Climate Change
About
From sweltering heatwaves and wildfires that choke our air, to rising seas and extreme floods washing out roads, every day we are feeling the impacts of climate change. Seattle's most recent greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory shows that to meet our climate goals, we need to urgently transition away from fossil fuels and to a more sustainable, clean energy future.
The City is working to drastically reduce climate pollution from our two largest sources, the transportation and buildings sectors, as well as accelerate efforts to build resiliency in the communities disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis.
While Seattle has long been recognized as an environmental leader, we face many of the same challenges as the broader U.S. environmental movement: those who shape and benefit from environmental policies and outcomes are primarily white, upper-income communities.
We are focusing on lifting up community-based solutions and creating opportunities for communities of color, immigrants, refugees, people with low-incomes and limited-English proficiency individuals to build capacity and benefit from Seattle's environmental progress.
Our Focus Areas
Buildings & Energy
OSE manages Seattle's Energy Benchmarking and Tune-Ups programs along with overall building energy policy development and ensuring City facilities are energy efficient.
Reducing Transportation Emissions
Road transportation represents two-thirds of Seattle's climate pollution. In addition to reducing the miles we need to drive to meet our daily needs we must electrify our cars, buses, and trucks, and seek progressive revenue sources to support an equitable transportation system.
Resilience Hubs
The future Citywide Resilience Hub Plan will guide how the City assists and supports a network of resilience hubs.
Climate Portal
Seattle tracks, measures and reports our greenhouse gas emissions on a regular basis through publicly available reports and maps that houses more frequent and granular data indicators of emissions in Seattle.