The pickup truck stopped and I knew it was time to get out. Following the advice of the “water guardian” I had just met, I opened the door and waited a few seconds before exiting. I breathed in the dense mountain air and stepped down carefully. I had walked only a few meters before I felt in my body the weight of more than 4,500 meters (14,760 feet) of altitude. I paused for a moment, a little dizzy, waiting for the vertigo to pass.

None of that kept me from standing there, taking in the landscape. Before me stretched the Andean mountains of Peru, imposing and silent. As I looked out over the scene, I thought it was probably the highest place I had ever reached in my life—and I wondered whether the Lincoln Institute had ever reached so high….

Yet the altitude was only the beginning of the story.

Imagining the Future of a Sub-Basin

The mountain visit took place the day before a workshop on water resilience in the Santa Eulalia sub-basin, many meters lower down. The gathering was part of a process that had been unfolding for several months that seeks to strengthen capacity across Latin America and the Caribbean to imagine and prepare for uncertain futures in the context of water.

The tool behind that exercise is exploratory scenario planning (XSP): Rather than betting on a single predictable or desirable future, XSP sets out to navigate a range of uncertain futures and then return to the present to design strategies accordingly.

Santa Eulalia is one of five cases that make up this regional initiative, led by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy through its Consortium for Scenario Planning and its land and water program, the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Local implementation was carried out by Aquafondo, the Water Fund for Lima and Callao, an organization that promotes water security through nature-based solutions and collaboration among multiple stakeholders.

Over two days, members of rural communities, authorities, organizations, and other local stakeholders worked together to imagine different future scenarios for the basin, built around the driving forces participants considered most critical in terms of their uncertainty and impact. What would this sub-basin look like amid frequent, intense climate impacts and political instability? The group working on the most adverse scenario asked that question, titling the scenario “My dear Santa Eulalia, you are dying—where will we sing the hualinas…?” Hualinas are traditional Peruvian songs that pay tribute to water.

Despite the differences among scenarios, certain answers came up again and again, aligning with three broad ideas.

First Idea: Caring for Natural and Ancestral Infrastructure

The first idea concerned the need to strengthen the natural and ancestral water infrastructures that for centuries have made it possible to manage water in the mountains. Here, the amunas took center stage.

The amunas are channels built in the upper reaches of the mountains that capture rainwater during the wet season and carry it across permeable terrain, where it slowly infiltrates the subsoil. Months later, in the dry season, that same water resurfaces lower down, just when it is needed most. It is a system as simple as it is ingenious, inherited from pre-Hispanic times and preserved from generation to generation. The practice is known as “sowing and harvesting water”: You sow when water is abundant so you can harvest it when it is scarce.

Its impact is no small thing. Estimates say one kilometer of amuna contributes around 148,000 cubic meters (39 million gallons) of water per year, according to Aquafondo’s monitoring studies, and to date about 87 kilometers (54 miles) of amunas have been restored. But perhaps most revealing is that the water sown in the mountains does not stay there: It travels through the subsoil and can reach much farther, even to the cities.

Second Idea: Recovering and Passing on Knowledge

The second idea addressed the importance of recovering, making visible, and passing on the knowledge tied to these practices, through educational and cultural programs.

This idea struck me as especially powerful. Because what is not made visible is rarely valued. And what is not valued is rarely passed on to new generations. When that knowledge is lost, not only do specific techniques or practices disappear—so does a way of understanding the territory, of relating to water, and of building resilience.

This is not an isolated intuition. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself, in its report on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, recognizes that Indigenous and local knowledge offers valuable understanding for acting on climate risk and can enrich adaptation policies and practices. In the amunas, that principle becomes tangible: A body of knowledge more than 1,000 years old proves to be a concrete tool for adapting to water uncertainty today.

Third Idea: Financing What the Mountain Gives Us

The third idea was to design financing mechanisms to restore and maintain these ecosystems—and this, in a way, is where the whole effort is decided. Amunas and bofedales do not maintain themselves: they need hands to restore them and resources that make that work possible year after year. The question underlying every idea raised in the workshop was the same: who pays for the infrastructure that makes water possible, and how do those resources reach the people who keep it functioning?

There is no single answer, and that is why it is worth exploring—from land-based financing instruments to voluntary conservation mechanisms. This is exactly the intersection where the Lincoln Institute works: tying together how land is used, governed, and financed, so that caring for a territory and paying for that care stop being two separate decisions.

Water connects everything. The water that reaches Lima is born in the mountains, and as long as that link goes unrecognized, those who care for the sources high up will keep sustaining, almost in silence, the water supply of millions downstream. The challenge is for these mechanisms to reach the communities that care for water in the highlands, without being diluted along the way.

The True Height

Today, back in my own city, just a few meters above sea level, I still remember that dizziness I felt in the mountains. But when I think about this trip, the altitude is no longer what matters most.

What stays with me is the image of communities that came together to imagine their collective future and, in doing so, recognized the value of knowledge accumulated over generations. Perhaps that was the true height reached during those days: not the 4,500 meters above sea level, but the conversation that reached places where the future is rarely considered collectively, and where knowledge of the past still offers answers to the challenges of tomorrow. As one community member put it, with a simplicity that stayed with me: “We often believe the past was better, but we are the ones who can make the future even better.”

Melinda Maldonado is an Argentina-based lawyer with a PhD in Urban Studies, specializing in urban finance, climate change, and urban-environmental conflicts. She has extensive experience as a researcher, lecturer, and consultant across both the public and private sectors. A collaborator with the Lincoln Institute’s Latin America and Caribbean Program since 2010, she teaches courses on climate change and urban law. Her work currently focuses on land value capture as a means of financing climate measures, particularly nature-based solutions.

Lead image: Members of the Lincoln Institute and Aquafondo teams walk along the amunas (high-altitude rainwater channels) at around 4,500 meters above sea level in the Andes of Peru. The two organizations recently ran a scenario planning workshop focused on water resilience in the Santa Eulalia sub-basin. Credit: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Responding to the climate crisis will require more than solar panels, a modest carbon tax, or another flood barrier. A new book from Billy Fleming demonstrates that the climate policy, planning, and design professions have been looking in all the wrong places for models of sustainability and resilience, instead building projects that raise emissions and drive displacement. With 29 richly illustrated projects across six continents, this book shows readers a promising set of alternatives for building more just, decarbonized futures from the neighborhood to the continental scale. 

Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, provides a crucial counterpoint to the growing despair around climate action by presenting a series of optimistic solutions that show how various forms of collective ownership, multi-purpose infrastructure, and grassroots power are already tackling the climate crisis at great scale. It is both a celebration of action underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers, and activists who are pushing this planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

“Building a just, postcarbon future requires a transformation of our social, political, and economic systems in ways that challenge the status quo,” said Billy Fleming, codirector of the Climate and Community Institute and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. “This book explores existing works of climate justice and provides a range of tools, methods, and models of practice and policymaking to demonstrate what is possible if we act now at the scale of the crisis.” 

Organized around energy, land, and urbanism, the core of the book is an atlas featuring original cartography that maps and documents examples—such as the Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal Power Plant in British Columbia and the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement Project in Australia—of existing and effective grassroots work toward climate justice. Often, these projects are at odds with the status quo and incorporate the work of marginalized people and frontline communities.

“This is an incredible contribution, offering creative models of land stewardship and climate justice that will push design practice in radical new directions,” said Jenny Jones, principle of TERREMOTO and 2025 Smithsonian National Design Award recipient.

“This book puts the earth, the land, and the spaces we all share at the center of the climate crisis, precisely where they belong,” said Julian Brave NoiseCat, author of We Survived the Night and Academy Award–nominated director of Sugarcane.

Building Postcarbon Futures also features more than a dozen contributions from leading scholars and practitioners of planning, design, and climate policy. Their field-based research presents additional studies of the past, present, and future—including social housing experiments in Uruguay and Jakarta, land stewardship and ecosystem restoration initiatives in the Pacific Northwest and American South, and submerged histories of energy democracy and collective ownership of the power grid in the rural United States.

More information about the book can be found here.

Kristina McGeehan is the director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A team of workers welds and installs a new solar array for a rice mill in Burkina Faso. Credit:Joerg Boethling

Three Michigan mayors—Sheldon Neeley of Flint, Christopher Taylor of Ann Arbor, and David LaGrand of Grand Rapids—appeared at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Detroit in April, on a panel moderated by Anthony Flint, author of Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.

Their conversation, which followed similar mayors’ panel sessions at APA’s national conferences in Denver and Minneapolis, highlighted the challenges municipal leaders face on issues including housing affordability, the property tax, and an evolving relationship with the federal government. These highlights from the discussion have been edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Flint: What is it like to run a city at this current time, in this political environment, and what impact has the role of the federal government had, especially as it has changed?

Mayor Sheldon Neeley: One of the things I find is that it’s the intersection of crises. It’s like any intersection, you have … to make sure you don’t run into catastrophic accidents. My engagement has been on the financial crisis, water crisis, civil unrest, and also a global pandemic. I call it prayer, planning, partnership … we looked for our partners to be able to get through that. We needed all parts of government to play a part to serve the various residents across the state of Michigan. Also, I have a great relationship with the state government as a former legislator, and also have one of the greatest state legislators in the state, [who] happens to be my wife.

Mayor Christopher Taylor: With the current climate, we have a combination of certainties and uncertainties as we grapple at the global level. We know that if we are trying to protect our community members, we need to be welcoming…. That’s going to be complicated, at best, frustrated, at worst, by the administration. We also know that some of our primary quality-of-life initiatives with respect to housing and climate action are at odds with the federal policy and with the process of the administration. We have been doing a lot of work on climate action. [The federal policies], at the very best, complicate and slow down the exciting work that we’re doing.… On housing, crucially, with all those cuts in HUD, those are going to hit our residents.

Mayor David LaGrand: The level of chaos that’s been injected at the federal level has been really problematic, because a lot of people want me to come and do something about Donald Trump. I can’t change his mind on tariffs. I can’t change his mind on a lot of things. We’re the closest people to [yell at], so we get a lot of frustration. Maybe we’re about to revert to city-state models rather than a federal one. The federal government’s been around for a couple hundred years. Cities have been around for 9,000 years. They’re very durable. They have lots of structural advantages, and there are reasons why the cities are going to be fine.

Then the question is, [do] we just forget about the federal government and the state government? The long-term question is, post–Great Society, if we made this deal … to put most of our money up to the federal level and it was going to come back in the form of grants and programming … if that bargain has been falsified, then why am I sending my federal taxes off to the federal government anymore?

If we want to do housing, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. We have to figure out what the resources are. If we want to do environmental work, we have to figure out what’s city level. We just have to be honest and break out of [the approach of saying] gee, there’s a grant somewhere we should apply for.

AF: The next question is about local action. I’m going to ask three questions, one for each of you. I’ll start with Mayor Taylor. Can you tell us about the clean energy public utility you’ve started in Ann Arbor and how that fits in with your local climate action plans?

Mayor Christopher Taylor: We have, in our liberal town, no surprise, we’ve had a climate action plan for quite some time. We were able to, through some work at the county level, find a million dollars a year starting in about 2017, which enabled us to staff up our Office of Sustainability and Innovation. In the state of Michigan, we have a franchise with a regulated provider. That franchise for electric is perpetual. That means if we wanted to run our own utility, seizing [its] assets and utilizing them, not only would we have to pay for capital, we’d also have to pay for the profit interest going forward perpetually.

We decided to start the Sustainable Energy Utility, [which] overlays the existing utility. It is an opt-in utility. It enables residents who wish to sign up to get from the city, from the public utility, 100 percent renewable, reliable, sustainable, resilient, and just-at-market, if not a little bit below, energy. We are getting this underway. We have hired some staff. We’re allocating some budget. We’re going to try to hit 100 homes this year. We’re going to try to hit 1,000 homes next year. We’re going to work … on batteries and solar panels, and we’re focusing on one of our lowest-income areas in the city. The residents are signing up for it. It’s something that gives us a lot of drive, a lot of excitement. It’s something I think that lots of jurisdictions could take a look at.

AF: Mayor Neeley, I know that the … water crisis was traumatic and this is in the rearview mirror, but we’d like an update on how the resolution is going. Importantly, this is ultimately about infrastructure and investment in the city. What can you tell other cities about your experience?

Mayor Neeley: When people find out that I’m the mayor of Flint, Michigan, they ask, how’s the water? I reply, the water’s fine. We’re doing very well. We’ve invested more than $20 million into our infrastructure repair programs [plus $100 million in federal matching funds] … to get us to this point. All of you have been watching over the last decade or so. I want to thank you for your prayers and your wishes. We’re still providing water for the poor families inside the city of Flint, while we’re trying to build … trust. It’s a confidence thing that we have to build back.

AF: I want to turn now to affordability and start with you, Mayor LaGrand. You’ve got your own special circumstances in terms of your local economy, which I’d like you to talk about, but what have you found in terms of the strategies for promoting affordable housing? I’m going to follow up with each of you about your particular strategy, and that is something we’re interested in, which is promoting the use of government-owned land for housing.

Mayor LaGrand: First of all, I’ve just got to acknowledge that I think jealousy is an under-respected emotion. I am jealous of the work that Ann Arbor is doing on the electric utility work, [which] we’re watching very carefully. It’s incredibly exciting.

One of the things that I think in the policy space is really important [is] to ground things in economics. The law of supply and demand is a law. You can try ignoring it if you want. Try ignoring gravity and see how well that works for you. Demand is going to give you price pressures. It really boils down to two things. One is the regulatory environment, and the other is how you actually make it. Again, just to geek out for you guys a little bit, one of the weird things about housing is if you look at industries in general, think about a computer, they get more and more efficient, dramatically so, right? We see that all the time. For housing, the construction industry still involves a guy or a woman coming out to a site with a hammer and knocking a bunch of pieces of wood together like it’s 1940. The housing industry hasn’t moved forward very much technologically.

Sheldon and I were deskmates in [the state legislature] in Lansing. There was a good idea of taxing vacant land that Mayor Duggan proposed for Detroit . Those of us with bad developers squatting on land—that’s a problem. I wrote a bill so that cities could have land banks and not just counties. Then when I became mayor, now we have a land bank in Grand Rapids. That’s a way for you to do public investment, and it’s exciting. That gets to your public ownership of land question.

The other thing is [ADUs, or accessory dwelling units]. Let’s say I have 50,000 garages in Grand Rapids. Those garages are all potential one-bedroom or studio apartments, but only if the regulatory environment makes that possible and makes it work. I’ve got bills in Lansing that will drop the cost of construction of an [accessory dwelling unit] about 20 grand a unit because of regulatory things in the state building code. You’ve got to get it fixed at the state level. Then at the city level, you’ve got zoning questions. Is it even allowed? Do you have prebuilt models? How easy is it to get through your zoning department? How easy is it to get financing?

If we increase supply enough, prices will moderate. We saw it happen in Minneapolis. We saw it happen in Boston last year. We see it happen in Austin. The law of supply and demand is a law.

AF: We’re going to have to move into a little bit more lightning-round mode, but I want to ask you about affordability and specifically this idea of making use of government-owned land.

Mayor Taylor: Just a couple of weeks ago [we] passed our comprehensive land use plan, which envisions substantially more housing throughout the city, much more in the downtown, substantially more on transit corridors, and more in established neighborhoods, duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, wherever we can.

There isn’t much vacant land in Ann Arbor. We do have a couple of parking lots downtown that we’re utilizing in different ways. One, we are looking to sell on the open market. We’re going to sell to the highest bidder for as much housing as we can get, [plus] a grocery store on the first floor.

Next, we have a … parking structure that has been a conversation in the city for a number of years. We are transferring the air rights to that parking structure to the next-door library. The library is going to build an awesome library on top …. They’re going to work on having affordable housing, workforce housing, artist housing. Across the street, we’ve got another surface parking lot owned by the City of Ann Arbor. We are going to break ground this season on about 300 units of new permanent housing there. We’re working on it.

AF: Mayor Neeley, have you seen efforts to redevelop underutilized land in the city of Flint?

Mayor Sheldon Neeley: The good news is that if Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor don’t have a home for you … we have land, and we have industrial space, and also residential space. What we’re doing, we’re taking a lot of structures down, and we’re redeveloping that land. It’s affordable. The Real Estate Association says the land value has increased over the last decade by about 332 percent, but it’s still very affordable. Flint, right now, for the first time in 20 years, is actually growing in population, so people are realizing that it’s a good investment to come back there and even start your business.

AF: All around the country, there’s this new property tax revolt just at the time when local governments are counting on that revenue. Just interested in your reflections on that revolt, and then also where you stand on the land value tax.

Mayor David LaGrand: If you want to geek out, the land value tax is called Georgian economics. It’s a great idea. It’s good for everybody incrementally, so I’d like it in general.

Property tax in Michigan is badly broken, but let me tell you middle-class people: It’s broken in your favor. That’s really the conversation we have to have when we [discuss] property tax. It’s money for the local government. It’s revenue. It’s not an inalienable way to tax if you want to do the stuff [that] government does. The question [is] who pays the most.

Mayor Taylor: With respect to property tax, we’ve identified some of the challenges. If you stay in your home, your property taxes tick up with inflation. If you move, they leap up to the assessed value. That is great if you’re in your home. It’s hard if you’re a senior and want to downsize. The way our property tax system operates keeps people in their homes longer when they want to stay there.

Second, and this is a little bit of a particularity with respect to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, a fairly important economic engine in the city, doesn’t pay any taxes. We do have an opportunity to have a city income tax. The way that it’s structured in Michigan, however, in the city of Ann Arbor, would mean that the imposition of an income tax would, on the one hand, be capped at 1 percent for residents, 10 percent for nonresidents, and crucially, would involve an approximately 13 percent property tax cut for people in the city of Ann Arbor.

Mayor Neeley: How many of you guys are thoroughly confused by this whole tax question right now? Let me help you simplify it. Taxation is a necessary thing in order to provide services for residents inside any particular community. Let me give you an example from the city of Flint. We have more than 290 churches, about 23 vacant school buildings [that have] been vacant for more than a decade. We have two major hospitals. We have three university campuses. All our nonprofit entities are not paying property taxes. We talk about a PILOT payment [payments in lieu of taxes]. We need to make sure everybody is able to get their share [of public services when] just one-third of the communities are paying for all the services that they need.

We use a combination of different revenue streams to be able to have a support base. I do operational audits to see how we can provide more services for less without cutting or raising the price. These are dialogues and conversations that we need to have.

We can get industry back in and using land space for redevelopment, housing, or other businesses. If we have hospitals, we need to be able to have a PILOT payment because if they need help with the fire department, police department, those are tax dollars of the residents that are providing that level of service. All these things have to come together .… We need to take a really good look … around the table and be able to have these really engaged conversations. Truth has never been afraid of an audience, and so we need  to be able to speak the truth, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, white, Black, rich, or poor. We need to have that.

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.

Lead image: Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand speaks during a session at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference in Detroit in April. Seated next to him (partially obscured) is Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor, with Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley and Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy completing the panel. Credit: American Planning Association.