Philadelphia’s Sustainability Director on the Changing Climate for Climate Leadership

Katherine Gajewski, the Director of Sustainability in the City of Philadelphia, is responsible for implementing Greenworks Philadelphia, the city’s sustainability framework unveiled by Mayor Michael Nutter in April 2009. The framework sets goals in five areas — energy, environment, equity, economy, and engagement — and encompasses more than 150 achievable, measurable initiatives. In April 2015, Ms. Gajewski joined U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Gina McCarthy, and other guests at the University of Chicago for “The Next Frontier of Climate Change: State and Local Action,” a conference sponsored by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago and The New Republic.

How do you see the role of city governments evolving in efforts to confront issues that are national or global in scope, like climate change?

Cities are where the rubber hits the road, quite literally, and climate change has become very real for many of us. In Philadelphia, we are experiencing extreme weather both in the summer and in the winter. We’re having freeze-thaw, which is ripping up our roads, causing building façades to fall off, and hurting our natural gas infrastructure.

Cities have a sense of immediacy that comes along with feeling the direct impact and having the operational responsibility. We have some tools and levers at our disposal to regulate and legislate, and to invest to address these issues, but right now we’re largely working without full alignment up through the state and federal level. We’ve been making a lot of progress figuring out what we can do at the local level, but, at some point, we’re kind of maxed out in the scale of the impact we can have.

What has been the reaction initially from state and federal agencies? Are they excited to have you mobilized at the ground level?

It really varies considerably from state to state. Federal agencies have been supportive of city-level action. They’ve been stuck with Congress, so they’ve increasingly started to look to cities to move things forward. The White House convened a task force of state, local, and tribal leaders over the course of last year to empower some of these leaders and try to figure out what we can do together outside of legislation.

When I started this job six years ago, the focus was largely on federal climate legislation. Obviously, the political context and viability have shifted, and that’s reversed now. There’s a lot of attention being paid to what we’re doing at the city level, which is great. Cities have made tremendous progress in a relatively short period of time in growing increasingly sophisticated sustainability programs. But we’re kind of throwing that back now and saying, we really can’t meet the kinds of aggressive goals we collectively need to hit without having a price on carbon and some of the other things that need to happen at the federal level.

How are cities working around the federal vacuum?

Cities don’t necessarily have a natural way of connecting and working together. There are some mayors’ associations and conferences, but they’re not built to be practitioner-focused. Often we find each other through federal coordination: some kind of program comes down, and we go to the conference to learn about it and talk. But we really had no way of working together. Around seven years ago, cities were starting to build out sustainability programs, hiring sustainability directors, releasing plans. In many cases, it starts with one person who’s handed a roll of duct tape and a pack of bubble gum and works to put an ambitious plan together.

We have created a peer-to-peer network called the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), and there are now hundreds of people who hold my position in cities across North America. USDN is staffed and funded and works very extensively to share information, rapidly disseminate best practices, and then find opportunities to scale programs across cities.

We’re trying to do what we can to scale across cities right now, to reach the highest level of impact that we can. No one’s forcing us to compare greenhouse gas emissions apples-to-apples, but we want to do that on our own, so we’re creating our own collaboration systems among city sustainability directors. If we’re not going to be regulated to do things, then we’re going to coordinate to figure out what makes sense. So for example, by the time there is a cap-and-trade program, we’ve already created what a greenhouse gas framework should look like, or what a climate adaptation plan should look like at the local level. I think that’s a really interesting trend that doesn’t necessarily have parallels across other issue areas in cities.

What kinds of reactions are you getting from constituents?

In Philadelphia, we’re a liberal, Democratic town, and we have a really strong general level of support for advancing sustainability and climate initiatives. Greenworks has built up a broad base of support, and we have well organized stakeholders that work across a number of issue areas to support our shared agenda. Still, my phone is not ringing off the hook with residents calling and asking how we’re extrapolating greenhouse gas emissions goals in our long-term planning and zoning.

I’m feeling like public opinion, generally, is changing very quickly because of these extreme weather events. The drought in California right now is terrible. From a public awareness perspective, it’s an awareness opportunity. In Philadelphia, we’re having weather events of our own that are really making people scratch their heads and think differently and make connections.

I’m trying to figure out, from my vantage point in government, how to get people a little more fired up. I want people to put pressure on me so that I can put pressure on the City Council or others to say, “Hey, we’re getting tons of calls and emails asking what our long-term greenhouse gas emissions goal is. What are we doing?” Right now, there’s not quite that level of engagement, but it’s starting.

 

Feature Photo: cc/(Monika & Tim)