Riverside is gearing up to approve a climate action and resilience plan later this month.
At their March 20 meeting, village trustees previewed an 80-page draft of the plan, developed by sustainability strategy firm Nutter Consulting. Principal Melanie Nutter walked the board through the plan’s table of contents, which includes a yet-unwritten letter from village officials, the effects Riverside and the surrounding area will experience from climate change, an inventory of greenhouse gas emissions in town and a list of 45 strategies with 127 specific actions across eight general categories.
The village board did not take any formal action. Trustees are expected to consider adopting a final draft of the plan at a meeting in April.
Those categories include efficient buildings and green energy, clean transportation, waste reduction, healthy green spaces, sustainable village operations, water and wastewater, community resilience, and social cohesion and equity, each with four to seven “umbrella strategies” that include actions Riverside can take now and over time to further each goal.
The listed actions range in size and scope as well as the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the cost, and the timeframe over which they can occur. Specific actions include items like promoting financial incentives for energy efficiency programs, collaborating with nearby municipalities to create accessible pedestrian infrastructure, educating residents on the public health impacts of idling cars and more and even encouraging residents to shop local.
Nutter said Riverside’s list of actions was adapted from the Cross-Community Climate Collaborative (C4) framework document, put together by members of Riverside’s C4 team, including trustees Aberdeen Marsh-Ozga and Cristin Evans alongside Assistant Village Manager Ashley Monroe and resident volunteers, over the course of 2023. Riverside joined the C4 initiative in 2022.
Some actions also came from the Metropolitan Mayor’s Caucus Greenest Region Compact Climate Action Plan for the Chicago Region (GRC2).
“The C4 list and the GRC2 list were much larger, so a lot of the work that we did was really condensing strategies, dropping some strategies or actions that really were not going to have a lot of impact,” Nutter said.
“It cannot be overstated that immediate action is not required from the village for every recommended action,” Monroe wrote in a memo to the village board. “A plan identifies critical information and prioritizes the most important issues for our municipality to address. It is a living document that will be updated every five years.”
She emphasized that nearly half of the identified actions are “in some part already in motion at the village or within the community.”
Nutter said the next steps will involve incorporating any feedback from trustees into the plan as well as creating a priority action list.
“You’ve got 45 strategies, 127 actions. You can’t do all of those at once, so, really, where do you start?” she said. “The priority action list is something that we are formulating right now, and that’s going to be a much shorter list of recommended priority actions that the village can pursue in the next two to three years.”
She said many of these items will be tangible projects led by Riverside that will target relatively large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Brookfield adopted its own sustainability plan last April.
