Evanston Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl won first place honors in the 2011 Mayors’ Climate Protection Awards.
The award, sponsored by the United States Conference of Mayors and Walmart, recognized Tisdahl and the city in the small city category, comprised of cities with populations of less than 100,000, for its implementation of the Evanston Climate Action Plan.
“It is an honor to be recognized for our Evanston Climate Action Plan, where our community leaders and the public identified more than 200 strategies to guide the city as we move forward in reducing our carbon emissions,” Tisdahl said in a news release.
An activity that is transferable to other cities is one of the standards of evaluation for the award, said Kevin McCarty, managing director of the Mayor’s Climate Protection Center at the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
A panel of judges independent from the U.S. Conference of Mayors picked winners from a pool of 130 applicants. According to McCarty, a former mayor and two national environmental nonprofits sat on this year’s panel.
Catherine Hurley, sustainable program coordinator for Evanston, said winning the award shows the mayor and the city are doing all they can for the ECAP.
“Receiving the award helps to affirm that the City of Evanston is a leader in this area,” Hurley said. “It helps to validate the work and helps to serve as motivator to do that good work.”
The Evanston City Council adopted ECAP on Nov. 10, 2008. The plan outlines more than 200 strategies aimed at reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 13 percent by 2012.
According to Hurley, 115 strategies have either been completed or initiated or are currently in progress. There has been a 22 percent reduction in carbon emissions in municipal operations and a 2 percent reduction community-wide, Hurley said.
Hurley said the city is looking to transportation and energy projects as the “biggest opportunities” to reduce emissions.
“The primary challenge is funding,” she said. “There are many great ideas, some of which require more resources to implement than others. This gives us the opportunity to see what can be done with the maximum amount of partnerships.”
The Climate Protection Awards, now in its fifth year, was an offshoot of the mayors’ conference’s work on climate started in 2005, when the conference endorsed the Climate Protection Agreement. The agreement asked mayors to commit to reduce emissions in their cities to 7 percent less than 1990 levels by 2012.
