Charlottesville launches climate action dashboard during annual report

The City of Charlottesville has launched a website that allows members of the public to find out what they can do to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to take a look at a bigger picture.

“This dashboard is an engagement tool that will both increase awareness of and transparency of our work,” said Emily Irvine, the city’s climate program manager. “It will make the climate action plan more accessible and it will be a place where we can tell stories and share resources and showcase and highlight the work of our community partners.” 

Irvine spoke as part of a work session on July 15 on an update of the city’s work toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That work has been underway for many years and is led by Kristel Riddervold is the director of the Office of Sustainability. She began her remarks by thanking the Council for their investment in the work.  

“You adopted Charlottesville’s first community climate action plan in 2023 as an amendment to the Comprehensive Plan,” Riddervold said. “We now have a dedicated three-person climate team in our Office of Sustainability.”

In FY24, Council also allocated $1 million to a climate fund that Riddervold said has been used as a match for state and federal grants.

“I feel a sense of momentum and a real sense of urgency like never before and that urgency is making itself very tangible today given our extreme heat conditions and drought warnings,” Riddervold said. “Climate change and the impact that it is having is an enormous global problem that demands action at every scale.” 

The city’s continued investment in climate action comes at a time when Governor Glenn Youngkin has used the executive branch to end two programs approved by the Democratic-led General Assembly. They are Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and a mandate banning the sale of vehicles powered by fossil fuels after 2035.  

Nevertheless, the report to Council went through a series of initiatives designed to help the city meet its goals. 

“Charlottesville has community-wide emissions reduction goals of 45 percent by 2030 and carbon-neutrality by 2050 and we have a strategic-level climate action plan to help guide us toward those goals,” Irvine said. 

That target of 45 percent is measured against the emissions levels from 2011. Irvine said that levels from 2022 are 42 percent lower. In raw numbers, that’s a reduction from 450,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents to just over 250,000 metric tons. 

“When I say CO2 equivalent, what I mean is that this inventory includes carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, or N20 emissions,” Irvine said. “And when I talk about community wide emissions, I’m talking about all of the emissions from our community exclusive of our municipal emissions.” 

There’s a separate accounting for those emissions, which are defined as those controllable by the City of Charlottesville itself. 

“Our municipal emissions were a little over 12,000 metric tons in 2022 and they’re down 36 percent from that 2011 baseline,” Irvine said.  

Community-wide, heating and cooling buildings accounts for two-thirds of emissions and transportation makes up about a quarter. Irvine said she expects trends to continue because of progress made by the Virginia Clean Economy Act passed in 2020 which is intended to force Dominion and other utilities companies to invest in emissions-free power generation. 

Virginia left the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative at the end of 2023. Under RGGI, Dominion and others had to pay to exceed emissions caps with the proceeds going back to the Commonwealth of Virginia. Dominion was able to pass on the cost to ratepayers, something Youngkin described as a hidden tax. 

A lawsuit claiming the exit was unlawful is still pending in Floyd County Circuit Court.  (read that story)

Irvine said transportation emissions are down to in part because of consumer choice.

“In Charlottesville, one in six vehicles registered in the city in 2022 were electric,” Irvine said. 

Much of the work the three-person team does is to try to find ways to further decrease emissions. That includes working with the Local Energy Alliance Program to make existing homes more energy efficient and ongoing work to decarbonize the city’s utility department. 

“The gas service new connection fee that will go into effect in January is an early result of this study and we certainly count that as a climate win,” Irvine said. 

Irvine said there were 123 applications for solar installations at Charlottesville in 2023 as well as 16 permits for installing chargers for electric vehicles at people’s homes. She said the new townhouses built by the Piedmont Housing Alliance at Kindlewood are built to federal high-performance standards.

On transportation, Irvine said another climate win was the city’s first concrete-protected bike lane on the Belmont Bridge and also added that the city’s contract with Veo for scooters and e-bikes are getting people out of their cars. 

“Almost 450,000 miles were ridden on scooters and e-bikes last year helping to avoid nearly 60,000 car trips,” Irvine said. 

Many of these bits of information are on the new climate action dashboard. Several new initiatives are expected to launch in the coming fiscal year.

Before you go: The time to write and research of this article is covered by paid subscribers to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In fact, this particular installment is from the July 18, 2024 edition of the newsletter. To ensure this research can be sustained, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing monthly through Patreon.