Full Title: Exploring Gaps in City Climate Planning and the Need for Regional Action
Author(s): Joseph Kane, Adie Tomer, Caroline George, and Jamal Russell Black
Publisher(s): Brookings Metro
Publication Date: September 20, 2022
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Description (excerpt):
This report attempts to better understand why cities are failing to meet their targets and what can be learned from the planning practices that are working well. By evaluating the most comprehensive decarbonization plans across 50 of the country’s largest cities, the report judges how well the strategies and actions in these plans prepare cities for meaningful, accountable decarbonization. Using 25 standardized criteria and interviews with local practitioners to judge city decarbonization plans, we find:
- – Most plans have long-term decarbonization goals, but less than one-third (32%) have detailed benchmarks and reporting.
- – Only about one-quarter (28%) of plans include detailed, sector-specific strategies for electricity, buildings, and transportation decarbonization.
- – Nearly two-thirds of plans provide some detail on who will lead decarbonization efforts, but few offer extensive detail.
- – Many cities struggle to pay for decarbonization efforts; only 16% of plans identify detailed funding sources or financing approaches.
- – While almost all decarbonization plans identify equity as a goal, nearly three-quarters lack details on how to achieve it.
Combined, these results show yawning gaps between city ambitions and their preparedness to act. Yet across each of the 25 criteria, we found promising strategies and actions that could be adopted in peer cities. Policymakers, planners, and other public and private leaders need to better understand where they can add more teeth to their plans. Planning for the sake of planning is not good enough; practitioners need to draft clear sets of actionable and accountable steps to drive decarbonization.