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Advancing equity and justice in climate action planning (CAP) presents a considerable challenge for urban governance actors. This paper provides necessary and practical guidance for developing participatory approaches that help planners avoid perpetuating dominant knowledge systems and corresponding planning interventions that have brought us to the current state of climate change and social inequity. Advancing equity and justice in CAP requires reflexive, participatory practice that centers vulnerable residents and supports communication across differences in social position and systems of meaning. These actions require a fuller accounting of the underlying social processes that drive vulnerability to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories are widely considered a first step toward climate mitigation and adaptation planning, but progress completing inventories at the local level is often slow. Local governments may lack motivation to carry out inventories when staffing and funding are tight. Articulating the current costs of energy consumption could motivate cash-limited local governments and help justify investments in alternatives. Calculating financial savings of alternatives could further motivate planning. Here we demonstrate an approach to calculate operating costs (and potential savings) for a town in southern New York, using measures of heat consumption and eGallons to calculate expenditures. We find that business-as-usual community energy cost amount to $50–$60 million per year in funds exported from the community, or $10,000–$12,000 per household. By replacing gasoline vehicles with electric vehicles and oil-burning furnaces with heat pumps, the community could save around $20–$33 million per year, or $4400–$7000 per household. Local government operations costs could decline by over $70,000 per year. For a small government, such reductions could have a substantial financial impact. Adding a cost assessment to a standard GHG inventory appears reasonably straightforward, and if implemented broadly, it could increase the speed and effectiveness of GHG inventories and climate action planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities around the world are creating formal planning documents proposing local actions to mitigate and prepare for the impacts of climate change. Despite a growing number of examples of such plans and "toolkits" that outline the process for undertaking these planning efforts, many cities are still struggling to know where to start. Furthermore, meta-analyses of existing climate action plans show that many suffer from similar limitations including lack of scientific input, failure to consider strategies across multiple sectors within local government, limited public involvement, narrow focus on mitigation, and lack of detail regarding implementation and monitoring. This paper describes our process for developing the Anchorage Climate Action Plan and our experience fusing a three-way partnership between the municipal government, a local university, and the broader Anchorage, Alaska community. We describe the nuts and bolts of our funding, leadership structure, and technical working sessions and reflect on the key structural, political, and social elements that catalysed plan development, adoption, and implementation. Our experience suggests that public support from municipal leaders, commitment from local experts, a dedicated steering committee, a diverse set of stakeholders, and a good working relationship with the local government officials (e.g. Assembly members or City Council) are critical to creating a successful framework for climate mitigation and adaptation planning in a community. Collaborative planning with a local university that prioritises community-engagement can support the development of a robust planning document that integrates local scientific expertise and is representative of the community it is meant to serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, urban climate action plans have not focused on residents who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change: neighborhoods of people of color and low-income communities, also known as frontline communities. I examined the climate action planning process for five U.S. cities that have recently updated their climate action plans to focus on equity: Austin (TX), Baltimore (MD), Cleveland (OH), Portland (OR), and Providence (RI). The goal of the analysis was to identify how planners and policymakers are making the climate action planning process more inclusive of marginalized groups and incorporating equity into the plan's goals. I examined three aspects of climate equity: procedural, distributional, and recognition. Using content analysis of the plans and interviews with past and current sustainability directors in each of the cities and a small number of participants, I provide context for how the updated plans addressed the three aspects of equity. Further, I call into question how academics have defined procedural equity. The experiences of these five cities revealed that three actions essential to achieving authentic participation are antiracism training, comprehensive efforts to bring underrepresented groups to the table, and creating a planning process in which participants are valued. The bottom line in all three is that procedural equity is a trust-building process. Participants in these planning processes viewed acknowledging previous rounds of harm committed in frontline communities as a first step in prioritizing equity. Although distributional equity is defined through implementation, the plans of these five cities, to varying degrees, attempted to stipulate how equitable implementation of goals will be measured. Developing climate plans that emphasize equity requires a considerable upfront commitment to building authentic participation from frontline communities and ensuring that it is measured in implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study points to the importance of studying the intersection of sustainability planning, revitalization, and equity in urban spaces by applying Henri Lefebvre's representation of space in a critique of the ongoing debate over "green gentrification" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this paper, I examine how the city of Pittsburgh sustains that (1) gentrification is sustainable and just, (2) it will help better neighborhoods for local families and create better 'green' communities and (3) green gentrification along with greening of city spaces result in city-wide benefits for all citizens, not just White or affluent citizens. Through this rhetorical representation of space, the city of Pittsburgh defines the process and associated values of gentrification as desirable, unavoidable, and most importantly, a sustainable process with just outcomes for obtaining equality throughout all the city's neighborhoods. Ultimately, the material reality of how the city of Pittsburgh is planning on creating a sustainably just city for all its citizens is hidden in its rhetorical sustainable discourses when surveyed utilizing Lefebvre's theoretical production of space as a foundation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite interest in the importance of social equity to sustainability, there is concern that equity is often left behind in practice relative to environmental and economic imperatives. We analyze recent climate and sustainability action plans from a sample of twenty-eight medium and large U.S. cities, finding that few made social equity a prominent goal of their plans, although there is a discernible trend in this direction. We present case studies of three cities that incorporated social equity goals, concluding that sustainability planning efforts provide strategic opportunities to pursue equity goals, especially where capacity exists among community-based actors to intervene and participate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study describes the climate adaptation planning efforts that were undertaken on the island of Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. This effort focused on establishing a multi-agency Climate Change Working Group. The adaptation planning efforts on Saipan used two main sources of guidance: one document written for application to coastal jurisdictions throughout the United States and a set of tools designed for small island communities in the Pacific. These sources were combined with inspiration from adaptation processes in other jurisdictions and adjustments were made to fit Saipan's situation. Modifications were based on available knowledge or expertise, technical capacities, and local needs. Several themes that are common to adaptation processes elsewhere were important in Saipan: leadership and political will, stakeholder involvement, level of climate knowledge, building on existing collaborations, and technical capacity. These themes are examined, with an emphasis on how we adjusted to meet the challenges that arose in the context of Saipan's social, political, and economic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While climate change has global causations and impacts, there is growing consensus on addressing the 2 °C challenge through local actions. However, at the local level, there is disintegrated knowledge on the following: (a) short-, mid- and long-term climate vulnerability, (b) economy and GHG structures and their future pathways, and (c) useful mitigation and adaptation undertaken elsewhere. We evaluate these gaps through a comprehensive review of scientific literature and policy approaches of urban-climate studies in the Asia-Pacific Region. Based on the research findings, we develop a collaborative research framework of an integrated climate action planning (ICLAP) model for evidence-based decision-making tool. It adopts an innovative methodology integrating knowledge and data from diverse analytics, as follows: (a) spatial: downscaling global/regional climate scenarios to forecast local climate variability (50 km × 50 km) for 2030 (SDG target) and 2050; (b) statistical: a meta-analysis of 49 five-million-plus cities to forecast economic, energy and GHG scenarios; (c) bibliometric: a systematic review of global urban climate interventions from Google Scholar that collectively aid cities on policy inputs for mid-term climate variability, GHG profiles and available solutions at their disposal. We conclude with a discussion on scientific and policy relevance of such a tool in fostering overall urban, regional and global sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While higher education institutions play a role in regional sustainability transitions, community–university partnerships for sustainability may be underdeveloped and fraught. Moreover, the specific role of students in building and strengthening those partnerships remains little explored. This research occurred in Laramie, Wyoming—the first community to resolve to pursue carbon neutrality in the top coal-producing state in the U.S.—amidst declining state revenue and absent any formal community–university sustainability partnership. Drawing on a community resilience framework and the social-theoretical construct of agency, we examined an informal, multi-year partnership developed through a project-based, community-engaged Campus Sustainability course at the University of Wyoming. Through a chronological sequence case study, we synthesized autoethnography, document analysis, and semi-structured interview methods involving community and university stakeholder and student participants. We found that students, rather than other university actors, played a vital bridging role in absence of a formal community–university sustainability partnership. They also served in a catalyzing role as change agents alongside community stakeholders, providing the potential to develop stronger community–university partnerships and advance sustainability transitions across other Wyoming communities. Findings suggest a need to keenly attend to power dynamics and whose agency is driving higher education institutions' roles in regional sustainability transitions in specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]