Q&A with Rachel Hodgdon and Mark Chambers: Climate, Health, and Justice: Intersectionality in the Built Environment

Education, climate, and buildings are the greatest passions of IWBI’s President and CEO Rachel Hodgdon. And she’s using that passion to propel action with others. Don’t just take our word for it.

At the October milestone of the Climate Action Pursuit - hosted by Second Nature and the Intentional Endowments Network (IEN) - Rachel talked with Mark Chambers, Senior Director for Building Emissions and Community Resilience, Executive Office of the President, to discuss the intersectionality of climate, health and justice in the built environment.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q. Mark, can you share a little about your scope of work in your current role at the White House?

A. Currently I work as Senior Director for Building Emissions and Community Resilience with the White House Council on Environment Equality. Previously, I worked for the City of New York as Director of Sustainability supporting 8.5 million residents. There is so much exciting climate work happening right now that…I believe it’s helpful to have these national and local skillsets.

Right now, I could not be more thrilled to work on behalf of the President to help decarbonize our built environment. Every day we are confronted with more tangible and experiential evidence that our climate is changing rapidly. On behalf of the administration, I work predominantly on buildings and the resilience of those in community settings – how we construct buildings better, making existing buildings more efficient and electrified, more resilient and less fragile while simultaneously making the people inside the buildings more resilient and healthier, as we work to unlock the ability for people to fully participate and thrive in a multi-generational work to create carbon-free future. I am always driven by a call that I have toward social justice. I have always been driven by this need to improve the lives of others and the nature of service has always been really compelling to me.

As an architect, I bring three-dimensional problem solving into public policy and apply that toward climate. I always think: how do I cultivate a physical environment where good design and good decisions can take place?

When I got the call to join the White House team, I looked at it as an opportunity to serve and do whatever it takes to meet this climate moment. I’m thrilled to engage today and hear from everyone about how we are going to take on these challenges quickly.

Q: In the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, climate scientists are calling it a “code-red moment.” The report makes it clear we aren’t doing enough and that we can expect to see a number of climate-related catastrophes…The Biden administration has broadly committed to building back better. In your opinion, is better enough? Are we at a point of no return?

A. There is a haunting quality to the report that makes it very difficult to see the end. That is part of the challenge we face right now. Not only are things grim, they are unevenly distributed. Communities that contribute the least toward the climate crisis are watching their homes, history and culture destroyed and uprooted. That is not only nationally but globally as well.

Last month after a significant rain event, about 11 New Yorkers drowned in their basements. We have to make significant changes to the way we live in order to project those who are more vulnerable than ourselves. Absolutely more needs to be done. People are suffering right now. Action needs to be taken right now. In the last 2-3 months, we stood up five different interagency working groups and policy councils to work toward specific resilience goals, one on wildfire, drought, coastal resilience, flooding, and extreme heat. Because all of those things are putting us in a place where people are having to respond in real time. As much as we want to plan for the future, we are in a place where we have to activate support right now. Because of that, we are having the agencies fully engaged on how to distribute services, funds and technical assistance that makes communities less fragile.

Q: Another lesson that we have learned through the pandemic is that over and over again, those who have the least suffer the most, which is true not only in education but in any sector. What is climate justice? What does it look like to you?

A. Before taking this job at the White House, when I was working for the City of New York, and in the summer of 2020, we were predicting the hottest summer on record. There were going to be vulnerable people in urban areas, particularly elderly who will experience extreme heat and will not have the ability to visit any public places to cool down due to the pandemic closures. For me when we talk about climate justice, it’s recognizing the intersection of social inequities simultaneously with the climate driven extreme experiences and being able to confront those in real time—that is climate justice.

We pooled together different funding and set up a system of contractors to purchase and install 75,000 air conditioning units in the apartments of elderly New Yorkers. Simultaneously, we petitioned the NY Public Service Commission for utility bill relief to ensure the additional electric usage from air conditioners was not going to be more burdensome. Again – how do we take the present danger and experience and make sure we are taking account of all the other inequities that have made that situation potentially lethal? Urban heat is a pernicious killer every year. This is one of the reasons that the Biden Administration set up an extreme heat interagency working group and a part of the reason that we have started to put out new policies protecting workers that perform their jobs outside in extreme heat.

We also convened a stakeholder engagement roundtable, led by the Chair Brenda Mallory of the White House Council on Environmental Equality, on buildings and extreme heat and how building design assists in dealing with the climate justice issues, specifically on ameliorating heat concerns and the stresses it puts on the occupants.

Q. What Is the call to action for higher education leaders and the most important points of intervention that higher education can make within the system to catalyze climate justice? At its core, higher education is an expression of privilege.

A. It is such an important and difficult question. Higher education, in a time where there is so much income inequality and familial pressures, has an important role to play for the needed nurturing of individuals who are prioritizing confronting present-day challenges like climate change and inequity. Higher education also needs to take the role seriously to educate those who may confront the nature of higher education. The topline is that we need to be educating activists and actively curating an environment of learning for those that are seeking to address these inequalities as a fundamental pillar of success as opposed to an add-on.

Q. Second Nature is well-known and highly regarded for creating the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Hundreds of colleges and universities have signed onto that commitment and thereby committed to move towards carbon neutrality. However, that progress is generally slow. Fewer than a dozen universities have reached carbon neutrality, with only 100 committed to meet the goal by 2050, which is not fast enough. What are some of the ways that you see the private sector expediting progress that could help inform approaches in higher education? Can you also share the work that you and others are doing in the Biden administration to accelerate that progress in terms of “sticks and carrots” which is by mandates and incentives?

A. I am a big proponent of creating boundaries. I think that collectively we’ve had plenty of time for all the altruism to drive decision-making for confronting climate and we haven’t risen to the occasion. Different sectors have shown the ROI strategy on decision-making solely on a financial basis, that doesn’t account for all the externalized costs, has gotten us to a code-red moment. I would argue that time is up where we only encourage people to take climate action and we have to set up constraints.

On the buildings side, that requires working to set caps for the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions that buildings should be responsible for, whether it be an office building, academic building, or a home. This means everyone playing by the same rulebook and that rulebook using carbon as a currency. We are in an interesting place where we are so interconnected and the platforms to communicate and inspire others to change are so vast-- it is important to bring attention to those that are doing well and to those that are pushing work on decarbonization while also addressing social inequality. These need to be equally paired because it’s only through the addressing of social inequality and climate justice that we get to the place where we are doing what we need to do on decarbonization. Create those boundaries and support them by placing good actors on the front street.

Q. For the first time over the last couple of years, we started to see sustainability and CSR reports that are being rebranded as Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) reports, in which companies are starting to take that narrative within their own hands and wanting to share what they are doing proactively, not to just meet a minimum expectation around reporting and disclosure, but as a leader. The shift to ESG is being driven by investors, as they are not interested in less risky investment, but a winning investment. How do you reframe the conversation around climate? You have to make it about business and the bottom line, translating what is in it for them. We don’t need intellectual agreement to get the systemic change that we so desperately need.

A. A lot of the decision-making is still risk-based; not just financial but social risk, too. On social risk, there is the ability to compete for customers/clients, or the talent needed to be successful, as well as seeing that the inability to clarify your climate commitments and get off the sidelines may ultimately impact your business and increase your risk. That is similar to how we are seeing a lot more financial institutions do what many of us have been encouraging them to do for decades and consider climate risk. Another part of that challenge will be making sure that everyone is using the same metrics to evaluate success.

Q. I spent the bulk of my career focused on energy efficiency and diligently working toward getting businesses, education sectors and others to do “less bad” in consideration of planetary health. Regeneration essentially says that focusing on lowering emissions is kind of like telling someone to drive slower over a cliff, or telling a patient that their cancer is terminal but, hey, the chemo might prolong your life for a couple of months…so to be honest that reframing through the lens of regeneration was devastating. I’m curious about the work that you and your colleagues are doing around regenerative approaches and reframing the imperative around solutions.

A. We saw over the last several years what it looks like to dismantle progress and we have spent this year in office first restoring a lot of the Obama era climate policies that were previously set in motion.

That clarified the fact that you have to also embed a lot of this climate work in a way that makes it lasting. The notion of regenerative approach is absolutely the right way to think about it but also gives us a little bit of pause. When we are encouraging people to leap to a better place, you are also asking them to acknowledge whether or not they’ve been in a good place before. We have a very short collective memory of what good is.

It’s therefore also incumbent upon us to be better communicators at how we paint an inclusive vision of the future, the immediate, middle, and long-term future that gives people a clearer picture of what we are actually working towards and how we are using all of the levers in our capacity to do things differently. I think as we get to the other side of the pandemic, reimagining how we look at the built environment is going to be a part of that.

All of the work we’re doing- decarbonizing the transportation sector, moving to zero-emission vehicles, the power supply and electrification- all of that transition will be experienced through buildings. It’s incredibly important for us to use that opportunity to tell the story and be really clear that everyone can bend their skills, passion and expertise towards that collective carbon neutral future.

Q. Human health and planetary health are inextricably linked, and that is the way that we approach our work at IWBI. We’ve mapped all of our WELL features parallel with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and found that we align 16 out of 17 of their goals. I really appreciate this reframing of climate change because the thought of polar bears grabbing the last iceberg seems far away and is hard to relate. However, when you start to tie back to what that means for your family and community, it personalizes it in a big way.

A. Absolutely–and it puts it in metrics that matter to people. I hear you on the polar bears–that has never been a driver for me and for a lot of communities—just because it’s true doesn’t mean that it is something that is relatable. We have to meet people where they are and use better tools to communicate as well as listen to their lived experiences to be able to better develop policies to meet those needs. You can also create the space for new interactions. For example, the President recently created within the Health and Human Services an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity.

In addition to exploring a lot of the one-off strategies that will impact the healthcare sector, they are looking at ways to integrate other Federal programs, such as the weatherization program, into solutions that will impact the built environment, particularly from a health lens. We might not know exactly what the outcome is going to be yet, but creating space for a lot of the connection points that will actually drive human behavior is really important for those who have the positions to make policy changes, whether that is in the government sector, private sector or academia.

Watch their conversation here.

Rachel serves on the Second Nature Board of Directors.