Strategic Climate Action Planning in Portland
Perhaps no American city has taken up the challenge of combating rising green house gas emissions as diligently as Portland, Oregon. Portland adopted the firstmunicipal climate action plan of any city in the nation in 1993, with plan updates following in
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Strategic Climate Action Planning in Portland Matthew I. Slavin and Kent Snyder
Climate change is the defining challenge of the twenty-first century. —City of Portland and Multnomah County Climate Action Plan, 2009
erhaps no American city has taken up the challenge of combating rising green house gas emissions as diligently as Portland, Oregon. Portland adopted the first municipal climate action plan of any city in the nation in 1993, with plan updates following in 2001 and 2009. Portland is also the only large city in America to have reduced both its per capita and overall CO2 emissions during this period. A climate action plan is similar to a municipal master, general, or comprehensive plan that employs analytical methodologies to identify community challenges, sets forth goals and identifies strategies and actions by which these goals are to be attained, and establishes benchmarks or other sorts of measures that can be used to assess the degree to which progress in meeting these goals is being made. In the case of climate action planning, the objective of the planning process is to mitigate generation of CO2 and other globally warming emissions and position the locality to adapt to a warming planet. In this chapter, we examine the antecedents that paved the way for Portland’s engagement with climate
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M.I. Slavin (ed.), Sustainability in America’s Cities: Creating the Green Metropolis, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-028-6_2, © Island Press 2011
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action planning and the key features that characterized the climate planning process in Portland.
Antecedents to Climate Change Planning in Portland Portland’s engagement with climate action planning follows a long history of local government and civic efforts to increase the city’s livability and enhance the local environment. An early sign of this can be seen in creation of the Portland Development Commission as the city’s urban renewal agency in 1956. The commission embarked on a program of rebuilding the city’s downtown. Its first project involved creation of the auditorium district, whereby an “old stopover neighborhood on the southern edge of downtown Portland was leveled and designated for reuse by offices and business services.”1 As with many similar urban renewal agencies, the commission has largely been dominated by the city’s business establishment. It has also been the subject of controversy and criticism at times due to the perception that it overlooked the city’s neighborhoods to the benefit of downtown in making investments. Still, during the last fifty years, Portland has received frequent acknowledgment for its success in creating one of the most livable downtowns of any major American city. Among the reasons are the city’s creation of a number of highly accessible downtown public parks, plazas, and fountains and development of one of the nation’s most extensive regional light rail public transit systems. Removal of Harbor Drive, a freeway separating the city center from the Willamette River waterfront to cre
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