Katrina Wyman and Danielle Spiegel-Feld ’10 examine how cities can address climate change
What role can local government play in responding to climate change? That question is the focus of the just-published book Local Greens: Cities and Twenty-first Century Environmental Problems (Cambridge University Press), coauthored by Wilf Family Professor of Property Law Katrina Wyman and Danielle Spiegel-Feld ’10.
Spiegel-Feld began studying the issue while serving as executive director of NYU Law’s Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law from 2014 to 2023. She also took action, encouraging New York City to enact its 2018 law requiring large buildings to post letter grades for their energy efficiency. Her enthusiasm for city-based initiatives drew in Wyman, and the two began co-teaching an Urban Environmental Law and Policy seminar. Local Greens grew (so to speak) out of a 2020 California Law Review article that they wrote together, “The Urban Environmental Renaissance.”
Spiegel-Feld is now director of environmental strategy at Hines, a real estate investment and management company. We asked Wyman—who is faculty director of the Guarini Center and of the Law School’s LLM program in Environmental and Energy Law—about the opportunities and challenges that cities face in combatting the perils of a changing climate.
What are some of the most significant environmental-protection measures that cities have taken—and how do you assess that significance?
Since the 19th century, local governments in the US have been providing many environmental services that are vital for life in cities, such as drinking water, sewage treatment, garbage collection, and green spaces.
As people have become more concerned about climate change this century, some local governments are trying to help limit global warming. For example, between 2018 and 2024, nine US cities—and a few US states—legislated laws to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or increase energy efficiency in buildings, which, along with transportation, are the main sources of these emissions in cities.
These local building performance standards, which include Local Law 97 in New York City, are just starting to take effect, and the jury is still out, in my view, on whether they will successfully decarbonize buildings. Nonetheless, they represent an innovative attempt to address a major global environmental problem very different from the typical concerns of local governments focused on improving life within local borders. Cities have limited legal tools for decarbonizing cars and trucks, but cities often control the streets within their borders, and they are taking steps to reallocate streetspace to bikes and pedestrians.
How does your vision for the role of cities in environmental protection vary based on which party is in control in Washington and their differing views on federal regulation?
When the party in control federally is hostile to environmental regulation, environmental advocates and scholars tend to focus more on what local and state governments can do to protect the environment. Local Greens emphasizes that local governments play an important role in protecting the environment, especially their local environments, regardless of who is in power in Washington DC. I hope the book will motivate scholars to think of environmental law as more than federal law, which has been the focus on environmental law scholarship since the 1970s when Congress legislated the major federal environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.
Of course, when the federal government is working to protect the environment, cities have more opportunities to advance environmental protection. Cities cannot address many important pollution problems on their own because the sources of greenhouse gas emissions and other types of air and water pollution are often outside city borders, and there are limits on the regulations that cities can impose on local actors if other cities with which they are competing for businesses and residents are not similarly regulating.
What are some advantages cities have over federal and state governments in advancing environmental initiatives?
Cities can more easily tailor environmental policies to address highly localized risks than the federal and state governments. For example, while everyone suffers when it is very hot outside, the risk of dying from extreme heat is not equally distributed. New York City has a map that shows that the risk of dying from heat varies significantly depending on the neighborhood in the city. In some cases, the risks of dying from heat are substantially different in neighborhoods that are geographically proximate, because these risks relate to social and demographic factors. Local governments are likely better placed to understand at a granular level the risks within their borders, and to implement measures to address these risks in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, such as planting trees, improving access to air conditioning, and bolstering community ties that can help people get food and basic supplies in heat waves.
However, it is important to recognize that, in order to act, local governments may need funding and expertise from higher levels of government. Also, the distribution of political and economic power in cities also may mean that local governments do not focus their attention on addressing risks in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Your book focuses on New York City. How can New York—with its high population density, extensive mass transit, and coastal location—serve as a model for other cities with very different attributes?
The book does not suggest that New York City’s environmental policies are models that other cities should simply replicate. I grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and moved to New York as an adult from Toronto, and I am wary of suggesting that a policy developed in one city can easily be transplanted to another.
Local Greens looks at New York City’s environmental policy efforts this century to demonstrate that big city governments have economic and policy reasons to protect the environment, and to illustrate the constraints on local environmental protection efforts. For example, the book argues that New York and other coastal cities have strong incentives to protect their populations and infrastructure against flood risks, and it highlights some of the city’s efforts to reduce damage from storm surge flooding after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. However, the book also underscores that New York has yet to seriously grapple with the flood risks that will likely grow in many of the city’s coastal neighborhoods over the course of the 21st century as sea levels rise and storms become more intense with climate change.
In using New York as a case study for thinking about why cities might address climate change, and the constraints they face in doing so, Local Greens aims to draw attention to the potential for local governments to participate in environmental protection. Readers might not agree with the book’s generalizations based on New York’s experience, but I hope the book stimulates more serious thinking about what can—and cannot be—expected of local governments in an era of climate change.
As your book notes, cities often bear the full cost of measures they take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but receive only a tiny fraction of the benefit, since these gases are produced and spread globally. So how can cities be incentivized to undertake this spending?
Realistically, no single city can do much on its own to affect planetary temperatures, so you need activists, motivated by ethics or ideology or something else, to motivate local officials to think beyond local economic interests. You also need people within government who share a commitment to try to limit climate change and are willing to put in the time and effort to develop policies to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions.
However, I want to add that the jury is still out on whether local governments can truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions within their borders. Even if government insiders and outside activists can persuade cities to pass laws to reduce local emissions, the laws still need to be implemented. The most meaningful local policies, the building performance standards mentioned above, are just starting to take effect, and it will be years before it is clear whether these standards lead building owners to invest in costly retrofits to decarbonize their systems.
What did you find most rewarding about writing this book?
Working with Danielle Spiegel-Feld and the many NYU Law postdoctoral fellows and student research assistants who helped with the book. Danielle is a native New Yorker and she is a great writer who always prodded me to express myself more clearly and succinctly. The fellows and research assistants were invaluable in finding information and getting the book to the finish line.