Alliance members are working to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius by reducing emissions, accelerating action, centering equity, and tracking progress. 

Explore North Carolina's policies and actions across the Alliance's 10 key policy areas. Numbers presented below only reflect the number of policies in this database and thus may not reflect all climate policies pursued.

north_carolina

GHG Targets + Governance

Just Transition + Equity

Industry

Pricing Carbon + Valuing Damages

Electricity Generation

Transportation

Resilience

Natural + Working Lands

Climate Finance

Buildings

total

Announcement of North Carolina Climate Action Corps

Roy Cooper announced that the NC Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service (VolunteerNC), a division of the Governor’s office, has secured funding to create the North Carolina Climate Action Corps as part of the Climate Action Corps National Expansion Pilot through the California Volunteers. The Governor’s Climate Action Corps will support 25 Climate Corps members across the state. These members will serve with existing NC AmeriCorps programs, with an investment of nearly $1,000,000 starting in the fall of 2023.

Climate Strategy Reports

Highlights progress from each cabinet agency toward achieving goals and recommendations outlined in Executive Order 80, Executive Order 246, and the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan.  The report details efforts across state government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through building decarbonization and motor fleet electrification, increase statewide resilience to the impacts of climate change, address public health impacts of climate change, and advance climate and environmental justice.

Executive Order 305: Protect and Restore North Carolina's Critical Natural and Working Lands

The Order sets statewide goals for North Carolina public and private partners to collectively achieve the following by 2040:

- Permanently conserve 1 million new acres of forests and wetlands.
- Restore 1 million new acres of forests and wetlands.
- Plant 1 million new trees in urban areas.

In addition, this Executive Order:

- Establishes a Native Plant Policy for North Carolina State Government, expanding the policy implemented by the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to apply to all future state-owned projects.
- Directs the state to avoid or minimize new projects that would adversely impact vulnerable wetlands like pocosins, Carolina Bays, and mountain bogs.
- Directs state agencies to study the social, economic, and environmental value of protecting North Carolina’s wetlands, particularly wetlands that recently lost state and federal protections.
- Directs agencies to go after federal funding to protect and restore wetlands to enhance flood resiliency, improve water quality, and sequester carbon.
- Directs agencies to promote and support new and ongoing conservation and restoration, and climate resiliency efforts within tribal communities.
- Directs Department of Natural and Cultural Resources to research impacts of future climate conditions on the state’s biodiversity.

The North Carolina state officials who attended the 2023 NWL NLL were inspired at the learning lab to review progress on NC's 2020 NWL plan, and ultimately proposed this executive order. 

USCA also advised the Governor's Office on the communications plan for this EO.

The North Carolina Climate Action Corps is an opportunity for AmeriCorps members to focus on helping the state achieve its climate goals, while also strengthening community resilience and offering participants opportunities for personal and professional growth. North Carolina deals with hurricanes and flooding annually and is ranked second in the Southeast for federally declared disaster by FEMA. The Governor’s NC Climate Action Corps will support 25 Climate Corps members across the state. The three AmeriCorps NC programs participating in the NC Climate Action Corps are Conserving Carolina with the AmeriCorps program Project Conserve, Conservation Corps NC, Conservation Trust for NC’s AmeriCorps program Resilience Corps NC.
AmeriCorps members will advance climate actions that engage communities, cultivate change, and leave a lasting impact on North Carolina.

North Carolina Climate Action Corps

This toolkit is an interactive document with information about Transportation Demand Management (TDM) measures that reduce VMT and the potential funding sources available to implement these measures. The toolkit is divided into two parts:

- TDM Summary Pages that describe each TDM measure including pros/cons, successful examples in North Carolina and elsewhere, and additional resources.
- Funding Pages that describe grant programs that could potentially be used to fund the implementation of the TDM measures.