City’s Sustainable Syracuse Initiative promotes education, environmental action
The newly launched Syracuse initiative will assess the city’s greenhouse gas inventory. It aims to create a “comprehensive and strategic” list of actions for the city and local community and will work with various government agencies to implement it. Avery Magee | Asst. Photo Editor
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In celebration of Earth Day, the city of Syracuse formally launched the Sustainable Syracuse Initiative as part of Mayor Ben Walsh’s comprehensive 25-year plan to help the city achieve 0% greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.
The initiative is a “comprehensive approach” to engage, educate and empower the Syracuse community with the tools to reduce their own carbon footprints. As part of the initiative, Syracuse’s sustainability planner Karina Freeland said the city will work on its implementation with C&S Companies, Syracuse’s Division of Planning and Sustainability Office and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
“We are focused on bettering the lives of our constituents, so we’re looking to bolster the local economy, reduce the effects of climate change and also increase public health in our space,” said Freeland, the leader of the initiative.
The city plans to assess its greenhouse gas inventory to create a “comprehensive and strategic” list of actions for Syracuse and the surrounding community to help the city become more sustainable, Freeland said.
The initiative is Walsh’s latest legislative move to promote sustainability. The mayor has also replaced nearly 18,000 streetlights with the city’s sustainability task force and invested $2 million in planting 3,600 trees in Syracuse in 2021, syracuse.com reported.
Walsh said both previous efforts positively impacted Syracuse’s environment and economy, and expressed hope for the new initiative’s impact.
“We really started on this path towards Sustainable Syracuse by establishing a sustainability task force within city government, where we brought in representatives from multiple departments,” Walsh said. “We will be developing a greenhouse gas emission inventory, a climate action plan and we are updating our comprehensive plan all under this Sustainable Syracuse umbrella.”
Freeland stressed the importance of investing in urban forestry and using more sustainable forms of energy. As part of the initiative, she said the city will continue to invest in planting trees and installing additional solar panels and LED lights.
She also said the city will protect its natural areas by expanding the Onondaga Creekwalk and implementing micromobility infrastructure, such as using VEOs.
Freeland highlighted the implementation of such infrastructure as a key part of the initiative, considering the city’s reliance on VEO scooters as part of its public transportation system.
Syracuse has the second-highest ridership rate of VEOs in the country, she said.
“Micromobility is incredibly important for bolstering our local economy because it shortens the length or the access for somebody to be able to get to an economic opportunity,” Freeland said. “Our partnership with VEO, which is electric micromobility, really demonstrates that this city particularly uses such aspects because it has the second highest ridership rate in the nation.”
The city also invested in Centro to improve its public transportation amenities, Freeland said.
Olwen Huxley, senior principal at C&S Companies, spoke alongside Freeland and Walsh, expressing hope for the initiative’s potential impact. Huxley said the company recently joined Syracuse’s sustainability efforts and pointed to the progress the city has made since it first began collecting data in 2010.
When Syracuse first released its sustainability plan in 2012, the city hoped to achieve a single-digit decline in greenhouse gas emissions, but has experienced a much larger decline at 60%, Huxley said. She said the notable drop in emissions reflects the city’s work to combat greenhouse gases prior to implementing the Syracuse Sustainability Initiative, and hopes the city will continue its efforts.
“The city has been working really hard to make things happen,” Huxley said. “Climate action did not stop when we got hired to write a plan. We had a plan for decades, and it has been effective.”
Andy Jakubowski, Syracuse’s superintendent of environmental services, echoed Huxley, pointing to the work his department has completed leading up to the initiative. As part of previous sustainability efforts in the city, he said his department clears homeless encampments, 1,500 vacant lots, litter on over 400 miles of road and code violation pickups.
“It’s mainly beautification, but a cleaner city, I think, is a more sustainable city,” Jakubowski said.
Freeland said departments like Jakubowski’s work in different parts of the city to reduce individual transportation emissions, highlighting the sustainability initiatives the city has implemented to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Freeland said she hopes the initiative will continue to build on city sustainability efforts like Jakubowski’s, and encourage the Syracuse community to be more aware of city efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“The last thing that this plan hopes to achieve is a culture of sustainability, developing a universal mindset across our partners, across our city departments and across our community to set the collective intention to better the lives of all now and later, and to achieve a community goal of becoming a more sustainable and a better city of Syracuse,” Freeland said.
CORRECTION: A previous version of these article said Jakubowski’s department cleared 15,000 vacant lots. They cleared 1,500. The Daily Orange regrets this error.
