Toronto's Carbon Progress Is Real, But Oslo and Amsterdam Are Pulling Away, Officials and Experts Warn

Toronto cut its greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 30 percent between 1990 and 2024, according to figures from the City of Toronto's Environment and Climate division, a number the Mayor's office has been quietly touting in pre-summer briefings. The problem, according to three urban climate researchers who spoke to The Daily Toronto this week, is that Oslo, Amsterdam and Copenhagen have cut deeper and faster, and the gap is widening, not closing.

The timing of this conversation matters. Europe's current catastrophic heatwave, France alone recorded more than 2,000 excess deaths at its peak earlier this week, is landing in Toronto's policy circles just as the city prepares its 2026 mid-cycle review of TransformTO, the climate action strategy launched in 2017 with a target of net zero by 2040. Municipal elections are fourteen months away. Every councillor on the Infrastructure and Environment Committee has a reason to either claim credit or assign blame right now.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Toronto's per-capita emissions stood at approximately 5.1 tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2023, down from a peak above 8 tonnes in the mid-1990s. That's measurable progress. But Oslo, which has made electrification of its entire public ferry and bus fleet a centrepiece of city policy, sits closer to 2.3 tonnes per capita. Amsterdam's figure is roughly 3.8 tonnes, and the Dutch capital has already surpassed 70 percent renewable electricity in its municipal grid. Toronto draws roughly 94 percent of its electricity from non-emitting sources provincially, a genuine advantage, but researchers at the University of Toronto's School of the Environment point out that buildings, not electricity generation, account for over half of Toronto's local emissions, and that's where the city is losing ground against its peers.

The Atmospheric Fund, a Toronto-based climate finance organization operating since 1991, has been vocal on this point. Its analysts have flagged that the city's deep retrofit program for residential buildings, which offers low-interest financing to homeowners in areas like Scarborough and Etobicoke, has reached roughly 1,200 households since its 2022 expansion. Advocates say that number needs to be closer to 12,000 annually to meet the 2040 target. The program's current budget sits at $18 million for the 2025-2026 cycle.

On the transit side, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, still not carrying revenue passengers as of July 2026 after years of construction delays and contractor disputes involving Metrolinx and Crosslinx Transit Solutions, represents a significant missing piece. Urban mobility researchers have long argued that the Eglinton corridor, running through dense mid-rise communities from Mount Dennis in the west to Kennedy Station in the east, could take tens of thousands of car trips off the road daily once operational. Every month of delay is a month of those emissions not being avoided.

Ford's Province, Trudeau's Pressure and a City Caught Between

The provincial picture complicates everything. The Doug Ford government at Queen's Park has made no secret of its skepticism toward carbon pricing mechanisms, and its decision in 2023 to freeze the provincial building code update, which would have required higher energy efficiency standards for new construction, drew sharp criticism from the Toronto Environmental Alliance, a nonprofit based on Adelaide Street West. Federal pressure from Ottawa, even as the Trudeau government's own political standing remains fragile, has kept some funding channels open, including a $47 million grant to Toronto under the Green and Inclusive Community Buildings program announced in late 2024.

What happens next depends heavily on whether the mid-cycle TransformTO review, expected to be tabled at City Hall this September, includes binding timelines for the building retrofit acceleration and a concrete commitment on electric bus procurement, Toronto Transit Commission currently operates 69 fully electric buses out of a fleet of roughly 2,000. Advocates from the Toronto Environmental Alliance and the Pembina Institute plan to present delegations at that September committee meeting. Climate researchers say the review is the last realistic moment to course-correct before 2030, when interim targets will begin to crystallize into either credibility or embarrassment for a city that has long styled itself as a North American climate leader.