Huron County Making Progress on Climate Change Adaptation

By Bob Montgomery

Huron County's Climate Change and Energy Specialist brought county council up to date on their Corporate Climate Change Adaptation Plan at this week's council meeting.

Derry Wallis says over the past three years staff, senior management and county council have successfully initiated and achieved forty-five actions within their Corporate Climate Change Adaptation Plan. Wallis says that amounts to seventy-one per cent of the actions that were outlined in the Plan and those actions have lead to positive changes both at the corporate level and in the community.

Wallis says those actions include things like single-use item reduction strategies. She says they also have a high performance building standard that's used when they're designing or retrofitting any of their buildings, including some of the social housing properties. She says those standards were used in the Gibbon Street project in Goderich as well as the Bennett Street triplexes that are now complete. Wallis says the twenty-two level two electric vehicle charging ports in Huron East and Goderich have been in place for almost a year now. She adds, Huron County is part of the Regional Electric Vehicle Charging Network that's hoping to build a network of higher level, level three chargers across multiple counties in Southwestern Ontario. She says hundreds of projects approved through the Huron Clean Water Project have helped with naturalization across the county on private properties and just this month they were able to initiate a climate risk assessment on county bridges and culverts. They're also working on a county-wide master cycling plan.

Wallis says aside from the major projects, there are a lot of things individuals can do that are really just a matter of re-thinking some of the things we do every day that could be done just a little bit differently that could reduce the impact of climate change. She says something as simple as switching to LED lighting fixtures can save a lot of energy and be more cost-effective as well.

Wallis says Huron County is one of the leaders when it comes to tracking and recording their progress towards their climate change goals and she believes it's very important to make sure they're reaching the goals that they've set.