TransformTO: Climate Action for a Prosperous, Equitable and Healthy Toronto is a community-wide, cross-corporate initiative of the City of Toronto and The Atmospheric Fund. TransformTO was designed to engage residents, other stakeholders, experts, and all City operations in identifying ways to reduce Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 30 percent by 2020, and by 80 percent by 2050, against 1990 levels.

SSG and whatIf? Technologies worked with city staff, stakeholders and community members to develop a pathway to achieve 80% emissions reductions by 2050 using currently available technologies. The process involved the development of future scenarios, spatial modelling, analysis of co-benefits and co-harms for the scenarios as well as community input. Opportunities for collaborative and sustained emissions reduction efforts by the City of Toronto, the private sector, higher levels of government, and Toronto residents are included in the report.

SSG’s and whatIf? Technologies’ CityInSight energy and emissions model was key to the analysis. CityInSight incorporates the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC), a standard that enables emissions comparability between cities globally. The model creates and compares land-use scenarios that assess varying considerations for transportation, building types and densities, energy use, energy production systems, liquid and solid waste production and treatments, infrastructure, and all associated costs and paybacks, in order to assess what emissions reduction actions are possible and what should be prioritized.

CityInSight is built with integrated spatially-explicit land-use and transportation components, and stocks-and-flows accounting. The model enables bottom-up accounting for energy supply and demand, including energy sources (e.g.: renewables, coal, oil, gas), energy consuming stocks (e.g.: vehicles, appliances, dwellings) and all intermediate energy flows.

Visit the CityInSight website for more information on our model.