The City of San Luis Obispo won the 2023 national Environmental, Climate, and Energy Award for its Climate Action Plan for Community Recovery.
The American Planning Association Sustainable Communities Division organizes the Awards for Excellence in Sustainability to honor the projects, policies, plans and people who show exemplary leadership and inspiration in sustainability planning and implementation.
“The City of San Luis Obispo Climate Action Plan for Community Recovery (CAP) is a cutting-edge climate action plan that provides a pathway to carbon neutrality with a deep focus on people, equity, and economic recovery,” said Chris Read, sustainability manager for SLO,
The plan begins with a storybook from the future in 2035, illustrating a day in the life of a carbon neutral, equitable and thriving San Luis Obispo. Volume 2 establishes the goals of achieving carbon neutrality community-wide by 2035 and in government operations by 2030 — some of the most ambitious goals in the nation.
In December of 2022, the San Luis Obispo City Council adopted the most current version of the work program. Volume 3 reflects a cross-departmental and multi-sector approach to climate action implementation that incorporates two years of planning and learning, community guidance gathered through stakeholder working groups and the community Climate Party in August 2022, and is aligned with the federal government and state’s unprecedented funding and policy support for climate solutions.
The Climate Action Plan also includes a commitment to implement every single foundational action and work program task through an equity lens that examines representational equity, distributional equity, and systemic equity.
For a detailed look at the plan, go to https://bit.ly/3UGlvqy