It astounds me that some people still argue that Canada shouldn’t address our national greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) because our net emissions pale in comparison to countries with much larger populations and much higher gross emissions. Of course, this fails to take into account that on a per capita basis, Canadian citizens produce considerably more emissions than the citizens in these other countries.
By now, with all the evidence about how climate change is accelerating and with the impact a changing climate is having on weather patterns and ecosystems so self-evident, you’d think we’d all want to do our part to reduce all GHGs from all sources in all countries…and in all communities.
No one should get a pass on addressing what is the greatest threat to global stability (ecologically, economically, and socially), including communities like ours.
To that end, Council has taken advantage of a federal grant to hire a Climate Change Planner (or “Carbon Review Coordinator”) to get expert assistance to develop a GHG reduction and climate mitigation and adaptation strategy and to implement it. This grant enables us to retain internal expertise to work on both community and corporate (i.e. City functions, services, buildings, mobile equipment) GHG reduction strategies and to closely examine what we can do to adapt to the impacts of an already changing climate on our community’s infrastructure and living environment (adaptation strategies).
The City’s proposed GHG reduction targets will follow the provincial targets including a 40% reduction below 2007 levels by 2030; 60% below 2007 levels by 2040 and 80% below 2007 by 2050.
At the end of the day, unless every household and every community does its part we won’t achieve any provincial, national, or international targets for GHG reductions. So, it’s great that we were able to access federal funding to help us plan to meet these targets as a community, while at the same time exploring ways we can mitigate the current and potential future impacts of a changing climate.
The timing of this grant couldn’t be better for us as we are in the process of conducting a comprehensive review of our waste management systems, analyzing our mobile fleet needs, refreshing our active transportation strategy, and developing a new multi-year budget framework that will explore issues related to our City-owned buildings, snow removal standards, and core infrastructure investment program.
This new position will also assist us to engage the whole community in GHG reduction strategies, because the City’s corporate GHG emissions are small relative to the community writ large and are merely a function of delivering services to our residents and commercial and industrial ratepayers. For example, the only way we can truly reduce GHGs from our waste management system (and reduce the overall amount of waste we have to handle) is through citizen engagement in the process of developing and implementing waste reduction initiatives. So, stay tuned and be ready to join us in this endeavor.
The City was already part of the Provincial Climate Revenue Incentive Program and our 2018 report was just approved by Council for submission to the Province. However, this provincial program does not come with significant funding to plan and manage a robust climate change strategy, so our activities to date are more ad hoc and only nominally incremental. We’re excited that we’ll now be able to take a more focused and aggressive approach to this critically important aspect of becoming a sustainable and resilient community.