Climate & Environment
The Village of Rhinebeck:
A Bronze-certified Climate Smart Community & Designated Clean Energy Community
Our village, together with communities across NY state, needs to transition to zero carbon emissions, invest in community resilience, restore ecosystems, build a more just and sustainable future. We need to do it. But the question is how? We have pledged to become a Climate Smart Community and a Clean Energy Community, and these programs maps out how.
Learn More & Get Involved
Visit our website at ClimateSmartRhinebeck.org to find out about local environmental programming, actions the CSC Task Force is tackling right now, and how to get involved. You can also visit NY State’s CSC website to browse through the over 100 actions and explore what other municipalities are doing across the state. After earning our Bronze-certification, our CSC profile was updated for the public to dig into detailed documentation of our work.
The CSC Certification Program
This set of over 100 actions, developed by the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, provides a transformational roadmap. This is how we are drawing down our carbon footprint and building more efficient and resilient operations.
As our village certifies at higher levels of the CSC program (as we prove we’ve undertaken more and more of the actions), we receive higher rankings for our applications for NY State grants which will further fund our sustainability projects. The Rhinebeck Village Board, under Mayor Reardon, took the first steps by passing a resolution to become a Climate Smart Community in 2010. On January 10, 2020, the Climate Smart Task Force submitted our first public filing, and in March 2020 achieved Bronze level certification, one of only about 50 in NY State at the time. We resubmitted for bronze in 2024. We are now working towards Silver.
The CSC Task Force
Mayor Bassett and the Village Board have formed a task force to run point on the CSC program and Trustee Vanessa Bertozzi is serving as the coordinator. Our goal is for the CSC Task Force to be a focusing mechanism, to draw together both the community and government in our actions to fight climate change.
The CSC Task Force is currently meeting quarterly, with the Compost Subcommittee meeting weekly. Core task force members are expected to manage projects which contribute specifically to the CSC framework and help us build a more sustainable future for Rhinebeck. We’d love to hear from you! Visit our website at ClimateSmartRhinebeck.org to join our email newsletter or contact trusteebertozzi@villageofrhinebeckny.gov.