As the director of the city’s new Office of Sustainability and Resilience, Sherry-Lea Bloodworth Botop is all about being ready – ready for the next wave of tornadoes, the next heat wave, the next flood, the next energy crisis. Ready for the next catastrophe and, preferably, ready to avoid it.

Botop’s true baptism into resilience and sustainability came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“What became apparent to me really quickly – and this is why I do this work today, 20 years later,” Botop said, “is that a lot of the things that I saw, a lot of the death and illness, injuries could have been avoided if we had prepared better.”

That preparedness includes using green infrastructure to mitigate the risk of damage and constructing homes better.

“Of course, Katrina was catastrophic,” she said. “Some of it couldn’t have been avoided. But we started saying after that disaster, disasters don’t kill people, bad building kills people. So, I worked a lot with architects and engineers and planners from that point on just determined to help in any way I could so that no one had to live through that again.”

“Just seeing the injustice (that) I saw, the environmental justice issues, the inequities and communities that were poor and underserved, how some communities were getting resources and others weren’t.”

Birmingham was one of 25 cities to receive federal funds to assist in matters of resilience and sustainability. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act have made more than $400 billion in federal funding available to local governments to invest in revitalized infrastructure and bold climate action.

Launched in March 2024, Bloomberg American Sustainable Cities is a three-year initiative to turbocharge the efforts of 25 U.S. cities, also including Montgomery, to leverage historic levels of federal funding to build low-carbon, resilient and economically thriving communities.

The $200 million Bloomberg Philanthropies initiative will provide deep support to the selected cities to pursue solutions in the buildings and transportation sectors through partnerships with PolicyLink, Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University and Natural Resources Defense Council.

More recently, Birmingham’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience wrote the Bloomberg Sustainable Cities grant proposal to fund the city’s iTeam. That team is working on sustainability and public health, as it is a partnership with Johns Hopkins.

Roald Hazelhoff, formerly of Southern Environmental Center, said he was pleased to see Birmingham got the initial grant.

“I’m hoping that this new position will focus on some of the extreme weather mitigation techniques that I think we need to start looking at,” he said. “NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration) did look at Alabama in terms of its vulnerability to climate change.”

Hazelhoff said Alabama hasn’t been known for taking the lead in matters of sustainability and resiliency. Perhaps, he said, Birmingham’s focus on this will allow it to lead.

“I think there are a number of actions we can take to mitigate some of these extremes,” he said. “In terms of heat waves, plant more trees. But not just plant more trees. Plant them strategically.

“If you look at playgrounds for schools, or you look at practice sites for sports, for high school football teams, etc., or even college, you’ll very rarely see shade.”

Hazelhoff said a NOAA study indicated that in the next 60 or so years, there could be a 70% increase in the likelihood of extreme weather.

“By that we mean forest fires like (you’ve seen) in Jefferson County, that you’re seeing in a large scale in South Carolina and nationally, obviously, in California, (and) across the border in Canada,” he said. “Much of Alabama is forested and therefore the likelihood of more forest fires, and with it, not just the destruction of the forest, but also the air pollution that comes with it.”

Botop said Birmingham already has a sustainability plan.

“That is looking at sustainability and all our regulations,” she said. “We also have a climate action plan that’s looking at the MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area). Birmingham is central to it and the person who is running that, the climate action manager, reports to me. That will help us look at how to reduce our carbon emissions in the city and look at things (that are) climate related, which are really important.”

Other issues being considered concerning resilience and sustainability include urging residents to grow their own food to address food deserts or other impediments to acquiring food, reducing the area’s carbon footprint by urging the use of solar energy, and creating sustainability hubs so that residents can more easily reach things they need during an emergency.