Providence Giving Its Climate Justice Plan a Makeover
PROVIDENCE — When the city launched its climate justice plan in 2019, it set 2025 as the target for implementing strategies to move the city toward a more equitable, low-carbon, and climate-resilient future.
That deadline has passed. Now, seven years after the plan’s launch, local officials and residents are taking a look at what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to change.
It’s the first five-year update to the plan, which was adopted under then-Mayor Jorge Elorza and hailed as a model because it was shaped and written by residents of color from neighborhoods most affected by climate change and environmental injustice.
Some of its strategies have since become binding: a building energy reporting ordinance, a green revolving fund, and the creation of a Sustainability Commission.
The commission met Aug. 5 as city officials began laying out where the update stands, and what’s next.
Sophie Worsh-Farnum, a sustainability projects associate with the city, said the sustainability department is in the early stages.
Its consultant partners are assessing gaps in the plan’s climate justice strategies and comparing them with the city’s current position. Another consultant has completed a gap analysis of the plan’s energy goals and is moving toward recommendations based on Providence’s progress.
But the city isn’t relying solely on consultants to determine what has worked and what hasn’t.
The department is working with local organizations, including the Providence Resilience Partnership and the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, to reach residents most affected by stormwater and sewer utility issues. Workshops planned for the coming weeks will give those residents a chance to shape the update.
“It’s being able to figure out how to get those targeted audiences instead of just hearing secondhand from a community partner,” Kevin Proft, Providence’s deputy director of sustainability, said.
That push to hear directly from residents echoes how the original plan was created.
The 88-page document is divided into sections — Lead by Example, Collaborative Governance and Accountability, Housing and Buildings, Community Health, Local and Regenerative Economy, Clean Energy, and Transportation — and sets specific deadlines for goals ranging from 100% renewable electricity in municipal buildings to reducing childhood asthma-related emergency room visits.
The city kicked off the update process June 30 at the Elmwood Community Center in South Providence, where residents gathered to discuss the existing strategies and identify their priorities for the next five years.
They called for a plan that was easier to engage with, including dashboards to track its progress. They also wanted it to prioritize water conservation and gray water, brownfields and land remediation, adequate and affordable housing, and workforce operations.
Among them was Greg Gerritt, a longtime environmental advocate and member of the Sustainability Commission. He argued at the Aug. 5 meeting that the updated plan needs to treat economic justice as a core part of climate justice.
“So much of what we do in the city focuses on economic development for the people who already have money, rather than focusing the economic part of this project on what’s needed more in low-income communities,” he said.
For Gerritt, that means rethinking where the city directs its economic development dollars, and who benefits from them.
Rather than continuing to subsidize downtown development, he said, Providence could invest in businesses in lower-income neighborhoods that help make those communities more resilient.
“Does somebody make kayaks so that we can get around in the flood, or even rubber boots?” he asked.
Gerrit, who wrote “Economic Development, Climate Justice, and Prosperous Communities in the 21st Century,” offered his services as a local-economy consultant if the department could find the money to hire him.
The conversation is just beginning. The sustainability department has several events planned and is asking residents to weigh in on what should change as Providence rewrites its climate justice roadmap for the next five years.