Climate of Crisis: How Cities Can Use Climate Action to Close the Equity Gap, Drive Economic Recovery, and Improve Public Health
Like climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the importance of decisions that are grounded in sound science and systems thinking, prioritizing actions that generate simultaneous benefits across health, equity, the economy, and climate.
Effective response may require adjustments that break down barriers across traditional silos in planning and decision-making. The full complement of benefits from action on climate, health, and economic recovery come to fruition if decision making is transparent and inclusive.
Government officials and city planners can lead by strengthening approaches that more deeply involve communities, and by making equity a key organizing principle.
The purpose of this webinar is to support planners, as well as city and other local officials, in their response to the events of 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic, a severe recession, a wave of social protest, and the ongoing imperative to respond to climate change.
The webinar will: provide new insights into the cause and confluence of these stressors; suggest ways to blunt the short-term setbacks while simultaneously strengthening the foundation for sustained and equitable climate action that improves well-being for all; and describe how city planners can seize the moment by treating climate change with the same urgency and resolve as the pandemic, recognizing that delay today will substantially raise future costs.
Speaker: Cutler Cleveland, Professor of Earth and Environment and Associate Director of the Boston University Institute for Sustainable Energy.
This webinar is hosted by the American Planning Association Sustainable Communities Division.