A new climate survey could lead to less greenhouse gas emissions and a big, green thumb for Carrboro.

The Carrboro Board of Aldermen passed an initiative in 2009 to take steps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Seven years later, the town is proposing a plan to do even more—to cut the carbon footprint in half over the next decade.

The proposal — dubbed “Community Climate Action Plan” – was created by the town’s task force and recently brought to the board. One of its main goals is to raise community awareness and involvement in solutions to global climate change.

“Our town undertook a really intensive study of how the town could do this a few years ago,” said Lydia Lavelle, Mayor of Carrboro. “So the difference here is this is a plan that is centered around our community and looking at ways that they can do this.”

The town sent out a tweet inviting citizens to take a short online survey about climate action, which will allow the board to see what residents want to be prioritized in any implementation of the plan.

“Anything the town does, about 10-20 percent of the community really knows about it,” Lavelle said. “So this is one where we’re going to take intensive efforts to really get it out to the folks who aren’t the typical people we see out at town hall on Tuesday nights or the ones we don’t see when something’s going wrong. We want the whole community to know about this.”

Lavelle also said that the survey will allow the board to gauge whether or not the public is aware of the relevance of taking steps to a greener environment.

“Even as much as we are doing, we are a little drop in the bucket of 20,000 people trying to do what we can do. But on the other hand we can serve as a model, serve as best practices and ideas for other communities.”

Lavelle said the town will officially accept or adopt the plan in the next couple of weeks. When enacted, it will become a major step to revamping Carrboro’s focus on climate change.

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