Justice in Urban Climate Plans: How and Where Cities Are Integrating Equity and Climate

Held on December 7, 2021.
Watch a full recording of the event, or scroll down to read a recap and watch event highlights.

Recap by Amelia Murray-Cooper

On Tuesday, December 7, 2021, the Boston University Initiative on Cities and Institute for Sustainable Energy hosted a panel discussion to share the latest research on equity in urban climate plans and hear from current and former city officials working to integrate justice and sustainability.

The speakers included Claudia Diezmartínez, PhD Student in the Department of Earth & Environment in the BU College of Arts & Sciences and URBAN Program, Ava Richardson, Sustainability Manager for the City of Baltimore, and Michael Armstrong, Partner at City Scale and Former Sustainability Manager for the City of Portland, Oregon. The event was moderated by Anne Short Gianotti, Associate Professor of Earth & Environment at BU.

Analyzing Policy Trends

Over the past decade, more cities have made commitments to pursue justice and climate action. The COVID-19 pandemic and recent social movements have highlighted systemic injustices, and more cities have focused on equity as a result. However, little empirical research has focused on how justice has been operationalized in urban climate plans.

To fill this gap in knowledge, Diezmartínez conducted content analysis on the most recent climate action plans for the 100 largest US cities. She explained that prioritizing climate justice “can help us organize and analyze how the response that we are creating to address climate change can also result in unintended consequences, and how those consequences may be unevenly distributed among populations in cities.”

Diezmartínez found that cities are increasingly incorporating justice in their plans, but attention to policy implementation and evaluation is lagging. Of the cities analyzed, 58 cities had an eligible climate plan for Diezmartínez to evaluate, 40 cities incorporated justice in their plans, and 12 cities included tools to evaluate and implement just climate policies. Cities also used two general approaches: 20 articulated justice as an aspiration, while 20 included explicit planning for climate justice.

Diezmartínez concluded that time is the most significant determinant of a city’s engagement with justice, even after accounting for social, economic, and political characteristics. For the 12 cities that included explicit justice plans, she categorized these plans into four groups: equity tools, equity bodies, justice partnerships, and justice indicators.

However, Diezmartínez explained that valuable interventions for climate change and justice also happen outside of urban government plans. “We can also see advocates, activists, and the private sector as protagonists in this fight. I would encourage everyone to also see what’s going on outside of formal city processes to understand how urban climate action is unfolding on the ground,” said Diezmartínez.

Broad Contextual Shifts

According to Armstrong, calling individual attention to climate and justice policies is valuable, but eventually, these areas must be integrated with all the “regular” responsibilities of governments. The broad societal context has shifted and these issues can no longer be ignored, regardless of ideological differences.

“We like to talk about how cities lead on climate, or sometimes mayors lead on climate, and that can be really helpful, but it’s really that they are responding to community permission and sometimes expectations that their local elected officials and governments are being responsive,” said Armstrong. “If you don’t see the context, you don’t know what’s possible, and a lot more is possible today than even just a couple years ago.”

Local climate plans often focus primarily on greenhouse gas reduction targets as metrics of success, “but that’s not even the goal,” according to Armstrong. Instead, a local government’s mission should be to consider how it can help reach a stable global climate while delivering on its community’s priorities.

“You can imagine a scenario where local greenhouse gasses go up, but the net benefit to the globe is very positive. We have really gotten distracted by that metric,” said Armstrong. “The whole rest of this is around what our community is working on: housing, transportation, jobs, justice. That’s the game, and we should do that in ways that contribute to solving climate change.”

Local governments should be responsive to community needs first, but they should also translate their work across regional and national scales to advance shared climate goals. According to Richardson, cities can benefit from peer-learning by joining regional climate action networks and relying on the expertise of colleagues across the country.

Working with Communities

Richardson explained that the City of Baltimore’s 2019 Sustainability Plan has guidelines that operationalize equity and make budget allocations to avoid displacement when developing communities. Baltimore’s plan also advances participatory governance and ensures that the city is hearing from residents, particularly in frontline and environmental justice communities.

“We received feedback from thousands of community residents across the city and really gained a better understanding of what language we should be using when talking about these issues. It can’t just be about methane emissions or carbon neutrality, but really connecting the language to things that connect to people,” said Richardson.

In Baltimore, community-based organizations and nonprofits were called upon alongside city agencies to implement action items. Baltimore also has community advisory councils to implement “the types of policies people want to see.” However, cities must avoid tokenizing or exploiting marginalized groups when pursuing equity. Residents who serve on advisory councils should be compensated for their work, and cities should not burden the communities they are trying to support.

Richardson explained that planting trees is important for mitigating climate change in cities, but if the government wants to plant trees in front of homes, they must consider the burdens that may be placed on residents to maintain the trees over time. Additionally, when Baltimore instated a plastic bag fee, the city distributed free reusable bags to avoid imposing financial barriers on low-income residents.

Cities must also consider the local workforce impacts of transitioning to clean energy. For example, Richardson explained that fossil fuel industry workers may need to be trained to install solar panels or operate wind farms if they lose their current jobs when cities shift to renewable energy sources. Richardson also said “we need to do better when it comes to the green jobs pipeline” to bring more people of color into the environmental field.

Diezmartínez explained that the most successful cities are those that do not treat justice as the “cherry on top” of climate action, but instead acknowledge their inherent connection. “Climate justice is climate action,” she said.

According to Armstrong, one successful policy is the Portland Clean Energy Fund, which passed as a ballot initiative in 2018. This imposed a gross receipts tax on large retailers and has raised about $60 million annually for a group of community advisors to allocate towards clean energy projects in Portland, Oregon.

“It’s not something that the City Council was willing to do, and yet it passed with just over 65% of the support, as another illustration of communities as the head of public bodies,” said Armstrong. “How do we harness that? Sometimes getting out of the way lets good things happen, and sometimes it has to be very structured.”

Cities have a responsibility to be transparent if they do not meet their emission reduction goals, but they should focus on other measures of success beyond greenhouse gas targets alone, according to Richardson. She explained that increasing tree canopies and providing new cooling infrastructure and shaded areas are also important measures of urban climate action progress.

“We talk about a just transition, but I don’t think anyone knows what that is or has seen an example of it,” said Richardson. “As we go through this process, we have to acknowledge that there’s so many things that we don’t know.”

Baltimore also ensured cross-agency collaboration by launching an internal sub-cabinet focused on sustainability and resiliency, which includes city departments such as waste management, transportation, and buildings. This helps city leaders apply different perspectives to challenges like incentivizing public transportation use. “It really helps us to think critically about how we are strategically implementing as well as allocating city resources,” said Richardson.

“No one can do this on their own. This is all about the ‘us’ and doing this together, and the broader those coalitions are, the more durable they will be to political change,” said Armstrong. “It’s taken a very long time and we have a very long way to go, but climate and justice together are a powerful intersection among all these social issues and economic issues that really are about quality of life in urban areas.”