ENVIRONMENT-CANADA: Toronto Not Waiting for Agreement on Kyoto

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, May 10 2002 (IPS) - With Canada’s senior politicians split over whether to support an international treaty to stem global warming, the country’s largest city is going ahead with local solutions to cut greenhouse gases.

Toronto’s Atmospheric Fund (TAF) is building the first windmill along Lake Ontario, devising a heat health alert for upcoming summer months (modelled somewhat on similar U.S. plans), planning a community-wide bike network and exploring the feasibility of using lake water to cool downtown offices, which could cut conventional air conditioning use by 75 per cent.

Toronto is the only city in the world with a special fund dedicated to finding local solutions to climate change, says TAF executive director, Philip Jessup.

TAF has never received a penny from the city treasury. The 16.4-million-U.S..-dollar endowment fund was established more than 10 years ago after the city sold a piece of valuable property.

Through TAF sponsored strategies, Toronto has curtailed its use of fossil fuels (which create greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, leading to global warming and climate change) and saves more than 1.7 million dollars a year. “The city’s own corporate operations has reduced greenhouse emissions by 67 per cent since 1990,” Jessup says.

Last week, the TAF sponsored the North American Urban Heat Island Summit, a gathering to assist northern hemisphere cities that face extreme heat waves mixed with serious air pollution during the summer months.

“What we are trying to do with this conference is connect the scientists with the policy makers” at all levels of government, says Jessup.

Last year was the warmest on record on the planet and the consequences of continued balmy temperatures will be deadly even in the north, says Eva Ligeti, TAF policy advisor and former environment commissioner for the province of Ontario.

During previous heatwaves, some U.S. cities have experienced deaths numbering in the 100s, particularly among frail and elderly people with respiratory and heart problems. The air pollution that envelops northern industrial cities has been linked to increased asthma rates, infant deaths, premature births and stillbirths.

People in the north are less used to severe heat and tend to suffer from it more than those who live in more tropical climates, Ligeti continues. “If there is a public emergency, it will be early in the (summer).”

The combination of automobiles powered by fossil fuels, factory emissions, and air-conditioning use can raise local temperatures at that time of year from four to seven degrees centigrade, turning cities into heat islands, says Ligeti

Opposition to the Kyoto Protocol from oil and coal-producing provinces, the business community, and the neighbouring United States may have slowed measures in Canada to curtail the harmful effects of industrial and automobile-related activities, but local cities and individual citizens can still adopt measures to fight urban heating, the TAF summit was told.

These include eliminating dark asphalt paving and roofs, which absorb and intensify the sun’s heat, replacing them with lighter surfaces. More trees and roof gardens also help reflect the incoming light.

The problem may be even more acute in the suburbs surrounding major North American cities, the conference heard. “The suburbs have so few trees; there is so much concrete and so many of these strip malls. They are actually hotter than older parts of cities where you have a nice urban [tree] canopy,” says Ligeti.

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) estimates that urban communities alone can eliminate about 20 per cent of greenhouse emissions in Canada.

With the responsibility to hand out federal government money for local projects to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the FCM has become a major player in the Canadian environmental movement.

Led this year by Toronto city councillor Jack Layton, who has also headed TAF, the FCM has mobilised more than 100 city and town councils to endorse the Kyoto Protocol.

When it comes to political change, says former Toronto mayor and local columnist John Sewell, “cities are much more progressive than central governments in every country of the world, Canada included.”

“It is only normal to think that innovation around social thought, around how you govern things, around culture, all those kinds of questions, happens first in cities.”