By Steve Holt

Climate change impacts in cities do not hit every resident equally. Consider Portland, Ore. Residents of Southeast Portland’s low-income and communities of color live with the carbon and particulate matter emitted from Interstate 5, which slices through the urban core. Heat waves disproportionately threaten residents who can’t afford air conditioning or who work outdoors. Portland’s tree canopy—which mitigates climate change by capturing carbon emissions—is more concentrated in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods west of the Willamette River. Low-lying communities on the east side of the river, which are less affluent and more Black and brown, are more vulnerable to extreme impacts from storms and flooding—like the 1996 flood that killed eight people and ruined countless businesses.

Portland’s 1993 Global Warming Reduction Strategy was the nation’s first such plan, and in 2015 it became the first major city to integrate environmental justice into its climate action plan. According to two BU researchers, 39 major US cities have since followed suit. According to a 2022 paper in the journal Nature Communications—coauthored by earth and environment PhD candidate and BU URBAN trainee Claudia Diezmartínez Peregrina (GRS’25) and her adviser, Anne Short Gianotti, an associate professor of earth and environment—58 of America’s 100 largest cities have a climate action plan, and 40 of those plans acknowledge climate justice, or the fact that historically underserved communities bear an unjust burden from climate change. 

“We see that the impacts of climate change are not equally distributed between geography, but also between demographic groups, between classes, income, races,” Diezmartínez says. “The idea that climate change has different impacts between different people has become more mainstream in the last decade. There cannot be climate action without climate justice anymore.”

The Rise of Environmental Justice

The birth of the modern environmental justice movement is widely traced back to October 1991, when more than 1,000 activists gathered in Washington, D.C., to share stories about the environmental injustices they faced in their communities: Black residents displaced by dangerously high pollution levels; farmworker quarters built on chemical dump sites; Asian-American factory workers who developed respiratory illnesses; Indigenous tribes battling the effects of nuclear testing on their lands. They emerged from the four-day First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit with 17 Principles of Environmental Justice. 

“A lot of the principles were centering not just even distribution of harm, but protection from harm, sovereignty, and self-determination of communities,” ideals the US has been slow to enact, Short Gianotti says. “Good progress is happening in many places, and you need some really radical transformations of society to get to a point where you feel like something has worked on a widespread basis.”

Meanwhile, we were just beginning to learn about the ways in which a warming Earth affects communities. Portland published its climate action plan in 1993. In that first plan, which was less than two pages long, Portland sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the implementation of actions like increasing recycling, reducing gas-powered transportation, and planting 75,000 acres of new trees in the city. In stark contrast to that brief and narrow plan, Portland’s 162-page 2015 Climate Action Plan envisioned a city that addresses the building crises of climate change and racial and economic inequity. That meant increasing the share of buildings being powered by renewable energy and ensuring that housing remains affordable for all residents, regardless of race or income. It meant addressing East Portland’s poverty alongside its air pollution from too many highways and not enough bike paths. 

Just as Portland was a trendsetter in 1993, other cities have written climate equity plans—a number of them citing Portland’s plan as a model. According to Diezmartínez’s and Short Gianotti’s research, 31 of the 40 plans that incorporate justice were published between 2017 and 2021. This was a period of time defined, in many ways, by the struggle for racial justice and by the COVID-19 pandemic, catalytic events that shined a light on many economic and social justice challenges. As a result, many racial justice groups and movements—like Black Lives Matter—sprung up or gained prominence, and justice for racial and economic minorities began to infuse environmental advocacy organizations.

A few trends emerged in Diezmartínez’s and Short Gianotti’s analysis of cities’ climate plans. Cities with larger populations were more likely to integrate justice, as were cities with a higher median household income and higher poverty rate. “This could mean cities that have perhaps more resources to engage in climate action are also thinking about equity,” Diezmartínez says, adding that cities with especially high economic inequality may be more attuned to climate justice. Cities’ articulation of justice differed as well. The BU researchers broke the 40 cities that include justice in their climate plans into two categories: aspiring for justice (20 cities) and planning for justice (20 cities). According to the report, the cities that aspire for justice “articulate justice and/or equity as a goal, vision, guiding principle, or core value of their plan but do not explicitly describe policy actions or systematic strategies to implement or evaluate progress toward just climate mitigation.” Cities that were categorized as planning for justice, meanwhile, included in their climate plans specific policy measures aimed at addressing justice concerns. 

“What matters is what cities end up implementing,” Diezmartínez says. “There’s concern that cities often do not have tools to implement and evaluate the climate policies on the ground, and they’re even less equipped to implement and evaluate justice-oriented climate policies.”

Pushing for Implementation

Portland’s acknowledgement of injustices in vulnerable communities might not have happened were it not for the prodding of environmental justice organizations like Organizing People/Activating Leaders (OPAL) Environmental Justice Oregon that assisted the city in writing the updated plan, Short Gianotti says. 

These same groups are now “very critical” of the city’s implementation of its climate justice plans. “You could, in some ways, interpret that as a measure of failure, that there is a critical perspective, that they still feel like the city is not doing enough,” she says. “But then you can also interpret it as a measure of success, that those critical voices are included in the conversation—because you need continued pushes to create change.”

These groups play a role in ensuring that solutions to climate-related problems in cities remain accessible even to low-income residents—and don’t become an added burden. Solar power and electric vehicles are financially out of reach for many low-income and communities of color, for instance. And the addition of green space can drive up housing costs in low-income neighborhoods. “Having the actual input from the community to what they see as good solutions to climate change in their own neighborhood is key,” Diezmartínez says.

For instance, Short Gianotti says that when residents from vulnerable communities are surveyed about their main concerns, housing and food security frequently rank much higher than climate resiliency. “From the outside, it’s easy to think about these bigger-picture, longer-term issues, but they need to be contextualized with attention to the immediate needs of communities,” she says. 

Since completing their survey of cities’ climate plans, Diezmartínez’s and Short Gianotti’s research has taken them in two main directions. One research thread pertains to climate finance, or how cities are using their resources (including federal grants and private philanthropy) to decarbonize. The second area of research explores how cities can move from mere articulation of a climate justice commitment to actual implementation. The research intersects with and is informed by Diezmartínez’s work since the summer of 2022 with the City of Boston—first through a Rappaport Fellowship and now in a part-time paid capacity—to integrate environmental justice into the city’s climate action. In that role, she engages with environmental justice leaders, residents, and building owners around the implementation of the city’s decarbonization initiatives.

“I’m learning how there are many faces behind every decision that we see in a policy—a lot of different people’s emotions, perspectives, vulnerabilities—that are part of those decisions,” Diezmartínez says. “The job of environmental justice advocates that engage with these processes is not just to tell us, ‘Great, you care about this!’ but to tell us how to do better, to push us forward to do the harder work for justice.”