Jurisdictional Approaches to Transportation Planning as a Climate Change Mitigation Tool

This paper presents how transportation planning concepts are utilized in provincial and municipal climate mitigation action plans across Canada. There is currently a gap in the understanding of how different jurisdictions are addressing climate adaptions, and the findings of this study contribute to the understanding of climate change mitigation for practitioners, policy makers, and academics. It is critically important to develop this knowledge given the well-supported evidence that climate change is becoming exponentially more severe due to human activities and Canada’s commitment to address climate change through the Paris Agreement. The goals of this study are achieved by identifying relevant climate mitigation action plans through an environmental scan of municipal jurisdictions: Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, and Yellowknife; and provincial jurisdictions: Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories. A thematic analysis is conducted on the plans to show the prevalence of the themes: (i) Active Transportation, (ii) Public Transportation, (iii) Electronic Vehicles, (iv) Shared Mobility, and (v) Road Infrastructure. The results identified by the thematic analysis include the average rate that a theme occurs in each climate action plan and a comparison between municipal and provincial jurisdictions. When compared to literature on climate change policy creation, the results provide insight into how the geopolitical landscape of Canada influences each jurisdictions' approach to transportation planning as an intervention to climate change.