Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people āCovering Climate Nowā, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is āCovering Climate Nowā in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine

IN MIAMI, A REPUBLICAN MAYOR EMBRACES CLIMATE-SMART STIMULUS SPENDING
Francis Suarez, Miamiās Republican mayor, has been consistently aggressive on climate. Dismissing the idea that taking climate change seriously makes him somehow less conservative, Suarez says the idea of a green stimulus is āmusic to my ears.ā
In 2017, on the same day Suarez was elected, Miamians voted to authorize a $400 million āMiami Foreverā bond that seeks to develop long-term resilience for the city, including against sea-level rise, flooding, and hurricane storm surge. That means building seawalls, installing stormwater pumps with valved outfalls (so water ejected from the city into water bodies is clean and doesnāt damage local ecosystems), and physically raising some city roads.
Flooding in the city is already routine, putting billions of dollars in property at risk and leaving many low-lying residentsānearly 60 percent of Miami-Dade county is less than six feet above sea levelāanxiously looking for somewhere else to go. This past November, Suarez led Miami to declare a āclimate change emergency.ā
But $400 million isnāt nearly enough to prepare Miami for the full extent of whatās coming, Suarez said. And Covid-19 budget cuts have only complicated matters: Recently, the city weighed eliminating its chief resilience officer, for instance. āMiami Forever was sort of a down payment,ā Suarez said. āItās not going to solve all our problems. So, if we were to get a stimulus, we would be able to put the money to use right away.ā
A green stimulus would also give a boost, Suarez said, to more ambitious, engineered solutions in the works. Large urban reservoirs, designed to trap and expel excess waters, are under construction along the inland Miami River, and along the ocean-side Biscayne Bay. The benefits are three-fold, Suarez said: elevating the sea wall, creating a buffer for the community in the form of a reservoir, and creating new public space. āAnd whenever youāre investing in public spaces, you get infinite return, because by their very nature theyāre not going anywhere,ā Suarez said.

REVIVING A BATTERED SOLAR INDUSTRY TO HELP COOL PHOENIX
Phoenix is hot. Itās among the fastest-warming cities in the United States, with temperatures topping 100 degrees on 103 days in 2019. This summer was the cityās hottest season ever. And for four years running, Phoenix has set records for heat-related deaths.
This June, Phoenixās Street Transportation Department fast-tracked a ācool pavementā pilot program. Roads in eight neighborhoods are being outfitted with a special, water-based treatment that is lighter in color than traditional asphalt and reflects sunlight instead of absorbing it. If the cool pavement proves effective in mitigating the urban āheat islandā effectāand is resilient to Phoenixās high temperatures, persistent sunshine, and monsoon stormsāofficials hope to implement it far and wide in the city.
Meanwhile, however, the Covid-19 lockdown has shrunk potential sources of funding for climate-smart projects. With ridership way down on public transit, fare collection has fallen by more than 50 percent. To ensure that cooling projects and sustainable development continue to reach the cityās residents, Phoenix needs a green stimulus, said Mayor Kate Gallego.
Federal support, Gallego said, would aid the expansion of cooled bus stops, shaded walking paths, and elevated solar panels around the city. The solar panels would provide not only electricity but also badly needed shade in open areas, especially in lower-income neighborhoods where regular access to air conditioning is not guaranteed.
In 2019, Arizona was the state with the sixth most solar-related jobsālast year, the state produced enough solar energy to power three-quarters of a million homesāand nearly 90 percent of those jobs reside in the Phoenix metropolitan area. But the economic slowdown following the coronavirus hit the solar industry hard. Thousands of solar jobs were lost, and plans to expand solar deployment in Arizona were dramatically scaled back. Federal funding, especially for workforce training and development, could help the industry bounce back.
The government could also provide up-front loans to help people and businesses, particularly in low-income areas, adopt solar and other green technologies, such as more efficient windows, air conditioners and other appliances. āThere are so many energy efficiency products that pay for themselves over time, but there are upfront [financial] barriers to some people taking advantage,ā Gallego explained.
āThere are beautiful and important ideas waiting to happen,ā the mayor added. āIf the federal government could lead the way, there are so many transformative projects that could happen, just when local government needs them most.ā

BOGOTĆāS MAYOR SAYS DEVELOPING NATIONS CAN BE SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS
In Colombia, the funds a city receives from the national government are more or less fixed in the constitution, based on the cityās population and relative wealth compared with other parts of the country. When it comes to a stimulus, then, itās a matter less of lobbying for better support than of rebalancing priorities in BogotĆ”ās budget.
Thatās fine for the new mayor, Claudia López HernĆ”ndez, who already counted climate action among her foremost priorities in BogotĆ”. The coronavirus pandemic has caused a significant shortfall in tax collection, so this is a time for fearless and intelligent use of debt, López said. āThis is a time to invest heavily and push. This moment [calls for] a Keynesian approach. If we start doing some neoliberal solution, weāll only depress the economy.ā
López, who began her four-year term this January, is the first member of Colombiaās center-left Green Party elected to BogotĆ”ās mayorship, generally viewed as the second-most-important elected position in the country after president. López is also the first womanāand the first gay womanāelected to the post. āWe donāt want to just comply [with UN climate goals]. We want to be a world leader,ā López said. āWe want to be a big, developing city in a developing country leading not only in what we achieve but in how we achieve it.ā
Equity and reconciliation are foremost on Lópezās mind, in a country that is recovering from a long and recent civil war. āWhat we do has to be sustainable in both climate change and social inclusion terms, otherwise itās not really sustainable in the long-term,ā López said. In the near-term, López plans to implement a universal basic income and invest heavily in education, especially post-secondary education, with a focus on skills that lead to green jobs in digital and knowledge-based economic sectors.
Before the pandemic hit, Lópezās government declared a general alarm for environmental pollution in the city, where air pollution levels often are more than twice as high as the World Health Organization recommends, contributing to thousands of deaths annually.
Cleaning up the air means changing how BogotĆ” gets around. Since March, the city has added 80 kilometers of new bikeways, adding to the 500-some already in place. By the end of her term, López hopes to add 300 kilometers more, taking space away from cars directly and giving it to bikers: āinverting the pyramidā of how transportation space is allocated in the city, López said, enough that 80 percent of commuters in the city will be able to get around by bike if they choose to. (López has set an example in this regard, biking seven kilometers from home to her inauguration ceremony in BogotĆ”ās Parque Simón BolĆvar.) The city will also aim to replace its buses with lower-emissions models and push forward with a new, all-electric mass transit system.
All of these plans were already in the works, López said, but in the wake of Covid-19 sheās front-loading them and striking while the iron is hot. āWe have no choice,ā she explained. āJust like we have no choice to wear masks and social distance and invest to improve our health and testing systems, there is no point to discuss here. The way we produce, the way we live, the way we consume, itās simply unsustainable for humanity. We need to act.ā

PARIS CHAMPIONS āTHE 15-MINUTE CITYā TO CUT BOTH STRESS AND EMISSIONS
Around the world, pandemic shutdowns prompted cities to reclaim streets from cars and preserve them for bikes and pedestrians. In Paris, that work had been underway for years. Since her inauguration in 2014, mayor Anne Hidalgo has eliminated thousands of on-street parking spots across Paris, barred high-polluting vehicles from entering the city, and banned cars from some streets entirely, including along the river Seine. Still, the lockdown this spring offered a calming, if uneasy, glimpse of what a green future could look like in the City of Light. āWe could breath,ā Hidalgo recently told Time magazine. āWe could hear birds.ā
Environmental pledges were central to Hidalgoās campaign for reelection, which she won this June by a landslide. Hidalgo championed āthe 15-minute city,ā a planning concept in which neighborhoods function as villages unto themselves, where virtually all needs can be met with 15 minutes or less of walking or biking: stores, restaurants, fitness centers, schools, banks, work centers, and more. The need for cars, in turn, decreases.
The 15-minute city, or la Ville du quart dāheure, represents a shift away from the conventional zoning wisdom, which separates residential and commercial districts, that has dominated city development over the past century, said Carlos Moreno, an urban planning advisor to Hidalgo and professor at the Sorbonne.
Itās not just Paris thatās going green. France is in the midst of a āgreen wave,ā with environmental party candidates winning mayoral elections in June in large cities across the country, including Marseilles, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux. The election marked a decided shift, commentators said, toward public concern for climate action, driven perhaps in part by the unbearable heat of recent summers in Western Europe; Emmanuel Macron, the centrist president, has suggested a referendum to amend the countryās constitution to include language about fighting climate change.
With peopleās movement necessarily constricted, the pandemic shutdown was a great time to pilot many aspects of the 15-minute city, including a further reclamation of public space from cars, Moreno said. Now, he added, the 15-minute city will prove key to Parisās economic revitalization. As part of a ābig bang of proximity,ā as Hidalgo puts it, the city will move to reimagine work life, revolutionize child and elder care, revisit dated real estate practices, and ensure that cafĆ©s and cultural opportunities are more ubiquitous in all 20 arrondissements. In theory, this will help rekindle economic activity citywide, Moreno saidāincluding in parts of the city that were underdeveloped and marginalized under Franceās old economic status quo.
But to do all of this, while also ensuring that those devastated financially by the coronavirus shutdown donāt fall through societyās cracks, will take spending. āAutomatically, we will have a deficit,ā Moreno said. The 15-minute city is a Paris project, and not something that requires explicit support or approval from Franceās central government. But the central government can, Moreno said, help the city stay afloat financially as it charts a way forward in this difficult time.

IN LOS ANGELES, A GREEN STIMULUS WOULD āSUPERCHARGEā THE SHIFT TO EVS
In the car capital of the world, itās little surprise that plans for tackling climate change would focus on how Angelenos move.
As a part of the cityās extensive and thorough Green New Deal, announced by Mayor Eric Garcetti in the spring of 2019, work is underway to electrify the cityās bus fleet and to get more car owners into electric vehicles; the goal is for a complete, citywide transition to zero-emissions vehicles by 2050. That requires installing more EV chargers. The cityās Green New Deal calls for increasing the number of chargers from 8,000 at present to 10,000 by 2022 and 28,000 by 2028.
That was the plan, at least. But the coronavirus lockdown is forecast to cost the cityās transit agency, which partially funds green initiatives, $1.8 billionāa quarter of all forecast revenues for 2020, according to Doug Mensman, Los Angelesās director of transportation. That doesnāt mean that the cityās Green New Deal projects will be scrapped, but all could be delayed or deferred. āIt may take up to two years to recover to pre-Covid levels of financial security, so federal funding is imperative to backfill that loss,ā Mensman said.
The transition to low-emissions cars, in particular, is funded by Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits, which reward the sale and consumption of cleaner fuels. But that requires a robust marketplace. Here, too, the federal government can play a role, in part by telling car manufacturers that low-emissions vehicles are the way of the future, said Lauren Faber OāConnor, LAās chief sustainability officer. The Trump administration has done the opposite, rolling back fuel emissions standards for gas-powered vehicles.
A crucial element of the cityās Green New Deal, OāConnor said, is that all the cityās residents reap the benefits of change. That includes ensuring that jobs created through the Green New Deal reach historically underemployed populations. āWeāre building a new economy. We need to be very deliberate about ensuring that everyone has the ability to participate in it.ā To help low-income residents access electric vehicles, the cityās EV car-share program, BlueLA, offers steeply subsidized rates to consumers who need them. BlueLA is another program that could benefit immediately from climate-smart stimulus spending, OāConnor said. āWe want to help people in every way to make the right decision.ā
Los Angeles is also working to get drivers out of their cars and instead to choose public transportation, walking, bike share systems, or micromobility systems, such as scooters. āItās not rocket science. The solutions are there,ā OāConnor said. āWe know what we need to do, and the strategies are no-regrets, economically and from a health perspective. All signs point in this direction. We just need the federal government to embrace it.ā