Boston names city’s 1st chief climate officer to oversee Wu’s agenda
Brian Swett, a seasoned sustainability professional who served as Boston’s environment cabinet chief under two prior mayoral administrations, will return to city government as Boston’s first chief climate officer in June, Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration announced Wednesday.
The appointment will further bolster Wu’s climate initiatives, city leaders said. The mayor ran on a Green New Deal platform and has said that cutting Boston’s greenhouse gas emissions and adapting the city to the impacts of climate change are key priorities for her administration. (Last week, Wu announced a new $75 million fund to obtain state and federal climate resilience grants in her fiscal year 2025 budget.)
Swett will oversee the city’s environment and energy offices, as well as work across departments to implement the mayor’s climate agenda. He and Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia, a senior adviser to the mayor, will create a new climate cabinet, which will convene city leaders to regularly check on progress toward climate goals.
Swett has led the city’s environment cabinet before — he was first appointed by Mayor Thomas Menino in 2012 and reappointed to the same position by Mayor Martin Walsh in 2014 before he left to return to the private sector. His new job comes with “climate” in the title and a more expansive purview. Swett will court federal, state, and private partnerships, and coordinate climate initiatives across city departments.
“This is a decade of action,” said Swett, who called the role a “dream job.”
“We’re very much in delivery mode, whereas, in the 2010s, we were very much in planning and target-setting mode,” he said.
In 2016, Swett launched Boston’s “Climate Ready” strategy, which identified the city’s vulnerabilities to climate change, from more intense precipitation to sea level rise to extreme heat. The strategy also outlined a loose set of local solutions.
Since then, the city has analyzed climate vulnerabilities in each neighborhood. The city’s plans have also explored possible protections for flood-vulnerable areas, which include building seawalls, berms, and absorbent greenery, largely through public-private partnerships. A handful of the flood barrier projects identified by “Climate Ready” have already been built, such as Piers Park in East Boston and McConnell Park in Dorchester, but the majority are still being developed.
Swett is currently a principal for Arup, a sustainable development engineering, design and consulting firm, where he has worked since 2015.
This is the second brand-new senior climate role that Wu has created; Sellers-Garcia was appointed in 2022 as the Green New Deal director. The two will work closely together, although Sellers-Garcia will focus more on economic initiatives, such as clean energy job training programs, and public health initiatives as they relate to climate change, Swett said.
Boston, one of the most vulnerable US cities to sea level rise, has yet to experience a catastrophe like Hurricane Sandy in New York or Hurricane Harvey in Houston. Swett noted that those sorts of major, devastating disasters often unlock huge amounts of federal funding for climate resilience projects and can spur a greater sense of urgency within the community to protect themselves from climate disasters.
Though Boston is far ahead of many cities in terms of climate studies, too little infrastructure has been built so far, he said.
“We know we need to move faster,” Swett said.
Swett will take over the Environment, Energy, and Open Space cabinet, which includes the Environment Department, the Parks and Recreation Department, the Office of Historic Preservation, and the Office of Food Justice, in June. The Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, the current chief, will leave her position at the end of this month to focus on leading New Roots AME Church in Dorchester, for which she was the founding pastor.