‘Real, urgent action is needed’
Municipalities have declared climate emergency. Challenge now is getting everyone to play a part
Like little green shoots pushing through the soil, signs of climate change progress are happening all over Waterloo Region.
The rainwater at Kitchener’s Operations Facility is harvested for other uses, saving 4.8 million litres of water a year.
All municipalities in the region converted street lights to energyefficient LEDs, cutting their streetlight greenhouse gases (GHGs) by a whopping 80 to 85 per cent.
Grand River Transit is buying its first all-electric buses — 11 of them — this year, providing transit that produces zero emissions.
“Climate change is here, and it affects us all. We are past the point of sounding the alarm bell,” said Waterloo Mayor Dorothy McCabe in her city’s climate action plan. “Real, urgent action is needed to make meaningful change.”
The region’s residents understand the need for strong action on climate change: 80 per cent said they are concerned about climate change in the 2022 Resident Wellbeing Survey.
Municipalities have a key role to play, even though their direct operations account for a small fraction of total GHGs produced in the region. For instance, all the operations and buildings of Waterloo, and of Kitchener, account for less than one per cent of the community’s total emissions each.
Nonetheless, cities have influence over 50 per cent of emissions, through things like planning and public transit, a recent study by the University of Waterloo says.
Big wins
Some changes, like the change in street lights, are easy wins. The conversion of about 50,000 street lights has saved millions of dollars in annual electrical bills and maintenance.
“That was a project that, hands down, showed its value and how efficiency makes sense,” said Anna Marie Cipriani, Kitchener’s corporate sustainability officer.
But that kind of low-hanging fruit, providing big gains at little cost, “there’s not a lot of them left,” she said.
A big move for the Region of Waterloo is the plan to buy 11 fully electric buses this year. Grand River Transit’s diesel buses account for about one-fifth of all the greenhouse gases the regional municipality produces each year.
But it’s not yet possible to replace every gas-powered bus — an electric bus will likely only be able to be on the road for three or four hours before needing to be recharged. Many GRT buses travel 300-400 kilometres a day without returning to the garage.
It will take decades to replace the fleet of 280 buses, as buses last about 14 years. GRT aims to be fully electric by about 2036.
Projects like the downtown cycling grid in Kitchener provide safer options for people who want to cycle rather than drive, notes Tova Davidson, executive director of Sustainable Waterloo Region. The protected cycling infrastructure has boosted ridership, with 54,781 cycling trips in the first seven months of 2023.
Another big win is the change in attitudes, Davidson says. Five years ago, electric cars were considered unusual, and most people had not heard of technology like air-source heat pumps.
“People are starting to see these as part of their future. That cultural shift is certainly happening, and it’s happening faster than we realized.”
Another big win is that it’s becoming clear sustainable solutions aren’t just about giving things up, but about making things better, Da
vidson says. Sustainable housing, for example, is not only better for the planet, but is cheaper to heat, more comfortable and quieter.
“A lot of people think it’s a fight for the trees and the bunnies,” Davidson said. “But it’s a fight for a better world.”
Buildings
About 70 per cent of the emissions that local municipalities produce as corporations come from buildings and facilities.
Many of those buildings date from the1950s and1960s, aren’t designed for energy efficiency, and use fossil fuels for space and water heating, Cipriani said.
Some, like arenas and swimming pools, are energy hogs.
Arenas burn fossil fuels to make the ice, to resurface the ice, and to heat the building. Pools use lots of energy to heat the water and building.
“I don’t think anybody that plays hockey recognizes the intensivity of that service delivery,” Cipriani said.
“Most people I talk to have never thought of ice making and arenas and pools .”
Cambridge now has three electric ice resurfacers, which produce no emissions. They “have both economical and health benefits, as we no longer have to exchange the air in the arenas every 50 minutes, because these vehicles do not burn fossil fuels,” said city spokesperson Teresa Chiavaroli.
Cambridge also launched a project last year to look at its top GHGemitting buildings to chart a path to renovating them to reduce emissions.
Private-sector buildings like the zero-carbon Evolv1 office building in Waterloo and the Bright Building, a fully electric condo project in Kitchener, are tangible signs of progress, Davidson says.
Transportation
Fleets are the next biggest generator of emissions for local municipalities, which are working hard to convert more vehicles to clean electric — half of light-duty vehicles in Kitchener are now electric.
Cambridge bylaws officers will be driving only electric cars by next year, and the city has EVs for cutting grass and grooming volleyball court sand.
But there is no electric option available — at any price — for almost half of city vehicles that are medium and heavy trucks.
“There’s nothing to transition to,” Cipriani said. The focus for those vehicles is using them as efficiently as possible.
All of Kitchener’s fleet of 450 licensed vehicles have monitors that encourage energy-efficient driving — no hard braking, cornering and accelerating. The move has raised the percentage of energy-efficient driving from the low 90s to 98 per cent.
“It’s a challenge,” said Matthew Lynch, Kitchener’s director of fleet.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see an electric snowplow in our lifetime, to be honest.” Battery life drops in cold weather, and limits the number of hours of use, while snowplows run 24 hours a day during big storms.
Across the entire region, transportation accounts for almost half of all emissions. More of us are taking public transit. Grand River Transit ridership is setting records and is 30 per cent higher than it was before the pandemic.
But the reality is most of us still get around by car: 89 per cent of workers in the region get to work by car, a percentage that hasn’t changed in 20 years.
The number of electric cars is rising fast — jumping 5,500 per cent from 151 EVs in the region in 2015 to almost 2,800 in 2021 — but they represent a tiny fraction of all vehicles. The number of gas-burning vehicles in the region is rising faster than the population, and more of those vehicles are bigger, less efficient pickup trucks, says 2020 Our Progress, Our Path, a report on the community’s climate progress.
Targets
The region’s municipalities are setting aggressive targets for reducing GHGs, and have concrete plans to measure their progress and meet those goals.
All of the local municipalities have declared a climate emergency, and set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent by 2030. Many then set even higher targets of net zero by 2050.
“We have ambitious targets that we’re committed to meet,” says Meaghan Eastwood, manager of planning and sustainability at the Region of Waterloo.
The region and Kitchener have approved climate action plans, spelling out how to reach those tar- gets. Waterloo is working on its plan now.
That’s already more than most other Ontario municipalities are doing, according to a study by the University of Waterloo.
All of the local municipalities are working with business groups and community organizations on the Transform WR climate action plan, as well as plans to better adapt to wilder weather and to look at com- munity energy. “One of the things we really need to celebrate is the amount of collaborations that’s happening,” Eastwood said.
Costs
Converting to greener buildings and vehicles is not cheap.
Waterloo estimates it will cost more than $34 million to make just three facilities — RIM Park, McCormick and Moses Springer community centres — greener. Gradually replacing heating, lighting and insulation systems in other city buildings, and adding solar panels where possible, is pegged at $55 million.
Kitchener estimates it will need to spend $250 million over the next 25 years to reduce emissions.
That works out to an extra $10 million a year. A one-per-cent increase in Kitchener’s tax rate generates about $1.4 million. So to cover the costs of needed climate infrastructure on its own — without accounting any other city needs, or inflation — Kitchener would need to raise taxes more than seven per cent.
Municipalities realistically can’t cover those costs without help from senior levels of government, local leaders say.
Challenges
Municipalities are taking action. But they account for a fraction of total emissions in the region — even if they eliminated all greenhouse gases, it would barely make a dent.
“Every organization across the region, every household, every resident, has a very small piece of the whole,” Cipriani says. “That’s the challenge. It really is a shared responsibility.”
Progress is minimal, suggests the 2020 Our Progress, Our Path report by SustainableWR.
Total emissions in the region dipped in 2020, but that data is distorted by the pandemic, when workplaces shut down and people took many fewer trips.
In the region as a whole, “we’ve been monitoring for 10 years, and we’re not seeing sustained reductions,” Cipriani notes.
In the 1980s, when it was clear that chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the Earth’s protective ozone layer, the solution was relatively simple, and the world acted quickly to replace those chemicals with safe alternatives, Davidson notes.
But addressing climate change requires action on every front of human activity, which can seem overwhelming. The key, she says, is to strive for progress rather than perfection
The community hits its emissions target in 2020, notes the progress report, but it continues: “it is unlikely that we would have achieved our six per cent reduction target in 2020 without the drastic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
No one is suggesting we adopt those kinds of “drastic” measures, but the experience of the pandemic does contain a glimmer of hope, Cipriani says. “What COVID taught us is that systems can change on a dime.”
The work continues, Eastwood said.
Policies now in the works will have major impacts.
Local municipalities are working to develop green development standards within the next few years. “These will be both innovative and a powerful way to ensure we’re developing climate-friendly designs” for new construction, said Eastwood.
The Region of Waterloo is working on having a climate budget within the next couple of years, which would put climate and environmental impacts at the core of all decisions of council, just as financial impacts are today.
The climate challenge is huge, Eastwood says, “but we can choose to be hopeful and to see the momentum.
“The climate is still seen by most organizations as a ‘nice-to-do,’ not a ‘must-do,’ ” Davidson adds. “But if we don’t solve the climate problem, then all of the other problems — justice, equity, the economy — will be meaningless.”