Transforming our facilities for net-zero

This Strategic Story is just one example of how the City of Waterloo's 2023-2026 Strategic Plan and community feedback helped inform the 2024-2026 staff tabled budget.

Environmental Sustainability and Climate Action:

We need to make transformational changes to City operations and facilities to meet our climate change mitigation and adaptation goals.

What we heard

When residents shared their vision for the future of Waterloo, common themes included:

We must work towards achieving low to zero carbon emissions from City offices and service facilities.

We must continue our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We should learn how and routinely count the embodied carbon in existing buildings, and realize how important it is to carefully manage demolition waste, and to champion repurposing of existing buildings and building materials where possible.

Prioritize more initiatives to support lowered carbon emissions.

Why it's important

City facilities support all our programs and services, but these buildings are also the largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for our organization. The City of Waterloo has declared a Climate Emergency, and we are taking action on climate change. We have pledged to achieve a target of 50 per cent reduction in GHG emissions (relative to 2010 emissions) by 2030, on our way to net-zero emissions by 2050. The City needs to do our part and set an example as a leader in environmental sustainability practices and climate action, and we only have about 85 months left to meet our 2030 goal.

What we're doing

With budget adoption, we’ll continue our efforts to improve and transform the sustainability of our city buildings and facilities, with a heavy focus on our recreation centres (Albert McCormick Community Centre, RIM Park Manulife Sportsplex and Healthy Living Centre, and Moses Springer Community Centre) in 2024-2026. We’ll move forward with deep energy retrofits, as well as low-carbon electrification of building mechanical systems. Low-carbon retrofitting of our existing facilities will be done as part of necessary upgrades, helping us meet our greenhouse gas mitigation goals while making sure that our facilities will meet the needs of future generations. We’ll also continue to seek grant funding opportunities to help, like our application to the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings Grant - Second Intake in February 2023. Transformational change involves larger system/building level retrofits, to support infrastructure renewal and corporate GHG emission reduction targets. This work will align with needed renovations and building improvements, in order to enhance the programming opportunities at these facilities.

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