Four months before its 50th anniversary last April, Point State Park faced unprecedented flooding. Pittsburgh’s three rivers reached flood levels of more than 28 feet — the highest the park had seen in 20 years — submerging the fountain, swamping the lawn, and shutting down the infamous “bathtub” section of the Parkway East.
Long a symbol of Pittsburgh’s green post-industrial renaissance, Point State Park being underwater seemed to highlight the current era of urban planning and its imperative to address climate change. In 2024, the region also experienced a record number of tornadoes, some of the nation’s worst air pollution, and its hottest year on record.
At the same time, Pittsburgh is often touted as a “climate haven” city. While there’s no formal definition of the term, a climate haven is a place perceived by public officials, researchers, and actuaries, to be shielded from climate change’s worst effects, providing a sort of natural refuge for residents. A combination of favorable topography, planning, and preparedness tend to make for a climate change haven.
But do Pittsburgh’s climate bona fides measure up? Pittsburgh City Paper looked into the region’s brief history as a climate change haven and what residents might expect as our environment changes.
Joshua Mullenite, an environmental social scientist and professor at Chatham University’s Falk School of Sustainability and Environment, says from the outset, that Pittsburghers should be skeptical of the climate haven idea.
“It makes it sound like Pittsburgh is not being impacted by climate change, [which is] not the case,” Mullenite tells City Paper. “Obviously we’re seeing changes in rainfall, changes in snowfall, and increases in extreme weather.”
In the U.S., climate change havens generally include more inland cities, which are less vulnerable to hurricanes, sea level rise, coastal flooding, and cooler climes, better positioned to withstand a warming atmosphere. These criteria tend to favor the Great Lakes region, and have landed Pittsburgh, no stranger to lists, on a number of best-of rankings.
In 2022, Policygenius named Pittsburgh as the nation’s eighth-best city for withstanding climate change. The insurance agency used government data to analyze the 50 largest U.S. cities based on propensity for heat, natural disasters, flooding, and “social vulnerability,” which measures preparedness for environmental hazards. Even with its heightened flood risk, Pittsburgh made the top 10 for its cooler temperatures, and low wildfire and hurricane risk. It also achieved one of the highest scores for community resilience, attributed in part to the city’s climate action plan.
Despite these comparative advantages, Pittsburgh’s status as a climate haven is relatively recent, and reflective of larger economic shifts in the last decade. Though climate researchers and media members have echoed Mullenite’s assertion that nowhere is immune from climate change, some cities have embraced their climate haven status for marketing purposes. In 2019, Duluth, Minn. dubbed itself “climate-proof Duluth” in a New York Times story, viewing the slogan as an opportunity to spur the city’s growth. Climate risk modeling and technology have also recently become big business as Americans assess where to live in the coming decades. Zillow added climate risk data to its real estate listings for the first time in September.
For its part, Pittsburgh has worn the climate haven label lightly. The city’s first climate action plan was created in 2008 as part of a federal program. In 2014, under then-Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, it became one of 100 Resilient Cities (a Rockefeller Foundation initiative) and released a resilience assessment looking toward the city’s 200th anniversary in 2016. Though not positioning Pittsburgh as a climate haven (something the city has previously specified it doesn’t intend to do), the report still praised a “history of resilience” and noted Pittsburgh’s capacity for rebuilding.
“Today Pittsburgh faces fewer threats than many other cities thanks to our location, geography, and natural resources,” the report states. “However, the Steel City must still overcome certain challenges from its industrial legacy, and will face new pressures with climate change, urbanization and globalization.”
Mullenite says a history of deindustrialization and disinvestment, while not unique to Pittsburgh or even among Rust Belt climate havens, does indeed pose a challenge.
To tackle climate change, Chatham’s Sustainability programs emphasize a holistic approach that combines ecological changes, like reducing air pollution, with social ones, like changing how residents think about transit. In addition to flood management, Mullenite cites Pittsburgh’s “overreliance” on cars and driving as an area of priority to curb climate change, with many downstream effects.
“Thinking about that movement infrastructure as a whole, it’s going to be probably one of the key challenges that the city, the county, and the region are going to need to face. And there are ways to tie that into the other things, like flooding infrastructure,” Mullenite says. “If we start by rethinking how we get around … [then] a reduction in air pollution comes from removing vehicles from the road, or from maintaining the roads, especially come spring, when they have to fill all those potholes. If there are less potholes to fill, there’s less heavy equipment out there creating air pollution.”
Like Pittsburgh, most cities’ climate change plans are now decades-old and re-examining their benchmarks. The city laid out a variety of goals for 2030, including cutting emissions in half, though they may not be falling quickly enough.
Another development is a new understanding of affordability and the role it will play in addressing climate change. If the city’s population remains flat, there will be no growing tax base to fund large infrastructure improvements or other necessities, a detriment to creating a climate change haven for all.
“You have all these needs, and you have to pay for them, [but] how do you pay for them?” Mullenite asks. “And how do you [it] without making it unaffordable for the people who have been here for a long time, and who haven’t seen the economic benefits of the new industries that have moved in?”
“My philosophy is, the future is unwritten,” Mullenite adds. “It’s for us to do now and come up with [solutions]. But it’s going to take those things where we really need to invest in green infrastructure.”
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2025.
