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Climate Action Plan. On April 22, 2020 – the 50th anniversary of Earth Day – the City launched the science-based, community-driven Houston Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, meet the Paris Agreement goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, and lead the global energy transition. Read the April 22, 2020 Press Release (.html)
Jun 26, 2021 · The Corps plan slates about $2.6 billion, a tenth of the total bill, for ecosystem restoration, such as restoring salt marshes that can absorb the impact of surging seawater. “That’s a great ...
Oct 17, 2022 · City-owned land in a total of 26 parks will be protected under Houston's first land preservation ordinance, which aims to combat climate change along with improving air and water quality.
- Adam Zuvanich
- It Focuses on Reducing Emissions in Four Main Areas
- But That Alone Won't Meet The Goal
- It's Unenforceable
- It Doesn’T Address The Region's Biggest Polluters
- There's A Focus on Equity, But Is It Enough?
Of the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted in Houston, 49% comes from the energy generated to power homes, businesses and industry, 47% comes from transportation and 4% is from waste management. With that in mind, the plan focuses on taking action across four areas: transportation, energy transition, optimizing buildings to be more energy-effi...
Even with the planned reduction in emissions, it still won't be enough for the city to reach net-zero. So, the plan also includes strategies for offsetting emissions by removing carbon from the air. One simple way to do this is by planting more trees, which naturally remove C02 from the atmosphere — under the Climate Action Plan the city aims to pl...
The plan itself is a series of recommendations, not requirements. It's not an ordinance, meaning the city can't do much in terms of enforcement. "It’s really focused more on incentive-based programs, market-based programs, public-private partnerships," said Gavin Dillingham, with the HARC research firm, which acted as the technical advisor for the ...
Because the plan focuses on Houston city limits, it doesn't include emissions from some of the area's biggest polluters, which are located in the surrounding counties. The refineries and petrochemical facilities along the Houston Ship Channel, for example, are excluded from the plan. "It doesn’t really address a lot of the industry in our region, w...
Gavin Dillingham, with HARC, said the plan was designed with a focus on equity to make sure it's benefiting everybody. "We’ve seen in the past with some other cities doing climate action planning that it has a tendency to be very much kind of a mid-to-higher income type effort to where you talk about EV charging stations and Teslas and all sorts of...
Oct 5, 2020 · Houston’s market city mentality relaxes land-use policies, downplays environmental impacts and conceives of risk as an individual issue, not a collective one. But as the climate warms, the economic and human tolls of catastrophic flooding from increasingly frequent and extreme weather events necessitate a more collective response, one that links urbanization to the imperatives of a safer ...
There are multiple tree-planting initiatives currently at play in Houston, which will be covered in more depth in an upcoming Urban Edge post. One ambitious example comes from Houston’s Climate Action Plan, in which the city set a goal of planting 4.6 million new trees by the end of the decade. More than 700,000 were planted from 2019–2020 ...
Apr 21, 2022 · 10 ways Houston can embrace climate action this Earth Day. By Randall R. Morton Updated April 21, 2022 12:21 p.m. The WA Parish Generating Station can be seen south of homes in Sugar Land, Tuesday ...
