Alberta Ecotrust wants to help Edmonton meet climate goals through partnership

A 35-year-old charity dedicated to advancing environmental solutions hopes the City of Edmonton will contribute $10 million toward its work in the next four-year budget, suggesting that such a collaboration would save time, money, and CO2 emissions.

Alberta Ecotrust Foundation vice-president Mike Mellross is hoping that two unfunded service packages at $5 million each and a more formal partnership with the city will be approved as part of the 2027-2030 budget process. Executive committee voted unanimously on Sept. 2 to have administration bring the requests to budget deliberations in the fall.

While Mellross thinks the option is good for all parties, he's not 100% confident it will go through.

"It depends on what day it is," Mellross told Speaking Municipally with a laugh. "We have a really good case. It's just a function of the austerity mentality," he added, noting the attitude some have observed at city hall heading into the budget. "There is a scarcity mindset."

The service packages support existing work from the foundation, allowing it to scale up its work to help the city catch up on its climate goals, which Edmonton is behind on. Both rely on the charity's expertise as a "professional grant maker" and investor, said Mellross, who spent more than a decade at the City of Edmonton in climate roles before joining the foundation in 2020.

Package 1 is to fund community grants and Ecotrust-led programming such as its Retrofit Accelerator and the Emissions-Neutral Building Information Exchange (best known as ENBIX), which launched in 2023. The City of Edmonton originally contributed $1.7 million to create ENBIX as a way to help the building industry address issues such as embodied carbon. The ENBIX initiative can help prepare the industry for what Mellross predicts will be stricter regulations regarding the climate. Plus, it could help address the construction-worker shortage by showing an interest in innovation, he said.

"You build better," he said. "You use the coolest technology. You position these jobs as resilient, future-focused, green jobs, and you can attract people to that sector to work in it."

Package 2 is to contribute toward the Climate Innovation Fund, a pool of money originally endowed by the federal government that invests in projects to help scale up initiatives to accelerate climate action in Edmonton and Calgary.

"An endowment allows you to have a sustained voice on climate and sustained return on investment that you can continually cycle into community programming," Mellross said. "We will actually take some of those dollars and we'll invest in an organization that's doing an emissions-reduction initiative right in Edmonton, or a company in Edmonton that's wanting to scale up its operations, or an emissions-reduction technology that can be used in Edmonton right away to help reduce emissions in the city."

Couldn't the city do these things without the Ecotrust?

"There are advantages to having an external agency to the city do this work," Mellross said. "One of them is leverage. We've been able to do that surprisingly well in terms of every dollar the city contributes to us, we are able to crowd in other sources of funding." He noted that a municipality can't accept philanthropy or corporate funding, whereas ENBIX has secured $6 in funding for every $1 the city contributed during its first three years of operation.

The Ecotrust has been working since 1991, originally with funding from the oil and gas sector. As a charity, it doesn't face the same red tape that cities do. (One might say its tape is green.) And its money goes to work.

"We actually get a return on investment — the city would have a hard time doing that," Mellross said. "We have a really, really specific direct impact that we look for … We look for community co-benefits, so we can operate in that venture capital space quite a bit easier than the city would."

In making the motion to bring the unfunded service packages to budget deliberations, Coun. Keren Tang said there's an opportunity to build on a solid foundation.

"If we have something good, I think we should amplify that and continue that relationship," said Tang, who serves as the city's representative for the Climate Innovation Fund. "They have some really brilliant minds who can provide some very important expert advice when it comes to climate."

Expert advice could be formalized in the proposed partnership. Mellross told executive committee that the city's climate implementation priorities report lacks some actionable details and pathways to outcomes. Tang's successful motion asks admin to explore an agreement between the parties to "support implementation of climate-related initiatives, including consideration of governance structure, performance measures, funding accountability, and regular reporting to council."

On Sept. 8, council approved the updated climate resilience policy and committee recommendations on climate implementation priorities. The policy update adds adaptation targets and a sustainable return-on-investment threshold for new city buildings; both documents are meant to guide the decisions council will make when setting the four-year budget.

The Ecotrust will celebrate the third anniversary of ENBIX on Oct. 28 at The Westin Edmonton with a panel and luncheon. The panellists include former mayor Don Iveson of Civic Good, Reza Nasseri of Landmark Homes, and Jen Hancock of Chandos. The event listing teases an announcement at the end of the celebration.

Hear the full conversation on Episode 371 of Speaking Municipally, including what Mellross thinks is missing from the city's climate plans and how there's no single priority item to fund.