St. Albert will start planning some climate change action this fall thanks to a federal grant.
The city announced Wednesday that it had received $15,000 from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Green Municipal Fund to create a climate change action plan for St. Albert. The announcement coincided with Clean Air Day.
St. Albert applied for this cash last year, said city environmental manager Leah Jackson, but didn’t get it because the fund was oversubscribed. The city reapplied in December and was successful.
St. Albert completed a greenhouse gas inventory in 2010 that recommended that the city reduce its emissions to six per cent below 2008 levels by 2020. The city is currently about five per cent above those levels.
Combined with the $15,000 already allocated by council, the city now has about $30,000 to create a greenhouse gas reduction plan, Jackson said. The plan itself will likely focus on education and awareness, but might also lead to efficiency standards for new homes or rebates for energy-efficient furnaces.
“A lot of our greenhouse gas emissions are from our residential buildings and transportation,” she said, so the final plan will likely address these areas too.
The city’s Environmental Advisory Committee will start working on the action plan with a consultant this fall, Jackson says.
Canadian cities are planning ahead for climate change, suggests a new study, but need political support if those plans are to get off the ground.
Environmental policy and planning professor JoAnn Carmin and her team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study this week on urban climate adaptation planning. The study, based on a survey of 468 cities, aimed to find out the extent to which communities were planning ahead for climate change.
Climate researchers predict that the world will warm by at least two degrees during the next century as a result of rising greenhouse gas emissions, with many Canadian studies predicting three to five degrees of warming over Alberta by 2050. That will lead to more droughts, floods and pests, according to Natural Resources Canada.
Some 92 per cent of Canadian cities had taken steps to adapt to climate change, the study found, putting Canada second only to Latin America in terms of preparation.
That’s surprisingly high, Carmin said, but it covers everything from simple research on climate effects to full-blown action plans.
“Are they full-throttle planning? No, but this is obviously something they think is important enough to begin taking action.”
Just 59 per cent of American cities had taken any action to prepare for climate change, the study found. Carmin wasn’t sure why Canadians seemed more prepared to act, but noted that many Canadian cities (such as those in B.C.) were keenly aware of the effects extreme weather had on their people.
“We’re not just talking about the mitigation of greenhouse gases,” she noted. “We’re talking about the security and safety of communities.”
St. Albert is reworking its stormwater management plan due in part to storms attributed to climate change, says Tracy Allen, the city’s director of engineering.
“We’ve had some interesting storms in the last few years,” she says, referring to the two monster storms that happened in 2007 and 2008, so the city is now adding bigger pipes to its sewer systems and more erosion-stopping vegetation to its shores. One example is the new storm-sewer network and grit-interceptor being added to Mission Ave. this summer.
Carmin said local and national political support was essential to getting climate adaptation efforts off the ground. Administrators can’t make changes without the support of mayors, for example, while premiers and presidents can shape cities with their funding. “Without political support, it becomes very difficult.”
The study is available at www.icleiusa.org.
