Boston's 2030 Climate Action Plan: Executive Summary

The City of Boston has a long-standing history of climate leadership, pairing ambitious goals with decisive local action to reduce greenhouse emissions and increase resilience against climate hazards. The 2030 Climate Action Plan is the City of Boston’s roadmap for achieving these ambitious climate goals and targets while advancing affordability and creating healthier places to live, work, and learn for all Bostonians - outcomes that go hand in hand with effective climate action.

This Plan is grounded in two core and interconnected areas of work: mitigation and resilience – which frame every strategy and action included. Mitigation efforts focus on rapidly reducing emissions from the sectors that contribute most to Boston’s carbon footprint, particularly buildings, transportation, and energy. Resilience strategies are designed to protect people, infrastructure including new, existing, and historic assets, open space, and neighborhoods from the growing impacts of climate change, while strengthening the City’s ability to adapt over time and creating pathways to good green jobs that support resilience and mitigation investments.

In addition to tracking progress on mitigation and resilience, we acknowledge the broader impacts of climate work across three deeply interconnected areas: public health outcomes, climate justice, and the intersection of mitigation and resilience benefits. This approach recognizes that effective climate action must deliver healthier living and working environments, address historic inequities, and maximize co-benefits, ensuring that investments reduce emissions while also protecting communities most exposed to climate risks. Climate justice is embedded throughout the Plan, recognizing that the impacts of climate change will not affect neighborhoods equally and that climate action presents an opportunity to correct past harms. Communities that have been and will be adversely affected by climate change must be prioritized in both decision-making and investment

The City will continue to engage residents on the Climate Justice Framework to determine how to utilize them in practice and keep the City and its implementation partners accountable for equitable climate action.

The 2030 Climate Action Plan was developed through an all-of-city approach that reflects all Bostonians. No single City department, organization, sector, or community can deliver climate solutions alone. The City worked in close collaboration with residents, institutional partners, community-based organizations, advocates, and technical experts to shape the strategies outlined in this document. This collaborative process helped ensure that the Plan responds to on- the- ground realities, aligns with community priorities, and leverages the strengths of partners across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to accelerate implementation. The priorities outlined in this Plan intersect with and reinforce other City initiatives, ensuring that climate action is integrated into how Boston plans, builds, and governs. This Plan introduces several important updates that reflect how Boston’s approach to climate action has evolved since prior Climate Action Plans. Together, these updates strengthen accountability, better integrate equity, and provide a clearer foundation for implementation.

• First fully integrated Climate Action Plan that addresses climate mitigation, climate resilience, and climate justice together in a single, coordinated framework
• Climate justice centered throughout the Plan, elevating equity impacts of strategies and actions
• Multi-draft, iterative planning process that creates intentional opportunities for reflection, community input, and refinement ahead of the final Plan.
• Metrics that track progress toward climate goals while also measuring impacts on residents’ health, affordability, and daily lived experience.

To understand where Boston stands today and where action is most needed, the City relied on a combination of data analysis and modeling, cross-departmental coordination, and extensive community engagement. Engagement efforts were designed to reflect neighborhood-specific priorities and lived experiences, with workshops and discussions conducted primarily in environmental justice neighborhoods. These discussions were designed to elevate community-identified concerns related to heat, flooding, housing conditions, energy affordability, public health, public transportation, and other topics to ensure that the Plan responds to the impacts of climate change as they are truly experienced by Boston residents across neighborhoods and sets quantitative targets accordingly.

Climate Mitigation

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is central to Boston’s climate strategy. While Boston’s emissions alone will not determine global climate outcomes, the City’s actions play a critical role in demonstrating what is possible. By clearly showing how deep emissions reductions can be achieved in a dense, historic, and economically diverse city, Boston helps set expectations for the private sector and provides a replicable model for other cities. This leadership is essential to accelerating broader emissions reductions beyond Boston’s borders.

Boston’s emissions primarily come from buildings and transportation, with smaller contributions from waste and wastewater. Because waste contributes only a small share of Boston’s overall emissions, the Climate Action Plan includes relatively few waste-focused strategies, prioritizing high-impact actions that deliver meaningful emissions reductions. The waste strategies that are included provide meaningful co-benefits and lie at the intersection of climate mitigation and resilience, primarily focusing on building resilient local food systems and advancing the construction, deconstruction, and reuse of buildings. Driven by strong local and state policies, Boston has already reduced citywide emissions by 22.4 percent compared to 2005 levels, based on the most recent annual community-wide greenhouse gas inventory.

Despite this progress, current trends show that Boston is not yet on track to meet its 2030 climate goal. To better understand the scale of action needed over the next five years, the City modeled three emissions scenarios:

• Boston’s Emissions Without Climate Action: This scenario shows what future emissions would look without climate policies that are currently underway. It highlights the significant impact of existing programs and underscores how much higher emissions would be without them.
• Meeting Existing Goals and Targets: This scenario reflects projected emissions through 2050 if Boston continues with the programs and policies already in place today. It represents where we are headed based on our current efforts.
• 2030 Climate Action Plan Pathway: This scenario shows the path to meeting Boston’s 2030 goal. It assumes that both our existing programs continue to be implemented and expanded, alongside additional actions outlined in this Plan that are expected to further reduce emissions.

These three scenarios highlight the impact of Boston’s climate action to date and the additional work still needed. The City has implemented programs and initiatives, such as the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance and the Zero Emission Vehicle Roadmap, that are critical to reducing community-wide emissions. As reflected in the Meeting Existing Goals and Targets scenario, full implementation of these programs is projected to reduce emissions by approximately 48 percent by 2030, bringing the City within reach of its 50 percent reduction target.

By contrast, the Boston’s Emissions Without Climate Action scenario shows that without these foundational policies, emissions would decline by only about 28 percent by 2030, underscoring the significant progress already underway. Building on this foundation, the 2030 Climate Action Plan Pathway illustrates how the City and its partners can work to close the remaining gap by fully delivering existing programs while advancing additional actions identified in the Plan. This approach focuses on implementation that is equitable, effective, and designed to serve all residents.v

The Climate Action Plan focuses on accelerating action in the sectors with the greatest potential for near-term emissions reductions. Buildings, both large and small, must significantly increase efficiency and reduce fossil fuel use. Transportation strategies must go beyond electrification alone, expanding mode shift, increasing electric vehicle adoption, and reducing emissions from both passenger and heavy-duty vehicles.

The Plan builds on established targets while identifying additional actions needed to reach the full 50% emissions reduction by 2030 and stay on course for carbon neutrality by 2050. By prioritizing high-impact strategies and scaling proven solutions, Boston is positioning this decade as the decisive window for delivering deep emissions reductions across the city.

Climate Resilience

Unlike emissions targets that can be aggregated to track progress through greenhouse gas emissions, resilience targets are inherently more complex. Climate resilience cannot be measured through one indicator alone, because it reflects how people, neighborhoods, and systems experience climate risk and withstand climate impacts. Many resilience efforts are ultimately about preventing harm - keeping people safe during heat waves, storms, and flooding - which makes success harder to measure, as it is not defined by events that happen, but by impacts that are avoided. As a result, Boston’s resilience targets are designed to track progress across multiple indicators that together show how the City is reducing risk and strengthening resilience in neighborhoods through the three key hazards that Bostonians face: heat, stormwater and inland flooding, and coastal flooding. A fourth category, cross-hazard climate risks, acknowledges that the impacts of the three aforementioned hazards often overlap, so tracking progress through holistic targets can provide a more complete picture of neighborhood resilience.

Boston’s Climate Action Plan translates goals and targets into action through a set of high-impact strategies and measurable metrics. Strategies encompass the priority actions that the City and its partners will advance across sectors, with some led directly by the City and others driven in collaboration with external partners. The City will work closely with our community partners to ensure that programs remain accessible, responsive, and grounded in the needs of Boston’s residents.

Metrics track progress over time and help ensure accountability. Reported annually, they will be used not only to understand how Boston is reducing emissions and strengthening resilience, but also how climate action is translating into real, tangible benefits for residents. Together, these strategies and metrics provide a clear roadmap for how Boston will deliver effective, equitable climate action across the city.

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