Community Partnerships for Equitable Local Climate Action: Learn how to build strong community partnerships that achieve climate targets and equity goals

When it comes to climate action, it’s better to work together. Research shows that local governments that form partnerships with their broader community make better progress toward their climate targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Partnerships with organizations and entities from across the public, private, and civil society sectors play an instrumental role in advancing climate mitigation efforts, as they bring together skills and resources and enable collective action. These partnerships also present an opportunity to involve underserved and marginalized communities by integrating equity goals and actions into a climate partnership.

The Municipal Net-Zero Action Research Partnership (N-ZAP) has created this Community Partnerships for Equitable Local Climate Action guide to provide Canadian municipalities with best practices for structuring partnerships. These evidence-based recommendations are based on data collected from 12 partnerships comprising 55 total partners across Canada.

The guide gives recommendations on how to design (or improve) partnerships for effective community-wide climate action, including step-by-step guidance between formation, planning, implementation and evaluation. It also emphasizes the importance of equity in climate action and offers evidence-based ways to embed equity and Indigenous engagement in community-wide climate action. Accompanying these recommendations are stories of real-life examples from participating Canadian partnerships.

This guide aims to help Canadian municipalities’ structure partnerships effectively in order to equitably advance collective climate action and help achieve Canada’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050.