St Paul Climate Action and Resilience Plan: Building Equity Through Community Engagement

Abstract

Our team researched emerging practices in public engagement for the City of St. Paul Climate Action and Resilience Plan (CARP). We discovered that the city is excelling at applying many best practices for public engagement. There are opportunities, however, for St. Paul to implement an innovative engagement strategy. Our research of other Climate Action Plans found that Cleveland and Portland take an intentional approach to reaching out to vulnerable communities and considering equity issues in climate change policy. Based on this research, we recommend that the city strive to incorporate an engagement structure that includes a more iterative process of evaluation and work to frame their engagement around the 2025 review of the CARP. We created a toolkit that provides resources to support ongoing engagement as well as the long-term success of CARP initiatives. Finally, we provide several recommendations to assist the city in engaging vulnerable communities and supporting collective community action.