Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski announced that the city would begin work on a climate resolution at Monday’s city council meeting.
Roswarki said that work on the resolution would begin in 2020, and that the process will be slow, thorough and engage a diversity of constituents in the community.
“I want it to be collaborative,” Roswarski said. “I want us to bring in our businesses or industries or citizens and work to see if we can find solutions that we can do as a city and that our citizens can do so everybody can play a part in making a change.”
The city has worked with junior in the College of Agriculture and climate activist Iris O’Donnell Bellisario to help understand what a climate resolution would look like for Lafayette. O’Donnell Bellisario spent several years helping West Lafayette develop a climate resolution, which was unanimously passed in October.
O’Donnell Bellisario spoke at the council meeting and said the city's first step will be to conduct a Greenhouse Gas Inventory to begin to identify high-emitting parts of the community.
“Basically, once you have an idea of where your emissions are coming from, then you look at that and ... see what are the specific things that would help you make a difference,” O’Donnell Bellisario said in her address to the council.
She said that cities in Indiana are fortunate to have access to resources from the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University to help cover the cost of conducting a GHG inventory.
