Brett KenCairn is the Founding Director of Center for Regenerative Solutions and Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience in the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Team, where he coordinates the city’s nature-based solutions work. Brett has worked across the western U.S. in community-based initiatives in rural, Native American, and other marginalized communities, and is co-founder of multiple organizations including the Rogue River Institute for Ecology and Economy, Indigenous Community Enterprises, Veterans Green Jobs, and Community Energy Systems. Center for Regenerative Solutions (CRS) brings together cities, resource specialists, community-based organizations, scientists, innovators, land managers, and others to accelerate the implementation of regenerative, nature-based solutions that simultaneously improve the social, economic, and environmental resilience of local communities. CRS was established to support and disseminate city-scale actions that operationalize high-leverage nature-based Climate Action as an Equity-Centered Community Development effort. In 2017, a group of cities began exploring the integration of climate action as community development, working with the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance to develop implementation strategies that accomplish both climate adaptation and social equity objectives. This work led to the founding of CRS in 2019 and has produced an evolving framework and action pathways for regenerative urban climate solutions, as well as a growing resource database and key initiatives like the Urban Nature-Based Climate Solutions Accelerator. CRS was selected as one of 12 organizations nationally jointly managing over $270 million in U.S. Forest Service urban and community forestry fund regranting.
Why their voice matters: Brett demonstrates that climate action requires integrating nature-based solutions as equity-centered community development rather than focusing solely on carbon accounting and energy systems change, recognizing that land degradation has been largely forgotten despite being one of two fundamental causes of climate destabilization since the early 1970s. By founding the Center for Regenerative Solutions and launching initiatives like Cool Boulder that mobilize communities around regenerating local soils, trees, and habitats, KenCairn shows that the ability of communities to remain livable in future climate conditions requires much more robust urban living systems that shelter us through nature’s direct benefits rather than asking people to care about greenhouse gases they can’t see, smell, taste, or experience. His work operationalizing high-leverage nature-based climate action as equity-centered community development proves that restoring more than 70% of Earth’s living systems that have been deeply degraded demands city-scale actions growing out of communities’ connection to their living world, finding ways to take care of places so they can take care of us.
