Fall 2024 - 60095 - PA 682GA - Policy Research Project on Global Policy Issues

Proposed Policy Research Project for Fall 2024 and Spring 2025

PA 682PGA (xxxxx): Can Austin Use Its Climate Plan to Improve Its Infrastructure and Public Services?

            Course Number      Graduate section: PA 682PGA (unique #: xxxxx)

                                          Undergraduate section: PA325 (unique #: xxxxx)

                  Day & Time      Mondays, 6 to 9 pm

                         Faculty      David Eaton
Bess Harris Jones Centennial Professor of Natural Resource Policy Studies
LBJ School of Public Affairs

                Office/Phone      SRH 3.342; telephone: 512-626-6333

                           E-mail      eaton@austin.utexas.edu

                 Office Hours      Tuesdays, 2pm-5pm, via phone. Please call 512-626-6333.

            Faculty Support      Crystal Arteaga

                Office/Phone      SRH 3.346; telephone: 512-232-4292

                          E-mail:      crystal.arteaga@austin.utexas.edu 

I. COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course is a joint class between The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies of Hayama, Kanagawa, Japan, with graduate students and faculty from both Texas and Japan. The UT-Austin course will have a graduate section (PA682PGA, unique #:xxxxx) and an undergraduate section (PA325, unique #: xxxxx) that will meet at the same time and in the same location, Monday nights from 6 to 8:50 pm in Austin, Texas and 9 am to 11:50 am in Japan. The LBJ School of Public Affairs (LBJ School) of The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) is cooperating with the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) (based in Hayama, Japan) to investigate whether Austin, Texas can by implementing its Climate Equity Plan achieve co-benefits to improve its municipal infrastructure and municipal services.

In recent years, many cities have adopted net-zero or carbon neutral plans (Fuhr, Hickmann, and Kern 2018). Whether these plans achieve their stated ambitions remains an open question. One way to improve plan design, implementation and outcomes is integrating co-benefits into urban climate planning. ‘Co-benefits’ refer to benefits from actions that address climate change while meeting other essential development priorities. Co-benefits can include improved air quality, better health, enhanced mobility, affordable housing, improved parks, enhanced water, wastewater and drainage infrastructure, increased employment, etc. Co-benefits can demonstrate how additional development gains can offset the costs of climate action, allaying concerns that can weaken implementation (Balaban and de Puppim Oliveira 2017; Xing, R., Hanaoka, T., Kanamori, Y. and Masui 2018; Zusman, Srinivasan, and Dhakal 2012). Co-benefits can similarly help align the interests of different government agencies and stakeholder groups around more integrated climate strategies (Jennings et al., 2020; Zusman et al., 2021). A clear understanding of co-benefits can also ensure that growing pools of climate finance will be allocated to meet core development needs. 

The concept of co-benefits of climate action plans already appeal to national governments as a rationale for climate plan infrastructure investments. However, demonstrating co-benefits may be more influential in cities (Puppim de Oliveira et al. 2017; Uchida and Zusman 2008) because development co-benefits are by definition more local, near-term and certain than climate benefits (Krupnick, Burtraw, and Markandya 2000; Mayrhofer and Gupta 2016; Nemet, Holloway, and Meier 2010; Pearce 2000) and because cities tend to more innovative and flexible than national governments (Betsill and Bulkeley 2006; Bulkeley and Betsill 2013; Corfee-Morlot et al. 2009; Mohajeri et al. 2021). 

Climate co-benefits can strengthen city climate planning. They may also present those same governments with a challenge: cities may lack the resources to systematically estimate co-benefits and assess how policies with the greatest potential can be implemented effectively.  Simply stated, there may be tension between interest in and capacity to draw on co-benefits to drive implementation on the ground. The primary motivation for this project is to help Austin, Texas work with cities in Japan to address that tension. The remainder of this proposal outlines the underlying rationale and motivation, methodology (four-step approach), and timeline for implementation.

This project will employ three steps to achieve its goals: (a) Step 1: Estimate Co-Benefits of Austin’s Climate Equity Action Plan; (b) Step 2: Evaluate Implementation Barriers; and (c) Step 3: Convene Dissemination Workshops.

Step 1: Estimate the co-benefits of Austin’s Climate Equity Plan 

Austin, Texas adopted its Climate Equity Action Plan in September 2021 (Austin Plan). The plan sets ambitious greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) targets of a 52% reduction by 2030 with a view towards reaching negative emissions after 2040. Many proposed actions in the plan have potentially significant co-benefits, including reduced air and water pollution, increased employment, and improved access to social services, especially for the poor and disadvantaged (see Table 1) (City of Austin 2020).[1] The Austin Climate Equity Plan mentions health-related co-benefits over 180 times. The Austin Plan refers to other development priorities, but does not describe co-benefit details, value, or community outcomes. The LBJ School and IGES have secured resources from the Wellcome Trust (a philanthropic organization based in the United Kingdom) to perform such an assessment for Austin, Texas and three cities in Japan (Kawasaki, Niigata, and Hachinohe). This Policy Research Project will use a diverse set of methods and models to quantify the magnitude of Austin Plan co-benefits. One example would be to estimate how many disability adjusted life years (DALYs) can be reduced from Austin’s promotion of electric vehicles and compact planning. Table 1 lists some co-benefits and their relation to United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Table 1: Sectoral Coverage and Interventions with Potential Co-benefits from Austin’s Climate Equity Plan

Source: Austin Climate Equity Plan, 2021

Step 2: Analyse implementation barriers for key interventions in Austin’s Climate Equity Plan

Following quantification of co-benefits, the PRP research team will identify a core set of interventions which can enhance Climate Equity Plan outcomes. The team will identify barriers to implementing priority interventions through interviews with policy makers, knowledgeable business/nonprofit/university informants, as well as focus groups or key informant interviews on how Austin Plan implementation will assess technological, economic, social and institutional barriers. To illustrate, questions will be asked about the social acceptability of changing lifestyles or the institutional constraints on working across different divisions to align interests on climate and land-use planning. To complement focus groups or interviews, surveys will be distributed to policymakers to estimate how much barriers could delay implementation. Estimated delays can then used to illustrate poyential lost co-benefits from slow or ineffective implementation. The research team will then use focus groups and interviews to determine how barriers can be overcome. For example, how could inter-agency or inter-local cooperation raise awareness or align community interests to increase climate, health, and other co-benefits? IGES will use the insights from the Austin research and their own Japanese-based staff to applied similar methods in the three funded cities in Japan.    

Step 3: Organize policy dialogues and dissemination activities to inspire replication in other parts of the United States and Japan

Following the completion of the analyses in Step 1 and 2, the PRP members and IGES staff will convene at least three dissemination events. One of these events will be convened in Japan and two will be held in the United States. Details of the policy dialogues will be developed as part of the PRP class. With funding from the Wellcome Trust, IGES has convened a series of introductory meetings with Kawasaki, Niigata, and Hachinohe, Japan on how the analyses of the sustainable development co-benefits of their climate plans can occur. IGES organized (and LBJ School staff participated in) an opening workshop for the Wellcome funded project, so cities could share a broad overview of their climate plans and possible links to health. IGES also has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between IGES with the Hachinohe government to create a solid foundation for collaboration and enable data requests to the Japanese city governments to help quantify health benefits. 

Work Cited

Balaban, O., and J. de Puppim Oliveira. 2017. “Sustainable Buildings for Healthier Cities: Assessing the Co-Benefits of Green Buildings in Japan.” Journal of Cleaner Production p.S68-S78.

Betsill, Michele M., and Harriet Bulkeley. 2006. “Cities and the Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change.” Global Governance 12:141–59.

Bulkeley, Harriet, and Michele M. Betsill. 2013. “Revisiting the Urban Politics of Climate Change.” Environmental Politics 22(1):136–54.

City of Austin. 2020. “Austin Climate Equity Plan 2020-21.”

Corfee-Morlot, Jan, Lamia Kamal-Chaoui, Michael G. Donovan, Ian Cochran, Alexis Robert, and Pierre-Jonathan Teasdale. 2009. “Cities, Climate Change and Multilevel Governance.” OECD Environmental Working Papers 125.

Fuhr, Harald, Thomas Hickmann, and Kristine Kern. 2018. “The Role of Cities in Multi-Level Climate Governance: Local Climate Policies and the 1.5 °C Target.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 30:1–6. doi: 10.1016/j.cosust.2017.10.006.

Krupnick, Alan, Dallas Burtraw, and Anil Markandya. 2000. The Ancillary Benefits and Costs of Climate Change Mitigation: A Conceptual Framework. Washington DC.

Mayrhofer, Jan P., and Joyeeta Gupta. 2016. “The Science and Politics of Co-Benefits in Climate Policy.” Environmental Science and Policy 57(January):22–30. doi: 10.1016/j.envsci.2015.11.005.

Mohajeri, Nahid, Phil Symonds, James Milner, Juliette Aplin, Joanna Hale, Simon J Lloyd, Henry Fremont, Sam Younkin, Clive Shrubsole, Lawrie Robertson, Jonathon Taylor, Nici Zimmermann, Paul Wilkinson, and Mike Davies. 2021. “A Tool for Assessing the Climate Change Mitigation and Health Impacts of Environmental Policies: The Cities Rapid Assessment Framework for Transformation (CRAFT).” Wellcome Open Research 5. doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16345.2.

Nemet, G. F., T. Holloway, and P. Meier. 2010. “Implications of Incorporating Air-Quality Co-Benefits into Climate Change Policymaking.” Environmental Research Letters 5(1):014007.

Pearce, David. 2000. Policy Frameworks for the Ancillary Benefits of Climate Policies.

Puppim de Oliveira, Jose A., Christopher N. H. Doll, Jose Siri, Magali Dreyfus, Hooman Farzaneh, and Anthony Capon. 2017. “A Systems Approach for Health/Environment/Climate Co-Benefits in Cities.” Pp. 302–19 in Urbanization and Climate Co-Benefits: Implementation of Win-Win Interventions in Cities, edited by Routledge. New York.

Uchida, Toshihiro, and Eric Zusman. 2008. “Reconciling Local Sustainable Development Benefits and Greenhouse Gas Mitigation: Research Trends and Needs.” Studies of Regional Policy 11(1).

Xing, R., Hanaoka, T., Kanamori, Y. and Masui, T. 2018. “Achieving China’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution and Its Co-Benefits: Effects of the Residential Sector.” Journal of Cleaner Production 172:2964–77.

Zusman, Eric, Ancha Srinivasan, and Shobhakar Dhakal. 2012. Low Carbon Transport in Asia: Strategies for Optimizing Co-Benefits in Asia. Oxford: Earthscan.