Austin:
Capital city pursues very aggressive carbon emission reduction goal Austin, Texas –If you think your city has done a good job publicizing its achievements in becoming more sustainable, don’t look at this city’s “Climate Action Report” for 2011. The report provides an impressive summary of what the city has achieved in a fairly short time frame. Austin is working to make its operations, facilities and vehicle fleets carbon neutral by 2020. Led by the Austin Climate Protection Program, a cross-departmental group of City of Austin staff, has identified strategies that may look small on their own but which will equal significant carbon reductions when implemented across all city operations. Since 2007, departmental teams have watched the overall municipal carbon footprint fall by more than 49,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. The report cites the following accomplishments for 2011: • Austin Energy Green Building celebrated its 20th anniversary. • Voters passed the City’s first mobility bond package focused on multi-modal livability. • The City, along with regional partners, is using a $3.7 million federal Sustainable Communities grant to pursue a regional Sustainable Places Project.
• Austin is one of 10 pilot cities now refining a new national sustainability benchmarking tool, the STAR Community Index. • The Austin Convention Center earned a Gold certification under the LEED for Existing Buildings rating system. Lucia Athens joined the city staff as its first Chief Sustainability Officer in 2011. In her introduction to the report, she made some important observations. Her comments are reproduced below. Central Texas has just had a brutally hot summer and is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record, leading to tragic wildfires that burned more than 30,000 acres, killed two people, and destroyed approximately 1,600 homes. The drought has killed trees, plants and wildlife and affected our entire ecosystem. Stressed wildlife must compete for scarce food and water: the drought affects the entire food chain. No one can say definitively global warming caused any single event. What we do know is that a pattern of increasing extreme weather events is consistent with climate change projections. 2011 has given us a taste of the future predicted by
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WINTER 2012 • Sustainable Communities
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