November 2024
By Steve Winkelman, Executive Director, Ottawa Climate Action Fund
The Ottawa Climate Action Fund (OCAF) convened about 80 business and community leaders October 9 for the Ottawa Climate-Economy Opportunities Summit, a day-long multi-solving event that tackled the local housing supply and affordability crisis through a climate-economy lens. The results of the event provided insights relevant in cities across the country who all have their hands full advancing their climate goals while addressing a pressing housing crisis.
With powerful and timely input from many of Ottawa’s leading doers and thinkers, the deliberations at the summit will shape OCAF’s climate-economy-housing work plan in the months ahead. OCAF was proud to create space for thoughtful discussion at the intersection between climate, housing and economy.
Steve Winkelman, Executive Director, Ottawa Climate Action Fund
The engagement process leading up to the summit began nearly a year ago with PREVENT, PREPARE, PROSPER, a feature article in the local Board of Trade magazine that placed climate solutions at the heart of the effort to revitalize the local economy. By the time the summit got onsite in October, several dozen local experts had reached agreement on five Action Opportunities that would drive down emissions, make housing more affordable, deliver practical, real-world results, and roll out quickly.
At the summit, participants stepped up to help develop step-by-step playbooks to move the Action Opportunities off the page and into implementation:
- Public Land for New Housing: Identifying parcels of surplus land that can be deployed quickly to deliver more affordable, low-carbon/net-zero new housing
- Reno-Protection: Public-private collaboration to acquire older apartment buildings for deep energy retrofits while permanently protecting their affordability
- Gentle Density Accelerator: Discovering how to house more people on under-utilized residential lots while tackling neighbourhood carbon footprints
- Energy Resilience Districts: Looking beyond the building at how technology can deliver deep energy efficiency, onsite renewable power, energy storage, and district energy solutions in new developments
- Ottawa’s Green Pipeline: Bringing together the investors, opportunities, finance mechanisms, and matchmaking services to accelerate low-carbon, more affordable housing supply.
From ideas to action
OCAF began work on the summit with a clear directive: the event would only be worth holding if it pointed toward action on four urgent but achievable goals:
- Drive down greenhouse gas emissions
- Expand the local supply of affordable housing
- Be scalable beyond the initial demonstration projects—across the Ottawa region and to other urban centres in Canada
- Be quick and practical to implement
By the end of the day, the summit had delivered an ambitious set of commitments and next steps spanning all five Action Opportunities.
Participants agreed to assess the feasibility of an energy resilience district in Ottawa’s Kanata North Research Park and map out the opportunity, available resources, and local trades capacity for a gentle density accelerator.
As part of the government’s housing strategy, the National Capital Commission (NCC) is engaging with builders, social housing providers, First Nations, and the wider community to understand how underutilized NCC lands can be identified and more quickly brought to market to deliver much-needed housing, including projects with affordable units and low-carbon/net-zero design.
And OCAF will reprise the convening role that made the Summit possible, bringing together a circle of potential investors and investment aggregators to begin building a bigger, wider pipeline of green development projects across the city.
A head-nod from economic leaders
We’re grateful to the Board of Trade, the city, Invest Ottawa, KNBA, EnviroCentre, the Canadian Urban Institute, and Lumos Energy, along with all the other local organizations that helped build the five Action Opportunities, for the incredible contributions that made the Summit possible.
A highlight of the Summit was an economic leaders’ panel where senior representatives of the Board of Trade, the City of Ottawa, local economic development agency Invest Ottawa, and the Kanata North Business Association (KNBA) stressed the linkages between affordable housing, a thriving economy, and the local response to climate change.
“At the Ottawa Board of Trade, we know that city building must be sustainable, affordable, and inclusive,” said Board of Trade President and CEO Sueling Ching.
“The way forward is through radical collaboration amongst the private, public, and non-profit sectors. Events like the Ottawa Climate-Economy Opportunities Summit provide an opportunity to actively take part in this collaboration and to use the outcomes of the day to build up Ottawa.”
By the time the summit wrapped up, participants had handed OCAF a compelling to-do list … and we couldn’t be more thrilled. In the months ahead, we’ll be working with a wide network of partners to get deals in place, Requests for Information issued, pilot projects funded, and capital mobilized – all aiming to make Ottawa a more prosperous community with affordable, lower-carbon housing and prepare for the heat waves, flooding, storms, power outages, and other climate impacts that are undoubtedly in our future.