Equitable and Efficient Project Delivery

Achieving climate goals requires significant investments in clean energy, transportation, and other climate technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate risks and impacts. The need to make these investments while prioritizing communities hardest hit by pollution and historic disinvestment provides an opportunity for equitable and efficient project delivery – developing climate infrastructure rapidly while delivering meaningful environmental and economic opportunity to communities and avoiding historic patterns that concentrated pollution and poverty.

CLEE’s Equitable and Efficient Project Delivery work focuses on the “soft” infrastructure investments necessary to realize equitable outcomes in deploying the hard infrastructure, technology, and nature-based solutions needed to reduce emissions and build resilience. We focus on:

• Community benefits agreements and other structures to enable meaningful engagement, decision-making capacity, and wealth- and power-building in communities that host climate infrastructure.
• Improved local permitting processes to ensure projects are approved and built rapidly while providing appropriate stakeholder input.
• Collaborative site selection processes that identify least-conflict, highest-benefit locations for investment.
• Legal, institutional, and governance systems to provide pathways for community-oriented project management, oversight, transparency, and accountability.
• Durable funding and financing systems, including community ownership structures, to provide equitable access to clean technology and deliver economic benefits in the most impacted communities.