With the recent publication of the Sustainability Department’s Fiscal Year 2024 (FY24) Annual Report and the launch of a new Municipal Climate Action Plan (MCAP) webpage, more information about recent successes and challenges is now available. The Annual Report provides an overview of sustainability work conducted during FY24, which ran from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, including MCAP insights, data points, and highlights, alongside information regarding sustainability partnerships, initiatives, and future work. “Make Climate and Sustainability-Related Data and Progress Towards Goals Publicly Accessible” is a prioritized MCAP activity and resulted in a webpage that includes specific baselines, charts, and performance measure methodologies for FY24.
The Annual Report showcases a few of the City of Asheville’s FY24 sustainability highlights, including the Broadway Public Safety Station, which played a critical role in Helene response efforts, being awarded LEED Gold. Among other features, the building has a solar photovoltaic installation that helped the City double our annual renewable energy production to 512 megawatt hours. We also launched ElevateAVL to support community driven resilience efforts and Electrify Asheville Buncombe to enhance electrification efforts in the City and County. 15 of 22 MCAP high impact activities were underway in FY24 with another 2 scheduled to activate in FY25.
For an FY24 status snapshot check out our update memo.
As detailed on the MCAP webpage, the plan specified six metrics to evaluate progress toward the three overarching MCAP goals. The performance measures provide an important snapshot, and eventually a trendline, regarding key sustainability data points. One notable finding is that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased since 2022 as city employees have returned to the office following an easing of COVID precautions. The increasing GHG emissions are largely driven by increased usage of fleet fossil fuels and electricity, and expanded employee commutes. 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 emissions by 2034.
Tropical Storm Helene, which happened during FY25, will have a big impact on performance measures and on the work and priorities of the Sustainability Department. The storm made clear that sustainability initiatives are more important than ever and we will continue to incorporate them into the City’s decision-making throughout the recovery process. If you would like to receive regular updates about our work, sign up for our quarterly newsletter on our Department’s homepage.