It’s dawn on waste-collection day in the hilly Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle. Along the curvy streets of this residential peninsula northwest of downtown, three large bins wait outside each house. The green ones hold compost — leftover food and yard clippings. The blue ones overflow with everything recyclable: glass, plastic containers, cans and aluminum foil. The round black ones, for the trash, often aren’t full these days.

Three years ago, Seattle’s City Council passed Resolution 31312, calling for zero net emissions by 2050, one of few cities crusading...

Not too long ago, a municipal conservation director’s job centered around maps, meetings and the occasional field walk. But these are not normal times. The effects of climate change on the rate of sea-level rise has hit the streets of every coastal town in Connecticut. The Greenwich conservation director,
Denise M. Savageau, has added a new duty to her job: during major storms, she works at the town’s emergency operations center, where, watching flood gauges, she directs firefighters and ambulance drivers away from roads she knows will always flood.

What used to be...

A unique annual meeting at the Garrison Institute comes to grips — or at least tries to — with the human behavior component of energy use and climate. A key question: What makes people tick?

GARRISON, N.Y. — Early each summer, an unlikely crop of social scientists comes together at the Garrison Institute’s “Climate, Mind, and Behavior” conference.

Tucked in a former monastery on the banks of the Hudson River, in Garrison, New York, 100 or so sociologists, economists, psychologists, and historians studying human...