Four years after the San Antonio City Council approved the SA Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, city leaders will now utilize federal funds to revisit the plan and to help launch a regional version.
The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded the City of San Antonio a $1 million grant as a part of the first phase of a two-phase competitive federal grant program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions nationwide. The city will work with the Alamo Area Council Of Governments, the local agency responsible for air quality monitoring, to update the city’s climate action plan and to create a regional action plan to lower the area’s greenhouse gas emissions, said city Chief Sustainability Officer Douglas Melnick.
The second phase will see the EPA issue implementation grants to municipalities that create a competitive “priority climate action plan,” Melnick said. Funding from the first phase will go toward creating these plans, he added.
With community input, the Office of Sustainability will lead the update to the city’s climate action plan and help AACOG’s efforts to create the regional plan, Melnick said. When the SA Climate Action and Adaptation Plan was first approved in October 2019, it was with the intention of updating the plan every three to five years, Melnick said.
The main goal of the city’s climate action plan is to make San Antonio carbon-neutral by 2050. Interim goals set in 2019 to help the city meet this goal include adding more renewable sources to San Antonio’s energy mix, reducing building energy consumption, reducing vehicle-related pollution and promoting local biodiversity.
“We’re going to review all of the mitigation strategies and confirm that ‘Yes, these still make sense.’ We’ll consider, ‘Are there any gaps that may have evolved since 2019? Are there other new approaches, new strategies, new technologies that we should be considering?'” Melnick said.
The city will be using the EPA funds to hire additional staff, including choosing a contractor that will coordinate planning between the city and AACOG. The funding will also go towards the city’s communications and outreach efforts to launch these initiatives and to help come up with more project implementation plans, Melnick said.
So far the city has been somewhat successful in lowering overall local emissions, but not at the pace it needs to be to meet its goal, according to a report earlier this year.
The update process will include meetings between the city and “stakeholders,” city-led community meetings for the public to attend, and undetermined outreach efforts, Melnick said. He expects the updates will take less time than formulating the plan originally did back in 2019. That planning process launched in 2017, and included monthly meetings by technical groups, gathering input from local leaders, and dozens of stakeholder and community meetings.
Updates to the climate plan will require City Council approval, Melnick said.
It’s unclear what changes to the plan could come from the meetings, Melnick said. But stakeholder and community meetings could reignite tensions between local environmentalists and the area’s business community.
The city’s existing climate action plan includes dozens of strategies to help the city adapt to life in a warmer world. Many are already underway, including creating more green space, preparing for wildfire and incorporating more realistic flooding standards into the city’s drainage codes.
But just months after a draft of the plan was first issued, pushback from businesses softened the one most controversial parts of the plan, and specific commitments to cut emissions were removed.
The plan calls for actions that will both mitigate climate change by reducing emissions as well as adapt to the changes San Antonio is already experiencing, like hotter summers, more severe droughts and increased risk of flood and wildfires.
Meanwhile, local environmentalists and AACOG have historically been at odds about where San Antonio’s air pollution comes from. AACOG estimates that activity within San Antonio accounts for only about a fifth of the ozone recorded, while the rest comes from outside the area — mainly Mexico or other states. Ozone is a key ingredient of smog, which irritates and damages the lungs and has been tied to chronic conditions such as asthma.
Local environmentalists, however, such as the Alamo Sierra Club’s Chair Alan Montemayor, say AACOG’s numbers are skewed due to too few local air quality testing sites. Montemayor told the San Antonio Report that AACOG has been reluctant to run more tests in order to appease the business community.
He added he’s glad to see the city and AACOG finally making a regional plan.
“Frankly the response to the [city’s plan] has been disappointing,” Montemayor said. “I think it’s way past time to have a regional plan to address climate issues, air quality being just one.”
Lyle Hufstetler, natural resources project coordinator for AACOG, said the agency will be engaging with the 13 counties in its coverage area, which includes rural and suburban communities, to gain their input for the regional plan.
AACOG likely will be basing much of the regional plan on the city’s existing plan, he said.
This article has been updated to correct that City Council will have to approve updates made to the climate plan.
