CEA partnership spurring climate leadership in Alberta

June 2024

As the Community Energy Association works with more clients across Canada, we are learning what’s needed in each new context. This is how we develop the right solutions for the right challenges—by listening to our stakeholders and innovating on past successes.

BC Climate Leaders provides elected officials and municipal staff with access to a peer network, coaching, research and modeling. When it launched in 2019, the program represented everything we’d learned from working on-the-ground in communities and with municipal leaders about how to advance climate action at the local level.

“You have to have up-to-date data to support decision-making. You have to have connections to peers and knowledge about solutions that are working elsewhere. And you have to have connections to the place and people you’re working to protect and help thrive,” says Kate Letizia, senior community energy manager with CEA.

“That’s what gets municipalities moving all together on climate action.”

We’ve had great success delivering the BC Municipal Leadership Council since 2010 and the BC Climate Leaders program over the past five years. But would the model work elsewhere?

New resources for Alberta’s climate leaders

In 2022, we gained the opportunity to find out. Collaborating with Alberta’s Municipal Climate Change Action Centre, CEA co-developed a new program under the banner of Alberta Climate Leaders. The program website, which just launched, gives elected officials and municipal staff access to learning resources, emissions data, and the opportunity to connect with other Alberta climate leaders.

Founded by Alberta Municipalities, Rural Municipalities of Alberta and the Government of Alberta in 2009, MCCAC exists to provide funding, technical assistance, and education to municipalities and community-related organizations. When it comes to Alberta Climate Leaders, they bring to the project their longstanding relationships with municipalities of all sizes and a depth of contextual knowledge. CEA brings the BC Climate Leaders model along with expertise designing supportive tools, training programs, and contextualized interventions for municipal ecosystems, with the proven potential for measurable impact on climate change. These new resources are designed around the real-world experiences of elected officials in Alberta.

Kate, a fourth-generation Calgarian, has been leading the project for CEA, working closely with Ronak Patel’s team at MCCAC.

Having previously worked as a climate change planner for cities in BC and Alberta, Kate was excited to be tasked with bridging the experiences of the two provinces and exploring what they can learn from one another.

Evidence for decision making

Something she appreciates about her home province is the climate innovation that flies under the radar. “In Alberta, we see a remarkable diversity of approaches and incredible creativity in what communities are doing,” says Kate.

Edmonton and Calgary both have approved and funded strategies to achieve Net Zero by 2050 and are using creative and collaborative approaches to support implementation. For example, through a partnership with the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation, the Climate Innovation Grant Program supports local organizations in Calgary and Edmonton that align with the city’s climate plan and the goal of achieving Net Zero.

Elsewhere in Alberta, the Town of Raymond has rapidly installed enough solar power to become Alberta’s first electrically net-zero municipality; the Town of Banff is putting ten, all season EV buses on the road in Canada’s most visited national park; and 20 Albertan municipalities have started home retrofit financing programs using the Clean Energy Improvement Program.

These cases and more are captured in Alberta Climate Leaders’ Climate Action Playbook. This is a collection of case studies, best practices, background information and recommendations for how municipalities in Alberta can most effectively accelerate climate action. Playbook content is based on research, current available data, and criteria such as: how the actions reduce emissions and risk, the opportunity they present to support equity, their feasibility, and cost. The recommended actions consider the experiences of communities in Alberta and around Canada, so users can find out what has succeeded in contexts similar to their own.

The Playbook feeds directly into another Alberta Climate Leaders tool, the Climate Action Explorer. This interactive web app creates a free emissions inventory for every municipality in Alberta— data that has never been readily available to most communities before. Users can then use the tool to conduct simplified modelling to see the potential effectiveness of implementing various climate actions—for example, increasing renewable energy generation or organics diversion— and the subsequent effect on their community’s emissions and energy costs.

“It’s about making decisions based on data and evidence, not based on hopes and assumptions,” says Kate. “This is going to be so powerful—every community in Alberta can now have an instant understanding of where they are starting from and where they could go with local climate action.”

Connect, mobilize, make a difference

The Playbook and the Explorer show elected officials and municipal staff what has proven effective and what can make the biggest difference in their own communities. But just having this information on paper isn’t enough to make change happen. That’s why Alberta Climate Leaders also provides curated spaces for elected officials to connect, initiate action and collaborate to scale up impact.

Starting early 2023, the Alberta Municipal Climate Leadership Council is a forum for elected officials to deepen their knowledge, connect with their peers, and spark regional partnerships.

“I not only learn from the facilitators and guest speakers, but I also find it very valuable to listen to my colleagues from across Alberta,” says council member Jean Barclay, mayor of Innisfail. “These meetings reinforce that our community is on the right path and I look forward to the new Playbook and Explorer tools to help us navigate this journey.”

A similar peer network for municipal staff is also in the works, along with a coaching program for elected officials. By interacting in these forums, Alberta Climate Leaders gives people the opportunity to bring what they’ve learned with the Playbook and Explorer to life—connecting with peers who have are navigating parallel challenges and envisioning a path forward together. In fact, Kate sees Alberta Climate Leaders serving a crucial role facilitating increased collaboration across shared regions (a service that is not filled by regional governments, as is the case in BC). “We’ll increase potential impacts tremendously by providing municipal leaders the opportunity to forge meaningful connections and to build the confidence to act boldly together,” says Kate.

Partnership makes the difference

The partnership between CEA and MCCAC brings together two organizations with long histories working behind the scenes to support local governments delivering action on climate and energy (over 45 years combined experience).

It’s the potential of this collaboration that attracted financial backing from generous funders including Alberta Ecotrust Foundation, Trottier Family Foundation, and the Government of Alberta.

Across the sector, organizations and funders recognize the importance of collaboration for scaling up innovations and climate solutions that work. We need to find efficient ways to take successful ideas from the local level across regions, the province, and beyond, and do so together. With many climate goals set for 2030 and extreme weather ever more frequent, governments at all levels need to accelerate climate action.

But every local governments is unique and needs to implement solutions in a way that makes sense for their community. This highlights the necessity for support organizations to collaborate more often and more effectively, leveraging their different strengths to accelerate impactful change.

“Alberta municipalities play a critical role in reducing emissions and fostering resilient communities,” says Lori Rissling Wynn, Alberta Ecotrust Foundation’s director of grants & community initiatives.

“Alberta Climate Leaders is a timely platform for fostering the critical connections and capacities Alberta municipalities need to progress in their climate leadership journeys, and to do so together,” says Lori.

Visit albertaclimateleaders.ca to begin today.