 So thank you very much for the introduction and the opportunity to come speak to you all here today. And thank you all for, I think, unless you're here on a dare or a bet, being interested in the idea of greener planets and greener cities and greener countries and what that all looks like. So I'm going to be speaking about a few things today. So the first thing I'm going to be speaking about is Vancouver's efforts are mandate to be the greenest city in the world by the year 2020. And the four not-so-secret ingredients that we see as being critical. We started this effort in 2009, so we've had some time now to learn about what is working and what isn't working about this effort. So to share with you the four things that we think are quite critical ingredients to that effort. I wanted to talk to you about why we've moved from this mandate to now also having a mandate to go to 100% renewable energy before the year 2050. And also why I'm very pleased to be with you all here today. So afterwards I'm hoping we have some time for some questions and hopefully I will have some answers for you as well. I wanted to start though by giving you some context about the city of Vancouver. So we are a city on the west coast of Canada on the Pacific Ocean. We're in a region that is about two and a half million people. We have, that is actually, we just did our most recent census like last week. So this number is a little out of date. We're probably closer to 675,000 right now. A few things to note about our population. We have 675,000 at night when everyone goes to bed. But by the next day at noon, if it's a weekday, we have close to a million people. Because we're the regional centre for commerce and jobs. So we have several hundred thousand that come in for work. We also are home to two universities. So all of the students come to us as well. Because of the way the Canadian constitution works, cities only get revenue from property tax. So all those 300,000 people who come during the day who need buses and transport and policemen and water and sewage and waste management. They don't bring any money into the city of Vancouver that's usable by the city. So that's one of our challenges. The other significant challenge about 29% of our population lives below the low income cutoff. So we have quite significant challenges around poverty that's significantly higher than any of the neighbouring cities. We also have about half of our population speaks a language other than English at home. That might be in a number of languages. The big ones are Cantonese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Hindi, Vietnamese and Tagalog. So quite a diverse population. And the younger you are, the more likely you are to speak a language other than English at home. So also some demographic divide as well. The last thing I was going to point out, we have a regional government that works on things like transportation, water, sewage, because these things cross city borders. So Vancouver's population is about 5,500 people per square kilometre. In some parts of the city it ranges as high as 30,000 people per square kilometre. You'll note though that in the region, if you took out Vancouver's population, the rest of the region is about 500 people per square kilometre. So the debates that we have at a regional level about things like transportation involve quite a divergence of views about need and what the future might look like for us respectively. So those are some of our challenges. But we have nonetheless decided that we would like to be the greenest city in the world by the year 2020. I was said that I would share some key ingredients. So the first one I wanted to share with you is leadership. This is our Mayor Gregor Robertson, newly elected. At that point we'd only been elected for about four months launching the Greenest City Action Initiative. I know it probably goes without saying in all four of these ingredients you'll be like, oh well that sounds so simple. But I think sometimes it's so simple that we kind of forget to be purposeful about it. And on any big transformative initiative you need somebody to lead and not just somebody but somebody whose title involves a capital letter. So it's one thing to have a leader on a campaign. And we've had many councillors over a number of years, many decades actually who've shown leadership on various green initiatives to have the mayor, the capital M mayor, leading on this initiative that has made all the difference in the world. So I would say that if you're on a city council, if you're involved in a corporation or a labor union or whatever endeavor you're in, you really need the CEO, the president, the mayor, whoever it is, willing to put their name and their credibility behind this effort. If not, there's time. I mean in our case it's me who does the heavy lifting on the file. But I know that the mayor is always prepared to go and put his credibility on the line to help us move forward on whether it's a transit funding or bicycle lanes or green building standards or whatever it is. So right, the other thing I might note is that if you don't have that leader right now, there's a question for you about how do you get that leader. Is there a way to support the person in the leadership position to be that leader? And maybe there's a way to help transition the leadership so that the person who is in that position is able to provide it. The second key ingredient is a plan, which again seems really obvious, right? Obviously if you want to be the greenest city in the world, you don't just kind of, you don't just do it, you need a plan to do it. And I think in government and in corporations and nonprofits, we have a habit of writing down plans that actually are not either very strategic or either not very strategic or they don't actually have numbers in them. So we have a saying that some is not a number and soon is not a time. And our plan is very strategically focused on quantifiable outputs that we can have benchmark to 2007. The reason for that is our provincial government benchmarks everything to 2007. So for the sake of reporting, we just homogenized it. However, 2007 levels for Vancouver are very similar to 1990 levels. They're like 0.1% different. So we're, you know, it helps benchmark it internationally as well. So we set, we've developed a plan, all of the timeline is to 2020. We have 10 key areas. I'm not going to read them out, but there's a website where you're welcome to look at it. There's 15 targets that go across 10 areas. So we have the zero carbon targets. We have a waste target. We also have healthy ecosystem. So access to nature, water, air and food targets. And then overarching goals. When we started green as city, the global recession had hit, oh, I don't know, four months before, five months before. About a month before I got elected, actually, well after I decided to run for election, but before I actually was elected. So everything we did obviously had to have clear economic strategies and goals built into it. And then the last thing to note that the first nine targets are related to things within Vancouver's direct control. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't possible to externalize the problem. So you don't ship all your production out and have them absorb all the carbon and toxin and water and waste. And then import it back in and go, hey, our numbers are awesome. So the last target is really about consumption and how to ensure that you can't externalize this problem, but you're also tracking that issue. So the first one, first thing was leadership. Second thing is a plan. The third thing is acting. Again, I know it sounds so obvious, right? Of course you need to act. And yet I think so often in government, even if we can convince people to sit down and write the plan, there's not a lot of action happening and you lose credibility with the public and your stakeholders. So in our case, before we mandated the team to come up with the plan, we actually gave them a task to come up with 50 things that we could do before the plan was passed. And the result of that was that even as the plan was being written over the course of two years, it's a big plan with ambitious goals. We had dozens of activities happening. So this had two impacts. One was that normally if you're against something in government, if you're a member of the public and you're against it, you go to all the planning exercises and you just sort of subvert it and you hope that somehow you outlast the government. In this case, it was clear that stuff was happening. So when people came to the planning exercise and they came in huge numbers, because they saw that this was happening with or without their involvement. So obviously there's benefit to being involved then, right, so that you can have some impact on the outcome. It also meant that a lot of stuff was happening. So in the interval between February 2009 and July 2011, when the plan was finally adopted, we had completed 84 separate actions. So the original 50 from the quick start list, but then also more that had been generated in the time period. So these range from really what I would consider incredibly simple, straightforward exercises of reallocating road space from cars to bicycles. In this case, the day this bike path was launched, it was the first separated bike lane in Canada, and it had nine news helicopters, nine. There was not even that many in the city of Vancouver hovering over it, waiting for Armageddon to strike or something. And in reality, as you can see, it's just people cycling to work. We now have the highest rate of bicycle commuters in North America and one of the highest in the developed world. Obviously we have a few challengers in the Northern European countries to overcome. We also are an exceptionally hilly, rainy environment. So relative to weather and incline, we are accomplishing quite a lot through the lanes. I think there is a cyclist up there with an umbrella. There is a cyclist with an umbrella. That was a good catch. It is pretty wet in Vancouver. It's a little like Dublin. So some of them, and not this bike lane, costs less than one tenth of one percent of an annual capital budget. And the maintenance costs for it are so low that I can't even put them in a line item on a single year's budget. It's under 10 grand a year. So they're just like minuscule relative to the lanes of road next to it, which are much more expensive. But it generates that much coverage. This initiative, which was to separate food waste out of our garbage, about 40 percent of our waste stream is food waste. It generates methane and greenhouse gas. It's very heavy to transport. And it's really ideally best done by separating it away from your garbage. This cost us close to $12 million to implement, although subsequently reduced our waste budget by 20 percent a year, which was worth doing. But to note that it barely got any headlines at all. It was not remarkable to anyone that we were doing this. And it's been the only major complaints we've had in implementation is why haven't you got my building on this program yet? So to say that we are predictably irrational as humans and it really is about narrative and reallocation of car space is a shot right at the heart of a paradigm. Separating food waste from other waste apparently is common sense stuff that people wonder why they haven't been doing for a long time. We also on the waste file part of our quick starts, we did some pilots on deconstruction. So this building we were able to recover 94 percent of the materials from it for reuse or be able to recycle them back into production. We now as a result of that have mandated deconstruction for all homes built pre-1940 to help build up the capacity for deconstruction. The problem is of course you can't do this all at once because we're all the companies that are going to do this work, right? So we have to send clear market signals well in advance. We have to pilot then bring in the policy with a long timeline so that the market can adjust to it. Pre-1940s next year we'll bring in pre-1950s then the next year 1960s until we have all homes covered by the deconstruction bylaw and have the industry have enough people in the market that are able to do the work that it doesn't become impossible. Some of it was water providing drinking water to people. This little guy, a water fountain costs in Canada at least close to $35,000. The amazing thing is nobody knows where to put them. So it's like going to Vegas with 35 grand and betting on whether or not this water fountain is going to get used or not. These guys cost $2,000. So we can deploy them using fire hydrants to different intersections, measure the flow through that fire hydrant to see how well used they are and know where to put that infrastructure investment on the water fountain better. And if we have special events for emergencies or whatever, they're fantastic and easy to deploy. We do local food production. We have a goal to double our food assets. So we have everything from these smaller gardens. These are local residents apply for allocations in these gardens and win through lottery. This one is actually at City Hall on the grounds. And then we also have large scale, we now have 19 farms in the city of Vancouver and even that our area is 115 square kilometers. That's a fairly substantial number of urban farming enterprises. Every single one of them now carries its own weight financially and most of them are turning a profit that they're able to put into expansion of one sort or another. This particular one is one of three that provides employment to people with barriers. So either mental illness or addiction. Farming is very well suited to people, urban farming is very well suited to people in those positions because it's not really a nine to five job. So you can show up for three hours or eight hours or 12 hours one day and not the next as long as there's some predictability to your unpredictability and we're able to staff it appropriately. And these greens will all be served at a hotel in downtown Vancouver has a permanent contact with them. We also have a lot of work we've done on power production and green energy. This building which I showed you at the top of the show, I showed you because it is powered by this which is a district energy system that draws heat off of hot water and sewage. So fugitive it recovers all of the heat out of our sewage and hot water in this trunk line and is able to put that into a new building area which was the Olympic Village, the Athletes Village for the Olympics for Vancouver as well as surrounding buildings are required to hook up to it as well. And of course transportation. I love this shot because it shows the guy on the bicycle. It also shows car sharing where the largest users of car share on the planet and each car that is shared puts between nine and 15 cars off the road. So nine to 15 people decide not to either continue to own a car or ever buy a car because they have access to the car share program in a city that is land constrained at well ocean, river and land constrained on all sides. Space is at a premium and parking is not a good use of space. So car share is a very vital program for us that we are very excited about having. And of course of the people who have to drive, we'd like them to use electric so we have the highest deployment of electric plug-ins per capita on the continent of North America as well. Again very expensive infrastructure so figuring out where to put them is challenging. These little cardigos, the reason we signed one of the original contracts on it was because they have data. They track their cars very closely so we know where demand is which means that we can tell where to put the infrastructure which is critically important to us. Don't tell them and it's too late now anyway. They paid us for access to Vancouver. We would have paid them just to have access to the data. Luckily they didn't know that in the negotiation so we ended up on the good end of that. Urban forest, so green infrastructure. We were talking about that a bit earlier. We have a goal around access to nature and number of trees. We screwed up originally. We don't mind screwing up in green a city as long as we're learning from it. Our original goal was to plant 150,000 new trees. We realized that our engineers who are fabulous take it very literally, right? A tree is a tree. It's a trunk. You can cut down 10. You can replace them with 10 more. You can plant these things anywhere. It's just about numbers. The reality is that's not how a forest functions effectively at all. It's not what we imagine when we set the tree goal. What we imagined is that our residents would have access to a quality of trees and nature that they weren't getting by that approach. We completely shifted to an urban forest approach and now have a goal that 22% of Vancouver will be covered with canopy, have a tree canopy. Right now we're at 18%, and we've lost a lot over the decade before we were elected, so we're working very hard on how we bring that back in. As you can see, certain, in fact, this is a tree, a canopy map of Vancouver, but it's actually almost exactly a map, a socio-economic map. So all the gray areas or the forest areas and all the green areas are the more affluent areas, which is useful in a number of aspects in terms of building a good city. The other thing is that the minute you change from calling them trees to calling them green infrastructure, suddenly you have access to way more capital dollars than you have. We were talking about it earlier. It's hard to get a budget for trees. It's very easy to get a budget for infrastructure. In fact, trees and forests generally are by far the best infrastructure you can buy. The minute you pour concrete on a pipe, the value of that asset is diminishing. The minute I plant a tree, the value of that asset is actually increasing and will increase over the course of its lifetime quite substantially. So on your ledger sheet, as a city government, I'm sorry, I'm looking at you because we were talking infrastructure. Everyone's like, why is she staring at you? On your ledger sheet, instead of it becoming a liability, suddenly you have infrastructure as an asset, which is a pretty incredible concept for cities. So the last piece I'll talk to you about briefly is Vancouver Green Capital. So this was our brand around economic development. I think when people think about green jobs, they think about this poor woman sitting all by herself typing away at some tech job. And certainly that can be a green job, although technology jobs are not inherently green. They're actually quite heavy users of energy. And there's a lot of light. We've done audits in different sectors and there's a lot of travel associated with technology. So green jobs trust look a lot more like these guys. This is Saltworks, who have a clean tech technology that removes heavy metals and other pollutants from water and allows you so from industrial processes, whether it's our tar sands up in the north of Alberta or in Vancouver from disturbed industrial sites, they're able to clean the water and put it right back into production. So they have literally hundreds of places in Canada in the world that would be better geographic places for them, better aligned with the industry. There's not a lot of polluted water in Vancouver, but what they don't have is Vancouver's brand. So we have now 90,000 jobs in Vancouver that are associated with green industries of one kind or another, and particularly technology industries. We have the largest green building cluster in North America now, largely driven by the fact that we have the best green building policies. So if you want to be in green buildings, where are you going to be? You're going to be where policy is driving that and materials recovery similarly. And you can get a sense here of how our jobs in those sectors have grown since we brought in the Greener City Action Plan. And in fact, we will have, have had a very strongly performing economy slightly edged out by the oil producing regions of Canada over the last decade. But now that our oil industry has completely tanked out because it's very expensive oil to produce relative to the Middle East and other areas, Vancouver's economy is by far the fastest growing of any city in Canada and considered to be the most resilient because we can lose one of many sectors that will be quite robust in how we're moving forward. So the fourth thing, I did leadership, I did plan, I talked about the actions. I'm going to close out on engagement and how you actually bring the community into all of this. So we from day one knew that as a city government, we can, we have very few taxation tools available to us and even less legislation authority, right? So how, oh, and we have an extraordinarily hostile federal government at the time we were doing this. So then you're like, well, what can you actually do? We can inspire. We can engage. We can enable. We can mobilize. And the whole thing was set up that way. So the green circles, one for each of the 10 focus areas, are interdepartmental staff committees. We didn't just want engineers doing water. We wanted like, well, waste is a better example. We wanted animal control and waste. We wanted social planning and waste. We wanted anyone who could possibly have anything to do with this there so that we were solving across as many perspectives as we could. And then they have each one of them an external advisory committee that involved stakeholders. So in the case of green buildings, our green building council would be there as well as our urban development institute, our architecture institute, our planning institute, as well as academics, labor unions, construction industry, everybody who needed to be there. So everybody felt engaged in the solution. We started it off with a pachachka. I don't know if you do those here, but they're like, no, okay. So a pachachka is a Japanese thing. Six minutes roughly, you get 30 slides, 40 seconds per slide. It's pretty rapid fire. So we did a pachachka on the stage. We sold tickets to it for $10 a ticket, which is nuts, right? So this is a government inviting people to a consultation where we're charging you to show up because there's a recession on and we have to somehow figure out how to make this revenue neutral. And we were charging, we had 300 people register, which blew out the number of seats available in our venue. So then we got the next biggest venue and had 500 people register on day two, which blew out that venue. Finally, we said, you know what, let's just get the biggest venue we can in town that's not the hockey arena which is this venue. It's a little over 2,000 people. Filled the place at $10 ahead and had 1,000 people on the waiting list. That's how much interest there was in talking about this because of the actions that I just went through. As people saw bike lanes come in and gardens and farms, they're like, how do I get involved with this? Whether I like this or not, I want to know how I get involved with it. The important thing though wasn't the 2,000 people was that we got their name and we got their email address because we wanted to not talk to them. These people would literally have come to a consultation on the moon if they could figure out how to get there. They're so engaged and green and so interested. They're not actually who we want to talk to. Who we want to talk to are their friends who would never come to a consultation on green. So of those original 2,000, we got all their email addresses, invited them out to an event and then ask them how we get in touch with them. So in this case, the man the woman in the middle is the woman who came to the original event at the theater. The guy next to her when I met him, I came to this dinner said, oh, this is ridiculous. I don't even know why I'm here, whatever. By the end of the night, you could not shut this guy up. He had so many ideas about how he would engage with being green. How he saw himself. My memory was bikes for really the issue that he wasn't that jazzed about, but on the other nine areas that weren't bikes. He was really excited about how he could get engaged. Had tons of ideas. So everybody's ideas were collected through this fanning out process. We talked to 35,000 people in 180 different stakeholder organizations. They were all put on a website and here's the kicker. Everybody could vote for these ideas but if you come in first, your thing gets priority. So this is a good incentive, right? Suddenly you have power to go out. This is very early on in the process. There were thousands of votes cast in the process and we did in fact honor it in the eventual plan. You'd think that's crazy, but from a governance perspective, it's kind of nuts to be like, no, no, you decide what you want to do. What the upshot of it is, those blue dots are the action projects that are happening in this case as of March, that are not led by the City of Vancouver. So these are led by all those people who got really excited and organizations and businesses and labor unions, faith groups, ethnic groups, whatever they were, who got really excited about the greenest city and wanted to figure out how they could start a project and get their local residents, their members, their employees involved in it. The results are quite positive. We've had an 8% overall decrease in greenhouse gas emissions because we have a rising population in the economy. It's a 10% per capita decrease, but overall a little bit lower. Waste and water, both down 18%. Our green jobs are up almost 20%. Food assets up 30%. And my personal favorite, when we originally passed the plan, the goal was to get half of the city walking, or taking transit by the year 2020. We reached that goal in May 2015. So halfway through, we made it to our end goal and we had another goal in transportation because if you have less people driving, but they're driving farther, you really haven't accomplished much. We also had a vehicle kilometers travel. We have reduced them. The goal was 20% reduction. We're now at about 25% reduction in vehicle kilometers. Traveled through planning, decisions about how planning works in the city. We also have a mandated requirement to report out each and every year. So whether we're doing better or worse, the public will know and be able to hold us accountable for it. So it doesn't stop there because it can't stop there. We have also to do some other work. Oh, I should have noted on the successes slide. When we started, we didn't even fall on the city's rankings. They only ranked 500 cities in the world. So we were sub-500. We're not really sure where we were sub-500, but sub-500. We are now the fourth greenest city on earth behind Stockholm, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. And to note that their governments nationally are much more, have been much more supportive of the work that they're doing. We've really been battling pretty far uphill on our work. So what's next then? We're going to go through some renewable, so I'll close out on that. Adaptation to note that I don't think there's anyone on earth now that can avoid dealing with adaptation. Regardless of how successful we are at reducing climate emissions, we have to adjust and respond to a changing climate. There are definitely technical issues, flood construction levels, diking, whatever it is. But most of the challenge is actually social behavior and how you get people to understand what's happening, right? We will flood. There will be landslides. There will be catastrophic loss as a result of climate. So how are we adjusting to it? This is actually a public art project that shows how much sea level is projected to rise. Not because we want people to freak out, but because we want people to understand this is happening and that we need to take steps to mitigate. We also have a little challenge recently who was very committed to fossil fuel expansion and we have a port that shifts oil out. So we have had to very aggressively fight that. This is the harbor in Vancouver. After a relatively minor oil spill, this is about one-sixth hundredth of the size of what an oil spill would be. Even a moderate oil spill related to this is from this fuel is the fuel that runs the tanker as opposed to the fuel in the hull of the tanker itself. So this is a tiny spill compared to what we should expect from a massive oil spill. So the result of that is that we have had to do a lot of advocacy about why we would like them not to be investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure and why last March we committed to going 100% renewable energy. So this is a theme of it impossible to you but it really is not. Vancouver is already 31% renewable energy. Almost all of our electricity is renewable. Some of our heating is renewable and then of course transportation is a big challenge for everybody on the planet. It is not as hard as it sounds. We can't just keep saying no to a federal government about fossil fuel infrastructure. We need to be able to do that. We also needed to be a clear market signal. I was talking to Vienna, the city of Vienna who has a goal of 50% renewables by the year, I think it's 2030. And the deputy mayor was saying to me oh well, it's been really hard. We find that everyone who comes wants to invest in the fossil fuels. I'm like well yes, because you're not sending them like if you give someone 50-50 and one has new, which one are you going to bet on? You're going to bet on this sure thing, right? Regardless of the irrationality of that given the issues around adaptation, global treaties and other things. And why it was important to us first to choose 100% renewable and then to figure out by what date the nearest possible date that was feasible so that the market is getting a clear signal that this will be banned. You will not be allowed to burn fossil fuels. You will have to start transitioning capital and investment and structure into that. So far it's actually been going extraordinarily well, better than we thought it would have gone. It turns out it is 100% doable. The only major challenge for us really is on the commercial transportation side. It's not to say it's easy, it's definitely challenging. But consider that the entire city of Vancouver came into being in the year 1867 or so almost a million. Our global brand is worth $31.5 billion based largely on the clean and green. And if we can do that in under 150 years, why couldn't we transition to with thoughtful purposefulness? The city of Vancouver as it exists today was not developed with a thoughtful purposefulness. It just did what it did. We feel that not only is it possible it's actually inevitable and what a place to be knowing what the future is going to look like, being able to own our future as a city, we feel puts us in a position that is a very enviable one globally. So thank you for having me here today and look forward to your questions.