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.

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.

The post Game Changers: 7 Ways Leading Cities Are Reducing GHG Emissions appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

What is the prospect of managed retreat becoming a prevailing practice among US cities that are faced with likely unmanageable future climate impacts? As we continue to study this question, we’ve developed a hypothesis of how this might come about: the potential negative impact of chaotic retreat driven by market dynamics in response to climate risks and disasters is the most likely factor that will lead cities to consider and embrace managed retreat as a viable approach.

We define urban managed retreat as the use of public policies, including regulation and investment, to over time eliminate or prevent development in places at significant risk of recurrent or permanent damage or destruction from climate effects or places needed in a less developed or undeveloped condition in order to protect other development that is at significant climate risk.

We see managed retreat as one of five approaches to climate resilience that cities can use to reduce the potential of physical, environmental, economic, and social damage from climate changes. Cities may use these approaches in various combinations.

But for a number of reasons. managed retreat is the last resort of cities, if it is considered at all. Eliminating existing or future development raises particular issues:

• Displacement. Where will displaced people and businesses relocate and what is the city’s responsibility to facilitate relocation?
• Property Acquisition. How much money will the city have to pay to acquire the right to eliminate privately owned development, which may be legally required?
• Lost Public Revenue. How much will city revenue be reduced when taxable private development is eliminated or prevented in the future?
• Political and Community Opposition. How will people who depend on existing development or count on future development targeted for retreat react to the plans, and how will civic leaders and the public react to a retreat approach?

Our research has turned now to these questions:

1. To what extent do US cities face climate risks that cannot be sufficiently addressed through other approaches?
2. To what extent are and will market dynamics (e.g., unavailability and pricing of insurance) trigger chaotic retreat?
3. In what ways would managed retreat be better for a city’s well-being than chaotic retreat?

You thoughts on these questions–and links to information and studies–would be greatly appreciated.

The post Will Market Forces Prompt Cities to Manage Retreat from Climate Risks? appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

INC’s John Cleveland has worked with Metrics Reporting Inc. to produce a set of processes and tools for employers to develop talent supply chains, now being implemented in the heath care, manufacturing and retail sectors. The Talent Supply Chain Management (TSCM) system has five components for employers to implement:

• Competency Validation. Competency validation assures that employers clearly define the skill requirements of each job and validate that those requirements accurately predict job performance. It involves developing a job family taxonomy and conducting job analysis and competency validation for each job family. Competencies fall into two groups – foundational competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities and personal characteristics that create the capacity to carry out specific tasks), and occupational competencies (industry wide and job-specific tasks that individuals need to be able to carry out to be effective in their work).
• Talent Planning. Talent requires a planning system similar to any other organizational function. The key components include: annual forecasts of talent requirements by job; an annual Talent SCM budget; talent KPIs that are reported on a regular basis; and talent reports to leadership to assure contribution to mission and margin.
• Talent Selection. Talent selection uses evidence-based processes to manage the talent acquisition “funnel” from a large pool of potential candidates to those ultimately hired. Key steps in this pipeline are sourcing, screening, selection, hiring and on-boarding.
• Talent Development. Talent development supports continuous improvement in the productivity of the incumbent workforce. It involves three processes – career planning, learning/development and performance appraisal.
• Supplier Management. Supplier management assures that individuals and talent suppliers (education and training organizations) understand the competency requirements as the employer has defined them. This means they have to integrate those competencies into their curricula, and utilize competency-based credentialing processes that assure that credential holders in fact possess the required knowledge and skills.

The system also depends on individuals navigating competency-based career pathways and accumulating the competencies and credentials that demonstrate their qualifications for jobs. Talent suppliers (schools, workforce development organizations, credentialing organizations) need to provide students with competency-based education and offer valid competency-based credentials that align with employer requirements. This requires that they use occupational competency information to inform curricula improvements to ensure graduates have the competencies to be successful in the jobs marketplace.

More information about the TSCM system and how it can be used by individual employers, regions, and industry sector: https://in4c.net/innovation-network-for-communities/workforce-development/.

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Hurray! Our book about building social-impact networks is still selling nicely after 42 months on Our Best Seller List! “Connecting to Change the World: Harnessing Networks for Social Impact” is on its way to 5,000 sales. To our surprise, nearly a quarter of the sales are ebooks.

Writing a book is hard work and flinging it out into the world to find an audience is something of a gamble. Will anyone notice? Will anyone care? Will anyone pay money for it? “Connecting” was even more of a gamble because there was no natural audience for it, no professional association of social-impact network builders, no annual conferences about network building, no magazines for network builders. But during the past four years, we’ve heard from many readers who appreciated the practical advice and frameworks in “Connecting” and put them to use. We’ve provided free advice to readers who had questions unaddressed in the book. We’ve worked for networks and philanthropic funders investing in social-impact networks. And, of course, we’ve kept thinking and learning about network building.

We’re grateful to every customer, for every bit of feedback, and for the new opportunities to contribute to the efforts of social change agents. Thank you.

BTW: The networking dogs image is from Dog Mountain, Home of the Stephen Huneck Gallery, and well worth a look if you love dogs and fabulous art with dogs and other animals.

The post The Joy of “Connecting” appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

• New tools for measuring vulnerability to climate impacts and assessing the cost-benefit calculations on new investments.
• New competencies needed to identify, design, engineer, build, finance and maintain complex resilience projects.
• New sources of financing for a combination of public and private resilience investments.
• Strategies for maintaining the viability of insurance and other tools for hedging climate risk in urban markets.

The report will develop specific recommendations for cities and investors in the field of urban climate adaptation that address three core questions:

1. Accelerating Innovation. Are there specific adaptation finance innovations under development that warrant acceleration, and what forms of collaboration (between cities and financial institutions or between different financial sectors) might support this acceleration?
2. Filling gaps. Are there gaps in current urban climate financing efforts that warrant more attention, and how might they be explored?
3. Building capacities. What capacities – technical expertise and institutional arrangements – will cities and financial sectors need to develop or enhance for large-scale, sustained climate adaptation finance?

Strategic Assumptions

The development of recommendations for urban climate adaptation finance is guided by the following assumptions about the state of the current market.

• Accelerating change. Over the next several decades, the effects of climate change in urban areas (sea level rise; extreme storms and precipitation; extreme heat) will continue to accelerate and intensify regardless of action taken on emissions reductions.
• Many different needs. To adapt to these impacts, the public and private sectors will need to make new investments in resilience strategies. These strategies fall into three different categories:
  • Reducing physical exposure to damage
  • Reducing social vulnerability to climate impacts
  • Hedging against future risks
• A new cost of doing business. Overall, the expenses involved in these investments will increase the cost of doing business in urban markets. However, investments in prevention will be typically far cheaper than investments in recovery. (FEMA estimates that the cost-benefit ratio of prevention vs. recovery is in the range of 6:1.)
• Significant scale. The scale of investment required will be quite large, often in the billions or tens of billions of dollars in larger cities. In most cities there is precedent for making infrastructure investments of this scale for other purposes.
• Some old, some new. In many cases, there are existing financing mechanisms that can be used to raise and manage capital for resilience investments. Some resilience measures can be integrated into existing infrastructure capital budgets without requiring separate, new resilience projects, (although most measures are likely to cause an incremental increase in capital costs). In other cases, cities will need to create new sources of capital and new ways of managing the investment of that capital.
• Private markets are starting to wake up to climate risk. In the last several years, it appears that private financial markets are beginning to internalize climate risk management into their calculations. The recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) is an example of this, as is the declaration by Moody’s that they intend to take climate preparedness into account when they issue municipal bond ratings. But the implications of these developments for cities are still unclear.
• It takes a system. The need is not just for new sources of financing. Cities need to develop integrated systems that support climate adaptation investments. These systems will require:
  • New data and analytics (impact forecasting, risk assessments, performance measures).
  • Tools for cost-benefit analysis.
  • Standards for resilient infrastructure investment.
  • New planning processes to define risks and plan investments.
  • New governance structures and institutional relationships to support collaboration across sectors.

• Many challenges to overcome. There are a number of challenges that will need to be figured out in the process of building a well-functioning “system” for urban climate adaptation finance. Some examples include:
  • Inaccurate risk pricing. Many existing market mechanisms (insurance, property valuation, bond ratings, etc.) have not yet figured out how to internalize future climate risks into their calculations.
  • Difficult to quantify. There are no standardized methodologies for developing accurate cost benefit analyses, and the uncertainty of future risks makes the development of these methods complicated.
  • Difficult to monetize. Even though investments in prevention may be repaid by multiple orders of magnitude in future risk reduction, it is difficult to monetize this value in a way that it can be used to finance the prevention investments.
  • Difficult to divide. There is not yet agreement on how the costs and benefits of resilience investments should be shared between the parties making those investments and the parties most likely to benefit from them.
  • Legal limits. Even when cities are willing to tax themselves to make new resilience investments, some have legal limits on their ability to borrow that constrain them from acting.
  • Problems of scale. In many cases, the investments required span more than one municipal jurisdiction, but there is no established institution with the mission and authority to manage such regional investments.

• Timing matters. It is important for cities to “get ahead of” the adaptation investment challenge so that they avoid the “viscous cycle”. Depending on the timing of the risk, a failure to act can lead to reductions in property values, which leads to reductions in revenue, which further reduces the ability to invest. Once the “viscous” cycle starts, it is very hard to reverse.

The post Work in Progress: Financing Climate Adaptation by Cities appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

1 SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION – Capacity to assess and understand climate risks and vulnerabilities of city’s built, natural, and economic assets and its populations, and use these analyses for ongoing adaptation planning.

2 COMMUNICATIONS – Capacity to communicate with and educate civic leaders and community members in ways that build and sustain a sense of urgency to adapt for climate changes.

3 EQUITABLE ADAPTATION – Capacity to make social and economic equity a central driver of the city’s adaptation approach.

4 INCLUSIVE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT – Capacity to fully engage stakeholders and the public, especially vulnerable and underrepresented populations, in developing, implementing, and monitoring adaptation plans

5 INTERGOVERNMENTAL ALIGNMENT – Capacity to coordinate planning and action across governments at local, regional, state, tribal, and federal levels.

6 TECHNICAL DESIGN – Capacity to design, test, and implement adaptation actions that require engineering, legal, and other highly specialized details, as well as performance metrics for monitoring

7 FINANCIAL RESOURCES – Capacity to repurpose, leverage, and obtain public and private funds to invest in infrastructure development and other adaptation actions.

This work was supported by the Summit Foundation and the willingness of 35 city practitioners, climate-adaptation experts,city-supporting and conservation NGOs, and funders of urban adaptation work to share their knowledge with us. See report

The post Essential Capacities for Urban Climate Adaptation appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

though widespread recognition of this and serious planning for it are lacking. . . .

The sooner we recognize the truth about nature’s intentions at the shoreline, the better.

Neither time nor tide is in our favor.

—Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change[1]

Managed retreat is widely considered to be a “third rail” of local politics—there is great peril in touching it, even in discussing it. There are good reasons for this: The idea of retreat undercuts the conventional urban narrative of development and growth, and the related public revenues and economic activity that are generated, as the path to urban wellbeing. It also raises the specter of government “taking” of private property. Depending on the actions that local government takes, property owners can suffer significant losses of asset value. Intentional retreat involves long-term changes to city land uses and more advance planning. It has significant equity and fairness implications: how do you decide which places are “worth” saving, which are not, and who should bear the costs? Its value is undercut by perverse incentives in government flood insurance programs and private insurance financial risk management. Finally, authority to enact the practices of retreat—policies, regulations, subsidies, etc.—is fragmented among levels of government and is filled with legal uncertainties as well as subject to scientific uncertainty about potential climate impacts. “Retreat is at present mostly a legal theory,” note J. Peter Byrne and Jessica Grannis in a chapter, “Coastal Retreat Measures,” for an American Bar Association publication. “Few retreat policies have been implemented on the ground.”[2]

Yet, more and more cities are finding themselves responding to real and crippling natural disasters or anticipating and planning for climate change in their future—and having to decide where and what to permit and build under what conditions. Even inaction is a type of decision with consequences. It’s not hard to recognize that as the emerging urban climate adaptation field of practice matures, it will need to develop practical knowledge about why managed retreat makes sense, what managed retreat involves, and how managed retreat can be enacted by cities

The focus of this project is the “what” of managed retreat. We intend to frame the multiple pathways that cities consider when deciding what they want to do about using managed retreat as a city strategy for addressing climate change risks. We will also identify the city capacities needed to prepare, make, and implement decisions about which pathway(s) to take.

A preliminary, rudimentary look at the practice of managed retreat suggests three general, prevailing pathways:

• Do Nothing About At-Risk Development. Cities let the insurance, financial, and other markets (or another level of government) address the problems of vulnerability and loss.
• Defend/Armor At-Risk Development. Cities invest in increased climate protections that reduce vulnerability of high-risk areas.
• Starve At-Risk Development. Cities buy/relocate development and/or demolish/withdraw support for infrastructure in high-risk areas.

Using this initial framing of pathways, the project will develop a more finely differentiated, nuanced set of pathways that cities are using or could be using. For each pathway the project will identify the city-based capacities needed to make pathway decisions. We will initially frame the capacities along the lines of the 7 capacities identified in INC’s March 2017 “Essential Capacities for Urban Climate Adaptation” report:

• Scientific Foundation
• Communications
• Equitable Adaptation
• Inclusive Community Engagement
• Intergovernmental Alignment
• Technical Design
• Financial Resources

Here, too, we expect to produce a more finely grained, nuanced version of capacities for managed retreat. For example, the capacity to manage legal challenges to managed retreat may loom larger than in our more general framing of urban adaptation capacities.

We believe that framing the pathways and capacities in this way will provide two kinds of value. It will help others in the urban climate adaptation field who are developing tools and other knowledge for cities. For instance, we have been developing a collaboration with the Georgetown Climate Center, which is launching a two-year project to produce a best-practices toolkit for state and local governments about managed retreat. As we conduct the project we expect to engage with other organizations, such as the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, C40, 100 Resilient Cities, the American Planning Association, and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, which may contribute to our thinking and find the report’s framing useful for their own work. The project report will also be made available directly to cities, hundreds of which are in various stages of developing and implementing climate adaptation plans.

[1] Orrin H.Pilkey, Kinda Pilkey-Jarvis, and Keith C. Pilkey, Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 164-165.

[2] J. Peter Byrne and Jessica Grannis, “Coastal Retreat Measures,” chapter 9.

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With the acceleration of city efforts to plan and implement adaptation strategies, there is a growing need to develop and expand capacities to finance adaptation—through a variety of public, private, and nonprofit resources. A variety of innovations are underway, but they typically focus on capital for specific infrastructure projects and/or a comparatively narrow range of financing mechanisms (e.g. green bonds).

This project takes a broader view across financial sectors and financing mechanisms, broadly defined. It seeks to reveal trends and opportunities that are not visible to more narrowly cast efforts. In particular, this research project is intended to develop actionable insights into ways to expand and accelerate the access of U.S. cities to diverse financial resources. It is hoped this research will produce insights into a framework for an urban “operating system” for adaptation finance: a structural and institutional model that would align and integrate financial mechanisms to meet a broad range of city adaptation needs.

The outputs are intended to inform the various practice communities of cities, NGOs, private financial sectors, and governments seeking to develop capacities and innovations for urban climate adaptation. The framework developed through this project can help decision-makers select financing mechanisms suitable to specific city needs and support the field of practice in identifying gaps in the existing range of financing solutions.

Project Team and Funders

This research is being undertaken by the Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and Meister Consultants Group, A Cadmus Company (MCG-Cadmus) and in partnership with Ramboll. The project is funded through the generous support of the Kresge Foundation and the Summit Foundation.

Scope 

The project research plan casts a wide net initially, covering the range of climate effects to which cities are responding, and cities’ various adaptation vulnerabilities and needs. It will cover multiple types of financial sectors: private debt, public revenues, private and public insurance, climate risk liability, and philanthropy. The primary focus is on mechanisms available and/or applicable to U.S. municipal governments; however, this may involve leveraging successful models used in other countries which could be deployed in the U.S.

Process Overview

The project team will draw on a detailed literature review, interviews with experts and practitioners, and input and review from a range of project advisors in city government, private investment, climate finance research, community-based capital entities, NGOs/philanthropies, and development agencies. These activities will inform two primary deliverables:

• A matrix of relevant financing mechanisms, including both existing mechanisms or those under consideration or development in U.S. municipalities. This will help catalogue available tools and mechanisms and serve as an analytical tool for identifying patterns and gaps. For each mechanism, the matrix will detail important financial characteristics as well as additional elements that cities value such as “co-benefits” produced, equitable development, and synergies with GHG reduction efforts.
• A research report that analyzes the matrix/map’s implications for accelerating and institutionalizing the development of urban climate adaptation financing. The report most likely will focus on three questions: (a) How might innovations under development be accelerated, for instance through collaborations between cities and financial institutions or between financial sectors? (b) What gaps are there in current urban climate financing efforts that warrant more attention and how might they be explored? (c) What capacities—technical expertise and institutional arrangements—will cities and financial sectors need to develop or enhance for large-scale, sustained climate adaptation financing?

Both deliverables will be available for public release and dissemination. Project completion is expected by mid-2018.

The post What’s in Your City’s Wallet? Financing Urban Climate Adaptation–An INC Research Project Overview appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

The Zone is composed of two stretches of mostly coastal land in the United States, covering 12 states. Atlantic Climate Zone spans 400 miles, from Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia to New York City and Boston, and contains more than 33.7 million people in its major metropolitan areas. Pacific Climate Zone sweeps across 1,100 miles, from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Portland and Seattle, with about 24 million people in the largest metro regions. These Zone’s combined metropolitan areas alone generate about 23 percent of the entire U.S. economy’s annual output—a combined GDP larger than any nation except China and Japan.

When you use a climate economy lens to look at this population and economic data, adding climate change, physical and economic infrastructure, and political culture, a larger and intriguing picture emerges—a potentially robust response to the Trump Administration’s ferocious opposition to climate-smart policies.

Why add these particular elements? First, they are critical to the prosperity and wellbeing of urban economies in the 21^st century. As has been widely noted, a “climate-smart” economy—clean-energy technologies, green buildings and infrastructure, energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, electric vehicles, water-efficient utilities, and more—is growing rapidly and becoming a driver of urban wealth creation and a means to reduce the cost of living for households. At the same time, the risks of severe physical damage and business disruption from climate changes is growing; examples already exist worldwide and climate science tells us that things are only going to get worse. The cities, states, and regions that will be big winners in the emerging economy are those that take climate change seriously, as an opportunity and a threat, by forging the political leadership and consensus needed to invest in innovation and infrastructure. Second, these elements lend themselves to geographic mutuality, the connection and alignment among metropolitan regions and states that makes it possible to generate shared benefits that an individual city or state cannot realize by itself. As strategist Parag Khanna argues in Connectography, the global trends of urban connectivity across national borders, devolution of authority from central capitals to provinces and cities, and competition over global supply chains, energy markets, and flows of finance, technology, knowledge, and talent all lead “smaller political units” like cities and states to fuse together so they have the resources needed to survive.

Applying the climate economy lens reveals that these coastal urban agglomerations—the metro areas and states of the Pacific and Atlantic zones—look pretty similar, and quite different from much of the rest of the nation.

When it comes to climate change, California, Massachusetts, New York, and other coastal states and the cities we’ve mentioned are national and international leaders in reducing GHG emissions and building climate resilience and, In many cases, they have achieved strong “vertical” alignment of local and state policies. They are adopting and implementing public policies that require new and existing buildings to meet strict standards for energy consumption; transition as much energy supply as they control with renewable sources; promote a shift from driving to walking, bicycling, and use of public transit; and remove potential sources of GHG emissions from the waste stream. They are using their resources to stimulate the emergence of “green economy” businesses and jobs—especially clean-energy technologies—as a robust and sustainable sector. They are taking steps to assess the risks they face from increasing climate turbulence, to plan actions that will make them “climate proof,” and to develop the community, technical, and financial capacities to implement plans.

When it comes to infrastructure, the economies of the Climate Economy Zone’s two regions, especially their metropolitan areas, are based on a similar model for success: They are deeply embedded in the interconnected global trading economy and have developed, over the decades, world-leading business clusters in technology, finance, education and other sectors. They depend critically on competitive transportation and digital systems, corporate supply chain management, research and development assets, availability of financial capital, and well-educated and entrepreneurial talent. And they face similar challenges due to the national underinvestment in physical and communications infrastructure and the chronic underperformance of public education systems.

When it comes to political culture, the climate-economy regions have developed large constituencies and prominent stakeholder groups, including business leaders, which support aggressive climate action and have been willing to support substantial local changes, including increased public investment. They share a strong affinity for political leadership that fully acknowledges the practical and moral responsibilities of the nation, as well as its cities, to address climate change. One indicator of this is voting in the 2016 presidential election. In 10 of the 12 Zone’s states, Clinton defeated Trump by landslides, 10 to 29 percentage points, won another by 4 points, and narrowly lost one, while the District of Columbia went 92 percent for Clinton. Another indicator is found in survey data from Yale University: people in the Zone’s metropolitan areas and states are more likely than most other Americans to think that global warming is happening, caused mostly by human activities, and already harming people in the U.S., and that carbon emissions from power plants should be strictly limited and utilities should be required to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources.

This sketch of the Climate Economy Zone suggests a potential for “horizontal” economic, infrastructure, and political collaboration at the regional level, multiple cities and states, which has only been minimally tapped so far. Pacific Zone states, for instance, are slouching toward a regional price on carbon emissions; California has a cap-and-trade market, while Washington and Oregon have explored options. The three states are developing the West Coast Electric Highway, a network of fast-charging stations located every 25 to 50 miles on Interstate 5and other roads. Six states in Atlantic Zone are part of a regional carbon-emissions trading market. Core cities on both coasts work together on aggressive climate actions: eight are members of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, six are in the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, eight are among the 100 Resilient Cities.

But much more could be explored and perhaps done. We tend to think of public policy making as occurring along the traditional vertical axis of federal-state-local authority, and this obscures the potential of horizontal approaches. We tend to think of cities as locations, and this obscures their growing interest and engagement in international relations. We tend to think of climate change as a problem of reducing GHG emissions through national government regulation of energy markets, but this obscures the crucial role of corporations and cities as end users in the energy supply chain. If we were to think more about Climate Economy regions not as separate states and separate urban regions, but as “countries within the country” that align around a shared framework of public policies to address climate change, business growth, and urban development—what opportunities might be revealed?

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