Join us in imagining a just, green future for our communities. Municipal infrastructure renewal is one of the core, underexplored challenges Canadians face in addressing the climate crisis. It’s a challenge of moving from national ambition to local action: Municipalities have core policy influence over approximately half of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. And about 80-percent of Canadians live in mid-to-large cities—ones that must undergo a massive transformation in order to reach our social and climate goals by 2050.

We are facing a grand challenge: the move from big concepts to the nuts and bolts of operationalizing change at the municipal level can seem insurmountable. In this session, we’ll explore the key insights from the brand new Just|Green|Cities Discussion paper, which seeks to create a common framework and language for integrating equity-driven decision-making into municipal infrastructure renewal to respond to the climate crisis.

We’ll examine three municipal cases—fleet electrification, net-zero housing, and stormwater management—to reveal the known and unknown factors affecting planning and financing and discuss how we can open this conversation to a broader, inclusive population.