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Boulder is known for its environmental activism and leadership, earned over many decades of fighting climate change at municipal level. The community’s legacy includes accomplishments in waste reduction, energy, transportation and conservation.
But, the new approaches to combating climate change go beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The city’s government and businesses across Boulder are embracing coalitions and collective action as a better way to tackle this more complex range of environmental issues such as equity and climate justice.
After the publication of an important report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a United Nations agency) that provided regular scientific assessments of the possible effects and future risks of climate changes, policymakers felt compelled to address the devastating impacts of human-caused global warming.
“Scientists tell us that we have roughly until 2030 to make the massive, societal, systems-scale changes required to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Jonathan Koehn, interim director of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Department. “I think our community is poised to take the next step in this work, but as the city, we recognize that climate action has to look different than it has in the past.”
City government has adopted a greater emphasis on collaboration — partnering with counties, other cities, governmental agencies and local businesses in order to increase the scale and impact of environmental initiatives.
“The city has really been thinking deeply about the role of local government in overall community-based climate action,” Koehn said. “There are things that local government is good at, and there are things that perhaps we are not so good at, so we’re shifting to facilitating and not always being the doer. The reality is that individual actions absolutely are critical, but they matter more when they’re done in a collective way.”
Boulder was a co-founder Colorado Communities for Climate Action, also known as CC4CA. This coalition of 40 counties and municipalities advocates for stronger state, and federal climate policies. The idea for the coalition was born out of the realization that Boulder’s local climate goals could not be met without more-effective federal and state environmental policies.
It addressed 44 bills directly during the 2021 Colorado legislative sessions. This resulted in Colorado moving toward a larger regional power grid, reducing an Xcel Energy limit for rooftop solar energy generation, and improving how electric utilities manage resource planning.
Earlier this summer, Boulder unveiled new, more aggressive emission-reduction targets that support achieving larger regional and national climate targets and express the community’s commitment to solving the global climate challenge.
These are the city climate targets:
- 70% reduction in emissions by 2030, compared to a baseline of 2018.
- Becoming a “net zero” city by 2035, which means that Boulder would produce sustainable, carbon-free energy in amounts equal to or exceeding the amount of energy consumed within the city.
- Becoming a “carbon-positive” city by 2040, which means Boulder would go beyond net zero status and create environmental benefits by removing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The city’s Climate Initiatives Department plans to take advantage of existing ecosystems such as urban parks to serve as “natural climate solutions” that can help combat greenhouse gases and improve community resilience to climate change. The city aims to remove 50,000 tons carbon dioxide annually by 2030. This will be achieved through urban tree, forest, and soil landscape restoration. A “Cool Boulder” campaign to be launched later this year will include support for private landowners — both residential and commercial/institutional — to fill available tree planting areas with appropriate species.
Cool Boulder will address climate justice and equity issues. A recent city report stated that “historic racism, redlining and other factors contribute to reduced tree canopies, depleted or polluted soils and other environmental impacts.”
“Climate change is a crisis that places a disproportionate burden on our most vulnerable populations — low-income communities, communities of color, seniors, people with disabilities,” Koehn said, adding that investments in climate solutions must target such vulnerable communities.
Boulder’s private sector is also taking important steps in combating climate change. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has been on the front lines for decades, developing satellites that provide environmental measurements that have been vital to assessing the scope and impact of pollution and other forms of climate damage. Ball is developing a satellite to dramatically improve the measurement of methane (a primary greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere. Methane has 80 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide within the first 20 year after it is released into space. Ball stated that reducing methane emissions from oil-and-gas exploration and production by 45% by 2030 would have the same 20-year climate benefit as closing 1,300 coal-fired power stations.
Ball said that MethaneSAT’s satellite is designed for precise measurement of methane emissions around world. It will be able to find and measure them with a precision that has never been achieved before. MethaneSAT is scheduled to launch in this year. It will monitor areas with high oil and natural gas production as well as methane emissions from industrial agriculture.
“We can’t manage what we don’t measure,” said Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager of civil space at Ball Aerospace. “We need to manage pollution, we need to manage air quality, manage ocean plastics. These are all things we need to globally manage, but you can’t do that if you don’t have the right kind of global measurements.
“These satellites are so important because that’s what provides the global measurement that allows you to know where to put your resources for mitigation and cleanup, to know where you can get the most bang for your buck,” she said. You’ve got to have the global measurements as well as local measurements to use your resources wisely.”
Ball is working on the advanced spectrometer for the MethaneSAT mission. The satellite will circle the globe continuously and monitor a view path of 125 miles. It will have high-resolution sensors that can detect methane concentrations as low as 2 parts per billion. They also identify specific emissions and their rate of emission. To monitor progress in methane reduction efforts, the satellite can be used to periodically reassess problem areas.
MethaneSAT LLC is financing MethaneSAT, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Environmental Defense Fund. This non-profit environmental advocacy group is well-known for its work on issues ranging from global warming to deforestation.
Businesses in some of Boulder’s other major economic sectors, such as the outdoor recreation sector, also are taking direct action to positively impact the environment.
In 2020, Boulder’s Outdoor Industry Association created a Climate Action Corps to bring together association members to address climate change. The corps has set the ambitious goal of making outdoor recreation the world’s first “climate positive” industry by 2030. To reach that goal, outdoor recreation businesses would need to set and achieve a science-based target that addresses all their greenhouse gas emissions, remove more gases from the atmosphere than they emit, and advocate for wider systemic change. More than 100 companies, representing more than $25 billion in annual revenue, have already joined.
Members who join the corps agree to publicly share their progress each year. The association reported that 84% of corps members measured greenhouse gases emissions from their controlled or owned operations. 78% have set or are setting targets for reducing those emissions. 49% are actively reducing them through energy efficiency improvements and sourcing renewable electricity in the U.S.
The corps is represented by Nite Ize Inc., a Boulder-based company. Nite Ize manufactures, distributes, and designs a wide range consumer products that are used for outdoor recreation. Nite Ize has found the corps’ very detailed approach a great resource for achieving the company’s environmental goals, Nite Ize President Michael Boyd said.
“As a small company, partnering with the largest players in the outdoor industry has really built our knowledge base about how to build a strategic approach for what we can do to fulfill our part in the battle against climate change,” he said.
Nite Ize is developing separate strategies to support its local operations and its global supply chains. Locally, the company reduced energy consumption at its Boulder office and distribution centre by installing LED lights and new HVAC control systems. It began buying wind energy from Xcel.
To reduce energy consumption in its supply chains, company officials have begun the tedious process to talk with partners like contract manufacturers and retailers to assess their energy use. Boyd said that many of these companies already recognize and address their environmental impact.
“We want to identify what’s our best focus as we try to make the biggest impact as quickly as possible,” he explained.
Boulder is also home of a significant number of natural and organic products businesses. The natural-products industry is similar to the outdoor recreation sector in that it takes a broad-based, well-organized approach towards addressing climate change.
“Brands in natural and organic products were founded with the belief that they wanted to be mission-driven and work to better the planet and their communities,” said Jenna Fitch, community and content director for New Hope Network, a publishing and events company focused on natural foods and products.
New Hope uses its publications and industry events as a way to increase awareness of companies taking measurable actions to improve the climate and address climate injustice, Fitch stated. Fitch added that there has been a growing interest in climate issues over the past five years, and that resources have increased to help with that.
The Climate Collaborative, an independent organization, is made up of distributors, wholesalers, brokers and manufacturers from the natural foods sector that work to reverse climate change. The collaborative is intended to help companies take meaningful steps towards reversing climate change both independently and in collaboration. According to the organization’s website, its 700-plus members have made more than 2,600 public commitments to specific climate actions.
Climate Collaborative offers a wide range of educational resources, including webinars and workshops, that can be used to help natural products companies identify the climate strategies they can take on.
“Nature is very complex and everything is interconnected, but we can still break this challenge off into chunks,” Fitch said. “If food waste is something that’s easier for a brand to act on than refrigerants, then focus on food waste.”
The Climate Collaborative identified nine areas in which natural-food companies could take meaningful and measurable actions:
- Regenerative agriculture is a way to store more carbon in the ground that is released into the atmosphere during farming.
- Increasing energy efficiency
- Reducing food waste in a company’s supply chain.
- We are working to ensure that important commodities like beef and soy come from non-deforestation sources.
- Reduce the climate impact of packaging
- Committing to switch 100% to renewable power
- Transport emissions can be reduced.
- Reduce short-lived pollutants, such as methane (or hydrofluorocarbons) by reducing their emissions.
- Support legislation that promotes meaningful progress in combating climate change.
The Boulder area’s environmentally conscious consumers expect local businesses to be doing their part to address climate change, Fitch said.
“Business is a really cool mechanism for change. We can provide the things that people want and need to live their lives in a way that is good for the world and for people,” she said. “Consumers are driving some of this change because they’re seeking transparency, traceability, sustainability, social justice in the supply ecosystems of the food products they’re purchasing and eating.”
All segments of society, including businesses, have a role to play in combating global warming, said Nite Ize’s Boyd.
“Whether it’s at the individual or global level, climate change is a reality that we collectively need to recognize and work together on,” he said. “I believe from individuals to private companies all the way through to governments around the world, we all have a responsibility to participate and work together.”
