Le français viendra sous peu.
On September 16, City Council’s Environment and Climate Change Committee received two critical reports: a Greenhouse Gas Inventory and a Progress Update on the Climate Change Master Plan (CCMP).
These documents are years overdue: the last GHG Inventory was in 2021, and the last CCMP Progress Update was in 2023. Yet the CCMP promises both of these annually.
They're also critical. Both tell us how we're doing on climate: the Inventory how we're doing on GHG emissions reductions, and the Progress Update on the CCMP's eight priorities.
The short version is we're not doing well: we won't meet our 2025 emissions targets. But also concerning is the lack of information.
We invite you to read our delegation below—or watch it here.
City staff present the GHG Inventory and CCMP Progress Update at Environment and Climate Change Committee on September 16.
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Thank you for the opportunity to address you.
I want to start by acknowledging the importance of this report. In Ottawa, we’ve increasingly seen the results of climate change, including tornados, flooding, wildfire smoke, and storms. We’re seeing these effects across the world too, even as too many political leaders—including in Canada—are retreating from the climate action we know we must take.
Cities play an important role in climate change. In Canada, they’re responsible for at least 50 percent of emissions; and as the CCMP audit response acknowledges, Ontario municipalities “are uniquely positioned to influence both climate mitigation and resiliency outcomes.” This is why it’s been so frustrating to not have the annual inventories that the Climate Change Master Plan promised. So we’re glad to finally have some data, after five years of silence.
That said, this report is disappointing. First there are the numbers. While we may reach our corporate targets for emissions, these are only 4 percent of our total emissions. For the other 96 percent, the report states that “Ottawa is not expected” to achieve our 2025 reductions target. Indeed, our community emissions are only 5 percent lower than the 2012 baseline, far off from the 43 percent target by this year.
But how the numbers are presented is also problematic. First of all, we don’t have enough information. For the two data sets, corporate emissions and community emissions, we only have a pie graph offering a low-level breakdown with percentages, and a line graph with no numbers on it. That’s it. Nothing on the actual sources for these subsectors, no absolute numbers on annual emissions for other years, to take two obvious examples.
I’m not sure this reflects the seriousness of the climate emergency, which Council itself declared—or even whether it satisfies the exercise of an inventory. The CCMP promises that “where possible, data (including the results of the GHG inventories) will be made available through the City’s Open Data Catalogue to ensure transparency of information and to assist members of the public in undertaking their own climate change actions and emission tracking.”
Now presumably this information exists. The report states that “the City of Ottawa maintains detailed inventories that track emissions from both the community and City operations.” So why isn’t this information being shared? How can we—both the public and yourselves—make decisions based on a couple pie charts and line graphs?
I fear that the report’s aim is for the City to save face, rather than to provide a transparent account of our emissions—the whole purpose of an inventory. This is apparent in the section on community emissions. The report prefaces the bad news that we’re missing our targets with information about other municipalities, how they’re missing their targets too—implying that if Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary are missing their targets, it’s okay that we are too. In fact, the report never explicitly acknowledges how far off we are in community emissions—the most important number in the inventory.
In a similar vein, the CCMP progress report lists many “key achievements” under each of the eight priorities. To be clear, the Climate team should be this active. But what’s the impact of these actions? How much has each reduced emissions or shored up resiliency?
Furthermore, what initiatives have been attempted and not succeeded? Most obvious to us is the High-Performance Development Standards, which Council approved but then delayed in implementing. These would have made significant progress on both mitigation and adaptation. Again, we need the whole story.
This report reflects a fundamental miscomprehension of climate change. We won’t get a pass on climate change because we sort of tried, and because we’re not doing worse than our peers. Missing targets means extreme weather will come sooner and harder. Damage from climate change has cost the City $36 million—and this is to say nothing of the cost to Ottawans.
We urge you to demand better. We need numbers that will inform decisions. We also need a more sober approach to climate change—one aimed not at saving face and palliating, but instead at understanding the situation we’re in and confronting it with courage.
Thank you.
