The City of Busselton took the concept “Think global, act local” on board when it joined the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) program in June 2008 with the intent of developing a coordinated approach to reducing its carbon footprint and its impact on climate change.

The City prepared an energy inventory in June 2009 (CCP Milestone 1), which revealed that City’s assets and services produced 5,871 tonnes of emissions in 2006/07. The inventory also forecasted that emissions would increase by 65% by 2020 in a business-as-usual scenario. This created a strong impetus for the City to endorse greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals and start developing an action plan to work towards reversing this trend.

In December 2009, the Council endorsed the following emissions reduction goals (CCP Milestone 2):

A 50% per capita reduction by 2015 and a 70% per capita reduction by 2020 in corporate emissions on 2006/07 levels.

The action plan presented in Section 4 of this document represents the City of Busselton’s current strategy to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage of City’s assets and services. It is equivalent to Corporate Milestone 3 of the now defunct CCP Program.

This action plan was endorsed by the Council on 23 June 2010.

Its implementation will have multiple benefits for the City, including reducing the City’s contribution to climate change, demonstrating the City’s leadership on this issue and achieving important financial savings. These will only increase with anticipated rising energy costs.

The focus was put on identifying actions with the best return on investment in terms of emission reduction. Due to increasing energy costs, actions with short payback periods were selected as a priority.

This is consistent with the standard approach of reducing emissions by initially reducing energy use and becoming more energy efficient, to reduce the cost of switching to energy sources that are less greenhouse intensive such as renewable energy.

Actions recommended are considered the best strategy for the City of Busselton at the current time. Actions to be taken may vary with the introduction of updated technologies, changing legislation and new State and Federal Government initiatives amongst other things. This Plan is a dynamic document and will be reviewed and revised as required to keep it relevant and practical.