In the increasingly urgent effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow the damaging effects of climate change, local policy makers and planners are playing a critical role. The good news is, they have access to more data than ever. But wrangling, sorting through, and making sense of all this data can be a major challenge. A new crop of technological tools is helping to capture data related to municipal greenhouse gas emissions, organize it comprehensibly, and make it easy for municipal leaders to access.  

In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council is working on an ambitious new effort to support local climate decisions. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Minnesota’s emissions per capita as of 2016 were slightly above the national average of 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person. But breaking down the details behind that number can be complicated. Making it less complicated is a major goal of the council, which is a regional policy-making body, planning agency, and provider of essential services including transit and affordable housing for a seven-county region that includes 181 local governments.  

In the works for about three years, and set for release this summer, the Metropolitan Council’s Greenhouse Gas Scenario Planning Tool grew out of the council’s work to promote regional livability, sustainability, and economic vitality, and is ultimately intended for use by any municipality in the United States.  

Intriguingly, the process began by assembling a team of partners including several leading academics (from Princeton University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Minnesota) studying various aspects of climate change, as well as private-sector nonprofit partners—“giving us access to all the science and innovation that academia can bring, combined with the practical wisdom of government,” says Mauricio León, senior researcher for the Metropolitan Council.  

León’s duties include greenhouse gas emissions accounting for the Twin Cities region, which makes him familiar with the complexities of both measuring emissions in the present and figuring out how to project that data into the future under different scenarios. The council’s recognition that this can be a time- and resource-consuming challenge for local governments led to the idea of building a web application that draws on existing databases and is adjustable according to specific policy strategies.  

León and one of the council’s academic partners, Professor Anu Ramaswami—a civil and environmental engineering professor at Princeton who has been the principal investigator in the planning tool project—emphasized that such public/academic partnerships don’t happen often. “This is rare,” says Ramaswami, who has worked with individual cities for years, but seldom on a project meant to serve such a broad range of municipalities and local governments.  

In terms of the process, she says, scientists and policy makers jointly framed the relevant questions, then built the model together. The collaborators identified data sets related to the primary sources of emissions. In the Twin Cities area, for example, 67 percent of direct emissions come from “stationary energy” such as the electricity and natural gas used to power homes and buildings, while 32 percent comes from on-road transportation. The team also identified the most promising reduction and offset strategies and policies, including regulations, economic incentives, public investments, and land uses such as parks and greenways. With three focus areas or modules—building energy, transportation, and green infrastructure—the application is designed to show policy makers the potential outcomes of various mitigation strategies. The overarching framework is pegged to the goal of local governments achieving zero emissions by 2040, an aspirational target adopted by the Metropolitan Council. 

In a preliminary conceptual demonstration of the tool at the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP) conference earlier this year, León showed how different types of communities, from cities to rural areas, will have different impacts and strategy options. A city has a lot of transit options, for example, that a rural community doesn’t have. Policy makers using the tool can also factor in other key considerations, such as the equity implications of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that may impact some segments of a community more than others. “You can use this tool to create a portfolio of strategies that’s based on your values,” León explained.   

With similar goals but a different approach, Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) unveiled a localized greenhouse gas inventory tool several years ago. MAPC’s tool focuses less on future scenarios and more on providing community-specific, accurate baseline data and estimates of the impacts of various activities and sectors. Guided in part by a greenhouse-gas inventory framework developed by the World Resources Institute, C40 Cities, and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, it attempts to measure a municipality’s direct and indirect emissions. 

Jillian Wilson-Martin, director of sustainability for Natick, Massachusetts, says the MAPC effort made available data and estimated impacts of car emissions, home heating, lawn care, and other factors that would be difficult for an individual town to collect. This helped Natick gauge its biggest sources of emissions, the starting point of a process to devise strategies to reduce them. Paired with offsets, the town aims to reduce its net emissions from 9 metric tons per capita to net zero by 2050. “It’s making it easier for smaller communities with no sustainability budget to get this really important data so they can be more effective,” Wilson-Martin says.  

While MAPC provides guidance and training resources to the 101 cities and towns it serves in eastern Massachusetts, it’s up to leaders in each municipality to customize how they measure their local emissions inventory, and how they might use that for planning. This may limit specific forecasting uses, but has another payoff, says Tim Reardon, director of data services for MAPC. “Ultimately the value of having a nuanced and locally tailored tool is to gain credibility and buy-in with stakeholders at the local level,” Reardon explained at the CSP conference. While big-picture data that doesn’t apply to a particular community can be a turn-off, he said, local data brings the global climate crisis down to the ground and reduces a barrier to talking about what has to happen locally to ensure a resilient future. 

Often in discussions around greenhouse-gas scenario planning, León agrees, “there’s this element of ‘this is just too complex for us to even think about.’” The council’s simple web tool is meant to help counter that argument. It’s designed to show in clear, graphic form the difference in emissions levels that would result from adopting various specific tactics, versus simply continuing the status quo.  

One benefit of such an accessible tool, Ramaswami adds, is that it encourages wider involvement and thus “opens up more creative opportunities.” In fact, she says, the project has had a similar effect on its academic partners: “It requires a different kind of research mentality, and a different kind of research group” to work directly with municipalities and respond to real policy options. When the tool is released, it will be accompanied by the publication of related academic research from Ramaswami and the group’s other scholarly partners. 

León acknowledges that the application will have its limits, and that ultimately more sweeping federal and global policies will have greater total impact than any single local initiative. But anything that boosts engagement is important, he says. And the web application is designed to encourage municipalities of all sizes to interact with the calculations and numbers the project team has compiled; they won’t have to upload their own data. “It’s really easy,” León says, “and there’s no excuse for them not to use it.” 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Leaders in Natick, Massachusetts, have used a greenhouse gas tool developed by Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council to gauge the town’s largest sources of emissions. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

This article was originally published by the American Planning Association and is reprinted with their permission. 
 
With 47 miles of coastline subject to punishing inundation, Boston is considering a range of innovative techniques to build resilience against the inevitable impacts of climate change. But one of the most groundbreaking features of this effort may well be the mechanism to pay for it. 

City officials last year established a Climate Resiliency Fund to help finance the berms, seawalls, and natural systems restoration that will help protect real estate in the vulnerable Seaport district and other potential flooding hotspots. Private developers will make contributions to augment local, state, and federal funding. 
 
The mechanism will be applied to the estimated $124 million cost of protecting a city-run, 191-acre coastal industrial park, but is poised to become a template for building resilience at many other vulnerable areas. 
 
While chipping in to help build defenses seems to be an obvious thing to do, the resiliency fund reflects an important recognition: Public investments in critical infrastructure benefit the private sector by boosting property values—and in the case of rising seas, allow land to continue to be usable. 

“There’s been a cultural shift,” said Brian Golden, who retired this spring as director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency after eight years of service. With such a huge task—preparing for 40 inches of sea level rise by 2070 across a landscape of hundreds of acres of squishy landfill dating back to colonial times—developers understand they have to pitch in and foot part of the bill, he said at the Lincoln Institute’s Journalists Forum in April. 
 
“We don’t get a lot of people balking at any of this,” he added, suggesting that developers have come to understand exactions and charges for climate infrastructure as a basic reality of the times, and appreciate the consistency and predictability of the policy. “If you’re doing business with us . . . you’re going to be paying to build some resiliency measures.” 

Don’t ‘Leave Money on the Table’ 

What’s happening in Boston reflects a growing consensus around the world, rooted in the concept of land value capture: the retrieval of increased land and property values specifically associated with government action and public investment. Just as a new transit line can increase values for properties all along it, resilience infrastructure can be shown to do the same. That increase in value is identified as the land value increment. 
 
Allowing the private sector to enjoy those benefits without making any contribution is increasingly recognized as the equivalent of “leaving money on the table,” noted Enrique Silva, director of International Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute. 
 
Value capture won’t fully finance climate adaptation efforts, but can become part of a “stack” of public finance arrangements that jurisdictions can leverage together, said Lourdes German, executive director of The Public Finance Initiative and a Lincoln Institute board member, also speaking at the Journalists Forum. Drawing contributions from developers and landowners can help fill critical gaps that often remain at the local level, after national and state funding is allocated. 
 
The search for the necessary revenue to fight the battle against climate change, estimated by the UN to be some $90 trillion worldwide through 2030, is certain to intensify. Governments have been using versions of value capture in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, the United Kingdom, and throughout Asia for many years. Officials in Miami are studying similar mechanisms to help pay for resilience infrastructure in that flood-prone city. 

Protecting Assets 
 
The argument for developer contributions is bolstered by the quality of the climate action efforts, which build confidence that real estate assets on urban land will indeed be protected. Boston has been taking steady steps for decades to address climate change in its planning, backed up by changes to zoning regulations and its broad application of Article 80, which provides the discretion to approve projects with certain strings attached. The Climate Ready Boston plan won an APA award in 2019, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize bestowed special recognition for the city’s efforts to address climate change in an older coastal city. 

It may have taken the climate crisis for landowners and developers to accept the obvious benefits of such government-funded interventions, said Golden. In the past, public investments that enhanced land and property values may have been regarded as a gift to the private sector or a form of stimulus for economic activity. Now the enormity of the task—fending off the water in some places, letting it be absorbed in others—is clear to all the stakeholders, who are more willing to be part of such a daunting, but necessary, effort. 

“It’s an old city, our building stock is fundamentally 19th century and early 20th century, and none of this was considered,” said Golden, referring to climate impacts and flooding. “And it’s not just about the benefit to metropolitan Boston. We are, after all, the economic engine of all the New England states. So people are, in 2022, signing up for this. They get it.” 

 
Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor to Land Lines. 

Image: Boston’s Seaport District. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Several major sources of radical uncertainty are currently affecting the performance of infrastructure and will likely shape infrastructure in the future: climate change, automation, the sharing economy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our book, Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives, recently published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, attempts to determine how the infrastructure sector should cope with these radical uncertainties. 

Three chapters of the book assess the impacts of climate change, automation, and the sharing economy, respectively, and discuss how public policies should respond to these challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic erupted while we were preparing the book, and little evidence was available on which to assess its impacts on infrastructure. These impacts are becoming increasingly clear now as data and empirical studies are emerging, and we have included our thoughts on them below.  

Climate Change 

Severe weather conditions and natural disasters due to climate change can seriously disrupt infrastructure services and damage or destroy infrastructure facilities, from transit lines to power lines. These impacts typically vary from one locality to another. For example, forest fires are a major concern in California, while rising sea levels are more important to Miami. As a result, Henry Lee, the author of chapter 18 of the book and a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School, argues that effective adaptation policies will mainly emerge at lower levels of government, in a bottom-up process.  

Lee predicts that the magnitude of investments in climate-resilient infrastructure over the next few decades will be unprecedented. He discusses the characteristics of these investments and the scope of the transitions that will be required in the transportation, electricity, and water sectors. After identifying the governance challenges that underlie all climate mitigation and adaptation options, Lee proposes changes in governance to enable more effective planning, delivery, and management of infrastructure. His main messages are as follows: 

• Honoring the commitments made by many nations to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 will require unprecedented investments in infrastructure.  
• Local governments are likely to lead in developing adaptive policies, since the nature and extent of climate damages vary so much by location. 
• The electricity sector will be by far the most affected by efforts to mitigate emissions as electricity replaces direct burning of fossil fuels for mobility, heating, cooling, and manufacturing and as countries shift to solar, wind, and other renewable sources that require more sophisticated and extensive grids and standby capacity to remain reliable. 
• In the water sector, changes in precipitation will require some areas to import water, increase desalinization, or encourage conservation by raising prices. 
• Transportation infrastructure will be the least affected, although many vehicles are likely to be powered by electricity or hydrogen.  
• For these investments to succeed, four changes in the governance of infrastructure are needed: (1) reduce the number of agencies and levels of government with overlapping responsibilities; (2) streamline the process for siting facilities; (3) address stranded financial and human assets; and (4) reduce the bias for spending on disaster relief rather than disaster prevention. 

Autonomous Vehicles 

The second radical uncertainty examined in the book is automation and other new technologies that have emerged rapidly in recent years, thanks to advancements in information technologies such as cloud computing, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence. Whether these new technologies will revolutionize the infrastructure sector is the central question examined in chapter 19 by Shashi Verma, director of strategy and chief technology officer at Transport for London (TfL). Verma reminds us that fundamental infrastructure change typically comes only very slowly. Then, using autonomous vehicles (AV) as a case study, he discusses the economics of AVs, the likely impacts of automation on other modes and consumer behavior, and the institutional challenges it faces before its widespread acceptance. He offers the following advice: 

• AVs may prove to be among the rare fundamental changes in infrastructure technology, on par with the invention of the internal combustion engine, and especially disruptive to our cities. 
• Policy makers should take actions to prepare for the arrival of the technology, including licensing, allocation of road space, economic support to public transportation, and control over pricing structure. 
• Between one-half and three-quarters of the cost of a taxi ride covers hiring the driver. If AVs could save on driver cost, this would stimulate an increase in travel and pose an existential threat to public transportation. The latter would be competitive with AVs only during peak hours and even then, only where it is protected from traffic congestion. 
• Road congestion would likely increase greatly with the rising use of AVs unless there is a large increase in ride-sharing. The only unmitigated benefit would be a large reduction in the land required for parking. 

The Sharing Economy 

The third radical uncertainty examined in the book is the sharing economy. Sharing is an economic model of acquiring, providing, or sharing access to goods and services using online platforms. What impacts might the sharing economy have on infrastructure services and assets? In chapter 20, authors Andrew Salzberg and O.P. Agarwal explore this question using a case study of urban transportation. Salzberg is responsible for public policy at Transit, a leading public transportation app in North America, and before that worked as an executive at Uber. Agarwal served in the Indian Administrative Service and the World Bank and is currently chief executive officer of World Resources Institute India.  

Over the last decade, new methods of sharing motor vehicles (Zipcar, Car2Go, Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Ola, and others) and smaller motorized electric vehicles like e-bikes and scooters (Bird, Lime, Gojek, etc.) have grown rapidly around the globe. Salzberg and Agarwal discuss the potential benefits, costs, and risks of shared vehicles, and argue that the sharing economy model has the potential to improve the use of fixed assets and thereby allow wider access to services. However, the current experience of shared vehicles in the U.S. indicates that the market penetration remains tiny, as most people still prefer individualized mobility services. Therefore, whether the service will grow to a significant size remains uncertain. The authors predict that new regulations will emerge to address the disruptive impact of this model on traditional businesses. More important, public policies related to road and parking pricing and congestion charges will be crucial to the future of the sharing economy in the urban transportation sector. Their chapter also delivers the following specific messages: 

• The sharing economy is not an altruistic neighbor-to-neighbor exchange, but a digital transaction connecting asset owners with users by taking advantage of improvements in technology. 
• In theory, car sharing could greatly increase asset utilization, since personal cars are used only about five percent of the time. Simulations have shown that a ubiquitous shared vehicle network—using right-sized vehicles, potentially including AVs, and moving 100 percent of motorized travel—could dramatically reduce peak-hour congestion, the number of vehicles on the road, and the roadway and parking infrastructure needed to accommodate a given quantity of passenger travel. These model results are optimistic, however, in that they assume that travelers will shift to a sharing mode that is highly efficient from a systemic perspective. In reality, the long-term decline in carpooling suggests how difficult it is to convince two or more people to ride together in the back of a car. 
• Infrastructure managers could encourage sharing by imposing per-vehicle congestion charges or by designating priority lanes for carpools. 
• The future of micromobility services, such as electric scooters and bikes, seems especially dependent on designating street space where the vehicles could be safely operated by people with different levels of skill. 

The COVID-19 Pandemic 

During the production of the book, researchers were actively studying both the effects of infrastructure on pandemic severity as well as the effects of the pandemic on infrastructure. One of the first studies of the former appears in chapter 3, in which the World Bank’s Sameh Wahba, Somik Lall, and Hyunji Lee argue that infrastructure shortages and affordability challenges have exacerbated exposure and community contagion risk from COVID-19 across poor neighborhoods in developing cities around the world. Many other cities, including some of the major cities in China and Europe, adopted the opposite policy of attempting to reduce contagion by deliberately limiting access to infrastructure through lockdowns, quarantines, and other similar measures. How successful these measures have been in reducing the spread of disease and whether those reductions are worth their often-substantial economic costs is a matter of continuing and intense debate. Other emerging takeaways include: 

• Public transit systems around the world lost much of their ridership and passenger revenues. Moreover, these systems seem unlikely to be able to fully bounce back even after the pandemic is over. Former riders are now more used to working at home and meeting online, and are more inclined to view riding on crowded public transportation as a health hazard.  
• The consequences of a long-term shift from public transit to driving would be a financial disaster for public transit operators and traffic gridlock in our largest and most congested cities. It is important to consider what public policies are required to revitalize public transit systems, and to enable them to cope with future pandemics. 
• A likely increase in public infrastructure spending is an important part of post-pandemic economic recovery programs. The primary objectives of these programs are to increase employment and revitalize the economy, and this funding can speed up the delayed construction of public infrastructure works, clear maintenance backlogs, and perhaps finance some “shovel-ready” projects. The key question is whether this is the right time for increased public investment for new mega-infrastructure projects. 

Policy makers often assume that infrastructure investment would have significant multiplier effects on other parts of the economy. However, a review of empirical analyses of economic stimulus programs, presented in chapter 2—authored by Gregory Ingram (former president of the Lincoln Institute) and Zhi Liu—suggests that in developed economies, infrastructure spending has little stimulus effect in the first several years, after which the economy is likely to have begun growing again anyway. These analyses find little to no short-term economic impacts, even when the long-term economic impacts are clearly positive. The small short-term impacts are due in part to the substantial time required to prepare and construct a project and in part to the crowding out of private investment by public investment. Therefore, it is important to select and include the most valuable and shovel-ready projects in the stimulus programs.  

José A. Gómez-Ibáñez is the Derek C. Bok Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Harvard University. Zhi Liu is senior fellow and director of the China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Image: A woman in the back seat of a rideshare. Credit: halbergman via GettyImages.

Amid claims by corporations and other institutions of lowered carbon footprints and net-zero pledges, the city of Burlington, Vermont, is going green with a special commitment, promising to eliminate fossil fuel use across the board by 2030. 
 
Vermont has long been a progressive kind of place with a population dedicated to environmental measures, whether solar and wind power, electric vehicles, or sustainable farming practices. Burlington, its change-agent capital—the place that gave rise to Bernie Sanders, after all—became the first city in the country to source 100 percent of its energy from renewables in 2014. Now, city leaders are ready to go even further. 

“This isn’t just a governmental goal, it’s a community-wide goal,” said Miro Weinberger, Burlington’s four-term mayor, in an interview on Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 
 
With its electric power coming from renewable sources, the conversion can proceed for “electrifying everything,” he said, from cars and trucks to heating and cooling systems for buildings. The strategy is a mix of incentives and regulation, such as a planned ordinance to phase out fossil fuel-based mechanical systems in major buildings. 

Green-minded utilities have been a critical element, bolstering the political will that has only grown in strength over time, Weinberger said. But he adds that “we are still fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back because it is not a level playing field for new electrification and renewable technologies. The costs of burning fossil fuels are not properly reflected in the economics right now.” 

Getting the energy mix right is especially important given Vermont’s growing population. Reflecting on a surge of both climate and pandemic “refugees” moving to Vermont for the quality of life, Weinberger acknowledged that “We’ve seen big new pressures on our housing markets . . . It’s worse than it’s ever been. The silver lining of that may be [that] it may finally force Vermont to get serious about putting in place land-use rules at the local and state level that make it possible to build more housing.” 

A native Vermonter who was first elected in 2012, Weinberger attended Yale and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and worked for Habitat for Humanity before founding his own affordable housing development company. He’s also a part-time athlete, playing catcher in an amateur over-35 baseball league.  
 
The net-zero pledge has become a full-time occupation, but one that has underscored the importance of mayors and cities in confronting the climate crisis, he said. 
 
“This is making a decision to lead in this area and to make change, and you can have a big impact,” he said. “At a time when clearly the climate emergency is an existential threat, at a time when clearly the federal government is paralyzed in (its) ability to drive change, and when many state governments are similarly gridlocked, mayors and cities can really demonstrate on-the-ground progress. I think when we do that, we show everybody else what’s possible.” 
 
The edited interview will appear in print and online as the Mayor’s Desk feature in Land Lines magazine—a series of Q&As with innovative chief executives of cities all around the world.  
 
The Lincoln Institute’s work on climate change is spelled out on the website page Our Work. 
 
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. 

Image: Burlington, Vermont Mayor Miro Weinberger. Credit: Miro Weinberger

 
Further reading 
 
Burlington Issues 2021 Net Zero Energy Roadmap Update (City of Burlington) 

Armed with new regulatory power, Burlington City Council commissions plan to reduce carbon output (VT Digger) 

Vermont’s largest city on track to hit ‘net zero’ by 2030 (Associated Press) 

Power to the People: Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous (The New Yorker) 

When companies evaluate potential locations for starting or expanding their operations, they typically consider factors including the costs to build or relocate in the area; risks associated with the site, such as regulatory or infrastructure issues; and the time required for acquisition and construction. But in a growing number of U.S. cities and regions, from Orlando to Indianapolis, policy makers are encouraging businesses to incorporate additional considerations into their decisions, including racial equity and climate change. 

In northeast Ohio, a region that includes the legacy cities of Cleveland and Akron, two organizations have unveiled a mapping tool that allows companies to compare several potential locations based on equity and sustainability factors. With a premise similar to the Walk Score and Transit Score tools that assess neighborhood walkability and transit opportunities, the ESG to the Power of Place (ESGP) tool scores up to five locations across the northeast Ohio region on the total number of potential workers within a 30-minute car commute, total number of Black or Latinx workers within that same car commute, and emissions impact of the average commute to a potential site location. 

The tool, created by the Fund for Our Economic Future and Team NEO with support from the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Lincoln Institute, is part of an effort to tie regional economic development more closely to equity and sustainability. 

“For years, the Fund has said how much place matters for equitable economic growth,” said Bethia Burke, president of the Fund for Our Economic Future, a network of philanthropic funders and civic leaders working to advance equitable economic growth in the region. “This tool will help businesses and site selectors compare location options in ways that can have meaningful implications for both individual corporate strategies and broader regional outcomes.”  

The tool also provides an overlay of designated job hubs, which are defined areas of concentrated economic activity and development. When used with existing site selection tools such as Zoom Prospector, the tool’s creators say, ESGP can provide a more complete set of data for return on investment analysis.  

“Reducing racial inequities and mitigating our impact on the climate are two of the Lincoln Institute’s most fundamental goals, and they tie directly to economic development,” said Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “That’s what’s so exciting about this tool – it makes it easier than ever for economic development professionals to integrate equity and climate impacts into their considerations.” 

The tool comes on the heels of the Fund for Our Economic Future’s 2021 Where Matters report, which analyzed the equity and sustainability impacts of different types of locations, from a rural area to an urban neighborhood. The report showed, for example, a tenfold increase in the potential number of workers within a 30-minute car commute in urban neighborhoods compared to rural areas, and an urban talent pool that included nearly 65 times more Black and Latinx workers. These findings are especially significant in today’s tight labor market, according to the Fund.  

“With more companies prioritizing climate and diversity, equity, and inclusion in their values, strategies, and performance goals, they need better information and accessible tools like this to inform their site selection decisions,” said Bill Koehler, chief executive officer of Team NEO, a business and economic development organization focused on accelerating economic growth and job creation throughout the region. “Using this tool and its data, businesses have the opportunity to determine their accessibility to diverse talent pools and better understand how location decisions play into their overall environmental, social, and governance objectives, while also addressing their broader corporate return on investment objectives in specific regions.” 

Ultimately, the groups say, emphasizing equity and sustainability is a long-term strategy that can benefit businesses, the people who work for them, and the places those people call home. Burke hopes the new initiative will have a broad impact as the region continues to recover from decades of industrial losses and population decline: “We hope this tool will help to start and guide conversations within the business community that will lead to positive economic development for the region.” 

Grogan says the tool holds promise for other regions as well. “While this tool is based in Northeast Ohio, now that the methodology has been established, we hope it will be replicated widely,” she notes. “This could help practitioners around the country make more informed site selection decisions that consider equity and climate impacts more fully than ever before.” 

Image: A site at Woodland Avenue and Woodhill Road in Cleveland scored highest among five sites compared by a new online tool measuring factors such as racial equity in job locations.
Credit: Team NEO/Fund for Our Economic Future via Cleveland.com.

Perched at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, the city of Norfolk, Virginia, has long relied on its proximity to water as a source of economic strength, from its history as a key port in the 18th and 19th centuries to its current role as the site of the world’s largest naval station. Miles of beaches and a downtown riverfront trail draw tourists and residents alike. But the location of this low-lying coastal city makes it especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including sea-level rise, flooding, and increasingly powerful and frequent coastal storms. 

To address these risks, leaders in Norfolk have put climate adaptation at the center of their long-term planning. In 2018, the city revised its zoning to codify resilience standards and nudge new development toward higher ground. A new study by Smart Growth America (SGA) will examine the economic impacts of that zoning change, including its effects on the municipal budget and projected effects on property values. The research—which will be led by Katharine Burgess, vice president of land use and development, and supported by the Lincoln Institute—will also include a national scan to identify and categorize other resilience zoning initiatives and develop a list of complementary policy approaches, addressing topics such as anti-displacement, housing affordability, and environmental justice. The team hopes those findings will serve as a resource for policy makers in cities across the United States. 

The study by SGA is one of seven projects the Lincoln Institute is supporting through a call for research on the intersection of land-based climate change adaptation, property values, and municipal finance. Over the next year, each project will explore the fiscal impacts that various climate adaptation approaches—such as green infrastructure, floodplain buyouts, and rezoning—have on the places that implement such approaches. 

“The findings of these research projects will illuminate fiscal dimensions of land-based adaptation measures and help communities identify more effective and equitable strategies to advance their climate goals,” said Amy Cotter, director of climate strategies at the Lincoln Institute. “We hope this research will help inform and change public policy, and ultimately change practice.” 

In addition to SGA’s study of resilience zoning in Norfolk, the following projects will receive support from the Lincoln Institute: 

• Erwin van der Krabben, professor of planning and property development at Radboud University in the Netherlands, will lead a team studying the current and prospective role of land-based financing mechanisms in urban climate adaptation, comparing cases from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. 
• Researchers from the South Africa–based consulting firm PDG will investigate the effect of stormwater infrastructure projects on property values and municipal fiscal health in Cape Town, which experiences persistent flooding exacerbated by climate change. 
• Resources for the Future will examine the effects of eliminating federal incentives for development in U.S. coastal areas at risk from climate change, analyzing the long-term effects of the Coastal Barrier Resources Act of 1982 and quantifying the program’s net impact on local property tax revenues. 
• A team from the Universidad de Costa Rica will conduct a comparison of the property value impact of municipal and national land use regulations for flood mitigation in the Quebrada Seca-Río Bermúdez watershed, located in the Heredia Metropolitan Area, using a dataset of 1,697 real estate listings and simulations of recent flood events. 
• Texas A&M University researchers will examine the effects of floodplain buyouts on nearby tax-assessed property values in the Houston metro area, with the goal of offering suggestions for municipalities on the appropriate scale, pace, and clustering of buyouts to minimize negative impacts on neighboring property values. 
• Jeffrey Cohen, professor of finance at the University of Connecticut and research fellow at the Federal Reserve’s Institute for Economic Equity, is leading a team that will study the current and projected impacts of green infrastructure on housing prices in shoreline areas of New Haven, Connecticut, and consider the potential of property assessment as a tool to encourage and finance additional green infrastructure projects. 

To learn more about current Lincoln Institute requests for proposals, fellowships, and other research opportunities, visit our research page. 

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

Image: Low-lying Norfolk, Virginia, is taking steps to build climate resilience. Credit: Jupiterimages via Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Citing the increasing demand for water even as drought is shrinking supplies, several national organizations representing planners, water utilities, and other key stakeholders have issued a call to action urging more comprehensive integration of land and water planning and management.  

The statement emerged in the wake of Connecting Land and Water for Healthy Communities, a virtual conference held in July 2021 that was cosponsored by the American Water Resources Association (AWRA) and the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. After the conference, which was attended by more than 200 water and planning professionals from around the country, organizers released the findings to address why fragmentation of land and water management occurs and how to repair and prevent it. They also released a set of guiding principles to help land and water managers better recognize and build upon the connections between their work. In addition to AWRA and the Babbitt Center, the American Planning Association’s Water and Planning Network and the American Water Works Association (AWWA) signed on to the statement. 

“The fact that multiple organizations signed off on this statement is a really good outcome of the conference, and we hope to build upon that,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, who cochaired the 2021 conference with Jim Holway of the Babbitt Center. “Places all over the world are feeling pressure to their water supplies due to water quality concerns and the changing climate,” said Megdal, who is also a board member for AWRA. “Taking available water resources into account is critically important when planning for land uses, [but] there is a lack of connection between water planners and land planners.”  

There are many reasons for that disconnect, including the fact that decisions related to land and water have historically been made by different departments or agencies. “Siloing didn’t start as a bad thing,” notes Bill Cesanek of APA’s Water and Planning Network, which provides a platform for interdisciplinary exchange about water-related issues and boasts approximately 500 members. “Different agencies focused on different problems and created different solution sets.” Too often, though, those solutions didn’t take into account the complicated relationship between land and water, leading to issues ranging from supply shortages for new developments to contamination in water sources.  

“We need to make sure we don’t stay in these siloes,” said Chi Ho Sham, president of AWWA, a nonprofit scientific and educational association dedicated to managing and treating water. AWWA’s membership includes 4,300 utilities that supply about 80 percent of the country’s drinking water and treat almost half of its wastewater. “We need to reach across to other disciplines to take a holistic view on the availability and quality of water—the world’s most vital resource.”  

That’s true whether you’re in the drought-stricken West, the flood-prone East, or somewhere in between, says Joanna Endter-Wada, professor of natural resource and environmental policy at Utah State University: “Growth-related plans have to take water into account.” Endter-Wada, who coauthored the findings statement and cochairs AWRA’s Policy Committee, noted that she knows of at least one state-level water official who has already brought the statement into policy conversations. In April, the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute will use it as a backdrop to a seminar series on opportunities and challenges facing communities due to the Colorado River Basin shortage declaration.  

“This is not just a one-off statement,” Endter-Wada says. “Given the challenges the world is confronting, we will keep sharing the science and making the argument. The power of words and the power of action go together.” 

That steady drip of communication is key, agree Cesanek and his Water and Planning Network cochair Mary Ann Dickinson, who send a regular newsletter to their members and maintain a collection of reports, toolkits, and other resources on the APA website. Cesanek thinks the message about the importance of integrating land and water seems to be getting out; he pointed to a new book about comprehensive planning written by David Rouse, a Water and Planning Network steering committee member and former APA director of research. The book touches on both green infrastructure, a nature-based urban stormwater management approach, and One Water, an integrated approach to water management that prioritizes sustainability and community vitality. This type of integrated approach “needs to be applied universally, and climate change has made that all the more apparent by exacerbating not only a lack of water but excess water,” Cesanek says. 

Promoting conceptual, scientific, and management frameworks and techniques like One Water is one of six guiding principles laid out in the joint statement. The others include balancing the health of human and ecological communities; incorporating diverse perspectives; honoring and learning from traditional and tribal knowledge; protecting land critical to drinking water source protection; and utilizing collaboration, engagement, and boundary-spanning tools.  

The call to action, which marks the first such collaboration between the four organizations, “was just one example of the partnerships that emerged from the AWRA conference,” said Faith Sternlieb, senior program manager at the Babbitt Center and coauthor of the findings statement. Sternlieb noted that plans are in the works for a follow-up conference in 2023, and said organizers hope to focus on the “action” part of the recent call to action.  

Sham said he is optimistic about the collaborations underway and looking forward to the 2023 conference, as well as other opportunities to keep this conversation going: “We need time for folks to meet up, think about the big issues, and come up with solutions.” 

It’s a conversation that is increasingly urgent in an era marked by history-making drought, floods, and extreme weather. “We face a lot of challenges due to climate change,” said Megdal of the University of Arizona, who published a reflection inspired by the findings statement. “We can only do a better job if we put our heads together.” 

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines.

Image: A national call to action recommends embracing frameworks like One Water, an integrated approach to water management that prioritizes sustainability and community vitality. Credit: Courtesy of Brown and Caldwell.

Stretching from Portland, Maine, to Norfolk, Virginia, the Northeast megaregion is a powerhouse of the knowledge economy. Yet it struggles with grinding congestion, escalating climate change risks, and skyrocketing housing costs—problems that too often fall to the region’s more than 1,500 individual cities, towns, villages, and boroughs to solve. 

The Northeast and a dozen other U.S. megaregions will shape the country’s future over the next century. Each one is a network of metropolitan areas united by history, culture, economics, and shared infrastructure and natural resource systems. They contain only 30 percent of the nation’s land, but most of its people. As a new book makes clear, they face complex challenges that require planning, policy, and governance that cross traditional political boundaries. 

Written by planning scholars Robert D. Yaro, Ming Zhang, and Frederick R. Steiner, Megaregions and America’s Future explains the concept of megaregions, provides updated economic, demographic, and environmental data, draws lessons from Europe and Asia, and shows how megaregions are an essential framework for governing the world’s largest economy. 

Far from being a substitute for a strong national government, megaregions are, in the authors’ view, the perfect geographic unit for channeling federal investment and managing large systems such as interstate rail, multistate natural resource systems, climate mitigation or adaptation, and major economic development initiatives. 

“Creating national, megaregional, and metropolitan governance systems will require a reinvention of the federal system and a nationwide program of innovation and experimentation unlike any that the country has undertaken since the New Deal almost a century ago,” the authors write. 

The book pays particular attention to defenses against sea-level rise and storm surges, calling for regional alternatives to the “go-it-alone approach” of cities like Boston and New York, and to high-speed rail, which could open access to opportunity as it has in other highly industrialized countries. Building better rail networks within cities and regions is critical to the success of high-speed rail, the authors write. 

Geared to urban and regional planners and policy analysts, staff and decision makers in transportation, environmental protection, and development agencies, faculty and students in related fields, as well as business leaders, Megaregions and America’s Future includes a case study of the Northeast—the nation’s oldest megaregion and the source of the concept—but delves deeply into every megaregion, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf Coast to Southern California. 

The book builds on two decades of Lincoln Institute scholarship on megaregions, including several books on the European model and Regional Planning in America: Practice and Prospect, a foundational text in the field of regional planning.

“This ambitious book makes the case for recognizing American megaregions as a driver of policy, planning, and investment,” said Sara C. Bronin, a planning professor at Cornell University. “It provides a road map for breaking down jurisdictional boundaries to address urgent needs in affordable housing, ecosystem vulnerability, and transportation-system connectedness—and it is essential reading for anyone hoping to broaden their thinking about our national trajectory.” 

Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: DKosig/iStock.