Julia and Graham chart various innovative ways to use OZs that are already being pursued:

“The OZone program is a good fit for clean energy and sustainable development. First, the tax benefits — capital gain tax deferral, partial forgiveness of tax on capital gains and forgiveness of additional gains on investments in OZones — make it easier to include sustainability features because the projects can deliver higher returns and be structured with simpler capital stacks. The higher return on Opportunity Fund investments, for example, could allow sponsors of clean energy projects to add features to projects or partner with energy customers that are considered more risky, as proposed by Jon Bonanno, CXO of New Energy Nexus. New Energy Nexus provides assistance to global energy entrepreneurs.”

“Second, the program allows for more comprehensive and holistic projects. In fact, the lack of restrictions on investments in the Opportunity Zone program creates an opportunity for integrated, interdisciplinary development plans. With the clarifications in the federal rules for OZones making it clear that clean economy projects are eligible, every project can be a clean energy and a clean jobs-producing project.

“Third, the program allows for a deeper commitment to neighborhood success than many past economic development incentives. That’s why Bo Menkiti of the Menkiti Group has teamed up with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) to pursue OZone funding for its Neighborhood Investment Model, which includes LEED buildings. Because OZone investors must keep their capital invested for a full decade to realize the maximum tax benefits, they have a stake in a neighborhood’s long-term success. In this way, the OZone program creates space to combine clean energy projects with initiatives to train local workers and nurture new local clean economy businesses.”

Full Parzen/Graham report

The post Putting Real Urban Opportunity–Carbon-Free and Equitable–into Opportunity Zones appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Each of these cities has had to find its own way to public and private financial resources, because there is no system in place for solving the problem of how to pay for climate resilience—no cost-sharing arrangements, for instance, for resilience infrastructure across local, state, and federal levels of government. The cities are involuntary pioneers faced with growing climate hazards and exposure that require more money for resilience.

Examining these cities’ pathways revealed common strategies that, while only reflecting the leading-edge of urban climate-resilience financing practices, quite likely foreshadow what other cities already or may do. These strategies form the content of Playbook 1.0. But the pathways also suggest the limits of what cities are able to do, with important implications for the continuing evolution of the urban playbook for climate-resilience finance.

Playbook 1.0 Strategies;

1. Generate Local Revenue. Producerevenue for government climate-resilience public infrastructure by taxing local property owners and charging utility ratepayers.
2. Impose Land-Use Costs. Adopt land-use and building regulations and policies that place undetermined future resilience-building costs on property owners and developers, rather than on government.
3. Embed Resilience Standards into Future Infrastructure Investments. Ensure that all future capital spending for public infrastructure will be designed to strengthen climate resilience as much as possible.
4. Leverage Development Opportunities. Link resilience-building projects with real estate development opportunities to generate public-private partnerships that invest in both public infrastructure and private development.
5. Exploit Federal Funding Niches.Identify resilience-friendly federal funding streams and develop projects that fit pre- and post-disaster program requirements.
6. Tap State Government. Mine existing state programs, or seek to modify them, to obtain funds for local climate-resilience efforts.
7. Develop Financial Innovations. Explore the use of innovative mechanisms for generating public and private revenue for climate-resilience projects, including district-scale financial structures.
8. Pursue Equity in Resilience. Factorsocial and economic equity into funding and financing actions by serving economic development, housing, and other needs while investing in climate resilience.

The post New INC Report: Playbook 1.0: How Cities Are Paying for Climate Resilience appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

As mounting destruction by rising seas, hurricanes, and wildfires drives the dangers of climate change deeper into public awareness, more and more US cities are trying to figure out how to strengthen their resilience against climate shocks and stresses. They are using two approaches to protect public infrastructure and private property from climate risks: Armoring—building physical barriers to flooding, for instance—reduces the exposure of physical assets and people to climate hazards. Accommodating—raising roads and building sites, for example—alters physical assets to reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards.

But few cities are using, or even considering, a third approach known as “managed retreat.” This approach uses public policies, including regulations, investments, and incentives to remove existing development—buildings, infrastructure, entire neighborhoods—over time and prevent future development in parts of the city that cannot, should not, or will not be armored or accommodated for potentially devastating climate hazards. (See Appendix for an inventory of tools cities use for managed retreat.)

It’s not hard to understand why managed retreat is overlooked: it is an irrational decision under the current rules of the urban-development game. Cities are their development: housing for residents; stores, offices, factories, and warehouses for businesses; transportation, water, energy, and waste infrastructure for everyone. Existing development provides enormous financial value for owners and businesses and a large portion of a city government’s revenue. New development generates profits for developers, investors, and lenders and boosts the local economy. It signals that the city is attracting people and investment, indicators of urban health.

City leaders can foresee that considering retreat would produce substantial political, financial, and emotional pain locally—an array of immediate and intimidating difficulties with little gain in the short run. Property owners and real estate developers will worry that retreat will reduce the value of their assets; some will accuse the city of trampling on their private property rights, People will refuse to abandon their homes, businesses, and neighborhoods, citing a deep attachment to place and neighbors. Civic leaders will be concerned that retreat will shake public confidence in the city’s future. Renters will fear they will be displaced and left with no affordable housing options. City officials will be uneasy about losing future property tax revenue when private development is eliminated and future development is prohibited. And so on.

The inclination to avoid retreat is strong even in cities that have undergone a destructive climate disaster; the civic reflex of city leaders is almost always to rebuild everything as it was. After Hurricane Sandy pounded New York City in 2012, for instance, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that “we cannot and will not abandon our waterfront. It’s one of our greatest assets. We must protect it, not retreat from it.”[i]

But these calculations are changing.

This report examines the role that managed retreat will increasingly play as more and more cities wrestle with how to deal with the growing risks of destructive climate changes. It is organized around three insights:

1. Many cities will not be able to avoid retreat, but they can choose what kind of retreat to have. Whether or not to retreat is a false choice for cities facing certain climate risks such as rising seas. Politicians don’t want to make decisions about who gets protected from climate risks and who doesn’t, notes David Titley, head of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at the University of Pennsylvania. “We saw this in New York with Mayor Bloomberg. ‘We don’t retreat.’ Well, guess what. The ocean gets a vote.”[ii]The question is which of three kinds of retreat will occur in the city: traumatic post-disaster retreat; chaotic, market-driven retreat; or forward-looking planned retreat. In this light, the alternatives to managed retreat may be “greater evils” that cities will want to avoid.
2. There is an emerging roadmap for generating community acceptance of managed retreat as part of building a city’s climate resilience. The limited experience of cities that have taken on managed retreat suggests that an effective process depends on critical actions that move the community from denial and anger to acceptance. It’s especially important to reframe retreat as not simply a loss of what was, but as part of a larger and inspiring vision for what can be, for the city’s future. Five lessons learned are:

• A city’s community-engagement process for resilience planning should be designed for the emotional and social aspects of considering managed retreat.
• A city’s assessment of its climate risks and vulnerabilities should expose, not hide, the potential implications for retreat.
• Cities should reframe retreat as not just a loss, but as part of a positive and inspiring vision for the city’s long-term development and success.
• A city can help to normalize retreat by starting with the relocation of essential public infrastructure and revising city rules that steer new development.
• Consideration of retreat should include recognition of its potential impacts on economic and social disparities in the city.

3. Until more cities seriously consider using managed retreat, it is unlikely that crucial support from state and federal governments will occur on other than a sporadic, special-case basis. Retreat can involve implementation challenges that cities cannot resolve by themselves, such as legal, regulatory, financial, and planned resettlement concerns. So far, though, state and federal governments mostly treat retreat as a unique episode, usually only responding after a climate disaster. They have not institutionalized policies and resources that cities can rely on for managed retreat—nor has a critical mass of cities pushed for such policy changes.

Download report

[i]Sarah Crean, “Bloomberg: No Retreat From The Coastline,” Gotham Gazette, June 12, 2013, https://www.adaptny.org/2013/06/12/no-retreat-from-the-coastline/.

[ii]Laura Parker, “Who’s Still Fighting Climate Change? The U.S. Military,” National Geographic, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/pentagon-fights-climate-change-sea-level-rise-defense-department-military/.

The post New INC Report: Can It Happen Here? Improving the Prospect of Managed Retreat by US Cities appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

From the report introduction:

“The report’s analysis makes clear the great magnitude of the change needed to achieve carbon neutrality. It requires an electricity grid that is powered by renewable sources of energy and a large-scale reduction in the use of oil and natural gas for transportation, space heating, and hot water. It requires immediate and dramatic efforts to make buildings more energy efficient. It entails replacing travel in personal vehicles with greater use of public transportation, cycling and walking, while eliminating the use of internal combustion engines for remaining vehicles. And it necessitates sending zero-waste to landfills and incinerators. These necessary achievements will require innovation and transformation in our city’s core systems. And we will need to make these changes in a way that is cost effective, that equitably distributes benefits and burdens, and that does not unduly disrupt ongoing operations.”

— Amos B. Hostetter, Jr., Co-Chair, Boston Green Ribbon Commission Vice Chair, Boston Green Ribbon Commission and Trustee, Barr Foundation

— Mindy Lubber, Vice Chair, Boston Green Ribbon Commission, CEO & President, Ceres

The post “Carbon Free Boston” — How One US City Can Reduce GHG Emissions and Improve Quality of Life appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World 

Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley, Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs

Timothy Beatley, Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning

Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities

Joan DeJean, How Paris Became Paris

Richard Florida, Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History

Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives through Urban Design

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability–Designing for Abundance

Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

Richard Register, Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature

Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

Eric Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities Without People in the World’s Most Populated Country

Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History

Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

The post Urban Transformation Reader: A Holiday Book List appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

As climate innovations proliferate in cities, it has become common to hear urban innovators talk about the “transformation” of urban systems, neighborhoods, the economy, and the entire city. but what exactly about the city is being transformed, and how does transformation happen? the answers lie in our understanding of both cities and innovations.

Cities arrange their built and natural space in ways that establish the fundamental elements of urban life–the underlying economic activities, life-maintaining metabolism, use of natural systems, and inhabitants’ capacity to shape a shared future…

We explain that urban climate innovations change the design and use of urban space in ways that don’t just decarbonize the city; they change the fundamental elements of cities.

The cities are still cities, of course…. But as their underlying elements change, the cities will not be the same as they were before. They are being transformed. 

When a dozen or so cities began in the early 1990s, with an early version ICLEI, to develop strategies for reducing GHG emissions within their borders, decarbonization, not transformation was on their minds. The urban decarbonization effort gained has gained traction worldwide thanks to entities like C40 Cities, which periodically reports on the thousands of actions its city members are taking to reduce GHG emissions.

Gradually, cities realized that many of the decarbonization actions they were taking produced other, highly desirable benefits. C40 Cities identified these as increased healthiness, economic efficiency, innovation, productivity, growth in the technology sector, and quality of life. “A well-designed city can reduce congestion, improve air quality, reduce noise pollution, and decrease energy use,” state the China Development Bank guidelines. “It can create enjoyable spaces for everyone, from children to the elderly, and increases options for daily life. It makes neighborhoods more attractive and livable, and creates cities with more vitality and economic prosperity.”

With decarbonization underway and co-benefits being promoted, our book argues, the focus can also turn more to intentional transformation–replacing the ideas upon which the modern city was built in the 19th and 20th centuries, but which cannot solve cities’ 21st century problems. Fortunately, we show, a new set of transformational ideas are embedded in the many climate innovations of cities.

The post The 30-Year Evolution of Urban Climate Innovation: From Decarbonizing to Co-benefits to Transformation appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Purpose

This research project’s purpose is to identify ways to accelerate the development and growth of public and private financial resources that US cities can use to implement climate resilience plans and projects. Cities often cite access to capital as a major barrier to the implementation of their climate resilience plans.

 Findings

Climate risks disrupt city financing.Cities use multiple, well-established public and private systems to pay for their public responsibilities, but these systems do not have the ability to meet the challenges of financing the mounting climate resilience needs of cities. Barriers include:

• Insufficient publicrevenue for climate resilience projects.
• New and uncertain financial risks posed by climate changes.
• Inherent imbalances between the burdens and benefits of climate resilience projects.
• Misaligned public policies and markets.
• Resilience projects that fall outside of traditional municipal jurisdictions.

Emerging innovations in climate resilience finance do not sum to a system-building approach.A growing number of developments seek to address barriers and opportunities in climate resilience financing. We identified 30 of these [Table 1], but they are mostly “one-off” innovations and changes made by an individual city or financial institution or insurer for a specific project or financial mechanism. Most of these efforts are largely disconnected from each other. The public and private sector players engaged in climate resilience finance efforts do not have a shared vision, framework, or strategies for developing, as quickly as possible, a comprehensive, large-scale urban climate resilience financial system. The set of innovations does provide a great deal of the research-and-development that could evolve into a more systemic and impactful stage of change.

A system for city climate resilience finance would contain three key elements:*

• City transaction capabilities, including adaptation planning, adaptation investment planning, governance arrangements at metro-region and city district scales; and public revenue sources and funding mechanisms.
• State and federal government policies, including: adaptation planning requirements and support; climate resilience standards; flexible governance structure frameworks; insurance market regulations and public “last resort” insurance policy; and grants and loans for city adaptation projects.
• Financial, insurance, and real estate market capacities, including products and services; risk assessment and disclosure; risk pricing; and lending and investment standards.

Recommendation

Development of an urban climate resilience financial system can be accelerated and expanded through collaborations of cities, state and federal governments, and real estate, insurance, and financial markets, as well as community-based sectors such as health care and utilities, that prioritize, design, and implement system-building solutions.

Given the highly distributed nature of the system that exists and needs to be developed, cities—as the entities directly facing the financing challenge—are the only players with an overriding interest in developing all of the elements of a climate resilience financial system. But they would need support and resources from their partner organizations, other sectors and levels of government, as well as philanthropy, to help lead and sustain such an effort.

A starting point for developing a system-building collaborative approach would be to organize cities to link, learn, and align with each other, and act in concert with relevant private sectors and other levels of government to develop and implement projects that build a climate resilience financial system.

The post Research Report: Toward a Climate Resilience Financial System for US Cities appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Before climate change arrived in the headlines in the late 1980s, the groundwork for climate leadership had been laid. The creators of urban climate innovation labs span three overlapping generations, each of which experienced its own jolt of awakening and urgent call to action. 

Those who are in their sixties, seventies, or eighties were present when the environmental movement came to life, assembling for the first Earth Day in 1970, spurred by biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which warned of the dire impact of pesticides, and by the mounting, visible crises caused by hazardous and toxic industrial processes.

City innovators in their forties and fifties, many of whom are entering positions of substantial authority in government, business, and the civil sector, were coming of age when a 1987 United Nations report, “Our Common Future”—known as the Brundtland Report after its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s first female prime minister—put a new idea onto society’s radar screen. It offered “sustainable development” as an overarching concept in which the use of physical ecosystems and renewable resources would occur “within the limits of regeneration and naturalgrowth.” Brundtland called for action by all nations but also signaled the importance of cities: “The most immediate environmental concerns of most people will be urban ones.”

These two generations were joined by a third generation of innovators that arrived after the dawn of climate-change awareness. The commitment of countless numbers of twenty-and thirty-year-old innovators, many of whom are raising young children, was sparked by Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, which detailed the advent of global warming, argued that the means were available to reverse the trend if only there was the political will to act, and called on viewers to take personal responsibility for solving the problem.

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Bob Friedman’s A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone offers an elegant—and proven—way to create widespread prosperity in America and renew the nation’s fundamental promise of opportunity for all.  How uplifting and timely! But most of all, how instructive: turn the existing government budgets and tax incentives for family wealth building into Prosperity Accounts that provide families with money—a few thousand dollars a year—to get more education, start businesses, buy homes, save for the future, and pass money and values on to the next generation. And do it for everyone. No more money is needed because families will leverage the resources, but smarter public policies are. Policies that recognize the common good that is generated by investing in people.

Friedman makes the case for policy change with data, logic, and a sprinkling of profiles of individuals who in their lives got a crucial helping “hand up” from family, community, and government. A veteran of the nation’s economic-justice struggles, he writes with insight, clarity, passion, political savvy, and, most of all, a firm conviction that the change America so badly needs can happen.

Order from Amazon

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CNCA members selected the seven Game Changers to share with other cities: next-generation practices that can accelerate and amplify decarbonization in cities.

Cities that are embracing these game changing opportunities are thriving and benefiting economically because they are clean, efficient cities where people want to live. Gregor Robertson, Mayor, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The Game Changers and the CNCA cities used as a main examples are:

• Adopt a Zero-Emissions Standard for New Buildings – Vancouver
• Build a Ubiquitous Electric-Vehicle Charging Infrastructure – Oslo
• Mandate the Recovery of Organic Material – San Francisco
• Electrify Buildings’ Heating and Cooling Systems – Boulder, New York City, Washington DC
• Designate Car-Free and Low-Emissions Vehicle Zones – Stockholm, London, Oslo
• Empower Local Producers and Buyers of Renewable Electricity – Washington DC, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro
• Set a City Climate Budget to Drive Decarbonization – Oslo

The report details the cities’ key implementation steps and lessons learned and challenges that other cities may face in implementing the actions. It was released September 12 at the Global Climate Action Summit.

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