Cities have a unique and significant role to play in responding to climate change. Many are already doing so by adopting legal and policy tools to encourage the use of smart surfaces—a group of technologies and design strategies that mitigate the effects of climate change in urban environments, especially extreme heat, stormwater flooding, and poor air quality.
To help understand the steps that cities are taking in this space, the Sabin Center and Smart Surfaces Coalition are launching the Smart Surfaces Policy Tracker. This publicly-available database contains over 450 legal and policy instruments adopted to advance smart surfaces relating to smart surfaces. These include zoning and building codes, procurement policies, comprehensive plans, green stormwater infrastructure regulations, and more. Users can filter the documents based on the policy goal that they support—for example, mitigating extreme heat, managing stormwater, providing recreational space, among many other goals searchable—and/or the type of smart surfaces they advance. Users can also sort the documents based on the state, region, or climate zone in which they were adopted, and more.
The tracker is intended to be a resource for city policymakers and others to learn what approaches cities have taken to smart surfaces implementation. It provides examples that policymakers might want to replicate or build upon in their own jurisdictions. Each item in the database features a description as well as links to the original source described to understand how it functions in full context.
Initial research supporting this project was conducted by the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance, and the searchable online site now available was created in partnership with the Smart Surfaces Coalition, National League of Cities, and American Public Health Association. As of today, data in the tracker is drawn from the nine U.S. states containing cities participating in the Smart Surfaces Coalition’s Cities for Smart Surfaces Initiative: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas. The tracker will be expanded in the near future to cover additional cities.
Click here to learn more about the Smart Surfaces Coalition, and here to view more information on the Sabin Center’s large library of other trackers and databases on climate change law topics.
Dan Metzger is a Smart Surfaces Fellow with the Cities Climate Law Initiative at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
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