This past year was one of the most challenging our country has faced in many of our lifetimes. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the summer’s protests against police violence have forced deep, damaging inequities in our society out into the light of day. Now, as we start the new year, it’s up to all of us to ensure they not only stay there but that we actively work to redress them.
Nearly half of all homes in Massachusetts rely on gas for heating, which contributes significantly to the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Ending this reliance on a climate-damaging fossil fuel could take decades. That’s why the work must start now, especially if the Commonwealth is going to meet its 2050 targets for cutting its overall carbon emissions.
Addressing physical infrastructure only will never be enough to ensure that our communities and our neighbors can both withstand climate impacts and bounce back quickly when catastrophe strikes. The neighborhoods highlighted in this study are currently the highest risk in terms of both the social and physical risks of climate impacts in the City of Boston. The City can and must support and develop climate resilience hubs to ensure that our communities have the resources they need now and into the future.
This new rapid Health Impact Assessment (HIA) explores how transit-oriented development impacts health and contributes to social, environmental, and economic changes. A collaboration between the Metropolitan Area Planning Council and Conservation Law Foundation
In times of change and upheaval, there is also room for hope and inspiration. While we collectively have much hard work ahead of us, we also have much to commend. Our hope is that this report offers insight into the work that your support makes possible – and inspiration for what we know we can accomplish together.
This Field Guide describes how the partners in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study do research in 9 communities in Greater Metropolitan Boston. The project uses the Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, which is grounded in the idea that the people who are most impacted by a problem are in the best position to understand and solve that problem. After years of research together, we wrote this guide for other communities interested in Participatory Action Research.
Over the past decade, scientific evidence and data linking community conditions to health outcomes has grown exponentially. This report offers recommendations for how the growing ecosystem of tools, approaches, and data sources should support community investment’s impact on health and equity in communities.
CLF is focused on driving forward a future that is equitable and healthy for all, while also confronting the most urgent environmental threats in the here and now. The work we do, together, in the next five years will lay the foundation for the 50 years that follow.
For centuries, Atlantic cod has been essential to New England’s identity. Yet today, you can rarely find locally caught cod in a grocery store or on a menu – because it has been fished to the brink of disaster. Here’s what it’s going to take to save New England’s founding fish.
We can’t allow manufacturers to get away with the false narrative that it’s up to you and me to recycle our way out of the plastic pollution crisis. It’s time to call them out as the real culprits and put the burden on their shoulders, not ours.
