Bringing Climate Change into Official Plans - Emerging Leading Practices

Discussions:

Would the determination of what it costs re: infrastructure be a part of Asset Management Plans?

  • Yes, there is a lot of insight re rehabilitation/replacement costs that can come from your Asset Management Plans. BUT not sure that will provide you with servicing costs and it would consider only costs across the municipality and not look at different land use archetypes and would not be likely to consider revenue from the different land use archetypes and which are costing the municipality more than they provide in property taxes, thereby contributing further to the infrastructure deficit or analysis of what land use archetypes may be being subsidized by the municipality.
  • City of Kingston completed a major asset mgmt plan review, and broadened the mandate significantly and met with KEAF and they provided a lot of recommendations that are being rolled into the new OP. ACTION ITEM: Future presentation/sharings on how Kingston approached this and what change has occurred as a result of OP integration.
  • At a municipal level, what does an air quality plan look like? A number of municipalities have Air Quality Plans in place. It is less common than Climate Plans but if your municipality has one, it makes sense to bring in the connections between air quality and climate change and how they interact with each other.
  • How can we use transparency and accountability more? That will be necessary to ensure Plans get implemented. The advancement of a carbon lens (requiring each council report to have a Climate Implications section that needs to be completed will help with that). That may be better for a qualitative education/connection discussion. But carbon budgeting is emerging as an leading approach to increasing transparency and accountability. It is early days for carbon budgeting in Ontario municipalities but this approach shows enormous potential.
  • Here is the link to a webinar where Edmonton and Oslo describes how they are approaching their Carbon Budgeting.
  • Here is also the link to the Carbon Budget experience in Durham Region and Town of Whitby.
  • How can municipalities increase their transparency of actions, commitments, outcomes?
    Public dashboards can help so that the public can have a better understanding of, for example, actions being advanced and reduction being achieved. CAP recently had two webinars on tools municipalities are using for advancing a Climate Action Dashboard. EDemocracy webinar and Climate View webinar.