About the Cool City Challenge:

The Cool City Challenge is a climate moonshot strategy. Its mission is to accelerate the decarbonization of the world’s cities which emit 70% of the planet’s CO2 through empowering its citizens – 70% of a city’s carbon footprint. 

It is a whole system climate solution which integrates bottom-up and top-down change strategies. It develops the transformative leadership skills of a multi-sector team to facilitate a Moonshot Climate Action Plan (MCAP) in a city. The MCAP is built upon the foundation of the Cool Block of 5 to 8 households and Cool Neighborhood of approximately 10 Cool Blocks in geographic proximity. This creates the foundation for creating a carbon neutral neighborhood. The goal of the MCAP is to scale up carbon neutral neighborhoods citywide. 

By combining the MCAP strategy with these empowerment tools, a city is able to accelerate the speed and magnitude of change needed to become carbon neutral by 2030. The intent of the Cool City Challenge is to create 100 climate moonshot cities across the US and worldwide over the next several years. This will provide the knowledge, models, and momentum for its larger mission of accelerating the decarbonization of the world’s cities. 

Over 5,000 people on 325 Cool Block teams across eight California cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Santa Barbara, Isla Vista, Irvine, and Petaluma) have participated in the program pilot phases. They achieved an average household carbon reduction of 31% (5 metric tons), took 25 actions, and had a 45% block recruitment rate.