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The climate justice movement has gained momentum at the local, state, and national levels. Frontline communities are leading by example, confronting the global climate change crisis at the neighborhood level with projects that increase community resiliency, such as cooperative solar projects, local green industrial waterfront plans, coastal protection priorities, and local resiliency hubs. New York City needs to accelerate and scale up solutions for a Just Transition, tackling emissions equitably, supporting climate adaptation for frontline communities, and creating good, green jobs. To respond to complex climate challenges adequately, New York City needs an intersectional approach to climate justice that centers leadership from the frontlines. Achieving true climate justice requires more than drawing down emissions and creating jobs – it also requires supporting the health and resilience of every community in our city and honoring the rights of communities to articulate their own climate solutions.

Prioritizing Justice in New York State Cap-Trade-and-Invest

Since 2021, NYC-EJA, in partnership with Resources for the Future, several academic partners, and many of our community partners (member organizations, coalition partners), has worked to better understand how different methods of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) implementation would function to meet the goals this law outlines. The project we undertook used extensive, cutting-edge climate and emissions modeling to discover how different policies and implementations would impact air quality and emissions in New York State. We found that the most effective policies at reducing emissions were those recommended by environmental justice communities.

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The NYC Climate Justice Agenda

The NYC Climate Justice Agenda is a research and advocacy campaign to address the need for comprehensive community-based approaches to climate action. Informed by the experiences of our member organizations, NYC-EJA monitors City and State government progress towards meaningfully and equitably addressing climate change, and provides strategic recommendations to dismantle historic environmental burdens for frontline communities in New York City.

In April 2020, NYC-EJA released its latest report, NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2020: A Critical Decade for Climate, Health, and Equity, which outlines urgent recommended strategies to enact a Just Transition, including specific timelines and concrete financial and legislative commitments to create healthy and resilient neighborhoods; tackle emissions in an equitable way; support climate adaptation for frontline communities; and generate good, green jobs in the process. The report focuses on three main themes aimed at achieving an intersectional set of environmental and climate justice goals: (1) Reduce Greenhouse Gases and Localized Emissions, (2) Advance a Just Transition Towards an Inclusive, Regenerative Economy and (3) Cultivate Healthy and Resilient Communities.

In April 2018, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance released NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2018 – Midway to 2030: Building Resiliency and Equity for a Just Transition, detailing key strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation that the City and State should adopt to ensure a Just Transition in New York City. The report focuses on four key areas of government action and policy: 1) Extreme Heat and Community Preparedness; 2) Air Quality; 3) Green Infrastructure Equity; and 4) Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency.

In April 2017, NYC-EJA released NYC Climate Justice Agenda – Climate Justice in a State of Emergency: What New York City Can Do. The report is a pragmatic roadmap with specific policy recommendations for how a progressive city can lead the way on environmental and climate issues while challenging the reactionary policies of the Trump administration. The report analyzed sustainability and resiliency efforts from City government, as laid out in OneNYC: The Plan for a Strong and Just City and New York City’s Roadmap to 80×50, and proposed specific policy recommendations for the following items: (1) Urban heat island mitigation (2) Food system resiliency (3) Renewable energy and energy resiliency (4) Air quality and low-emission zones (5) Coastal resiliency (6) Community engagement. These recommendations are critical to begin to reduce the vulnerabilities of low-income communities and communities of color to climate change impacts. To read NYC-EJA’s 2017 report, NYC Climate Justice Agenda – Climate Justice in a State of Emergency: What New York City Can Do, click here.

In 2016, NYC-EJA released NYC Climate Justice Agenda – Strengthening the Mayor’s OneNYC Plan. This pioneering report is a critical evaluation of OneNYC: The Plan for a Strong and Just City. The 2016 NYC Climate Justice Agenda reported on New York City’s progress over the inaugural year of OneNYC while providing recommendations on how the City could bolster its commitment to equity through specific policy and programmatic recommendations. To read NYC-EJA’s 2016 report, NYC Climate Justice Agenda: Strengthening the Mayor’s OneNYC Plan, click here.

Grassroots Action for Green Infrastructure Equity (GAGE)

Green Infrastructure (GI) is a key climate adaptation strategy that can increase community resilience to climate change. Our vision of nature-based solutions requires a commitment to equity and justice. NYC-EJA engages in multifaceted advocacy and research strategies to increase green infrastructure in low-income communities of color to mitigate historic environmental burdens, protect against growing climate vulnerabilities, and maximize co-benefits of GI including addressing air quality, extreme heat, stormwater flooding, and coastal protection.

Just Nature NYC
Just Nature NYC is a partnership between NYC-EJA and The Nature Conservancy’s NY Cities team. Our partnership advocates for more nature-based solutions, especially trees, across NYC to support climate justice and equity. We believe that these investments must be targeted strategically in frontline neighborhoods to help improve wellbeing and resilience, especially in the most heat-vulnerable communities of our city. We aim to provide analyses and resources to community-based organizations and propose remedies that are rooted in and elevate community leadership.

The Just Nature NYC partnership creates a space for our organizations to collaborate, share knowledge and skills, and broaden the networks of people, organizations, and institutions across which we work with. We analyze data related to open/green space in NYC, alongside data on social and demographic factors and environmental hazards to better understand citywide inequities in access to nature and its benefits. We hope our research can be leveraged by local environmental justice communities to advocate for their needs, while highlighting trends throughout NYC and informing the broader policy landscape to help realize a city where nature and people can both thrive. To learn more about our work visit our GAGE Blog.

Forest for All NYC
The Forest for All NYC (FFANYC) coalition is made up of over 100 member organizations that represent diverse perspectives and span sectors, industries, interests and geographies – all working together to advocate for the most valuable natural infrastructure in NYC. The vision of FFANYC is for a healthy, biodiverse, robust, accessible, well-understood, and resilient urban forest that justly and equitably delivers its multiple benefits to all residents of NYC while helping the city adapt to and mitigate climate change. There are twelve key goals of the coalition, outlined in the NYC Urban Forest Agenda, including: achieving 30% tree canopy coverage equitably by 2035, establishing a citywide plan for the urban forest, cultivating urban forest careers, setting tree planting and management standards, and creating an urban forestry monitoring and research agenda.

NYS Climate Modeling Project

NYC-EJA, in partnership with NY Renews, was a driving force behind the most progressive and ambitious climate action law in the nation, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), passed in 2019. This law outlines a variety of key climate goals focusing on emissions reductions and protecting and investing in disadvantaged communities to ensure they receive at least 40% of the law’s benefits. However, enacting a law and implementing one, are two distinct endeavors that require immense time, effort, and action. To continue driving this ambitious law, NYC-EJA has continued to work toward identifying and operationalizing policies and mitigation strategies to implement in order to meet the goals and mandates the law demands.

The NYS Climate Modeling Project is a partnership between NYC-EJA and a variety of research partners including Resources for the Future and several academic teams across multiple universities. This research partnership seeks to model a variety of climate policies that could help reach the CLCPA goals to determine how different approaches will impact emissions and air quality.

After over two years of work, our research teams released a major report: Prioritizing Justice in New York State Climate Policy: Cleaner Air for Disadvantaged Communities? Using extensive, cutting edge climate and emissions modeling, this report compared climate policies favored by the Hochul Administration-dominated NYS Climate Action Council with policies championed by environmental justice advocates intended to implement the CLCPA. This comparative analysis showed that the more ambitious, targeted policies advanced by environmental justice advocates would lead to greater emissions reductions than the official Climate Action Plan recommendations, indicating that bolder action is needed to reach the goals outlined in the CLCPA.

Our modeling work continues with ongoing further research into key emissions mitigation policies. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on our upcoming releases. Read the Prioritizing Justice in New York State Climate Policy: Cleaner Air for Disadvantaged Communities here and the press release here.

COVID-19 and Environmental Justice

The negative health outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic closely mirror the racial and socioeconomic disparities that environmental justice communities have faced for decades. Similarly, to climate change, COVID-19 is a threat multiplier. When the two crises intersect, the effects of poor air quality, extreme heat, and severe storms on environmental justice communities will be disastrous.

Download the COVID-19 and Environmental Justice Factsheet here.

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Accomplishments

In 2023, Just Nature NYC published a blogpost: Looking at Cooling Benefits of Plants Through NYC Vegetation Data
In 2023, in collaboration with the Forest For All NYC coalition, NYC-EJA helped shape and pass Intro 1065 – legislation requiring a citywide Urban Forest Master Plan to identify strategies and set goals to protect, care for, and expand the urban forest canopy with an overall goal of equitably expanding the urban forest canopy to 30% citywide, which will help curb the urban heat island effect. NYC-EJA also supported and helped pass Intro 1066, which amends the City Charter to require the City to consider the role of trees and tree canopy in its long-term sustainability planning. Together, we believe this legislation will help make NYC more just, healthy, and resilient.
The Just Nature NYC Partnership now released a translated version of “Opportunities For Growth: Nature-Based Jobs in NYC”. You can read the full Spanish version here “Nuevo informe — Oportunidades de crecimiento: Empleos basados en la naturaleza en Nueva York“.
The Just Nature NYC partnership released “Opportunities for Growth: Nature-Based Jobs in New York City” highlighting the complexity and variety of nature-based jobs across the city needed to build climate-resilient communities.
Thanks to NYC-EJA’s advocacy, the City passed two laws in July 2020 on extreme heat, Local Laws 84and 85 . The first law requires the NYC Department of Health to annually report on neighborhood heat vulnerability and the number of heat-related deaths, as well as an estimation of heat-exacerbated deaths. The second law requires the NYC Office of Emergency Management to develop and submit an annual comprehensive NYC cooling and communication plan.
The Just Nature NYC partnership released “How a Healthy and Equitable Urban Forest Can Help Communities Thrive” highlighting why the urban forest is an environmental justice issue.
In anticipation of the OneNYC update, NYC-EJA released the NYC Climate Justice Agenda to assess the extent to which the Mayor’s sustainability and resiliency blueprints address environmental and climate justice issues, and the type of progress achieved to date. The Agenda also highlights community-based initiatives and recommendations to address these issues.
The City committed to addressing the vulnerability of industrial facilities to climate change impacts through the Open Industrial Uses and Resilient Industry studies. These studies will help assess potential hazardous exposures from industrial sites in the event of severe weather, and create a detailed inventory of best management practices for pollution prevention and climate adaptation.
Mayor Bloomberg’s SIRR reportand the federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding task Force’s reportincluded several Sandy Regional Assembly priorities, and highlighted the problem of environmental justice and industrial waterfront vulnerability to storm surges.
The Hunts Point Lifelines Proposal, submitted by the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and OLIN and supported by THE POINT CDC, received a combined $45 million from US-HUD’s Rebuild by Design Competition and the City of New York. NYC-EJA facilitated discussions leading to the adoption of issues & opportunities prioritized in the Sandy Regional Assembly Recovery Agenda for Hunts Point.