By Joseph Mendonca · February 27, 2025

Smart Growth America is excited to announce the release of a new U.S. Climate Alliance resource to help states and territories advance climate mitigation and resilience goals through their land use policies. Climate and Land Use Planning: A Policy Guide for U.S. States and Territories, produced with support from Smart Growth America and Climate Resilience Consulting and in consultation with the Alliance’s members, provides government leaders and policymakers with a suite of policy recommendations and governance strategies for climate action, with a special focus on location-efficient and climate-resilient development.

As land use policies can significantly impact communities’ greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilience, ensuring state-level alignment between land use planning and climate goals can be a powerful tool to create more sustainable and resilient communities. The guide details how states and territories can advance this work, outlining key land use planning policies, governance strategies, and case studies.

Climate-aligned land use planning

The guide organizes its recommendations around three foundational principles for climate-aligned land use planning: reduce greenhouse gas emissions and bolster climate resilience; protect natural and working lands (and their associated ecosystem services); and build social equity by addressing climate and environmental injustices.

The guide’s recommended policies fall into one of three priority areas:

• Location-Efficient Development (LED): Land use policies can encourage development in areas already well-served by infrastructure, which reduces sprawl and encroachment on natural and working lands, produces housing that is more energy-efficient, and promotes lower-carbon transportation options like walking, biking, or taking transit.
• Healthy and Resilient Natural and Working Lands (NWL): Land use policies that preserve, restore, and protect NWL allow them to sequester carbon, maintain ecosystem services (including resilience to environmental hazards), and remain ecologically functional. NWL also provide co-benefits to communities by supporting physical and mental health and fostering community-building.
• Climate-Resilient Development (CRD): Land use policies can guide development away from high-risk areas, reducing exposure to environmental hazards. CRD reduces the impacts of environmental hazards on communities by integrating nature-based solutions, limiting development in high-risk areas, and facilitating community-centered relocation.

To effectively implement the policies, the guide also outlines several governance strategies for states and territories to consider, including:

• Cross-sectoral and intergovernmental planning: Collaboration across government teams, especially between professionals of different areas of expertise, allows for more effective land use planning. Collaborators’ differing knowledge bases can be leveraged to align climate and land use goals across several government agencies, creating opportunities for more holistic approaches.
• Data-driven planning and decision-making: Approaches to climate-aligned land use planning that are informed by data increase the likelihood of effective implementation. Governments can draw inspiration from policies and strategies with demonstrated outcomes and use data to establish benchmarks to track progress toward strategic goals.
• Stakeholder partnership and engagement: By partnering with a wide variety of stakeholders, governments can establish dialogues with groups affected by land use policies early in the planning process, and help ensure that community needs are adequately addressed. This is especially critical when engaging with historically marginalized groups that are often most affected by climate and land use issues.

Case Studies

In the guide, several climate-aligned land use policies implemented by members of the Alliance are highlighted as inspiration for similar efforts in other states.

As an example of location-efficient development, the guide discusses the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Communities program in Massachusetts. This program created multifamily zoning requirements for MBTA Communities, or those localities that host or are nearby to transit stations operated by the MBTA, centered around Boston. The state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities heavily incentivizes communities to amend their zoning codes to allow multifamily housing, ideally within a half mile of a transit stop, with noncompliant communities subject to consequences like a loss of state funding. By encouraging denser housing types near transit, the MBTA Communities program directs future development to areas well-served by existing infrastructure and reduces car dependency.

For climate-resilient development, the guide highlights New Jersey’s Blue Acres program. This program, established in 1995 and significantly expanded after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, involves buyouts of repeatedly flooded properties for homeowners who are willing to relocate. Implemented in partnership with localities, the program promotes the permanent conversion of these properties into community amenities, moving development away from these high-risk areas and enabling participating homeowners to move to homes in less flood-prone areas. Importantly, this program is designed to prioritize neighborhood-scale buyouts so that it’s not only low-income property owners, who may not have the resources to mitigate the impacts of hazards on their own, that need to leave their homes. To help reduce barriers to relocation, the program offers participating homeowners some financial assistance.

Finally, to showcase how cross-sectoral and intergovernmental planning can be used to advance these policies, the guide focuses on Colorado’s SB24-174, which built a framework for cooperation with local governments to create a Colorado Housing Needs Assessment. Through this law, municipalities are required to produce local housing needs assessments and implement policies to promote infill development, transit-oriented development, and a diversity of housing types. To facilitate the needs assessment process, the state developed methodologies and guides for municipalities, created datasets and web tools to inform municipal planning efforts, and offered technical assistance to ensure effective implementation. These partnerships allow for more effective implementation of the law, especially by supporting smaller communities that otherwise may not have had the resources to comply.

The policies and strategies laid out in this guide can serve as powerful tools to help states and territories achieve their climate goals. Resources such as this guide can help inform government leaders and policymakers on existing best practices and potential learning opportunities, facilitating the creation of greener communities for all.