Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Human-induced climate change imposes an unprecedented threat to public health and involves significant cost. The World Health Organization estimates that health costs due to climate change are between 2-4 billion dollars annually. In response, some US local governments have voluntarily implemented sustainability programs to improve environmental quality and community health. These programs are designed to minimize environmental hazards by mitigating air pollution. They also improve quality of life by establishing green infrastructure, and promote environmentally healthy behaviors of residents (e.g., by improving walkability). However, implementation of these programs is varied, with the majority of US local governments electing to forgo allocating resources towards these voluntary sustainability programs. One rationale is a lack of evidence that links local governments’ sustainability programs to meaningful improvements in environmental sustainability and community health.

Prior research has examined the reasons why local governments adopt sustainability program by focusing on the role of stakeholders, organization capacity and cost-savings. Other scholarship has focused on the design of local governments’ sustainability programs and the degree of program implementation recognizing that not all sustainability program are created similarly. In fewer instances, prior research has examined the environmental performance of local governments’ sustainability program. What is missing across all these discussions is knowledge about the extent to which local governments’ sustainability programs affect resident health. Such an assessment would be relevant to both practitioners and policy scholars alike by offering important evidence about whether (and which types of) sustainability programs are associated with greater public health improvements.

This paper addresses this gap by providing one of the first empirical studies that assesses the health impacts of local governments’ sustainability programs. It examines the relationship between US local governments’ sustainability programs and their residents’ health conditions using data from a nationally representative longitudinal survey of the Health and Retirement Study and the International City/County Managers Association’s 2015 Sustainability Survey. More specifically, it analyzes the health conditions (e.g. self-reported health, Body Mass Index (BMI), depression, and health-related life style choices) of more than 10,000 residents across 1,214 US municipalities that implement sustainability programs with varying levels of policy commitment.

Preliminary results indicate that residents living in jurisdictions with more sustainability programs tend to show greater health improvements. These positive health impacts vary for different types of sustainability program, with stronger impacts being associated with community-wide sustainability programs focused on land use and transportation. Understanding these relationships is particularly important as local governments seek to allocate their limited resources in ways that have the greatest social benefit. Our initial findings suggest that these investments are best allocated towards programs that relate to community-wide programs and specifically those that focus on land use and transportation.