By Guananí Gomez-Van Cortright
To prepare for a future buffeted by climate change, California has set some of the most ambitious climate goals in the nation. These include achieving carbon neutrality, transitioning to clean energy sources, and ensuring community resilience in the face of climate risks and hazards. But while Sacramento sets goals for mitigation, adaptation, and resilience, local communities are where such goals meet reality.
Local governments seeking state funding for climate projects are first asked to develop their own climate action plans. Climate action plans lay out how a community will do its share to meet state climate mitigation and adaptation goals. They tackle topics such as how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from homes, businesses, and transportation; prepare for climate change-driven extreme weather such as increased heat; and minimize climate change-related harms to vulnerable communities.
The problem is that many municipalities lack the incentives, resources, and wherewithal to create or update their plans. This has left many opportunities for local climate action either unaddressed or behind schedule.
Two University of California research programs aim to help local governments eliminate these roadblocks by supporting equitable climate action planning. One program will provide localized carbon emissions data. The other assesses and disseminates information about local climate action, highlights challenges, and showcases outstanding examples of climate adaptation and mitigation projects across the state. Both are funded by some of the more than $80 million in California Climate Action Seed and Matching Grants provided by the state in 2022–23 and administered by the University of California.
Empowering local governments with carbon emissions data
Before any community can promise to reduce its carbon emissions, it must first quantify the amount of greenhouse gases it currently produces. But for many municipalities, gathering and making sense of local carbon emissions data is a major barrier to developing meaningful climate action plans and projects.
A collaboration between the CoolClimate Project at UC Berkeley and various climate justice organizations are working to eliminate this roadblock. With $1.4 million in Climate Action Seed Grant funding, they are developing a free and accessible carbon emissions tool for use by all governments in California. The CoolClimate Project is well suited for this task: the data analysis lab at UC Berkeley quantifies the carbon footprint of a variety of systems and activities, from flying in an airplane to having an Amazon box delivered.
“It’s an incredibly costly process to even begin developing these plans, which are integral to actually rationalizing investments in local projects that reduce carbon emissions and make for greener communities,” said John Vandervort. Vandervort is a project manager for the climate energy team at CivicWell, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering local governments across California to tackle civic improvement projects.
To use the tool, all local governments need to do is enter their jurisdiction into the web-based application. The tool will then serve up an inventory of emissions data broken down by sector, plus policy recommendations for projects that could take the largest bites out of the municipality’s emissions.
“If you don’t measure it, you can’t act on it,” says Dan Kammen, professor of sustainability at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the CoolClimate Project. “Rich communities tend to be able to measure things poor communities can’t. And our social fabric is only as strong as the most vulnerable communities.”
Kammen and Chris Jones, the CoolClimate program director, are committed to partnering with under-resourced communities across California to make the state’s transition to clean energy inclusive. With the quantitative power of carbon emissions analysis tools, they want to assist disadvantaged communities to receive their fair share of state resources available to address climate issues.
“We are proud of our history of working with and for the communities that can be on the frontlines of innovation for a clean energy economy, but are often left behind,” said Kammen. “We want to demonstrate that there are really good, cost effective, clean energy options available to low income communities.”
At this early stage, CivicWell, the CoolClimate Project and their collaborators are focused on design. They are holding workshops and reaching out to potential users to make sure the tool is relevant, useful, and easily plugs into the climate planning local governments have already set in motion. The tool will draw from data gathered by utilities and government agencies as of 2022. Long term success hinges on finding an agency or institution to continue updating the data beyond the two years funded by the Climate Action grant.
Keeping the tool operational would help keep disadvantaged communities at the forefront of climate planning. “By making the geography of injustice clear, we hope that local to national policies can be crafted to make clean energy and smart infrastructure something that happens first in the most needy communities, not at the end of a trickle-down process,” says Kammen.
Vandervort hopes that this tool can save costs for local governments across the state, allowing them to overcome the barriers to developing climate action plans and get impactful projects approved, especially in rural and disadvantaged communities.
“This project with UC Berkeley has the chance to be a really transformative change in how local governments in California approach their climate planning policy,” said Vandervort. “Grants like this are perfect for filling in these gaps that are oftentimes really hard to identify and overcome.”
Information infrastructure for equitable climate action
In addition to making communities greener, California’s climate mandates offer cities and towns the chance to rebalance how communities are affected by land use decisions. “Within twenty years, land use across the state will change dramatically,” said Gregg Macey, Director of the Center for Land, Environment & Natural Resources at UC Irvine School of Law. “The governance systems that address climate change, energy systems, groundwater management, habitat restoration, and adaptation and resilience require more expansive regional partnerships and careful integration with local land use decision-making to succeed. This is the IECA program’s mission: to integrate local land use planning with state climate and environmental justice laws, policies, incentives, and aspirations.
“We need to build infrastructure to encourage and help local governments meet state goals to prevent further climate change and adapt to the effects of climate change,” says Alejandro Camacho, Faculty Director of the Center for Land, Environment and Natural Resources at UC Irvine. “A key part of this is connecting municipalities and communities with state-of-the-art information about the challenges of and best practices in climate action—particularly empowering the communities most impacted by it.”
The Integrated and Equitable Climate Action (IECA) program pulls together UC scholars, municipal and state government partners, and environmental justice organizations to develop equitable adaptation and climate planning projects. The collaborative was awarded a $1.2 million Climate Action Seed Grant.
The IECA program aims to align local land use plans with state mandates. An example might be to identify where agricultural lands could be transformed into solar farms. It will also develop a living, publicly accessible database that helps communities learn from each other how to make climate action plans. This database will inventory existing initiatives, assess their effectiveness, and catalog common obstacles facing municipal governments. The learning infrastructure project will use these data to identify incentives that could foster effective climate planning and action.
“While our focus is climate action and general plans, our aim is more ambitious,” Macey says. The goal, Macey says, is “to energize public engagement, assist local land use planners and city management, and provide a model for integrative climate governance for the state and nation.”
Camacho hopes to also launch workshops and conferences for stakeholders and cities to share best practices. “This is absolutely critical for helping promote action that prevents the worst effects of climate change,” he says. “This is money well spent, to both increase knowledge and to actually address the problems that are already happening.”