City of Surrey's 2024-2028 Financial Plan

STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK

CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY In addition to making progress on sustainability outcomes at a community level, the City has made great strides in integrating sustainability into its decisions, projects and plans. The City embeds sustainability and climate action into our planning and decision-making for corporate operations and demonstrates this commitment through Surrey Excels Strategy Maps. We aim to provide leadership and propose ideas that can be implemented more widely by residents and businesses in Surrey. Taking bold action on climate change is core to achieving the sustainability vision of a thriving, green, inclusive city. Surrey’s first Community Climate Action Strategy was adopted in 2013. Since then, the City has put various policies and systems in place to reduce carbon pollution, including building a district energy system (“Surrey City Energy”), adopting higher energy efficiency standards for buildings, providing electric vehicle (“EV”) charging stations, requiring EV charging infrastructure in new development, implementing a closed-loop organic waste collection and processing program, and many more. The urgency of scaling up our actions in response to the climate crisis is becoming clearer every year. In November 2019, recognizing escalating impacts of the climate crisis both globally and locally, Council declared climate change as an emergency. In 2020, Council adopted targets to reduce City-wide GHG emissions to net zero, and to eliminate all corporate GHG emissions, before 2050. To define a roadmap to reach these targets, the City developed a new Climate Change Action Strategy, which was adopted in July 2023. The CCAS outlines the actions the City will take to reduce GHG emissions and improve resiliency to climate change impacts. CCAS measures and targets will be used to track progress across six key focus areas – Leadership, Neighbourhoods, Transportation, Buildings, Ecosystems, and Energy & Zero Waste – that are critical to reaching the 2050 targets. Accountability is one of the key guiding principles of the CCAS, which means the City will commit to transparency in our climate-related decision-making, publicly disclose our risks and our progress, and correct our course as necessary to remain on track. This includes developing and tracking clear targets and measures for the different focus areas of the CCAS and reporting out publicly each year. Progress is shared with the public through an online Climate Action Tracker (climateactiontracker.surrey.ca). As part of public reporting, we are also intending to report on our climate risks and key strategies in the future financial plans, following the recommendations of the Task Force for Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. CLIMATE ACTION

City of Surrey | 2024—2028 Financial Plan | Executive Overview

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