City officials gathered last Wednesday to draft a memo to the mayor that calls for voluntary property buyouts, flood proofing infrastructure and low-impact development as means to mitigate the local effects of climate change.

But the memo wasn’t for Cranston.

It was for Milton, a hypothetical community that served as the backdrop for a role-playing exercise on climate change.

The New England Climate Adaptation Project (NECAP) is organized by the MIT Science Impact Collaborate, the Consensus Building Institute and the National Estuarine Research Reserve. The project is being conducted in four communities around the region. The goal is to get municipalities thinking about the future, and what they might do to protect their city or town from the potential impacts of climate change.

“It’s already a key issue. These risks already exist and climate change is only going to get worse, but nobody knows how to do adaptation planning,” said Danya Rumore, a PhD student at MIT who ran last week’s workshop.

Rumore explained that coastal communities are facing rising sea levels, more intense and more frequent storms, and increased flooding. Throughout the course of the NECAP workshops, potential solutions to those problems will be addressed, such as new or improved water treatment facilities, protecting electricity supplies, stepping up emergency management operations and looking at development in a new way.

“There are a lot of things towns should be doing already,” Rumore said. “There’s a general awareness [about climate change], but that awareness is distant from ‘we should act on it.’”

Last Wednesday’s session at the Cranston Senior Center is the first of several that will take place over the next six months. The initial group was made up of more than a dozen community stakeholders, including Planning Director Peter Lapolla, City Planner Jason Pezzullo, Fire Chief William McKenna and Council President John Lanni.

Roles were reversed for the exercise, however. Each participant was given a packet that detailed their role and their position on common adaptations. Other community groups will host future workshops, followed by a meeting that is open to the public.

“This is a really interesting project we’ve been working on; we’ve been looking forward to doing this session for many months,” Pezzullo said.

In a NECAP poll of 100 Cranston residents, many said that climate change is not really a problem. Despite that, Pezzullo believes that many more residents recognize that the city needs to be proactive, particularly those residents who have faced extreme flooding.

Melissa Higbee, a Master’s student at MIT involved in the project, interviewed the first round of participants and said that Cranston officials are starting to make the connection between climate change and flooding locally.

“The March 2010 floods came up a lot,” she said. “It seems very important to this community.”

Pezzullo hopes that ultimately, the workshops will get stakeholders and residents on the same page.

“It calibrates everyone’s thinking on where we’re going to go on hazard mitigation,” he said.

The National Estuarine Research Reserve recommended Cranston and the other test cities. Cranston is the first community to come through the program. The team is also working in Wells, Maine, Dover, N.H., and Barnstable, Mass.

“We’re really interested with helping towns and cities to build consensus,” said Rumore.

Milton, the simulation city, was conceived on climate change projections for Cranston. Like Cranston, Milton has 80,000 residents and was said to have experienced significant river flooding that negatively impacted businesses and homeowners. The mayor of Milton is under increasing pressure to mitigate the effects of flooding, and has established a task force to study the issue.

Participants last week were broken into small groups and talked about their options for an hour, after which they took a vote in their groups on what recommendations to forward to the mayor. The most popular recommendation was a voluntary property buyout for homeowners living in the floodplain. Reusing that land as open space or limiting zoning for low-impact development was another popular option, as was investing in flood proofing for buildings and infrastructure.

Participants said they found the exercise useful but noted that emotion was absent from the room.

“People don’t get involved until they see their self-interest in the process,” Lapolla said.

Whether Cranston begins enacting change in the near future or not, Rumore believes the exercise is a tool to help people collaborate more effectively.

Still, she hopes the series of workshops will at least plant the seed that climate change is a real issue, and something that Cranston and other cities should be looking at.

“All the data is showing an upward curve,” she said. “We know there’s more rain than there was in the past and there’s more flooding than in the past. We also know our infrastructure can’t handle those kinds of impacts.”