City of Victoria Consulting

Our team was brought in to provide outside counsel and advice as practitioners in the public realm with significant expertise in the field. The goal of our team was to review existing materials and initial work by City staff and provide an outside perspective and help recommend what concrete next steps could be taken by the city to best leverage its current resources, legal authority and regional influence. Our team also acted to provide industry context and evaluate market readiness, precedents for comparable cities, and guidance on potential GHG impact of considered measures at a conceptual rather than quantitative perspective.

The report can be seen as the necessary next step beyond a climate emergency declaration in order for the City to understand what it can do to contribute to climate change mitigation and the rapid reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) within the bounds of its legal authority as a municipality and its role as an important city within Canada. It also builds upon the great work of the city’s Climate Leadership Plan which was released prior to the Climate Emergency Declaration. Victoria is among many other communities declaring similar emergencies who want to follow the declaration with swift and effective action. As such, City staff immediately began exploring ideas and strategies to rapidly reduce GHG emissions and to explore which strategies had the right risk/reward ratio for adoption based on legal and technical review.