Climate Ready Capital Budgeting City Cohort: A Tool for Local Leaders to Take Climate Action
November 12, 2024
In the summer of 2023, I was serving as the Sustainability Program Director at the National League of Cities. In this role, I led a team of five delivering technical assistance and conducting applied research to cities, towns and villages taking climate action. During the summer of 2023, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of State and Local Finance hosted a “Summer Series on Resources for the State and Local Government Climate Transition.”
At first convening, which I attended with several of my colleagues at NLC, Dr. Jan Whittington, a professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Urban Design and Planning, presented a climate budgeting tool she and her colleagues had developed and tested over the last decade for managing climate-related financial risk and integrating climate-related factors in capital and budget processes. I left that meeting wanting NLC members to have access to this tool. I saw the tool as helpful to both cities who already have an all-of-government approach to climate action and to those who as yet have no approach at all, the latter because the tool enables action in a business as usual process
I emailed Jan the next day and the rest is history. Through NLC, and now through SCC, I have been supporting Jan and her growing team to think through sharing this tool with US cities. I believe that we need both deeply transformative and highly replicable solutions to address the climate crisis at the local level. I see this tool as something that is scalable and replicable across cities regardless of climate ambition, city size, or previous planning. It’s practical because you can right size it to just one project, or your entire capital program. I believe that if all communities had access to this tool, we would reach our decarbonization goals faster and consider climate data in capital investments more systemically.
Graphic 1 is a typical budget planning process.
Graphic 2 is a climate-aligned budget planning process.
We are launching a new technical assistance cohort where we will work with approximately ten cities over the course of 2025 to understand the decarbonization climate resilience, and social equity factors that can inform local capital investments to reduce fossil fuel pollution and build more resilient infrastructure.
Calls to action:
Join a focus group and info session on November 21st, 2024 with our team to understand the tool, learn more about the technical assistance cohort, and contribute to our team's understanding of local needs related to climate budgeting. You can register the November 21st focus groups using the links attached!
Feel free to apply to be part of the first Climate Ready Capital Budget Cohort! Applications will be open until December 13th at 8 pm EST. We will be selecting ten cities based on three core factors: 1) political readiness to use the tool in at least one city department 2) municipal diversity across city size, geography, and demographics and 3) clear internal project manager/point of contact.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out! I am available to answer questions at siler.climate.consulting@gmail.com.