It’s 2009 in Fayetteville. Hurricanes Mathew and Florence have yet to cause catastrophic flooding and hardship in the city and region. The extent of the PFAS contamination crisis in the Cape Fear River has not yet been discovered. This was the last time Fayetteville adopted a new sustainability plan, a comprehensive strategy to reduce environmental impact and carbon emissions via citywide sustainability initiatives.
Now, 15 years later, Fayetteville is developing a new plan with help from environmental consulting agency, Blue Streak Environmental, who presented details about the planning process at Thursday’s meeting. Council Member Courtney Banks-McLaughlin expressed enthusiasm about the plan after the presentation and acknowledged it was a long time coming in Fayetteville.
“This is something that's been talked about for a while,” Banks-McLaughlin said at Thursday’s meeting.
Rich Swanson, director of climate and energy at Blue Streak Environmental, said the new sustainability plan will involve developing several actionable priorities the city can use to be more energy-efficient while improving residents’ quality of life and the economic opportunities in the city. For example, Swanson said, the city could use renewable energy sources for community events, convert the city’s fleet to electric vehicles or increase pedestrian mobility downtown.
Essentially, the plan should create a roadmap for the community to become more sustainable, Swanson said. This roadmap will also include an inventory of the city’s current greenhouse gas emissions — both current and projected rates — as well as ways to reduce those emissions via decarbonization and how to make the community more adaptable to climate change.
This plan should also include funding options, identification of necessary resources and a clear timeline with specific benchmarks for progress.
“So the plan should be very actionable, and the programs and projects that we have that are outcomes of the plan will be very clear cut,” Swanson said.
Fayetteville is particularly susceptible to extreme heat, drought and precipitation, with flooding presenting a major risk to infrastructure here, according to a 2022 report from the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency
In response to these climate threats, the city and the Public Works Commission (PWC) have taken steps to increase climate resiliency and renewable energy. PWC announced this week its plans to open a second solar farm by 2025.
Fayetteville has made significant strides in stormwater management in the past few years. The city is in the process of studying flooding risks and creating stormwater preparedness plans. Most recently, the city was awarded a $15.4 million flood resilience grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in September.
Though Fayetteville has been recognized as a statewide leader for its stormwater resilience plans, the city’s efforts to address climate change have been less pronounced than many peer cities with clear renewable energy goals. Fayetteville’s most recent notable climate change-specific action occurred in June 2023, when the city council passed a resolution supporting a regional climate agreement that affirmed shared goals of energy efficiency.
The 2023 resolution sets a goal for Fayetteville, in collaboration with regional partners, to make “progress toward significantly reducing carbon emissions to become a net-zero city by 2050.” It also affirms the existence of climate change and that it is caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions. The resolution notes climate change “could lead to water scarcity, food insecurity, increasing poverty and complex unforeseen challenges for our future generations.”
The Blue Streak Environmental consultants said they are currently collecting data for the multi-stage planning process for the sustainability plan, the final version of which is expected to be completed in about a year. lt will involve an extensive community engagement process, including meeting with neighborhoods across the city.
“The sustainability plan should be designed to be locally attuned and very responsive to Fayetteville, while at the same time leveraging learning and best practices from other municipalities,” Swanson said. “So the action steps that wind up being part of the plan will bubble up from the community itself, from our various engagement efforts.”
Swanson said it’s common for cities to update their plans approximately every five years, depending on various factors such as climate science and technology trends. He said the plan will tie into existing environmental initiatives — such as stormwater management — that city staff are already working on.
“It should be a living document and should be revisited,” Swanson said.
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
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