Five years later, Sarnia’s climate plan is still here.

Sarnia secured federal climate-planning funding in 2019 and adopted its Climate Change Action Plan and Implementation Strategy in 2021. The plan is still referenced in major city documents, including the 2025 Corporate Asset Management Plan, the 2025 Urban Forest Management Plan, and the city’s Official Plan. It also promised annual report cards and measurable indicators to track progress. Five years later, those reporting tools are not clearly visible in public-facing records.

It began in 2019, when council approved a Climate Change Work Plan tied to funding through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. That report directed staff to proceed with climate planning, establish an interdepartmental working group, and involve the Environmental Advisory Committee in guiding the work. The city’s 2019 supplementary budget materials also described the climate change strategy as underway.

That process led to the adoption of the Climate Change Action Plan and Implementation Strategy in 2021.

The plan was not presented as a one-time policy. It was built around more than 100 actions across flooding, the natural environment, emergency preparedness, and greenhouse gas emissions. Just as importantly, it promised a system for tracking what happened next. The plan states that implementation items would be reviewed annually, that an annual report card would be created, and that key performance indicators would be developed to measure outcomes over time. It also identified emissions tracking as part of that framework, while acknowledging that some of those tools did not yet exist at adoption. The plan says directly that specific KPIs still needed to be completed and that the city’s corporate greenhouse gas inventory still needed to be completed as well. All of that appears in the CCAPIS document itself.

The plan did not just promise action. It promised that the city would build the tools needed to measure that action.Five years later, the plan itself is still visible across city policy.

The 2025 Corporate Asset Management Plan references the Climate Change Action Plan and Implementation Strategy in its discussion of climate change considerations and infrastructure planning. The 2025 Urban Forest Management Plan also places itself within the city’s broader climate framework. Sarnia’s Official Plan refers to the Climate Change Action Plan and Implementation Strategy as part of the city’s approach to climate adaptation and resilience. The city also continues to maintain a dedicated Climate Change Action Plan webpage that presents the plan as the city’s central climate framework.

The policy exists, it is still being used. The harder question is what happened to the measurement system the plan described.

The plan’s reporting promises did not disappear from discussion right away. In October 2021 EAC minutes , committee members discussed KPIs as a “layer of accountability” and described a report card as part of the implementation approach. In a later February 2023 EAC agenda, follow-up on Climate Action Plan issues and the report card was still listed as an active topic. In March 2024 EAC minutes, committee discussion again referenced a Climate Action Report Card. In May 2024 EAC minutes, the committee also passed a motion asking council to direct staff to meet annual update requirements for greenhouse gas emissions reporting on the city website under provincial rules.

Those records show that reporting, KPIs, and emissions tracking remained live issues in committee discussion.

What is much harder to find is a clear, centralized, public-facing sequence of the annual report cards the plan promised. I could find the plan itself, repeated city references to it, and committee discussions about scorecards and KPIs. I could not find a clearly published series of annual CCAPIS report cards or a centralized KPI tracking system presented publicly in the way the plan describes.

That does not prove no reporting exists anywhere in any form. It does mean that the public-facing trail is much easier to find for the plan itself than for the scorekeeping system the plan promised. That distinction matters because the scorekeeping system was part of the plan’s structure.

The city delivered the plan within the original project window. But the plan’s own commitments extended beyond adoption. It described a system that would continue after 2021 through annual reviews, report cards, KPIs, and emissions tracking. Without those tools being clearly visible, the plan becomes harder to evaluate on its own terms.

The actions it describes may still be happening. In some cases, they clearly appear indirectly through other city plans and projects. But without consistent measurement and reporting, it becomes much more difficult to tell what progress has been made, what has not, and how the city is judging its own results.

The Climate Change Action Plan and Implementation Strategy was designed as more than a document. It was designed as a framework that could show what was happening over time.Five years later the framework is still there, the scorecard is harder to see.