Sean Pander

When the City of Vancouver decided to take on climate change, it may have seemed a futile task: after all, what can one city do about global warming? But spend a few minutes talking with Sean Pander, the man entrusted with enacting the city’s ambitious Climate Change Action Plans, and you’ll be convinced that the city not only can, but already is, making a difference.

Pander’s official title is manager of the city’s Climate Protection Program. He was initially hired as a consultant to oversee the drafting of the city’s Climate Change Action Plans, which were adopted by council in 2005, before coming on board full-time to put the plans into action.

The 38-year-old Pander brings a unique blend of blue-sky optimism and engineering know-how to the task. A native of Red Deer, Alberta, he got an engineering degree at the University of Alberta, and ended up working in the oil patch, a job that eventually led him to Chicago. It was there that he had the epiphany that would lead him to Vancouver.

“Increasing throughput for stakeholder return on investment wasn’t something I could get really fired up about,” Pander recalls. What really fascinated him was the emerging field of sustainability.
“I started looking around and asked, where is this happening? Where can I learn something?” Those questions led him to Vancouver, where he first got a job at UBC’s sustainability office, then completed a graduate degree in resource management, before being hired by the city.

Pander is enthusiastic about the results of his recently completed 2007 progress report, which shows the city’s greenhouse gas emissions have plateaued, and may have even begun a slow decline. We still have a long way to go to reach the city’s goal of reducing emissions by 20 per cent (for City of Vancouver operations) and six per cent (community emissions) by 2012. But Pander is convinced he’s in a position to make it happen.

“Part of the City’s role is to make it easier and more attractive to do the right thing,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s infrastructure, and sometimes it’s information, and sometimes it’s just connecting people’s values to their behaviours.”