The Washington region’s municipalities have met most of their preliminary goals in a regionwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a new report shows.
However, some areas are falling short on several goals adopted by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments in 2008, including setting policy, determining actual greenhouse gas emissions and preparing a plan to reduce those emissions.
According to the report released last week by the council, about one-fourth of local governments have not yet prepared an inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions from government operations and community-wide emissions, and one-third of governments have not started writing an emissions reduction plan.
The report does not break down performance by municipality because the council doesn’t want to publicly single out jurisdictions, said Joan Rohlfs, the council’s environmental resources program director. But those that are behind are in that position because they don’t have the staff or volunteers to meet the deadline, she said.
“Some of our smaller jurisdictions … they may have one environmental person on their staff and they just don’t have the resources available,” Rohlfs said. “We do workshops to try and help them out, but they really need more than that.”
The deadline to meet the preliminary goals was 2011, according to the report. The overall goals approved by the council and based on recommendations from the United Nations are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent in 2012, by 20 percent for 2020 and by 80 percent for 2050.
Of the 19 goals set for 2011, the region’s municipalities have met or are in the process of implementing 11 of them. Those goals include moving toward green fleets to reduce car emissions and developing green challenges for communities and businesses to encourage energy reduction.
