Cities are at the forefront fighting against climate change in a range of ways, according to a new article.

In 2018, New York became the first US city to require buildings to publicly display letter grades indicating their energy efficiency. So when the law goes into effect in 2020, you’ll see an A, B, or C on front doors, similar to the way restaurants currently feature their health ratings.

New York is also making efforts to increase the greenery dotting the city’s skyline through recent legislation that provides larger tax breaks to owners who install green roofs in locations where they can offer the most social and environmental value. These actions are part of a slew of urban initiatives to advance and strengthen environmental protections.

Both the letter grades and the changes to the green roof tax abatement program took inspiration from research by Danielle Spiegel-Feld, executive director of New York University Law’s Frank J. Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law.

She and the center’s deputy faculty director, Katrina Wyman, detail the rise of cities as environmental vanguards in their forthcoming article, forthcoming in California Law Review, which explores how major cities have stepped up greening measures in recent decades, and have accelerated their efforts in response to the federal government’s undoing of Obama-era regulations intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and secure other environmental improvements.

The piece compares this era to a period between the early 1800s and later 1900s, when cities operated fairly independently with regard to water management, sanitation, and air quality. That changed with the passage of landmark statutes, including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, in the 1970s, as the federal government finally took the lead on environmental standards.

Here, Spiegel-Feld and Wyman explain this shift and how some cities are reassuming their historic role:

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