Building on the book’s assessment of the incentives of cities to protect the environment, the chapter outlines an agenda for cities to meet the challenges presented by climate change. The chapter starts by charting an agenda for cities to adapt to the impacts of planetary climate change, because cities have the greatest incentives and levers to address this aspect of the climate challenge. Then the chapter identifies plausible contributions that cities can make to societal decarbonization. The federal government has been, at best, an inconsistent partner in decarbonizing the economy. Climate regulation in major cities provides a means of ensuring that the societal decarbonization project continues to advance, regardless of who is in power federally. The chapter emphasizes the need for higher levels of government to better support municipal efforts to tackle climate change and suggests ways for lawmakers at higher levels of government, in particular the federal level, to do so if they are interested in environmental protection.

This chapter outlines a framework for understanding what drives city governments in the early twenty-first century to engage in environmental protection efforts in the absence of mandates or generous subsidies from higher levels of government. The chapter begins by emphasizing is the central preoccupation at the local level with promoting economic growth, partly to fund the services that local governments provide, such as police and firefighting. The chapter distinguishes between two archetypal categories of environmental problems: local public goods problems, such as the need to collect solid waste or inadequate green space, that local residents benefit from addressing; and global public goods problems, such as planetary warming, that people throughout the world benefit from addressing. Local elites may push from “the top” for measures, such as building parks and collecting garbage, that simultaneously will improve the local environment and promote economic growth by making their cities more attractive to existing and new residents. In addition, community groups may push from “the bottom” for measures to improve the local as well as the global environment, such as limiting planetary warming. However, U.S. local governments are likely to resist imposing costs on local actors to address global environmental problems, such as limiting climate change, because of localities’ nested position as relatively small entities within a large federation competing for businesses and residents. Left to their own devices, local governments are more likely to undertake measures that will yield local benefits, such as improvements in the health of local residents and the beautification of the local environment. For cities to contribute meaningfully to addressing the global task of limiting planetary warming, local activists will need to mobilize over a sustained period to maintain the pressure on local officials who are sensitive to the need to cultivate local economic prosperity.

New York City’s policy efforts in the first two decades of the twenty-first century emphasize the potential for local governments to materially improve their local environments. During the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013), the city government sought from the top to remake the city’s physical environment to appeal to postindustrial elites to promote local economic development. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio (2014-2021), the administration explicitly prioritized equity alongside economic growth and this commitment was reflected in environmental policy in a focus on investing in community parks. Under both mayors, environmental policy came from community groups, as well as city leaders. For example, across the two administrations, prominent environmental justice advocates prompted the city to adopt measures to address longstanding inequities in the allocation of responsibility for solid waste management, although the injustices persisted at the end of the de Blasio administration. Overall, the history of New York City’s efforts to address problems such as lack of greenspace, contaminated lands, and solid waste management underscores that change can come from the top and the bottom, but that there are legal, fiscal and other constraints on the ability of cities to address even paradigmatically local environmental problems.

Many of the contemporary discussions of the potential for cities to address climate change overlook the historical efforts of cities to protect their residents from environmental harms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the emergence of the administrative state at the state and federal levels, local governments were often the first level of government to provide many Americans with environmental protection. Supplying safe drinking water was an early priority for expanding cities. With water more readily available, city governments then built sewage systems. They also built parks, established systems for collecting solid waste, and attempted to address air pollution from the combustion of coal. The historical efforts of cities, well documented by historians, emphasize that city governments can positively contribute to protecting the environment. However, these efforts also offers cautionary lessons about the limitations of relying on local governments to address large-scale problems, and help to explain the substantial federalization of environmental law in the latter twentieth century. Federalization diminished the ability of cities to innovate in the environmental field but cities still have considerable legal authority to pursue environmental policies to address contemporary challenges.

Most American environmental law scholarship overlooks the role of cities in environmental law and policy. Instead, scholars typically focus on federal environmental law. This book emphasizes the potential for leading cities to play a meaningful role in protecting the environment. It offers a framework for understanding the factors that give to, and constrain, local environmental law and policy. Local environmental policy may emerge from the top from local elites centrally concerned with local economic development, and from the “bottom up” from community groups. However, there are limits on the costs that local governments can impose on local actors to address global environmental problems, such as limiting climate change, given the overriding importance that local governments attach to promoting economic development. The book offers case studies of local environmental efforts in New York City to illustrate the promise and limitations of local environmental policy. Taking into account the opportunities and constraints at the local level, the book outlines a high-level agenda of actions that local governments in large cities should undertake to adapt to climate change and contribute to decarbonization.

In the face of the federal government’s failure to tackle climate change in the early decades of this century, large cities in the U.S. started to take action. Networks of city governments and philanthropists offered cities support, and cities invested their own resources in sustainability offices. However, cities made limited progress in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in the first two decades of this century. This book provides a clear-eyed analysis of the potential for big city governments to address society’s most pressing environmental problems, including limiting and adapting to climate change. It includes original case studies of New York’s environmental policy efforts in the first two decades of this century, which ground its analysis of the promise and perils of turning to cities to address climate change and other environmental issues. Drawing on the book’s analysis of cities’ strengths and weaknesses, it outlines a high-level agenda for urban environmental policy for the near term. With President Trump’s return to power in 2025, and his promises to undo many aspects of federal environmental law, it is more important than ever for environmental advocates and scholars to understand the potential and limits of local action to fill the gap.

While local efforts to decarbonize will mainly benefit the world as a whole, local efforts to adapt to climate change will benefit mainly people in cities, who will be more resilient to the extreme heat, drought, flooding and fires that planetary warming is exacerbating. Reflecting the benefits to cities of adapting, cities began planning adaptation early in the twenty-first century. However, as of the early 2020s, US cities had undertaken little adaptation (as opposed to adaptation planning). From 2000 until 2012, when Superstorm Sandy struck the city, New York policymakers focused on gathering information about the risks that climate change presents for the city, but they undertook few tangible actions to protect the city against risks such as storm surge flooding. Sandy increased policymakers’ perception of the urgency of acting to adapt, and injected $15 billion of federal funding into the city that enabled it to invest in adaptation. Yet, between 2012 and the early 2020s, the city had great difficulty implementing adaptation actions. New York City’s top-down approach to climate change adaptation underscores the difficulties that cities face implementing the costly local public good of climate change adaptation without additional assistance from higher levels of government.

In the early twenty-first century, New York and other cities established targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to help limit global climate change. Limiting these emissions is not an obvious task for local governments: no city’s efforts will materially affect planetary temperatures, and curtailing these emissions imposes costs on local actors mainly for the benefit of the world as a whole. Between 2007, when the city set its first GHG reduction target, and 2019, the city’s emission reduction efforts were consistent with the preoccupation of local elites with economic growth. The city did not impose costly requirements on local actors to reduce their emissions, and the city did not achieve significant emission reductions. However, in 2019, the city government passed a local law that establishes declining caps on greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, and portends real costs on private actors – including the owners of residential real estate – if the city enforces the law. This 2019 law emerged from the efforts of city insiders, and local progressive interest groups motivated by environmental, social justice and labor concerns in the first Trump presidency. The history of the city’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions illustrates the precarious politics of local decarbonization efforts.