New York City’s policy efforts in the first two decades of the twenty-first century emphasize the potential for local governments to materially improve their local environments. During the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg (2002-2013), the city government sought from the top to remake the city’s physical environment to appeal to postindustrial elites to promote local economic development. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio (2014-2021), the administration explicitly prioritized equity alongside economic growth and this commitment was reflected in environmental policy in a focus on investing in community parks. Under both mayors, environmental policy came from community groups, as well as city leaders. For example, across the two administrations, prominent environmental justice advocates prompted the city to adopt measures to address longstanding inequities in the allocation of responsibility for solid waste management, although the injustices persisted at the end of the de Blasio administration. Overall, the history of New York City’s efforts to address problems such as lack of greenspace, contaminated lands, and solid waste management underscores that change can come from the top and the bottom, but that there are legal, fiscal and other constraints on the ability of cities to address even paradigmatically local environmental problems.

Humanity’s impact on the planet is undeniable. Fairly and effectively addressing environmental problems begins with understanding their causes and impacts. Is over-population the main driver of environmental degradation? Poverty? Capitalism? Poor governance? Imperialism? Patriarchy? Clearly these are not technical questions, but political ones.

Updated to cover new debates, data, and policy, and expanded to include chapters on colonialism, race and gender, and the impacts of energy and resource extraction, this book introduces students to diverse perspectives and helps them develop an informed understanding of why environmental problems occur.

How the international community should act is deeply contested. Guiding students through the potential responses, including multilateral diplomacy, transnational voluntary action, innovative financial mechanisms, problem displacement, consumer-focused campaigns, and resistance, this book explains the different forms of political action, their limitations and injustices.

Online resources include lecture slides, a test bank for instructors, updated weblinks to videos, and suggested readings for students.

Many of the contemporary discussions of the potential for cities to address climate change overlook the historical efforts of cities to protect their residents from environmental harms. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the emergence of the administrative state at the state and federal levels, local governments were often the first level of government to provide many Americans with environmental protection. Supplying safe drinking water was an early priority for expanding cities. With water more readily available, city governments then built sewage systems. They also built parks, established systems for collecting solid waste, and attempted to address air pollution from the combustion of coal. The historical efforts of cities, well documented by historians, emphasize that city governments can positively contribute to protecting the environment. However, these efforts also offers cautionary lessons about the limitations of relying on local governments to address large-scale problems, and help to explain the substantial federalization of environmental law in the latter twentieth century. Federalization diminished the ability of cities to innovate in the environmental field but cities still have considerable legal authority to pursue environmental policies to address contemporary challenges.

Humanity’s impact on the planet is undeniable. Fairly and effectively addressing environmental problems begins with understanding their causes and impacts. Is over-population the main driver of environmental degradation? Poverty? Capitalism? Poor governance? Imperialism? Patriarchy? Clearly these are not technical questions, but political ones.

Updated to cover new debates, data, and policy, and expanded to include chapters on colonialism, race and gender, and the impacts of energy and resource extraction, this book introduces students to diverse perspectives and helps them develop an informed understanding of why environmental problems occur.

How the international community should act is deeply contested. Guiding students through the potential responses, including multilateral diplomacy, transnational voluntary action, innovative financial mechanisms, problem displacement, consumer-focused campaigns, and resistance, this book explains the different forms of political action, their limitations and injustices.

Online resources include lecture slides, a test bank for instructors, updated weblinks to videos, and suggested readings for students.

Humanity’s impact on the planet is undeniable. Fairly and effectively addressing environmental problems begins with understanding their causes and impacts. Is over-population the main driver of environmental degradation? Poverty? Capitalism? Poor governance? Imperialism? Patriarchy? Clearly these are not technical questions, but political ones.

Updated to cover new debates, data, and policy, and expanded to include chapters on colonialism, race and gender, and the impacts of energy and resource extraction, this book introduces students to diverse perspectives and helps them develop an informed understanding of why environmental problems occur.

How the international community should act is deeply contested. Guiding students through the potential responses, including multilateral diplomacy, transnational voluntary action, innovative financial mechanisms, problem displacement, consumer-focused campaigns, and resistance, this book explains the different forms of political action, their limitations and injustices.

Online resources include lecture slides, a test bank for instructors, updated weblinks to videos, and suggested readings for students.

Humanity’s impact on the planet is undeniable. Fairly and effectively addressing environmental problems begins with understanding their causes and impacts. Is over-population the main driver of environmental degradation? Poverty? Capitalism? Poor governance? Imperialism? Patriarchy? Clearly these are not technical questions, but political ones.

Updated to cover new debates, data, and policy, and expanded to include chapters on colonialism, race and gender, and the impacts of energy and resource extraction, this book introduces students to diverse perspectives and helps them develop an informed understanding of why environmental problems occur.

How the international community should act is deeply contested. Guiding students through the potential responses, including multilateral diplomacy, transnational voluntary action, innovative financial mechanisms, problem displacement, consumer-focused campaigns, and resistance, this book explains the different forms of political action, their limitations and injustices.

Online resources include lecture slides, a test bank for instructors, updated weblinks to videos, and suggested readings for students.

Most American environmental law scholarship overlooks the role of cities in environmental law and policy. Instead, scholars typically focus on federal environmental law. This book emphasizes the potential for leading cities to play a meaningful role in protecting the environment. It offers a framework for understanding the factors that give to, and constrain, local environmental law and policy. Local environmental policy may emerge from the top from local elites centrally concerned with local economic development, and from the “bottom up” from community groups. However, there are limits on the costs that local governments can impose on local actors to address global environmental problems, such as limiting climate change, given the overriding importance that local governments attach to promoting economic development. The book offers case studies of local environmental efforts in New York City to illustrate the promise and limitations of local environmental policy. Taking into account the opportunities and constraints at the local level, the book outlines a high-level agenda of actions that local governments in large cities should undertake to adapt to climate change and contribute to decarbonization.

In the face of the federal government’s failure to tackle climate change in the early decades of this century, large cities in the U.S. started to take action. Networks of city governments and philanthropists offered cities support, and cities invested their own resources in sustainability offices. However, cities made limited progress in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions in the first two decades of this century. This book provides a clear-eyed analysis of the potential for big city governments to address society’s most pressing environmental problems, including limiting and adapting to climate change. It includes original case studies of New York’s environmental policy efforts in the first two decades of this century, which ground its analysis of the promise and perils of turning to cities to address climate change and other environmental issues. Drawing on the book’s analysis of cities’ strengths and weaknesses, it outlines a high-level agenda for urban environmental policy for the near term. With President Trump’s return to power in 2025, and his promises to undo many aspects of federal environmental law, it is more important than ever for environmental advocates and scholars to understand the potential and limits of local action to fill the gap.

While local efforts to decarbonize will mainly benefit the world as a whole, local efforts to adapt to climate change will benefit mainly people in cities, who will be more resilient to the extreme heat, drought, flooding and fires that planetary warming is exacerbating. Reflecting the benefits to cities of adapting, cities began planning adaptation early in the twenty-first century. However, as of the early 2020s, US cities had undertaken little adaptation (as opposed to adaptation planning). From 2000 until 2012, when Superstorm Sandy struck the city, New York policymakers focused on gathering information about the risks that climate change presents for the city, but they undertook few tangible actions to protect the city against risks such as storm surge flooding. Sandy increased policymakers’ perception of the urgency of acting to adapt, and injected $15 billion of federal funding into the city that enabled it to invest in adaptation. Yet, between 2012 and the early 2020s, the city had great difficulty implementing adaptation actions. New York City’s top-down approach to climate change adaptation underscores the difficulties that cities face implementing the costly local public good of climate change adaptation without additional assistance from higher levels of government.