Plan aims to make city low-carbon by 2050

City council has unanimously supported the TransformTO climate plan to transition Toronto to a lowcarbon city by 2050, but the fight for greenhouse gas reductions isn’t over yet.

It remains unclear whether council will agree to fully fund the ambitious action plan’s recommended $6.7 million budget for 2018, after voting to support a motion that called for business case analyses of the various recommended actions.

“We were very excited to see unanimous support for the plan, but we are also cautiously optimistic because we know the big challenge will also be funding and implementing the plan in the long run,” said Dusha Sritharan, a climate-change campaigner with the Toronto Environmental Alliance.

Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon’s motion calling for business case analyses is “definitely a concern,” she said.

“We know that this plan is an integrated plan, you can’t take out different pieces of it. It’s like removing one leg of a stool and expecting it to stay stable,” Sritharan said, noting her group will be watching closely come budget time.

TransformTO aims to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, with an interim target of 65-per-cent reductions by 2030.

To reach those goals, the initiative’s second report recommends, among other initiatives:

All new buildings should have near-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

75 per cent of community-wide energy use be derived from renewable or low-carbon sources by 2050.

All transportation options use low or zero-carbon energy sources by 2050.

McMahon’s motion directs staff to submit business cases for TransformTO prioritized “on a basis of greenhouse gas reductions per dollar spent, the projects that could be eligible for cost-sharing with other levels of government and alignment of timing with other provincial and federal greenhouse gas reduction projects.”