Evaluating the Role of green infrastructure in Indiana municipalities’ climate action plans: strategies, metrics, and implementation plans

As a result of climate change, severe storm events and flooding have increased in frequency and intensity, posing significant threats to human health, environmental stability, and existing infrastructure. At the local government level, an increasing number of municipalities have adopted Climate Action Plans (CAPs) as a decentralized approach for strengthening climate adaptation and resilience efforts within their communities. Unlike regulatory-required reporting efforts, CAPs provide a proactive and holistic approach to urban planning efforts, integrating interdisciplinary strategies across various sector types, such as energy, transportation, wastewater, and natural resources. Within CAPs, green infrastructure (GI) is often recognized as a valuable nature-based solution with ecological, social, and economic benefits that also support climate adaptation, mitigation, and community resilience. This study explores the integration of GI initiatives within municipality-published CAPs across the state of Indiana, United States (U.S.), including an evaluation of how municipalities contextualize, prioritize, and plan to implement and track GI initiatives. The findings of this study indicate that while Indiana municipalities have increasingly proposed GI initiatives within their climate action planning efforts, opportunities to establish clearer performance metrics, strengthen implementation strategies, and support long-term maintenance of GI initiatives remain. The identification of growth areas within CAP development, particularly with regards to GI, provides an opportunity to enhance consistency between CAPs and strengthen accountability through greater specificity, ultimately supporting the translation of GI goals into measurable actions.