A guide to climate action in your local community

If there are few trees in an area, the urban forestry department can estimate the number of locations suitable for new trees before planting. After planting five years later, the department can measure the number of surviving seedlings to gauge success. Before installing protected bike lanes, a transportation department can measure the number of cyclists and motorists on the road over a 12-month period, and then take the same measurements after the protected lanes are built to see whether improved bike infrastructure has made a difference in how people get around. .

However, municipalities do not always consider all relevant data and information before launching an intervention, which can have disastrous consequences for the people living there or the intervention itself.

A policy is a course of action that your municipality has decided to take through guidelines, ordinances, funding priorities, or laws. Everything about your neighborhood—where parking is located, the height of buildings, and which areas have street trees—comes from a deliberate decision based on policy. Sometimes decisions were made a hundred years ago, and sometimes they were codified last week. However, these decisions can be modified to reflect current or desired values ​​and norms.

At its core, policies are ideas that governments believe will help them achieve specific goals.

Do you know who has good ideas on how to make a difference in your community? You. You are well suited to transform the information you collect into municipal policy ideas through data collection, understanding local history, and conversations with community members.

Politics is carried out through your elected and municipal officials, and you and your coalition have many opportunities to interfere with decisions made. Understanding how policymaking occurs will help you understand how to intervene. As you begin this work, it is helpful to focus on four main areas of intervention: master plans, landscaping or sustainability plans, local ordinances, and zoning. These four areas of intervention determine how most decisions are made to prioritize community needs and allocate resources.

Examples of requests and sacraments

Events like climate votes don’t happen every day, so for your average community, implementing your priorities using existing municipal infrastructure makes sense. Below are a few examples of “asks” that you and your coalition members might consider advocating for, as well as the processes or people you will need to influence to get those requests realized.

Concrete examples prove that change is possible and is already being adopted by other communities (so what are we waiting for?). This may motivate elected or government officials to worry about the feasibility of new programs, policies, and regulations. Additionally, it is easier to change existing policies and regulations than to develop them from scratch.

Ask: New Local Ordinances Improving Bicycle and Pedestrian Infrastructure

What: Petition your city or city council to develop, introduce and pass ordinances that ensure transportation system improvements address the needs of pedestrians and cyclists as well as the needs of automobiles. Most municipalities have a regular schedule for road and sidewalk repairs, and some cities have ordinances that tie improvements to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, such as rapid construction of bike lanes or curb reductions, to road repairs.

Why: The hotter it is, the less likely people are to walk, cycle and use public transport, and the more likely they are to drive. However, cars generate significant amounts of waste heat from internal combustion engines, making walking on roads or active parking lots hotter than in areas without cars.1 More heat means more cars; the more cars, the more heat. Regulations that devote resources to cycling and pedestrian infrastructure help reduce the number of cars on the road, thereby reducing the urban heat island effect and improving air quality.

Example of a Resolution: In 2019, the Cambridge, Massachusetts City Council passed the nation’s first “Bike Safety Ordinance,” which requires the city to add permanent protected bike lanes to major streets during planned renovations.2 The ordinance is expected to result in the construction of 25 miles of new protected bike lanes in seven years.

Ask: Change the parks master plan to include splash pads and misters when constructing or renovating parks or replacing outdated swimming pools.

What: Parks and Recreation departments often develop master plans for large individual parks (for example, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California) or an entire park system. These plans cover everything from the presence (or absence!) of drinking fountains to the repair, replacement or decommissioning of park infrastructure.

If your community is vulnerable to heat, work with your coalition to submit recommendations to the parks department to change its general plan to prioritize the installation of splash pads and splash pads at local parks and playgrounds when they are built or renovated, as well as the relocation of decommissioned or retired ones turn pools into splash pads instead of covering them.

Why: Taking a dip in the pool on a hot summer day can be a great way to beat the heat, but there are a few issues with using pools as a climate adaptation strategy that may have you turning your attention to the gentlemen. Municipalities are increasingly decommissioning pools that have reached the end of their useful life because they are expensive to restore and maintain. Even if your local pool remains open, that doesn’t mean it can be used by those who need help most.

Some residents at risk for heat-related illnesses cannot swim or have a disability that prevents them from accessing or enjoying the pool. People who work outside the home may not be able to get into the pool during opening hours, and with a shortage of lifeguards across the country, those opening hours are being significantly reduced. Splash pads and misters are great alternatives to pools. They provide affordable, intergenerational access to cooling; do not require qualified personnel, such as lifeguards, to supervise them; can work day or night; and, compared to swimming pools, they are relatively cheap to install and maintain.

Splash pads require a fair amount of drainage to prevent standing water or localized flooding, but misters, which emit fine water vapor like the kind you might see sprayed on vegetables at the grocery store, require virtually no drainage while offering the same benefits. as well as mud flaps. .

Example of a Resolution: The Louisville, Kentucky Department of Parks and Recreation’s Master Plan for Park Improvement Projects calls for the installation of “sprinklers” (interactive splash pads and misters) during park renovations and construction. While the master plan is not mandatory, it does guide investment in Louisville’s park system, which currently has more than thirty sprayers.

Using collective power for the benefit of all

No one has a complete, foolproof approach to greening our cities without unintended consequences. However, there are ways to reflect on your impact and use your collective power to advocate for sustainability policies and programs that benefit everyone. As cities and states develop their climate resilience plans, they must engage residents and local advocates and include multifaceted strategies that build wealth for those long excluded from the housing market due to climate change. for their race or class, stabilize rents, and push for more decommodified housing through support for community land trusts and housing cooperatives.

They must allow local job creation without disproportionately locating toxic industries in black, brown, immigrant and poor neighborhoods. They must enable transport and trade without exposing those most vulnerable to plumes of black carbon-containing exhaust gases. Fair and effective solutions meet the demands of the climate crisis without harming those who have borne the brunt of injustice for too long. If the risk of flooding in an area decreases, but long-term residents can no longer live there, one crisis simply gives way to another.

As you continue your journey to combat the climate crisis, use whatever resources and privileges you have to not only push for positive change, but also to ensure that those who will be most impacted by those changes are actively present in the room and listened to. Bringing attention to the lived experiences and ideas of those who are often excluded from processes is a huge and underappreciated step towards putting the values ​​of equality and justice into practice.

This excerpt is adapted from Kate Mingoia-LaFortune’s book Climate Action for Busy People (2024, Island Press). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It is adapted and created for the web by Earth | Food | Life is a project of the Independent Media Institute.