Atlanta plans to launch its first comprehensive plan to address climate resilience and the disproportionate impacts of climate change April 30.
The Climate Resilience Action Plan sets goals that include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 59% by 2030, adding 250 electric vehicle charging stations by 2025 and reducing the energy burden on 10% of the city’s most energy-burdened households.
The Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience spent 18 months studying and gathering community input into how Atlanta’s three primary climate challenges — extreme heat, drought and flooding — affect the city’s different populations. The plan spells out how the city can respond at municipal and neighborhood levels “in ways that make our communities more climate-resilient and more equitable,” said Chandra Farley, Atlanta’s chief sustainability officer.
Atlanta consistently ranks in the nation’s top five cities for energy burden, as indicated by the percentage of household income spent on energy bills, Farley said. Traditionally, households spending 6% or more of their monthly household income on energy are considered energy burdened; Atlanta has many households that spend from 6% to 19% of their monthly income on utilities, Farley said.
The Georgia city’s focus on creating energy equity has put the plan’s federal funding in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Farley said her team received a cease-and-desist letter regarding a grant it was working on with the Southeastern Energy Efficiency Alliance to address equity and building codes, for example. That grant is on hold as agreements are updated to remove DEI language.
The city’s efforts to address inequity in energy burdens will continue, Farley said.
“We understand that climate resilience must also be focused on the disproportionate impact that some of our distressed neighborhoods feel more acutely than other neighborhoods,” Farley said. “It is a challenge, but it’s one of the things that Atlanta tries to get right.”
Farley said the sustainability and resilience office is staying on top of communications, even as the federal agencies overseeing the grants have gone dark, and making sure its paperwork is in order and ready to resubmit as soon as that becomes possible.
The change in approach from the Biden administration to the Trump administration is “certainly a lot of whiplash for us, but we have lots of things to do that don’t have anything to do with federal dollars,” Farley said. “There are lots of innovative things on the horizon that we’re staying excited about, even in the face of these challenging and difficult times.”
A pilot project is studying how to make houses more energy-efficient before installing alternative energy sources like solar. The city is also working with Invest Atlanta’s Owner-Occupied Rehab Programs, which are offering forgivable loans for homeowners to weatherize and make critical home repairs, Farley said. Atlanta also partnered with Sustainable Georgia Futures to help building contractors grow their businesses by offering weatherization and energy-efficiency upgrades.
Collaborations like these are crucial to the plan’s success, Farley said. The city has created a 32-member Climate Resilience Advisory Board that includes agency partners from the Atlanta Housing Authority and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, as well as seats for residents from Atlanta’s most energy-burdened neighborhoods, Farley said. After board members serve their two-year terms, they become part of a resource network that now has more than 100 members, she said.
“Robust and continued engagement from our residents and our local business and nonprofit community” is the key to achieving the climate resilience plan’s goals, Farley said, regardless of federal funding.
