Many municipalities introduced their first stand-alone green infrastructure (“GI”) plans in the late 2000s and early 2010s, specifically as a means of achieving compliance with water quality standards set by the federal Clean Water Act. As climate change becomes a more imminent threat and extreme weather events increase in frequency, cities again are turning to […]
Equity in Green Infrastructure Read More »
Many cities in the United States have turned to stormwater fees to help address the infrastructure challenges posed by stormwater runoff, which continue to mount due to climate change. Stormwater fees help mitigate the strain caused by excess runoff amounts both by allowing municipalities to raise funds needed to improve sewer systems’ performance and by
The Legal Case for Stormwater Fees in New York City Read More »
New York City, like many other cities, faces numerous practical, political, and legal challenges in raising the revenue it needs to support its growing population. Against this backdrop are ongoing concerns about how the City will finance the additional public services and infrastructure necessitated by new development, as well as the costs it incurs in
Impact Fees in New York City? Legal Authority, Constraints, and Potential Options Read More »
Progressive cities and states have begun enacting policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, one of the leading sources of such emissions in the United States. The same jurisdictions have also generally committed to pursuing decarbonization equitably, without exacerbating the disadvantages faced by historically marginalized communities. Electrification is currently a favored policy for decarbonizing
Equitable Electrification: Could City and State Policies Aggravate Energy Insecurity? Read More »
Tangible environmental resources such as land and water have been the object of property rights and traded in markets for millennia. In a development largely unnoticed by legal scholars, technology now allows a new class of environmental resources that are much harder to see and touch to be measured and potentially sold—environmental attributes. Some of
Propertizing Environmental Attributes Read More »
Katrina Wyman responds to a new article by Daniel A. Farber, Yuichiro Tsuji, and Shiyuan Jing, Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Lessons from the U.S., Japan, and China.
From Why to How Subnational Jurisdictions are Mitigating Climate Change Read More »
Since commercial drilling for oil and gas began in the United States in the nineteenth century, the idea that the first party to capture oil and gas owns them has played a role in determining who initially owns these resources. This article, which appears in the American Bar Association’s July/August 2022 issue of Trends, describes how
Ownership of Environmental Attributes in the Energy World Read More »
As the climate crisis accelerates, policymakers are increasingly turning to novel forms of regulation to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These include regulating the emissions of buildings, which account for over 30 percent of GHG emissions nationwide. A key issue in regulating buildings is whether to regulate building GHG emissions, or whether to regulate the
Building Better Building Performance Standards Read More »
Long a mainstay of environmental policy, emissions trading programs have faced increasing criticism in recent years. Critics have assailed trading programs for failing to generate the scale of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reductions necessary to mitigate the climate crisis and have argued that trading exacerbates the burdens imposed on environmental justice communities. This essay offers
Toward Tradeable Building Performance Standards Read More »
In May 2020, the New York City (NYC) Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency (MOCR) began convening bi-weekly discussions, called the Rapid Research and Assessment (RRA) Series, between City staff and external experts in science, policy, design, engineering, communications, and planning. The goal was to rapidly develop authoritative, actionable information to help integrate resiliency into the
Rapid Research and Assessment on COVID-19 and Climate in New York City Read More »
