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Climate Change For Cities: Mitigation And Adaptation

How does climate policy get enacted on the local level? Problems, Policy, and Politics…

Richard P
The Quantastic Journal
26 min readJul 21, 2024

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This was written as a Capstone paper to complete a Northwestern Master’s in Public Policy and Administration.

Free link, here.

Climate change is a complex systems problem that poses special risks for cities in the United States. In 2018, 83 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas, and this is expected to grow to 89 percent by 2050 (U.S. Cities Factsheet, 2021). The threat of global warming induced climate change is especially urgent for coastal U.S. cities. A 3-degree Celsius increase in global temperature that melts the Greenland and West Antarctica Ice Sheets would raise sea levels at least 20 feet, resulting in massive permanent flooding for major cities like Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. (Kanter & Martinez, 2022). Farther from the coast, the likelihood of extreme weather events including droughts, wildfires, and tornadoes has increased as a result of anthropogenically-driven climate change (Stott, 2016), which threatens Midwest and inland American cities. To prepare for these challenges, cities can implement strategies of greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, and adaptation to prepare for future climate…

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Richard P
Richard P

Written by Richard P

I write about databases and geospatial topics

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