by Martyn Roetter
During the first week of August, the City of Boston posted a draft pf ots 2030 Climate Action Plan (CAP) and invited citizen feedback. The CAP “includes a preliminary list of high-impact climate action strategies and a draft Climate Justice Framework. Based on public input, a more detailed full draft—including metrics, partnerships, and implementation pathways—will be released in Fall, 2025 for public comments, with the final plan to be published in early 2026.”
Boston Green Action co-founder Martyn Roetter shares his perspectives on the challenges and opportunities:
It is encouraging and praiseworthy that Boston is continuing to pursue and update its Climate Action Plan even though the federal government has been taken over by climate—and more broadly fact and knowledge—deniers. The challenge for us as citizens is how to work with the city to do whatever is in our power to help minimize the harmful consequences of human-exacerbated climate warming as much as we can, despite the new role of the US EPA, where the P now seems to stand in practice for Pollution, not Protection.
Boston’s draft Climate Action Plan should be read carefully. In a spirit of cooperation and constructive suggestions we should consider where and how we think Boston has been doing well and where it may have fallen short, for example whether it is effectively protecting and strengthening the ecosystems of our iconic parks.
We should also consider how the Climate Action Plan should be coordinated with a (yet to be formulated and long overdue) Master Plan for development. After all, buildings are the major source of greenhouse gases from Boston, which raises a key question of when and where it makes more sense to maximize reuse of existing structures rather than build new ones. New construction generates larger carbon footprints than reuse and renovation of existing structures.
It is also important—hence the reference to parks—to emphasize the need for actions and plans to mitigate the effects of weather-related disasters that are already devastating communities (floods, wildfires, heat waves), not in the 2030s or 2040s or by the Net Zero target date of 2050. They are becoming alarmingly more frequent and intense, driven by climate changes that include contributions from human activities to date.
Read the draft of Boston’s Climate Action Plan in full.