ABSTRACT
New York City has been a world leader on climate policy and practice going back to at least 2007, when the city released its long-term sustainability plan. This chapter outlines the city’s progression toward increasingly more ambitious climate goals, along with the city’s innovations on collaborative interdisciplinary and cross-agency policy development and adoption. OneNYC was the first comprehensive major city sustainability plan to add social and economic goals to the traditional environmental goals and demonstrate how they were interrelated. The effort involved more than 70 citywide agencies, multiple stakeholders, academics, elected officials, and residents in a complicated and multilayered collaboration. The new planning process used design and systems thinking approaches. This chapter also focuses on a follow-up effort that laid a pathway for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. OneNYC also was integrated with the emerging UN Sustainable Development Goals. Both the methodology and scope of New York’s efforts set a new standard for other cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, Orlando, San José, and New Orleans.
