Climate Policy Toolkit FAQ

This toolkit is intended as a free public resource for local governments, particularly those in the Bay Area of California, who want to integrate climate change into their polices. This site is meant to be an evolving repository of best practices for local government climate planning. Specifically this toolkit is focused on resources to assist local governments with adoption of climate Change policies in General Plan Updates.

Who is responsible for this toolkit?

This toolkit was developed by Strategic Energy Innovations (SEI) under a grant from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's Climate Protection Program. SEI currently hosts and maintains the toolkit. Questions about this toolkit should be directed to the project manager, Kif Scheuer.

How can I use this toolkit?

The toolkit has three kinds of resources for users

1. Articles on a variety of climate / policy related topics that can help your local government understand the background issues related to climate change and some of the emerging conditions that make development of climate change policies a critical step. Start at the home page and look at the topic headers. Clicking any of them will take you to a set of subtopics or to individual articles. From any article you can navigate back to the home page or to related articles. The site is built on a wiki structure, which allows users to make comments about the content and in time will allow us to expand the pool of registered users who can provide new content.
2. Links to valuable resources and organizations that provide more in-depth coverage of specific topics and further resources. From the home page, select the links section. Additionally, within specific articles there are many links to related content.
3. The first searchable database of climate change policy language. This database is a comprehensive set of policies and options drawn from jurisdictions that have already developed climate change policies and programs. This database organized hierarchically and coded by relevant keywords to facilitate easy identification of policies that are relevant to individual local government needs. From the home page select the climate policy database, this take you to a starting page from which you can launch the database. Inside the database you can browse all the policies, sort them by various criteria, and search for specific policies using key words and predefined categories. At anytime you can return to the site home page by selecting the home page of the database and selecting the "return to site" link.

Where did you get the information in your database?

In addition, examples of policy language and implementation options were adapted from The Institute for Local Government's

Best Practices Framework