The Town Wants Your Opinion

CLIMATE

By Staff Reports

Should the Town of Chapel Hill offer an incentive for property owners to upgrade their own buildings and make them more energy efficient?

Should local organizations provide more electric vehicle charging stations for their clients and employees?

These are among the questions the town is asking in a survey it’s conducting among residents to help create a community climate action plan. Responses to the survey and other community outreach will outline how the community can work together to address the impacts of climate change.

The goal of the plan is to identify the most meaningful actions the community can take over the next five years. The town defines climate action as any activity that reduces our carbon emissions or that helps us respond to our changing climate by making Chapel Hill a stronger and more resilient community.

While climate change is a global issue, it’s also a local one. In a press release, the town points out that we’re already experiencing climate change in Chapel Hill. This includes more extreme weather events that lead to problems like flooding, drought and severe storms. The Chapel Hill Town Council already has a goal to reduce carbon emissions and make Chapel Hill a 100-percent clean energy community by the year 2050.

The survey will help gauge what residents see as the biggest challenges and opportunities for reaching that goal and addressing climate change in Chapel Hill. Since buildings and transportation produce the most carbon emissions in town (about 95 percent), Chapel Hill officials in particular want to know what ideas and solutions residents have for tackling these two big areas.

To take the survey, go to chplan.us/2020climatesurvey. The survey takes about 15-20 minutes and will be open through May 8.

For more information about the project, visit www.sustainchapelhill.org. The web site offers a number of resources, including “10 easy things I can do at home” to reduce carbon emissions. Those items include taking shorter showers and reducing junk mail.