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Environmental advocates celebrated the creation of a chief resilience officer. Now they have doubts.
For almost seven months, Florida had a dedicated leader on climate change. Then she left for another job.
The state has now gone longer than that without a full-time replacement.
Environmental advocates celebrated Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hiring of Julia Nesheiwat for the newly created position of chief resilience officer in summer 2019. They saw the move as a declaration his office would accept, and try to address, the realities of climate change in a vulnerable state.
Now some wonder about that commitment.
“We were so excited about it because it acknowledged what we were doing,” said Hank Hodde, Pinellas County’s sustainability and resiliency coordinator. “If the position isn’t backfilled, it just seems like it’s business as usual, and it was for show.”
After 1st One Left, Will DeSantis Hire Another Florida Climate Change Leader? wjct.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wjct.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Former State Resilience Officer Julia Nesheiwat speaks at an American Water Resources Association meeting in Ponte Vedra Beach in November 2019. BRENDAN RIVERS/ADAPT
For almost seven months, Florida had a dedicated leader on climate change. Then she left for another job.
The state has now gone longer than that without a full-time replacement.
Environmental advocates celebrated Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hiring of Julia Nesheiwat for the newly created position of chief resilience officer in summer 2019. They saw the move as a declaration his office would accept, and try to address, the realities of climate change in a vulnerable state.
Now some wonder about that commitment.
full-time
position running the stateâs response to sea level rise.
Nesheiwat stepped down in February to take a homeland security job in the Trump administration. For most of 2020 at least some of her responsibilities were supposed to be shifted to Noah Valenstein, the secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection.
From left: Florida Chief Science Officer Thomas Frazer, then-Chief Resilience Officer Julia Nesheiwat and Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Noah Valenstein sit for an interview in August 2019. [ DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD | TIMES | Tampa Bay Times ]
Nesheiwatâs most visible accomplishment was a 36-page report summarizing attempts at studying and adapting to sea level rise across Florida. She called the stateâs work âdisjointed,â with regional collectives and flood-prone municipalities taking the lead. To the frustration of environmentalists, she did not detail what can be done to reduce fossil fuel emissions that contrib