From its founding Ecology Ottawa has encouraged the City of Ottawa to work with citizens to both:
- do our fair share in reducing our city’s contribution to climate change; and
- plan for how the city will cope with the changes climate change is bringing.
Through 2011 and 2012 Ecology Ottawa worked with supportive city councillors and city staff and achieved several important milestones:
- the city’s GHG Inventory* had been hung-up in back offices until Ecology Ottawa prompted its release;
- that document would have been read into the record without debate but Ecology Ottawa influenced it to be discussed at Environment Committee;
- that discussion highlighted missed GHG reduction targets from past city climate change management plans and opened the opportunity to do something about it;
- Ecology Ottawa worked with supportive councillors to draft a motion which passed Environment Committee and full City Council to hold a GHG Roundtable;
- through 2012 when there was no evidence that the Roundtable was being organized Ecology Ottawa undertook a campaign to encourage the city to get on with it, until in late 2012 the Mayor promised it would happen in Q1 2013;
- still there was no public sense, nor any sense through private conversations with city staff or supportive councillors, that there was political will to take action on climate change.
See also these links on what you can do to fight climate change, the five point countdown:
#1 tell politicians it matters
Also, have you signed the Ottawa Climate Pledge?*GHG is shorthand for “greenhouse gas” – those emissions such as carbon dioxide (also known as CO2) and methane which, as their concentrations increase, are responsible for trapping more heat in earth’s atmosphere.
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Ottawa Eco Awards 2024 - Recipients Announced!
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Ecology Ottawa delegates to the Environment and Climate Change Committee on the Rain Ready Ottawa program.
Ecology Ottawa was at the City Council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee on April 16, 2024, to talk about the Rain Ready Program. We’ve provided our delegations below and you can also watch the recording.
Members of ECCC invited to webinar on incineration
On April 8, we invited members of City Council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee (ECCC) to attend a webinar on incineration. This webinar is timely: Council is considering incineration as an option for dealing with Ottawa’s waste, since staff has warned Council that the Trail Road Landfill—which currently receives the majority of Ottawans’ garbage—will fill up soon.