The Tulsa Sustainability Task Force was formed last March with goals to review the city's comprehensive plan, find environmental initiatives that worked in other places and find potential funding sources.
Kara-Joy McKee, director of the Oklahoma Sierra Club chapter, is one of more than a dozen people named to the task force. The former Tulsa City Council member said the group is nearing the end of a written report that will be delivered to Mayor Monroe Nichols this month.
The document will show Tulsans have significant concern for indoor and outdoor air pollution, emergency response during severe weather, water availability and infrastructure, McKee said.
"We want that institutionalization of sustainability and resilience within the city of Tulsa to find those efficiencies, to increase safety, to really increase our preparedness for climate disasters," McKee said.
Installing a sustainability board, office or commission within the city's government is key to taking action on the report, McKee said.
" The scientists have been telling us for years this is what we'd see, and year after year we're seeing the increased warmth and the increased climate instability, where we don't know what to expect," she said.
"And that's difficult for us economically and it's difficult for us culturally and as a society."
As the task force wraps up its series of meetings, new research outlines challenges to Tulsa's climate adaptation planning.
A study, published in the journal Urban Climate, found Tulsa's local government is not prioritizing measures to prevent harm from extreme weather. Climate adaptation planning can create safer conditions for residents during such disasters, the researchers say.
The study found Tulsa lacked clarity about which entities were responsible for sustainability and resilience initiatives through data analysis and conversations with residents and officials. Olivia VanBuskirk, a graduate research assistant at the University of Oklahoma, and former OU faculty member Lauren Mullenbach conducted the research.
"There's a lot of fragmentation going on in Tulsa in terms of who is responsible for any sort of environmental decision-making," VanBuskirk said.
The research was conducted before Nichols began his term as mayor in March 2025.
" They should be doing things like ensuring that everyone has adequate access to air conditioning during a heat wave, providing cleanup support after a storm," Mullenbach said.
"They've had a lot of high wind events in the past couple of years, and falling tree branches, they're something that the city needs to help residents with, especially if they're older, if they have a disability, if they don't have good access to transportation."
Severe storms and extreme heat are among the greatest threats to the city as climate change progresses, according to the paper's analysis.
"Tulsa is at a crossroads: develop climate adaptation strategies for the future or continue with business as usual," the researchers wrote in a report of the study's findings.
During the task force's work on examining potential sustainability strategies, McKee said the group met with tribal nation partners who shared ideas such as training residents to conduct neighborhood triage after a disaster.
"The most significant partnership that I saw was our collaboration with the tribes, because unlike the city of Tulsa, nothing was put on pause with regard to sustainability with our tribal nations," she said.
Although finding funding for new staff positions is difficult, McKee said assigning someone in the mayor's office or elsewhere to oversee these kinds of efforts would benefit more than just the environment.
"There's different possibilities there that would allow the city to make sure that there's somebody in the city of Tulsa that's checking in with each of the departments to make sure they are using the most state-of-the-art technology and best practices to really keep our citizens safe, to boost economic development, to increase health and wellness and access to affordable clean housing," she said.
