to adopt a sustainability agenda and create a citywide office to enact it.

But - whether timing, luck, or skill - it worked.

In 2008, Mayor Michael Nutter created the Mayor's Office of Sustainability. In 2014, voters made it a permanent department: the Office of Sustainability.

And, this month, Knapp, 37, of Passyunk Square, was named director.

As Knapp took over for predecessor Katherine Gajewski, they decided to update the makeshift "M.O.S." sign tacked to the office wall. They removed the "M" and split it, wishbone-style.

Knapp got the smaller fragment. But she already had her long-held wish.

"It's the single position that's been on my back burner for the past eight years," she said, "since we made the case for creating it in the first place."

She's stepping into a post that helped advance Philadelphia from a remedial level of environmental competency to a city that now touts itself as the greenest in the country.

But there are real challenges ahead. A new report from the city anticipates a Philadelphia more prone to floods and deadly heat waves than ever. (Among facilities vulnerable to flooding by the middle of this century: Philadelphia International Airport and 2,831 miles of road, including 29.5 miles of designated evacuation routes.)

It's Knapp's job to help prepare for that. She sees her role as a defender of not just the physical landscape of Philadelphia, but also its residents.

Sustainability, she said, "used to just be considered environmental issues, which, traditionally, everyone thought of as, like, saving the rain forest. But now, it really means things like equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities."

Knapp's first love was not nature, but politics.

She describes such formative moments as tracking the Bush-Dukakis election with her fourth-grade class, and Bill Clinton's campaign four years later.

She studied political science and communications at Villanova, then landed a job with Clean Water Action. There, she organized workers at the Sunoco refinery, in a coalition with Southwest Philadelphia residents, to seek safety improvements, including ending the use of toxic hydrogen fluoride.

"It wasn't just protecting the environment to protect the environment," she said, "but also to protect the people." (Coincidentally, years later, Knapp married Jim Bazis, a software engineer whose father had worked at the refinery for years.) "Understanding the impacts on people's health made me double down on this."

It was also a lesson in how activism at the local level could achieve immediate impact.

In 2006, Knapp took a job with the nonprofit Penn Future to head the Next Great City Coalition, an alliance of civic and environmental groups promoting a sustainability agenda for the 2007 mayor's race.

"All five candidates issued environmental position papers, which was the first time any candidate for mayor had," she said.

Nutter followed through and created the sustainability office, which in turn produced an eight-year Greenworks plan for improving air quality, waste management, and energy consumption, based in part on the Next Great City agenda. Many of those goals were achieved.

Meanwhile, Knapp moved on to the Philadelphia Water Department, which was working on its own sustainability program: the $2 billion, 25-year "Green City, Clean Waters," storm-water-management plan.

As government relations director, she fostered connections with City Council and other agencies to piggyback water infrastructure onto other projects. When she learned the city was set to renovate Columbia Field in North Philadelphia, the department jumped in and placed storm-water-retention basins beneath the field.

Chris Crockett, deputy commissioner at the Water Department, described Knapp as a tenacious coalition builder in a city where even planting a tree can be controversial.

"She has this uncanny ability to convince people to help her out," he said. "She's opened doors where we couldn't get people to call us back."

She decorated her office with a picture of Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, with the quote: "What I hear when I'm being yelled at is people caring very loudly at me."

In Knapp's new job, the stakes will be even higher, the caring louder.

"You have such a high level of inaction in Washington, D.C., and now in Harrisburg, that cities have become the laboratory for really moving policy. Cities have taken the lead," said David Masur, director of Penn Environment and chairman of Mayor Kenney's transition team on sustainability. "The Office of Sustainability can be a driving force for all those things."

Knapp's to-do list includes writing a new, eight-year Greenworks plan with an emphasis on improving energy efficiency and moving to clean-energy sources. She hopes to continue work with the Water Department to create a network of modern public drinking fountains. And she's cochair of the city's Food Policy Advisory Council, which will include a project to explore repurposing brownfields for food production.

As well, she'll be working across city departments to devise a plan for weathering Philadelphia's hotter, wetter future.

That will likely involve many small interventions, like cooling-off centers for heat waves, and bigger ones, like removing buildings from places affected by recurrent flooding.

Gajewski - now principal of a start-up, City Scale, that aims to help cities and private-sector partners scale up sustainability efforts - said Knapp was the right person for the job. But there's no question it's a big one.

"The last eight years was putting in the groundwork," she said. The next eight must bring real change, like deep reductions in energy-use and greenhouse-gas emissions. That means environmental concerns must be considered in Philadelphia's daily business - even as part of budgeting, or approvals for public and private developments.

"The challenges she's going to need to wrangle with are much more complicated than they've been in the past," Gajewski said. "A lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, so the next phase of work will be harder and harder."

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