Seattle's Upcoming Climate Action Plan Update Could Prove Critical to the Health of South End Communities

In 2013, when Seattle last updated its citywide climate action plan, just 12 out of the report's 90 pages were concerned with how the city might prepare for the hazards posed by the climate crisis. Most of the rest was concerned with what the city could do to slash the emissions it contributes to climate change. To people like former City Councilmember Mike O'Brien, who championed the resolutions associated with the 2013 climate action plan, such a split made sense at the time.

Thirteen years ago, many climate consequences were already unavoidable, but throughout the 2010s, the possibility of the world coming together to take collective action in time to avoid the worst felt far more likely than it does today, explained Joel Wainwright, a political economist at Ohio State University. Surely no single city could solve the worldwide crisis on its own, but climate experts across disciplines have recognized that cities together represent an enormous share of global emissions, and their governments have the agility to take swift action in ways countries can't. Seattle's elected officials believed the Emerald City could become a shining example of what municipalities could accomplish.

Those efforts have led to international recognition, if far less progress than promised. In 2022, the C40 Cities collective gave the city an award for its efforts in "building a climate movement." The same year, Seattle's total emissions had declined just 12% relative to the 2008 baseline, according to the Office of Sustainability and Environment (OSE) — far from its 2030 goal of reducing emissions by 58%, with just a few years left and nothing yet indicating that a tremendous swing would close the gap to the goal.

Just as Seattle has struggled to achieve its climate ambitions, the world as a whole faces steep odds of meeting global targets. Last year, the United Nations Environment Programme found that emissions worldwide have continued to grow, in defiance of the pollution-plummeting objectives laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The spiking global temperatures of recent years are a potent reminder of the consequences, both present and future, of continued inaction.

Given this stalled progress and its portents, Seattle has decided to reinvigorate its actions with a particular focus on preparedness. Last year, former Mayor Bruce Harrell celebrated Earth Day withan executive order directing OSE to update the city's climate action plan for the first time in over a decade. And while much of the emphasis will remain on emissions, his order explicitly called for OSE to explore "new strategies to increase climate adaptation." This focus on climate resilience and adaptation was apparent in the way OSE kicked off its planning work last December.

"Folks from the UW Climate Impacts Group and Public Health King County presented to make sure that we were all starting off with the same foundation of the intense climate hazards we are facing," said Narita Ghumman, the OSE project manager for the climate action plan. "That helped set a good grounding from what the challenges are ahead and why we are saying we need big, bold, transformational [change]."

While resilience will be essential for all of Seattle as extreme weather strikes with increasing frequency, the strategies are especially salient for the South End. Already, communities in South Seattle bear the brunt of extreme weather. When extreme heat strikes, the South End feels it most. When heavy rain coincides with high tides, South Park faces the flood risks. And when wildfire smoke creeps in, it adds an extra burden on top of the air pollution that neighborhoods like Beacon Hill already cope with.

Understanding these risks to the South End, the city has already started taking action to bring resilience hubs into neighborhoods in the area. In 2022, at the recommendation of the city's community-led Green New Deal Oversight Board, Harrell established a $2 million budget for a program to identify and develop resilience hubs, including $1.3 million specifically for the Duwamish Valley.

These hubs include spaces that can provide a gathering place and access to resources in case of emergency, because they are designed to keep operating even if the power goes out. Mini Mart City Park, for instance, has a system of solar panels and batteries that can keep the building operating for up to 72 hours during an outage. On the other side of the river, OSE,through its Duwamish Valley Program, has also invested in upgrading the South Park Neighborhood Center for climate resilience and helped the Duwamish River Community Coalition acquire land to build their own center focused on youth development and climate preparedness.

Despite these commitments and strides toward protecting communities from future hazards, plenty of gaps remain. Nancy Huizar, an activist and environmental justice consultant who lives in Beacon Hill, points out that, for many communities, "there isn't really infrastructure to have a space that can hold people in a time of emergency, or [that has] solar panels for community power." To fill that gap, Huizar started the Juneau Street Resilience Pod with friends and has been workshopping a "resilience pod toolkit." While a hub is about building, a pod is about "connection between neighbors," Huizar says. They based this on a quote they remember hearing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: "Our neighbors are our first responders."

Research has shown that community cohesion is crucial for disaster resilience, so the tactic Huizar and their neighbors have taken aims to center that. They organize monthly tea times where they pop up a canopy tent and talk to neighbors to figure out what folks are worried about and how they can help them prepare for an emergency. "The pods can be the hyper-local, street-level organizing," they say, "to ensure we know what folks' needs are; we know where the elders are; we know who might need extra support or may be able to [provide] support."

The challenge right now is getting resources to support the labors of resilience-focused community building. The new climate action plan update, once it's finalized, could in theory lay the groundwork for expanding a network of these pods, whether by providing a pool of resources organizers could tap into or by training people to take on the task of coordinating a resilience pod on their street.

As the city prepares for the impacts of climate change that are here now and will continue to hit harder with each passing year, the South End is coping with other environmental injustices that the climate action plan could address, including air and noise pollution from plane and car traffic.

But for the city government to know the best ways it can take action to serve its residents, it needs to hear from them — especially those most often left out of the conversation. To do that, the Green New Deal Oversight Board and OSE convened a series of community assemblies, each of which brought together two dozen community members over the course of two days to talk about the problems that mattered most to them and what they felt the city could do to address them. The outcomes of these assemblies were then used to inform the board's recommendations for how the city should spend the climate-focused funds generated through the JumpStart tax and also used to inform the update process for the new climate action plan.

Beyond those assemblies, people will have more opportunities to get involved and share feedback. In late April, OSE will release a public survey to get input on the climate action plan. In early summer, the city will also host a regional partner forum to bring together philanthropies, nonprofits, companies, community organizations, academics, and other regional agencies to "coordinate on climate priorities and help advance these collaborative solutions," Ghumman says. In late summer or early fall, once an initial draft has been developed, she adds, "we'll be going back out to community to check in to see if we got it right."

Even outside of the assemblies, surveys, forums, and other formal opportunities for action, "there's multiple ways that we could influence the climate action plan," says Camille Gipaya, the program manager for advocacy and community engagement at the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, which organized one of the community assemblies. That could include contacting state agencies, calling city councilmembers, or reaching out directly to theGreen New Deal Oversight Board, on which Gipaya serves as a youth representative. "I always encourage community members to complain. You don't need to have a solution; that's not your job."