This project summarizes an 18-month campaign started by the Miami Climate Alliance. Throughout a series of six workshops hosted by Catalyst Miami, Miami-Dade County staff and some of our community partners discussed best practices for public participation. Check out the digital booklet below, or scroll down on this page to learn more and give us feedback! 

The group's recommendations can be integrated in local government policy and practice to improve engagement. This will be particularly important while implementing Miami-Dade County's Climate Action Strategy to cut planet-warming pollution.

Local government must strive to address the legacies of exclusion, while creating shared accountability and a culture of transparency.

Watch the video below for an overview of the campaign's process and outcomes. 

All the recommendations here and in the full report relate to the main takeaway: Community leadership is essential to achieve climate justice.

When residents are given the resources and opportunities to work together on their neighborhoods’ challenges, they design more effective solutions and the process itself helps to build community power for decades to come.

There is an appetite for this approach to resilience policy- and practice-making in Miami-Dade County. Key decision-makers must do more to facilitate the community-centered processes that residents are ready and willing to propel to achieve true resilience.

Expand the sections below to learn more about each aspect of this community-determined framework. 

Leave us feedback using the form on this page!

Inform

Consult

Involve

Collaborate

Empower

Get Involved & Learn More

Please leave your feedback by using the form on this page! You can use this same form to sign up for email and text updates from Catalyst Miami.

Become a member of the Miami Climate Alliance at miamiclimatealliance.org.

Helpful Links:

• Read the full report

• Miami-Dade County’s Climate Action Strategy

• Greater Miami & the Beaches’ Resilient 305 Strategy

Contributors

Miami-Dade County Partners

James Murley, Chief Resilience Officer
Kimberly Brown, Director of Resilience Planning and Implementation
Karina Castillo, Resilience Coordinator
Galen Treur, Resilience Coordinator for Strategic Outcomes
Jane Gilbert, Chief Heat Officer

These recommendations were developed by partners with backgrounds in local government, community organizing, academic research, resilience policy, community economic development, intersectional climate justice action, public outreach and engagement. This project was supported by the Energy Justice Working Group of the Miami Climate Alliance and the American Cities Climate Challenge Justice40 Capacity Building Fund. 

In 2019, Dade Heritage Trust invited several concerned organizations and individuals, including Catalyst Miami, to a meeting to discuss the increased loss of tree canopy in our community. The turnout was overwhelming, and it was clear that some action had to be taken to demand better from our decision makers regarding tree preservation and protection policy and procedures. The directive from the group was that we needed thorough research on current tree policies and trends, and education and outreach to the community to teach about the wonderful benefits of trees. The Miami Canopy Coalition was formed.

With a clear vision of next steps, Dade Heritage Trust received a grant from the Miami Foundation and a contribution from then District 8 County Commissioner, and now Miami-Dade Mayor, Daniella Levine Cava which provided funding for in-depth research and outreach which became the basis for this report. Click here to download it.

Miami-Dade County in Florida is a leader in addressing urban heat island effect and extreme heat, which causes more deaths than any other weather-related hazard. At the 2022 Grantmakers in Health conference, a learning tour through Miami — the Dade County Street Response Clinic, local parks, worksites, and public space — focused on the intersections of climate, heat, and health equity from the perspective of community leaders. Catalyst Miami, Florida Clinicians for Climate Action, We Count!, the South Florida Housing Link Collaborative, the Solar and Energy Loan Fund, and the County’s Chief Heat Officer highlighted their work to address extreme heat and displacement due to climate gentrification while sharing about the unique history and culture of the county.

Click here to download the overview.

With increasing urgency of local and regional climate adaptation, there is a growing need for governments to identify and respond effectively to the concerns of communities they serve and to align investments. Researchers designed and piloted a novel hyperlocal method for urban adaptation planning combining two social science tools that have been widely but separately used to foster community engagement and strategize solutions. Not-for-profit community partners Catalyst Miami and the Cleo Institute facilitated multi-session online workshops with participants from two communities in South Florida with whom they have well-established relationships and in which socio-economic conditions and climate risks represent notable vulnerabilities. The workshops first employed photovoice to elicit individual narratives about climate change impacts; participants then followed a design thinking protocol to critically evaluate the leading concerns they identified and propose adaptation solutions. Geospatial mapping and data tools were provided for participants to gain additional tools and further knowledge. Local planning and resilience officials attended some or all of the workshops as observers and interlocutors, dialoguing with participants. Comparative analysis revealed differences in risk awareness and primary concerns between communities, and further demonstrated that concerns and solutions proposed by members of at-risk neighborhoods do not always align with geospatial data that often drives infrastructure adaptation planning in the region, suggesting that more widespread use of community engaged methods could enhance government climate adaptation responses for local communities.

Find the full pilot study here.

Only seven states have laws requiring landlords to disclose an apartment’s flood risk to tenants. Given increasing occurrences of flooding, renters deserve a right to know if their homes are at risk. This report summarizes the state of flood disclosure laws for renters in the seven states that have them, and, building on these laws as well as other renter disclosure laws in other contexts, puts forth recommendations for states to adopt strong, protective, laws to ensure renters are made aware of potential flood risks to apartments before it is too late.

Click here for the full document.

Implementing a community-wide clean energy transition is an ambitious, long-term undertaking that requires leadership and collaboration. Neither municipal government nor community leaders can succeed on
their own. These documents that Catalyst Miami and partners contributed to help community leaders and municipal staff collaborate to establish and manage a task force, committee, or group to manage a long-term accountability process.

Read the accountability framework for community implementation of 100% clean energy goals.

Read the shared accountability guide.

There is a need to better understand the community health impacts of the emissions from commercial and non-residential buildings, as well as the economic impacts on communities of color., including access to capital and to healthy, affordable building space. This report, commissioned by IMT and the Institute for Sustainable Communities, focuses on the impacts and opportunities to advance equitable decarbonization for a subset of buildings that have been understudied: non-residential buildings, located in and providing services to low-income and/or communities of color.

Dr. Jalonne L. White-Newsome of Empowering a Green Environment and Economy set out with her team to uncover challenges and opportunities to advance energy efficiency and clean energy improvements in minority-owned buildings/businesses in six cities: Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Los Angeles, and San Francisco, CA; Miami and Orlando, FL. Dr. White-Newsome met with our Climate Justice Program Manager, Natalia Brown, to incorporate insights on efforts to achieve just energy efficiency and clean energy improvements in Miami.

You can read a blog post summary of this report or download the full report.

This white paper highlights the key findings from the first year of ACEEE’s Leading with Equity Initiative, launched in February 2021. Through the initiative, ACEEE held two sets of three workshops with community-based organizations, advocates, and utilities to help define and drive the development of new equity-focused metrics to include in the next editions of ACEEE’s state, utility, and city scorecards. The initiative aims to ensure community-based organizations and disinvested community interests drive the development of improved equity-centered metrics, while also assessing current decisionmaker capacity to report on desired metrics (e.g., data collection and availability). This white paper includes an overview of the initiative process, associated research findings, workshop outcomes, proposed prioritized metrics for upcoming scorecards, and an accountability commitment and next steps.

Download the full report here.

In March of 2021, Florida Power & Light filed a proposal to the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) to increase electricity base rates by approximately 20% over the following four years. In late October, the PSC approved a settlement agreement which allows FPL to raise rates by a record-breaking $4.868 billion, adding up to the largest rate increase in Florida’s history. Now, the average household utility bill is set to increase by over $215 each year by 2025.

Throughout the entire rate case, our coalition worked to protect households' right to affordable energy services while making the proceedings more accessible for community members to engage in. What follows is a summary of our actions, from organizing residents to speak at PSC hearings and sign action letters, to hosting street demonstrations and press conferences, and conducting community-wide education campaigns. We also highlight lessons learned and provide context for why energy affordability and utility accountability are crucial targets for our movements to achieve climate justice and deeper democracy.

• Background
• The Proposed Rate Hike
• The Settlement Agreement
• Lessons Learned