Climate finance and climate justice in small and midsize cities in the United States
PI: Claudia Viridiana Diezmartínez Peregrina, PhD Student, Department of Earth & Environment, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; BU URBAN Program
Co-PI: Anne Short Gianotti, Associate Professor, Department of Earth & Environment, College of Arts & Sciences
Cities have been important sites of climate action for more than two decades, and thousands of cities globally have adopted climate action plans. Implementing these climate mitigation efforts is already imposing additional costs to cities and urban governments are facing the challenge of identifying new revenue streams or redirecting existing sources of funding to finance climate programs. Whether and how cities are able to secure climate funding can significantly influence the effectiveness of climate policies and it can play a decisive role in determining who has the power to participate in climate action and to decide the sectors, types of interventions, neighborhoods, and populations to which climate investments are directed. This has profound implications for social justice in cities, as climate mitigation strategies produce co-benefits, redistribute resources, reorganize urban space, and impact infrastructure with uneven effects on urban residents.
Despite the importance of finance for climate governance and justice, urban climate finance remains a vastly unexplored area of research. This gap is particularly pronounced for smaller urban areas. Though nearly 30% of the US population lives in small (25,000-100,000 residents) and midsize cities (100,000- 300,000 residents), most research on urban climate action in the US has focused on large cities. Little attention has been paid to climate programs developed in small and midsize cities and the ways climate actions interact with systemic inequities and vulnerabilities in these locations. Diezmartínez and Gianotti’s project addresses these key knowledge gaps by examining the dynamics and justice impacts of climate finance in small and midsize cities in the US. They will use a mixed-method approach that combines surveys, finance analysis, semi-structure interviews, and document analysis to examine how small and midsize cities in the US are financing climate action and how these financing decisions impact existing inequities and vulnerabilities in these cities.
See more of our 2022 Early Stage Urban Research award recipients here!