An evaluation of U.S. cities’ efforts to further distributive justice in climate adaptation planning

Abstract Cities are increasingly pursuing sustainability efforts to create inclusive, safe, and climate resilient places. However, there is evidence that emerging climate adaptation actions in cities—whether intentionally or unintentionally—are contributing to widening socioeconomic inequalities. Scholars of climate urbanism have responded to this challenge by calling for efforts to tackle underlying injustices. Leveraging such insights, we provide an empirical assessment of 25 U.S. cities’ plans to address distributional inequities through climate adaptation. Despite increasing scholarly attention, we find that, in practice, cities have relatively limited, but growing, engagements with distributive equity in their adaptation efforts. We find evidence that distributive strategies tend to coalesce across five key sectors: economic empowerment, food and health, housing and land use, urban greening, and water. We find that a focus on distributive climate justice—as complementary to existing research on procedural equity—is needed to advance broader, more comprehensive climate justice goals in cities.