The Need for Urban Climate Justice

As many nations have failed to develop meaningful climate change policies, cities have become leaders on climate change, in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Preventing the worst effects of climate change requires dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and in most cases, national governments have been quite slow and unambitious in their response to this fact. Nonetheless, hundreds of cities around the world have made pledges to reduce their own GHG emissions by 30, 50, or even 100 percent over the next few decades. For example, the City of Toronto has committed to reducing its GHG emissions by 80 percent before 2050.11“TransformTO,” City of Toronto, https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/water-environment/environmentally-friendly-city-initiatives/transformto. Cities are also proactively responding to the effects of climate change, developing new strategies for resilience and adaptation. In many ways, climate change policy has shifted from the global to the local.

An important but often overlooked feature of this shift is that developing a local or urban-led response to climate change does not erase politics. Rather, urban leaders and climate change advocates must navigate a complex political terrain in their efforts to decarbonize cities and implement adaptive and resilient solutions. Climate change is also a new issue for cities to engage with, and there are often steep learning curves for practitioners and decision makers. New capacities, funding sources, and organizational relationships are often required for effective climate change policy at the local level.

Many cities that have been leaders on climate change—including Toronto—have made some initial progress on their goals. For example, Toronto has seen its GHG emissions fall by around 16 percent compared to 1990 levels.22“Toronto’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions & Targets,” GHG Emissions, The Atmospheric Fund, http://taf.ca/climate/urban-ghg-emissions. This is the product of a province-wide shift away from coal, but also city-level projects to capture methane at landfills and improve energy efficiency. The city has developed some truly innovative approaches to reducing GHG emissions, including a program for developing marketable carbon credits and new financing tools for energy efficiency retrofits in buildings.33For more details, see Sara Hughes, “Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Effective Steering Strategies for City Governments,” IMFG Perspectives 16 (2017): https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/imfg/uploads/371/imfgperspectives16_shughes_feb_2017.pdf. Nonetheless, like many North American cities, Toronto now faces the challenge of meeting steeper GHG emissions reduction targets in a context where the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Decision makers and advocates are grappling with the complexity and political challenges of deep GHG reductions that will begin to require more of government, the private sector, and residents.

Cities need to bear down on their climate change goals if they are to realize the potential for change that has been ascribed to them by the global community. It is in proceeding forcefully toward deep GHG reductions that cities will confront and manage the new social and political realities of their climate change work. Reducing a city’s GHG emissions by 10, 15 or 25 percent can be done without major disruptions. Changes to the existing grid, subsidizing energy retrofits, and building some methane capture plants or solar installations can often do the trick. Going deeper requires more significant social, economic, and political restructuring. It will mean changing the way people move around the city, and where they move to; it will mean changing the way people build and use buildings, or perhaps where buildings are located in the first place; it will mean changing where energy comes from, and perhaps even who owns and has access to that energy.

It is through these new and deeper engagements with climate change that questions and justice and equity should come to the fore in our cities. Around the world, cities are becoming much more unequal places, with highly segregated neighbourhoods and highly differentiated access to urban amenities and services. As cities consider major reconfigurations of their economies and infrastructure in pursuit of their climate change goals, the process and outcomes should include and benefit poor, marginalized, and equity-seeking groups. Such an approach can be called “urban climate justice.”

There are at least three reasons why urban climate justice is important and urgent. First, there are normative reasons for including and benefiting poor and marginalized communities in urban climate responses. This means it is simply the right thing to do, and reflects ideas of fairness: it is not fair that certain members of society should be disadvantaged or disproportionately affected by climate change; conversely, it seems fair that those who have contributed the least to climate change (typically the poor) should not bear as much of the cost of responding to it; it is also fair that all members of society, not just those with access to power, contribute to a vision of what future, climate-friendly cities should be.

Second, there are substantive reasons for involving all members of society, all types of people and organizations, in the process of generating climate change solutions for cities. Research has shown that deliberately seeking out diverse perspectives, and engaging the people whose lives are affected by policy choices, produces better decisions. Decision makers are more likely to develop a renewable-energy plan, or energy-efficiency programs, that reflect the needs and capacities of their communities if those voices are included in the decision making process.

Finally, there are instrumental reasons for building and maintaining a broad coalition of residents and advocates that support climate change responses. Many cities are beginning to find that linking their climate change goals to broader challenges related to housing, health, and poverty is making it easier for them to get financial support from city council and build electoral support among voters. For many urban residents, climate change is one concern among many. Issues that seem more immediate, like their health or affordable housing, can eclipse or override support for diverting valuable city dollars to climate change initiatives. Developing programs that are cross-sectoral is challenging from an organizational perspective, but may have political benefits.

Cities are positioned to remain leaders on climate change in the US and Canada, and are facing new challenges as they turn their attention to deep reductions in GHG emissions. Bearing down on these challenges requires centering urban climate justice—it is the fair and “right” thing to do, it leads to better policy outcomes, and it may improve the political feasibility of ambitious climate action. Building the cities we want our children to live in means taking the concerns and needs of all residents into account.