Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Taylor Davey presented her research at an environmental studies brown bag on Friday, Feb. 14. Davey’s lecture focused on the challenges that municipal governments have recently faced while implementing climate policies and investments. In particular, Davey studied the effectiveness of the Canadian city of Edmonton’s climate budget as a method used to forecast the carbon impacts of government decisions.
In the early 2000s, and especially around 2010, cities began to have an increasingly important position in international climate governance. Cities were previously seen as limited implementers of climate change plans, where national levels led policy to achieve climate goals, a wider audience began looking towards cities to make meaningful change.
Edmonton is the capital of Alberta, Canada, and is the closest city to the Canadian oil sands, which are a mixture of sand, clay, water and oil. Geographically, Edmonton is at the center of the fossil fuel industry and has the highest per capita emissions of any major city in Canada. In 2019, Edmonton declared a climate emergency to address this issue and ordered an administration to develop a climate budget that would be used in their financial budgeting process in 2022.
Davey is currently in the process of expanding her PhD dissertation into a book, which uses the city of Edmonton as a case study and evaluates their development of a climate budget as a method to quantify carbon emissions.
“Forecasting emissions of longer-term plans and strategies have been important to the climate action planning process for a while, yet cities have still struggled translating these plans into action,” Davey said. “In the Edmonton case study, the city developed North America’s first climate budget to quantify the emissions impacts of budget proposals, with the hope that this would keep City Councilors and members of City Administration more accountable to its ambitious climate goals.”
Edmonton’s climate budget was unlike the well-known carbon budget, which tracks global emissions and counts down how many emissions we have left before the Earth surpasses a certain temperature threshold. The climate budget was more explicitly focused on the financial budgeting process, where every budgeting item presented to city council was assigned financial and carbon based revenues.
Davey’s research found that rigorously quantifying budget proposals in this way proved to be unfeasible. Additionally, quantitative and technical framing of climate politics was not the most salient method to gather local support for action. In fact, this method in Edmonton heightened disagreement over climate investments.
“While my research tends to support the need for many of the infrastructure investments that were being proposed, I also argue that we need to find ways of framing climate action as part of a much wider range of co-benefits rather than narrowing our understanding of their benefits to only emissions reductions that can be traded off with financial costs and other government priorities,” Davey said.
Sophomore Adelaide Brislen shared her thoughts surrounding Davey’s findings.
“It was disheartening to hear how a project with such high hopes of encouraging environmental policy had such an adverse effect. However, I believe we can learn from this example. Environmental action at a local level should not just be based on numbers to prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, but should be a community centered discussion,” Brislen said.
Assistant Professor of Economics, Rick Klotz, also attended the lecture.
“I thought [Davey’s] talk was great. I am generally interested in the difficulties inherent in quantifying the climate implications of different activities,” Klotz said. “It was fascinating to see how these measurement issues played out in a local budgeting process. Like others in the room I was left a bit depressed by what happened in Edmonton, where a seemingly logical push to formalize the quantification of the city’s impact on climate decreased support for climate action.”
As cities continue to play a critical role in addressing climate change, Edmonton’s experience highlights the tension between ambitious climate action and practical limitations.
