On a recent Saturday morning, about 20 participants in a workshop at the North Birmingham Public Library faced an array of simulated disaster-response situations: They raced to assemble survival bags, protect important documents, match precautions to risks and juggle their finances to create emergency funds.
Then workshop leader Yawntreshia Coleman told them they had to escape a flood.
“Okay, y'all know flooding is really bad in Birmingham,” Coleman said. “So you're going to use the flood map – it has a house, a creek, a bridge, a road, an evacuation route. You must decide what items to grab, when to leave, where to go.”
Coleman is founding executive director of Beanstalk, a 2-year-old nonprofit that helps marginalized communities address climate injustice and build disaster resilience. The workshops she leads are highly interactive – and competitive.
During the flood exercise, she introduced a new problem, such as phone service going down or a bridge closing, into the simulation every minute. Participants reacted, and the team that made the safest decisions won.
Resident groups like Beanstalk as well as local-government offices have sprouted across the Southeast in recent years in response to increases in severe weather, flooding, extreme temperatures and wildfires. These organizations are preparing communities for current and predicted challenges.
Beanstalk’s growth plans
Coleman said Beanstalk focuses on marginalized neighborhoods because they’re often left out of conversations and don’t have insurance or the resources to navigate emergency situations.
“I feel like those are the communities that are preyed upon, or they're not considered, or they're not thought of as worth protecting,” she said.
So far, the organization has partnered with emergency-management agencies in the Birmingham area and launched community programs such as the disaster-prep workshop, which was the first in a series focusing on practical training to help families be more self-sufficient.
But Coleman’s vision for Beanstalk is much broader than workshops. She sees the organization facilitating a statewide network of resilience centers that offer support and resources during emergencies and provide a platform for community advocacy.
“This would be like a storm shelter-slash-resource center, where you can come get what you need, and if you can go back home, you can go back home. But if you need somewhere to stay, you can be there for a few days until things get better,” Coleman said.
The centers also would be training grounds for teaching people to assist other communities when disasters strike and to collect environmental data and use it to push for better policies and more resources.
Coleman said marginalized communities are often complaining, and nobody's listening.
“But once you're taught what to say, who to say it to, and how to go about it ... they can say, ‘Yes, it's polluted. Here's the data. Now do something about it,’” she said.
Birmingham Resilience and Sustainability Office moves out of planning phase
While Beanstalk takes a resident-driven approach, the city of Birmingham established an office last year that aims to tackle many of the same problems, from a local-government standpoint.
For example, the city’s office also will address disaster preparedness as well as environmental justice in relation to marginalized communities.
“So many of our challenges related to the environment and sustainability stem from our history of industry and our history of redlining,” said Thomas Yuill, director of the Office of Resilience and Sustainability, which turned 1 year old in February. “When you combine redlining with industry, that can lead to environmental justice concerns. Those are things that we're working on mitigating – the effects of people living in close proximity to industry.”
Yuill said the new office also is considering how the city can ease the effects of worsening storms, flooding and higher temperatures.
“It's important for us to plan for that and make sure our residents aren't disproportionately impacted and still have high qualities of life and lead healthy lives,” he said.
Some solutions include enabling sustainable forms of transportation, using green spaces to manage stormwater, and making homes and other buildings energy efficient.
As Birmingham’s Resilience and Sustainability Office moves out of the planning phase and begins implementing ideas, Yuill said it joins a couple hundred Southeastern towns and cities that have similar departments and initiatives.
Some of those municipalities in Alabama include Mobile, which established a resilience and sustainability office in 2021, and Alexander City, whose Community Development Department emphasizes sustainable growth, resilience and environmental stewardship.
Yuill said the strength of Birmingham’s office is in engaging all the city’s other departments and coordinating their efforts.
“So one example of that is Community Development here has a critical-repair program where they've helped several hundred homeowners do critical repairs to their homes,” he said. “One of the things that we've been talking with them about is layering onto that a specific energy-efficiency focus.”
Air pollution and goals in regional plan
Yuill described one of the office’s biggest accomplishments so far – completion of a Central Alabama Climate Action Plan – as a toolbox for the future.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funded the Central Alabama plan, and Birmingham collaborated with governments and industry in seven counties to develop it. The plan lays out greenhouse-gas-emission goals to achieve by 2035 and 2050.
“I like to think of it like a math problem,” Yuill said. “We added up all the greenhouse gas emissions that are occurring in that seven-county region, and we developed a series of projects that would allow us to get to net zero, or basically zero out those emissions, by the year 2050.”
The biggest sources of air pollution in the Birmingham area are industry and transportation, according to the report. Yuill said reducing greenhouse gas emissions theoretically reduces the severity of future weather events.
But the emission reductions in the plan are targets, not requirements.
“It's an extremely aggressive goal,” Yuill said. “I can't say whether or not most municipalities will hit that goal, but we're going to try our hardest to.”
Because of the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations – and a new Alabama law prohibiting state environmental regulations that are stricter than federal ones – many facilities in the Birmingham area can legally emit more pollution, not less.
Madison Naves, communications manager for the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution, said changes at the national level will push back most timelines for reducing air pollution by at least three years.
“However, I don't think it's impossible – that we still can't complete everything that we want to see happen. I think it more so means that we can't just rely on federal policy,” she said.
Yuill said he’s focusing on what the city of Birmingham can control.
“I'm interested in understanding how we can help our local industry to set and achieve their own climate-action goals,” he said.
Coleman with Beanstalk agrees reducing pollution to protect health and prevent climate disasters is vital. But for now, helping people respond to events already happening is also key, she said.
As Beanstalk’s disaster-prep workshop wrapped up, participant Yolanda Hardy said her biggest takeaways were answers to questions the simulations generated: “How would I move? What am I taking? Is it important to have the emergency kit, or maybe I need something else. How much money should I take with me? Things like that.”
She said she’s going to talk with her grown children about whether their households are prepared. And she’s going to invite them and others to future Beanstalk workshops.
