Opinion: Achieving Amherst’s 2025 Climate Goals: How Are We Doing?

Local and Green

In 2019, Amherst Town Council adopted ambitious climate action goals to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 with intermediate goals for the emissions reductions of 25% (below 2016 levels) by 2025, and 50% by 2030.  Since 2021, the town’s Climate Action Adaptation and Resilience Plan (CAARP), has provided a comprehensive roadmap to guide Amherst in accomplishing those goals. At the end of each year, the council evaluates the Town Manager on implementation of climate action goals for that year and creates a new or continued plan of action for the next year. To assist in that process, the Energy and Climate Action Committee provides an annual report and recommendations which is in process now.

The (separate) Town Manager Climate Action Goals for 2025 are to “continue to make progress on the Council’s Climate Action Goals, guided by the CAARP, to prepare the Town to be resilient in the face of climate change.” The three specific sub-goals are: 1) to update the capital inventory to include criteria for the transition of buildings, vehicles, and equipment away from the use of fossil fuels (not done yet); 2) seek Climate Leader Community Designation (done)  and accompanying funding from the Department of Energy Resources; and 3) support the development of climate action focused bylaws that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions including the waste hauler bylaw (significantly delayed), the Battery Energy Storage System Bylaw (just started); and the Solar Bylaw (significantly delayed). 

If providing a Town of Amherst Climate Scorecard for 2025, I would say we have made some progress. We are significantly behind, though, on implementing the town’s 2025 emissions reduction goal of 25% and on the CAARP actions to be done by 2025. I would rate climate action  “needs MUCH improvement”.

So how can we do more?

Our main progress this year has been in obtaining Climate Leader Community status with accompanying major funding possibilities, finishing our first full year of Valley Green Energy electricity aggregation (and exploring using a Joint Powers Entity to expand its impact), implementing a heat pump incentive program for 30 low to moderate income families, and implementing our first Zero Energy K-5 School. We have also provided a good year by year look at emissions by sector in our Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report though its conclusions each year are worrisome.

Our main challenge has been to fully staff our Sustainability Department with even a full time director, which leads to: seeking fewer grants and other revenue streams, inability to implement a meaningful “climate lens” policy across town departments and in town procurement; less capacity to do the type of outreach to residents, businesses and higher ed institutions necessary for a robust program; less capacity to use our sustainability dashboard to do pro-active and interactive outreach; no engagement with local landlords and businesses on incentives for energy efficiency of rental properties available under the Property Assessed Clean Energy Program (PACE) adopted by the council; and significant delay in the development of needed solar, battery storage and waste hauler bylaws. In addition, we have not been able to implement a significant portion of the CAARP that was targeted for completion by 2025 in order to reduce emissions by 25%. Sustainability Director Stephanie Ciccarello has been a stalwart advocate for the climate over her years in that position but cannot possibly do alone the kind of work needed to fulfill our goals and to climate-proof Amherst for the future.

I hope that the new council will look at climate action not as a separate issue or budget item but as integrated into all decision-making and into all departments in whatever we do.

Part two of this series will enumerate specific CAARP actions we need to do to catch up on to meet our intermediate goal.

Darcy DuMont is a former town councilor and sponsor of the legislation creating the Amherst Energy and Climate Action Committee. She is a founding member of Zero Waste Amherst, Local Energy Advocates of Western MA, and a non-voting member of Valley Green Energy Working Group. She can be contacted at dumint140@gmail.com.