Climate Action Planning

Climate action planning meets two objectives: adaptation and mitigation.

1. Adaptation: Protect ourselves from global climate hazards.

2. Mitigation: Protect the global climate from us: stop burning fossil fuels.

Adaptation

Adaptation planning starts with finding out who lives in your city and making a plan of how to talk with people who represent the full range of different communities.

With communications set up, the city collaborates on figuring out what is at risk from climate-change impacts; what could go wrong to cause harm; and what can be done to keep everyone safe and minimize damage.

Finally, plans are created to take the needed steps. Plans include specifics about what needs to be done, who takes responsibility, and when the work will be done.

Mitigation

Mitigation planning depends on the same community connections as adaptation, but in different ways. For mitigation, the questions are about the sources of greenhouse gas pollution in the city and what can be done to stop them.

Solutions have to work for everyone. Otherwise, they will be ignored and make no difference.

Final plans spell out what is to be done, when it will be done, and who will do it.

Outreach

Our approach to outreach is founded in participant observation and iterative deep canvassing.

Participant observation is an anthropological strategy of joining a community to learn from the community.

Deep canvassing is meeting people where they are, bringing up hard questions, and sharing our judgment with curiosity, honesty, respect, and an enthusiasm for learning where we were mistaken.

Iterative canvassing methods involve returning to the same people after they have had weeks to consider the hard questions they discussed. People generally do not change their minds in the middle of a conversation. They change their minds after they have had a chance to sleep on it.