Stratford Town Council approved a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of 20 per cent below levels measured in 2015 for the town corporation and six per cent below 2015 levels for the community by the year 2026.
“We are talking more than LED lights here,” said Stratford Mayor David Dunphy.
The average person will have to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions from 8.44 tonnes to 5.51 tonnes.
The town of Stratford created its own Community Energy Plan committee in 2016 in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The town has also been a member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) since 2008, the organization where it got its target goals.
Dunphy said the town chose to go with FCM targets because they are much lower than provincial and national targets.
Dunphy does recognize this will be a challenge since Stratford’s population is growing by three per cent annually but feels that this ambitious goal is possible. The annual growth was considered for community targets.
“It will be difficult, but we have to pick a target and the FCM was the most reachable of the targets that we were presented with.”
“We have to do something, and you need to put some lofty goals,” said Deputy Mayor Randy Cooper, who also feels there should be incentives alongside this implementation, as people will be struggling to pay upfront costs.
Dunphy said the large unknown at this time is the exact plan to be implemented by the provincial energy strategy. But setting these target goals for the town of Stratford is at least a start to the process.
“We have to be in sync with what they are going to do, but we have to start sooner rather than later and so hopefully over the next year those things with the province will become more concrete and we will be able to plan around that, ” said Dunphy. “We have nine years to reach this target.”
They currently have an application into the FCM for a pilot project to see how the town is going to go about implementing this reduction plan.
The greenhouse gas emission reduction targets will be renewed in 2021 to assess whether Stratford is meeting its targets.
“It’s a big step for the town, however if this works out the way we hope it will, it’s going save our residents a lot of money in carbon tax as time go on,” said Dunphy adding that the challenging part is going to be the education piece. “We have some work to do.”