Mayor, commissioner.

This is uh should be a kind of work session.

It is a work session to essentially update uh you on the five-year progress report around our sustainability strategy.

Uh before I turn it over to Meg Malonia, you want to acknowledge and welcome Mark Charles, our first director of sustainability for our Office of Sustainability.

Yes.

So I'll turn it over to Meg for uh to start the presentation.

Good afternoon.

Um I'm excited to give you our five-year progress report.

Um, so today we're going to be focusing on that kind of green document.

I'm going to be walking you through that's a high-level overview of our plan.

Um, and I will say there is a much more detailed um spreadsheet with all of our projects and our progress report already available on the City of Dayton website.

Um, so this is just kind of a high-level overview to give you an update of what we've been working on.

So to get started, a lot of folks always ask me uh when you start a sustainability office in a city, kind of what is the plan moving forward?

And uh Mark did a great job laying out our sustainability plan, which I'll get into in a moment.

But I kind of have uh four areas that I encourage folks when they're thinking about a sustainability office and starting one to kind of hone in on.

Um, the first piece of that is identifying where your greenhouse gas emissions are.

Um, and again, we're in a climate emergency, we know the climate is warming.

That is driven by the increase of carbon emissions.

So identifying those emissions is important, then creating a policy around it to address those emissions is the second step.

Um, our policy was our sustainability strategy and our climate emergency, which identified projects that we implemented to help reduce our overall emissions and improving not only the environment but the health and well-being of our community.

So I'll keep coming back to this slide as I walk you through kind of what we've been doing.

We've been following this process over the past five years.

So on our website, we have a very complicated, deep version of this that you don't need to pay attention to any of these numbers.

But this is what a greenhouse gas inventory kind of looks like in a whole.

So there's two pieces of a greenhouse gas inventory.

You first look at the emissions from your city operation.

So, what is our municipal buildings contributing?

What is the uh transportation side of our usage of vehicles uh contributing, and then you also look at the community as a whole.

So our residents, our businesses.

So a greenhouse gas inventory for a city is usually split into these two areas.

Now, our uh study was from 2019, so right before we adopted our plan in 2020, we did this um inventory in 2020, but we used 2019 as kind of a base year before COVID.

Um, and for our city operations, what we found is most of our emissions were in three main sectors.

Um, the first is wastewater treatment.

Uh so methane is a natural byproduct of the wastewater process.

And as you remember, we did a very big project to reduce the emissions in that category, which I'll get into.

But 50% of all emissions coming from the city were just from wastewater treatment.

And again, that's a natural process.

It's these microbes, they they release that as they um break down the wastewater.

Um, and then the second two areas we see a lot of emissions in is electricity.

Um so a lot of our projects were focused on renewable energy and also solid waste.

So the waste that comes from our city facilities.

So a lot of the projects that we focused on, we're trying to reduce emissions in these sectors.

When we look at the community as a whole, it's a similar story.

You see a lot of um our emissions concentrated in the electricity sector again.

So 45% of our community's emissions are in electricity.

Another 22% is in stationary combustion, which is natural gas.

So again, mostly energy usage.

Um, and we've done a lot of projects again around natural gas usage as well.

And then the last one is mobile combustion or transportation of vehicles.

So when we look at a city again, we're kind of focused on wastewater operations and electricity, whereas at our community, we're focused on electricity and natural gas.

So more of our housing stock and also um yeah, the heating and cooling of buildings.

Great.

So we know where our emissions are, and so the next step of you know, working towards a more sustainable city is creating a policy that addresses these emissions.

Um, and so what we did as part of that is we adopted our sustainability strategy, but an important piece of that as well is identifying which neighborhoods were in the most need of investment.

Um, so we also conducted a climate vulnerability index, which we will also do again this year for our next plan that we will adopt.

If any of you want to nerd out later, I can tell you all the data analysis we did for this.

But essentially what we did is we looked at climate factors, so infrastructure investment, we looked at our like stormwater infrastructure, we looked at flood risk, we looked at urban heat island effects, we looked at health risks, so we looked at access to health insurance, we looked at their access to a vehicle or if they were close to a bus stop or walkability.

Um we also looked at uh various other things too, like employment, um education.

So we had over 25 different indicators, and then what we did is based on the national average, we prioritized which neighborhoods were the most vulnerable to least vulnerable.

So every neighborhood in red is our most vulnerable from again, climatic is kind of all-encompassing of not only like you know, environmental, but also again the health and education.