Sustainable Community - Canada

The voluntary market for carbon credits is on the rise in parallel with the emergence of new regulated markets. The goal of Sustainable Community is to offer low emitters the possibility of trading off their efforts of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by stimulating and accounting for their common efforts and selling them on the carbon market.

Fast facts:

This activity aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3 MTM annually by 2020;
For the 2010-2020 period, this activity wants to generate 22.8 megatonnes of carbon credit titles that will be available on the voluntary market.

The problem
The emission of greenhouse gases is causing climate change.

The solution
Sustainable Community targets small final greenhouse gas emitters (businesses, local governments and organizations) that share a common territory and clusters them into a regional “Carbon Group.” Each region can include thousands of individual stakeholders that aim to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. A regional Carbon Group motivates local administrators to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions by allowing them to share key information, solutions and business opportunities regarding sustainable development. Greenhouse gas reductions come from source activities like improved energy efficiency for buildings, redirection of waste away from landfills and optimal usage of transportation for businesses.

Helping the planet

The Sustainable Community solution has been specially designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions originating from non-regulated and low emitters, all industrial, commercial and institutional business unit’s sectors taken into account and for which reductions are unaffordable for most of them.

Helping people

Hundreds of different stakeholders grouped together around a sustainable community project are motivated by their corporate social responsibility. The thousands of business units which are making reductions and the voluntary sponsors recognizing them will gain social and environmental value from the project since it associates thousands of small conscious efforts made by thousands of enterprises.

Scaling Up

The project itself seeks out entrepreneurs wishing to get involved in sustainable development. Entrepreneurs must be interested to act in the carbon market. They must also provide funds for the deployment of Sustainable Community in their territory.