Greenest City 2020 Action Plan

[1] The GCAP originated based on the 2009 work of the Greenest City Action Team, a committee co-chaired by Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson.

It offers ‘highest priority actions’ and broader ‘key strategies’ to achieve the targets it sets out.

Former city councillor Fred Bass commented that to “save our ecosystems, we need to be heroic [as] we’re facing a real ecological emergency.” The public's main concern is that they want to see measurable and concrete results instead of objectives such as to “secure critical and sensitive habitats and environmental corridors”.

[4] There needs to be doable actions and specific measures taken towards each goal without more development projects that would have adverse results of hurting the environment.

[4] Unfortunately, the original plan completely ignored the First Nations whose lands Vancouver is on, excluding the deep knowledge and rights of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people who have thousands of years of living sustainably in their territories.

As such, the action plan does not address issues like colonization and leaves out vital Indigenous ecological knowledge.

[5] Vancouver was recognized as the third greenest city in the world according to the 2016 Global Green Economy Index, behind only Copenhagen and Stockholm.