Annapolis presents updated Climate Action Plan; 2024 inventory shows transportation as largest emitter and prioritizes 20 measures

Annapolis city staff and consultant Keramida presented an updated community Climate Action Plan (CAP) and a 2024 greenhouse-gas inventory to the City Council, summarizing emissions, prioritized reduction measures and next steps for public tracking.

Jackie Guild, deputy city manager, introduced the CAP update and the project team—environmental programs managers Dylan Laconich and Dylan McCoach, Ashley Diaz, and consultant Emily O'Neal of Keramida. The consulting team said the city last completed a community plan in 2010 based on 2006 data and that methodological and technological changes prompted a refreshed plan using 2024 as the baseline year.

Consultant Emily O'Neal described a three-phase process—community engagement (working groups, town halls and surveys), a greenhouse-gas inventory and reduction planning. She said the inventory focused on four sectors (buildings & energy, transportation, waste and land use) and that the planning team used a feasibility assessment and "backcasting" (modeling the annual tempo of reductions needed to hit targets) to set realistic, implementable measures.

Inventory results presented by the team showed transportation as the community’s largest emitting sector (about 58%), followed by buildings; waste accounted for about 1% of emissions. Emily O'Neal also said land-use practices and tree canopy created a carbon sink in the city’s inventory. The municipal inventory (emissions the city directly controls) is a small share of community emissions but has declined substantially—staff said municipal emissions are roughly 70% lower than earlier targets, driven by grid changes and municipal efficiency measures.

The team said it screened roughly 150 candidate reduction measures for technical, financial, social and timeline feasibility, and narrowed the list to 20 prioritized reduction measures. Examples include building retrofits and efficiency programs, transportation shifts (including expanded transit, bike/pedestrian infrastructure and electrification), waste-reduction measures and urban-forest/land-use strategies. The plan maps actions (policies, incentives, pilot programs and education campaigns) and implementation elements, and the team noted that measure-level costs are included in each reduction-measure briefing in the plan.

Councilmembers asked detailed implementation questions. Councilor Wu urged the team to expand emphasis beyond private electric-vehicle adoption to city-controlled levers such as transit and water-based mobility, noting Annapolis’s maritime character. Several councilmembers asked whether the plan had fully considered maritime emissions (private boats, ferries) and blue-carbon strategies (tidal marshes, seagrasses); staff replied that private boats and harbor operations were included in the inventory but came in lower than on-road transport as a share of emissions. Representatives said the plan includes actions to evaluate ferries and other maritime solutions further.

On feasibility the consultant said each measure was rated across economic, technical, social and timeline criteria; measures also tie back to inventory opportunity and existing policies. Staff said cost estimates are provided at the measure level but the plan does not present a single consolidated total for the entire pathway scenarios—costs are reported in the implementation snapshot for each reduction measure.

The team will publish the inventory and measures to ClearPath 2.0 (an ICLEI tool) so the city can track progress publicly, and staff asked the council for written comments by June 25 so the consultant can finalize the report under contract.

No vote was taken; councilmembers and staff agreed to continue refining the plan and to use the ClearPath public dashboard to track implementation and community-facing progress.