For the first time, Montreal’s municipal budget includes a carbon budget—a cumulative cap on Montreal’s emissions out to 2050. By requiring City Council and staff to consider climate change in all investment decisions, the budget has the potential to push climate action forward while reducing spending decisions that increase climate pollution.
State and municipal governments across the US are developing work plans and budgets to secure a slice of the $250 million allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act for climate action planning. We share five best practices from our time developing climate action plans with over 100 communities.
Looking backward and forward With the start of the New Year we reflect on how we navigated the year past and what we have to look forward to in 2023. 2022 saw us creating new models, bringing on a host of new faces, and starting projects in new places (Chile! Argentina! Uruguay!). Two decades on, […]
On November 3, 2022, the City of Edmonton released the first municipal carbon budget report in Canada. The report indicated that Edmonton is set to blow past its carbon budget of 176 million tonnes by 2037 and fall short of its target to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Though this news is alarming, it’s promising […]
On May 2, SSG’s cutting-edge climate planning work was recognized with two awards from the American Planning Association Sustainable Communities Division! With the City of Toronto, we won the Environment, Climate, & Energy Award for the TransformTO Net-Zero Strategy, attaining a near-perfect score from the jurors. The strategy sets a target of net-zero community emissions […]
Experience of UK local governments shows deep community engagement is critical for rapid and ambitious action.
In 2017, the City of Oslo pioneered a game-changing approach to fighting climate change: the carbon budget. The budget sets a cap on how much the city can emit before 2030, when Oslo plans to become carbon neutral, and divides that amount into annual budgets. The City’s finance department considers the budget alongside its finances […]
On October 22, Yuill Herbert and the City of Edmonton’s Abhishek Chakraborti teamed up to deliver a presentation on developing carbon accounting frameworks to manage GHG emissions at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Sustainable Communities Conference.
Developed in Oslo in 2016, the carbon budget (a.k.a climate budget) responds to the climate crisis in a manner similar to a city budget—by setting an overall budget for how much greenhouse gas the city can emit. Ever. It is a critical tool for bold climate action.
Last week, Edmonton city council passed a historic plan—the first in Canada to incorporate a carbon budget limiting how many greenhouse gas emissions the city can emit. SSG helped crunch the numbers behind the ground-breaking carbon budget and we hope Edmonton will be the first of many Canadian municipalities to take this step.
