Written by Kate Mingoya-LaFortune, a human-centered climate adaptation planner, community organizer, educator, parent, and cautious optimist. Raised in an environmental justice community, Mingoya-LaFortune is committed to advancing a future where all people live in clean, prosperous communities. She currently serves as groundwork usais the Chief Climate Resilience and Land Use Officer and leads the Climate Adaptation Capital Project. climate safe area These include climate organizing efforts, urban and community forestry projects, and field-building collaborations across disciplines. she is the author of Climate change prevention for busy people (Island Press, 2024). find her online www.catemingoya.com
This excerpt is from an article by Cate Mingoya-LaFortune Climate change prevention for busy people (2024, Island Press). This is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission island press. It is tailored and produced for the web. Earth | Food | Lifea project of the Independent Media Institute.
The data you collect is important if you want your local community to have a say in how policy decisions are made and resources are distributed. Local governments typically want to understand the scope and scale of the problem and how to identify and measure the success of their interventions before committing tax dollars to new programs and policies.
If there are few trees in your neighborhood, your city’s forestry department may evaluate the number of locations suitable for new trees before you begin planting. Once tree planting is complete, the department may measure success by measuring the number of surviving seedlings after five years. Transportation departments assess the number of bicycles and cars on the road over a 12-month period before installing protected bike lanes, and conduct the same measurements after construction of protected bike lanes to ensure that improved bike infrastructure improves the way people get around. You may want to check if it is affecting you.
However, municipalities do not always consider all relevant data and information before initiating an intervention, which can have dire consequences for the people living in the area and the intervention itself.
A policy is a course of action that a municipality chooses to adopt through guidelines, regulations, funding priorities, or legislation. Everything about our neighborhoods, from parking locations to building heights to where street trees are located, is the result of deliberate policy decisions. Decisions can be made a century ago or codified last week. Still, these decisions are subject to change to reflect current or aspirational values and norms.
Essentially, a policy is an idea determined by a government to achieve a specific goal.
Do you know someone with great ideas about how to change things for the better in your community? You. By collecting data, understanding local history, and speaking with local residents, you are well suited to turn the information you collect into policy ideas for the city.
Policies are implemented through elected officials, and there are many opportunities for you and your coalition to intervene in the decisions being made. Understanding how policy decisions are made helps understand how to intervene. As you begin this work, it is helpful to focus on four key areas of intervention: master plans, green or resilience plans, local ordinances, and zoning. These four areas of intervention are how most decisions about prioritizing community needs and allocating resources are determined.
Examples of questions and rituals
Events like voting on climate action don’t happen every day, so it makes sense for the average community to realize their priorities through existing municipal infrastructure. Below are examples of “asks” you and your coalition members could consider putting forward, as well as examples of the processes and people you need to influence to make those requests a reality.
Concrete examples prove that change is possible and has already been adopted by other communities (so what are we waiting for?). This can motivate elected and government officials concerned about the feasibility of new programs, policies, and ordinances. It is also easier to modify existing policies and ordinances than to draft them from scratch.
question: New local ordinance to improve biking and walking infrastructure
Contents: Petition your city or town council to draft, introduce, and pass an ordinance to ensure that transportation improvements address the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists as well as motorists. Most municipalities have regular schedules for road and sidewalk repairs, and some cities are implementing bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and road rehabilitation, including rapid construction of bike lanes and curb cuts. We have an ordinance that ties pavement together.
The reason: The hotter it is, the less likely people are to walk, cycle or take public transport, and the more likely they are to drive. But cars generate a lot of waste heat through their combustion engines, so walking along a road or driving through an active parking lot is hotter than an area without cars. 1 The more heat there is, the more cars there are. The more cars there are, the hotter it gets. Ordinances that allocate resources to bicycle and walking infrastructure can help reduce the number of cars on the road, reduce the urban heat island effect, and improve air quality.
Example of ordinance: In 2019, the Cambridge, Massachusetts City Council passed the nation’s first Bicycle Safety Ordinance. The ordinance requires the city to add permanent protected bike lanes to major roadways during the planned rebuilding period2. The ordinance is expected to increase mileage to 40 miles. New protected bike lanes for seven years.
question: Modifying the park master plan to include splash pads and sprayers when constructing or redeveloping the park or replacing aging pools.
Contents: Parks and Recreation departments often develop master plans for large individual parks (think Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California) or entire park systems. These plans cover everything from the presence (or lack thereof) of drinking fountains to the repair, replacement, or decommissioning of park infrastructure.
If your community is heat sensitive, work with the Coalition to prioritize splash pad and fogger installations when local parks and playgrounds are built or renovated, and when transitioning decommissioned or failing facilities. Submit recommendations for the Department to amend the Master Plan. Pool on the splash pad instead of closing the shutters.
The reason: Jumping into a pool on a hot summer day is a great way to beat the heat, but there are some challenges to using a pool as a climate adaptation strategy that can make you look mister. Due to the expense of rebuilding and maintaining pools, more and more municipalities are decommissioning pools that have reached the end of their useful life. Even if a local pool remains open, that doesn’t mean those most in need of relief can use it.
Some residents at risk for heat stroke may not be able to swim or have a disability that prevents them from going to or enjoying a pool. Those who work outside the home may not be able to get to the pool during business hours, and the national lifeguard shortage has drastically reduced business hours. Splash pads and sprayers are great alternatives to pools. These provide access to intergenerational cooldowns. It does not require skilled personnel such as lifeguards for monitoring. It can be run day or night. They are also relatively inexpensive to install and maintain compared to pools.
Splash pads require a significant amount of drainage to prevent water stagnation and localized flooding, whereas misters, which produce fine water vapor like those sprayed on vegetables at the grocery store, require little or no drainage. It doesn’t require any at all and provides similar benefits as a splash pad.
Example of ordinance: A park improvement project master plan developed by the Louisville Kentucky Department of Parks and Recreation calls for park redevelopment and construction to include “spraygrounds” (interactive splash pads and sprayers). Although not binding, the master plan will guide investments in the Louisville parks system, which currently has more than 30 spray fields.
Harnessing collective power to benefit everyone
No one has a complete and undeniable approach to greening cities without unintended consequences. Still, there are ways to reflect on our own impact and leverage our collective power to advocate for resilience policies and programs that benefit everyone. Cities and states need to bring residents and local advocates to the table as they develop climate resiliency plans to help build wealth and reduce rent for people who have long been excluded from the housing market due to race or class. We promote stabilization and the creation of more decommodified housing through support of local land trusts and housing cooperatives.
We must enable local job creation without locating industries that are disproportionately harmful to Black, brown, immigrant, and low-income neighborhoods. Transport and commerce must be provided without exposing the most vulnerable to black carbon-laden exhaust fumes. Just and effective solutions meet the demands of the climate crisis and do so without harming those who have already endured the burden of injustice for far too long. If a neighborhood’s flood risk has been reduced but long-term residents can no longer live there, one crisis has given way to another.
As we continue our journey to fight the climate crisis, we must use all the resources and privileges we have to not only drive positive change, but also to actively engage the people who will be most affected by that change. Be present and be heard. Drawing attention to the lived experiences and ideas of people who are often excluded from the process is a major, but underappreciated, step toward operationalizing values of equity and justice.
