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The City of Cambridge has hired longtime climate policy advocate Julie E. Wormser as its inaugural chief climate officer. She will head the city’s Office of Sustainability starting Oct. 1.

The newly created role is designed to help Cambridge achieve its two goals of mitigating the city’s fossil fuel use and protecting residents from climate disasters, said Wormser.

“They created this position to help coordinate across different departments so that we’re doing the best job we can the most efficiently we can, with the most equity, with the most beauty,” Wormser said.

Wormser was the co-founder of the Resilient Mystic Collaborative and served as a policy advisor to the Mystic River Watershed Association, helping the organizations secure millions of dollars in funding for climate resilience and mitigation projects.

Wormser said she hopes to bring her previous expertise to the city’s government, highlighting the importance of Cambridge as a leading climate innovator due to the prevalence of higher educational institutions and its biotech startup scene.

“There’s a ton of people who come in and out of Cambridge and go all over the world,” she said, referring to students at Harvard and MIT.

“This is a community that has a lot of confidence and intellectual and financial resources, and is also really aware of how much structural racism and wealth inequity affects people around climate,” Wormser said. “If Cambridge can learn how to do all of this less expensively and more efficiently and more fairly, we can have a huge impact.”

According to Wormser, the city government has been a leader in climate action already.

In the past few years, the government has implemented the Net Zero Action Plan and the Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance, which imposed a net zero requirement on large non-residential infrastructure, including Harvard buildings. More recently, Cambridge’s Fossil Fuel Free Ordinance went into effect in March 2024, mandating any new buildings and major renovations to existing buildings to be fossil fuel free.

A Harvard Kennedy School graduate, Wormser said she is excited to apply what she learned in school to her new job, working closely with Cambridge City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 and Heather A. Henriksen, Harvard’s Chief Sustainability Officer and Wormser’s classmate at HKS.

“I would say working with my colleagues in Cambridge — it’s like going back to grad school,” Wormser said. “The Harvard connection is a joy, but I would say the level of creativity and confidence, across the board, living in Cambridge is very special.”

—Staff writer Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.

—Staff writer Christie E. Beckley can be reached at christie.beckley@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cbeckley22.