City of Seattle – Amber Garcia – 2025

Summary

This summer, EDF Climate Corps Fellow Amber Garcia assisted the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment (OSE) with creating a foundation to prioritize and measure the equity impacts of their climate work.

Goals

To support the One Seattle Climate Action Plan (CAP), an update of the 2013 Climate Action Plan, OSE tasked Amber with creating a framework that would assist subject matter experts in developing actions for the CAP update that would align with City and community climate priorities, and creating equity-focused goals that capture the potential social, economic, and health impacts of each action.

Solutions

With a goal to create a thoughtful framework that truly reflected and built upon the environment and climate justice work already being done by the Seattle community and City, Amber engaged in the following process to develop the Equity Impact and Strategy Framework.
1. Thematic analysis of reports written by Seattle community organizations and the City of Seattle in partnerships with community stakeholders: This process helped Amber develop key components to include in the framework and guided the content creation of each section.
2. Conduct presentations to receive feedback on the framework content from key stakeholders: Amber engaged with Seattle community partners, internal city employees, and OSE leadership to receive feedback that helped strengthen the content and usability of the framework.
3. Implement feedback and present the final framework: Amber built out the framework on ArcGIS Story Maps and presented the final version of the framework back to key stakeholders to showcase how their feedback was implemented.

Potential Impact

The Equity Impact and Strategy Framework creates a user-friendly process that supports thoughtful creation, implementation, and evaluation of potential CAP actions. It also provides a foundation to support a clear and formalized evaluation system for each action’s environmental and equity impacts to support the development of the One Seattle CAP. Most importantly, it will guide the development of actions that: center equity, prioritize partnership with the community, and encourage a geographic prioritization strategy that ensures residents equitably benefit from the positive impacts of each action.