Welcome!

If you’re a locally elected official in British Columbia ready to lead or support timely and bold climate action in your community, then you’ve come to right place. This resource helps us envision a zero-emission community, and identifies the practical tools and levers that local-government leaders have available to them to make it real—no matter where they’re starting from.

Every move and target in the resource is linked to the overarching goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report from October 2018. To reach this target, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, and become zero carbon communities by 2050. These are big goals, but we have solutions to get started. Local governments are critical in this journey; they lay the foundation for every resident and business in their community to make the clean choice the easy choice, every time.

The strategies in this resource are developed for the BC context, but readers in other jurisdictions may still find the content useful. If you are in the Yukon, check out this Yukon supplement.