How Green Zoning Helps Communities Reach Sustainability Goals
November 26, 2025
Zoning is a tool local governments have historically used to decide how land is developed and used in a community. Zoning ordinances shape our built environments, determining everything from the density and composition of neighbourhoods to the height of buildings to the proximity of homes to transit hubs.
As we navigate the worsening effects of climate change, zoning has come to be deployed to protect local environments, both built and natural. Prohibiting new development on floodplains and regenerating wetlands are just two examples of ways zoning can boost local resiliency.
More recently, a concept called green zoning has become a tool to help communities reach sustainability goals. But we need more of it. A lot more.
What Is Green Zoning?
Green zones are a designation given to an area by a local government in order to help that government implement stronger environmental programs and policies.
The concept originated in the early 2010s with environmental justice groups working in California to address the disproportionate exposure to pollution experienced by low-income communities of colour.
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Green zones can be designated in residential and commercial areas. They can be used by governments to address whatever sustainability issues are most pressing for the community. Air pollution, watershed damage, emissions and revitalization are just some of the challenges green zones can be designed to tackle.
How Do Green Zones Work?
Communities can use green zones to implement policies that solve larger, complex issues than individual pieces of legislation typically cover.
Green zone ordinances could feature provisions that offer priority permits for projects aiming for LEED or other standards, create green jobs, pilot programs to address specific issues like habitat fragmentation and allocate resources to assess the effectiveness of those programs. The scope and the mechanics are up to the community.
For example, in 2015, Los Angeles’ Clean Up Green Up program established green zones to address concentrated pollution exposure and economic disadvantage in three primarily Latino neighbourhoods.
One green zone provision included new building performance standards that incorporated criteria related to community health. Another provision enabled an ombudsperson to facilitate access to financial and technical support for local businesses within the zones.
How Zoning Changes Can Help Cities Reach Climate Targets
For many Canadian cities, reaching climate targets is an increasing priority, a priority often addressed through building standards.
As architect Lloyd Alter tells Treehugger, though, “the single biggest factor in the carbon footprint of our cities isn’t the amount of insulation in our walls, it’s the zoning.”
He argues that as long as cities are “locked into single-family zoning” that makes it difficult to impossible to put any kind of multi-residential building into a single-family neighbourhood, they cannot be effective in their efforts to reduce their emissions.
Changing zoning to increase density is generally agreed to be one way to lower a city’s emissions, but for many communities, that still might not be enough to meet targets.
Urban Planning for Emission Reduction in Prince George
In 2013, the City of Prince George, B.C. published an analysis of their 2008-2012 energy and emissions modelling project, which provided energy and emissions data for 4 different urban planning scenarios. The scenarios ranged from a conservative “Business as Usual” approach to new residential construction to a “Downtown Infill Scenario.”
The Business as Usual Scenario modelled energy use and emissions for a standard pattern of land use where half of all new residential units were single family detached homes in Prince George’s suburbs and only 6 percent of new units were apartments.
The Downtown Infill Scenario modelled a higher-density land use strategy in which 47 percent of new units were apartments built in the downtown area and heated with biomass through a district energy system. Only 18 percent of new units were single family dwellings.
The modelling results showed that the Downtown Infill Scenario was “overwhelmingly the most effective choice for conserving energy, reducing emissions and increasing cumulative cost-savings for Prince George residents over the long term.”
The overall impact of these measures, however, were less overwhelming. The results suggest that by 2025, even this aggressive (and therefore less likely) approach to energy-efficient building would only decrease the City’s emissions by 2.3 percent compared to its 2002 baseline. That’s 0.3 percent better than its target.
“Energy savings are optimized when higher density new construction is emphasized,” say the study authors, but they note that density alone wouldn’t get Prince George close to net zero.
The authors state that renewable energy technologies “may be crucial for the city to achieve targets on an going-forward basis.” In addition, they posit that “aggressive” retrofits of existing homes, education and financing will all also need to play a significant role.
The Added Power of Green Zoning
The findings of Prince George’s modelling project dovetail with urbanization scholars Karen C. Seto and Bhartendu Pandey’s contention that successful approaches to sustainable development will require attention to multiple “sustainability dimensions.” In their article “Urban Land Use: Central to Building a Sustainable Future,” they write:
“Although there is a general consensus that higher densities of co-located activities are necessary for certain desired outcomes (e.g., lower transport emissions), research shows that the same urban density could be manifested in many different ways. Thus, density alone is insufficient for achieving sustainability outcomes.”
Green zoning creates more opportunities for flexible, local solutions. It gives local governments a framework through which to address multiple “sustainability dimensions” and to accomplish the goals the community finds most urgent.
That said, it needn’t be a government that creates a green zone.
In Buffalo, New York, People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) created a green development zone in the economically depressed West Side.
Within the zone, PUSH develops green, affordable housing and affordable renewable energy projects, retrofits homes and redevelops vacant properties into green spaces. But it’s also created a jobs pipeline in which local residents receive training and living wage jobs in the green building industry.
And it’s been a resounding success.
The Global Impact
By 2050, the urban population of the planet is expected to rise by 2.5 billion people, according to the U.N.
Seto and Pandey argue that while research and public discussion tends to focus on the local, immediate impacts of urban development, the ways urban spaces are built and used have global, long-term effects that, although more difficult to measure, are crucial to consider if we want to create effective sustainability policies.
“Once in place,” the authors note, “basic urban structures and patterns are not easily reversed; what happens in the next several decades will shape the social and physical environment for generations to come.” Green zoning is a powerful collaborative tool that can help us better shape our environments and our futures.
Feature image: Mike Benna; Image 1: Nancy Bourque
