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In 2005, countries around the world ratified the Kyoto Protocol. It was the first big, legally-binding international climate policy, but there was a big drawback: The United States, the world’s richest country and second-highest emitter, didn’t ratify it.
In response, American mayors took action. Even if the US wouldn’t commit to cutting climate emissions, their cities would. It was the classic “think global, act local” move.
It started with mayoral resolutions—a bunch of “whereases” laying out the reasons cities needed their own climate targets. Whereas manmade climate change is happening. Whereas cities are responsible for 70% of the world’s emissions. Whereas more than half the world’s people live in cities. Whereas cities are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Therefore? Our city is going to do something about it. Mayors proclaimed, city councils adopted, and gavels cracked on podiums across the country as city climate plans were created, along with a new job to manage it all: the chief sustainability officer.
Twenty years later, hundreds of US cities have climate plans. Their chief sustainability officers are responsible for aggressive decarbonization goals that require deep cuts to emissions, and fast. But are cities actually meeting their targets? And do city sustainability officers have what they need to meet them?
“The state of decarbonization is lopsided. It’s really imbalanced in this country,” says Hilari Varnadore, a vice president at the U.S. Green Building Council, where she oversees a national program that helps cities with sustainability goals. “We have places—cities and states—that are just really accelerating progress, big time. And then there [are] just places that it’s moving super slow.”
Cities don’t count emissions the same way. While most use a tool called a greenhouse gas inventory, what they include in the inventory varies a lot. Some track emissions from all activities within city limits. But others only track municipal operations, like city vehicle fleets and government buildings, because it’s the only data they can get.
What’s more, cities have different targets, different baseline years and different future deadlines by which they aim to meet their targets. For example, many cities have what’s known as an 80-by-50 goal—a goal to reduce emissions by 80% by the year 2050. It’s a goal that’s roughly aligned with what scientists said would limit global warming to about 2 degrees Celsius when the Kyoto Protocol became official.
But the science has changed. Since 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has recommended limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst effects of climate change. To get there, scientists say global emissions must be cut as fast as possible—to net zero by 2050, with an interim reduction target of about 50% by 2030.
Varnadore’s career has tracked the story of US city climate planning, pretty much beat by beat. She graduated from high school in 1993, the same
year the city of Portland, Oregon, became the first in the country to adopt a climate plan. She became a planner in Frederick County, Maryland, in 2005,
the same year the Kyoto Protocol took effect. When Frederick County signed on to the national Mayors Climate Protection Agreement two years later, she became their first sustainability director.
“It was happening all over the country,” Varnadore says. As more cities hired sustainability directors, national networks brought them together at conferences, where Varnadore says they had a lot of the same questions. “What is sustainability? … What are we measuring and how do we measure it? And when do we know that we’ve met the target?”
Now, hundreds of US cities have their own climate action plans, but the ground is still shifting under
these fundamental questions. It makes it difficult to
pin down, on average, just how much climate
progress cities have made across the country.
But among the four cities included in this story, Baltimore and Pittsburgh have cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 20%. Denver and Portland, Oregon, have cut emissions by about 30%.
And each of these cities has a story about caveats—why the results may not be as good as they look, or why the deeper cuts required may be very difficult.
In Pittsburgh, for example, building sector emissions have been like a game of Whack-A-Mole. While commercial building emissions fell by 27% over the last decade, residential buildings offset much of that progress, rising by 22%.
One reason for the city’s success in cutting commercial building emissions is that Pittsburgh’s downtown is a high-performing building network known as a 2030 District. The city has the largest 2030 District in the country. But Pittsburgh is also among the top ten cities nationwide where families have the highest energy burden.
“Our houses are bad, our houses are leaky and they’re old,” says Flore Marion, the acting assistant director for sustainability and resilience in Pittsburgh. “The winter bills are just so high that people have to make tough choices … between their utility bill and food.”
The country’s first city climate plan was Portland, Oregon’s 1993 Global Warming Reduction Strategy. It’s a text-only, two-page document, written back when—as the writers put it—“the effects of global warming [would] take time to be apparent.” It sets a goal of reducing emissions by 20%, and lays out a few bullet points detailing how to do it.
And that’s how many city climate plans were for many years. Although they got much longer, with slicker graphic design, they largely focused on carbon.
But contemporary climate plans are more than carbon plans. They are also increasingly becoming resilience plans and equity plans. That’s because now the effects of global warming are apparent, and cities are grappling with actual climate change impacting frontline communities.
“We don’t have to convince people [climate change] is happening. They’re believing it,” Marion said on a February day in Pittsburgh. “This is not Pittsburgh winter. The snow melts in two days.”
Marion says Pittsburgh is lucky to have abundant greenways and urban forests, but the increase in rainfall has made the city’s hilly terrain prone to landslides.
“That’s a huge budget cost for us,” Marion says.
An old cliché about city government is that all it does is repair potholes. But now that cities are experiencing the effects of climate change, it’s as if landslides are the new potholes—along with drought, flooding, wildfires, and deadly heat domes.
Baltimore’s newest climate plan names environmental justice and alleviating unequal environmental burdens as its first guiding principle. That’s a significant tone shift from the city’s 2012 plan, which opened with climate science and the predicted local effects of climate change.
“We had some amazing community members that were honest and provided us some really, really tough feedback,” says Ava Richardson, Baltimore’s sustainability director. “While greenhouse gas emissions is a very important measure that we want to track and we need to track, that’s not the thing that probably is most important to people on an everyday basis.”
Baltimore’s waste sector, for example, is responsible for a relatively small proportion of the city’s carbon emissions—about 5%. But in South Baltimore, there’s a massive trash incinerator in the middle of a mostly-Black community. The people there are suffering very real health impacts from breathing air polluted by burning trash. If you only look at the carbon impacts of waste, you can miss the bigger picture.
In its latest climate plan, Portland has also shifted its focus from carbon to communities. Vivian Satterfield, Portland’s chief sustainability officer, says her office’s anti-displacement plan explicitly addresses one way a narrow focus on decarbonization can harm frontline communities. Imagine a landlord taking advantage of city incentives to make energy efficiency retrofits to a privately-owned apartment building.
“Without having an anti-displacement lens, a building owner could … say well, now this all justifies me raising the rent significantly and finding new tenants who are willing to pay a much higher premium for these climate-friendly and climate-secure amenities,” Satterfield says. “As opposed to ensuring that the folks who are the most energy-cost burdened in our community are the ones who are actually receiving the greatest benefit.”
Cities are up against real barriers when it comes to acting on their climate plans. One of these is the very idea that a chief sustainability officer alone could manage it all.
“I think there was this mythology for a long time, both in the public sector and in the corporate world that one person—a chief sustainability officer—is going to somehow just change all the systems and then everything will be sustainable. And that’s all you need to do,” says Elizabeth Babcock, executive director of Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency.
Many cities don’t have a chief sustainability officer. But among those that do, that person typically has few or no staff and a tight budget.
For some sustainability officers, this has meant getting trapped in a cycle of creating climate action plans, a multi-year process of drafting, stakeholder input, and adoption. The planning begets a cycle of reporting on the plan, which often includes doing greenhouse gas inventories.
“Data is not easy to get,” Marion says. “Right now we often still send emails to get the information. ‘Hey, it’s the end of the year. Do you have the information for this year?’ And then we get a spreadsheet that we enter into our system.”
Pittsburgh completed a greenhouse gas inventory in 2013, and then another in 2022. The data showed that between the two inventories, the city’s emissions had plateaued. That means the city met its goal of reducing emissions 20% by 2023 10 years early, but there was no progress after that—and they didn’t know until the latest inventory.
“There’s a lot of places that are a bit stuck,” Varnadore says. “They have this great plan. It’s very actionable. But then the big question is so, okay, now what?”
One thing that could be on the horizon for more city climate offices is more funding.
In 2015, the Kyoto Protocol was replaced by the Paris Agreement, and in 2019, the US gave notice that it would withdraw from it. Once again, communities across the country took action in the form of protests and new climate commitments—and more mayoral resolutions.
In Denver, a community task force developed another climate plan of sorts: a set of recommendations. But unlike many climate plans, one of the recommendations was a sales tax increase to fund the work. In November of 2020, a day before the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement took effect, Denver voters passed the 0.25% sales tax with more than 60% of the vote.
“It was very exciting. Game changing,” Babcock says. “Rather than basically constantly doing planning—and that’s all you’re doing—you’re actually able to scale and implement in a way that a lot of places are not able to.”
The Denver sustainability office’s budget increased from about $1 million a year to more than $40 million a year. While the funding isn’t enough to pay for large infrastructure projects, like public transit, the office can use its funds to apply for grants, build partnerships, and leverage policy changes.
Another change some cities may undertake is tracking a category of emissions most aren’t counting at all: consumption-based emissions. Most cities only count emissions from activities within city limits, such as driving and powering buildings. But cities are net importers of everything from cement to food to Amazon packages. Those resources are produced somewhere else, and they come with carbon emissions.
Portland is one of a handful of US cities counting consumption-based emissions.
“We’re Americans,” says Vivian Satterfield, Portland’s chief sustainability officer. “We have to talk about the consumption-based emissions because we are consumers more than anything.”
Portland has found its consumption-based emissions are nearly twice as high as the carbon generated within the city. This is likely to be true for most cities. It raises questions about the ability of cities to track these emissions, but also to meet science-based climate targets on a global scale.
“Can we get to zero globally while maintaining the level of consumption that we have today?” asks Kyle Diesner, a climate policy analyst for Portland. “I think the answer is no. … And that is very challenging and there’s a lot of questions about the role of government in that conversation.”
And across the country, city sustainability staff are learning to cope with climate grief and the difficulty of the tasks ahead of them. In Pittsburgh, Marion is working to find more joy in her daily work.
“I think there’s lots of anxiety around climate. It’s happening,” Marion says. “We’re not just working to remove carbon from the air. We’re not working to make the world a better place in 20 years. We also want to make life better for us right here, right now.”
One of her recent joys is a very appropriate one for a city sustainability officer: Pittsburgh’s celebrated new stormwater code, which requires developers to design for heavier future rainfall in a climate-changing world.
“I don’t know if we’re going to do all of the work on time,” Marion says. “But if we remember to be present in the moment and take every little win … that’s how we’re going to keep moving forward and get things done.”
Susan Scott Peterson is a climate reporter based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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