Kingston to consider declaring a climate emergency
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City council may be about to follow the lead of other municipalities around the world and declare a climate emergency.
Council, at its first meeting in March, is to vote on a motion calling for the city to “officially declare a climate emergency for the purposes of naming, framing and deepening our commitment to protecting our economy, our ecology and our community from climate change.”
The motion follows similar actions by approximately 40 municipal councils around the world seeking to move climate change up on the agenda.
“The hope is to essentially call a spade a spade,” said Trillium District Coun. Robert Kiley, the author of the motion along with Williamsville District Coun. Jim Neill. “Climate change, if we don’t do something right now, could devastate our economy, could really harm our environment and could hurt our community.
“This is an emergency and we need to tell ourselves that with crystal clarity.”
Other cities, among them Halifax and Vancouver – both coastal cities facing the effects of rising sea levels – passed almost identical climate emergency declarations this year.
Those motions directed municipal staff to find ways to increase the pace of existing climate change efforts and find new ways for the cities to meet and exceed current targets.
Halifax and Vancouver pledged to become carbon neutral by 2050 and become negative carbon emitters in the second half of the century. And both cities plan also to set up a working groups to monitor the effects of the municipality’s transition away from fossil fuels on the most vulnerable citizens.
Kiley’s motion is less specific than the Vancouver or Halifax motions, and he said that was meant to give the city the ability to consider any policy or action that could help lower emissions and place Kingston in a leadership position.
“Climate change, as big and scary as it is, is actually a tremendous opportunity for our community,” Kiley said. “But to realize the degree of potential – economically, socially and environmentally – that it actually presents we have to deal with it in its current form and that is the emergency. We have to name it now and go forward from there.”
Municipal councils are increasingly taking leadership roles in the climate change fight. The climate emergency declarations are meant to draw even more attention to the rising costs municipalities face related to climate change.
Kiley said Kingston could face millions of dollars in extra infrastructure costs if the impact of climate change is not addressed soon.
If passed, Kingston would be the first municipality in Ontario to make such a declaration.
“If we are going to claim to be Canada’s most sustainable city, that is something we should be leading on,” said Lakeside District Coun. Wayne Hill, who said he supports the climate emergency declaration.
“It provides the impetus for city council to take the direction to make the changes that need to be made, maybe even sooner than the Paris Accord is even asking for,” he said. “This just forces the issue a bit more.”
Vancouver’s motion cited 2018’s record forest fire season in British Columbia, an estimated $1 billion in flood-management infrastructure that will be needed before 2100 and, once built, will add $5 million in operating costs to the city budget, and the failure of provincial emissions-reduction goals.
“There is a lot to be said of leading by example,” Matt Benson, the chair of the board of Sustainable Kingston, told city council earlier this week when asked about Kingston making a climate emergency declaration.
“If we can set an example by being a truly impressive community in terms of how we are moving towards sustainability, taking meaningful steps, having data to support the steps that we are taking, I think that itself is a persuasive story,” Benson said.
Kingston is already near the top of the heap in the climate change fight.
While city staff advised council last month to be cautiously optimistic, data showed the municipality was about 13 years ahead of schedule in reaching its emissions targets.
Although it provides only a snapshot of the city’s emissions-reduction performance for one specific year, Kingston’s 2017 emissions reductions and energy use showed a 32 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 2011 and 2017.
The city had set reduction targets of 15 per cent below 2011 levels by 2020 and 30 per cent below 2011 levels by 2030.
The 32 per cent reduction puts Kingston ahead of the targets set for Canada in the Paris Agreement and in Ontario’s new environment plan.
In December, an article in the journal Climatic Change put Kingston’s climate change plan at the top of a survey of 63 municipalities of all sizes across Canada.
The survey measured the municipal plans against 46 indicators, which include baseline information, goals, implementation, evaluation and public participation.
“What we are really talking about is making climate, climate leadership, a priority,” Kingston Mayor Bryan Paterson said.
At Tuesday night’s strategic planning open house, Paterson said climate change was among the top concerns on people’s minds and he said there is a good chance the issue will be on the list of strategic priorities for this term of council.
Paterson said making climate change a strategic priority would be a better approach to the issue.
“I’m a big fan of action and finding practical, workable solutions that can make progress on the climate file. I think that’s a better approach than making declarations that are not tied to those actions,” Paterson added.
“That is my hope, that council can make climate leadership a priority and then we can work together as a city, and as a community, to develop those strategies and tools and technologies to establish that Kingston is on the front lines of this.”