RMI, Evergreen, and Climate XChange reviewed 47 Climate Plans from 45 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. Click on a link below to navigate through the findings.
Millions of dollars are about to flow to states to help them tackle their unique local climate challenges. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program is one of the largest buckets of direct funding within the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), providing $5 billion to states, municipalities, Tribes, and other governments to reduce climate pollution. The first phase of the program, the planning grants, put $250 million in state and local governments’ hands to conceive of their clean energy future. And nearly every US state, along with D.C. and Puerto Rico, put their hand up for this tremendous opportunity by submitting a Priority Climate Action Plan ( PCAP Climate Plan) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just last month.
It is a signal that a vast majority of US states—even ones that haven’t historically been leaders on climate—are eager to capitalize on the opportunity to address climate, advance clean energy, lower energy costs, clean up air pollution, and create jobs. States that might not have had the funding to invest in sectoral or economy-wide programs designed to reduce climate pollution now can—on their own terms, with nearly unlimited creativity.
This repository of action plans is our first opportunity to see how states are collectively approaching and tackling the climate crisis, with a huge amount of new information about each state’s approach to reducing climate pollution.
And a lot of money is on the table to bring these plans into reality. Following this planning phase, EPA will soon unlock a whopping $4.6 billion in grants that states, Tribes, and other governments can use to implement actions in their Climate Plans. This means the strategies laid out in the state Climate Plans will drive a major national investment to cut climate pollution.
So, what do states want to do with this massive sum of funds? How ambitious are their plans, and what does this tell us about our nationwide climate progress? Together, RMI, Climate XChange, and Evergreen Collaborative read a total of 6,795 pages of plans to answer these questions. This is a first look at what can be uncovered, with much more to come. For a complete look at our review, see our spreadsheet.
Note: The data included below is a result of our collective first-pass review. As such, there may be minor adjustments made as we continue to dig into the detailed plans.
RMI, Evergreen, and Climate XChange reviewed 47 Climate Plans from 45 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. The states and territories represented collectively account for about 90 percent of the country’s population and carbon pollution. For almost half of the states—23—these Climate Plans represent the first meaningful climate action planning effort in their history, giving a very first view into how they might think about and approach climate action.
Whether a state chose to call its plan a “Priority Resiliency Plan,” “Plan for Environmental Improvement,” “Priority Energy Plan,” or simply “Priority Plan,” it used the opportunity to produce a clear list of measures to reduce climate pollution. These initial plans give advocates critical information to push for continued ambition and effective implementation with IRA funds to support.
Measures describe which activities, policies, and programs the state will pursue to cut pollution.
The most critical component of the Climate Plan is the “priority measures” section that describes which activities, policies, and programs the state will pursue to cut pollution. States have started to articulate and focus their efforts, but we found significant variation in the number of measures and sectors addressed. These measures, or strategies, help us understand how states are planning to address climate pollution. They identify which sectors states are focused on, and whether that correlates with the most polluting sectors within that state or nationwide.
Including a greater range of sectors in a plan does not necessarily mean greater pollution reduction or higher ambition.
Of course, it’s not just about the numbers: Some states chose to disaggregate several action items under one single “measure,” while others listed each specific action item as its own measure. For example, Alabama (24 total measures) listed the specific “establishment of solar/charging infrastructure supporting irrigation in rural Alabama” as one measure, while D.C. (six total measures) listed several strategies below their third measure, “accelerate the deployment of local, clean, renewable, and resilient energy.”
Measures help identify which sectors states are focused on, and whether that correlates with the most polluting sectors.
This shows us that states are correctly focusing on many of the biggest problems. But there are gaps too.
As states build on their priority plans and develop their Comprehensive Climate Action Plans due to EPA by roughly summer 2025, it will be important to emphasize that this sector is really not so “hard-to-abate,” with many options on the table for states looking to act.
Importantly, including a greater range of sectors in a plan does not necessarily mean greater pollution reduction or higher ambition. Some states chose to narrowly focus their Climate Plan on a couple of specific sectors that they hope to use the CPRG Implementation Grant funding to address, while leveraging other federal and state resources to address the remaining sectors. Other states used the Climate Plan to address gaps or scale up their existing approaches and programs, especially for their highest emitting sectors. And still other states used their Climate Plans as a first step in identifying what action is needed—these plans tend to cover more sectors but may have lower ambition for each measure.
Many states were interested in climate strategies that supported economic and health co-benefits.
States are eager to create jobs, support communities, and grow their economies as they take climate action. EPA recommended focusing the Climate Plans on “near-term, high-priority, implementation-ready measures to reduce GHG pollution.” And states did so, while also including a more holistic focus on maximizing co-benefits.
We saw that many states were interested in climate strategies that supported economic and health benefits, in addition to tackling greenhouse gas pollution, especially in states where that might make their strategies more politically palatable.
And states are finding ways to use the new federal funds to fill the gaps to reach these benefits. Interestingly, while some states chose measures that had an abundance of additional funding options (logged as “cost-effective” in the below chart), others specifically chose to include measures that couldn’t be funded through other avenues and for which CPRG funds were the best option.
This shows that flexible funding streams can be used to complement other programs and incentives by layering or stacking multiple incentives to unlock greater benefits or by filling in coverage gaps left by other programs.
Many states used a combination of funding mechanisms to address high-level objectives.
Combining IRA funds with clear standards provides an untapped opportunity.
This could be because they were inspired by the opportunity to use federal funds for “carrots” (usually much more politically popular than “sticks”), due to a lack of regulatory authority from the authoring agency, or because many states interpreted EPA’s “implementation-ready” guidance as “shovel-ready projects.” Where states used their measures to address high-level objectives (e.g., Ohio's third measure, “transportation efficiencies”), they listed a combination of mechanisms to accomplish their desired outcome, listed as “multiple” in the chart below.
Optional elements give us a better look into how states plan to operationalize their strategies.
Many states are working to ensure their Climate Plans broadly benefit communities and leverage all available funds, but there is more to do. Per EPA guidance, the Climate Plans had to include four required “elements” or components: a GHG inventory, quantified measures, an analysis of benefits to low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and a review of the state’s authority to implement the included measures.
States will be required to address these discrepancies in their follow-up Comprehensive Climate Action Plan. The Climate Plans could also include five optional elements: GHG pollution projections, GHG reduction targets, an overarching benefits analysis, a plan to leverage additional federal funding, and a workforce planning analysis.
These optional elements give us a better look into how realistic the plans are, as well as how states plan to operationalize their strategies in ways that will create jobs and community benefits.
All states will be required to include these optional elements in the Comprehensive Climate Action Plans in 2025.
States are also engaging a wide range of key stakeholders to inform these plans, bringing communities, industry, and others along in their thinking. To prepare their Climate Plans, states were required to engage in stakeholder outreach.
Our team will be taking a closer look at the depth and breadth of this outreach in future publications.
For the first time ever, states across the country are writing down their plans for meaningful climate action at the same time. We are looking forward to partnering with states, advocates, industry, labor leaders, and communities to strengthen, implement, and expand these Climate Plans, supported by billions of dollars of federal investment. Our first look shows big opportunities ahead, and there’s more to explore.
We are just starting our analysis to ensure states and advocates have the information they need to answer key questions, like:
Though relatively high-level, these early insights should prove inspiring for state policymakers and advocates by demonstrating the sheer volume of potential climate action contained within the 47 Priority Climate Action Plans. Over the next few months, our team will continue to review these plans to identify additional takeaways from across the country to further advance the transformative climate action these plans could unlock.
