Sunnyvale City Council approved the City’s Climate Action Playbook this week! The playbook has 6 strategies.
1) Promoting clean energy
2) Decarbonizing buildings
3) Decarbonizing transportation and sustainable land use
4) Managing resources sustainably
5) Empowering our community
6) Adapting to a changing climate
Each strategy has “plays” for a total of 18. Together, the strategies and plays comprise the city’s longer term goals. Each play has “moves” which are short-term targets the community has committed to achieve in the next 3 years, for a total of 46 plays. If you’re short on time, here‘s the view of our Climate Action Playbook at a glance.
When local students ask me about what they can do to help reverse climate change, I focus on decarbonizing transportation. Do schools have a lot of people who walk or bike to school? If not, students could do a project to explore and the reasons for that and work on a way to resolve the concerns. For instance, maybe people don’t walk or ride to school because they don’t know how or they don’t have a bike or they don’t know how to load their bike on a bus.
A lot of young people want to reduce the use of plastics. Have you identified reusable flatware and plates that students could use and carry with them? (I carry the ToGo Ware Bamboo set everywhere I go, but haven’t completely solved the plate problem yet). Maybe concerned students could work on a way for cafeterias and restaurants to become more friendly about reusable flatware and plates, perhaps even providing a way for conscientious customers to to wash their plates and flatware after eating.
The Silicon Valley Clean Energy Authority, which buys clean power for Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Los Altos, has a Climate Youth Ambassadors program. Local schools or the Cities could consider similar programs.
A Sunnyvale student from the CAP outreach and the SVCE Youth program is working with bike stores near Lynbrook High School to see if they can set up a lease program to give students more options for commuting. Maybe other area schools could investigate partnerships with local business as well.
We have all kinds of land around that could be turned into regenerative organic farms. Students could grow food, learn about soil health and how to grow foods and raise animals locally, reducing the amount of fossil fuels needed to transport goods and eliminating the need for fertilizers. Regenerative farming is said to sequester carbon, which is even better than merely reducing emissions.
Happy to do what I can to be of assistance. What ideas do you have? Please share!
