Community Energy Association

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Shared, regional service enhances climate efforts on Vancouver Island

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Shared, regional service enhances climate efforts for 13 local governments and 3 electoral areas

Case Study

Published: May 28, 2025
Updated: n/a
Relevant Topics: Policy, Transportation

The CRD’s Climate Action and Adaptation Service highlights the potential for regional districts to play a pivotal role in climate action. By pooling resources, sharing expertise, and coordinating efforts, regional districts can help overcome the capacity and resource limitations of individual municipalities, avoid redundancy, and accelerate consistent, efficient, and impactful climate initiatives across regions.

Key benefits of regional coordination of climate action include programs that create a unified vision for residents, working groups that foster strong relationships and capacity building, centralized resources and data, and access to more grants and leveraged funding.

As regional districts and neighbouring communities evaluate how to move forward with coordinated climate action, they should prioritize building relationships, assessing unique and shared needs, identifying early wins, and building political support.

Published: May 30, 2025
Updated: n/a
Relevant Topics: Regional collaboration
Climate Zone: 4

Context

The Capital Regional District (CRD) is the regional government for 13 municipalities and three electoral areas on southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, serving about 460,000 people. The region includes traditional territories of many First Nations where 11 of these Nations hold reserve lands. This includes but is not limited to BOḰEĆEN (Pauquachin), MÁLEXEȽ (Malahat), paaʔčiidʔatx̣ (Pacheedaht), Spune’luxutth (Penelekut), Sc'ianew (Beecher Bay), Songhees, SȾÁUTW̱ (Tsawout), T’Sou-ke, W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip), W̱SIḴEM (Tseycum), and xʷsepsum (Kosapsum) Nations. The region is in climate zone 4 with one of the mildest climates in BC, and comprises both rural and urban communities.

Contributors

Ruth Midgley
Climate Adaptation / Low Carbon Resilience Lead
Community Energy Association

Problem

The Challenge of Coordinated Climate Action

The local government system in BC is complex, comprising of 162 municipalities, 88 electoral areas, 27 regional districts, and over 450 islands in the Salish Sea overseen by Islands trust. In addition, there are over 200 First Nations communities, both treaty and non-treaty, that interact with this system. This jurisdictional complexity presents significant challenges when addressing complex, cross-sectoral and cross-boundary issues like climate change.

Climate change impacts, such as sea-level rise and extreme weather events, do not respect municipal boundaries and effective climate action often requires coordinated efforts in areas like transportation, land use planning, and infrastructure. However, jurisdictional fragmentation, resource inequality, and data inconsistencies can make it difficult for local governments to work together. These challenges can also lead to redundancies and missed opportunities for collaboration that would increase impact and reduce costs and workloads.

Jurisdictional Fragmentation: Municipalities have differing planning processes, regulations, programs, and policies making coordinating efforts across municipal boundaries difficult.

Resource Inequities: Smaller municipalities and electoral areas may lack the expertise, funding, and staff capacity to develop and implement robust climate strategies independently.

Data Inconsistencies: Without a centralized approach, data collection and analysis on things like emissions inventories or climate hazards like sea level rise can be inconsistent, hindering effective regional planning.

Redundancy Risks: Municipalities working in isolation may duplicate efforts or miss opportunities for collaboration that would reduce costs and workloads.

Solution

The CRD’s Regional Climate Action and Adaptation Service

Regional districts have long played an important coordination role for local governments by providing services that make sense at the regional scale, like managing park land or providing emergency call services; regional districts can also provide services related to climate action.

The Capital Regional District’s (CRD) regional Climate Action and Adaptation Service (CAAS) provides a model for how regional districts can effectively coordinate climate action across multiple municipalities and electoral areas.

The CAAS serves 13 municipalities and three electoral areas, spanning urban centers like Victoria and Langford, suburban communities such as Oak Bay, agricultural areas like in Central Saanich, and the rural electoral areas of Salt Spring Island, the Southern Gulf Islands, and Juan de Fuca. There is a huge difference among these communities both in terms of population (over 100,000 in the District of Saanich compared to 2,500 in the District of Highlands) and staff capacity to address climate change. The City of Victoria and District of Saanich have teams with multiple staff working on climate action, whereas the smaller municipalities and electoral areas rarely have even one staff dedicated to climate or sustainability.

To complement and support staff capacity and address resource inequality, there are six full time staff at the CRD tasked with advancing the work of the regional climate service. In addition to coordinating with local governments and other external partners, these staff work to engage and coordinate with other CRD departments on climate action - such as regional planning, fleet and facilities management, and emergency management.

Since its inception in 2009, the CAAS budget and staff capacity has grown with increased interest and ambition from the Board and to support municipal partner needs. In 2024, the CAAS was funded by approximately $1.8 M in requisition as well as external grants. The service has been very successful in leveraging grants to support implementation of initiatives, with approximately $3.2 million in external funding supporting projects completed or underway in the 2024 year.

After signing the BC Climate Action Charter in 2007, the regional district board of the Capital Region established the CAAS in 2009, becoming the first regional district to have a service dedicated to climate action. Established as a region wide service, its core funding is provided through a financing agreement paid for by all the municipalities and electoral areas in the region and acts as a resource for local governments, residents, and organizations with five key focus areas:

  1. Coordinating local climate action
  2. Educating and fostering partnerships
  3. Engaging senior governments and utilities
  4. Providing scientific data
  5. Supporting CRD corporate climate objectives

Outcome
&
Benefits

The CRD Climate Action and Adaptation Service has demonstrated several key benefits of regional coordination of climate action:

Regional strategies and programs provide a unified vision and coordinated approach for emissions reduction and climate adaptation across the region.

  • Development of the regional retrofit concierge service, Home Energy Navigator, to offer consistent programming across the region, avoiding confusion for residents that could arise from a patchwork of retrofit programs.
  • Development and implementation of a regional Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Roadmap to map future charging station needs for the entire region and identify the opportunities for collaboration on reaching charging infrastructure goals.

Regular working groups for municipal staff and elected officials to foster strong working relationships and create space for knowledge-sharing, capacity-building, and partnerships.

  • Quarterly meetings of two inter-municipal groups: a Working Group for local government staff and a Task Force for elected officials.
  • The Inter-Municipal Working Group advances key initiatives in collaboration and hosts capacity building on a variety of topics, catering to the needs of local government priorities, such as workshops on regional best practices.

Centralized resources and data lead to consistent region-wide greenhouse gas inventories, climate impact data, and coordinated messaging and educational campaigns

Coordinating grant applications to leverage funding and create efficiencies. By spearheading and leading this work on behalf of local governments, there is increased grant success rates, reduced administrative burdens and workload for municipalities, and more efficient use of funding dollars.

For example, the CRD led a regional EV charging infrastructure initiative in collaboration with municipal partners and key interest holders to set targets, identify gaps, and develop technical guidance to support infrastructure EV deployment. This work resulted in the acquisition of $6.4M in grants funds for the CRD and municipal partners to install hundreds of level 2 EV charging stations, and 20 DCFC stations at over 80 locations across the region.

The CRD is project managing the installations for approximately 150 stations regionally and is responsible for overall grant management on behalf of municipalities, reducing administrative burdens for local governments.

Image from CRD Charging Guide

This regional district model of climate action is not without its challenges. A regional approach to coordinated climate action requires significant effort to understand how a regional initiative or program can support, not interfere, with municipal autonomy. For example, municipalities have jurisdiction over things like roads and bike lanes and their own development planning. Regional districts cannot directly or unilaterally implement policies but instead have to work collaboratively with member municipalities and electoral areas.

Implementation of the service also requires “buy-in” by member municipalities staff and elected officials, both to fund the service and to participate in the regional programs. Relationship building is key and the service must constantly respond to the needs and priorities of the municipalities and electoral areas, working to identify and fill gaps as required.

What’s next for the CRD Climate Action and Adaptation Service

The CRD CAAS is looking for innovative ways to continue to drive down regional emissions and has conducted research on potential policies and programs that the region and/or the municipalities can implement. One upcoming opportunity is the advancement of a regional building benchmarking program for large buildings and accompanying model bylaw development for local government consideration. This will support both forthcoming regulatory requirements of local governments and voluntary programs for the remainder of the region, allowing for consistent regulation, coordinated communication, reduced administration costs, and building of region-wide capacity in this area.

The CAAS is also undertaking a region-wide initiative to build capacity on climate adaptation amongst local government staff, Indigenous community staff, and elected officials. This program will also involve a process for regional priority setting to help the region move forward on adaptation in a coordinated way and identify opportunities for region-wide or sub-regional collaboration on specific projects.

Spotlight on CRD’s regional coordination of the Zero Carbon Step Code

The CRD CAAS played a pivotal role in coordinating a regional approach to the BC Energy Step Code and the subsequent Zero Carbon Step Code (ZCSC). Building on their experience with the Energy Step Code from 2017, the CRD leveraged its position as a regional government to facilitate collaboration and coordination among member municipalities to accelerate adoption of the ZCSC in the region.

In 2021, CRD initiated a three-step process: capacity building, consultation, and regulation implementation. In partnership with the District of Central Saanich, the District of Saanich and the City of Victoria, the CRD organized educational events and workshops for local government staff and industry stakeholders, fostering knowledge acquisition about the new code. They then facilitated regional consultations, reducing the workload for individual municipalities and ensuring consistent messaging across the region.

To help other municipalities in the region join the effort, they developed a toolkit containing bylaws, technical reports, and engagement materials, which municipalities could easily implement. Regular working group meetings allowed for co-development of these materials and regional consistency of regulations and bylaws.

The CRD's coordination efforts proved highly effective, resulting in a domino effect of adoption across the region. In 2025, most municipalities have implemented the highest level (Level 4) of the ZCSC many years ahead of the provincial timeline, with only four communities still working on adoption. In 2023, the CRD itself became the first regional district in BC to adopt Level 3 for its electoral areas.

This coordinated approach showcases the value of a regional climate action service in accelerating policy implementation and achieving consistency across jurisdictions.

Conclusion

The success of the CRD CAAS highlights the potential for regional districts to play a pivotal role in climate action. By pooling resources, sharing expertise, and coordinating efforts, regional districts can help overcome the limitations of individual municipalities, particularly benefiting smaller communities with limited capacity. This approach can lead to more consistent, efficient, and impactful climate initiatives across regions.

For municipalities interested in establishing a regional climate action service, consider the following strategies:

  • Invest in relationship-building and regular communication between staff. This foundation of trust and collaboration is crucial for the success of any regional initiative. Consider joining one of CEA’s existing regional peer networks to help make these connections.
  • Work together to assess regional needs and capacities. Understanding the unique challenges and resources of each municipality will help determine what gaps a regional service could fill.
  • Start with small collaborative projects that demonstrates the potential of regional collaboration on climate action. These early wins can build momentum and showcase the benefits of a coordinated approach.
  • Build political support among member municipalities' staff and elected officials. New regional services must be desired by residents and requested by their elected officials from member municipalities and electoral areas.

Regional coordination on climate action, as exemplified by the CRD CAAS, has the potential to significantly accelerate climate mitigation and adaptation efforts in British Columbia. As climate change continues to present urgent challenges, the model of regional coordination offers a promising path forward, enabling communities to leverage collective strengths and resources in the face of this global crisis.

Perspective from Colwood

“The CRD Climate Action Service leads regional climate action initiatives, along with bringing together and supporting the many different local governments through a collaborative and highly effective network, which has significantly contributed to the success of climate action in the region.  For the City of Colwood, with one climate staff position (as with other municipalities of our size), this network and the work of the regional team give us a huge boost in what we are able to accomplish.  Initiatives like the regional GHG inventory conducted every second year with specific data for each local government and the climate projections report for the region are critical for our climate action planning and monitoring.  Regional tools and programs like the Capital Region Extreme Heat Information Portal, regional EV infrastructure support, and the Home Energy Navigator are not only innovative and highly successful but assist us in leaping forward in these and other important areas of work in Colwood and across the region.  Recently the Climate Action Service responded to a Colwood request for a regional meeting on building retrofit initiatives.  The workshop type meeting that resulted was not only very helpful for the development of our Building Retrofit Strategy but also very well received by local government reps across the region who were clearly energized, better informed, and found opportunities to collaborate and align in efforts to scale up retrofits of existing buildings.

“It can be tough trying to work hard and fast as a single climate position within a local government, so knowing I can reach out to CRD’s climate team and other colleagues in the region makes it feel like I am working within a larger climate team.  I can ask questions, bounce ideas, ask for help or collaboration, and generally be supported to do my work much more effectively.

“The CRD’s Climate Action Service helps by increasing understanding, alignment, and confidence in decision-making of elected officials. A regional lens for climate actions is critical to amplify efforts and ensure broader mainstreamed outcomes.”

—Carolyn Richman, Climate Planner, City of Colwood

Contributors

Ruth 
Active Transportation Planner
City of Kelowna

Danielle Wiess
Director of Transportation Initiatives
Community Energy Association

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Related Content

CRD Climate Action Website (external link)

Many of the resources, data portals, and programs described in the above case study can be found in the Climate Action section of the CRD's website.