Sustainable Calgary Submission on Climate Strategy
For over twenty-five years, Sustainable Calgary has worked to put our city on the path to sustainability. Through research, education, grassroots projects, and advocacy, we have dramatically advanced the awareness of what needs to be done to achieve sustainability – and how Calgary can get it done.
Our work has always been grounded in a multi-dimensional monitoring of the State of Our City. On the basis of this evidence and research, conducted locally and drawn from cities all over the world, our activities over the past decade have included original research, policy design, planning proposals, and neighbourhood engagement for design and pilot implementation. Our projects have included designing for health, active transportation, housing affordability, transformational research, reimagining public spaces, sustainable post-carbon circular cities, walking and safety.
As documented in the State of Our City 2020 consideration of the evidence has made it abundantly clear that the two greatest challenges facing our city are 1) Over consumption of resources and 2) Socio-economic inequities.
It is also abundantly clear that both of these challenges are central to halting global warming and making a just transition to a net-zero economy. In this submission we focus on four topics tightly correlated to resource consumption and equity: active transportation modes; non-market solutions to affordable housing, land use policy and public health.
The Climate Strategy has clearly and convincingly laid out the need to take climate action. We can no longer afford the financial, health, and personal costs of rising temperatures, more intense and damaging storms, deeper, more prolonged droughts, and increased flooding.
We must also reduce our emissions. As Dr. Little Bear told you on April 26th, we “have taken ourselves out of the circle.” It is a moral imperative to accept the responsibility to contribute our fair share to solving the climate crisis.
It is also an economic imperative because, as Chris Brown reported, net-zero transition outperforms business as usual, generating an additional 170,000 jobs and $61 billion in GDP for Alberta – much of which will accrue to our city - if we act now.
As stated in the Strategy, “Climate action is not a cost, but an investment in the sustainability of our economic future and the health and resilience of future generations of Calgarians.”
The Strategy should be approved. We are particularly impressed with the commitments to:
Mitigation
Requiring all new homes to be built to a net-zero standard (Table 1)
Directly supporting those who experience energy poverty (Pathway C)
Right-sizing taxes and fees (p. 15)
Establishing community mobility hubs and zero emissions transportation zones (Pathway F5.1)
Implementing road-pricing tools (Pathways F4.2 & G4.1)
Repurposing existing vehicle travel lanes and updating complete streets guidelines to prioritize active mobility, transit, green infrastructure, and traffic safety (Pathway G3.1)
Determining the necessary growth split to achieve 2030 and 2050 net zero targets (Pathway H2.1)
Removing and/or reducing motor vehicle parking minimums in residential areas (Pathway H4.3)
Adaptation
Supporting climate change ambassadors (Focus Area A1.2)
Becoming food resilient (Focus Area A3.1-3.4)
Integrating sustainable procurement practices (Focus Area B5.3)
Preserving, restoring, and building natural infrastructure (Focus Areas F & G)
We support Climate Hub’s campaign for Clean Connected Protected Communities. Making the Strategy successful depends on net-zero electricity by 2035, rapid completion of transit projects, city-wide cooling and heating spaces, and net-zero retrofits of affordable housing.
We also support the positions taken by the Calgary Alliance for the Common Good and the EcoElders in their submissions on the Climate Strategy.
The Strategy’s Urgency Must Be Commensurate with the Climate Emergency
‘My concern over the years this plan has been worked on has been that, in order to be popular or palatable today, the final plan would fail to meet the clear and urgent needs of the future.’ Brent Toderian, former Calgary City Planner and former Vancouver Chief Planner
Toderian’s quote addressed planning along the Broadway corridor in Vancouver, but it is apropos of most major planning initiatives in Calgary over the past 25 years, including this Climate Strategy. There are many positive ideas in the Climate Strategy, but the actions need to be bolder and the implementation much faster. This mayor and council has acknowledged this is not business as usual – that we are dealing with a climate emergency.
These are areas where Council needs to provide clearer direction to ensure that, as set out in the Climate Declaration, Calgary becomes “a global center of excellence in climate adaptation and mitigation, and energy transformation.”
In the realm of TRANSPORTATION our specific recommendations for improving the Strategy and increasing its effectiveness are:
Walking and Wheeling
The emergence of the e-bike has the potential to utterly transform urban mobility. We need to treat the move to active mobility not as a burden, but as an opportunity. Calgary needs to become a leader in this transformation, learning and adapting what we can from early actors like Paris, Oslo, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Vancouver and Montreal. The Strategy should set targets for allocation of road space to other more sustainable modes of transportation (wheeling and walking), much like the 25% re-allocation by 2025 being considered by Los Angeles. Calgary will never be a hub of automobile manufacture and design but we can become a hub for bicycle design and manufacture and active mode urban design.
As argued in the State of Our City Report 2020, active mobility will promote healthier lifestyles; promote social ties, social capital and livability; support local business; liberate our kids for independent play outside without fear of injury or death, potentially save
Calgarians 100s of billions of dollars between now and 2050 and give Calgarians the real choice to not be forced to sink hard-earned money into expensive automobiles.
The 5A Network
The milestones for the 5A network and urban forest coverage need to be brought forward to 2030 instead of 2050. Both are extremely beneficial and synergistic in reducing emissions and providing direct health, safety, and resilience benefits to Calgarians. Waiting until 2050 is far too long. We need those benefits to kick in, starting now. It is not sufficient to wait for road improvements and maintenance opportunities to move forward on Network completion.
Electric Vehicles
With Respect to Electric Vehicles, it is our opinion on the strength of the evidence, that 100% EV by 2050 will likely happen. The market is moving rapidly and at an accelerating pace in that direction. This is a good thing, but there is no reason to believe EVs will reduce health impacts from sedentarism, produce less traffic and traffic fatalities, or be less of a burden on low income households.
The Climate Strategy states that “Calgary’s spread-out urban form will necessitate the use of vehicles to transport people and goods around Calgary for the foreseeable future.’ Yet it continues ‘Strategies that focus on incentivizing private electric vehicles are likely to disproportionately benefit middle-and-high-income individuals, so it is critical that the program design and implementation of this Program Pathway keeps equity considerations front of mind’.
What we consider to be a bias toward the automobile was established during the publication of the Low Carbon Economy Report. At that time SC objected to the automobile-centric bias of that research (the potential role of bicycles was low-balled, the second order carbon impacts of automobiles [ie embodied energy in the production and disposal] and the health benefits accruing to promotion of active transportation were not integrated into the analysis—all acknowledged by the City’s own project team and external consultants as a flaw in the analysis). Yet we find that same analysis driving this Climate Strategy when it states that “for transportation emissions to decline quickly enough to meet net zero emissions by 2050, fuel switching in both privately-owned vehicles and commercial fleets is the most significant opportunity to reduce emissions in the transportation sector.” To repeat, this assertion is made on the basis of biased and incomplete modelling and analysis.
The continued dominance of the auto will greatly impede progress on land use change for more compact living. The Climate Strategy must promote the conversion from ICE to EV, but it must also champion the transition to a city where active modes and mass transit become the most desirable means of moving about our city. To this point, a
target of 25% reduction in KVM per capita is completely inadequate. Achieving this target would still see us driving more in 2050 than citizens of Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France, Norway and the UK do today.
Parking
The City could build on the impressive achievement of the N2 condo tower in East Village and incrementally remove the mandate for any parking in new buildings by 2040. To the extent that residential parking infrastructure is required, it should be linked to vehicle ownership, not homeownership or home rental, thereby eliminating the very substantial automobile infrastructure subsidy we embed, without question, in the cost of residential construction. (The sustainable suburb of Vauban, in Freiburg, Germany, has pioneered such an approach.) Furthermore, the city could license autos by size (weight/length/carbon footprint) by 2025. These kinds of solutions are benefits ‘left on the table’, based on a Strategy that relies too heavily on conversion of Automobiles to EV.
Car Free City Core
The draft Strategy calls for ‘zero emissions transportation zones’. We urge Council to consider enshrining a call for a car free city core by 2035 in the Strategy. Such a move is just the kind of bold ambition needed to revitalize and re-brand downtown for the post-carbon era.
Transit as the Primary Mover
The inability to come to terms with the real costs of automobiles, cascades into conservative transit and active mode targets. The Strategy proposes that ‘40% of all trips are taken by walking, wheeling or transit by 2030 and that 60% of all trips are taken by walking or wheeling or transit by 2050.We would propose targets closer to 55% of trips by 2030 and 80% of trips by 2050 are taken by walking, wheeling or transit. The research we have done (cited above via hyperlinks) suggests this could result is substantial city budget savings, life-changing household savings, and billions in health benefits for the average Calgarian.
The Strategy proposes that 45% of people live within 400 metres of the primary transit network by 2030 and 95% of Calgarians live within 2000 m of a dedicated transit facility (e.g. LRT, MAX bus service). We propose that by 2030 and 2050 respectively, 55% and 95% of Calgarians live within 400 m of the primary transit network with service at 15-minute headway 20-hours per day.
Further, we propose that by 2050 any point A to point B transit trip be accomplished with no more than 1 transfer.
Streetcars – A Vital Role
Research from the University of British Columbia has demonstrated that street cars (trams) are the most climate friendly mode of urban mass transit. We recommend the Climate Strategy explicitly recognize the need to consider the feasibility of streetcar systems in the build out and intensification of mass transit in Calgary. For example, we believe there is tremendous potential in the re-introduction of a Beltline streetcar serving the core and adjacent inner-city neighbourhoods.
With respect to AFFORDABLE HOUSING, and as recommended by the Climate Hub, a new 2030 milestone should be added under “Existing buildings” (p. 19): Retrofit all municipal affordable housing to a net-zero standard.
The City’s non-market housing is a key element in reducing energy poverty, protecting the most vulnerable, and taking effective action against growing inequality in our city.
We urge council to consider stronger non-market housing policies and programs as an integral component of the Climate Strategy. While the Strategy does a very good job of identifying actions related to technology and the built environment, it says virtually nothing about the social and spatial relations of the city, specifically where people can afford to live and the equitable provision of infrastructure across the city.
Presumably the Climate Strategy aligns broadly with the concept of the “15-minute city” (or Calgary’s notion of “complete communities”), which allows for residents to meet their daily needs within a 15-minute walking or biking distance, thereby reducing vehicular travel needs and greenhouse gas emissions. Achieving the 15-minute city requires a degree of social mixing that allows for a wide range of people, from a wide range of incomes and occupations, to live within each neighbourhood, in turn providing a diversity of shops and services. Unfortunately Calgary is moving in the opposite direction, having become the second most spatially polarized city in Canada. (see graphic below) It is not sufficient to build compact neighbourhoods with mixed land uses; people from all walks of life must be able to afford to live in them. As it stands, Calgary is becoming more and more polarized between an increasingly upper-income inner city and increasingly poorer suburban neighbourhoods (except for the southeast). The number of neighbourhoods that could be considered middle-class, mixed, and stable has shrunk considerably since the 1970s. In this context, prospects for achieving complete communities, as well the social mixing and social exchange needed to build social capital and a healthy democracy, are diminished. We clearly need to reverse our decades-long course toward increased polarization and segregation. Issues of social equity and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions are, in fact, inextricably intertwined. They cannot be treated as if they were separate.
The polarization of Calgary’s neighbourhoods can be reversed by enacting policies that ensure that sufficient affordable housing is provided in every neighbourhood. Edmonton, Vancouver, and several other cities across North America have already adopted such policies. These policies necessarily entail the expansion of the non-market housing sector (Calgary’s is one of the smallest in North America) as well as the need to find sources of funding for expansion. Fortunately, Calgary can generate the needed revenue. The City is currently developing new Local Area Plans across the city, as well as other measures to raise density. A direct consequence of these plans is increased land value, value that is produced by the City through its plans, policies, and infrastructure investments. Currently the City lacks robust mechanisms to capture this publicly-produced increase in land value; instead, the increased value becomes a windfall for land speculators. There is, however, a broad palette of land value capture mechanisms that have been successfully used in a variety of cities across North America and the world. Indeed, Sustainable Calgary recently hosted an online panel discussion addressing land value capture. We strongly recommend that Council charge its newly created Housing and Affordability Task Force with identifying land value capture mechanisms that can be used to significantly expand the stock of high quality, net-zero, non-market housing across all of Calgary’s neighbourhoods.
Land Use and Development
With respect to Land Use and Development, a counterpart to the socio-spatial polarization of Calgary’s neighbourhoods is the question of how to equitably provide infrastructure to them. The City has already begun to address equity issues through its Equity Dashboard and other initiatives, but to date little has been done to evaluate infrastructure provision through a spatial equity lens. There are clearly many neighbourhoods that are underserved by primary transit, bicycle pathways, pedestrian pathways, parks access, recreation facilities, and more. Any comprehensive program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions requires that all the city’s neighbourhoods have access to the infrastructure that enables sustainable living. Some small steps have already been taken. It is now time to move the equitable provision of infrastructure, to all the city’s neighbourhoods, to the front of the policy agenda.
We also have these specific Recommendations
Retrofits
The $928 million previously included in drafts of the Strategy for more efficient buildings should be reinstated and applied specifically to retrofits of existing buildings. Retrofitting buildings we already have is, without question, the top energy efficiency priority.
Implementing the MDP
Updating the Municipal Development Plan is the lowest priority among all the actions in the Strategy. The problem with the MDP is that it has not been effectively implemented. Before contemplating revisions, Council should direct Administration to:
Eliminate the artificial separation of new community and established area planning
Prepare a city-wide, climate-based land and housing supply and demand study that includes consideration of active and public-transit focused transportation scenarios and the effects of such scenarios on demand for automobile-centred housing forms
Develop and implement a policy to reverse socio-economic polarization, as Edmonton and Vancouver have done, and ensure that housing options in all our communities are varied, inclusive, and affordable to those who are the most vulnerable
Plan for “sustainable change,” not just growth and build for prosperity rather than simply an ever-growing GDP
As Mr. Boyd pointed out, make a “strategic retreat” from floodplains
As Yuill Herbert pointed out on April 26th, one of the most profound influences the City can have on global warming is through land use policy. We go further: Land use policy is the most effective tool the City has to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Why? Because that is the one area where the City has been granted the greatest authority and responsibility. And it is the most cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Economics of Low Carbon Development, Table 2)
Integrating Housing and Transportation for Affordability
This is especially true for our established communities. As the City’s planning department has known since at least 2009, investment and growth in established communities is far more beneficial, particularly for the City’s bottom line.
Sustainable Calgary’s Housing + Transportation: Affordable Living research exemplifies the opportunity we see by rational integration of land use policy and transportation policy. Our research asked: What if the cost of owning operating and maintaining an automobile could instead be available for housing? The image below compares the housing choice available to a family, on an $80,000 annual income, with and without the financial burden of car ownership. The left map shows (in yellow) the affordable housing options available with car ownership, while the right maps shows the affordable housing options (in red), on the same income, if the cost of an automobile can instead be dedicated to housing. This general principle repeats across all income levels for both rental and home ownership scenarios.
Urban Forestry
The milestone for urban forest coverage needs to be brought forward to 2030 instead of 2050. Trees need to be planted quickly to be able to realize their benefit in getting to net-zero.
With respect to Health, under Focus Area B of the Strategy, we recommend reinstatement of the health-related actions that were previously included in the draft:
Assess opportunities for reducing the health effects of extreme heat and cold climate events on Calgarians’ health by providing locations and cooling spaces throughout the city.
Augment existing plans and strategies to prepare for a projected increase in future heat waves with a focus on vulnerable Calgarians and their service providers.
Enhance existing strategies and plans for responding to poor air quality events to prepare for an expected increase in wildfire activity
As Richard Boyd made clear on April 26th, the greatest impact of global warming will be on public health and will “disproportionately affect” older people, children, people with chronic health conditions, and the socially vulnerable. They are the residents who are not only more vulnerable, but have “less access to the information, resources, health care, and other means to prepare for and avoid” risks to themselves and their property.
And finally, a couple of important GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS to strengthen the Strategy
Redundant or duplicative measures need to be eliminated. IFor example, by requiring new homes to be net-zero and establishing retrofit standards (Pathway B5.1), you do not need energy labeling (Pathways A1.1 & B1.1) and new home financial incentives (Pathway A4.2 & Focus Area D9.3).
Funding needs much more serious attention including:
Applying full-cost, life-cyle accounting to all aspects of the Strategy, not simply examine it and only apply it to natural infrastructure.
Developing a robust climate budget that not just “kickstarts” the transition, but actually gets the job done. In a climate emergency failure is not an option.
As Sara Hastings-Simons pointed out on April 26th, the majority of technologies and policies for 2030 are already in place. The missing ingredient is systematic investment.
In summary, the proposed Climate Strategy represents a significant step in the right direction and we applaud City Council for the serious work it has done to address the climate emergency. It can, however, can be made considerably more robust and effective by adopting a number of well-grounded policies that go beyond the fairly narrow technology and built-environment focus of the current draft. Indeed, the demands of net-zero by 2050 require that we break out of the box of conventional planning and development paradigms and re-think how we build and organize our city. This should not be viewed as a burden, but rather as a tremendous opportunity to build a more liveable, desirable, affordable, and world-leading city.
Sincerely,
Noel Keough (Senior Researcher)
Court Ellingson (Chair of the Board)
Dr. Byron Miller (Board Member)