The City of Richmond has declared a climate emergency following a motion from Coun. Michael Wolfe, but several council members balked at the implication that work wasn’t being done, pointing out the environmental mitigation work underway.
Some councillors at Monday’s general-purposes committee meeting said they didn’t want the declaration to just be symbolic, and, in the end, the declaration passed on its own without the actions called on by Wolfe. Instead, councillors wanted to pull together current work and future planned work into a comprehensive report to council.
Coun. Bill McNulty said council needs a list of work being done and the status of that work, not just reports sitting on shelves.
“You’re not the only environmentally concerned person on council – I’d like you to know that, a lot of us are,” McNulty said, addressing Wolfe.
Wolfe’s original motion included declaring a climate emergency and asking staff to accelerate emissions targets, to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and net-zero waste, to work toward self-sufficiency in food and transition to being self-sufficient energy-wise.
Coun. Linda McPhail said Richmond is known to be a leader in the region for climate action initiatives, and pointed out some of the Halifax declaration was “symbolic.”
“I don’t want what we do to be mostly symbolic,” said Coun. Linda McPhail. “I want to understand what we are actually doing and we’ve been doing for years.”
The motion was separated in two and council voted to simply declare a climate emergency, with councillors Alexa Loo and Chak Au voting against the motion, and then asking staff to pull together all the work being done into a report and bring that back to council.
Coun. Harold Steves said Wolfe’s motion should be tied in with various reports done over the past 20 years, including the Richmond State of the Environment report created in 1998, which came back in 2014 as the Sustainability Progress report and the Blue Dot initiative, a David Suzuki Foundation initiative. Steves suggested they all be called by the original name, the State of the Environment report, for continuity.
Kelly Greene suggested the referral of the motion only pertain to the staff reports, not the declaration of a climate emergency.
“We know it’s a climate emergency – we know that we have 12 years to turn it around,” she said.
Wolfe said this motion is the reason he got into politics, and he wants the public to get behind the city on this issues, adding he believes many people care about the issue of climate change, including youth and politicians.
“We all have a stake in the future,” Wolfe told the Richmond News.
The final motion will come back to a future council meeting.
