Search for: All records

Even though neighborhoods are built for people, lots of wild animals also call these places home. You might have seen a squirrel, a fox, or a deer munching on your garden or running down your street. Living near people gives some animals food and places to live, but it can also cause problems for both animals and people. Sometimes people do not agree about what to do about the animals that live near them. We were curious about how people and wild animals live together and decided to investigate. We studied how people make decisions about deer in the suburbs of Massachusetts, where some people think there are too many deer and others are not so sure. We discovered that people often disagree, and politics matters. Paying attention to this disagreement can help people work together and make choices that let wild animals and people to live together with fewer problems. 

Implementing climate policies and programs in cities requires significant investments that inevitably entangle climate action with urban climate finance – the mechanisms and practices city governments use to pay for climate efforts. Here, we use U.S. cities as a case study to examine how climate finance impacts, and is impacted by, the pursuit of urban climate action and climate justice. Drawing on 34 expert interviews, we show how municipal financial decisions and budgetary practices are shaping how, when, and for whom cities are responding to climate change. We demonstrate how public spending decisions are intertwined with the logics of debt financing and examine the impacts of these relationships on cities’ climate investments. We showcase the structuring impacts of finance on climate action and the built environment, and we introduce pathways through which climate and justice considerations are already being integrated into, and potentially transforming, municipal finance in the U.S.