September 29, 2023
Subject: Latest CRD Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventory
Dear Mayor and Council,
CRD’s 2022 GHG Emission Inventory was reported in the September 27, 2023, meeting of the
CRD Environmental Services Commitee. CRD contracts with Stantec to prepare such a report
every two years, beginning in 2018. Based on these inventories, this leter carefully looks into
the community GHG emissions for the District of Sooke.
Sooke’s Climate Action Plan relies on a year-after-year reduction of 7% per year in order to meet
our GHG targets in 2035 and beyond. We thus need timely and meaningful data to measure our
progress year-to-year. Unfortunately, Stantec reports GHG changes over two years at a time and
bases them on an initial value thought to be accurate in 2007.
This leter uses the existing CRD data for Sooke and derives the annual total emission change,
irrespective of what the 2007 data were.
This was done in two ways for comparison. First, the 2022 data were compared with those of
2020, showing a very large increase in total emissions. To explore the possible impact of the
2020 COVID-19 shutdown, a second comparison was made by comparing 2022 data with those
of 2018 (pre-COVID) showing a smaller increase.
2020 to 2022 2018 to 2022
GHG Emission Change +11.5% per year +3.3% per year
Population Change +4.3% per year +3.6% per year
Per Capita GHG Change +6.6% -0.3% per year
It is my opinion that the 2018 to 2022 analysis is more realistic since it eliminates much of the
possible impact of COVID in 2020.
Summary

• Total GHG emissions are highly correlated with population growth.
• Emissions per capita remain essentially unchanged over 4 recent years.
• Sooke has so far achieved nothing toward reducing GHG emissions.
• Building for greater population will result in higher emissions.
• The Climate Action Plan will now need to achieve a significantly greater annual GHG
  reduction than 7%.

Notes on analysis

To get approximate annual percentage changes, I divided those calculated over two
years by two and those calculated over four years by four.

The 2020 and 2018 data were corrected to reflect the recently “hindcasted” GHG
emission factors for BC Hydro electricity, in order to accurately compare with 2022
numbers.

I omitted emissions due to Land Use Change for 2018, since this category is not reported
in 2020 and 2022.

Sincerely,
Kiefer Elliot, PhD, LEED AP