The Urban Climate Solution

Dense, walkable and transit-friendly cities are one of our greatest climate solutions. As we chart a new future for the 21st century city, leaders are looking for ways to make safer streets, fix polluted air, reduce carbon emissions, and make more vibrant, livable cities. In 2025, New York City implemented a bold and transformational program: congestion pricing, achieving a long-sought victory in the work to improve urban life. Today, New Yorkers are adjusting to a marvelous new normal: an 11% decrease in traffic congestion, an 8% drop in traffic injuries, 22% cleaner air, and faster buses leading to a 7% increase in transit ridership.

In this panel we’ll dive into how New York finally pulled off this transformative policy, the results we’ve seen so far, and what lies ahead for other major U.S. cities that want to explore similar policies. Learn how New York overcame political, legal and bureaucratic hurdles to implement its groundbreaking program to decongest streets, and how doing so is helping New York tackle one of its most persistent problems – congestion and tailpipe pollution. As New York followed in the footsteps of overseas pioneers, like London, Stockholm and Singapore, so too will U.S. cities follow New York. The panel will walk through how cities can build a winning coalition, champion the positive impacts, and reap the benefits of one of the most powerful tools in the urban climate policy toolkit.

Transportation is accountable for the second greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US economy, largely due to our car dependent transportation system that calls for Americans to drive millions of miles every day to reach daily destinations. Despite widespread recognition of the need to provide more sustainable transportation options, investments in transit have not increased enough to shape land development in ways that reduce emissions.

Instead, high costs to build and operate transit, along with mis-aligned, emissions intensive car-centric investment priorities continue to shape the transportation system. But what would it take to maximize investment and benefits from transit? Significantly increasing access to sustainable and affordable transit options will take both increased investment and systemic policy reform, but result in cascading benefits across health, equity, economic development, and climate.

Bringing jobs and commerce closer to where people live decreases our reliance on vehicles. Unfortunately, zoning, parking mandates, licensing rules, and residential sprawl have rendered neighborhood enterprises both illegal and unprofitable. This panel examines how to untangle the legal and economic web that prevents sustainable mixed-use neighborhoods.

In 2007, McKinsey popularized the global cost curve for climate abatement, ranking interventions from negative-cost efficiency gains to expensive new technologies. Land use has never appeared on that curve, yet infill housing may be one of the cheapest levers available: it lowers vehicle miles traveled and embodied carbon while relying on infrastructure that already exists, and the policies needed to legalize it, like ending exclusionary zoning and restrictive parking mandates, cost governments next to nothing to enact. Removing parking minimums in particular frees up land and lowers construction costs, helping infill projects pencil out and giving rise to more market-driven housing growth and a stronger property tax base. Panelists will explore why land use has remained a blind spot in climate strategy despite this outsized, low-cost potential.

The housing affordability and climate crises are often addressed through separate — and sometimes competing — policy agendas. Housing advocates seek faster approvals, lower construction costs, and fewer barriers to infill development. Building decarbonization advocates seek to prevent decades of additional fossil-fuel dependence by advancing all-electric construction, stronger performance standards, and cleaner energy systems.

But housing production and decarbonization do not have to be opposing goals. Well-designed infill housing can reduce transportation emissions, lower household energy costs, improve indoor air quality, and protect residents from extreme heat and wildfire smoke. Poorly designed or poorly sequenced requirements, however, can add cost, delay projects, strain electrical infrastructure, or disproportionately affect affordable and smaller-scale development.

This session will examine where housing and decarbonization strategies reinforce one another, where genuine implementation tensions arise, and how policymakers, developers, advocates, utilities, and funders can resolve them. Panelists will explore practical approaches to codes, incentives, permitting, utility coordination, affordability protections, and policy sequencing that allow communities to build more housing without locking in long-term emissions or future retrofit costs.

The session will conclude with a set of principles for advancing housing abundance, affordability, electrification, and climate resilience together.

Most of the world's urban growth over the next few decades will happen in cities that don't yet exist at scale — concentrated in the Global South, where population growth is fastest and infrastructure is least locked in. Whether that growth compounds sprawl-driven emissions or avoids them depends on choices being made right now about housing and land use policy, as well as transportation infrastructure investments. Once made, these decisions produce long-lasting impacts for climate, accessibility, and economies. This panel will draw from the experience of urban planning, land use, and transportation experts actively working on efforts in the global south.

The fiscal and climate case for infill housing is increasingly hard to dispute — but data alone hasn't been enough to overcome the political and aesthetic resistance to density, even if it's for the better. This panel is about the messaging gap: how advocates, designers, and coalition-builders are translating cost curves and emissions data and examples of beautiful infill housing from around the world into narratives and images that make compact, mixed-use development the changes communities yearn for rather than something imposed on them. Panelists will share what's worked around the country — and what hasn't — in turning abundance into a story policymakers, developers, and the public actually want to be part of.

The climate movement must explicitly embrace reducing driving as a key piece of reducing emissions and building a sustainable future. Adoption of EVs has not and will not sufficiently address emissions caused by transportation, even if they were being adopted at target goals. In fact, increases in Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), in NYC and nationwide, are currently undercutting other strategies for reducing transportation related emissions, leaving us all in a standstill.

This panel addresses the need to reduce driving and explores various strategies for getting there, with a focus on strategies that have successfully improved air quality and reduced driving, and the connection between the two.

Re-envisioning the right of way: from the road, to the curb, to the sidewalk. How can we rearrange our streets to encourage walking, biking, and transit ridership? How can we use public realm features for stormwater management and other resiliency interventions? How can we ensure congestion and curb pricing don’t just speed up traffic or make it easier to park but instead give us the space to create efficient, safe, resilient, and social streets?

Autonomous vehicles, e-bikes, bike share, car share, mobility-as-a-service, and other emerging technologies are already reshaping how people move. But whether these tools reduce emissions, traffic, and car dependency depends on the urban environments they enter and the policies that guide them.

This session will move beyond both hype and doom to ask how cities can use emerging mobility to support safer streets, reduce vehicle miles traveled, improve curb management, and incentivize climate-aligned transportation choices.