While several Ontario municipalities are equipped with climate plans, less than half of them publish reports on their progress, prompting researchers at the University of Waterloo to suggest that accountability and transparency can be improved through regulation.

Their study, “Municipal Sustainability and Climate Planning: A Study of 38 Canadian Local Governments’ Plans and Reports, was published last October in the journal Environments.

The 38 municipalities analyzed account for nearly 80% of Ontario’s population, including the province’s eight regional municipalities (Durham, Halton, Muskoka, Niagara, Oxford, Peel, Waterloo, and York) alongside 30 “single-tier” municipalities, chosen for their geographic location to capture the broadest range of community types.

While nearly all the reviewed municipalities publicize their sustainability and climate goals, the study found, less than half publish reports providing detailed and transparent progress reports that track how they’re doing.

“Citizens can go online and see the financial performance of a municipality,” research lead Leah Feor, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise and Development, told Phys.org. “But they would have to dig around to see how the operations and policies of the municipality are contributing to sustainable development and climate action.”

“It’s not always easy to find.”

This communication failure persists, despite the evident value of such reports to local governments seeking “to legitimize their actions, engage with their stakeholders, and be recognized for their leadership,” write the study authors.

Other key findings include a clear correlation between the size of a municipality and the likelihood that sustainable reporting is taking place. Feor and her team found that all municipalities with populations above 75,000 produced sustainability reports between 2007 to 2021.

Climate change reporting is far thinner on the ground. The team only identified two of them, both of them produced by municipalities with populations over 100,000.

The study also found that new sustainability plans “have been on the decline in Ontario over the last 15 years,” with none of the municipalities reviewed publishing such a plan in 2020 or 2021, the years when the COVID-19 pandemic dominated.

But beyond that crisis period, “less than 30% of sample municipalities had published a new sustainability plan on their website in over 15 years,” the researchers found. New climate change plans are more common, with seven municipalities publishing them in 2020 and 2021 alone.

That reports are so rare, even though reporting is a natural “output of the planning process,” could owe to the “voluntary nature” of external reporting on sustainability and climate change performance, say the authors. They add that the Doug Ford government’s current environmental plan “does not define a performance measurement process, nor does it include obligations for municipalities to set targets and report on progress.” 

Citing a study out of Italy that showed the benefits of “increased coercive pressure,” the authors suggest that “a stick approach” might be useful—though coercion alone is likely to backfire.

“A regulation isn’t a silver bullet for ensuring municipalities adopt planning and reporting practices,” Feor said. “If we want to see province-wide adoption, then we will need to see more guidance, capacity building, and potentially funding from the top. Otherwise, it will be driven bottom-up, and some municipalities will excel, and others will lag.”

Such guidance is available. The study authors point Ontario municipalities towards membership in the voluntary Partners for Climate Protection program. Led by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability), the program “freely provides access to resources, including a five-step Milestone Framework.” The framework offers guidance on everything from inventorying emissions, to setting reduction targets, to implementing strategies, monitoring progress, and reporting results.