In the increasingly urgent effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and slow the damaging effects of climate change, local policy makers and planners are playing a critical role. The good news is, they have access to more data than ever. But wrangling, sorting through, and making sense of all this data can be a major challenge. A new crop of technological tools is helping to capture data related to municipal greenhouse gas emissions, organize it comprehensibly, and make it easy for municipal leaders to access.  

In Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council is working on an ambitious new effort to support local climate decisions. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Minnesota’s emissions per capita as of 2016 were slightly above the national average of 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person. But breaking down the details behind that number can be complicated. Making it less complicated is a major goal of the council, which is a regional policy-making body, planning agency, and provider of essential services including transit and affordable housing for a seven-county region that includes 181 local governments.  

In the works for about three years, and set for release this summer, the Metropolitan Council’s Greenhouse Gas Scenario Planning Tool grew out of the council’s work to promote regional livability, sustainability, and economic vitality, and is ultimately intended for use by any municipality in the United States.  

Intriguingly, the process began by assembling a team of partners including several leading academics (from Princeton University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Minnesota) studying various aspects of climate change, as well as private-sector nonprofit partners—“giving us access to all the science and innovation that academia can bring, combined with the practical wisdom of government,” says Mauricio León, senior researcher for the Metropolitan Council.  

León’s duties include greenhouse gas emissions accounting for the Twin Cities region, which makes him familiar with the complexities of both measuring emissions in the present and figuring out how to project that data into the future under different scenarios. The council’s recognition that this can be a time- and resource-consuming challenge for local governments led to the idea of building a web application that draws on existing databases and is adjustable according to specific policy strategies.  

León and one of the council’s academic partners, Professor Anu Ramaswami—a civil and environmental engineering professor at Princeton who has been the principal investigator in the planning tool project—emphasized that such public/academic partnerships don’t happen often. “This is rare,” says Ramaswami, who has worked with individual cities for years, but seldom on a project meant to serve such a broad range of municipalities and local governments.  

In terms of the process, she says, scientists and policy makers jointly framed the relevant questions, then built the model together. The collaborators identified data sets related to the primary sources of emissions. In the Twin Cities area, for example, 67 percent of direct emissions come from “stationary energy” such as the electricity and natural gas used to power homes and buildings, while 32 percent comes from on-road transportation. The team also identified the most promising reduction and offset strategies and policies, including regulations, economic incentives, public investments, and land uses such as parks and greenways. With three focus areas or modules—building energy, transportation, and green infrastructure—the application is designed to show policy makers the potential outcomes of various mitigation strategies. The overarching framework is pegged to the goal of local governments achieving zero emissions by 2040, an aspirational target adopted by the Metropolitan Council. 

In a preliminary conceptual demonstration of the tool at the Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP) conference earlier this year, León showed how different types of communities, from cities to rural areas, will have different impacts and strategy options. A city has a lot of transit options, for example, that a rural community doesn’t have. Policy makers using the tool can also factor in other key considerations, such as the equity implications of greenhouse gas reduction strategies that may impact some segments of a community more than others. “You can use this tool to create a portfolio of strategies that’s based on your values,” León explained.   

With similar goals but a different approach, Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) unveiled a localized greenhouse gas inventory tool several years ago. MAPC’s tool focuses less on future scenarios and more on providing community-specific, accurate baseline data and estimates of the impacts of various activities and sectors. Guided in part by a greenhouse-gas inventory framework developed by the World Resources Institute, C40 Cities, and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, it attempts to measure a municipality’s direct and indirect emissions. 

Jillian Wilson-Martin, director of sustainability for Natick, Massachusetts, says the MAPC effort made available data and estimated impacts of car emissions, home heating, lawn care, and other factors that would be difficult for an individual town to collect. This helped Natick gauge its biggest sources of emissions, the starting point of a process to devise strategies to reduce them. Paired with offsets, the town aims to reduce its net emissions from 9 metric tons per capita to net zero by 2050. “It’s making it easier for smaller communities with no sustainability budget to get this really important data so they can be more effective,” Wilson-Martin says.  

While MAPC provides guidance and training resources to the 101 cities and towns it serves in eastern Massachusetts, it’s up to leaders in each municipality to customize how they measure their local emissions inventory, and how they might use that for planning. This may limit specific forecasting uses, but has another payoff, says Tim Reardon, director of data services for MAPC. “Ultimately the value of having a nuanced and locally tailored tool is to gain credibility and buy-in with stakeholders at the local level,” Reardon explained at the CSP conference. While big-picture data that doesn’t apply to a particular community can be a turn-off, he said, local data brings the global climate crisis down to the ground and reduces a barrier to talking about what has to happen locally to ensure a resilient future. 

Often in discussions around greenhouse-gas scenario planning, León agrees, “there’s this element of ‘this is just too complex for us to even think about.’” The council’s simple web tool is meant to help counter that argument. It’s designed to show in clear, graphic form the difference in emissions levels that would result from adopting various specific tactics, versus simply continuing the status quo.  

One benefit of such an accessible tool, Ramaswami adds, is that it encourages wider involvement and thus “opens up more creative opportunities.” In fact, she says, the project has had a similar effect on its academic partners: “It requires a different kind of research mentality, and a different kind of research group” to work directly with municipalities and respond to real policy options. When the tool is released, it will be accompanied by the publication of related academic research from Ramaswami and the group’s other scholarly partners. 

León acknowledges that the application will have its limits, and that ultimately more sweeping federal and global policies will have greater total impact than any single local initiative. But anything that boosts engagement is important, he says. And the web application is designed to encourage municipalities of all sizes to interact with the calculations and numbers the project team has compiled; they won’t have to upload their own data. “It’s really easy,” León says, “and there’s no excuse for them not to use it.” 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Leaders in Natick, Massachusetts, have used a greenhouse gas tool developed by Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council to gauge the town’s largest sources of emissions. Credit: Denis Tangney Jr. via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

When companies evaluate potential locations for starting or expanding their operations, they typically consider factors including the costs to build or relocate in the area; risks associated with the site, such as regulatory or infrastructure issues; and the time required for acquisition and construction. But in a growing number of U.S. cities and regions, from Orlando to Indianapolis, policy makers are encouraging businesses to incorporate additional considerations into their decisions, including racial equity and climate change. 

In northeast Ohio, a region that includes the legacy cities of Cleveland and Akron, two organizations have unveiled a mapping tool that allows companies to compare several potential locations based on equity and sustainability factors. With a premise similar to the Walk Score and Transit Score tools that assess neighborhood walkability and transit opportunities, the ESG to the Power of Place (ESGP) tool scores up to five locations across the northeast Ohio region on the total number of potential workers within a 30-minute car commute, total number of Black or Latinx workers within that same car commute, and emissions impact of the average commute to a potential site location. 

The tool, created by the Fund for Our Economic Future and Team NEO with support from the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Lincoln Institute, is part of an effort to tie regional economic development more closely to equity and sustainability. 

“For years, the Fund has said how much place matters for equitable economic growth,” said Bethia Burke, president of the Fund for Our Economic Future, a network of philanthropic funders and civic leaders working to advance equitable economic growth in the region. “This tool will help businesses and site selectors compare location options in ways that can have meaningful implications for both individual corporate strategies and broader regional outcomes.”  

The tool also provides an overlay of designated job hubs, which are defined areas of concentrated economic activity and development. When used with existing site selection tools such as Zoom Prospector, the tool’s creators say, ESGP can provide a more complete set of data for return on investment analysis.  

“Reducing racial inequities and mitigating our impact on the climate are two of the Lincoln Institute’s most fundamental goals, and they tie directly to economic development,” said Jessie Grogan, associate director of reduced poverty and spatial inequality at the Lincoln Institute. “That’s what’s so exciting about this tool – it makes it easier than ever for economic development professionals to integrate equity and climate impacts into their considerations.” 

The tool comes on the heels of the Fund for Our Economic Future’s 2021 Where Matters report, which analyzed the equity and sustainability impacts of different types of locations, from a rural area to an urban neighborhood. The report showed, for example, a tenfold increase in the potential number of workers within a 30-minute car commute in urban neighborhoods compared to rural areas, and an urban talent pool that included nearly 65 times more Black and Latinx workers. These findings are especially significant in today’s tight labor market, according to the Fund.  

“With more companies prioritizing climate and diversity, equity, and inclusion in their values, strategies, and performance goals, they need better information and accessible tools like this to inform their site selection decisions,” said Bill Koehler, chief executive officer of Team NEO, a business and economic development organization focused on accelerating economic growth and job creation throughout the region. “Using this tool and its data, businesses have the opportunity to determine their accessibility to diverse talent pools and better understand how location decisions play into their overall environmental, social, and governance objectives, while also addressing their broader corporate return on investment objectives in specific regions.” 

Ultimately, the groups say, emphasizing equity and sustainability is a long-term strategy that can benefit businesses, the people who work for them, and the places those people call home. Burke hopes the new initiative will have a broad impact as the region continues to recover from decades of industrial losses and population decline: “We hope this tool will help to start and guide conversations within the business community that will lead to positive economic development for the region.” 

Grogan says the tool holds promise for other regions as well. “While this tool is based in Northeast Ohio, now that the methodology has been established, we hope it will be replicated widely,” she notes. “This could help practitioners around the country make more informed site selection decisions that consider equity and climate impacts more fully than ever before.” 

Image: A site at Woodland Avenue and Woodhill Road in Cleveland scored highest among five sites compared by a new online tool measuring factors such as racial equity in job locations.
Credit: Team NEO/Fund for Our Economic Future via Cleveland.com.

For years, innovations in alternative mobility—scooters, e-bikes, autonomous vehicles—have focused on how individuals get around. But the pandemic era has put fresh emphasis on a different mobility goal: moving stuff around. 

The demand for rapid delivery has increased sharply in the past two years, and it doesn’t seem to be abating. By some estimates, companies like Door Dash see the quick delivery of groceries alone adding up to a $1 trillion market. With major companies from UPS to Domino’s trying out new ways to deliver their products, the pace and range of vehicle experiments has accelerated—and that is likely to impact the design, planning, and regulation of urban and suburban spaces. 

While it’s unclear which of these experiments will pan out, it’s undeniable that new kinds of delivery vehicles are or soon will be on our streets. With new questions arising, urban design thinkers, retail and technology companies, and municipalities are working to address the convergence of increasing delivery demand and new vehicle forms. Leading the micro-mobility pack is the e-bike, a form that’s been around for decades but has lately become strikingly popular: with sales up 145 percent since the pandemic started, e-bikes now reportedly outsell electric cars. John MacArthur, a program manager at Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), has been researching their potential—including the “tantalizing hope” that micro-mobility tech gets more people out of cars—for the better part of a decade. Last year, he taught a new class focused on cities dealing with all manner of new micro-mobility experiments, or “technologies being thrust in the public right of way.” 

Students in that class found that the pandemic was inspiring a range of responses from cities. On the one hand, work-from-home trends reduced and reconfigured car-centric commuter patterns. In Portland and elsewhere, MacArthur notes, that led to the creation of more bike and bus lanes. On the other hand, delivery demand spiked, leading to concern about a corresponding spike in single-occupancy delivery vehicles. 

MacArthur’s research connected him to Portland’s B-Line Urban Delivery, a 12-year-old firm that operates a fleet of electric cargo trikes that can handle 500-pound loads. With input from TREC and B-Line, Portland is now considering ways to create “micro-delivery hubs.” In this model, a truck brings a load of deliveries to a strategic location, with e-bikes or other micro-vehicles handling the last mile for each delivery, reducing traffic congestion. Such experiments are already underway in Europe, where delivery giant UPS has been experimenting with e-bikes, delivery hubs, and other “sustainable logistics solutions.” 

MacArthur acknowledges that complicated zoning and other issues are involved. But the bigger point is that Portland is among the cities proactively grappling with the future of mobility and how cities can respond to it and, more important, shape it. Shaping the response to new vehicle forms was a theme of a recent “Rebooting NYC” research project spearheaded by Rohit Aggarwala, a senior fellow at the Urban Tech Hub of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Aggarwala—who previously led mobility work for Sidewalk Labs and recently joined New York City government as commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection and the city’s chief climate officer—sketches the broader context. “If a vehicle is designed to fit well in traditional traffic, then it is almost by definition not designed to be a good urban vehicle,” he says. Cars, pickups, and SUVs are built for highways; their makers put far less emphasis on, say, turning radius or other factors that would make them more suited to the narrower confines of urban streets. 

Thus the rise of new, smaller autonomous vehicles such as the Nuro, shaped like a diminutive van and about half the width of a conventional sedan; with no driver, it’s designed to haul up to 500 pounds of cargo. The startup might be best known for a limited pilot program in Houston with Domino’s, offering “the world’s first fully automated pizza delivery service.” 

While such wee vehicles are pitched as virtuously reducing not just pollution but also traffic congestion, the reality is that they’re often fundamentally unsuited to real-world traffic. So where can they go? 

Another recent pilot program involving startup Refraction AI’s REV-1 had the three-wheeled, washing machine–sized autonomous vehicle hauling pizzas via bike lanes in Austin, Texas—a development that some cyclists were not pleased about. “What if in two years we have several hundred of these on the road?” one bike advocate asked a local journalist. Yet another startup, Starship, has been testing its small mobile robot—a 55-pound object with the footprint of a wagon—in several cities, using sidewalks. This, too, has met with a mixed response. Such responses signal a major potential flashpoint, but also, perhaps, an opportunity. Aggarwala points out that in New York and other cities, bicyclists and e-bike users (who are often delivery workers) have long battled over bike lane use. In many cases, bike advocates have fought for years or decades to establish dedicated lanes, and have little interest in seeing them clogged with newfangled motorized vehicles of any kind.  

But the problem isn’t the e-bikes or AVs or robots, each of which offers positive alternatives to traditional cars, Aggarwala says: “The problem is all these alternative vehicles being shoehorned into an incomplete network of generally unprotected lanes that are way too narrow.” Thus the “Rebooting NYC” proposals include creating New Mobility Lanes. This would involve widening and expanding the city’s existing bike lanes into a “network that can accommodate both bicycles and these new vehicles.” 

Other researchers have made similar proposals for “light individual transport lanes,” with varying specifics but a common goal. “You’re basically providing more space for different kinds of vehicles,” says MacArthur of PSU. “That’s the big question that planners will have to face in the next five years.” It’s a knotty challenge for municipalities caught between the ambitions of tech companies, the limits on local regulation resulting from superseding state or federal rules, and the reality that even designating bike lanes in the first place depends more on mustering political will and popular support than it does on the planning that underpins it. 

On that last point, Aggarwala suggests a potential opportunity. As a political matter, bike lanes are often seen as benefiting just a portion of the population at the expense of everyone else. But pretty much everyone has been stuck behind a delivery vehicle. And, maybe more to the point, more of us than ever have come to depend on those delivery vehicles. So rejiggering the way road space is divided doesn’t just benefit the few—it’s for nearly everyone. In other words, Aggarwala asks: “What if you broaden the relevance of a bike lane by expanding its use?” 

Clearly a wave of new-vehicle experimentation is poised to disrupt the delivery business, in a time of unprecedented demand. It’s worth thinking about how planners and policy makers can not just respond to that wave, but harness it to help make city streets more functional and accessible for all. 

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. He is the author of The Art of Noticing. His newsletter is at robwalker.substack.com. 

Image: Nuro, an autonomous vehicle company founded by two former Google engineers, has partnered with companies including Domino’s, CVS, Walmart, and FedEx on delivery pilot projects in several U.S. states. Credit: Domino’s.

During the first session of the virtual Consortium for Scenario Planning (CSP) conference in early February, participants were asked to name the biggest disruptors they are experiencing in their work. Their typed answers flooded onto the presenter’s screen, creating a shifting, multi-colored cloud of words. As the most common answers grew larger and moved to the center, it became clear that three would dominate the conversation: funding, COVID, and climate change. 

Over the course of the next two days, the conference—which drew more than 165 registrants from 11 countries and 27 U.S. states—addressed all three of these issues, with a focus on planning for climate change and building climate resilience. “The impacts of climate change on a day-to-day basis are hard to ignore,” said Ayano Healy of Cascadia Partners, during a presentation on participatory planning in California’s San Joaquin County. “There’s a lot of momentum both at the social level and at the political level for getting organized around climate resilience and taking action.” 

Scenario planning can be a helpful tool for communities confronting the local impacts of climate change. A practice with roots in the military, scenario planning guides planners, community members, and other stakeholders through considerations of various futures and how to effectively respond to and plan for them. Practitioners and researchers at the conference described how communities are using this approach, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 

In a session focused on greenhouse gas scenario planning tools, Mauricio Leon of the Metropolitan Council—the regional planning agency of Minnesota’s Twin Cities region—described working with a team of researchers to help local governments create paths to net-zero emissions. “It’s great to create a portfolio of strategies to meet net-zero emissions, but [we have to] acknowledge that there are things that we don’t know,” Leon said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.” He cited the pandemic and its effects on urban demographic projections as an example of how plans can go awry.  

Tim Reardon of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Massachusetts described a similar tool his organization has developed to help communities in the Boston region benchmark greenhouse gases. “Being able to provide information that is reflective of [specific communities] reduces a barrier to a conversation about the big moves that have to happen” to reduce emissions at the local level, Reardon said. One goal of the tool, he said, is to help communities feel more engaged in the planning process. 

The notion of scenario planning as a form of community conversation, rather than a technical exercise, came up throughout the conference. “When scenario planning is really done well, it can serve as a kind of platform for social learning where different jurisdictions and stakeholders can talk about different values, not just debate technical issues,” said Ryan Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in city and regional planning at Cornell University who is studying regional efforts to prepare for climate impacts in the Great Lakes region. “It allows multiple jurisdictions that have different interests to be able to preserve those within the scope of a collaborative process.”  

Thomas was one of several researchers supported by the Consortium for Scenario Planning who provided updates on projects related to climate adaptation and growth scenarios in legacy cities. That work includes an exploration of how scenario planning can be used in rural communities, the development of a tool that uses scenarios to explore the impacts of land use and water policy, and the creation of an exploratory scenario planning how-to guide that legacy cities can use to prepare for a potential influx of new residents migrating from more climate-vulnerable places. 

As the breadth of this research indicates, scenario planning can be applied in many contexts, says Heather Sauceda Hannon, associate director of planning practice and scenario planning at the Lincoln Institute. Hannon says both the practice and the CSP conference are gaining momentum. 

“This was the fifth year of the conference, and we had the most people we’ve ever had, with attendance at sessions ranging from 30 people to 90 people,” said Hannon. “It’s great to see new people entering this field and wanting to learn more, and the conference is designed to give them the chance to share ideas, learn from one another, and make connections they can follow up on.”  

To learn more about the Consortium for Scenario Planning, visit https://www.lincolninst.edu/research-data/data-toolkits/consortium-scenario-planning.

Image: Disruptors named by participants in the Consortium for Scenario Planning conference. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

The leading technology companies should be doing more to address climate change, says Silicon Valley chronicler Kara Swisher, host of the Sway podcast at the New York Times. Inventions await in manufacturing, materials, batteries, agriculture, land use monitoring, and carbon sequestration, she says. 
 
“A lot of these answers are going to be in how we build things, how we make things, how we consume things, how things are distributed—and tech really does play a part in it,” Swisher says in an interview for the Land Matters podcast. 

Technology has long been intertwined with the way people live, since well before the notion of the smart city and the Internet of Things. Traffic lights were transformative technology a century ago; today traffic and transit management is using Artificial Intelligence, there are apps for finding a parking space or getting a pothole filled, and 3D printing and other methodologies are part of building construction. 
 
Now expectations are even higher for addressing the biggest challenge facing humankind: the climate crisis. Swisher predicted in a New York Times column at the end of 2019 that there were abundant, lucrative opportunities for tech entrepreneurs in green solutions. Their contribution might be vital as national governments struggle to come together on a global program to reduce emissions. 
 
“These are issues that are not going to solely be fixed by tech, but there’s a lot of technology that’s going to go into … how to build the right seawall and make it work, to less consumption to carbon capture to space travel, all kinds of things are all within the bailiwick of the tech industry,” Swisher said. 

One promising area among many is the task of monitoring global land use changes, fires, land clearing, severe weather, drought, and floods. Expect these platforms to get even more sophisticated as a kind of global dashboard, using artificial intelligence to map and understand all the climate data. 

“Our whole world is monitored,” Swisher says. “I think we can use it to help us really understand what’s happening versus anecdotal stuff that often happens when we make policy decisions.” 

Perils abound, including, for example, insufficiently vetted ideas involving shooting supposedly curative matter into the atmosphere—a geoengineering scheme depicted in the sci-fi novel Termination Shock, which Swisher recommends. 
 
The blurring of technology fixes that are truly good for the planet with those that simply make money was also underscored by the quirky tech entrepreneur featured in the film Don’t Look Up. “I thought it was perfect … this idea [of] that benign goodness that really masks malevolence and greed,” Swisher says. “I think the whole point of that character was that there are people on this planet that are more powerful than governments.” 
 
Climate change—and land’s role in both reducing emissions and adapting to new realities—is a core focus for the Lincoln Institute, which is also engaged in the role of technology in cities and in the stewardship of the earth. The Center for Geospatial Solutions has been developing precisely the kind of land use monitoring and mapping tools that Swisher talks about. 
 
You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines. 

Image: Kara Swisher Credit: vox

Further Reading 
 
City Tech: Mapping a More Efficient Approach to Land Use | Land Lines 
 
President’s Message: 2030 is Coming Soon, Let’s Get To Work | Land Lines 
 
Let’s Make the Future What it Used to Be | The Boston Globe