The Sustainability Department’s Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) Report has been published along with annual updates to the Municipal Climate Action Plan (MCAP) webpage and performance measures. Tropical Storm Helene impacted our City, region, lives, and work in significant and lasting ways, including work reorganization to address emerging recovery needs alongside ongoing sustainability work.
The Annual Report provides an overview of sustainability work conducted during FY25, which ran from July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025, including resilience related Tropical Storm Helene recovery efforts, MCAP insights, data points, and highlights, and information regarding sustainability partnerships, initiatives, and future work. “Make Climate and Sustainability-Related Data and Progress Towards Goals Publicly Accessible” is an ongoing MCAP activity with work focused on annual performance measure updates on the website.
The Annual Report showcases a few of the City of Asheville’s FY25 sustainability highlights, including the launch of the Climate Action Toolkit, which is full of resilience tips, and the biochar production pilot, conducted with the help of the USDA Forest Service. 15 of 22 MCAP high impact activities were underway in FY25 and some activities scheduled to begin or advance were delayed to allow for Helene response. For a FY25 status overview, read our MCAP update memo.
As detailed on the webpage, the MCAP specified six performance measures to evaluate progress toward the three overarching goals. They provide important information and the beginnings of trendlines regarding key sustainability data points. Helene significantly increased the number of weather-related City facility and road closures, though progress was made on the other metrics, including carbon emissions reductions. In terms of carbon emissions, the city is still on track to meet its 80% emissions reduction by 2050 goal, but further interventions will be required to meet the accelerated reduction goal that aims to have zero municipal operations emissions by 2034.
Tropical Storm Helene spotlighted the importance of sustainability and resilience, and the City’s recovery work is focused on rebuilding for resilience. If you would like to receive regular updates about our work, sign up for our quarterly newsletter on our Department’s homepage.