Climate Action Plan - Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City, UT, is trying to approach the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2040 under the 2009 emissions level. To analyze the climate actions, this report investigates the carbon emissions in the city and analyzed the influences of potential high-level strategies to reduce carbon emission. The previous carbon emissions data (2009-2019) demonstrates a slight 3% carbon reduction. Based on the emissions trends, this report analyzes the emission of business-as-usual by regression models and obtains a slight reduction in the short term but an unchangeable potential trend in long term. It means the city demands more effective strategies to reduce carbon emissions to achieve the 80% reduction by 2040. Hence this report investigates strategies in terms of three domains, transportation, green infrastructure, and solar canopy. Transportation section includes public transit and electrified transportation, and the report demonstrates the gap of public transit system and services and the 15% electric vehicles influences by 2030. Green infrastructure section focuses on urban forests and obtains the demand of the tradeoff between carbon reduction benefits and maintenance costs. Solar canopy section analyzes the benefits of carbon reduction by constructing solar parking canopy on parking lots.SLCgreenOpe