Climate Action Plan

What is a Climate Action Plan?

A climate action plan is a pathway or roadmap to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions (or in other words to decarbonize society). It is a vision statement for a community, region, or city, telling a compelling story about how to improve lives by reducing costs, pollution, and emissions.

Climate action planning incorporates many dimensions of regional and municipal planning and requires the involvement of multiple City departments, interested and affected parties, and communities in all phases of planning and implementation. Climate action planning is a multifaceted planning process with broad implications.

Why is the City of Wilsonville creating a Climate Change Action Plan?

The impacts of climate change are becoming more evident in Wilsonville as wildfires, extreme heat, and heavy rainfall hit the city with increasing frequency and severity. To address the causes of these effects, the City has led several sustainability initiatives such as participating in the EPA’s Green Power Communities program and working with the transit authority to deploy electric buses and eliminate transit fares within the city.

To continue addressing climate change, the City is now developing a Climate Action Plan (CAP). The CAP will build on existing work completed by the City, Clackamas County, and the State, such as Wilsonville’s Comprehensive Plan, Bike and Pedestrian Master Plan, and the Urban Forest Management Plan, Clackamas County’s Climate Action Plan, the South Metro Area Regional Transit (SMART) Transit Master Plan, and statewide mandates such as Oregon’s Clean Energy Targets.

What is the difference between mitigation and adaptation?

Mitigation refers to efforts to reduce or prevent the emission of GHG, aiming to slow down global warming. Adaptation involves making adjustments in natural or human systems to minimize harm or take advantage of opportunities caused by climate change.

What is SSG’s planning process?

Wilsonville has retained Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG) to complete the new Climate Action Plan. SSG integrates modelling and engagement in shaping the update of CAP in the following six steps. SSG will collaborate with the City throughout the project on these steps.

1. Data Request and Engagement Planning: SSG will review existing plans and data to understand Wilsonville’s context. The engagement planning will guide engagement with the City’s staff and community members throughout the active engagement period between Fal; 2024 and Spring 2025.
2. GHG Inventories and Reference Scenarios: The model is ‘calibrated’ by loading a single (baseline) year of this data into the software and adjusting the model until its output aligns with observed energy use data. At this point, the model is calibrated to the community’s energy and emissions profile, and a GHG inventory for the baseline year is produced. SSG will develop a reference scenario (referred to as the business-as-planned) which reflects projects planned or in-progress.
3. Low-Carbon Actions Development: Working with City staff, SSG will identify a series of actions likely to be the most effective, efficient and equitable approaches for the City to reach its targets. High-level actions such as ‘require new buildings to meet a net-zero standard’ will be made ‘modellable’ and appropriate to Wilsonville’s context by identifying when the transition will begin, and the order and speed with which the final state is achieved.
4. Low-Carbon Energy and Emissions Modelling: The low-carbon actions will then be modelled in a specific order to maximize their cumulative effect. The results will identify down to a neighborhood level how fuel types, energy consumption, travel patterns, and emissions will change relative to the BAP scenario. Each action’s impact will be tracked individually, resulting in a comprehensive picture of the value of each, and their interdependencies.
5. Draft Climate Action Plan: Once the low-carbon scenario is modelled, we will create the draft Climate Action Plan. The draft Climate Action Plan will outline the community’s project energy use and emissions in the reference scenario and low-carbon scenario, and will provide a pathway of the modelled actions and timeline for implementation.
6. Final Climate Action Plan: The final Climate Action Plan will be designed and posted on Wilsonville’s webpage.

What is SSG’s Planning Philosophy?

The Avoid, Reduce, Replace, Remove, Offset Planning Paradigm identifies five categories into which most climate actions fall. We use these categories to help us decide how to prioritize actions.

Avoid: To eliminate enough emissions to become net-zero we must prioritize actions that avoid producing emissions in the first place. This includes choosing to ride our bikes or walk when possible, rather than driving our car. It also includes actions like reducing the amount of garbage we throw away.

Reduce: The next most valuable type of action is one which reduces the amount of energy required. This includes actions like improving the energy efficiency of our buildings, lights and appliances, as well as re-using waste heat and waste energy, for commercial and industrial purposes.

Replace: Thirdly, the energy that is used must be from sources that generate zero emissions. So communities must replace our fossil fuel energy sources with renewable and alternative sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal energy, and the electricity generated from these sources.

Remove: Fourthly, emissions must be removed from the atmosphere using natural or technological sequestration. Natural sequestration includes planting trees, grasses and shrubs, and protecting natural areas such as wetlands that are very effective at sequestering carbon dioxide. Technological sequestration includes carbon capture, which is extremely expensive, and requires enormous amounts of energy.

Offset: Finally, when emissions in a community’s jurisdiction cannot be eliminated using any of the first four approaches, the community can temporarily address the issue by purchasing offsets. If offsets are well-managed, they can be used to subsidize the cost of directly reducing emissions in another place, effectively eliminating the emissions we are unable to address locally. However, there are costs to administer offsets, raising their purchase price. There are also many offset programs that do not result in sustainable emissions reductions, and the benefits of the emissions reduction (like associated job creation) are often not realized within the local community. For these reasons, good climate action planning requires that offsets are only used as a last resort, and that the emissions being offset are continually reevaluated to find other approaches to eliminating them.