Released earlier this summer, the Harborwalk 2.0 Design Guidelines include best practices for upgrading Boston’s 43-mile coastal path to improve resilience while remaining accessible. Photo by James Sanna | Banker & Tradesman staff

Amid the many climate-related headlines we’ve seen this summer – new heat records, high tide flooding and catastrophic storms – we hope you didn’t miss an important and hopeful announcement: the city of Boston’s creation of a new Office of Climate Resilience.

We get it that not everyone’s heart leaps for joy when they hear about the creation of a new government office. But we also know that so many people love Boston and its 40-plus-mile coastline and want to see its communities protected from rising sea levels and increasingly damaging storms.

And for those folks, the launch of the Office of Climate Resilience is a momentous step and a cause for hope.

One Office, Committed to Action

Mayor Michelle Wu’s creation of the new office and appointment of the experienced and savvy Chris Osgood to lead it is a key commitment to addressing climate change impacts as the threat is worsening. Osgood’s inspiring description of the mission of the new office is “helping us speed that transition between really thoughtful plans and really effective action,’’ which is exactly what is needed.

Through the city’s Climate Ready Boston initiative that began eight years ago in collaboration with the Green Ribbon Commission and the Barr Foundation, Boston has done excellent, comprehensive work identifying the threats that climate change, rising sea levels and growing floods pose to the city’s neighborhoods and people, all the way down to the street and block level.

Climate Ready Boston has helped planners, engineers and community leaders sketch out key steps needed to address those threats. Those plans include everything from upgraded waterfront protection, to expanding our tree canopy, to “greening” buildings and transportation.

Having the responsibility and accountability for implementing those plans centralized in one office – explicitly committed to rapid, effective and equitable action – is an encouraging commitment.

At Boston Harbor Now and the Stone Living Lab, we’re also grateful that the Wu administration is committed to coastal resilience in the most beneficial ways. That includes, wherever feasible, adopting effective and sustainable “nature-based approaches” to coastal resilience and protection like living shorelines, marsh restoration and installation of cobble berms of naturally occurring rocks to absorb and attenuate the impacts of storm-whipped waves.

A Blueprint for Harborwalk Upgrades

There is growing support for climate adaptation infrastructure, including nature-based approaches, that connect us to the water, while protecting us from it.

Boston Harbor Now’s vision of a vibrant, welcoming and resilient harbor and the Stone Living Lab’s commitment to helping to achieve this vision with nature-based and hybrid approaches to climate adaptation is embodied in initiatives such as our “Harborwalk 2.0 Design Guidelines.”

Released earlier this summer, the guidelines catalog some of the best practices for upgrading our 43-mile Harborwalk to improve coastal resilience while also ensuring the waterfront remains vibrant, welcoming and accessible to all.

Linda Orel

These guidelines pull together today’s highest standards for access and resilience and highlight newer examples of coastal resilience approaches, like the living shoreline at Clippership Wharf in East Boston and the storm-surge-fortified new stretch of Harborwalk at the Andrew Puopolo Playground in the North End, which can be models to replicate throughout Boston’s waterfront.

Later this year, the Stone Living Lab will begin installing “Living Seawall” panels on stretches of existing seawall in East Boston and the Seaport that will create habitat for marine life of all kinds to flourish, making existing “gray infrastructure” considerably more green.

Big Questions Remain

We still have much work to do when it comes to planning and implementing coastal resilience in Boston and throughout the commonwealth. That includes resolving major questions around regulations and how the work gets funded.

Joe Christo

However, Boston’s new Office of Climate Resilience, which will coordinate and oversee the climate work of virtually every city department and the commonwealth’s Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience, are great examples of how cities and states can marshal a true “all of government” response to this enormous challenge.

Finally, it’s important to remember that all this hard work will lead to a tremendous payoff.

A Boston that has successfully prepared for climate change impacts will be an economically vibrant, livable and safe city with green spaces and shade trees protecting us from the heat and absorbing carbon pollution.

Boston’s waterfront will include living shorelines and restored marshes complementing and strengthening harder infrastructure, such as vertical seawalls and  rip-rap.

And it will be a Boston that has ensured that one of our most precious legacies and defining public treasures, our harbor and waterfront and harbor islands, survive and thrive to be enjoyed by future generations.

Linda Orel is chief impact officer at Boston Harbor Now and Joe Christo is managing director of the Stone Living Lab.