Solutions
What's a city to do?
The local opportunities for Calgary to turn the page on climate change
Calgary has long been regarded as an energy-forward city, particularly one that is focused on oil & gas, driving, and seemingly endless expansion. While it has instated some climate change-related directives at the local level, experts and citizens would like to see more. PHOTO: Noel Harper
The City of Calgary has yet to join many of its fellow large Canadian cities in declaring a local state of climate emergency. Such a declaration can be one of the first steps to signaling a more serious approach to adapting to climate change, but given Calgary’s previous commitments to solving the issue, some say it might not be necessary for the city.
The first meeting of the City of Calgary Climate Panel was held in November 2018, and it has since met three to four times annually. The panel is meant to “provide strategic advice and support to facilitate the implementation of actions from the Climate Resilience Strategy,” according to the city’s website.
The panel is made up of community members who advise city council on climate-related issues. Groups that are represented include Alberta Health Services, companies like Siemens and ATCO, and organizations such as the Calgary Climate Hub and Alberta Ecotrust.
The issue of declaring a climate emergency has been brought up among members of the climate panel before. The panel notes in its October 2019 meeting minutes that “in most cases, during climate emergencies cities move to update their climate plans to limit warming to 1.5°C.”
Ultimately, the panel collectively stated that it did not have an official position on declaring a climate emergency in Calgary. Yet, polling indicates support for action on climate change.
In the Climate Resilience Strategy report update in 2019, a survey showed that 77 per cent of respondents think that the city needs to act now, while 72 per cent think Calgary should be doing more to prevent climate change.
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The Pembina Institute, which advocates for a clean energy future for Canada through policy solutions, completed a recent survey of its own showing that 68 per cent of Albertans are in support of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The policies that are in place for Calgary don’t seem to be affirming the opinions of these polls, according to Sara Hastings-Simon, who is on the Pembina Institute’s board of directors.
“I think at the city level, there's still a lot more that needs to happen to really have that reflected … more needs to be done to really implement [policies and technological developments] in order to deliver on what the voters and the populace are asking for.”
The Glenbrook Community Association hall building. The southwest Calgary community is not as prone to extreme weather events as other parts of the city, but it is still involved in environmental stewardship, particularly with the neighbourhood's urban canopy. PHOTO: Murray Ost
Bistrin Opacic has cared a great deal about climate change and its impacts on the world quietly for many years. Neither a political figure nor a vocal activist, the business systems specialist for Canadian Pacific Railway has a lot to say about the issue if one digs enough to find it.
“I have been passionate about the issue since university, but I guess I always figured the combination of technological improvement along with terrible consequence[s] which are already observable would at some point result in enough political pressure to tackle the problem,” he says.
Opacic’s view on climate action is two-fold, addressing the opportunities that the world’s most powerful stakeholders have before them to solve climate change, as well as initiatives at the hyperlocal level, particularly in his southwest Calgary neighbourhood, Glenbrook. As a volunteer with the Glenbrook Community Association, Opacic oversees the community’s urban canopy, encouraging increased tree planting and stable development practices.
Given its return-on-investment, he says planting a tree is “one of the best investments you can make. But mostly, it’s the beauty of them. You know, they provide a home for birds, they absorb pollution, and they just enhance the community.” Despite this, Opacic understands the limits this enterprise can have on making meaningful climate impacts.
“You’d be surprised how little a tree actually absorbs.”
The majority of responsibility for creating a safer and healthier world, he says, rests with key industries and governments of all levels — and when it comes to municipal efforts on climate change, Opacic wants to see more.
Local governments do not wield as much power as their provincial or federal counterparts, and as such, he says, leadership is required higher up in order to offer sufficient climate-related financial incentives.
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“We’re paying for climate change, but we’re not charging that money appropriately to the causes of it … because it’s not traced back to the source, the behaviour doesn’t change.”
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In the meantime, he recommends that cities shift their capital expenditures to become more efficient, aligning pricing and incentives in sectors such as transportation, in which there is a price to access transit and no direct financial consequence of driving a personal vehicle.
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“I think public transit should be free, and we should have tolls on roads or higher fuel taxes … and then take that money and put it into better transit and better city planning,” says Opacic.
“That’s how you get people to actually behave well. But … it’s hard to have a good transit system in Calgary that’s convenient when the city is so huge and everybody has cars.”
To that end, Opacic also recommends that Calgary control its sprawling growth, ban building in the city’s flood zones and give residents an annual carbon statement based on utility information, akin to the letters it sends out breaking down how tax dollars are spent.
“We are in an emergency situation. And imagine if you had an emergency in your home, you wouldn’t be setting a 30-year target to address that emergency. You have to have concrete steps.”
He is referring here to the City of Calgary’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent below 2005 levels by the year 2050, adding that, “30-year targets are basically meaningless, because any politician can promise anything in 30 years.”
Despite using that term, Opacic does not want to see it thrown around by the city without meaningful action behind it.
“If you’re going to declare a climate emergency and do some symbolic actions, you’re just actually making things worse, because people are getting more complacent,” he says.
The Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 by 195 nations around the world, with a goal to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius. The City of Calgary says it will consider this goal, which would achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, in its 2022 Climate Strategy update. PHOTO: Arnaud Bouissou
The first step
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Declaring a climate emergency is one way to start addressing the impacts of climate change, Hastings-Simon says, comparing it to starting a diet.
“What do you take from that when somebody says, ‘Okay, I'm going to go on a diet and lose weight’? Well, that's great, you know, you've declared your intent,” she says.
“Now, of course, if you're sitting on the couch eating chips and watching TV, I'm going to maybe question, ‘Are you actually making progress towards that?’ And so, I think that's where we are on a lot of these climate emergency declarations.”
As with a diet, setting goals can be an important part of long-term success. Joe Vipond, the co-chair of the Calgary Climate Hub and board president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, says that both future and immediate actions are necessary.
“You're not going to achieve your long-term goals unless you achieve your short-term goals. The problem with the climate crisis is we needed to start on this 50 years ago, and every year that we delay makes it more difficult.“
Some key points from Calgary's Climate Resilience Strategy and the action plans included within. GRAPHIC: Zach Worden
Don't forget a plan
Some of the actions within the Climate Resilience Strategy include new development designs for affordable housing, reducing barriers for energy efficiency and producing renewable power.
“Understanding and managing the energy consumption in buildings is important for building owners and users to save energy and money in the long term, because buildings have a long service life,” reads the 2018 document.
“All the time that you wait before you implement those [building codes], buildings are being built that are not to that code, and so you're sort of falling further and further behind the longer that you wait,” says Hastings-Simon.
Opacic believes that local governments in general should do more with their climate goals and targets.
“What cities could do, for example, is they could try to be as energy-neutral as possible,” he says, by such methods as electrification of city-owned fleets and making structures more efficient.
Other areas of commitment under the plan include water management and citizen awareness through public education and outreach.
Nick Kendrick, a Calgary-based volunteer with Iron & Earth, an organization that helps workers from trade backgrounds become employed in renewables and energy-efficient industries, says that buildings, in particular, could play a significant role in a transition that will create jobs.
“I think building retrofits are going to be a huge part of that, and I think that's something that could be pretty big in Calgary — adding insulation, upgrading windows, finding lower carbon heat sources,” he says.
Vipond and the Calgary Climate Hub have not directly advocated for a climate emergency declaration; rather, they are in favour of policies and practices that reflect the serious nature of the climate crisis.
“We as an organization have never really pursued a declaration of climate emergency, because our understanding of the makeup of this current council is that it would be unlikely to pass, and that for us, there are more important campaigns with more important goals,” he says.
Members of Calgary's city council have pushed back on the idea of a climate emergency declaration. In October 2019, just after the town of Canmore made its declaration, councillors Sean Chu and Ward Sutherland essentially dismissed the possibility of Calgary doing the same.
“Over my dead body,” said Chu, according to a Calgary Herald article.
“I think it’s overly dramatic and I certainly would not favour it,” Sutherland added.​
Members of Calgary city council during its term from 2017 to 2021. Councillors Sean Chu and Ward Sutherland, pictured next to each other at the back left, vehemently opposed declaring a local state of climate emergency in Calgary. PHOTO: Ward Sutherland/Twitter
Benefits of Action
Kendrick, who used to work in the oil and gas industry, understands its appeal to workers — his job paid well, had health benefits and a good schedule, he says. But, he ended up leaving this position to learn about sustainable energy development at the University of Calgary, which is how he became involved with Iron & Earth.
“I think job security was the first thing. That's the reason I switched, is I wanted something that had growth potential,” says Kendrick.
“But now, I mean, I have the added benefit of feeling proud, and I know I can tell my kids someday and my grandkids that I was helping, trying to make a more sustainable future.”
Kendrick notes that it can differ for those who have been in the industry for a while, but people want steady jobs that can help support their families, while at the same time trying to stay relevant by working to lower carbon emissions.
“There's a lot of business opportunities by being progressive and jumping on board. I feel like sometimes when you're not doing those things, you alienate investors and partners from outside of Alberta from working with you, and that’s the last thing we need right now.”
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Adaptation and mitigation, Vipond says, are the methods for cities to address the changing climate and to prevent future problems that may stem from inaction, examples of which are shown when preparing for extreme weather events.
“Adaptation is just saying that we know there's going to be more severe events, and we need to harden our infrastructure for that. If we're not doing that, we're basically derelict in our duties,” he says.
“We need to be able to weather through the more extreme events that are coming, so that's a no-brainer.”
There is also a financial incentive to this adaptation. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, severe weather events caused $2.4 billion in damages throughout 2020. Alberta accounted for more than half of damage costs that year with $1.3 billion, arising from events such as Calgary’s June hailstorm and the spring floods in Fort McMurray.
This sort of price tag isn't new to the province — the 2013 floods in southern Alberta cost more than $1.5 billion in insured damages.
“There's certainly an economic incentive on the … adaptation dimension, and we saw that with the flood most famously, and the kind of incredible cost that can come from not having infrastructure that's robust to what we know will be an increasingly changing climate and more extreme weather events. So, there's a very real cost in not addressing those issues upfront,” says Hastings-Simon. ​
A solar-powered home under construction in the Prairie Sky housing co-op, located in Calgary's Winston Heights neighbourhood. Iron & Earth’s Nick Kendrick believes that Calgary’s solar potential leaves much to be desired. PHOTO: Keanna Rapin
“And then I think there's a real opportunity cost … in attracting and keeping a vibrant population in the city, and attracting and keeping companies that want to be doing business here.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes just how unpredictable those costs can be.
“Some costs are relatively easily quantifiable in monetary terms but not all. Climate change impacts human lives and livelihoods, culture and values, and whole ecosystems. It has unpredictable feedback loops and impacts on other regions, giving rise to indirect, secondary, tertiary and opportunity costs that are typically extremely difficult to quantify.”
Opacic believes that a local government is in an interesting position to impact monetary factors around climate change.
“It's a lot easier for certain economic interests to influence a local government than it is to influence a federal government or a provincial government.”
Canada has an interim goal of reaching 30 per cent greenhouse gas reduction below 2005 levels by 2030. In December 2020, the federal government released a plan for programs and investments in cutting pollution, in order to “build a stronger, cleaner, more resilient and inclusive economy.”
“The clean economy is an immense opportunity. Global momentum is already accelerating towards this end and Canadian workers and businesses are well-positioned to be leaders,” reads the forward by Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change.
Southern Alberta experienced significant flooding in the spring of 2013, including in Calgary. The event resulted in the deaths of five people and $5 billion in damages — one of several costly natural disasters that the province has experienced in the last few years. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons
As Hastings-Simon notes, making changes that include mitigation and adapting to climate change can affect how a city will function and also may cause changes in behavior.
“It's sort of an ‘if you build it, they will come' kind of phenomenon, and so I think we're going to need to have city leaders that are … willing to take those risks and say, ‘Look, we can imagine what a future looks like for our city,’” she says.
“But, you are going to have to be a bit bold in making those changes, and that's not easy and scary and takes real leadership.”
Calgary’s climate potential
Kendrick believes that helping workers through rebates for post-secondary courses and creating grants will help them get past the education hurdle.
“It's not like a one-for-one switch. Like, if you do this, you can definitely do this or do that. It does, I think, require some support,” he says.
“A lot of things are happening organically because energy efficiency and renewable energy often pay for [themselves].”
He also notes that because he, like many others, initially went into the oil and gas industry because it offered some financial security, workers feel that they are not directly responsible for furthering climate change.
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“I still maintain I don't feel like I was part of the problem necessarily … I don't blame people ever for working in oil and gas. But it definitely feels good to be doing what I'm doing now.”
Adapting to climate change has the potential to not only keep people interested in Calgary but can also help with air and noise pollution in the city through electric vehicles, which are becoming more mainstream and commercialized according to Hastings-Simon.
“If you take the electric vehicle example, and you look at, say, electric buses or electric garbage trucks, there's a case to be made around the emissions reduction,” she says.
“But there's actually a lot of other benefits that are really much more local … I think everybody is used to the really loud garbage truck with its brakes rumbling up and down the street.”
“Well, I think you’d see a boom in certain trades, for sure in the cities … I can see if we're upping our solar production, that can be inner city, so you might be working closer to home,” says Kendrick.
“Alberta has the most solar potential in the whole country and lots of wind potential. Just building that out is an easy one, I think.”
Adaptation and mitigation are key metrics to address climate change, and experts say there are many potential benefits to exploring renewable sources of energy, not only when it comes to the climate, but also talent retention and labour directives. PHOTO: Pixabay
Transitions such as electrification can offer benefits that not only are good for the environment, but also for a city that is looking towards the future, says Vipond.
“If we do not recognize that climate is an issue and that we need to start playing a role in the transition, this will not bode well for our city,” he says.
“We can't keep playing the game as if it's 1990. We need to start playing the game as if we're aiming for 2035 and aiming for 2050 because otherwise, we're not going to be able to attract talent or companies because nobody’s going to want to live in a city that doesn't understand the future.”
An update to Calgary’s climate report is expected in May 2021 with new polling results, according to an email from Adrienne Beattie, the city’s communications strategist for climate change and environment.
“What we’re seeing is that each year more Calgarians are concerned about climate change and more would like to see action,” Beattie said.
The report update for 2022 will consider revised timelines for climate resilience targets, as well as the IPCC recommendation of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.