Collaborating for Climate Resilience

Ann Goodman, Nilda Mesa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367237097
• eBook ISBN: 9781000407280
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Supporters of environmental well-being and climate resilience are awakening and mobilizing – cities, states, business, academia, community-based organizations, and the military. They understand the imminent and long-term risks of climate deterioration and they are creating new structures beyond the top-down government policy efforts of the past.

This highly practical book provides a clear insight into these collaborative solutions by real organizations in real time. It demonstrates how people from disparate fields and stakeholders cooperate to address climate issues at ground level and reveals how this can be undertaken effectively. Through case studies of key organizations such as the NYC Sustainability Office, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, IBM, and West Point Military Academy, readers will understand each party's role in a cooperative enterprise and the means by which they support climate resiliency, their institutional goals, and their communities.

Of particular value, the book illustrates the co-benefits of multi-party resilience planning: faster approval times; reduced litigation; ability to monetize benefits such as positive health outcomes; the economic benefits of cooperation (for example, capacity building through financing climate planning and resilience across public, private, and other sources of funding); and developing a shared perspective. The book will be of great interest to business managers, policymakers, and community leaders involved in combating climate change, and researchers and students of business, public affairs, policy, environment, climate, and urban studies.

Chapter 1

Cities and climate resilience (NYC Office of Sustainability)

Nilda Mesa

DOI: 10.4324/9780429281242-2

New York and OneNYC: climate and sustainability planning

New York City has been one of the world’s leaders on climate policy and practice dating back to at least 2007, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration released PlaNYC (City of New York, 2007), the city’s long-term sustainability plan. That plan was spurred in large part by data showing the city’s population was projected to increase dramatically, along with a concern that the city’s quality of life and infrastructure would be overwhelmed and suffer without sufficient goals, programs, and metrics to preserve and enhance them.

In 2015, under newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city took another leap, calling for reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and updating its long-term sustainability plan to include the new target. OneNYC (City of New York, 2015), as the new plan was named, also expanded the scope of PlaNYC significantly. It was the first comprehensive major city sustainability plan to adopt the United Nations’ definition of sustainability, which includes social, economic, and environmental considerations. The methodology included approaching sustainability as a design and systems problem, and in so doing involved more than 70 citywide agencies, multiple stakeholders, academics, elected officials, and residents in a complicated and multilayered collaboration.

Throughout the course of the next few years, the city tiered its collaborations and designed strategies for specific goals and visions, turning them into data-based policies and legislation with the flexibility and technical depth to begin to tackle the city’s ambitious climate goals.

This collaborative and design thinking process, as described below, even with a few fits and starts, advanced sustainability and climate policy, as well as practice, and set a new standard for other cities.

Background

New York City’s Charter requires the city to complete a long-term sustainability plan every four years, with annual progress reports in the intervening years. The plan must include:

an identification and analysis of long-term planning and sustainability issues associated with, but not limited to, housing, open space, brownfields, transportation, water quality and infrastructure, air quality, energy, and climate change…

(City of New York, 2004)

The Charter also requires that the plan contain goals, policies, programs, and milestones to meet the objectives and mandates consultations with a sustainability advisory board and the public. In 2015, following 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, the Charter added that the plan must “include a list of policies, programs and actions that the city will seek to implement or undertake to achieve each goal relating to the resiliency of critical infrastructure, the built environment, coastal protection and communities” (ibid.).

While the language makes plain what must be in the plans, it does not direct a specific process or limit future directors of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability (OLTPS) from adding new items. The Charter gives mayors great flexibility in developing their management processes and goals within a framework of some transparency. The one hard-and-fast rule is that the plan and updates must be transmitted to the mayor and the city council speaker by Earth Day, or April 22.

Under Mayor Bloomberg’s watch, the Departments of Environmental Protection, Sanitation, Parks, Planning, Transportation, Citywide and Administrative Services, and the Office of Environmental Remediation were assigned the development of PlaNYC sections and chapters, categories that corresponded to those in the city’s Charter, under the supervision and direction of OLTPS. However, there was little interaction among the agencies in developing the sections of the plan; rather, the agencies’ assignments were limited to their traditional agency scope. The PlaNYC participants consulted regularly and often early on with the Sustainability Advisory Board, made up largely of environmental advocates and civic and business organizations. As the years went by, consultations occurred less regularly.

There were several key advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Clear lines of authority and accountability from the start of the process meant that there was little ambiguity as to who was responsible for delivering what and when, a mark of Bloomberg’s private-sector-honed management style. Agencies by and large had to use their existing budgets, which kept down costs, even as it discouraged expansive costly initiatives. In several instances, such as with the popular Million Trees Initiative, the city received outside funding to supplement agency budgets.

With a limited number of agencies tapped, management and implementation of the plan appeared to be relatively straightforward, which was important to ensure that the goals and programs would be delivered, and measuring how well they were working. Agencies did not necessarily understand the larger picture, however, or know the synergies they might share with other agencies. They stated that they felt disconnected, a bit isolated from the development of broader citywide goals, and constrained from seeking funds for initiatives in addition to their already-programmed work.

Nonetheless, the Bloomberg era PlaNYC reports redefined for New York, and many cities, how sustainability could be integrated and implemented in a largely post-industrial urban environment. The Bloomberg team’s vision that gritty Gotham could somehow be a center for environmental innovation positioned the city as a leader, confounded skeptics, and challenged other large metropolises worldwide to meet the new standard.

OneNYC 2015

Mayor de Blasio took office in January 2014, after running on a platform that New York had become “a tale of two cities” (Walker, 2013). In the years since the first PlaNYC, New York’s population and economy had grown, but so had economic inequality and housing costs. Through de Blasio’s first year in office, many of the environmental advocates who had come to have confidence in the Bloomberg approach were skeptical that the new mayor shared their commitment to sustainability. The Earth Day deadline loomed in April 2015. In December, I was brought on board as the first director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, which merged OLTPS with the Office of Environmental Cooperation, and we assembled a team to put together a new long-term sustainability plan for the city.

In keeping with the new mayor’s focus on economic inequality, as well as his language on climate, affordable housing, pre-kindergarten education, and other priorities, the mayor agreed that the definition of sustainability for the new plan should be broadened to more closely parallel classic sustainable development parameters, applied and reinvented for New York City. While there are many definitions of sustainability, the city relied upon the UN’s Brundtland Commission definition: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland Commission, 1987).

These were uncharted waters for New York City. A new strategy was called for to hammer out the framework, goals, programs, and policies to deliver this sustainable development focus within less than four months while complying with the New York City Charter. That new strategy was to build a broad internal and external network, using design thinking and systems approaches to develop the visions, goals, and initiatives that would make it all happen for the next four years and beyond.

For a number of years before founding the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and serving as its director, I developed a graduate capstone class at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs that experimented with a design thinking approach to solving real-life issues for public sector clients. Design thinking is based on Roger Martin’s business theories, particularly as described in The Design of Business (2009), and promulgated by the industrial design firm IDEO.

The design thinking method sets up a circular design process that starts with gathering information, brainstorming without judgment, testing ideas, incorporating feedback from end users and other stakeholders, and improving the original design. It is a logical way to frame a policymaking, business, or product design process, though it is not especially well known among climate policymakers. I used similar circular approaches in previous work at the federal level, working through the often stilted environmental review process to achieve consensus and satisfactory results across multiple stakeholders and governments. Design thinking has been used in business for years, but not to develop urban sustainability plans.

In addition, as I will describe, I incorporated ideas into the internal city process from Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems (2008), which unpacks often invisible interrelationships and structures and how they affect each other as part of a complex system. New York City, to my knowledge, had never before explicitly used design and systems thinking approaches to tackle a complex and newly defined sustainability matrix.

During the first year of the de Blasio administration, city agency senior leaders identified cohesive themes and values, based largely on campaign commitments, that would define the new administration’s priorities. They developed eight themes, grounded in a consensus across the administration. These themes became the initial foundation for our endeavor, with the understanding that they would most likely change over the course of the sustainability-planning process. They provided the draft framework for analyzing and designing around the main themes within a system. The themes included climate, health care, education, poverty, affordable housing, crime, and resiliency.

By late fall 2014, an internal steering committee took shape. It was led by the first deputy mayor and included the deputy mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives, director of Operations, City Planning director and chair of the Planning Commission, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, the mayor’s special advisor on Infrastructure, director of Resiliency, and me, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, also serving as project director for OneNYC.

The kickoff meeting in early January 2015 called together the heads of city agencies with other key senior leaders in the administration and was led by the mayor. Members of the Steering Committee presented information on past plans as well as current and initial projections of conditions. The work ahead for the plan was framed thus: New York City, founded in 1625, would celebrate its 400th anniversary in 10 years. What would the city need in the next 10 years to position itself for the next century: not just what was under the city’s jurisdiction, but more broadly, what would be necessary for the city to thrive?

This formulation was important: the plan would not be limited to a narrow scope within agencies but would look at the system as a whole, at its interlocking elements, and identify those parts of the system that were critical to meeting city aims to thrive and grow in the years to come. Once those puzzle pieces were defined, the city could then develop a strategy. Figure 1.1 illustrates the challenges and opportunities of the transition to OneNYC.

Figure 1.1Core challenges and opportunities

Source: Office of the Mayor, 2015

Using this overarching question, agency heads and their senior leaders were handed stacks of sticky-note pads. Posters with data and key information, organized according to the eight consensus themes developed throughout the year, were positioned around the large hall. Agency leaders circulated to stop at each themed station, for three minutes as timed by a bell, and scribbled their ideas to improve city life as fast as they could, with one idea per note. Agency officials were told that the notes would be anonymous and to offer their ideas not in their capacity as heads of agencies but rather from their expertise on the city and in policy making. Outside-of-the-box thinking was encouraged. Participants were assured that there would be no consequences for putting in their ideas, and the more ideas they wrote the better. The typically risk-averse agency leaders had free rein to be creative and forward-thinking, regardless of their usual day-to-day constraints. The three-minute limit and the call for speed and quantity was also meant to bypass any undermining internal criticisms that something might sound too ambitious.

By the end of the afternoon, thousands of yellow sticky notes had been placed. These thousands of ideas were assembled and organized, and became the clay from which OneNYC was sculpted. In addition, a tight timeline was laid out with specific working group and agency deliverables. It was apparent to all that the months ahead would require a massive citywide effort, and the process sought the input and expertise of all the agencies to put together the draft. Agency leaders understood that they were part of something bold and potentially transformative, and that the process would rely upon their expertise and, ultimately, their ability to implement the initiatives. This non-linear process was unlike any they had seen before, and they wanted to be part of it.

The eight themes were developed into domains to be expanded upon by the interagency working groups. The domains were: core infrastructure and services, diverse and inclusive government, economic security and mobility, education, empowered residents and civic engagement, health and well-being, housing, and personal and community safety. The domains became the organizing structure for the interagency working groups, which took the anonymous ideas generated by commissioners and senior agency leaders in the initial kickoff as their starting point.

Each working group was co-chaired by two different agencies that had primary responsibility for the themed subject matter. Representing the agencies as co-chairs were senior administration members from the agencies and relevant City Hall offices who had enough authority to be able to speak for their agencies. Significantly, they included a mix of political and civil servants to ensure the right blend of institutional knowledge with policy direction. Figure 1.2 maps the structure o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Cities and climate resilience (NYC Office of Sustainability)
• Chapter 2 Communities: Teaming up with companies, cities, states, academia (The RAFT)
• Chapter 3 Climate change and national security: Opportunities for learning and cooperation
• Chapter 4 Equity: Climate justice in Detroit
• Chapter 5 Business: Building climate-resilient supply chains (IBM supply chain)
• Chapter 6 Regional deals, international players
• Conclusion
• Index