An Examination of Local Climate Change Policies in the Great Plains

Abstract

As the United States struggles with national solutions to address climate change, state and local governments have become leaders in both mitigation and adaptation policy. Although a significant and growing body of research targets these policies, most studies have assumed common factors motivating both adaptation and mitigation policy adoption. There remains a need for more research on cities of all sizes, their adoption of specific local policies, the factors motivating those choices, and whether the influences for mitigation differ from those that motivate adaptation.The paper uses data from a new survey of over 200 local governments in eleven states of the Great Plains region, including measures distinguishing between mitigation and adaptation policies. These data are employed to test the relative influence of factors from three areas: the policy environment, the attitudes of governmental actors, and community atmosphere, in explaining observed variation in the adoption of climate change policies.

What affects government planning for climate change adaptation: Evidence from the U.S. states

“…Notably, our findings are consistent with those cross-country studies (Berrang-Ford et al, 2014;Lesnikowski, Ford, Berrang-Ford, Barrera, Berry, et al, 2013;Massey et al, 2014) in suggesting income as a key determinant of government-led adaptation, because higher incomes normally imply stronger capacity to afford costly adaptation. Nonetheless, income is found to have little effect on local adaptation planning or policies in other studies (Shi et al, 2015;Wood, Hultquist, & Romsdahl, 2014). One possible explanation for these mixed findings is that local governments are more often driven by the tangible economic benefits of adaptation (Chu, 2016) and may not invest in adaptation merely because they can afford it.…”

Comparing Climate Change Policy Adoption and Its Extension across Areas of City Policymaking

“…To understand the initial adoption of climate change policies, some of these studies have examined factors associated with a binary outcome: whether a city has committed to a range of climate change actions across multiple policymaking areas through membership in climate‐protection networks (Krause, ; Krause, Yi, & Feiock, ; Sharp et al, ; Zahran et al, ). Some have looked in more detail at nonbinary outcomes: the extent to which a city has actually implemented particular policies or policy tools (Bae & Feiock, ; Krause, , ; Sharp et al, ; Wood et al, ; Yi, Krause, & Feiock, ). However, this research has provided some indication that participation in climate‐protection networks might not be a particularly straightforward indicator of the adoption of climate‐change–related efforts (Krause, ; Yi et al, ).…”

“…A number of quantitative studies have focused specifically on the question of why cities decide to take on climate change policies (Bae & Feiock, 2012;Krause, 2011Krause, , 2012bSharp, Daley, & Lynch, 2011;Wood, Hultquist, & Romsdahl, 2014;Zahran, Brody, Vedlitz, Grover, & Miller, 2008), but likely due to the more defined and developed nature of cities' attention to climate change mitigation (Bulkeley, 2010;Sugar, Kennedy, & Hoornweg, 2013), these studies have focused on this issue rather than adaptation (but see Wood et al, 2014). To understand the initial adoption of climate change policies, some of these studies have examined factors associated with a binary outcome: whether a city has committed to a range of climate change actions across multiple policymaking areas through membership in climate-protection networks (Krause, 2011;Krause, Yi, & Feiock, 2016;Sharp et al, 2011;Zahran et al, 2008).…”

Holding Back the Storm: Target Populations and State Climate Adaptation Planning in America

“…Much of climate adaptation research to date uses individual or a handful of cases to describe the landscape of national (Craft & Howlett, 2013;Williams & McNutt, 2013), subnational (Arbuckle et al, 2013), or local climate adaptation plans (Baker, Peterson, Brown, & McAlpine, 2012;Dannevig, Hovelsrud, & Husabø, 2013;Fünfgeld & McEvoy, 2014;Hamin, Gurran, & Emlinger, 2014;Kates, Travis, & Wilbanks, 2012;Rumbach & Kudva, 2011). More recent research has moved to quantitative and statistical understandings of municipal choices to adapt to climate change and explanations of adaptation strategy variation through surveys (see Wood, Hultquist, & Romsdahl, 2014;Shi et al, 2015) or document coding (Koski & Siulagi, 2016;Woodruff & Stults, 2016). The findings of these quantitative studies are that adaptation plans vary widely based on location-specific harms (Koski & Siulagi, 2016;Shi et al, 2015;Woodruff & Stults, 2016); that plans contain few explicit implementation strategies to meet a great number of commitments (Woodruff & Stults, 2016); that the politics of mitigation and adaptation are similar insofar as features, such as increased capacity and commitment of local officials are associated with better adaptation planning (Shi et al, 2015;Wood et al, 2014); but that the political communities associated with adaptation are linked with nonenvironmental perceptions of harm (Koski & Siulagi, 2016;Wood et al, 2014).…”