North Central Texas Council of Governments – Nahlia Yefet – 2022

Goals

The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) has been working towards reducing emissions in the North Central area of their state. Nahlia Yefet was tasked to create a comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction toolkit for their transportation sector as a continuation of sector-wide emissions reduction programs.

Solutions

Yefet tackled this project by first conducting research on climate plans around the United States to see what other cities and states were doing to reduce their transportation emissions, compiling individual strategies for the reduction of transportation emissions in an Excel workbook, and assigning a feasibility score to each strategy using a feasibility assessment framework from Ssegawa and Muzinda (2021). Additionally, Yefet created several maps in ArcGIS Pro to highlight the environmental justice communities in the NCTCOG region to bring awareness to the most vulnerable areas and to prioritize solutions in these neighborhoods.

Potential Impact

In total, 52 on-road and 14 non-road strategies were developed and scored, with the potential to reduce GHG emissions by over 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. These strategies cover decarbonization, infrastructure, and transportation demand management and are implementable at different scales, like individually, within businesses, or by local governments. The impacts of these strategies are far reaching and could transform communities into walkable, mixed-use, electric areas with significantly fewer GHG emissions.