The Pernicious Effects of Uncertainty on Municipal Climate Action
Daniel Engelberg (Commonwealth of Massachusetts), Anne Hudson (SSEN Transmission), Yonah Freemark (Urban Institute), Joanna Moody (World Bank), Jinhua Zhao (MIT)
Cities are well positioned to test policies designed to address climate change that could be implemented more expansively at higher levels. And many city officials are enthusiastic about leveraging local governmental powers to reduce greenhouse gases and prepare their cities for climate impacts. Cities like Washington, DC, for example, have implemented innovative decarbonization policies such as building performance standards designed to ramp down emissions from large buildings; others, like Boston, have created municipal heat resilience plans that seek to adapt local infrastructure and services for increased temperatures.
But for municipal governments, climate policy is a balancing act tempered by the great uncertainty inherent in enacting policies with unclear effects that respond to an unknown future. City-level climate policies suffer from inescapable uncertainty; decarbonization efforts often have little precedent and adaptation policies rely on climate science that is imprecise at the urban scale. How many greenhouse gases will a selected policy abate? What are the specific impacts of climate-related hazards on my city? What are the costs associated with this action? Will these policies still be politically palatable in the decades to come?
Our new research sets out to understand the effects of such uncertainties on local policy makers’ support for climate action. Using survey techniques and a novel measure of climate action uncertainty, we establish that these uncertainties have a pernicious effect on climate action. They generate hesitation among even progressive lawmakers. Advisors, staff, and activists seeking to promote climate action in the face of these challenges should seek out and promote policies that are likely to remain effective and well supported across knowable political, economic, and social uncertainties. Further, they should emphasize the robustness of their preferred solutions.
Throughout the remainder of this blog, we review several theories of uncertainty’s impact on decision making, argue for targeted study of municipal elected officials, summarize our methodology, and present our results.
Scholars offer three major theories to explain the impact of uncertainty on decision making. The first is that uncertainty is a paralytic — just one more reason to delay action. This is the hypothesis on which we based our research. The second possibility is that uncertainty encourages reversion to reference narrative. When the informational load of uncertainty is too overwhelming to process, this confusion can encourage the decision maker to stick even more strongly to their selected course. Or, finally, uncertainty could accelerate action. When considering the range of possible outcomes, some individuals may focus on worst-case scenarios and move quickly to forestall them.
Despite the widespread diffusion of these theories, there has been little quantitative research thus far examining how municipal elected officials make decisions. Much of our knowledge base is built upon case studies or extrapolated from the much broader literature on decision making. However, our elected officials are critical actors worthy of their own cross-cutting study. Moreso, they are not a random sample of the population; they are the few with the confidence to run for office and who possess qualities that make them appealing to their constituencies.
We thus sought to understand how local elected officials make decisions in the face of what we call climate uncertainty. To do so, we sent a survey to every mayor and city councilor in all US cities with over 100,000 residents. Our sample ultimately included responses from 245 elected officials. This survey consisted of three sections. The first consisted of several questions regarding impacts respondents might expect climate change to have on their cities, their level of climate urgency, and their uncertainty regarding climate action. The second section queried their level of support for four mitigation and four adaptation policies, such increases street tree funding, requiring climate impact assessments, and committing to a 90% greenhouse gas reduction by 2050. The final section collected socio-demographic control data, including their partisan affiliation and political-ideological leanings.
Our survey responses show that self-identified Republicans and conservatives were significantly more reluctant to support any of the policies that we presented, affirming that climate action is an issue divided on partisan and ideological lines. Nonetheless, we find that policies such as planting street trees and requiring elevated critical systems—neither of which explicitly mention greenhouse gas emissions or climate change—saw a higher degree of cross-party support. Their co-benefits are straightforward, and both serve the population broadly. Further, they are clearly within the jurisdiction of local government action.
Figure 1: Policy support by party affiliation
Figure 2: Policy support by ideology
We next used structural equation modeling (SEM) to evaluate responses. This method enabled us to measure latent variables, qualities that cannot be observed directly but can be inferred from observed variables. In our case, several different survey questions contributed to our broader assessment of respondents’ sense of climate uncertainty, urgency, and perceived impacts. SEM also allowed us to model the degree to which climate uncertainty has both direct and indirect effects on elected officials’ propensity to act. This means that we can observe how climate uncertainty encourages caution in elected officials, answering whether uncertainty is, indeed, a paralytic force. Additionally, we can also measure how climate uncertainty influences respondents’ assessments of urgency and impacts, further diminishing likely action.
In our full model, uncertainty had a significant, negative relationship with respondents’ propensity to support climate policies. This supports our hypothesis that uncertainty has a pernicious effect on climate action, including among respondents who identified as Democrats or progressives. The effects are primary direct and not moderated by the impact of uncertainty on assessments of climate urgency or impacts. Though uncertainty is important, we also found that officials’ assessment of climate impacts on their cities was a more important factor in explaining their propensity to act. This suggests that strategy of highlighting the local impacts of climate change to personalize it—rather than discussing it in terms of its global effects—should be used as a core of any climate messaging.
Our research indicates that policy advocates and municipal staff should acknowledge, and respond to, uncertainty when preparing climate policy recommendations for elected officials. Fortunately, many methods already exist to do so. Among the most valuable are those that identify robust actions—strategies that are effective in a variety of circumstances. They may be robust because they support the desired climate outcomes no matter the uncertainty or because they have co-benefits even if the climate outcome materializes. Scenario planning, in its various forms, can aid officials in imagining different futures and identifying pathways that succeed in a variety of circumstances.
Though our research findings suggest that climate uncertainty diminishes the propensity of elected officials, on average, to support climate policy, we emphasize that our conclusions are specific to our case. In other decision circumstances, and even other policy matters, uncertainty may have reference narrative or accelerationist effects. It’s worth investigating uncertainty further in different policy spaces. Perhaps elected officials are more inclined to cast aside uncertainty, for example, when dealing with more familiar municipal issues.
Daniel L. Engelberg is the Director of Climate Analysis for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. His work is focused on how the state decarbonizes and does so in an equitable manner.
Anne Hudson is an Energy Transition Strategy Manager for SSEN Transmission.
Yonah Freemark is the lead of the Practice Area on Fair Housing, Land Use, and Transportation at the Urban Institute.
Joanna Moody is a Transport Specialist in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region at the World Bank. She supports air transport projects in the Caribbean islands, facilitating regional connectivity of people and goods and improving the resilience of critical infrastructure to natural hazards exacerbated by climate change.
Jinhua Zhao is the Professor of City and Transportation Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prof. Zhao integrates behavioral and computational thinking to decarbonize the world's mobility system.