4 ways cities are funding climate action
Bloomberg Cities Network
When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last week, city leaders heralded the new law’s massive investment in addressing climate change, including billions of federal dollars municipalities can tap into for climate projects.
Yet in some ways, the feds were just catching up to what cities have been doing on their own for years. City leaders were already moving urgently to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and find ways to pay for it when federal support was scarce.
“Mayors have long been at the frontlines of the climate crisis, doing what we can to move our communities and country closer to the Paris Agreement goals,” says Sylvester Turner, the Mayor of Houston and Chair of Climate Mayors, a group representing more than 470 U.S. mayors. “This bill will be an incredible boost to those efforts.”
Longtime leaders at the local level include the 25 cities who received support and resources from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ network of partners while participating in the American Cities Climate Challenge. The funding strategies these cities developed helped sustain American climate leadership in recent years and remain critical today, even with historic amounts of federal dollars flowing from Washington to cities.