In the wake of the historic flooding we experienced in February of 2018, a small team from the IU Environmental Resilience Institute came to visit Goshen. They wanted to hear a bit about what the flood experience had been like, how we were recovering, and what steps we might be looking at to prepare for future flood events.
In the background was a larger question about what we might be willing to do to become better stewards of our resources in Goshen, especially in light of long-range, climate-change projections from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment (INCCIA, Purdue University). Larger and more frequent flood events are a key feature of these projections.
As a result of that conversation, Goshen was invited to participate in the 2019 Resilience Cohort, a collaboration between ERI and the IU Indiana Sustainability Development Program. We received a grant to help fund an extern to conduct two greenhouse gas emissions inventories.
The extern, Bronson Bast, an IU master’s degree student, was given the task of seeking out and compiling data from across our local government, and across our community, about the ways we use energy. Bronson has been working on these inventories throughout the summer; there is a lot of information, and a fair amount of complexity to decipher in order to make sense of it all.
