Cool City Challenge

An Initiative of Empowerment Institute in Partnership with the Cities of Davis, Palo Alto, Sonoma, CA, and Sao Paulo, Brazil

“The world’s cities are responsible for up to 70% of harmful greenhouse gases and have become the real battleground in the fight against climate change. What goes on in cities, and how they manage their impact on the environment, lies at the core of the problem.”

–Hot Cities: Battle Ground for Climate Change,
UN-HABITAT’s 2011 Global Report

The Purpose

To scale up a proven community-based social innovation to achieve dramatic carbon reduction in three early adopter American cities (Palo Alto, Davis and Sonoma, CA) and three neighborhoods in Sao Paulo, Brazil of comparable size to the American cities and then disseminate this model worldwide. The ultimate goal of the Cool City Challenge is to develop a disruptive social innovation capable of changing the game in the climate change space.

An Opening for Change

With international climate change legislation failing to get traction, as concerned citizens of our planet we are left to our own devices. But even if legislation had passed, the speed and magnitude of change our scientists tell us is needed goes well beyond anything political leaders were contemplating. The social change tools at their disposal―command and control and financial incentives―at their best are designed for slow, incremental change. If the current social change tools of carrots and sticks alone are unable to meet our needs, what else do we have? Are there assumptions we might rethink about what motivates people to change? And with our national governments unable to lead the way, how might our communities effectively step into this leadership vacuum?

A Vision of Possibility

Imagine for a moment that cities and citizens from the largest per capita carbon-emitting country―America―and one the world’s fastest growing economies and a global leader on climate change abatement―Brazil―came together to develop a game changing social innovation around global warming. Its goal: rapid and substantial carbon reduction in the short-term and carbon neutrality in the long-term, with vibrant livability for its citizens and green prosperity for its businesses.

With a real ticking clock, substantive and timely carbon reduction is critically needed. The fossil fuels used to power our homes and cars generate between 50 and 90% of a community’s footprint. In America this represents half of the country’s CO₂ emissions. It is also the low-hanging fruit because we can make these changes immediately while buying needed time for the longer-term technology and renewable energy solutions to scale-up.

Further, empowering the citizens of a community to lower their carbon footprint builds demand for the green products and services needed to create local low carbon economies and the political advocacy needed to become carbon neutral cities – the carbon mitigation end game for cities. Moreover, this sends a profound message to the world that citizens in a developed world country are able to reduce their high carbon-emitting lifestyles and citizens in a developing world country are able to leapfrog over the inefficient use of natural resources and develop environmentally sustainable lifestyles. And all while cities grow their economies and create greater quality of life for their citizens.

Cities and citizens coming together as partners to address climate change, accruing these many benefits, and taking this social innovation to scale can be a catalyst to engage humanity in believing there is a credible path forward in addressing the planet’s runaway carbon emissions. With this inspiration and restored faith in our future all manner of social inventiveness and bold solutions will come forward. Humanity will have stepped up and met the great challenge of our time. What exactly will be achieved is unknown, but what is known is that we will be consciously shaping our future on this planet with the best of our collective intelligence. We will have taken control of our destiny as a species.

Meeting the Challenge

While getting people to reduce their carbon footprint – energy efficiency – is the low-hanging fruit to CO₂ mitigation in the short term, will we be able to pick it? Can we empower citizens to get out of their comfort zones and adopt low carbon lifestyles? Will cities be willing to expand their social change tool kit beyond legislation and financial incentives to directly reach out and engage their citizens? And if cities and citizens are both willing to make these changes can such an initiative be brought to scale?

In 2006 Empowerment Institute―the world’s foremost expert in environmental behavior change and community engagement―began attempting to answer these questions by creating a community-based environmental behavior-change program called Low Carbon Diet. The program consists of twenty-four actions to reduce one's carbon footprint by at least 5,000 pounds in thirty days and to help others do the same. It is based on two decades of experience working with several million people in hundreds of cities around the world who are organized into neighborhood-based peer support groups of 5 to 8 households called EcoTeams.

The Low Carbon Diet program helped empower the movement that had been building in America around personal action and community-based solutions, and immediately took off. It was driven by the many local governments committed to the issue of climate change who were wishing to engage their citizens; faith-based groups like Interfaith Power and Light representing some 5,000 congregations, wishing to engage congregants; and environmental groups, like Al Gore's Climate Project, which gave the book to the 1,000 people he trained to lead his “An Inconvenient Truth” slide show. This interest resulted in the development of a community engagement strategy called a Cool Community.

There are now over 300 Cool Communities in thirty-six states across America with participants achieving on average a 25 percent carbon footprint reduction and reaching out to fellow citizens to accomplish the same. Low Carbon Diet and the Cool Community model has also been translated and culturally adapted for China, Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Cool Communities are developing robust long-term carbon reduction capability by building the community leadership, carbon-literate citizenry, and political will necessary to move the community toward carbon neutrality. However, a Cool Community does more than just address a city’s carbon footprint; it also enables it to enjoy the immediate practical benefits of green economic development, more livable and resilient neighborhoods and greater environmental sustainability.

And at the most fundamental level by enabling individuals to become personally part of the solution, Cool Communities are creating a new dynamic in how we tackle large societal challenges. They are allowing us to move beyond the traditional social change formula of business as the problem and government as the solution – the familiar paradigm in which nonprofits lobby government for better regulations against business while disenfranchised citizens sit on the sidelines complaining about the coziness between politicians and business.

When citizens are empowered to adopt socially beneficial behaviors, such as a low-carbon lifestyle, an opening can occur for traditionally adversarial relationships to establish new arrangements of cooperation and collaboration. When the whole system begins working together and there is no “other” to combat or protect against, more innovative and generative solutions start to emerge. Everyone is now a participant in shaping the future. (See Addendum for further information on the Cool Community methodology and the Social Change 2.0 framework that undergirds it.)

The Goals

Three American cities (Davis, Palo Alto and Sonoma, CA) and three neighborhoods in San Paolo, Brazil of comparable size to the American cities (50,000 to 75,000) will scale up the Cool Community model and become global “teaching cities.”
Build each cities capacity to engage between 25% and 75% of their citizens over a three-year period to reduce their carbon footprints 25%.
Build each cities capacity to enable a minimum of 40% of program participants to do energy efficiency building upgrades on their homes.
Assist cities in collaboration with a research institute and local universities to become carbon neutral by 2025. (The lead research partner is Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in collaboration with Stanford, UC Davis and UC Berkeley.)
Support cities in developing a green economic development strategy around the increased demand generated by the campaign for low carbon goods and services and renewable energy.
Support cities in redeploying the social capital generated through the EcoTeams to enhance the resiliency and livability of the city’s neighborhoods.
Create the Cool City challenge as a whole system solution through engaging and building the transformative leadership and community organizing capacity of the city’s civic and faith-based groups, university and high school students (Cool Community Corps) and businesses, This approach will not only enable the campaign to accomplish its EcoTeam recruitment goals, but leave a legacy of enhanced community leadership, strengthened community partnerships, and a deepened environmental stewardship ethic.
Create a formal research study of the environmental, economic and social results of the campaign and its various processes to assist in its future dissemination. (The lead research partner is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with Stanford, UC Davis and UC Berkeley.)
Launch the Cool City Challenge with an announcement of the three Brazilian and three American cities in June 2012 at the “Rio + 20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Announce the results of the Cool City Challenge as part of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and seed it in cities as the Olympic torch circumnavigates the globe.

Summary of Major Milestones

Phase 1 – January 2012 to December 2012: Secure financing, build program infrastructure, launch Challenge at “Rio + 20” UN Conference in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012.

Phase 2 – January 2013 to December 2015: Support cities to achieve carbon reduction, livability, resiliency, and green economic development goals, design carbon neutral plans.

Phase 3 – July 2015 to December 2016: Create film, provide “X Prize” to qualified cities, showcase results at Rio Olympics, and roll-out Cool City Challenge globally.

For More Information:

Contact David Gershon