What is a plan actually for?

Years ago, I worked at on California's SB 375 program at California Air Resources Board (CARB). My job was to evaluate the policy and technical plans provided by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). To see whether their modeling actually showed they would hit the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set by the state.

The target-setting itself had been slow. Months of back-and-forth between the state and the MPOs. Real engineering of the numbers.

Then came the modeling. MPOs would run their fancy tools and show whether their plan would meet the emission reduction targets.

I remember a phone call with one MPO director. We had just finished our review at the state. I told him we were not sure his region was actually meeting its target. There was a pause on the line. Then he said something I don’t think I will ever forget:

"Nader, you know we can just change the nub and show you the numbers you like."

He was not being cynical. He was just being honest. The system we had built rewarded compliance on paper. A different growth assumption here, a different mode-share assumption there, a small adjustment to a parameter nobody outside the room would ever see … and the projection would magically slide into compliance. The plan would get submitted and approved. Nothing on the ground had to change.

I have thought about that phone call for years. It is the cleanest illustration I know of how a planning system meant to drive real-world change can become a system for producing acceptable spreadsheets.

East Boston: A different approach

On Monday morning, Mayor Michelle Wu stood at LoPresti Park in East Boston, holding up the city's new climate plan. Behind her, volunteers from a neighborhood group called Tree Eastie planted ten trees in the part of Boston with the smallest tree canopy.

The plan she was holding commits the city to cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030 (Boston.com).

Boston is already on track to hit 48 percent just from programs already in place.

So the new plan, with all its drafts and partner meetings and public comment, exists in part to close two percentage points. A year of work for a slim margin.

That ratio looks bad on paper. But I think those two points are the most honest thing in the document.

Most cities round up. They publish a target that exceeds the trajectory they are already on, and they skip the actual trajectory itself. Boston did the opposite. They told the public, in writing, exactly how much of the 50 was already happening and exactly how much more they were promising to deliver.

That is not a modeling decision. That is a trust decision. That is a transparency decision.

And once you see it that way, the two points stop being an emissions number at all. They become something else.

What plans actually do

Climate plans get measured the way budgets get measured: by their numbers. Tons of CO₂. Megawatts of solar. Miles of bike lane. The 50 percent target is the headline.

But,

A plan is not a forecast. It is not a model. It is a piece of infrastructure for coordinating people who would not otherwise act together. It is a piece of permission for spending capital on things that won't pay back inside an election cycle. It is a piece of public commitment that becomes harder to walk away from once it has been made.

The Boston rollout makes that visible and tangible. The venue was in a neighborhood with the lowest canopy in the city. The partner was a community-based forestry group. The trees were real. The canopy gap was real. The mayor stood with a shovel.

You can't move a nub on a tree.

That is what makes Boston's approach different. The headline number sits inside a public ceremony that ties the plan to a place, to people, to a visible act. The model behind the 50 percent is just a model. A company built it by forecasting how much each program will deliver, then layering in additional actions. Models always have faults. We all know this. They assume programs are funded, staffed, enforced. They assume nothing slips. Even in 2022, Northeastern researchers concluded the same goal was out of reach.

The two points are not really an emissions number. They are a legitimacy number. They are the gap that all the coordination, mobilization, and public commitment exists to close and to defend, when the federal government pulls $105 million in climate funding back and the rest of the trajectory comes under pressure.

You cannot dashboard a coalition. But you can lose one fast if you stop nurturing it.

San José Approach

San José adopted its own Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan in early March. It is a careful document. The Council voted, the press release came out a month later, and the first voice quoted was the city manager, talking about coordination across services and operations (City of San José).

It is a different approach. Adaptation plans are less politically charged than mitigation plans, and the rollout reflects that. The work itself is real and the plan will likely do its operational job.

But there is something the moment of release could have been. A plan adoption is one of the few times a city has the public's attention on a piece of work it has just spent years on. San José could have used that moment to do what Boston did. To anchor the document to a neighborhood, to a partner, to a visible act. It is not too late. The rollout is not the only opportunity to build legitimacy. Every implementation milestone is another one.

It’s about clarity, trust, and trade off.

A plan that holds up under pressure has Clarity and Focus about who it serves and what work it is actually doing, beyond the headline number.

It navigates Trust and Power by naming partners, staging legitimacy in the right venues, building the coalitions that absorb shocks the model never anticipated.

And it confronts Tradeoffs and Courage by publishing the 48 next to the 50, admitting what existing programs already do, telling readers exactly how much more is being asked of them.

Boston fills in the 2 percentage points by planting trees. Others do it by changing the modeling assumptions. That is the difference between a plan that survives a bad budget year and a plan that becomes a binder on a shelf.

To me, the two points are not the plan's smallest claim. They are its biggest one. And the difference between them and the nub is everything.

One big idea.

A plan is not a forecast. It is infrastructure for mobilizing people, capital, and commitment toward something that would not otherwise hold together. The numbers inside it matter less than the coalition around it.

One thing to reflect on.

Where in your work are you tuning the nub instead of changing the thing? Where are you producing acceptable numbers when the situation actually calls for a different decision?

One thing to try.

This week, pick one plan you are working on. Name two partners outside your organization who would need to vouch for it publicly and believe in it. If you cannot name them, that is the work.

Nader Afzalan, Ph.D.

Founder and CEO, The Triangle

Program Director, Sustainable Environmental Design, UC Berkeley