Climate Policy Has to Work in the Real World.
This is a long one. It is also incredibly important, so bear with me as I delve into current policy and how it can be better integrated to enhance safety, economic outcomes, and climate resilience. This post was inspired by the TransformTO meeting last week.
Here are the three takeaways from this blog post: Yes. I used dancing emojis.
💃 Climate change is already here. Toronto needs to fund flood protection, heat resilience, stormwater systems and reliable infrastructure now.
💃 Cutting emissions still matters, but climate spending has to be measured against real outcomes, affordability and the risks we are actually facing.
💃 Growth without resilient infrastructure is bad planning. New density must come with the sewers, energy, transit, parks and public systems needed to support it.
I have spent the last few days reading Toronto’s climate plans, electricity modelling, building retrofit studies, resilience work, Wet Weather Flow Master Plan and regional energy planning. Toronto has done remarkably sophisticated work. The central tension is not a lack of planning, but the number of strong plans operating through different mandates, timelines and capital systems.
TransformTO models emissions. The Green Standard governs building performance. Toronto Hydro plans distribution. Hydro One and the IESO plan regional supply and transmission. Resilience planning addresses heat and flooding. City Planning decides where growth goes. The pieces communicate, but they are not yet fully reconciled within a single decision-making framework.
That matters because Toronto’s climate problem has changed. We still have to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but we are also living with the consequences of a warmer climate. The municipal challenge is no longer simply how quickly we can decarbonize. It is how we build a city capable of functioning amid hotter summers, heavier rainfall, wildfire smoke, electricity disruptions, population growth and an aging population. Those objectives are closely related, but not the same, and the distinction between them is increasingly important.
Toronto emitted about 16.1 million tonnes of CO₂e in 2023, roughly 35 percent less than in 1990 but slightly more than the year before. Buildings produced 55 percent of those emissions, transportation about 36 percent, and waste roughly 10 percent. The two largest individual sources are natural-gas heating in residential buildings, at 26 percent of Toronto’s total emissions, and gasoline burned in passenger vehicles, at 22 percent.
Toronto’s target is a 65 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2040. The City’s own emissions inventory says we are not currently reducing emissions fast enough to meet the 2030 target. This could be due to the reliance on individual homes to bear the brunt of the cost of the reduction through changes in energy use and building envelopes.
Those numbers explain the emphasis on electrification in TransformTO. If most of our emissions come from buildings and transportation, then replacing natural-gas heating and petroleum-powered transportation with lower-carbon electricity is an obvious pathway.
At the scale of a single-family home, this sounds uncomplicated: install a heat pump, perhaps upgrade the electrical panel, improve the envelope with energy-efficient windows and insulation and eventually plug in an electric car. At the scale of Toronto, however, every one of those decisions becomes part of a much larger infrastructure system, including capacity planning and cost.
Toronto has thought about this more deeply than many people realize. Its newer LENZ modelling suite links long-term energy and emissions modelling with SILVER-TO, which examines Toronto’s electricity system at the level of individual transformer-station zones and hourly demand. The model incorporates distribution line capacity, grid connectivity, and demand at individual transformer stations, and then tests whether electricity supply and demand can remain balanced as the city changes. Both models are designed to find least-cost feasible pathways.
That modelling changes the conversation about electrification. A heat pump is not merely a household appliance. It eventually connects to a neighbourhood transformer. An EV charger connects to a feeder. A new apartment tower, hospital, data centre, film studio or manufacturing business draws from the same broader system. Toronto Hydro has to distribute electricity, but it must first reach Toronto through the regional transmission system.
The proposed Toronto Third Line makes the physical reality of this transition impossible to ignore. The IESO is planning an approximately 65-kilometre connection from Bowmanville to the Hearn Switching Station, with a planned capacity of about 900 megawatts and an in-service date of 2037 or sooner.
The moment that project reaches the Hearn Plant, climate policy becomes land-use policy. Transmission and converter infrastructure require physical space and zoning for industrial use. This is why I am so concerned about the Port Lands rezonings and mass densification, including the Hearn project.
Employment uses require reliable power. New housing requires power. Industrial activity requires power. All of those demands are converging in the Port Lands at the same time Toronto is trying to decide what that part of the city will become.
This is why I am wary of planning these files independently. A decision that appears to be about housing today may constrain energy infrastructure twenty years from now. A decision to convert employment land may remove the physical space required by businesses that will build and service the very technologies our climate strategy depends on. Electrification is not simply a question of whether the technology works. It is a question of whether the land, transmission, distribution system, capital investment and construction timelines are being planned together.
The same systems problem appears when we come back down from the grid to individual buildings.
Toronto’s 2021 Net Zero Existing Buildings Strategy estimated that more than $300 billion would have to be co-invested in Toronto’s existing buildings between 2020 and 2050 to pursue the strategy it modelled, about $140 billion more than business-as-usual building investment. The City also concluded that building retrofits alone would not make net zero technically or financially possible, and identified fuel switching and a clean electricity grid as two of the most important technical requirements.
Those are modelling estimates from 2021, not quotations for construction in 2026, but the scale is important. Retrofitting Toronto means working through decades of existing building stock, from small homes to apartment towers, institutions and commercial properties. Some buildings need insulation and envelope work. Some need electrical upgrades. Some need heating and cooling systems replaced. Others require ventilation, windows, controls or substantial capital renewal. The cost cannot simply be wished away by calling the work an investment.
Toronto’s modelling is useful here by considering the Total Cost of Ownership rather than just the upfront price. A retrofit may cost a great deal initially but save energy and maintenance costs over twenty-five years. Those lifetime costs and savings can then be divided by the emissions eliminated to produce a cost per tonne of CO₂e.
What is fascinating is how different the results are. Toronto modelled small commercial and light-industrial retrofits at about -$145 per tonne (negative), meaning the lifecycle savings could exceed their incremental cost. Single-family homes were estimated at roughly $148 per tonne, multi-unit residential buildings at $345 per tonne, large or high-rise commercial buildings at about $1,044 per tonne, and institutional buildings at approximately $1,420 per tonne. The average across the recommended strategy was about $328 per tonne.
The broader 2021 TransformTO modelling produced another useful distinction. Its net-zero-by-2040 scenario required about $827 in undiscounted capital investment per tonne of emissions reduced. When the financial effects over time were incorporated, the modelled net present value of the abatement cost was about $216 per tonne.
Those figures are not contradictory. One describes the capital that has to be mobilized; the other attempts to account for costs and savings over time.
That difference is central to the affordability conversation. Something can make economic sense over twenty-five years and still be impossible for the person who has to finance it this year.
Toronto has seniors living on modest incomes in homes that have appreciated dramatically in value. It has renters living in buildings that need major reinvestment, yet they have little control over what happens to them. It has small businesses operating with little room for another capital expense. A subsidy can change who carries the cost, but it does not make the cost disappear. A loan can spread the cost over time, but it remains a cost.
This is why cost per tonne is useful. It forces us to examine the efficiency of different climate investments and ask what exactly we are buying with scarce public and private capital. But it also has a limit, and that limit becomes obvious when we move from climate mitigation to climate adaptation.
Mitigation is the work of reducing the emissions that cause additional warming. Adaptation is the work of ensuring Toronto can function in the climate already arriving. The distinction sounds academic until you consider what City Hall can actually control. Toronto has an obligation to reduce its emissions, but global climate change will ultimately be determined by collective emissions around the world.
Municipal government has much more direct control over whether a neighbourhood floods after an extreme storm, whether an apartment remains safe during a heat wave, whether a resident can reach shade or cooling, and whether essential services continue to function when the electrical system is under stress.
Toronto’s own climate-risk work now makes this point forcefully. Its first citywide climate risk assessment examined more than 400 potential impacts across the population, the local economy, municipal services, infrastructure, natural systems, and green space. It identified extreme heat and flooding from heavy rainfall as the most urgent climate risks facing Toronto, with risk expected to intensify toward the 2050s. In 2025 alone, Toronto experienced 29 days under Heat Warnings, including a June event that reached 34.5°C with a Humidex of 46.
This is where Toronto’s climate policy history becomes particularly interesting. In 2019, the City’s Resilience Strategy explicitly argued that mitigation and adaptation needed to be integrated and warned that Toronto lacked a robust climate adaptation plan, even as other cities were already implementing such plans.
Toronto has now begun closing that gap. In December 2025, Council adopted a Climate Change Resilience Workplan and directed staff to develop a formal Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan, including feasibility, cost and accountability, for Council consideration by the second quarter of 2027. Council also asked staff to examine whether resilience and adaptation should eventually be incorporated into Toronto’s Carbon Budget process.
The same disconnect appears in flood protection. Reading the master plans and the new Climate Change work plan, we are adding plans on top of plans. New frameworks are built on older plans without clearly showing how the new evidence will change capital priorities.
Toronto now identifies flooding as one of its most urgent climate risks, yet the core Wet Weather Flow Master Plan dates back to 2003 and is still implemented through Toronto Water’s existing capital program. The new Climate Change Resilience Workplan improves coordination, data and climate-risk analysis, but it does not yet clearly show how that new evidence will change the order in which flood projects are funded and built. If updated modelling shows that extreme rainfall, growth and neighbourhood vulnerability have shifted risk, then the capital plan should shift with it.
Otherwise, Toronto risks layering a modern resilience framework on top of an older flood program without a clear mechanism for one to materially change the other. That is progress, but it also reveals an important policy discrepancy.
Toronto has spent years developing increasingly sophisticated models for reducing emissions, including carbon budgets, building-retrofit economics, grid modelling, and a legally embedded emissions-accountability framework. Yet the equivalent integrated framework for adaptation is still being built, even as extreme heat and flooding have become the City’s own highest-ranked climate risks. TransformTO’s new 2026–2030 action plan is explicit about its purpose: it focuses on mitigating greenhouse-gas emissions to limit future climate change. Adaptation is moving forward too, but through a parallel resilience work plan, heat-response policies, asset-management processes and a forthcoming adaptation plan.
Toronto still has to reduce emissions, but we are no longer in a climate policy moment where mitigation alone is enough. The climate is already changing around us, and municipal dollars are limited. Our citizens are financially stretched. That means our priorities have to shift toward investments that protect people from the conditions we are already experiencing, especially where adaptation can also reduce emissions. A dollar spent on a building that uses less energy, stays cool during extreme heat, and remains functional during an outage does far more for Toronto than a dollar spent solely to improve a carbon metric.
I first encountered this kind of systems thinking in Boston in 2012. After helping increase transit ridership in Squamish by 24 percent, I was invited to spend two days at MIT with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and global transit and urban experts. We explored everything from gondolas and emerging autonomous buses to climate resilience and new ways of moving people through cities. What stayed with me was not any particular technology, but the willingness to ask how transportation, land use, infrastructure and resilience worked together rather than treating each as a separate problem.
Boston’s current resilience work follows that same logic. Its heat planning connects temperature with health, housing, neighbourhood vulnerability and social isolation. During a severe modelled heat event, parts of Chinatown were projected to experience high-heat conditions for 37 hours, with afternoon temperatures reaching 104-107°F and overnight temperatures remaining above 90°F. Boston’s response goes well beyond emissions reduction. It includes building retrofits, shade, drinking-water infrastructure, microgrids and a network of libraries and community centres that can function as trusted places of refuge during extreme heat.
THE TORONTO CLIMATE POLICY PIECE
Toronto should adopt a similar model, but make it more systematic. I would identify a network of existing civic buildings across the city. Libraries, community centres, recreation facilities and selected public-health or seniors sites and designate them as neighbourhood Climate and Health Resilience Hubs. The first phase should be targeted to areas with the highest combined exposure to extreme heat, flooding, low tree canopy cover, older housing, social vulnerability, and concentrations of seniors or residents with mobility and health needs.
Rather than build new facilities, the City should use planned capital-renewal cycles to upgrade these buildings so they can remain functional during heat waves, wildfire smoke, localized flooding and extended power outages.
Each hub should meet a common resilience standard. That could include reliable cooling, enhanced air filtration, backup or islandable power where feasible, charging for phones and mobility devices, accessible washrooms, drinking water, refrigeration for medications, communications capability, and space that can be used by public health, home care, or emergency response teams when needed.
The buildings would continue to function as ordinary community assets every day, but during an emergency they would become part of Toronto’s critical infrastructure.
The proposal should also be tied directly to capital planning. When a library, community centre or recreation facility is already scheduled for a major retrofit, the City should assess whether it is in a high-risk neighbourhood and, if so, whether the project should be upgraded to resilience-hub standard. That would allow Toronto to combine energy-efficiency spending, building renewal, public-health preparedness, and emergency resilience in a single project rather than paying for them through separate programs later.
Toronto should then map the network against a reasonable walking-and-transit catchment area to identify which neighbourhoods lack access to a safe facility during extreme heat or a major outage. The goal should not be to create a single hub in every ward for political symmetry, but to build a network based on actual vulnerabilities and service gaps. That same map should be coordinated with Toronto Public Health, Toronto Hydro, Toronto Water, Emergency Management, libraries and recreation so that the resilience network reflects where heat, flood, power and health risks overlap.
That becomes particularly important as the city ages. An older person living on the tenth floor during a heat wave does not experience housing, electricity and healthcare as separate systems when the power fails, the elevator stops, and the apartment begins to overheat. Climate resilience has to be designed around that reality. Buildings approved today may still be occupied near the end of this century, so they need to be designed not only to consume less energy but to remain safe through hotter summers, heavier rainfall and periods when mechanical systems fail.
This is also why cost per tonne cannot determine all of our climate spending. It remains useful for comparing different ways of reducing greenhouse gases, particularly when Toronto’s own retrofit modelling shows costs ranging from negative values in some commercial buildings to more than $1,000 per tonne in others. But adaptation creates value differently. A sewer upgrade is valuable because it prevents basement flooding. A resilient building is valuable because it helps keep people safe during a blackout. A cooling hub is valuable because it prevents a vulnerable resident from ending up in an emergency department.
Much of the return on adaptation is found in damage, illness and disruption that never occur.
With limited public money, Toronto now has to be much more deliberate about where climate investment goes. We should continue pursuing cost-effective emissions reductions, particularly where they produce long-term savings. But the municipal priority should increasingly be investments that make the city safer and more durable in the climate we already have, while reducing emissions wherever possible.
A citywide resilience hub network, built through existing civic assets and capital renewal cycles, is one concrete way to do that.
The goal can no longer be simply a lower-carbon Toronto. It has to be a Toronto that can function through the climate change already underway. We saw this during yesterday's storm. That is where municipal government has the greatest direct influence, and increasingly, where scarce climate dollars can do the most good.
To the policy geeks who made it all the way through a long municipal climate blog: thank you. You are my people.
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