A new report by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives highlights twenty local government across the country that are taking the initiative to combat global warming.

The report follows up an earlier survey ICLEI did of 298 American cities, which found that 74 percent had perceived changes in the climate — including increased storm intensity, higher temperatures, and more precipitation. Almost two-thirds are pursuing adaptation planning for climate change, compared to 68 percent globally, and virtually all U.S. cities report difficulties acquiring funding for adaptation efforts. (Only Latin American cities reported similar levels of difficulty.) And over one-third of U.S. cities said the federal government does not understand the realities of climate change adaptation.

Several examples from ICLEI’s new report on local adaptation efforts include:

New York City, NY shouldered 43 deaths and $19 billion in damage from Superstorm Sandy. The city’s sustainability plan, PlaNYC, includes $2.4 billion in green infrastructure to capture rainwater through natural methods before it can flood. New York is requiring climate risk assessments for new developments in vulnerable areas, as is restoring 127 acres of wetlands that serve as a natural storm barrier.

Atlanta, GA has been seeing hotter seasons year-round, and an increasing urban heat island effect. In response, the city is finalizing a climate action plan that includes cool/reflective roof standards for new construction, requirements for use of “cool pavement,” increasing canopy coverage by 10,000 trees by 2013, and improving building efficiency.

Chicago, IL, is experiencing more frequent extreme heat and flooding, threatening extensive damage, especially to the city’s stormwater infrastructure. Chicago has responded with a landmark Climate Action Plan. They boast the greenest street in America, a pilot program they’re looking to scale up to a citywide design standard. They also lead the green roof industry in installations, with the most square feet set up, and are encouraging further green infrastructure

Eugene, OR is facing more ultra-dry conditions with the attendant possibility of wildfires. One major nearby fire produced enough smoke to threaten the health of Eugene’s more vulnerable residents. The city is also responding with a Community Climate and Energy Action plan, including ramping up water conservation, increasing energy efficiency, and promoting climate-adapted trees for public spaces.

Some of the remaining cities included in the report were Miami Dade County, FL; Houston, TX; Denver, CO; Salt Lake City, UT; and Washington, DC.

The rise in extreme weather events has highlighted the need to build greater resiliency into communities’ infrastructure, through both local and national policy, and how to rebuild better infrastructure in the wake of destructive events.

by Roz Pidcock via The Carbon Brief

A study published yesterday outlines a new way to map the emissions produced by cities. Cities are major contributors to global climate change, so the authors say this could be an important step forward in meeting emission reduction targets.

Cities – as hubs of industry, housing, business and transport – are responsible for more than 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the World Bank. With the global population approaching nine billion and 68 per cent of people expected to be living in urbanised areas by 2050, the way cities develop in the future is set to be critical when it comes to setting and meeting international emission reduction targets.

While all countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are legally obliged to report their national greenhouse gas emissions, different countries use different methods to do so. This inconsistency filters through to the city level. Although a large chunk of the responsibility to reduce national emissions will fall to cities, an international standard for working out how much cities contribute also isn’t settled.

A new study published yesterday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology lays out a new method for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions for individual buildings every hour for an entire city. Professor Kevin Gurney from the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and lead author of the study explains why this is important:

“Cities have had little information with which to guide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – and you can’t reduce what you can’t measure.”

Tracking emissions

Previous research has tended to estimate cities’ emissions on a much broader level, based on data on industrial energy use and average domestic consumption. The new research takes advantage of the growing number of atmospheric measurements made at city level to dig deeper into exactly where the emissions come from.

A still from a video of hour-by-hour changes in carbon dioxide emissions from different building types for the US city of Indianapolis. Credit: Bedrich Benes and Michel Abdul-Massih

The team of scientists collected a range of ‘bottom up’ data about carbon dioxide emissions from air pollution reports, traffic surveys and basic information about building type and size collected for tax purposes. They combined these data with a computer modelling system which calculated energy consumption on a building-by-building basis.

As Gurney explains, users can track the emission intensity for the whole city using colour-coded, high resolution maps and use them to make decisions on where efforts to reduce emissions would be most effective. He says:

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Mayor Reed. Photo Courtesy of AP

by Kasim Reed, Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia

At the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Chicago earlier this summer, I joined President Clinton and other mayors from across the country and across party lines to explore how to accelerate investment in job-creating domestic infrastructure.

Each mayor faced unique challenges, but there was an immediate recognition of the enormous potential to improve our cities and our economies through public-private partnerships. We looked closely at the example of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s newly created Infrastructure Trust – a nonprofit entity designed to attract private capital for infrastructure investment, which will promote job creation and economic growth in Chicago.

We all left that initial meeting with a clear desire to sustain collaboration among mayors to explore better tools for public and private financing. Mayor Nutter, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, recently expressed interest in similar strategies to overcome the fiscal challenges local governments can face. Working together, I believe we can identify successful financing solutions and models that would work in any city in America to increase the value, efficiency, and sustainability of our cities. Simply, a successful private-partnership could improve not only our roads and bridges and electrical grids but also our citizens’ quality of life.

So, this week in Tarrytown, New York, President Clinton is hosting a two-day meeting organized by the Clinton Global Initiative that I’ll attend with Asheville Mayor Terry M. Bellamy, Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown, Joplin Mayor Melodee Colbert-Kean, and Portland Mayor Sam Adams, as well as top city officials from Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Louisville, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, and San Francisco. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, former director of the Office of Management and Budget and current Vice Chairman at Citigroup Peter Orszag, as well as infrastructure experts and capital providers will also attend in the hopes of advancing that conversation that began in Chicago this June. While each of us represent different cities and constituencies, I hope we will work towards a common goal—finding a workable model to increase private investment in public infrastructure.

In Atlanta, I’ve seen the potential for success in exactly this kind of partnership in our own Atlanta BeltLine, which I believe is one of the most transformative urban development projects in the nation. The Atlanta BeltLine will be a system of rails, trails, and greenspace that will seamlessly connect 45 of our neighborhoods, while providing first- and last-mile transit connectivity for the entire metro Atlanta region. This is the most comprehensive revitalization effort ever undertaken in our city and a true model of sustainability, smart land use, and mobility.

The success of this project hinges on private-public partnerships.

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by Ben Bovarnick

While many national governments struggle to take comprehensive action on climate change, major cities around the globe are acting on their own.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) recently released a report tracking initiatives cities are taking to address their greenhouse gas emissions. Many of these municipal governments — plagued by heat waves and flooding — recognize the urgent need to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Cities account for 70 percent of global emissions while occupying just 2 percent of dry land. The 53 cities that publicly disclose city wide emissions together produce more than 977 million tonnes of CO₂ — or the equivalent emissions of Germany.

While cities are a major source of carbon emissions, they’re also a hotbed of activity to reduce that global warming pollution.

Reacting to the dangers posed by climate change, 59 cities are taking a total of 630 city-wide actions to limit their emissions.  The most common measure is reducing the energy demand of buildings, with 133 efforts to do so in 48 cities. 47 cities have also initiated 129 actions to reduce transportation emissions.  In order to achieve this, cities are frequently using their general municipal funds, though there also exists “a wide variety of outside sources” like state grants, national funding, and UN programs to tap into.

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There’s a cheap, abundant resource that could help consumers save money and fight climate change: rainwater.

by Zachary Rybarczyk

Residents in eight cities around the U.S. could collectively trim up to $90 million a year off their water bills with simple rainwater collection techniques, according to a new report.

Urban rooftop rainwater collection, often overlooked or discouraged by complicated regulations in major cities and neighborhoods, could help individuals and families save money while improving water quality, says the Natural Resources Defense Council in a new report.

“Even under conservative assumptions, the study demonstrates that each city modeled can capture hundreds of millions to billions of gallons of rainwater each year, equivalent to the total annual water use of tens to hundreds of thousands of residents.”

And the yearly savings could be far greater for Americans than $90 million. The eight cities profiled in the NRDC analysis are only a snapshot of the different regions around the country.

Over 44 billion gallons of freshwater are used by public water suppliers on a daily basis in the United States, with consumers representing one of the highest individual daily usage rates in the world (between 100 and 165 gallons). As climate change and population growth drain some regional water supplies, urban dwellers may be vulnerable to water shortages or price spikes.

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by Greg Hanscom, cross-posted from Grist

It’s that time of year again: When public schools everywhere cast about desperately for a holiday celebration that doesn’t involve Jesus or a dude in a red suit; when families gather from thither and yon to spend a few days remembering why they’ve scattered thither and yon in the first place; and yes, it’s time to take stock of the year past, and look ahead to the one coming up. As the guy charged with keeping an eye on all things urban around here, I curled up with my laptop on a winter’s night that was definitely not as cold as they used to be, dug through the archives, and now offer this, my most humble (and totally non-denominational) retrospective of 2011.

The promise of 2010: “bright flight”

Photo: Matthew Rutledge

The view from Seattle’s Capitol Hill. With Millennials and Baby Boomers both expressing interest in more urban living, it looked like 2011 would usher in the “triumph of the city,” to borrow the title from a book released this year by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser. Between-year Census numbers released last year suggested that, for the first time in a generation in many metropolitan areas, white people were shunning the suburbs in favor of city living. “A new image of urban America is in the making,” William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press. “What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into ‘bright flight’ to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation, and a new city ambience as an attraction.” It was music to many city leaders’ ears, and great news for the planet, too, as tightly packed, car-free living is what a green future looks like for many of us. But wait, there’s more …

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by Greg Hanscom, cross-posted from Grist

If you Google the term “a scholar and a gentleman,” the first result to pop up is a picture of Witold Rybczynski — or it would be if there were any justice in the world. Rybczynski is an architect, author, and professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written a dozen or so books on technology, architecture, real estate — even a natural history of the screwdriver. He knows The City like it’s nobody’s business.

So it was notable when, in a blog post a few weeks back, Rybczynski opened a can of Jedi-style whoopass on writer Richard Florida for playing “fast and loose” with income numbers to make the case that dense, city-style living is the source of all that’s good in the world. Florida included a chart with a story in The Atlantic charting the average income in cities to show that the more people you pack into a small area, the richer they become. “There seems to be no limit, as yet, to the relationship between greater density and faster growth,” he wrote breathlessly.

Trouble was, the income stats Florida used were from metro areas, meaning that they included the suburbs — where most Americans live and work, Rybczynski points out. Take the ‘burbs out of the equation and the picture looks quite different. Florida’s chart puts the average income of Rybczynski’s hometown of Philadelphia  at $46,230, for example. The median income of the city proper is closer to $30,000, Rybczynski says. The suburbs are apparently where most of the action is.

The so-called creative classes, [Florida] writes, “cluster and thrive in places where the conversation and culture are the most stimulating.” … I don’t know if these suburbs are the scenes of “stimulating conversation,” but they are definitely neither dense nor concentrated. Neither is San Jose, Marin, or Palo Alto, or, for that matter, the outer boroughs of New York City or northern New Jersey. So people are thriving, just not exactly in the places where we imagine — or would like to imagine.

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by Greg Hanscom in a Grist cross-post

Somewhere on the way back to the city, Americans got sidetracked.

Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs.

The trends have spawned stories like this one, from America’s Finest News Source, headlined, “Family Of Five Found Alive In Suburbs.”

BUFFALO GROVE, IL-The Holsapple family, long feared missing or spiritually dead, was found alive in the Chicago suburbs Monday, somehow managing to survive in the hostile environment for more than eight years.

Rescuers discovered the five-person clan after a survey plane spotted a crude signal fire the family had created in a barbecue grill.

All ended well for the Holsapple clan, thanks to paramedics who rushed them back to civilization, but what about the roughly 150 million other Americans who are still stranded out there, out by the mall, in all those creepy look-alike subdivisions?

As one commenter on this website recently wrote, “Saying people prefer living in suburbs in the new century is a bit like saying people really liked living in East St. Louis, Watts, or Oakland in the 1970s.”

Watts? Really? I mean, I know that the real estate crash hit some suburbs hard, but last time I ventured out past the city limits they had the rioting relatively under control. The gun battles in the streets were down to just a couple a day. Heck, you could still get a tank of gas for less than I pay for a bag of groceries at my neighborhood Whole Foods.

Methinks we may have jumped the gun on the whole collapse of the suburbs bit.

So what’s really up with Americans and our weird relationship with the city? There are a lot of explanations for the discrepancy between where we live and where we say we’d rather.

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