Climate Change Action Charter and Community Sustainability in a Dollars and Cents Kind of World
Balancing Settlement Activities with Ecological Integrity
In 2007 the provincial government in British Columbia launched the Climate Action Charter (CAC) initiative. With clear goals and a methodology for measuring progress towards these goals, the CAC encourages local governments to take positive action on an issue that affects all of us. To date, 174 of 187 local governments across BC have signed onto this voluntary initiative.
In an article published online in the May 2009 issue of the Communities in Transition Information Resource!, Tim Pringle of the Real Estate Foundation provided his perspective on the Climate Action Charter.
“The ‘uptake’ on the voluntary CAC is significant to us at the Real Estate Foundation of BC. We look at land from several perspectives: long term stewardship, the impact of policy on land uses, and the way these values are reflected in market activity, among them,” states Tim Pringle.
“Over the past 20 years this has crystallized into what I think of as balancing settlement activities with the ecological integrity of the land base. One of the big challenges has been to establish a shared metric: measuring what matters. The CAC gives land use practitioners a metric that is widely accepted as one of the measures of ‘sustainability’: green house gas emissions (GHGs).”
To Learn More:
To read the complete article by Tim Pringle, click on Climate Change Action Charter and Community Sustainability in a Dollars and Cents Kind of World.
Posted June 2009