The year 2050, probably because it’s a nice round number, is a landmark year for many local governments that have adopted climate action or sustainability plans in an effort to make their communities greener and fend off the most devastating effects of climate change. If governments follow through on those plans, the Triangle could, in just 24 years, be a beacon of climate progress—with dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reliable public transit connecting the region, flood- and storm-resistant infrastructure, and a lush tree canopy grown over current urban heat islands.
With this relative utopia in mind, we set out to try to get a sense of whether local governments were on track toward their goals.
We asked 11 local governments around the Triangle—Durham County, Orange County, Wake County, Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Raleigh, Cary, Apex, Morrisville, and Holly Springs—for their most recent climate or sustainability plan and their latest progress report for that plan. The responses varied widely, with most cities able to produce their plans and slightly fewer providing some form of a status update.
The city of Durham told us our request was “very broad and would take a great deal of time to locate,” though Durham County was able to provide sustainability plans and more recent status updates. Holly Springs sent us its 2023 Sustainability Action Plan, but no corresponding progress report. Cary approved a detailed Sustainability and Climate Action Strategy in 2025 and tracks its progress on a public-facing dashboard. Raleigh, Wake County, Morrisville, Orange County, Chapel Hill, and Apex also have climate action dashboards.
Most Triangle municipalities have some kind of plan to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, transition to clean energy, and become more resilient to climate change. Some of those plans only pertain to the local government, but Raleigh, Cary, Carrboro, Chapel Hill, and Orange County have community-wide goals. In Durham, there’s a community-wide goal, as well as a shared goal for the city, county, and public school system.
Those goals vary depending on the community and its approach. Experts we interviewed told us there aren’t universal standards for what a local government in North Carolina should include in a sustainability plan. Without those standards, sustainability efforts can largely depend on the values and means of a local government.
While some local governments like Durham (the first in the state to adopt a greenhouse gas reduction plan) have been planning around sustainability goals for 20 years, for many places they’re kind of a nascent effort, said Christopher Lawson, program manager for community and economic development at Central Pines Regional Council, a resource and support hub for local governments.
“Sustainability, environmentalism, the thought around that is changing. The way we view our government’s role … in these things is changing to be—more recognition that there is a role for local governments,” Lawson said.
Across plans, though, most local governments have a specific goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with many also staking out plans to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050.
Some localities have made impressive strides: As of 2025, Carrboro’s emissions are down 20% compared to the 2010 baseline. Orange County reports a decline of more than 40% compared with 2005 levels. Chapel Hill has dropped its emissions by 32% compared to 2005. Raleigh reduced its emissions by 11% from 2014 to 2022. Wake County is 20% of the way to meeting its goal of 100% clean energy. Durham County, meanwhile, has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 18% since 2009.
Plans for future emission reductions tend to target vehicle trips and energy use in buildings, which make up the bulk of local governments’ emissions. Among the interesting ways they are chipping away at those impacts: Raleigh powers its bus fleet with renewable natural gas created from residents’ wastewater. Morrisville has rooftop solar arrays on five of its buildings.
Tobin Freid, sustainability manager for Durham County, told the INDY that before the county started implementing its climate goals, it found ways to reduce energy consumption at a number of county-owned buildings.
“If you put solar panels on a building where you haven’t done the energy efficiency yet, you’re sort of still wasting energy. You’re just wasting solar energy,” Freid said.
But much of what local governments are trying to accomplish via their sustainability plans—reducing community-wide emission reductions, increasing public transit ridership, improving water quality—is actually out of their control, dependent upon the actions of state government, private industries, or residents.
Triangle towns with ambitious climate goals are heavily reliant on the Republican-controlled state legislature and private companies to invest in sustainability initiatives.
“We will not meet our goals without Duke Energy coming along,” Freid said. “We set our goals, both the greenhouse gas goal but more specifically, the renewable energy goal, under the assumption that Duke Energy is going to be following along.”
Carrboro’s Chief Sustainability Officer Amy Armbruster said Carrboro was “disappointed” by the legislature’s decision last year to eliminate a requirement that utility companies reduce carbon pollution by 2030, especially as it “made our own goals a lot harder to achieve.”
As we reported last year, Carrboro recently tried to sue Duke Energy, arguing that the company misled the public by downplaying the impact of burning fossil fuels. In February, a judge dismissed the case.
Some plans (like Cary’s) are town-wide, which means the government can’t achieve them unilaterally; people and businesses need to get on board. Cary is encouraging residents to consider adding solar panels to their homes or purchasing an electric vehicle—or, if those options are out of reach, to plant a tree, experiment with composting, or try riding the (fare-free) GoCary bus.
Cary’s goal, said energy manager Sara Caliendo, is near-zero, not zero, because “it’s better to be realistic than to set unrealistic goals and fail.” The town operates three wastewater reclamation facilities, for instance, which consume a lot of power and realistically won’t be running on fully renewable energy anytime soon.
Armbruster told the INDY that Carrboro has focused specifically on reaching out to low-income communities and communities of color, which “are both most vulnerable to climate impacts—things like high heat or flooding—but also may have the least resources,” about updating their homes to be more climate resilient and energy efficient. Armbruster pointed out that updates can help people save money on energy and repair costs.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Danielle Spurlock, whose work focuses on environmental planning and policy implementation, thinks that policymakers could focus more on accounting for and changing human behavior.
“I would love to see us be able to build more of our policies taking into account all that we know about human behavior and how we can shift that behavior,” Spurlock said. “Because sometimes we hope that, well, if we build it, they’ll come. But we haven’t really built it well enough that it can alter behavior.”
Spurlock said in order for local sustainability plans to be successful, they also need to address affordable housing—which some Triangle plans do to varying extents. But without housing set aside for people who earn well below the area median income, “a huge chunk of people who are vital to what makes our cities great places to live” get pushed out to more affordable areas where they have no choice but to rely on a car, increasing emissions.
“People talk about sustainability, and they’ll talk about the environment, they’ll talk about economics, but if you don’t talk about equity, you’re actually not talking about sustainability,” Spurlock said. “It’s the question that many community residents bring up: ‘Affordable for whom?’ And so I think that is where I really want us to sit down in the Triangle and think hard about who bears the burden. Who gets the benefits for each of these sustainability initiatives that we’re pushing forward?”
While sustainability plans typically focus on one jurisdiction, the issues they contend with—like water pollution and regional transit—cross boundaries. We did find examples of cross-jurisdiction collaboration in the reports we reviewed. For example, the city of Durham, Durham County, and Durham Public Schools are collaborating on a solar farm to help power facilities with renewable energy and, in turn, reduce emissions.
“That is only possible because we work together,” Freid said. “None of us independently would have had enough demand that would make financial sense for a developer to build a solar farm on our behalf, but collectively, we could.”
Developing sustainability goals, implementing plans, and monitoring progress are huge tasks that demand more resources and more collaboration across the entire Triangle, Spurlock said. Local governments need to work together on shared goals, strategies to help communities with fewer means to accomplish them, and steps to take when goals aren’t met. Central Pines Regional Council has helped spearhead efforts to bring local governments together for regional sustainability planning.
“We have a very fragmented system, even as we require a really integrated coalition to meet these goals,” Spurlock said.
There’s an adage that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second-best time is today. That held true in our research—while Triangle city and county governments are now undertaking a lot of initiatives to be greener, it’s not always easy to see the progress. In some cases, that’s because it’s buried in dense reports or departmental presentations. But it could also be decades before the results of these efforts are apparent. Transit projects take years to plan, let alone build. Public works facilities can’t be transitioned to renewable energy sources overnight. Trees planted today won’t provide shade until … perhaps 2050.
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