As people gathered at the new Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus in downtown Toronto on October 1 to help launch the city’s inaugural Climate Week, former mayor David Miller addressed the crowd with a story. Twenty years ago, he told them, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, England, asked his staff to identify the cities leading the fight against climate change. At the top of their list was Toronto, which was cleaning up public spaces, prioritizing public transit, expanding recycling programs and tapping Lake Ontario water to cool downtown offices.
Miller ended up sending some of his staff to London to share Toronto’s success stories, launching a partnership that eventually inspired the creation of C40 Cities, a network that now includes 100 cities around the planet committed to climate action. Those were heady days, said Miller, who chaired the C40 following his second term as mayor. But, he told the Toronto Climate Week crowd, “I think we’ve faded a bit since then. We’ve been resting on our laurels, and it’s time to reassert our leadership.”
Everything vulnerable in our world is most at risk. But the biggest gap is creating a space for synergy, where people can come together and learn what each other is doing, and amplify it. We need this multiplier effect.
– Joannah Lawson, Brian & Joannah Lawson Family Foundation
Founded four months ago by Becky Park-Romanovsky, an HR specialist turned social entrepreneur, Toronto Climate Week aims to restore the city’s environmental swagger. As Park-Romanovsky watched Donald Trump’s administration renege on its climate commitments, she realized this could be an opportunity for Canada to sprint in the other direction. “When the U.S. broke up with us, I realized Canada has to be economically self-sufficient, and climate has to be part of that,” she says. “We need our own connections, we need to retain talent, and we need a platform where Canadians can work together and get to know each other.”
A template for a transformative gathering
Having already founded Climate North, an event series bringing together 1,500 activists and innovators dedicated to rooting out carbon, Park-Romanovsky decided Toronto’s environmental community needed a confidence-building big event to rally around. Her model: official Climate Week programs in New York and San Francisco, ambitious and inclusive public events featuring leaders in business, government and civil society. New York’s latest Climate Week, held just last week, included more than 1,000 different events and attracted 100,000 participants.
Working with like-minded supporters and mentors over the summer, Park-Romanovsky laid out a plan for an inaugural one-day Climate Week program this fall, building to a full week next June. But she found so much support that the “soft launch” became a three-day event with more than 100 events, ranging from the everyday lectures and panels to technology demonstrations and guided tours, musical performances, webinars, craft fairs, start-up pitch competitions, a ravine walk and a “solar-punk” fashion show. The overarching goal: to turn Toronto into the next global hub for climate innovation.
Opening day featured an all-day conference, affordably priced for entrepreneurs and activists, and kicked off with in-person greetings from Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Julie Dabrusin. While attendees later criticized both politicians for their lack of action on climate issues, Dabrusin – a Toronto MP – won points for acknowledging that “the solutions to climate change aren’t going to come from government, but from business leaders like you in this room.”
A test for Canadian innovation
For its part, corporate Canada was distinguished by its absence. Some big names were involved in the programming, including BDC, EY, PwC and Salesforce. But when a conference’s title sponsor is a University of Toronto research institute, you know the private sector is keeping its powder dry. While disappointed with the lack of support, Park-Romanovsky noted that Climate Week’s brief time frame didn’t match many corporations’ planning cycles, so she hopes for more support next spring.
Climate Week’s success will be judged over time, on how it catalyzes new ideas and projects based on bringing people together. Several first-day attendees told Corporate Knights they believe the opening-day session did just that. A former banker said she met five people with whom she will be following up, to advise them or explore common interests. An architect said he met several possible collaborators, and two colleagues from a municipal agency who work from home pointed out how rarely they get to meet like-minded people in person.
Two of the biggest fans of Climate Week are also, indirectly, among its biggest sponsors. Brian Lawson, vice-chair of investment giant Brookfield, and his wife, Joannah, a nutritionist and former senior manager at Nortel, donated $60 million this year to a University of Toronto climate centre (now the Lawson Climate Institute), to spur innovative climate solutions and train the next generation of climate leaders.
In endowing the institute, Joannah says, they ensured that it had the discretionary resources to help lead new initiatives, such as Climate Week. “Climate action is not a luxury,” she says. “Everything vulnerable in our world is most at risk. But the biggest gap is creating a space for synergy, where people can come together and learn what each other is doing, and amplify it. We need this multiplier effect.”
To close the first day’s proceedings, David Miller found another way to measure the potential of projects like Climate Week. “Seventy-four percent of Canadians want climate action,” he said. “But they think that their neighbours don’t. And when you overestimate your opponent, that’s a recipe for political inaction. That’s why Climate Week is so important – to get together, tell these stories and build this culture.”
Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also an editor-at-large at Corporate Knights.
