Michelle Wu was fuming. The late afternoon June sun roasted the elementary school basketball court in Bostons Chinatown. There was hardly a tree in sight. But car exhaust seeped down like mist from the towering concrete canopy of a traffic-clogged highway overhead.

This, the Boston city councilwoman thought, was a place where kids were supposed to exercise and play. Instead, its where they became statistics.

Asian Americans in Massachusetts breathe air 26% more polluted by tiny disease-causing particles from cars and power plants than the state average, a Union of Concerned Scientists study found last year. Black people in the state breathe air thats 24% more polluted than average, and Latinos breathe air that is 17% more polluted. Its only a glimpse of the crises that today grip New Englands largest city.

Rising tides lap at Bostons low-lying coast, already causing more sunny-day flooding than in almost any other U.S. city, according to federal estimates . Between 2013 and 2017, Boston became the nations third-most intensely gentrified city as aging housing stock failed to keep up with demand and monied newcomers lured by a booming biotech industry displaced working-class residents.

As global warming and its associated economic impacts worsen, the citys own reports seem to suggest that a place thats home to universities producing tomes of research on climate change has been caught flat-footed by the severity of the crisis at hand.

On Monday, Wu is set to unveil her plan to get out front again.