If a neighborhood has a small number of trees, the urban forestry department may evaluate the number of areas suitable for new trees before starting the planting process. Once planted, the ministry can measure the number of surviving saplings after five years to assess success. The transportation department could assess the number of cyclists and motorists on the road for 12 months before installing protected bike lanes, and then take the same measurements after the protected lanes are built to see if improved cycling infrastructure affects people getting around.

However, municipalities do not always consider all relevant data and information before launching an intervention; This could have disastrous consequences for the people living there or for the intervention itself.

Policies are courses of action that your municipality chooses to adopt through guidelines, regulations, funding priorities, or legislation. Everything in your neighborhood, from where parking lots are located, to the height of buildings, to which neighborhoods have street trees, results from a deliberate decision driven by policies. Sometimes decisions were made a century ago, sometimes they were enacted last week. However, these decisions can be modified to reflect current or desired values ​​and norms.

In essence, policies are ideas that the government decides will help them achieve certain goals.

Do you know who has good ideas about how you can change things for the better in your community? You. Through your data collection, understanding of local history, and conversations with community members, you are well-suited to translate the information you gather into municipal policy ideas.

Politics occurs through your elected officials and city officials, and there are many opportunities for you and your coalition to intervene in the decisions being made. Understanding how policymaking occurs will help you understand how to intervene. When you begin this work, it will be useful to focus on four main areas for intervention: master plans, greening or resilience plans, local regulations and development plans. These four areas of intervention relate to how most decisions are made about prioritizing community needs and allocating resources.

Sample Questions and Regulations

Events like votes on climate ballot measures don’t happen every day; so it makes sense for your average community to accomplish your priorities through existing municipal infrastructure. Below are a few examples of “questions” that you and your coalition members might consider advocating for, and the processes or people you need to influence to make those questions happen.

Concrete examples prove that change is possible and has already been adopted by other societies (so what are we waiting for?). This may lead elected or government officials to worry about the feasibility of new programs, policies, and regulations. Additionally, it is easier to change existing policies and regulations than to draft them from scratch.

Sir: New Local Regulations Improving Cycling and Walking Infrastructure

What: Petition your city or municipal council to draft, introduce, and pass ordinances that ensure transportation improvements meet the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists as well as cars. Most municipalities have a regular schedule for road and pavement repairs, and some cities have ordinances linking improvements to bike lanes and pedestrian infrastructure to repaving roads, such as rapidly building bike lanes or cutting sidewalks.

Reason: The warmer the weather, the less likely people are to walk, cycle and use public transport, and the more likely they are to drive. But cars produce significant amounts of waste heat through their internal combustion engines, making it hotter to walk on roads or in active parking lots than in areas where cars are not running.1 The more heat there is, the more cars there are; The more cars, the more heat. Regulations that allocate resources to cycling and walking infrastructure help reduce the number of cars on the roads, reducing the urban heat island effect and improving air quality.

Sample Regulation: In 2019, the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, passed the nation’s first “Bicycle Safety Ordinance,” requiring the city to add permanent, protected bike lanes on major streets during planned redevelopment.2 The ordinance is expected to create 25 miles of bike lanes. new, protected cycle lanes in seven years.

Sir: When Building or Redeveloping Parks or Replace Aging Pools, Amend the Park Master Plan to Include Splash Pads and Misters

What: Parks and recreation departments often produce master plans for large individual parks (think Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California) or the entire park system. These plans cover everything from the presence (or absence) of drinking fountains to the repair, replacement or decommissioning of park infrastructure.

If your community is vulnerable to heat, work with your coalition to submit recommendations that the parks department change its master plan to prioritize the placement of splashes and fogs when local parks and playgrounds are built or renovated, and the passage of decommissioned or malfunctioning parks. Convert pools into splash pads rather than closing them.

Reason: Taking a dip in the pool on a hot summer day can be a great way to beat the heat, but there are a few challenges to using pools as an acclimatization strategy that may have you leaning toward the bay. Because pools are expensive to rebuild or maintain, municipalities are increasingly decommissioning pools that have reached the end of their useful life. Even if your local pool remains open, that doesn’t mean it’s available to those who need help most.

Some residents at risk for heat-related illness cannot swim or have disabilities that prevent them from going to or enjoying the pool. People who work outside the home may not be able to access the pool during the hours it is open, and a nationwide shortage of lifeguards has significantly reduced those open hours. Splash pads and misters are great alternatives to pools. They provide accessible, intergenerational access to refreshment; There is no need for skilled personnel, such as lifeguards, to supervise them; can be operated day or night; and are relatively inexpensive to install and maintain compared to pools.

Splash pads require adequate drainage to prevent water stagnation or localized flooding, but misters, which express a fine mist of water like you might see sprayed on vegetables at the grocery store, require little or no drainage while offering similar benefits to splash pads. .

Sample Regulation: The Park Improvement Projects Master Plan, developed by the Louisville, Kentucky, Department of Parks and Recreation, calls for the installation of “spray pads” (interactive splash pads and foggy areas) in the redevelopment and construction of the park. Although non-binding, the master plan guides investment in the Louisville park system, which currently has more than thirty spray areas.

Using Common Power for the Benefit of All

No one has a complete and undeniable approach to greening our cities without unintended consequences. Still, there are ways to be mindful of your influence and use your collective power to advocate for resilience policies and programs that benefit everyone. As cities and states develop climate change resiliency plans, residents and local advocates must be at the table and a focus on building wealth, stabilizing rents, and creating more decommodified housing for those long excluded from the housing market because of their race or class, and with the support of community land trusts and housing cooperatives. effort.

They must allow for the creation of local jobs without disproportionately locating toxic industries in Black, Brown, immigrant, and low-income neighborhoods. They must enable transport and commerce without exposing the most vulnerable to black carbon-laden exhaust fumes. Fair and effective solutions meet the demands of the climate crisis and do so without harming those who have already borne the burden of injustice for too long. If a neighborhood’s flood risk has decreased but longtime residents can no longer live there, one crisis has been replaced by another.

As you continue your journey to fight the climate crisis, use the resources or privileges you have to not only advance positive change, but also to ensure that those whom change will impact the most are actively in the room and listened to. Drawing attention to the lived experiences and ideas of those who are often left out of the processes is a huge and underrated step towards operationalizing the values ​​of equality and justice.

This adapted excerpt is from Cate Mingoya-LaFortune’s book. Climate Action for Busy People (2024, Island Press). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial.ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) courtesy of Island Press. Adapted and produced for the web. World | Food | LifeA project of the Independent Media Institute.