City seeks community buy-in to reach its greenhouse gas reduction goals

City staff acknowledge they need residents’ help to halt Saskatoon’s rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The City of Saskatoon held a new conference Tuesday to announce a new campaign to try to engage citizens in reducing greenhouse gases.

The city’s director of environmental and corporate initiatives, Brenda Wallace, admitted it’s a challenge to get citizens to buy in.

“It is absolutely difficult, and if it were easy I think it would be happening already and the reason we’re putting some intentional effort into this and really want to engage the community to help us,” Wallace told reporters. “We all need to pitch in. It is not going to be easy.

“We have a lot of opportunities in Saskatoon.”

Most of those opportunities appear to lie in buildings and transportation. The city’s most recent inventory of greenhouse gas emissions in 2014 shows buildings accounted for 58 per cent of emissions and transportation accounted for 31 per cent.

The inventory showed emissions increased 12.6 per cent from the previous inventory in 2003, from 3.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to 3.9 million tonnes. Private vehicle use accounts for 86 per cent of the emissions in the transportation sector.

The City of Saskatoon’s corporate emissions rose 38.7 per cent in the same period, to 106,497 tonnes from 76,806 tonnes.

Last year, city council unanimously adopted new targets for the community and the municipal government. City hall aims to reduce emissions by 40 per cent of 2014 levels by 2023, while the overall community goal is 15 per cent of 2014 emissions by 2023 and an 80 per cent reduction by 2050.

The initiative launched Tuesday includes online surveys and community engagement events. Several events will target business owners and other community organizations. In the 2014 inventory, industrial, commercial and institutional buildings accounted for 34 per cent of emissions.

Residents are also asked to write anonymous letters looking to the future, to be stored in a time capsule and opened in 2050.

Coun. Mairin Loewen said transportation and buildings are main areas for reducing emissions.

“The great thing, in particular about turning our attention to the energy efficiency of buildings is that it’s not just an energy savings, but it’s almost always a financial savings,” Loewen said.