The city of Boston plans to buy only electric vehicles and increase access to cooling spaces during periods of extreme heat under a new five-year climate plan released Monday.
The plan detailed the steps the city plans to take by 2030 to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets, as well as to strengthen the city’s defenses against the growing threat of climate change.
“This is Boston’s first climate action plan that not only targets carbon emissions, but also gives us actionable goals to increase resilience against extreme weather and sea level rise,” said Brian Swett, Boston’s chief climate officer, at an unveiling of the new plan Monday morning in East Boston’s LoPresti Park.
The city’s resiliency plans include building new infrastructure to prevent coastal flooding and updating zoning laws to ensure new buildings can withstand storm surges.
“We know the threat that climate change poses here today and, of course, for generations to come,” said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. “But unlike our federal government, Boston is not hiding from that reality. Instead of selling out our communities for the financial gain of a few, this plan is designed to build a better future for all of our neighborhoods and to tap into the opportunity that that represents.”
According to the plan, by the end of last year, Boston had not received 37% of the federal funding it was awarded from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. About 16% of those funds were rescinded, and 22% are awaiting a final agreement with the federal government.
As federal funds are cut, Wu said the city needs to “do more than just envision” its strategy for reducing its impact on the climate and strengthening its resiliency.
“We are taking action,” Wu said. “And so this is the first plan that is all about implementation. It is focused not on the 2050 horizon — which if we don’t take the right steps now, we won’t even have that horizon to think about and pass on to our kids. This is focused on the next five years and the steps that we will take together.”
In addition to the new city policy to purchase only EVs, those short-term steps include increased support for retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient and investments to improve public transportation to incentivize more city residents to use it.
The plan says Boston has made significant progress towards meeting its goal of reducing its emissions by 50% by 2030. Currently, Wu said, the city is on track to reduce emissions by 48% in that timeframe, and implementation of this new plan would be sufficient to meet the goal.
“We have done most of the easy things already,” Wu said. “And at this point, to make a real difference, it is about coming up with the new ideas that would not be possible for city government to implement on its own, that really require community-wide, city-wide collaboration to make successful. It really is about how we sustain and deliver on the commitments that were made by not just announcing something and creating a new program, but then sticking with it and measuring it and making sure the impact is what it was intended to be and delivering what we had projected was going to happen from that action.”
The plan also includes longer-term proposals, including a plan to study to feasibility of extracting, storing and distributing thermal energy from the Charles and Mystic Rivers and from Boston Harbor. That technology is also under development by Vicinity Energy, which is currently installing a heat pump to exploit the thermal energy in the Charles.
Thermal energy from the city’s waterfront “could end up being our biggest natural resource that we are not currently using,” Wu said.
The city has launched a new online dashboard to track its progress on climate actions over the next five years.
