Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership
Minnesotans received an uncomfortable reminder of the consequences of climate change a month ago, with high-80s temperatures and high humidity bringing August swampiness to the first week of October. While we’ve since seen frost and lows in the 30s, it’s hard for even naysayers to ignore that our state is warmer than it once was. The consequences for our crops, our air quality, and our natural spaces are continuing to mount.
Fortunately, Minnesota is also on the forefront of climate solutions. Even before the passage of legislation like the 100% carbon-free power law, the Metro-area sales tax for transit, and the Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority, state agencies began a concerted effort to coordinate climate action at a high level.
Since 2021, the State of Minnesota has worked with stakeholders to develop the Climate Action Framework. This document aims to guide agencies in addressing the major sectors of emissions that drive climate change: transportation, agriculture, and buildings being among the most challenging greenhouse gas sources. The Framework also addresses ways to protect Minnesotans and our natural spaces from the health and safety impacts of climate change.
This year, the state is developing an update to the Climate Action Framework for 2026, which will include updated goals and action steps.
There’s a lot to like in the new draft, which analyzes the state’s major sources of greenhouse gases in detail and identifies how they connect to human health and disparately impact disadvantaged communities. It also puts forth solutions to these challenges.
For example, under transportation, the draft includes land use, increasing transit, bike, and pedestrian infrastructure, and vehicle electrification as complementary parts of the overall solution to our largest source of greenhouse gases.
However, the current draft misses some opportunities. Under the section on natural and working lands, for example, the draft update is vague on how to protect and restore Minnesota’s peatlands, a critical type of ecosystem that is one of our state and our planet’s most critical carbon sinks.
The report mentions that the “Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Board of Water and Soil Resources will facilitate programs to protect and restore more than 10,000 acres of peatlands.” But this represents about 1% of the state’s nearly 850,000 acres of partially drained peatlands. As the draft continues to develop, we hope to see the focus on peatlands expanded significantly.
The supplemental document that identifies potential metrics for the state to use to measure climate action success is also extremely short on detail when it comes to agriculture and natural lands. The only currently identified metric is “Reduce net GHG emissions from the agriculture and land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sectors,” which is too broad to provide direction on how to achieve it. The state should dive more deeply into specific measurements, such as reductions in emissions from nitrogen fertilizer, for example, in this section.
MEP and our member organizations will be weighing in on the draft update over the next week, and we invite our subscribers with an interest in climate action to do so as well. The state will be accepting survey responses on the draft update until midnight on Sunday, November 9th. No special expertise is needed to respond, just an interest in one or more issues related to this challenge.
With Washington’s short-sighted abdication of climate leadership, it’s more important than ever that Minnesota lead the way in both the Midwest and nationwide. If we get this Climate Action Framework right, we’ll be in a much better position to do just that.