The most successful climate solutions in communities are those that are planned with concerted community engagement and that apply an explicit equity lens to the planning process. Not wanting to miss this immense opportunity, climate equity offers to right the wrongs of past injustice as part of its climate programs.
City of Los Angeles’ Regulatory Affairs Division contracted ICLEI to convene a department-wide equity workshop for 12 staff in June 2019. The curriculum focused on root causes, social factors, and biological conditions that underpin climate sensitivity, then presented procedural, distributional and structural objectives that the Department could take to insert equitable decision-making. The objective of the workshop was to build a high level of understanding among city staff for the “why” behind multistakeholder engagement, building institutional capacity to cross-departmental silos and foster a community-driven approach when developing climate programs.
12 staff of the LA Department of Sanitation & Environment, Regulatory Affairs Division were trained on equity and multistakeholder engagement on climate programs.
Specialized and Expert Regulatory Services to develop and present Climate Equity and Community-Driven Planning workshop to select Los Angeles city employees.
The workshop has been completed. It successfully set the stage for on-going efforts to inform and garner support from city executives for the city’s Climate Action Plan.
Los Angeles, CA
“The workshop opened our eyes to how important stakeholder ownership is in achieving engagement in climate resiliency activities within our city government. It helped us address the paralysis caused from the perceived enormity of mitigation actions; we now recognize that the steps we can take will not be as hard as people imagine, and will ultimately save money. Over the next 12-18 months we are planning to use the ICLEI workshop as a catalyst for additional dialogue-inducing workshops.” – Jeremy Pathmanabhan, Program Manager, Climate Change, City of Los Angeles
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