Vanguard Cities Network

Overview

The Vanguard Cities Network is a field-advancing cohort of truly leading-edge communities deploying innovative strategies to ensure their climate action is focused on distressed neighborhoods that experience disproportionate impacts from climate change and environmental stressors. The growing network of more than 20 Vanguard Cities are being supported to achieve transformational change through rapid and effective nature-based climate solution implementation and enable early and visible benefits from the historic funding commitments made possible by the Biden Administration’s leadership in making these critical community investments.

CRS supports communities with advanced technical assistance, guidance, community engagement support, and training on the development and implementation of resilience programs and climate action plans for disadvantaged neighborhoods.  As a convener around synergies and multi-sectoral collaboration, CRS networks neighborhood-level projects across multiple communities/jurisdictions in ways that enhance efforts in each area. Cities in the Vanguard Network leverage the full range of funding options for climate solutions, including public-private partnerships, creating innovative and sustainable funding pathways to continue expanding important nature-based solutions sectors, and policies that ensure implementation helps communities in the long term, leading to community health, safety and shared prosperity.

The Vanguard Cities Network enables CRS to support high-impact/high-leverage innovation with substantial potential for dissemination, enhancing their climate planning activity with coordinated social impact assessment and monitoring systems that track social, ecological, and economic outcomes associated with the implementation of urban nature-based solutions. Through collaboration in the network, cities use data from geospatial science, ecology, economics, epidemiology, social science, urban planning, and more to advance health, equity, and community through climate action.

CRS helps cities to identify and develop long-term funding mechanisms that can sustain the expanded climate action enabled by increased levels of federal funding for nature-based solutions. Historically this long-term economic planning has led to successful ballot measures that have created more than $93 billion in new, voter-approved funding at the local level for nature-based solutions through technical assistance in compliance with rules governing 501c3 nonprofits.

Vanguard Cities have the opportunity to participate in coordinated social impact assessment and monitoring systems that will enable ongoing tracking of social, ecological, and economic outcomes associated with the tree-planting initiatives they are implementing.

Background

In 2020, a consortium of “vanguard” cities began collaborating around shared goals and knowledge about rapid implementation of high impact urban forestry efforts in historically under-resourced communities and areas with high vulnerability to climate change impacts. Lead cities in this collaboration – Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver/Front Range, Portland, and Albuquerque – formalized their collaboration as the Vanguard Cities Network and have since developed and refined large-scale urban forestry expansion strategies ready to utilize both federal and other leveraged resources.

The Vanguard Cities are developing “blueprints” for replicable, scalable urban forestry-based solutions that demonstrate equity-centered urban natural climate solutions as community development strategies. The technical and implementation expertise within these leading cities is shaping how equity-centered, community-up natural climate solutions achieve desired outcomes, creating a model for other cities nationwide. With proven, existing community-based urban forestry initiatives underway, these Vanguard Cities are already modeling new, holistic and comprehensive best practices to showcase the range of climate, health and economic benefits of robust urban and community forestry programs.

Vanguard City Network Benefits

Nature-based solutions play a critical role in the economy, national security, human health, equity, and the fight against climate change. In support of and alignment with the President’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50-52% below 2005 levels in 2030, conserve at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030, and increase community resilience to extreme weather and other climate impacts.  Towards these goals, CRS helps communities enact a range of enhanced climate planning activity, including:

1) accelerating nature-based solutions nationwide by providing a living lab to share guidance on valuing nature and supporting agencies when updating their policies;

2) modeling how to leverage federal funding to increase deployment of nature-based solutions so that Federal agencies can more easily prioritize nature in funding decisions;

3) providing data to enhance climate-ready site selection and performance criteria to ensure environmental justice, cultural resource protection, and collaboration are part of metrics and measurements of success;

4) supporting Agencies and the Administration in building and training a skilled nature-based solutions workforce that is equitable and brings the economic benefits of nature-based solutions back to communities and cities;

5) prioritizing collaboration and sharing of research, innovation, knowledge, and adaptive learning to fully reveal the scale of the opportunity that nature-based solutions provide and how they work best.

The Vanguard Cities Network is a collaboration of cities that will enable rapid implementation—and early and visible benefits—from the historic funding commitments made possible by the Biden Administration’s leadership in making these critical community investments.