A letter from the governor’s office last week informed Chris Ryan, Harvard’s director of community and economic development, that Harvard had been awarded $70,860 as part of the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program.
The MVP program was created several years ago to encourage communities to plan for resilience in the face of climate change. Harvard officially became an MVP community in September 2019, after identifying areas of risk and ways to adapt to climate change in a plan developed with the help of the Harriman design and engineering firm in Boston. Having been accepted into the MVP program, Harvard was then eligible to apply for action grants to deal with climate change. The recent grant resulted from an application Ryan submitted last fall.
In an interview this week, Ryan said his hope in applying for the grant had been to get about $162,000 and use it to create an action plan covering a wide range of issues—from broad topics like forestry and agriculture to specifics like roads, flooding, and culverts. A plan of that scope, he said, would take 15 to 18 months to complete.
Even though he received less than half the money he applied for, Ryan said he still expects to proceed with the first phase of the larger plan he had envisioned. With lots of help from the 10-member Community Resilience Working Group, he intends to gather as much data as possible. The first focus, he said, might be to determine Harvard’s carbon footprint. Another focus could be to identify best practices in other towns’ resilience programs.
Ryan and the working group face a June 30 deadline to complete this phase of the action plan with the new grant. And Ryan remains hopeful about receiving additional state funds in the next round of grants in April.
