Climate Adaptation

Protecting the planet, neighbourhood by neighbourhood

• Implement the City’s Climate Leadership Plan, Electric Vehicle and Electric Mobility Strategy, Zero Waste Victoria strategy and GO Victoria
• Create regular hot and cold weather shelters and relief services
• Enhance tree and native planting programs
• Update the Urban Forest Master Plan, Tree Protection Bylaw and Food Security policies
• Require shore power for ships docking at Ogden Point
• Offer education on household climate emergency readiness
• Enhance local emergency response services
• Expand free transit services
• Identify more car share parking spaces
• Explore a curb management strategy
• Create incentives to upgrade household infrastructure
• Complete the Bicycle Master Plan

As we increasingly feel the impacts of climate change, the focus of climate action plans must broaden to include tools that combine mitigation and adaptation. We must invest in ways to both reduce our emissions and respond to the impacts already being felt. This shift has begun at the City and, as your mayor, I will continue progress towards these hybrid models.

Continuing to implement the City’s Climate Leadership Plan will ensure that Victoria reaches an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and transition to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050. Making progress on our Electric Vehicle and Electric Mobility Strategy will expand the City’s EV charging network, accelerate the adoption of EVs, and increase options for electric mobility. Installing public chargers in neighbourhood centres, along the curb, and in parkades, will make drivers confident that they can switch to an EV knowing there will be convenient places to charge up close to home or on the move. Our Zero Waste Victoria strategy guides the city to a future where products and materials are avoided, reduced, and reused instead of disposed in the landfill. And GO Victoria is the City’s Sustainable Mobility Strategy, with values, policy positions, key initiatives, and strategies for supporting and shaping transportation in Victoria. GO Victoria identifies improvements in road safety, climate action, equity, and affordability goals, maximizing the use of public rights of way.

Other actions are emerging that respond to our new realities. We must advocate to the Province to integrate minimum cooling standards into the Residential Tenancy Act to respond to increasingly common extreme heat events, while we create local regular hot and cold weather shelters and relief services. At the same time, the city can offer education on household climate emergency readiness, and work to enhance local emergency response services (while collaborating with the CRD on regional emergency response).

Active and alternative transportation options have a significant positive effect on local response to climate change. Expanding free transit services by bridging the free transit gap, where the city continues paying for transit passes for kids 13 – 18, and introduces a free transit program for residents 65 and up, creates real change and offers lifetime public transit options while the city continues to advocate for a comprehensive provincial program to do the same.  To urge drivers to participate in programs that offer shared vehicles, we can identify more car share parking spaces, and increasingly reward provision of car share membership and increased numbers of shared cars in development applications.  In the longer term, we must explore a curb management strategy to move away from the idea that street parking is free parking, without impact or consequence on the environment.

The city’s tree canopy and healthy green spaces need enhanced tree and native planting programs, and overall we must continually update the Urban Forest Master Plan and Tree Protection Bylaw to reflect their collective relationship to urban design and expected densification.  Both these documents are guides that need to be evolutionary, living strategies.

If Victoria’s cruise industry has a future, it must include shore power. Internationally the industry has accepted and in some cases embraced a transition to shore power, and our port should do so, too. This is just one step in an evolving industry which understands the need for change if it is to continue in small ports.

Creating incentives for individual homeowners, and multi-family buildings, to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the needs of residents and reduce emissions (like heat pumps) will help individuals make a change in their own quality of life that will benefit the whole neighbourhood. When providing these incentives to landlords, protections will need to be put in place to ensure they do not lead to renovictions or astronomical rent increases. Bonuses in the form of increased density or speed of application process could be offered for building ‘green’, non-fossil fueled powered homes.

Over the past decade, the City has significantly invested in bicycle infrastructure. However, not all residents are able to take advantage of this infrastructure due to the distance of their commute or different levels of ability. To help respond to this gap, we can explore creating an e-bike incentive to make it easier for more residents access active transportation, while we complete the bicycle master plan.