Conservation Matters: Spring 2021
We find ourselves on the cusp of a sea change in how we transport people and goods as we urgently work to cut the climate-damaging emissions that spew from New Englanders’ tailpipes.
Roadmap: 10 Steps to Investing for Equitable Impact on Community Health and Sustainability
This report provides an overview of our experience with the Healthy Neighborhoods Equity Fund (HNEF). We hope to inform other efforts investing in housing and retail in ways that can lead to equitable changes in neighborhood health and environmental conditions.
Conservation Matters: Fall 2020
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.
Getting Off Gas: Transforming Home Heating in Massachusetts
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.
Climate Resilience Hubs
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.
Transit-Oriented Development and Health: Update to the 2013 Health Impact Assessment to Inform Healthy Neighborhoods Equity Fund II
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
Conservation Matters Summer 2020: Year in Review
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.
A Participatory Action Research Field Guide from the Healthy Neighborhoods Study
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.
Healthy and Equitable Community Investment
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.
21st-Century Transportation: MBTA Governance and Transformation
In this report, Conservation Law Foundation, MASSPIRG, the MBTA Advisory Board, and Transportation for
Massachusetts make a series of recommendations for the successors of the Fiscal and Management Control Board (FMCB). The report provides a pathway to ensure a safe, reliable, affordable, and accessible transit system for our community.