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Search for "climate" found 71 results

Newsletter
by Bruce Katz, Brian Reyes and Jessica A. Lee · October 28
Organizing for Climate Success: Lessons from Europe

Over the past year, the federal government has been making up for lost time on climate-related investment. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (enacted in November 2021) and the more recent Inflation Reduction Act (enacted this past August) provide hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding to support a broad range of much-needed investments in renewable energy generation and storage, electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, energy efficiency upgrades, and other climate-related concerns.

Newsletter
By Bruce Katz and Luise Noring · October 14
Cities and the Glasgow Climate Summit: Lessons from Copenhagen

In several weeks, the global community will gather in Glasgow for COP 26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference. There is no doubt that the “Conference of the Parties” will discuss in detail the role of cities in driving down carbon emissions as well as adapting to the disruptive effects of climate change. We urge the Summit to go one step further and make urban governance a critical element of transformational change.

A strong focus on cities and urban governance is critical for multiple reasons. Most cities around the world actually exacerbate carbon emissions due to the dirty sources of their energy, the excessive level of dependence on automobiles for intra-city mobility and the low energy efficiency of their buildings. They also, increasingly, bear the brunt of climate change, due to the consequences that extreme weather has for urban populations (e.g., flooding, droughts, and heat waves hit vulnerable populations and disadvantaged neighborhoods the hardest) and urban infrastructure (e.g., the flooding of public transit systems, the collapse of highways, roads and other infrastructures, the contamination of scarce drinking water and the surface overflow of sewer systems).

Newsletter
A Conversation with Iina Oilinki, Helsinki Metropolitan Smart and Clean Foundation · March 4
How City-Based Ecosystems Drive Climate Solutions: The Helsinki Case

The Biden Administration has built the strongest climate team of any U.S. Administration. As this team and their Congressional allies begin to craft federal policies to address climate change, it is critical that they focus on how they can leverage and learn from cities, in the U.S. and beyond.

Nordic cities, in particular, have been at the vanguard of both climate mitigation and adaptation solutions for quite some time. Luise Noring, Torben Klitgaard, Helle Lis Soholt and I, for example, have written before about how Copenhagen is on a glidepath to become the first global city to achieve zero carbon emissions. Copenhagen’s plan is an intricate mix of concrete goals and initiatives that aim to drive change through four areas: energy consumption, energy production, green mobility, and city administration.

Newsletter
Bruce Katz · January 23
Climate, Community and Finance

In the early days of this year, we’ve both been heartened by the changing behavior of institutional investors towards climate: divesting from the bad and investing in the good.

Earlier this month, for example, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio and London Mayor Sadiq Kahn launched the latest version of their Divest/Invest campaign to persuade cities to move pension fund investments out of fossil fuel industries. A growing number of cities around the world — New York City, London, Auckland, Berlin, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Oslo and Stockholm — have signed on and C40 Cities, the international group now led by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, has released a high quality toolkit to guide city actions.

Newsletter
Bruce Katz, Luise Noring, Torben Klitgaard and Helle Lis Soholt · October 3
Scaling Copenhagen: How Cities Can Drive Climate Solutions

Dozens of mayors will descend upon Copenhagen next week for a meeting of C40, a network of the world’s leading cities committed to addressing climate change. The urgency of the gathering cannot be understated. With climate impact and climate advocacy on a meteoric rise, cities are at the vanguard of both mitigation and adaptation solutions. This is because many cities possess the powers and resources to reorient key sectors of the economy, particularly the energy, buildings and transportation sectors, that disproportionately drive carbon emissions. Cities also represent networks of public, private and civic leaders and institutions that are pragmatic at the core and less likely to be hijacked by partisan rancor and ideological polarization, the curse of our times.

Article
by Bruce Katz · November 30
The Complex Interplay of Cities, Corporations and Climate

Across the world, cities are grappling with climate change. While half of the world’s population now lives in cities, more than 70 percent of carbon emissions originate in cities. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the UN’s 2016 Sustainable Development Goals, and the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany have all recognized that cities will need to be a key part of the world’s response to climate change.

Newsletter
by Bruce Katz, Domenika Lynch, Victoria Orozco, Milena Dovali and Benjamin Weiser · February 8
Unlocking the Procurement Economy: Lessons from San Antonio and El Paso

Over the past several years, the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Program and the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University have dedicated countless hours to one central goal: using the expanding Procurement Economy to grow small local businesses, particularly those owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.

Our collaborative effort has been driven by the substantial increase in federal spending, spurred by the successive enactment of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, the $411 billion Inflation Reduction Act and the $800+ billion (and rising) annual Department of Defense appropriations.

Newsletter
by Bruce Katz and Scott Bernstein · February 1
Rethinking Supply Chains for an Industrial Age

One of the lasting images of the pandemic period is of ships carrying goods from Asia stuck off the coast of California. The images prompted a burst of heroic federal action and the term “supply chains” became embedded in the public consciousness.

As with many things in the US, the pandemic images have receded into memory. But supply chain issues and the inefficiencies of our logistics sector persist, complicated by a surge in work-from-home and shop-from-home behavior as well as the reshoring of production driven by national security concerns and climate imperatives. And now, on top of these seismic shifts, we are encountering a rising conflict in the Red Sea and drought challenges facing the Panama Canal.

Newsletter
by Bruce Katz · January 18
How Cities Can Thrive in the New Industrial Era

Note: This newsletter was initially published by Governing Magazine on January 17, 2024

Fueled by macro dynamics and unprecedented federal investments, the reshoring of advanced manufacturing is happening at a pace and scale that would have been inconceivable even three years ago. As a result, in many respects the hierarchy of American metros is being reset.  If the decade between the Great Recession and the pandemic seemed to be all about “superstar” tech cities, many of the winners in the remote-work era are going to be places that make tangible things.

Newsletter
by Bruce Katz and Bryan Fike · January 5
Will 2024 be a Year of Financial Innovation?

The pandemic and post-pandemic period have been defined in many respects by capital. Beginning with the CARES Act and continuing with the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, this capital period has seen the federal government dedicate trillions of public resources for a broad set of activities, initially related to rescue and recovery (a focus on preserving existing businesses and communities) in 2020-2021 and then economic transformation (an industrial/energy transition of monumental proportions) in 2021-2023.