Understanding child-friendly urban design
More than half of the world’s children are growing up in cities. By 2030, up to 60 percent of the world’s urban population will be under 18 years old. Yet, children and families are often invisible to urban planners, developers, and architects when creating city-wide policies that impact transportation, air and noise pollution, and health and well-being. “The truth is that the vast majority of urban planning decisions and projects take no account of their potential impact on children and make no effort to seek children’s views…All too often, this is down to a simple lack of respect for children’s rights or abilities,” writes Tim Gill in his recent book “Urban Playground.”
A critical component of child-friendly urban planning is prioritizing opportunities for learning and healthy development both in and out of school. This is especially important for children living in communities challenged by decades of discrimination and disinvestment. Deep inequalities plague the education systems in many countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic has widened existing educational equity in worrisome ways. In the U.S., persistent economic disparities among families lead to large differences in educational outcomes. Research shows that as early as age 3, children from lower-income households lag behind their more affluent peers in language and spatial skills.
To address both of these needs, cities around the world are beginning to invest in Playful Learning Landscapes (PLL)—installations and programming that promote children and families’ learning through play in the public realm. The climate for building on this momentum could not be more favorable, or the timing more urgent. In the wake of COVID-19, growing numbers of leaders understand the need to rethink neighborhood investments to enhance health, well-being, and economic opportunity—and to reexamine old views on how and where children develop the competencies and skills needed to thrive—and ask how to build on a community’s fund of knowledge to reduce inequities through culturally-informed spaces. In the U.S., these leaders have a once-in-a-generation chance to channel American Rescue Plan funds for innovations in child development and learning—while making cities more vibrant and inclusive.
As the PLL movement continues to grow, we need more expansive ways to measure its impacts, and to use that information both to improve PLL installations and to garner greater investment in them.
We know from existing installations that PLL is effective at enhancing STEM and literacy skills and increasing child-caregiver interaction in ways that build social and mental capitol. But as the PLL movement continues to grow, we need more expansive ways to measure its impacts, and to use that information both to improve PLL installations and to garner greater investment in them. This brief presents the first iteration of a new metrics framework city-level policymakers, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropies can use to help assess the positive effects of PLL on learning outcomes, as well as its potential to enhance social interaction and public life in revitalized spaces.
A new approach to child-friendly urban design: Playful Learning Landscapes
PLL is an emerging, interdisciplinary area of study and practice that reimagines the potential of cities as supportive ecosystems for children and families by marrying urban design and placemaking with the science of learning. The Brookings Institution, in collaboration with Temple University and the Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network (PLLAN), is building an interdisciplinary community of practice and responding to the growing interest of stakeholders and decisionmakers around the world to generate evidence and guidance for scaling the PLL approach.
PLL uses human-centered co-design to create learning opportunities in bus stops, parks, and supermarkets and other everyday places—transforming them into enriching, social spaces for children, families, and communities. What makes PLL unique is the critical element of playful learning—a spectrum of child-directed play methods that include free play (no direct adult involvement), guided play (supported by adults toward a learning goal), and games (rule-based activities with learning goals) informed by the latest findings in developmental science. Guided play—the focus of interactions in PLL—allows children to maintain agency during their play with the guidance of an adult to provide structure and focus the activity around a learning goal (e.g., a well-curated exhibit in a children’s museum).
Scaling playful learning in cities
A growing number of cities around the world—including Philadelphia, Chicago, Santa Ana, CA, London, Mumbai, and others—are embracing PLL to support children’s learning outcomes and promote urban renewal, but efforts to scale and sustain these interventions are nascent. To fully realize the potential benefits of PLL, cities need more than a handful of installations placed sporadically around the landscape. To get to scale, municipalities instead must start infusing playful learning principles and design elements into the mainstream practices of government, businesses, and other organizations.
To this end, last year we outlined the steps city-level decisionmakers and stakeholders must take to create rich playful learning environments. These include fostering better coordination among city agencies to support the integration of playful learning efforts into new and existing programs and projects, streamlining regulatory and other processes to make it easier for nonprofits and other groups to implement PLL installations and activities, and collaborating with national organizations that are supporting local efforts. Scaling also requires engaging with neighborhood residents as equal partners in all phases of a project to ensure that designs meet their needs and preferences and communicating the why and how of playful learning to expand its reach and impact.
Brookings now seeks to address key gaps in cities’ knowledge, networks, and capacity and inform strategies that integrate PLL into mainstream urban planning and placemaking—bringing it to scale.
For city leaders, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropy to put time and resources into expanding PLL, they need hard evidence that it works. This requires a framework that outlines the desired outcomes of PLL and a set of metrics for measuring whether or not those outcomes are achieved.
Measuring Playful Learning Landscapes outcomes
For city leaders, community organizations, the private sector, and philanthropy to put time and resources into expanding PLL, they need hard evidence that it works. This requires a framework that outlines the desired outcomes of PLL and a set of metrics for measuring whether or not those outcomes are achieved. As Senior Fellow Jenny Perlman-Robinson wrote in a Brookings report on PLL in Philadelphia, “Without clarity about definitions of success or without clearly defined metrics for measuring outcomes, it will be challenging to motivate and inform change at large scale.” Moreover, more robust evaluation will help communities know if individual PLL sites are working as intended, which will inform improvements to current as well as future sites.
There is now ample evidence that PLL supports several learning goals. For example, existing research shows that PLL promotes the kinds of caregiver-child behaviors and interactions directly related to later progress in social, STEM and literacy skills. Aside from these learning outcomes, we also must build on what we know about the benefits of public space investments to better understand how PLL installations can help improve the public realm, provide new opportunities for social interaction, and contribute to community cohesion (Box 1).
To advance this knowledge, Brookings and its partners have developed a framework and an initial set of indicators from both learning science and placemaking perspectives to define success criteria. Our “Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework” will help evaluate the impact of pilot projects and guide iteration, scaling, and adaptation of PLL to future sites.
Box 1. Community engagement is critical for fostering PLL outcomes
The PLL metrics framework focuses on potential outcomes of playful learning spaces in the public realm. Philadelphia, Chicago, Santa Ana and other cities demonstrate that co-designing PLL prototypes with the community is required to reach these outcomes. For example, researchers worked closely with community members in Philadelphia to design and place the installations in Urban Thinkscape. Researchers also recruited and trained neighborhood members to be data collectors in response to requests from community members for more employment opportunities for neighborhood residents, and more ways to be involved in—and have greater ownership of—the process. In Santa Ana, researchers worked with mothers in the community to co-design signage that promotes caregiver-child interactions in the supermarket. Signs in the produce section with questions like, “How do you find the best fruit or vegetable?” and “What senses do you use to find the best one?” reflect stories that the mothers told about passed-down techniques for picking a ripe avocado or papaya. These signs promote sharing cultural traditions passed down from one generation to the next and encourage children to make observations and test hypotheses—both important skills for learning science later.
Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework
Our work to create a PLL metrics framework began with a landscape analysis to survey existing frameworks and tools around measurement and evaluation of playful learning in cities. To create goals and metrics from the child development perspective, we turned to the rich and growing body of research that demonstrates PLL increases caregivers’ attitudes about the connection between play and learning, promotes the kinds of caregiver-child communication that support relationship building and language learning, and encourages talk about numbers, letters, and spatial relations.
In addition, three placemaking and urban design frameworks inspired and helped shape our approach and selected metrics.
The Place Diagram (Project for Public Spaces (PPS)): Through their work evaluating public spaces across the world, PPS identified four qualities of successful public spaces: (1) The spaces are accessible; (2) people engage in a range of activities there; (3) the space has a positive image and is comfortable; and (4) it is sociable and welcoming. The framework also prompts the user to ask key questions in assessing each of the qualities. For example, asking “Do sidewalks lead to and from the adjacent areas?” or “Does the space function for people with special needs” to address accessibility.
KaBOOM! Play Everywhere: Understanding Impact (Gehl): To examine the impact of KaBOOM!’s Play Everywhere initiative—implemented across 50 U.S. cities—Gehl used a multimethod approach including on-site observations, interviews with stakeholders, and intercept and neighborhood surveys to understand who visits the sites, what they do when visiting, and how they feel about the sites. Through this work, Gehl identified four key components of a successful Play Everywhere project: (1) proximity to existing kid “hubs” (where families live and spend time); (2) incorporation of kids’ perspectives into the design and implementation process early and often; (3) prioritization of interactive designs that spark curiosity and imagination; and (4) messaging that it’s okay to play in many different spaces (e.g., at the bus stop or on the sidewalk).
Measuring the Civic Commons (Reimagining the Civic Commons): Reimagining the Civic Commons designed a measurement system to examine the impact of investments in public spaces and the surrounding communities towards four key goals: civic engagement, socioeconomic mixing, environmental sustainability, and value creation. Within each goal are “signals”—indicators associated with a project’s objectives, and each of those signals has a set of metrics designed to understand changes such as average hourly visitorship of the site, number of trees in civic commons sites, and percent of respondents who say they feel safe in the neighborhood.
While the resources described above were all instrumental in shaping the development of our metrics framework, we adopted the approach of mapping metrics to signals and the signals in turn to goals (inspired by the Measuring the Civic Commons framework) because it allowed us to integrate both the child development and placemaking perspectives of PLL into one framework (Box 2). Our metrics framework has the following five goals:
Promote healthy child development and learning: Sparks playful and meaningful experiences that support child-caregiver interactions known to promote cognitive and social-emotional learning and positive development.
Support an accessible and welcoming public realm: Offers a physical space that is easy and convenient to access, feels safe and inviting to visitors, and reflects community cultures and values.
Foster a vibrant and inclusive social environment: Cultivates an engaging public realm that promotes social interaction among children and adults of all incomes and backgrounds.
Nurture civic engagement and strong sense of community: Builds neighborhood pride and community cohesion through the cocreation and ongoing oversight of PLL sites.
Strengthen the economic health and resiliency of neighborhoods: Has a positive impact on the surrounding community, including local businesses, property owners, and residents.
Box 2. PLL metrics framework at a glance
Note: The full framework can be found here.
Challenges and next steps
The “Playful Learning Landscapes metrics framework” is a key step toward generating data that are critical for scaling by helping to define the desired outcomes of playful learning in public and shared spaces, and importantly, how they are measured. But measuring the impact of public spaces isn’t easy—getting the metrics “right” is likely to be an ongoing effort, and data collection itself is often messy and time intensive. Our framework employs a range of qualitative methods including observation, intercept, and neighborhood surveys, each of which can be difficult to design and employ, especially in communities where trust in local government is low and residents may be wary of interacting with outsiders.
As the PLL movement gains momentum, generating evidence to demonstrate its impact will be key to strengthening the field and shifting mindsets among key stakeholders and city-level decisionmakers to weave playful learning into the fabric of city policies.
In the next phase of work, Brookings—together with its partners—will pilot the PLL metrics framework to explore research questions such as:
Are changes in caregiver and/or child attitudes and behaviors toward play and learning sustained after the initial exposure to PLL installations? In the future, we will want to measure the possible child development and learning effects that are prompted after visiting a PLL site (for example, at home or in other environments).
Do multiple PLL installations in the same neighborhood lead to broad-based impacts at various geographic scales? The current framework focuses on outcomes at the individual site level. As more installations are built across cities in the U.S. and globally, we hypothesize that PLL will yield more expansive neighborhood and community outcomes. Data from The Ultimate Block Party—the first PLL pilot—suggest that caregivers’ attitudes about the play-learning connection can be shaped in a community setting. These broader outcomes will be important to measure as a step toward sustainable uptake of PLL approaches.
What are the most effective methods for collecting data to maximize the quality of feedback? As described in Box 1, engaging community members to collect data can help in increasing response rates and improving the quality of feedback, but collecting survey data at PLL pilot sites will be challenging.
As the PLL movement gains momentum, generating evidence to demonstrate its impact will be key to strengthening the field and shifting mindsets among key stakeholders and city-level decisionmakers to weave playful learning into the fabric of city policies. The PLL metrics framework provides a roadmap to collect data that demonstrates PLL’s tremendous potential to narrow opportunity gaps while creating more livable and playful cities. The framework will continue to evolve as we learn from communities that are testing the expansion and adaptation of PLL on a neighborhood- and/or city-wide level. Rather than an end point, the framework provides a starting point for thinking about PLL’s goals and how to understand—and communicate—if and how sites are achieving them. This important work is just beginning.
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Leveraging the Biden-Harris climate agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals
In November, at the COP26 U.N. Climate Change Conference, the U.S. will join the community of nations keeping alive the promise to meet the agreed target to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. The Biden administration will continue to work to reestablish U.S. leadership and increase global commitments for tackling climate change amid lingering skepticism from other countries. Its strategy for achieving its own ambitious target goes beyond a narrow focus on mitigation to include other important dimensions such as quality jobs, public health, and environmental justice. This offers an opportunity to leverage the areas of intersection and synergy between the U.S. climate agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to advance U.S. climate ambitions, both at home and abroad.
The US at COP26: The Importance of Rebuilding Credibility and Driving Ambition
President Biden has made climate change a key priority of his administration. He reversed President Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords on his first day in office, and hosted a global summit in April where he outlined a new, ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) for the U.S.—a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels of economywide net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030.
At the U.N.-sanctioned COP, nations come together as peers to present both individual and collective climate commitments and progress toward their targets. This year, advocates and markets will be closely watching areas such as the phasing out of coal, commitments regarding hard-to-abate industries such as cement and aviation, and increased financing. While President Biden hosted some of the largest countries at the April 2021 Summit, for the wider global community, U.S. participation in COP26 constitutes an important next step in its reentry to the fold.
The Biden administration has already built a formidable team and rolled out ambitious plans, led by first-ever White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy to advance its priorities at home and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry to rally the international community. The COP presents a major opportunity for the U.S. to reassert its leadership on the global stage. The administration will be eager to raise the collective global ambition, and it is likely to build on its April commitments with new initiatives. It may even roll out a climate action plan that demonstrates how the U.S. will meet its new domestic target.
Notwithstanding these ambitions, the U.S. is still working to rebuild credibility and trust on these issues. The administration will face skepticism about both its ability to advance its plans at home and the extent to which the U.S. will remain dependable beyond its term in office.
The US Climate Action Plan: More than Mitigation
The administration’s climate change agenda is also a core pillar of the president’s comprehensive Build Back Better plan. This policy agenda also seeks to respond to the inequalities unveiled during the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning unleashed by the murder of George Floyd. Informed by these objectives, its strategy to reach the newly ambitious target reflects an integrated approach, one that accelerates mitigation of greenhouse gases to achieve the 50 percent reduction by 2030 while also spurring an economic transformation that results in a fairer, healthier, and more just economy.
President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad (EO 14008) clearly lays out this integrated approach. Published just a week after taking office, it establishes a governmentwide National Climate Task Force comprised of Cabinet secretaries, with a mandate to “facilitate planning and implementation of key Federal actions to reduce climate pollution; increase resilience to the impacts of climate change; protect public health; conserve our lands, waters, oceans, and biodiversity; deliver environmental justice; and spur well-paying union jobs and economic growth.”
The SDGs: A Potential Force Multiplier
Such an integrated strategy mirrors the interdependent objectives reflected in the SDGs, to which the U.S. and all other U.N. member states agreed in 2015. A central component of the SDGs is that they are universal, meaning they apply domestically to all countries regardless of income level.
While the Biden administration has taken some steps to position its international development investments through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department, Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) within the context of the SDGs, it has not yet signaled an embrace of the SDGs related to its domestic agenda. Yet the harmony between the U.S. climate plan and the SDGs provides the administration with an additional entry point to rebuild U.S. credibility and generate additional political momentum for its ambitious and comprehensive climate agenda at COP26.
Similar to the administration’s climate agenda, the SDGs provide a ready-made framework that connects the dots between health, jobs, resilience, and justice. It also importantly helps to set targets for assessing progress and ensuring accountability. Action on climate change has its own goal (SDG 13) and, amid today’s changing environment, stands as an essential requirement for successful sustainable development. This framework for accountability is already recognized and being used around the world, including in specific cities and sectors in the United States.
Given that the SDGs represent a collective global effort, with an imperative for every country to make progress on human, economic, and environmental targets simultaneously, drawing connections between the U.S. climate plan and the SDGs could provide another concrete example of the administration’s seriousness about reentering and respecting multilateral alliances—and stake out a potential leadership position with humility, as it acknowledges the progress necessary within our own borders.
Specific Synergies between US Climate Actions and the SDGs
A key emphasis of the SDGs is to “leave no one behind,” ensuring that governments focus their policy attention on those who have been most marginalized or are most vulnerable. The president’s executive order quickly establishes this as a clear priority for its proposed actions on climate change.
Economic opportunities and new jobs (SDG 8) stemming from a sustainable economy and the economic recovery must benefit left-behind communities—“places that have suffered as a result of economic shifts and places that have suffered the most from persistent pollution, including low-income rural and urban communities, communities of color, and Native communities.” It also calls for greater job opportunities for women (SDG 5). This commitment is reinforced by multiple Build Back Better proposals under negotiation in the budget reconciliation process.
The executive order also strongly emphasizes the importance of advancing environmental justice. It establishes a White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council (WHEJAC) and calls for the creation of an environmental justice scorecard for federal agencies and initiatives. Its mandate of an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity and an interagency working group focused on reducing the risk of climate to vulnerable groups further advances this priority.
At the center of this effort, the Justice40 Initiative aims to ensure that 40 percent of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy flow to disadvantaged communities. It also calls for a new Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to provide further guidance to federal departments and agencies.
These actions directly link to SDG targets related to public health, clean air, clean water, access to green space, gender equity, racial equity, and reductions in inequality. Presumably, both a scorecard and screening tool for environmental justice will depend upon disaggregation of demographic and geographic data, replicating the type of targets, indicators, and evidence base inherent in the SDGs. For example, Justice40 directly reflects the spirit of SDG target 10.1, which calls for progressively achieving sustained income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population at a rate higher than the national average.
The transition toward a sustainable economy will involve upgrading infrastructure, investing in clean energy, and supporting bold U.S. leadership on innovation while uplifting impacted mining and power plant communities. These objectives tie to targets under SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, Infrastructure), including target 9.4 (upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable). The Investment in Coal and Power Plant Communities plan aims to support small, medium, and rural manufacturers in the transition, to increase access to capital for domestic manufacturers, to guarantee union and bargaining rights for public service workers (PRO Act), and to ensure domestic workers receive the legal benefits and protections they deserve.
The administration seeks to produce clean and affordable energy that generates opportunities for job creation. The Initiative for Better Energy, Emissions, and Equity (E3) includes $30 million investment in the American workforce through technical assistance and funding awards by the Department of Energy (DOE), with the aim to save $750 per year in energy bills for nearly 12 million American households, and create nearly 700,000 quality jobs in every region in the country through the Clean Energy Accelerator. By aiming at energy efficiency and universal affordable access to clean, efficient energy, the initiative could be measured through the indicators of SDG 7 (Affordable & Clean Energy), including targets 7.1 (ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services) and 7.2 (increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix).
Beyond the Federal Government: Leveraging US Multistakeholder Leadership
The Biden administration would not be starting from a blank slate in more intentionally fusing the SDG and climate agendas domestically. Many U.S. cities, states, and corporations are already in the vanguard of combining climate action and the SDGs. City governments across the U.S. have begun to use the SDGs as an evidence-based framework for measuring progress and fostering policy coherence among different offices and levels of governance. They also embrace the SDGs as a valuable policy framework that is helping to mobilize progress on climate goals, integrating those ambitions with critical targets on inclusion, equity, and sustainability. Cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Phoenix—leaders in the climate and environmental agenda—have pioneered approaches to adapting the SDGs to their local realities.
Over the past five years, U.S. local leadership has also had a decidedly global flavor. Through city-to-city cooperation, networks, and policy exchanges globally, U.S. cities and states are pushing ambition and policy among their counterparts across the world. They have established their leadership in networks such as C40 Cities (chaired last year by Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles), ICLEI, the U.S. Climate Alliance, the Urban 20 (an affiliate of the G-20), the Local2030 Islands Network, and the Brookings SDG Leadership Cities network.
This activity helped maintain U.S. global leadership and cooperation during a notable federal absence. While the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, U.S. stakeholders remained committed, and many of them have become global examples of combined action on climate and sustainable development.
Hawaii helps host a Local 2030 Hub, providing leadership, facilitating peer exchange, and offering technical assistance with a network of small island developing states in the Pacific. New York City launched the first-ever Voluntary Local Review (VLR), an innovative report on local SDG progress that has emerged as a global movement, one so widespread that it was recognized by United Nations member states this year in the Ministerial Declaration of the High-Level Political Forum for the first time. Los Angeles initiated a local Green New Deal and committed to 100 percent renewables on its grid by 2025 while launching a network of cities dedicated to advancing gender equity. The Biden administration can benefit from the experience of these leaders in integrating the two agendas and leverage the stature that many have earned globally.
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Stronger communication and interactions between the local and federal levels will also benefit the implementation of the administration’s domestic priorities. The effort to achieve 50 percent greenhouse gas reduction by 2030 will necessitate a shared vision, alignment, and support among local, state, and national actors, as many of the policies and goals designed at the federal level will rely upon execution by local leaders. From land use decisions to infrastructure and shifts in policies and investments, execution to reach emission targets has a decidedly local flavor. The SDGs provide the platform that can enable local leaders to take on climate while meeting other concerns of their constituents, and provide a common language for local governments to cooperate with the national government as well as coordinate across the vast array of local jurisdictions.
To be successful domestically, the federal government will need to scale up local success and facilitate transfers of knowledge to lower the costs of a fair and equitable energy transition. Building holistic sustainable development plans locally requires practices such as decarbonization, energy transition, geo-explicit approaches, and data monitoring, which require staff, skills, and resources. Federal leadership could help scale up local action and successes by lowering the transaction costs of that exercise, using the SDGs as a universal toolbox so it doesn’t have to be done from scratch.
Recommendations
There are several recommendations that the Biden-Harris administration could embrace in both the short and long term:
1. Explicitly leverage and showcase local leadership and domestic SDG-climate models and innovations at COP26.
This could be done by including local leaders at planned events and forthcoming announcements and partnerships, and even including them on the official United States delegation. Ensuring partnership and regular, open communication between these stakeholders and the U.S. government delegation during the COP proceedings can help jointly reinforce mutually beneficial agendas. Finding ways at COP26 to lift up U.S. local leadership could be a powerful motivator for building additional global partnerships and ambition, and this approach has the added benefit of showcasing U.S. actions that are not beholden to current Congressional budget negotiations or the politics of federal elections. Another opportunity is showcasing the existing and multistakeholder political leadership and innovations already taking place at the local level, through mayors, governors, corporate leaders, and universities. It would demonstrate the global leadership of all segments of American society—after all, it is not just nation-states that will solve climate change.
2. Map and align any U.S. climate action plan to the SDGs.
Doing so would draw attention in the global community and is likely to be perceived as a signal of support for global cooperation that could enable increased international momentum for the U.S. climate agenda. It would also help integrate the interagency process domestically. The National Security Council (NSC) can take advantage of the interagency processes, particularly on Build Back Better, COP26, and climate finance, as an opportunity for using the SDGs to describe how U.S. climate commitments can lead to better economic and social outcomes. This would provide a powerful narrative to bolster its international leadership and engagements at COP26, pushing to accelerate the economic and other transitions needed to reach the targets laid out in the Paris Agreement, especially as many governments are grappling with making progress on climate change at the same time as achieving an equitable economic recovery from COVID-19.
3. Elevate the SDG-climate nexus in specific domestic initiatives, starting with Justice40.
Identifying specific pilot initiatives that advance climate action and the SDGs, including around measurements of equity and prosperity, would send an important signal that the Biden administration is committed to supporting action-oriented efforts in local communities. As Justice40 develops its approach, tools, and scorecards, it could act as a pilot by mapping to key SDG targets and disaggregating data by racial and other demographics to develop the evidence base and measure progress on justice and equity considerations. This initiative so clearly combines social and economic considerations with the administration’s climate ambitions, it provides a ready-made opportunity to explore and exploit the intersections between the two agendas. The increased accountability through the use of SDG data and targets would also provide additional basis for building trust with communities skeptical of these commitments, and could help institutionalize climate justice efforts beyond election cycles. It could also create a through-line for upcoming events on the political calendar that are priorities for the Biden Administration, moving from COP26 to the Summit for Democracy, for example.
4. Identify and develop processes and channels to align federal and local actions within the SDG-climate nexus.
Creating more regular and sustained policy channels among local, state, and national leaders would enable efficient local execution on the policy ambitions set forward by the U.S. national strategy and help identify best practices and innovations. Given the priority that local leaders are already giving to social and economic considerations, an alignment between climate action and the SDGs would be welcomed at the local level. This would also pay dividends in better connecting influential local leadership to diplomacy being done in global networks. Several coalitions could be leveraged, such as the U.S. Climate Alliance and WWF’s America is All In.
5. Announce an intention to conduct a U.S. Voluntary National Review (VNR) on the SDGs, to take advantage of the multiplier effect for U.S. commitments on equitable climate action both domestically and globally, and recognize the domestic applicability of the SDGs.
This offers additional reinforcement to the administration’s drive to build credibility and momentum for its global climate leadership. The United States is the only G-7 and G-20 country not to have submitted a VNR (nearly 170 countries have presented VNRs since 2016). A U.S. commitment to a VNR could create global momentum and attention that will add to its new commitments on climate action, connect its domestic action to its global leadership and investments, and provide another entry point for U.S. reengagement in the global multilateral community. Undertaking a VNR would also offer a “unified, measurable vision” that connects to the global development priorities that the U.S. government invests in and implements internationally through USAID, MCC, DFC, and the State Department.
Conclusion
The above ideas and recommendations would send important signals to domestic and foreign policy audiences that the Biden administration is committed to and is implementing policies and practices that ensure a more just, sustainable, and equitable recovery from the pandemic. Since the administration has not yet signaled its approach to the SDGs domestically, these ideas could also provide momentum for what it might do on the SDG framework in the United States as well. The Office of the Climate Advisor and the National Climate Task Force ought to have a major role as the administration determines its commitment to the SDGs overall. So too should regular channels of communication, learning, and policy exchange be established among the growing cohort of diverse American leaders committed to climate action and the SDGs that cities, states, corporations and investors, philanthropy, universities, and civil society are already carrying forward.
The COVID-19 pandemic, a quickly warming planet, and the murder of George Floyd have demonstrated just how connected these issues are to one another, blurring the lines and important connections between domestic and global leadership from the U.S. The SDGs provide an important vehicle for the Biden administration to rebuild credibility at home and abroad and to implement a comprehensive climate action agenda rooted in equity and sustainability.
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