After 18 months of expert stakeholder collaboration and community engagement, the City of San Antonio has released its climate action plan, SA Climate Ready: A Pathway for Climate Action & Adaption. As a seven-time All-America City, the City of San Antonio is familiar with addressing local concerns with robust civic engagement efforts, the development of its climate action plan was no different.
After expressing its commitment to the Paris Climate accord by passing a resolution in support of the Mayor’s National Climate Action Agenda, the City of San Antonio began the task of developing a comprehensive climate action plan based on best practices from other cities and wide-spread input from residents.
The SA Climate Ready initiative was formed to include a coalition of ninety-one community leaders representing every aspect of the community from businesses, schools, nonprofits and everyone in between. In addition to input from these local experts, the Office of Sustainability sought feedback from San Antonio residents by discussing the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP) at over 300 events attended by more than 11,000 people. Residents also completed over 3,000 surveys and submitted more than 4,000 comments on the initial drafts of CAAP.
The CAAP Public Engagement Plan set two overarching goals for community engagement:
- To engage a geographically and demographically diverse sample of San Antonians throughout the planning process with a goal to achieve demographic representation.
- To foster valuable engagement of San Antonians on climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
To achieve these goals, the Office of Sustainability employed a diversity of engagement methods throughout the plan development, including:
- Public meetings and open houses
- Social media campaigns
- Surveys
- CAAP Steering Committee and Technical Working Group meetings
- Email notifications
- Targeted stakeholder meetings
- SA Climate Ready website
Learn more about the engagement efforts used and the resulting plan.
