Climate Action Plan

The City of Gaithersburg, Maryland is inviting qualified consultants to submit proposals for the preparation of a comprehensive municipal Climate Action Plan (CAP). Consultants must have experience in creating Climate Action Plans for public agencies, facilitating stakeholder engagement, recommending emissions and targets goals, and identifying grant opportunities to fund the implementation of the suggested changes. The CAP objective is to outline an actionable roadmap by which City Staff can implement processes that can safeguard a thriving community, assure the continued delivery of current City services, and introduce new initiatives to ensure resilience, adaptation and mitigation of negative impacts from climate change brought on by global warming.

The objectives of the CAP roadmap will be to:

• Ensure the City can provide a timely response during extreme weather emergencies;
• Clearly outline roles and responsibilities of departments in contributing to the implementation of the CAP roadmap;
• Suggest code and policy updates to activate institutional preparedness for a changing climate;
• Recommend actions and tools to help advance sustainability and environmental goals;
• Strengthen communication across inter-departmental teams, as well as increase collaboration across both internal and external City stakeholders; and
• Support City compliance with existing and expected future regulations.

The existing sustainability goals the CAP will assist with is the reduction of community greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2050 compared to the City’s 2005 baseline. This goal was developed by the City as a member of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG). The Offerors shall also assess the feasibility of reaching citywide net-zero emissions by 2045 as part of its scenario analysis modeling.

The City will require key milestones, priority projects and key performance indicators across all key sustainability focus areas to achieve the expected reductions, improve preparedness and awareness of any budgetary, staff capacity, and other challenges that might be encountered during the implementation process.

• Solicitation Document