Electric vehicles are seen as one of the best ways for Kelowna to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED/Province of B.C.

Five years ago the City of Kelowna adopted a Climate Action Plan that, among other things, called on the city to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The goal was to reduce those emission so they are 40% below by 2007 levels by 2030.

So far, the city has been moving in the wrong direction although, since data from the province takes two years to be released, it is hard to tell. The latest numbers date back to 2020.

Those show a 1.1% increase in greenhouse gas emissions from 2007.

“Something that has come through in our reports quite a bit is that, meeting our emissions reductions targets has been particularly challenging because of population growth,” Chris Ray, the city’s former Champion of the Environment, and current climate action and environment manager told iNFOnews.ca. “Emissions have reduced per capita by quite a bit but, because the population has grown so much, it has been challenging to reduce the overall emissions.”

Those per capita emissions dropped 22% below 2007 levels in 2020, according to a report that went to city council in July.

Since the 2018 plan came out, the only really tangible change on the environmental front seems to be Ray’s hiring in April 2021 as the city’s Champion of the Environment.

That was for a two-year term and carried a budget of $400,000.

His first report to council was made at the end of May that year that showed how he planned to review the city’s existing policies and make recommendations on how to address environmental issues going forward.

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That was followed in a December 2022 budget presentation to council with a recommendation to hire a climate action and environment stewardship manager at an annual cost of $135,000.

That’s the job Ray now has.

With that also comes two other dedicated staff.

“We felt it was important to have a new base of people that are working on this, almost exclusively,” Ray said. “The hope is the team can grow moving forward to help implement some of the initiatives we’re proposing.”

Prior to this change, a couple of people did some work on the environmental file but that was not their main job.

The July report to council has a bar chart showing that more than half of greenhouse gas emissions (55%) come from transportation and most of the rest from buildings. A much smaller portion comes from waste.

This graph shows greenhouse gas emissions since 2007. The green part of the bars represent emissions from transportation, blue is from buildings and orange from waste.

Image Credit: Submitted/City of Kelowna

Despite that fact, only one of the five elements of the “roadmap” to bring about changes deal with transportation.

That’s second on the list and talks about things like “promoting sustainable transportation through effective land use and alternative transportation modes, supporting the shift to zero emission vehicles, decarbonizing buildings, and shifting to renewable energy sources.”

The first item in the strategy is for the city to lead by example by “embedding climate resilience into decision making across the organization.”

Also on the list is preparing for climate change and the droughts, floods, wildfires, extreme heat and invasive species that will (or already have) come to the city.

Protecting natural areas and shifting to a “circular economy” round out the list.

The circular economy “can be accomplished by shifting to a sustainable local food system, reducing the embodied carbon of the built environment, reducing waste and diverting it from the landfill, recovering resources from waste, and moving to a sharing economy.”

This fall or winter, Ray will take a new Climate Resilient Kelowna Strategy to council that will try to really get the ball rolling on seriously reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“One of the biggest emission interruption opportunities moving ahead to 2030 and to 2050 will be vehicle electrification,” Ray said. “While our priority remains on getting people out of cars to support some of our other city transportation goals, the reality is a lot of people will continue to use their personal vehicles. Making the switch to electrification from internal combustion is a big part of emission reductions for the City of Kelowna going forward.”

Ray would not discuss the details of the upcoming plan but did say it will be more aggressive than the current actions.

One of the key elements is that it will push for that 40% reduction by 2030 and aim for 100% below 2007 emissions by 2050.

“Some climate action plans other communities have done have used that more distant 2050 target,” Ray said. “We were purposeful in wanting to have that 2030 date because we want it to be a little more tangible for people and something that was near term enough where we can actually have some real action and start to see some progress. With those more distant targets, it becomes a little more challenging to actually pin down specific initiatives we want to see in the short term.”

Of course, given the current data distribution process from the province, it will take until 2032 to find out if the 40% reduction target was hit.

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