City of Oakland 2030 Equitable Climate Action Plan

Oakland’s 2030 Equitable Climate Action Plan (ECAP) will establish actions that the City and its partners will take to equitably reduce Oakland’s greenhouse gas emissions 56 percent by 2030. The City’s ECAP is unique in that it focuses on equity and prioritizes those who have been harmed by environmental injustice and who are likely to be hurt first and worst by the impacts of climate change.

“The consequences of climate change will affect us all, but frontline communities will be hit first and worst as they may not be able to adapt, resist, or recover from the impacts of climate change.”

Problem

The 2030 ECAP is rooted in a deep community engagement process. Oakland is a grassroots community with dozens of community organizations that are actively involved in civic matters. The City was expecting a large amount of feedback on the plan, so they needed a tool to help streamline the collecting and reviewing of comments.  

Solution

The City used a Konveio site to collect comments on the draft plan from October through mid-December 2019. Each section of the plan included opportunities for both narrative comments and action comments. Narrative comments were those that had to do with the language used, while action comments had to do with the proposed goals and targets.

The City received 2,500 comments in total via a combination of the Konveio site, town hall meetings, and workshops. Konveio made it easy for staff to collect and organize comments in one place to analyze them. The ability to use Konveio’s tagging system was crucial to organizing comments and made the process much faster and effective.

Impact

Staff received positive feedback about the usability of Konveio, and people said they liked being able to click and comment directly within the documents. The public also reported they liked being to interact with each other via the comments. Staff said that Konveio allowed people who don’t normally submit comments to easily participate in the process, which helped the City achieve its goal of representing those who are more likely to be affected by environmental injustice.

“The comment process is an important part of getting feedback in policy making, and Konveio provides a modern tool for collecting comments and provides more accessibility over traditional methods.”

— Danielle Makous, Sustainability and Equity Fellow

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