Parry Sound’s new Corporate Climate Action Plan charts a path towards the town’s emissions reduction target.
That from Ben John, Georgian Bay Biosphere’s Climate and Energy Programs Manager. John says at a high level, the action plan just looks at ways in which the town’s operations use energy and the emissions that are associated with that use.
“Through the various actions that are contained within that plan, energy can be used and managed in a way that allows for a variety of different benefits. That could be such as cost savings or those emissions reductions,” he says.
John says there’s a great deal of flexibility injected into how the plan would get rolled out and implemented.
“Flexibility is built into the language of the actions as well as the impact that they have. What that means is that you don’t need to take on all of those actions to complete the targets that are laid out. Working with staff, we use what’s called a bottom-up approach that looks at the energy that you use, your actuals, your assets, the way that regulations and industry trends are headed to arrive at a target that’s realistic and feasible given your unique situation,” he says.
John says the CCAP’s actions fall into five different sectors, buildings and streetlights, fleet and Transportation, solid waste, municipal leadership and lastly waste and wastewater. He says those can be broken down into three different types of actions being capital, behavioral and policy actions.
“They’re designed in a strategic way to reinforce one another. Policy actions help support decision making around those capital actions and those behavioral actions are there to support sort of a corporate culture if you will, around energy management,” he says.
The CCAP plots out twelve action points, or objectives, as follows;
- Improve energy efficiency and conservation through retrofits and fuel-switching
- Integrate energy management practices throughout operations
- Integrate low or zero carbon technologies into buildings, including renewable energy generation, storage, and use
- Improve the efficiency of outdoor lighting
- Improve the fuel efficiency of the fleet through driver education and fuel-efficient technologies, including electrification
- Develop supporting plans and policies to enable fleet electrification and fuel conservation
- Develop supporting plans and policies to enable fleet electrification and fuel conservation
- Integrate waste-to-energy practices into operations
- Establish financing mechanisms to allocate funds to climate action initiatives
- Develop internal knowledge and capacity to advance climate action
- Integrate climate action principles into municipal decision making
- Improve the energy performance and efficiency of water-related assets
The plan was adopted by council on Tuesday, adding Parry Sound to the list of municipalities in the region with Corporate Climate Action Plans in motion.
Those include Carling Township, the Township of The Archipelago and Seguin Township.