HALIFAX—Climate change constitutes an emergency for Halifax, and the city’s councillors have become some of the first in Canada to make such a statement.

Regional council adopted that statement on Tuesday, voting unanimously in favour of an amended motion from Coun. Richard Zurawski designed to get the municipality moving on climate change.

“We all understand the climate is changing, and even the changes are changing more quickly than we thought,” Zurawski said during Tuesday’s debate.

“It’s overwhelming and incontestable.”

Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) becomes one of the first in Canada to adopt such a motion after Vancouver councillors made a similar declaration earlier this month.

“The reason for doing it is to be able to motivate provincial and federal governments to look at our situations,” Zurawski said of Halifax and Vancouver.

“We are the two major coastal cities in Canada, one on the Pacific, one on the Atlantic, where we will feel ocean-level rise, heat, fire, all the various horsemen of the apocalypse that come with climate change. We will feel it first.”

Zurawski’s motion, after some amending, requests a staff report and recommendations to council within a year with respect to four main points.

The first is, “The recognition by HRM Council that the breakdown of the stable climate and sea levels under which human civilization developed constitutes an emergency for HRM.”

The motion also asks for updates on current climate change-related staff reports, like Zurawski’s request for a climate change directorate reporting to the municipal chief administrative officer; it asks for a target of “net zero carbon emissions before 2050 and net negative carbon emissions in the second half of the century;” and it asks for the establishment of a “remaining carbon budget” aimed at limiting warming to 1.5 C and a reporting process on the municipality’s remaining carbon budget.

Zurawski was originally looking for a report back in 90 days, but municipal chief administrative officer Jacques Dubé said that wouldn’t be possible, especially with staff currently working on a plan to address climate change: the Community Energy and Climate Action Plan.

Halifax awarded a contract earlier this month to consulting firm Sustainability Solutions Group for more than $200,000 to complete that plan.

That plan will update the municipality’s greenhouse-gas emissions target, set in 2011: to reduce annual greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 per cent between 2012 and 2020. The municipality was about 24 per cent of the way toward that goal as of the 2015-16 fiscal year, the most recent data available.

Dubé told council the new plan and target should be before council by this time next year, and Zurawski’s report would have to take a back seat. Council amended Zurawski’s motion to change his 90-day timeline to one year.

Zurawski just wants Halifax to get moving.

“The scientific community has issued study after study and summarizations of those studies saying that we need to act now, and that it will be fiscally much cheaper if we act now as opposed to delaying,” he said.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its report in October, warning that climate change was happening much faster than previously thought, and calling for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

“My family has talked a lot about this since the IPCC came out, and to say we’re somewhere between seriously concerned and really freaked out, both those are understatements,” Coun. Waye Mason told his colleagues.

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“This is real. We know that there is a climate emergency and that human civilization is threatened. That’s what the science says.”

But Mason wants to focus on what Halifax can actually do. For instance, the city needs a plan for dealing with sea-level rise on the waterfront.

“There are concrete, pardon the pun, things that need to be done and considered in terms of how we build in the future and how we secure things that are already there,” he said.

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