By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
Gregor Robertson was the unabashedly green mayor of Vancouver for a decade. These days he’s helping 13,000 other cities around the world take climate action and green up their cities.
When Robertson first ran for office in Vancouver, he came up with a rather audacious campaign slogan.
“One of my big four goals was to make Vancouver the Greenest City in the World by 2020. That was in 2008 when I ran for mayor. And, you know, it was a calculated commitment that Vancouver was already, you know, in the top bracket,” says Gregor Robertson, former mayor of Vancouver.
He figured Vancouver was in the top 20 or 30 at the time but why not shoot for the moon?
“I figured we could use a challenge …You know, nobody was really tracking who was the greenest and others weren’t necessarily making that claim,” says Robertson. But certainly there were cities like Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm “who were leading the charge, decarbonizing their cities and reducing their impact on the environment.”
This may have irked the hell out of the mayors of other Canadian cities who were probably thinking “Oh, here they go again.”
But it did resonate with voters in Vancouver. Robertson was elected three times with majorities and served as mayor for a decade until 2018.
These days Robertson is serving as the Global Ambassador to the Global Covenant of Mayors which is helping almost 13,000 member cities take action on Climate Change.
We wanted to talk about two things with him – his Greenest City in the World goal and his work with the mayors of cities around the world taking action on climate change.
Greenest City in the World
Most of Vancouver’s greenhouse gas emissions come from two sources: 1. Buildings (57%) and 2. Transportation (36%).
“55 to 60% or more of our pollution comes from buildings,” says Robertson. “And the majority of that is the fossil fuels that we’re burning in our buildings.”
Vancouver is a charter city, which means they have the ability to regulate many things that most cities don’t have jurisdiction to deal with, such as building codes.
Green building code
Vancouver proceeded to create its own building code, which was the envy of cities everywhere.
“We’ve come all the way from very little [action] around environment, climate, and sustainability, to now having a building code that’s the greenest in the Americas,” says Robertson.
The Vancouver building code aims to get buildings to zero emissions. It requires multifamily and larger buildings that require rezomings to reach the passive house standards or equivalent.
In 2017 we did a story on The Heights (aka Skeena), a multifamily project that changed everything in Vancouver. Prior to that the green building code used a complicated standard of LEED Gold plus a few other indicators.
That’s when Scott Kennedy of Cornerstone Architecture reached out to the city and asked if he could build to the passive house standard instead. The City said ‘knock yourself out.’
The result was Canada’s largest passive house building at the time – an 85-unit apartment building that required 90% less energy to heat it.
The project was so successful the builder had more than a dozen commissions to build other projects before the first was finished and Vancouver changed its code to “or Passive House.”
Vancouver also considers the emissions embodied in the materials used to build as well.
“Once you have the materials factored in and the embodied carbon that’s in the materials, the energy use in the building can go to net zero,” says Robertson.
And in B.C. thanks to their hydro dams and renewable electricity it’s pretty easy to get to net-zero.
Green jobs
This leadership with building codes and other initiatives led to significant economic activity. “It ended up creating a lot of jobs, and a lot of economy by exporting the technologies, and the expertise that have been developed here.”
By 2018 at the end of Roberson’s tenure as Mayor Vancouver enjoyed a 35% increase in green jobs, $44 million in energy savings and $6 billion in cleantech equity investment for B.C.
Transportation – Getting people out of cars
When Robertson took office Greenest City Plan set a mode shift goal to go from 40 to 50% of trips moving out of cars. In 2010, the City approved a $25 million 10-year bike plan.
Vancouver famously closed a lane on the Burrard Bridge to create a dedicated bike lane into the core of the city and that was the day Heather Deal, a councillor at the time feared for her political life.
On that fateful day there were news helicopters circling overhead to document the traffic chaos that was sure to come. “We cut the ribbon and we cycled across that closed lane and nothing happened,” Deal told Green Energy Futures in 2013.
Chaos did not ensue and Deal and her colleagues including Robertson were re-elected.
Vancouver created a strategic hierarchy to guide their transportation priorities at the time.
In the transportation pyramid “Walking is first, biking is second, public transit is third, and in fourth place are single occupancy vehicles,” says Robertson.
“We were shooting for 2020 to be 50% – walk, bike, and transit, and we hit 50% in 2016, four years ahead of schedule,” says Robertson. Vancouver’s new goal is 60%.
50% not in cars – one of the highest rates in Canada
To address the car side of the equation Vancouver also required that electric vehicle charging infrastructure be installed in new buildings and set a goal of getting 50% of the kilometres driven to be zero emissions by 2030.
Before the Olympics, Vancouver also completed an innovative district heating project which uses heat pumps to extract heat from the sewer system to heat buildings in False Creek, and what was the Olympic Village.
Vancouver also worked on waste and many other issues through the Greenest City Plan and their accomplishments are significant.
I had to ask Robertson, So did you achieve your goals, is Vancouver the Greenest City in the World?
“We definitely got into the top five – Vancouver’s always right up there in the top of that list. and obviously I’m very proud of that,” says Robertson.
Vancouver has made it into the top five of some greenest city lists, but there is still much to do.
In recent years the City has continued to revise its goals and in 2023 a report to council indicated they were unlikely to meet updated goals for active transportation, walkable neighbourhoods and zero emissions space and water heating.
There is something to be said for setting big goals.
Global Covenant of Mayors
Robertson left his role as Mayor in 2018 and now serves as the Global Ambassador for the Global Covenant of Mayors (Mayors for Climate).
The Covenant of Mayors supports the climate actions of 13,000 mayors and cities around the world.
Robertson represents these Mayors at international meetings such as the Conferences of the Parties (COP), and many other international meetings.
Who better to represent Mayors, serve as a mentor and colleague and help them wrangle more resources for climate priorities in their cities, than a former Mayor.
As it turns out cities are where a lot of the action is when it comes to fighting climate change.
“You have to deal with all of the issues that impact a city day-to-day and that people are dealing with in cities,” says Robertson. Planning, transportation policies, zoning, waste management, and building policies all affect greenhouse gas emissions, increasing them if policies are weak and reducing them if good.
The trouble is, even though cities do all the hard work, they are not in control of the lion’s share of revenues collected mostly by national and provincial governments.
Arm-twisting nations to live up to promises
“A lot of my work on the global side of things is compelling the countries to work with cities on their climate plans and invest in cities to deliver climate infrastructure, to deliver on decarbonization, to make everything more resilient.”
The Global Covenant of Mayors is a close cousin of C40 the alliance of the world’s 97 largest cities fighting climate change, an initiative founded by Mike Bloomberg the wealthy former Mayor of New York.
The two organizations provide accountability, data, information, networking and a slew of resources to help cities learn from each other and achieve more with their climate actions.
The two organizations work with the rockstars of climate action such as Copenhagen, Stockhom and Oslo, and they also support cities from the “global south.”
“The Global Covenant of Mayors initiated something called the GAP Fund, which is a City Climate Finance GAP Fund, basically to fund a gap that many small cities in the global South.
The $100 million fund was primarily funded by Germany and its helping cities of the global south engage in climate action and adapt to climate change. Cities such as Mbombela in South Africa that needed stormwater management in the wake of the impacts of climate change.
Green Energy Futures has done previous stories on Vancouver, Vitoria Gasteiz, Oslo, Saerbeck, Osnabrück and many others and will be reporting on progress in other cities around the world in the future.