About Us

As mentioned above, the collected actions represent just a fraction of the local government actions around climate change. This is particularly true around the number of local governments. Currently, we are actively monitoring approximately approximately 5,000 local governments (including towns, villages, cities, counties, and parish/boroughs) out of the 35,000+ local government units in the USA (National League of Cities Local Government 101) and  3,000+ local governments, regional municipalities and district governments in Canada (Federation of Canadian Municipalities).

While our tracking is only reaching a fraction of local governments we are always expanding and adding more coverage. In addition, we are confident that the data we have collected is unprecedented in scale and represents the most comprehensive view yet at local climate action in the US and Canada. If you know of other actions or communities we should cover, please submit one on our Take Action webpage.

Not necessarily. While we applaud communities for acting on climate change (hence our name…) we also don’t want to to Green-wash actions and intend for this information to be valuable in warning of the magnitude of action necessary to act on climate change (hence the dual meaning of our name). The policies contained within the database are not assessed for implementation effectiveness. Greenwashing continues to be a problem in the environmental movement and some of theses actions may have been celebrated at the time but are in fact anathema to effective climate action. Furthermore, some of these resolutions may have since been overruled, revoked, or rescinded, and some agenda items may refer to contracts that may appear to increase renewable energy but in fact perpetuates fossil fuel usage.  So realistically not all of these policies or plans represents “positive” climate actions and most are far from “Best Practices”.

We believe this website is unique and adds value to existing efforts around sharing climate actions.

Generally, non-profit websites either focus on one type of action, such as a proclamation or specific resolution, or create a fee-for-service database highlighting only what the locality voluntarily submits. In both cases these websites provide incomplete information and tend to focus on larger communities, perpetuating biases that only large communities act on climate change.

A few states provide “certifications” around climate action (one such example is SustainableCT).  These databases often rely on information submitted by the local government, which can standardize reporting for comparison purposes (in order to “award” medals, grades, or other recognition). These websites are far more equitable by providing information on communities of all sizes, however, they rely on the locality to voluntarily submit this information. Oftentimes this only includes the base information necessary to achieve the achievement, and such information is oftentimes outdated as it is only submitted annually after legislation is approved by local council. By collecting the data ourselves we are able to avoid situations of greenwashing and be more comprehensive -and timely- in the data made available to the viewer. Climate Herald broadens the scope by focusing nationwide as well as provides topical and timely information, including notifications for actions that are still in committee or are coming in front of local council. 

Lastly, national datasets such as the US Climate Resilience Toolkit provide extensive information and go in-depth on one specific action in order to provide case studies. While these resources provide valuable information and context to climate actions they often lack the geographic range and extent that we do.  

All effort has been made to update information as new actions are taken. We include a list of upcoming actions identified from our tracking on the Homepage as well as provide an opportunity for individuals to sign up for email alerts for specific states and regions on our Take Action. Some of the information provided may be considered outdated having been rejected, revoked, rescinded, superseded, or pre-empted by additional action. We have kept this information in as the commitments and content is still valuable for context and assessing how governments continue to “Move-the-goalpost” around climate action.

For instance) There are examples of communities passing resolutions to reduce GHG 50% renewable energy by 2020 yet, in failing to accomplish that goal, have followed it up with the same goal but delayed a decade. We think it relevant to show the multiple commitments made by the locality so the viewer can recognize where, and when, communities have not met their commitments.

This website does not intend to – nor can it – replace the value of local journalism, city-hall beat reporters, community and frontline organizations and other informal community groups active on environmental efforts. In fact, this website was designed to help support local grassroots organizations by serving as an archive of actions to provide additional capacity to local individuals and community organizations. We aim to provide a resource to help local individuals and community organizations more effectively track local policy and raise awareness of opportunity and actions (both to celebrate substantive efforts to act on climate change as well as raise awareness of local decisions undermining climate action).

We highly recommend you support your local journalists and donate to such organizations as the Local Media Federation, Society for Environmental Journalists and others. In addition, we include a list of known local advocate groups under the Take Action page and also maintain a Twitter List of local climate organizations. If you know of others we would greatly appreciate an introduction so that we may recognize them for their effort. 

Many organizations out there provide grades, scorecards, “medals,” or other marketable information, however this website does not intend to be used for marketing purposes. From Dillon-rule to home-rule, charter to non-charter, state pre-empted to state-proscribed actions, there is so much variation in local government ability that we do not want to try to “compare apples and oranges” and evaluate communities for the purpose of grading them. Furthermore, we recognize the inherent bias in many of these “awards” as they oftentimes require time and money by the locality in order to be evaluated which may unintentionally bias larger communities with more capacity while excluding others. We seek to avoid this form of climate gatekeeping and, in the process, change the narrative that the New York City’s and Chicago’s of the world are the only ones acting on climate change by demonstrate the great work being done by communities of all sizes.

In the archive we wanted to ensure that only actions were included that were discussed and vetted through local government governing boards, commissions, or included local government employees. This is due to the desire to reference only what the city has done or committed to do on climate change. Academic reports and community-generated plans are not included because governing boards unfortunately too often dismisses them because the locality wasn’t involved in the development process. We are building out capacity for including regional government reports such as Metropolitan Planning Organizations, Community Redevelopment Agencies and other special districts as well as community led and academic analyses.

In the near future we intend to build out the Archive to include reference to all of these types of plans and more. 

Due to a potential conflict of interest, I am not presenting data for the Southeastern United States. I have collected information for communities in the Southeast United States however to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest I am not reproducing such data at this time. To learn more about how you can support the advancement of this effort and increase awareness of local government actions in the Southeast contact me via the Take Action webpage.

What you see on this website is just Version 1 of a longer term vision for this project. Version 2 of the website, which is in process of development, will seek to more effectively integrate artificial intelligence, machine learning, data-mining, and democratization of this data. In this next version, we anticipate connecting an underlying relational database with the “community profile” pages to facilitate users in viewing the source documents for these local government actions. This data is also anticipated to be available to users via an interactive dashboard that will replace the current static “Action Analytics” webpage. This dashboard will further help users compare actions, content, and results from communities across the country. Help us expedite this version through donating via the Take Action webpage.