From Climate Ambition to Implementation
Follow Urban Ocean Lab’s Senior Fellows as they address critical gaps in how cities decide, spend, and build.
“This is the summer of compounding disasters,” reads the subtitle of a recent CNN Climate article — pointing to expansive and record-breaking heat waves; 1,000-year rainfall events and flash flooding; and Canadian wildfires sending smoke into the Northeast, producing some of the worst air quality on record.
What were once seemingly discrete weather events are increasingly a series of stacked disasters. Just one of these would push the limits of a local government’s infrastructure, emergency management capacity, and planning — but more and more, cities are being asked to navigate these events all at once, with less and less support.
No single government can absorb that shift alone. And as the federal scaffolding that once provided funding and momentum for local climate projects has shrunk, the weight of responding to climate change has shifted downward, onto local and regional governments that are often navigating it with fewer resources than the moment demands. That makes the relationships between cities, counties, local agencies, and the community-based organizations working alongside them more important than ever. Partnerships aren’t a nice-to-have; increasingly, they are the mechanism by which knowledge, capacity, and political will on climate solutions can be built and sustained.
This is the moment our Senior Fellows are working in. Seasoned leaders who bring decades of experience navigating government and standing up policies and programs, our fellows are working closely with a network of city leaders, practitioners, and partners to develop and pilot innovative, equitable, and actionable climate solutions. Together, their projects activate local regulatory levers and governance structures to advance climate policies across local decision-making, spending, and community development that speak to this moment.
As we gear up for New York Climate Week, UOL is launching a Substack series highlighting the climate policy issues being explored through our Senior Fellowship program. Each week in August, you’ll hear directly from one of our three Senior Fellows on:
Centering community resilience and holistic neighborhood planning in post-buyout land use strategies;
Integrating climate resilience into local procurement reform;
and catalyzing community investment rooted in place-based values and resilient, adaptive design.
We’ll also be on the ground in NYC for Climate Week, so check our website for updates and events. And of course, if you’re interested in connecting with our Senior Fellows or with other projects at Urban Ocean Lab, please reach out to us at info@urbanoceanlab.org.
Daphne Lundi
Managing Director
Ella Clarke
Chief of Staff