Cities Say They’re Planning for Climate Equity. Are They Actually Doing It?
Yuer Wang (University of Texas at Austin) and Sara Hughes (RAND School of Public Policy)
Climate change doesn’t hit everyone equally. Socioeconomically disadvantaged groups—particularly low-income communities and communities of color, often termed “frontline communities”—face the greatest climate risks while possessing the fewest resources to adapt or recover (Schlosberg and Collins 2014). As local governments have become key players in U.S. climate action over the past decade, many cities have explicitly integrated equity into their Climate Action Plans (CAPs) as a stated priority alongside emissions reductions and resilience building. Cities in California have led this shift. Driven by aggressive state climate justice laws, a highly diverse population, and serious exposure to climate risks like wildfire, heat, and drought, California cities have produced some of the most progressive equity-centered climate plans in the country (Angelo, Macfarlane and Sirigotis 2020).
However, a critical gap persists in urban climate governance literature. Most research stops at studying CAP plans themselves—analyzing the language cities use and the goals they set—without asking whether those commitments actually turn into action on the ground (Angelo et al., 2022; Brinkley and Wagner, 2024). Our research bridges this gap by looking at implementation, not just the plan contents. Because many cities were just beginning to adopt equity-centered CAPs at the time of our research, we focus specifically on the early-stage transition from goals in CAPs to actionable pathways.
Mixed-Method Evaluation Framework: How Cities Translate Goals in CAPs to Implementation Progress
We analyzed 20 California cities whose CAPs explicitly commit to climate equity. Our study addresses the following core questions: How prepared is each city to turn its equity goals into actionable projects and programs? Why are some cities more successful than others? And what are the primary facilitators and barriers to early-stage implementation?
Grounded in policy implementation literature, our scoring framework comprises eight distinct indicators designed to evaluate how effectively cities operationalize the climate equity commitments embedded in their CAPs. These indicators assess critical structural elements, including equity-centered action specificity, frontline community identification and involvement, dedicated funding, departmental responsibility, timelines, accountability mechanisms, and the overall organizational capacity. Each indicator was scored on a 0–2 scale, with four indicators offering an additional bonus point for cities that exceeded baseline expectations. This yielded a total possible score ranging from 0 to 20, allowing us to systematically rank the 20 cities based on their overall implementation readiness.
Next, to understand why certain cities outperformed others in the strength of implementation strategies for equity actions, we conducted seven interviews with municipal climate policy leaders representing the top three and bottom two cities in our ranking. This allowed us to identify the internal barriers and facilitators to early-stage implementation readiness, and what helped or hindered them turning equity goals into actual projects and programs, while also capturing emerging factors likely to shape long-term implementation.
Even among cities in California that set genuinely ambitious equity goals, implementation readiness varied enormously, with scores ranging from 4 to 19. This variation demonstrates that while ambitious policy commitment is an essential foundation, it does not guarantee implementation capacity. We found that high-scoring cities didn’t just excel at one thing. They tended to be strong across the board: successfully integrating robust vulnerability assessments, explicit departmental responsibility, and inclusive engagement frameworks into a cohesive package. In contrast, low-scoring cities suffered from compounding institutional deficits, often lacking funding, clear responsibility assignment, and detailed monitoring systems simultaneously.
These differences in readiness translated directly into distinct real-world implementation progress. Cities with robust implementation frameworks reported advancements toward their equity goals, whereas municipalities with weaker structures described stalled or highly constrained initiatives. This divergence reinforces the reality that the quality of a plan’s operational planning—rather than its stated intent alone—is the primary driver of whether equity commitments are realized. However, even among the leading municipalities, progress remains concentrated in the foundational stages of equity work. Current initiatives primarily focus on rebuilding trust between local governments and marginalized residents, supplemented by targeted infrastructure investments such as resilience hubs and emergency communication networks. More substantive efforts to dismantle the structural disparities in how communities experience and recover from climate impacts have yet to fully materialize.
Across both high- and low-scoring cities, interviews revealed a consistent set of institutional prerequisites for successful implementation: sustained political leadership committed to both climate action and social justice, dedicated equity staff or offices, engagement processes designed to genuinely center marginalized voices, stable and sufficient funding, and monitoring systems built around measurable equity indicators.
Specifically, stable, progressive political leadership serves as the vital institutional “container” for equity initiatives, generating the political backing needed to prioritize it citywide and coordinate across departments that might otherwise work in silos.
Importantly, these foundational elements also directly mitigate the barriers cities most often report facing: limited internal capacity, community distrust, unstable or insufficient funding, and a lack of tools to track progress. Implementation research suggests these elements work best when built together, early and deliberately, thereby cultivating the institutional capacity a city needs to move equity goals from ambition into practice.
Suggestions for Municipal Planners
Our findings reveal a critical disconnect in contemporary urban climate governance: municipalities frequently achieve technical targets like greenhouse gas mitigation but struggle to demonstrate comparable progress on climate equity. Ambitious goals do not guarantee follow-through—equity must be intentionally institutionalized into a city’s agenda to drive transformative changes. City leaders can apply practical lessons derived from our findings to close the implementation gap. First, they must coordinate equity initiatives across municipal bureaus and broader social justice frameworks to prevent institutional siloes. Second, they should ground actions in data by utilizing social vulnerability assessments to identify at-risk frontline communities, guide strategy design, and establish evaluation baselines. Third, they need to establish quantifiable metrics, replacing vague goals with specific targets to provide the transparency required for active monitoring. Finally, they must reduce participation barriers for frontline communities, building institutional trust by treating community input as a core requirement for decision-making.
References
Angelo, Hillary, Key Macfarlane, and James Sirigotis. 2020. The Challenge of Equity in California s Municipal Climate Action Plans. Santa Cruz, CA: Univ. of California, Santa Cruz.
Angelo, Hillary, Key MacFarlane, James Sirigotis, and Adam Millard-Ball. 2022. Missing the Housing for the Trees: Equity in Urban Climate Planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research 44 (3): 1415 30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X211072527.
Brinkley, Catherine, and Jenny Wagner. 2024. Who Is Planning for Environmental Justice and How? Journal of the American Planning Association 90 (1): 63-76. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2022.2118155.
Schlosberg, David, and Lisette B. Collins. 2014. From Environmental to Climate Justice: Climate Change and the Discourse of Environmental Justice. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 5 (3): 359 -74. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.275.
Yuer Wang is a Ph.D. student in Public Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research evaluates climate policy implementation alongside community resilience planning and risk perception studies to advance equitable urban climate governance. She holds an M.S. in Environment and Sustainability and M.P.P. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Sara Hughes is a Senior Policy Researcher at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating solutions to water, climate, and environmental policy challenges from local to global scales. Current work examines water policy and planning, community resilience, environmental justice, infrastructure investment, and strategic partnerships. She is the author of Repowering Cities, which explores the governance and politics of urban decarbonization efforts.