A six-county climate action plan reshapes cooperation across political and geographic lines.
From the article:
Locally, municipalities varying in population density, income levels and industry are teaming up to strengthen their own communities’ climate resilience through a six-county regional climate action plan. The draft Central Kentucky Climate Action Plan, published last fall through an Environmental Protection Agency grant, targets an area of more than half a million people. Their leaders say neither politics nor an urban-rural divide can predict the popularity and effectiveness of climate action. “There are three parts to this, and it includes the environment, the people and the economy. We believe if we focus on those three areas, then we can make our community stronger,” Jada Walker Griggs, the senior program manager in sustainability for Lexington-Fayette Urban City Government, explains. Under the plan, the six counties — Bourbon, Clark, Fayette, Jessamine, Scott and Woodford — as well as municipal governments within will collaborate to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 23 percent by 2035 and 40 percent by 2050, as compared to 2021 levels. “Since the early ’90s, we have seen this attempt to pit local and global versus each other. We’ve seen this attempt to pit individual choice versus systemic change against each other. And we’ve seen this attempt to pit urban versus rural. And these are all false choices,” says Cagle, who has closely followed the climate action plan’s development.
