In Short : Cleveland is accelerating its ambitions to achieve net-zero energy status. This initiative signifies the city’s determination to drastically reduce its carbon emissions and overall environmental impact. By implementing renewable energy sources, energy efficiency measures, and sustainable practices, Cleveland aims to balance the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted with an equivalent amount removed from the atmosphere, contributing significantly to the fight against climate change.
In Detail : Individual plans for the city and its neighbors include cutting building emissions, adding EV charging and solar capacity and cutting miles traveled by fossil-fueled vehicles, among other priorities.
Sustainability leaders for Cleveland and three neighboring cities are making progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, despite a decade of retrenchment on climate policy at the state level.
Cleveland’s five-year update of its climate action plan will now commit to be net zero by 2050, said Anand Natarajan, assistant director for the Cleveland Mayor’s Office of Sustainability & Climate Justice. He spoke with other city leaders during a September 21 program for the Cleveland 2030 District, a network of urban areas working in public-private partnerships to address climate change, particularly in buildings.
The city’s last plan update, in 2018, called for an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which would include a switch to 100 percent renewable electricity by then. The net-zero goal in the 2023-2024 update will thus be more ambitious, and also more science-based, Natarajan said.
Cleveland also has signed onto the Department of Energy’s Better Building Challenge, Natarajan said. The challenge calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by at least 50 percent within 10 years.
Cleveland Heights has added rooftop solar to three of its city buildings and is having energy audits done for all its municipal buildings, said Andy Boateng, the city’s sustainability and resiliency coordinator.
The neighboring city of Shaker Heights already has done audits for its city buildings, said Michael Peters, the sustainability coordinator there, as well as the founder of Sway Mobility, an electric vehicle car-sharing business. Some recent business development has been on land formerly owned by the city, “so we’ve had the ability in development agreements to craft sustainability pledges or efforts,” he added.
Shaker Heights also became Ohio’s first LEED gold city in 2021. One of the rationales for doing that was economic development, Peters said. Participating in the program made it easier for the city to adopt a set of best practices vetted by the U.S. Green Building Council, instead of “reinventing the wheel” on what counts for sustainability, Peters said. Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus are part of LEED for Cities and Communities as well.
Just west of Cleveland, Lakewood is among Ohio’s leaders in public electric vehicle charging stations per capita, said Tristan Rader, a Lakewood city council member, who is also Ohio program director for Solar United Neighbors. Planning is also under way for a unified building code that would call for new buildings to be both EV-ready and rooftop solar-ready.
Lakewood also had added more information to its website to help residents and businesses navigate a streamlined permitting process. “The more information we put out there, the easier it will be for people to start those steps to lead a more sustainable life,” Rader said.
Along the same lines, Shaker Heights is working to help residents understand the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives and rebate provisions for replacing appliances,other equipment and installing solar, Peters said.
Beyond that, “a lot of our climate and energy education is just spending time and convincing people that this is important, that this is real,” Natarajan noted.