In February 2022, Duluth became the latest Minnesota city to implement a plan to address climate change. In response to the city’s climate emergency resolution, city staff worked with the Great Plains Institute and Common Spark Consulting to develop a Climate Action Work Plan. The City of Duluth Climate Action Work Plan 2022-2027 focuses on near-term mitigation and adaptation measures, building upon ongoing city and community efforts.
Here are a few key takeaways:
- Recent costly, extreme weather events in Duluth underscore the urgency of taking ambitious action to address climate change.
- The Work Plan builds on existing efforts in Duluth and puts the city on a path to both mitigate and adapt to climate change.
- The Work Plan enables the city to have a near-term impact while building a foundation that supports accelerated climate action over time.
Climate change is already impacting Duluth, a port city of 86,000 on the shores of Lake Superior. Multiple extreme weather events have flooded streets, uprooted trees, and knocked out power to thousands of homes and businesses in the last decade. Storm surges inundated parts of the city, damaging public infrastructure along the lakeshore and causing an estimated $18.4 million in rebuilding costs.
The region can expect wide variability in climate change impacts—swings between extremely dry and wet periods with continued warming—making adaptation a challenge.
This Work Plan was developed with the City Sustainability Advisory Team (C-SAT), led by Mindy Granley, the city’s sustainability officer. “It’s exciting to have the first Climate Action Work Plan published. The Work Plan demonstrates that our city has internal support and alignment on climate action, and we know what to do to get started. Now we work to find resources for capacity and funding to get projects done: building improvements, infrastructure upgrades, fleet changes, stormwater resiliency, and more,” Granley said.
The plan includes two phases. The first phase serves as the foundation of climate action in Duluth. It focuses on six key objectives:
- Drive down emissions from city operations
- Strengthen community resilience
- Eliminate institutional barriers and better enable climate action
- Create financial and workforce plans to support accelerated climate action
- Identify shovel-ready projects
- Execute the Work Plan
Each of these objectives includes action items that the city will implement over the next five years. Execution of these actions will prepare the city for the plan’s second phase, which involves accelerating climate action. In this phase, Duluth will focus on constructing climate-integrated infrastructure, community-wide decarbonization, and supporting community-centered projects.
Any city that has implemented climate action knows that capacity and funding are often cited as the major barriers to achieving emissions reductions and strengthening community resilience. This Work Plan addresses those barriers in two ways.
The first is through the identification of shovel-ready projects. These are projects where the city is poised to receive and make good use of state and federal funding that is likely to become available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The second comes from a review of a broad range of funding options suited for different types of climate actions. The review is in the appended memo completed by Common Spark Consulting.
While residents, local organizations, and the city staff have been driving climate action in Duluth for more than a decade, this plan solidifies the city’s efforts and puts it on a path to achieve its climate goals. It’s going to be an all-hands-on-deck effort that will continue well beyond the life of this Work Plan. As Granley said, “with action needed to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, there are a lot of ‘next steps.’ The city will need to partner with a lot of folks—from our community, from around the state, the Great Lakes region, and even the national level—to get this done.”
Contact the Communities team at [email protected] to find out more about how your community can reach its energy planning, sustainability, and climate action goals.
