This book explores a range of political, policy, and project efforts in Seattle, Washington, to mitigate and adapt to the formidable reality of global climate change. Developing a framework suggested originally by the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN), the book's core analysis considers both tantalizing progress and tangible problems in Seattle's climate action initiatives so far, particularly with respect to integrating carbon mitigation with adaptation; advancing climate action networks; cogenerating risk information; coordinating disaster risk reduction with climate change adaptation; and, most importantly, focusing on historically and geographically disadvantaged populations.

Linking together past, present, and future, I argue in what follows here that Seattle in the 2020s is less an “Emerald City” than an “Elite Emerald.” Profoundly uncomfortable with this contradiction, local climate change efforts are shaped by mounting political concerns not only with mitigation-adaptation commitments and risk aversion policies to manage rising sea levels, warmer temperatures, and more variable rainfall patterns but also with reshaping a metropolitan space-economy that too often favors and consistently rewards the high-tech “cognitariat” over middle-and low-income households and communities of color.

Seattle's climate change efforts and urban challenges are, of course, part of a larger and more important global story. International concerns with the deterioration of the planet's ecological commons started to merge with work in urban affairs and local development strategies in the 1970s. This is best symbolized by the co-location, staffing, and funding in Nairobi, Kenya, of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1972 and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in 1978 (Brand, 2005; Ivanova, 2010). The famous Brundtland Report accelerated the normative innovation of “sustainable development” in the mid-1980s. Part slogan, part program, this syncretic concept soon became a global aspiration that impacted policy practices around the environmental and equity dimensions of rapid urbanization along with ethical commitments to future generations (Næss, 1989).