Newton’s first Climate Action Plan expires this year, and its results reveal Newton has made great strides in legislation, but still has a lot to improve upon as it develops the next plan.

Newton published its first CAP in 2020, which mapped out sustainability goals for five years, in order to educate Newton businesses and residents about sustainability efforts, and to lead by example with sustainability goals.

They aimed to work with property owners to use green energy options, market climate friendly actions, promote the use of electric vehicles, improve zoning and permitting processes, and adapt municipal operations.

Newton’s Climate and Sustainability team is now working on the plan for 2025 to 2030 using the first CAP as a blueprint. The next plan will also feature a dashboard that consistently updates Newton about the city’s sustainability progress and has more readily available data.

“One of the great things that [the first plan] did accomplish was raising our awareness about what we needed to do in Newton in order to make goals like being decarbonized by 2050,” said Philip Hanser, the President of the Newton Energy Commission, which is providing data to the Climate and Sustainability team for the upcoming CAP.

Newton’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance is among the most progressive actions to come out of the first plan. It sets carbon neutrality standards for commercial buildings, which account for 26% of Newton’s emissions, and provides the owners with resources to reach the goal, according to the first CAP.

“I think BERDO is our best way to continue tackling existing buildings,” said Caroline Weiss, Newton’s Climate Action Coordinator, who is responsible for creating Newton’s next Climate Action Plan.

BERDO has 46 commercial buildings reporting emissions as of September 15, 2025, and they expect to have the rest reporting by next September. Mayor Ruthanne Fuller has committed resources to Newton’s Climate Action Team to hire a BERDO administrator to oversee growth and develop a resource hub on the city website, said the Climate and Sustainability Team.

“I think the city is also working towards systemic changes,” said Judy Jacobs, the executive director of Green Newton, a local climate activist group that partners with the city to educate residents.

The first plan made major strides across all emissions, including setting 95% renewable energy supply as the default option for residents opting into Newton Power Choice, Newton’s program to buy electricity in aggregation for its residents. Additionally, Newton has educated its residents about how they can incorporate green energy into their homes with over 750 consultations, according to the Sustainability Team.

Newton has advanced across all public sectors over the last five years, but households are still the biggest contributors to carbon emissions.

“The largest issue with the plan at this point in time is basically the residential sector,” said Hanser. “We need for all the buildings that are smaller than 20,000 ft, which are primarily residential, a plan that decarbonizes them between now and 2050. That to me is a big hurdle, and the biggest challenge in this coming Climate Action Plan.”

A way that Newton plans to combat residential emissions is through heat pump installations, but their goal of 45,011 installations has not been met as of 2025. The Sustainability Team aims to have heat pumps installed in all households by 2050.

Newton’s Earth Day Festival 2025 had several electric vehicles on display. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

A letter from the Newton Energy Commission back in 2023 reveals that the rate of heat pump installation amounted to 12% of the CAP’s commitments.

“We had some estimates, for example, about the rate of penetration of heat pumps that were going to be acquired in electrification,” said Hanser. “I think those goals probably have not been met, and so that’s an issue.”

Exact heat pump data for 2025 is difficult to collect because heat pump installations are recorded by different programs like the HeatSmart Program, Newton’s municipal permit system, and Mass Save^®. The sustainability team estimates that there were 1,233 cumulative installations from 2019 to 2023. 

Weiss said that Newton’s ongoing plan to get residents involved is “continuing outreach in as many places as possible.” She said there will be several upcoming events geared toward promoting sustainability, like Village Day and a Sustainability Café event.

EVs and sustainable transportation are another solution Newton urges residents to adopt. The city made efforts to target residents under the first plan by installing 24 new public EV charging stations.

“There’s definitely more to do on outreach on the private electric transportation side as well as just active sustainable transportation, but there has been significant progress,” Weiss said.

While there has been some growth, residents have not adopted EVs rapidly enough in the past five years to meet Newton’s goal of 100% privately owned EVs by 2050. Data shows that 61 additional privately owned EV chargers have been installed in Newton over the last five years in a town of 31,730 households.

“The electric vehicle portion of the plan was largely based on people adopting electric vehicles,” Hanser said, “which is essentially open up to the market in terms of how that would happen.”

As a part of the next plan, Newton will implement their Walk, Roll, and Bike network plan to promote sustainable and active transportation, Weiss said. 

They also plan to expand upon their waste collection, which now includes composting programs in schools and efforts by the Material Management Division to increase the use of the recycling center.

The plan will include benchmarks for each department to centralize their sustainability efforts. The data will be placed on a dashboard that will be periodically updated with Newton’s progress.

“The plan as it was before didn’t really have specific measures by department, in terms of goals they should be meeting to be plan compliant,” Weiss said.

In 2019, Newton measured that it produced over 750,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, most of which came from transportation and residential energy consumption. In response, Newton set milestones to have five percent of all residential buildings be all electric and a 15 percent reduction in total energy consumption in commercial buildings.

Weiss and her team began planning for the next five years in April by talking with all the departments and stakeholders in Newton. They began the process by reviewing the first plan and plans from other cities that they liked.

School Committee Vice Chair Emily Prenner, Mayor Ruthanne Fuller, Public Buildings Commissioner Josh Morse, Project Manager Tom Rooney, Deputy Commissioner Alex Valcarce and NPS Sustainability Director Stephanie Gilman gather at the Countryside Elementary School groundbreaking ceremony on May 19, 2025. The new school building will use deep wells for heating and cooling to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

The Sustainability team plans to rely heavily on feedback from the community to see what worked with the last plan and what didn’t. She says the next CAP will also work to help residents deal with the changing climate.

“Before, we had both a Climate Action Plan Vulnerability Assessment and a Climate Action Plan, and now our goal is to kind of merge some of those key actions for more climate mitigation and resilience,” said Weiss.

The plan will incorporate more categories of sustainability as well. It will include the same goals such as decarbonizing transportation, mitigating waste disposal, and electrification of buildings. New categories will include consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions, food waste, and community health and resilience.

After the plan is published, they are looking to focus on community engagement by creating a public-facing dashboard to keep Newton residents informed. Weiss hopes to hire a graphic design consultant soon to help with its convenience and accessibility. 

Despite these amendments, the next plan may not be able to weather federal cuts to green energy incentives. For example, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed on July 3, will end the 30% solar tax credit for residents.

However, Massachusetts has many green energy programs in place, like the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program and Mass Save, to ensure efforts are sustained.

“We’re really fortunate to live in Massachusetts and have access to existing Mass Save benefits, and so our focus will be continuing to help people access what we do have and will continue to have for a longer period of time in terms of rebates and incentives,” said Weiss.

While Newton has made several strides with the residential sector, there is still a lot of work to be done.

“We have a long way to go and we’re not on track right now to meet [our 2050 neutrality] goals,” said Jacobs, “but the city and climate activists have taken significant measures to move forward.”