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Greening our Fleet

We are committed to reducing our carbon footprint. Using 2016 as a baseline year, we are targeting a 28% reduction in carbon emissions by 2026. 

Part of that commitment involves greening our fleet of cars, which we completed this year with the purchase of two additional plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. This means we no longer have gasoline-only vehicles as part of our car fleet. We also added two charging stations to our parking lot – and they were paid for with the revenues made from our solar panels. 

Launching Soon: Climate Adaptation Project 

This year we completed all the technical chapters, which make up the bulk of the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. We also developed the recommendations, which involved a jurisdictional scan, a staff-wide presentation and survey, two workshops with our internal project team, and two external rightsholder/stakeholder workshops. We are now in the final stages of revising the recommendations and expect to release the strategy in early 2020. 

Corporate Carbon Reduction Strategy 

Since being approved by the Board of Directors in December 2018, we have been working through the proposed carbon reduction opportunities outlined in the strategy, with the creation of a 10-year implementation plan and timeline. This year we also released our 2018 progress report, which outlines what actions we have taken and the resulting carbon reductions. We plan to release a progress report each year.

Climate Change Mitigation Strategy 

As part of our Climate Change Mitigation Strategy, we’ve developed a watershedwide greenhouse gas emissions inventory based on downscaling provincial and national inventory emissions. This helps to determine where the hotspots for greenhouse gas emissions are in the watershed across various sectors, and where we can focus our efforts to reduce these emissions. 

Through our partnership with Lakehead University and the University of Toronto, we have obtained estimates for wetland and forest carbon sequestration in the watershed. Together, the inventory and the sequestration rates will help us to create a carbon budget for the watershed. We are also developing an emissions forecast based on official plan data to see where the areas of population and employment growth will be in the watershed and therefore, the areas of growth for carbon emissions.