To live better and secure crucial climate action, deliver tested wellbeing solutions

It’s within reach to live well and secure crucial climate action—making both happen is a matter of delivering tested solutions to improve collective wellbeing.

Here are some of the top such wellbeing solutions according to evidence:

Choices

Develop economic choices that allow people to make ends meet and live the life they want. Deliver choices by creating affordable and enriching options to help people in a wide range of ages, abilities, wealth/incomes, and backgrounds to meet their basic needs through:

Housing, especially infill middle housing;
Transportation, especially walkability, bikeability, and rich transit;
Food, especially nutritious plant-rich food; and
Energy, especially innovations in efficiency combined with beneficial electrification.

Delivering choices is associated with “demand-side” climate solutions, representing 40–70% of potential greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. This category also contains some of the most cost-effective measures to reduce emissions that have been studied, which means they save energy and money that can be reinvested and multiply results.

Delivering choices also boosts self-reliance and flexibility to help people have the best chance of being ready for life-changing disasters that are becoming more common, asd well as to cope with the shocks, shifts, and uncertainties of climate change more generally.

Clean air

Keep outdoor and indoor air clean and safe to breathe, especially by curbing air pollution impacting children and other sensitive and vulnerable populations. Deliver clean air through:

Transition of mobile and fixed sources of energy systems to being renewably-powered and electrified;
Reduction of system-wide energy use through demand management and compact-oriented land use strategies; and
Development of strong industrial controls.

Delivering clean air is a powerful way to reduce GHG emissions, since more than 75% of these emissions come from fossil fuels that cause regional, local, and indoor air pollution. Air pollution and GHG emissions also come from livestock, fertilizers, land clearing, and industrial processes.

Delivering clean air is also important for adapting to climate change because air pollution is more dangerous during heatwaves, wildfire smoke can be transported over long distances, and air pollution is particularly harmful for people who are already vulnerable.

Community cohesion

Develop community infrastructure and services to support strong social connections, where children, seniors and people with disabilities can travel independently, people with different racial, economic, and other backgrounds are integrated, and communities can efficiently and effectively solve collective problems together. Deliver community cohesion through:¹

Creation of compact, mixed-use design with urban forestry and urban villages where commonly used services are accessible without driving;
Great conditions for walking and bicycling, as part of which, vehicle speeds are overall slow (e.g., under 20 mph on local streets and less than 30 mph on urban arterials), parking capacity and subsidies are minimal;
Streets, parks, other public facilities, and local public schools are widely attractive; and
Shared resources to efficiently and effectively manage environmental challenges, including natural infrastructure and cooling centers and knowledge-sharing about changes under way and resources to help people and neighborhoods adapt.

Delivering community cohesion enables large-scale GHG reduction because it comes through designing communities to be transformationally more resource-efficient, in part by reducing the extraordinarily energy-intense process of urban sprawl, and it multiplies the possibilities of the solutions mentioned in the previous two sections. Related movements include Smart Growth and New Urbanism.

Delivering community cohesion is important for adapting to climate change for similar reasons: It allows local governments to accomplish more with less, and it leads to neighbors being more responsive in crises–which, with climate change, often occur at the scale of communities. It also makes local governments more flexible, able to create more shared infrastructure for shared problems, and more likely to provide safety nets when needed and preventatively address root causes

Responsive government

Dedicate government, especially local government, to provide outcome-driven wellbeing for everyone in the most efficient way, dynamically and accountably. Deliver responsive government through the following:

Realizing full, representative participation in voting, civic life, and other influential decision-making processes, especially for marginalized groups;
Managing for all ages, abilities, and backgrounds, for today and tomorrow;
Commitments to using resources productive by dedicating to using best, modern practices, knowing what those are, creating space for organized innovation, and delivering services effectively; and
Establishing the capacity to change, or the resources, knowledge, and willingness to conduct change management—and use it.

Delivering responsive government is foundational to reducing GHG emissions because most of the transitions involved require structural changes led through public policy, and there exists extraordinary inertia that makes the existing ways of doing things–including the processes that have led to climate pollution in the first place–stable and difficult to change. The climate challenge also demands greater participation and coalition building that in turn requires a strong hand and effective participatory processes that governments are best suited to provide. And the work to be done requires acting out of comfort zones, including in terms of pace, so responsiveness is needed to create accountability to deliver on outcomes in practice.

Delivering responsive government is needed for adaptation for similar reasons, and furthermore to stay on guard as the planet changes and to respond accordingly, to change practices and strategies, to inform and educate the public about those changes and responses, to monitor and address maladaptations, and to assert collective approaches when needed.

References

1 https://www.vtpi.org/cohesion.pdf