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.

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This summer has been historically destructive. Climate-change-driven wildfires continue to burn across the country. As of this writing, more than 8.7 million hectares have been scorched – an area about 2.5 times that of Vancouver Island – the second-worst year in Canadian history. Smoke from these wildfires ensured that the effects of the fires were felt in terms of degraded air quality hundreds of kilometres away. Drought affected many parts of the country, with southern Ontario, where I live, receiving virtually no rain in July and August.

Aside from the sheer scale of the devastation, the real significance of the past few months is what it augurs for the future. The summer of 2023, the worst wildfire season in our country’s history, prompted a flurry of surprised reactions. When the summer of 2024 wasn’t quite so bad, many people breathed a sigh of relief. But this past summer makes clear that 2023 wasn’t a one-off: the flames came roaring back. The trend is now clear, and we need stronger, faster action to keep Canadians and their communities safer. The only way to do this is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to invest in improved climate-proof infrastructure.

Canada’s summer of wildfire isn’t unusual. Countries all over the world experienced something similar. In most places, governments have quite logically focused on necessary solutions and are doubling down on decarbonization and preparing for a future of worsening climate impacts. As one example, the European Union is locking in a plan to achieve a 90% reduction in climate-changing pollution by 2040.

In North America, however, we are overwhelmed with media coverage of Donald Trump’s vendetta against all things climate-related. There is no logic to this: in fact, Trump’s hatred of wind turbines apparently originated with a personal dispute related to his Scottish golf course.

With the U.S. federal government backing away from action on climate change (though it needs to be underlined that many U.S. states are staying the course on net-zero), there are some Canadian voices saying we should just fall in line with Trump’s retrograde agenda.

I’m confident that the vast majority of Canadians understand the folly of doing this. Canadians know that Donald Trump has terrible ideas. Terrible ideas on Ukraine. Terrible ideas on tariffs. And terrible ideas on climate change.

A much better approach is to skate to where the puck is headed globally. If you look at the current and contemplated climate change policies of all the other countries with which Canada needs to diversify its trade, they’re pointing in the opposite direction to that which Trump is laying out.

More than four months ago, the current federal government was elected on a very strong and explicit climate change platform. In the intervening period, it has given Canadians very little sense of how it wants to take the nation’s climate policy forward. That vacuum, unfortunately, has encouraged vested interests to surface endless cockamamie arguments as to why our country should give up on the fight against global warming completely.

The next parliamentary session is the moment to reset and relaunch Canada’s decarbonization journey.

The priorities are clear. A handful of laws, both existing and new, are necessary to move us forward, including fixing our system of industrial carbon pricing, nailing down new regulations to reduce methane pollution, building more clean electricity and getting more affordable electric vehicles into the hands of Canadians.

We need renewed progress on climate change that works for Canadians, not for Donald Trump. And we need it quickly.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post A fork in the road for the Canadian climate change discussion appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But the intense backlash directed at JSO is not evidence that its campaign faltered. It is a sign that these activists succeeded in emotionally charging the public debate about climate change. They gave the public something to argue about, react to, even mock – and in doing so, made the climate crisis impossible to ignore.

The alternative, an apathetic consensus, would entail passively accepting the dominant approach to address the climate crisis. That means market-based solutions, a faith in technological innovation and incremental policy reforms within existing political and economic systems. These have arguably so far failed, as global temperatures continue to skyrocket.

Movements that are easy to ignore tend to be forgotten. Just Stop Oil made itself, and its cause, impossible to ignore.

Through my own research on climate activism, I have studied how environmental protest influences policy, corporate behaviour and financial markets. Activists can stimulate change, but not through rational arguments alone. Change happens by making an emotional splash. It creates antagonism, dissent and tension, which are all needed to enliven public debate. Emotions including anger, fear and guilt play a key role in the ability of activists to create moral urgency and force issues into the spotlight.

JSO harnessed this emotional logic not only from supporters, but from critics. Those who dragged protesters off roads, raged in comment sections and professed their hate toward the group were reacting because the group had emotionally triggered them. Like a person who gets under your skin, JSO became very hard to ignore.

The post The legacy of Just Stop Oil is that disruptive tactics work appeared first on Corporate Knights.

People the Planet Needs Now tells the stories of 25 scientists and activists working to protect and support their racialized and Indigenous communities in a changing climate.

The shoulders on which these younger folk stand are partially revealed by the next two environmental-justice-related titles: the new memoir by Catherine Coleman Flowers and the recently released classic by Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright.

The Bullard and Wright book provides a bridge of sorts to the more academic titles that follow, works that shift the focus from “environmental justice” to “climate justice.”

Among this second set of three titles, the new book by prolific legal scholar Cass Sunstein is likely to garner the most attention. Readers can get a preview of his take on climate justice from his interview with New York Times climate columnist David Wallace-Wells. Not Just Green, Not Just White and Climate Justice and the University complement Sunstein’s philosophical overview with deeper dives into environmental history and higher education.

Critical social histories make up the third rank, with new titles on “land power,” the Caribbean, and an activist, anti-consumerist “church” in the Alphabet City neighbourhood of New York City.

This month’s selections end with three recently published volumes of climate fiction: Library of America’s new collection of Afrofuturist stories and new novels from East Africa and Indigenous Australia. The two novels, it should be noted, made the long list for the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize. The short list for the prize will be announced next month; the winning title will be named in May.

As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the paperback edition.

People the Planet Needs Now: Voices for Justice, Science and a Future of Promise by Dudley Edmundson (Adventure Books 2025, 264 pages, $30)

Heroes among us are fighting for a better world – and many of them are Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour (BIPOC). Acclaimed author and photographer Dudley Edmondson has interviewed 25 racialized scientists, environmental justice activists, and social justice activists to inspire change on a global scale. Along with the full-colour photographs, his book offers a rare opportunity to see and hear from BIPOC scientists and activists about problems with “traditional” science and the current methods of addressing everything from climate change to city design. Racialized people around the globe have an interdependent relationship with nature, and their perspectives can help us push for positive change. People the Planet Needs Now strives to inspire difference-makers to create a better world together.

Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope by Catherine Coleman Flowers (Spiegel & Grau 2025, 240 pages, $28)

See also Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy (Simon & Schuster 2023/2024, 364 pages, $19.99 paperback)

The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities by Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright (New York

University Press 2012/2023, 313 pages, $19.99 paperback)

When the images of desperate, hungry, thirsty, sick, mostly Black people circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became apparent to the whole country that race did indeed matter when it came to government assistance. In The Wrong Complexion for Protection, Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright place the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades. They assess how the government responded to different emergencies and show that African Americans are disproportionately affected. Uncovering and eliminating disparate disaster response, they argue, can mean the difference between life and death for those most vulnerable in disastrous times.

Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, edited by Mary E. Mendoza and Traci Brynne Voyles (University of Nebraska Press 2025, 536 pages, $35.00 paperback)

Environmental history has been defined as the study of the changing relationships between humans and the environment – or nature. Not Just Green, Not Just White aims to redefine the field, arguing that neither humans nor the environment are monolithic actors. Both are diverse, and often the environment causes conflict between and among peoples, leaving unequal access and power in its wake. Just as important, these histories often reveal how, despite unequal power, those who carry less privilege still persist. Together the essays in this volume reveal how, when practitioners in the field move away from “green” and “white” topics, they will be able to explain much more about our collective past than anyone ever imagined.

Climate Justice: What Rich Nations Owe the World – and the Future by Cass Sunstein (MIT Press 2025, 216 pages, $29.95)

If you’re injuring someone, you should stop – and pay for the damage you’ve caused. Why, this book asks, does this simple proposition, generally accepted, not apply to climate change? In Climate Justice, a bracing challenge to status quo thinking, renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein clearly frames what’s at stake and lays out the moral imperative: when it comes to climate change, everyone must be counted equally, regardless of when or where they live – which means that wealthy nations, which have disproportionately benefited from greenhouse gas emissions, are obliged to help future generations and people in poor, particularly vulnerable, nations.

Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future for All by Jennie C. Stephens

Higher education can play a powerful role in addressing the intersecting crises of climate change and inequality. Institutions of higher education hold untapped potential to advance social justice and reduce climate injustices. However, universities are not yet structured to accelerate social change for the public good. In Climate Justice and the University, Jennie Stephens reimagines the potential of higher education to advance human well-being and promote ecological health. Drawing on more than 30 years of experience working on the climate crisis within higher education, she invites readers to collectively reimagine different priorities and structures within higher education, and suggests ways to shape a more equitable future for all.

See also Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education by Tom Roderick (Harvard Education Press 2023, 296 pages, $39 paperback)

Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus (Basic Books 2025, 336 pages, $30)

Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted Indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, in the forms of Soviet and Maoist collectivization. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism and climate crisis – and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate. Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe (Doubleday 2025, 384 pages, $35)

In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But the Caribbean people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe charts the forces that shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labour and the forced toil of enslaved people who mined the islands’ bounty – all for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Through the lens of the Caribbean, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. But his book is also a declaration of hope and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.

The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance by George Gonzalez (NYU Press 2024, 352 pages, $35 paperback)

The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, edited by andre m. carrington (Library of America 2025, 384 pages, $24.95 paperback)

With Afrofuturist pioneers like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, a new generation of Black writers is fashioning a renaissance in speculative fiction. Edited and introduced by SF expert andré m. carrington, The Black Fantastic brings together Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Tiptree/Otherwise and World Fantasy Award winners with emerging voices to showcase this watershed moment in American literature. Here are 20 beguiling, unsettling and visionary stories spanning the cosmos and a dazzling array of alternate timelines. Reimagining the past and laying claim to the future, these writers bring forth kaleidoscopic new visions of Black identity and creative freedom in stories that are, by turns, comic, provocative and terrifying.

Water Baby: A Novel by Chioma Okereke (Quercus Books 2024/2025, 17.99 paperback)

In Makoko, the floating slum off mainland Lagos, Nigeria, 19-year-old Baby yearns for an existence where she can escape the future her father has planned for her. With opportunities scarce, Baby jumps at the chance to join a newly launched drone-mapping project, aimed at broadening the visibility of her community.

Then a video of her at work goes viral and Baby finds herself with options she could never have imagined – including the possibility of leaving her birthplace to represent Makoko on the world stage. But will life beyond the lagoon be everything she’s dreamed of? Or has everything she wants been in front of her all along?

Praiseworthy: A Novel by Alexis Wright (New Directions 2024, 672 pages, $22.95)

In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, studies butterflies and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality – a cry of outrage against oppression, greed and assimilation.

This article by Yale Climate Connections is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

The post Dreaming of a just and sustainable future? Read these. appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The news cycle out of the United States can feel particularly chaotic and overwhelming lately. Almost daily, Canadians are faced with an onslaught of concerning developments south of the border on a variety of important issues. And when it comes to climate change, this news can seem uniformly grim (it’s not, and we’ll come back to this).

But it’s worth reminding ourselves of the important progress that’s happening on climate and clean energy around the world as an antidote to pessimism that can paralyze us right at the moment when action is needed most.

Take Europe, for example: the continent’s nations have seen massive progress in cutting emissions. The latest data show that European Union countries slashed emissions by more than 8% in a single year in 2023, the largest drop in decades outside the COVID-19 years. That left its collective emissions 37% lower than 1990 levels, all while the economy grew nearly 70% bigger. The EU remains on track to cut emissions 55% below where they were in 1990 by 2030.

The vast majority of major economies of the world remain deadly serious about decarbonization. We need to keep pace.

– Rick Smith, President, Canadian Climate Institute

In the United Kingdom, the country has already seen emissions fall by more than half since the same baseline year. A big driver of that success has been the stunning transformation of its electricity sector, where emissions fell by a full three-quarters in just 12 years. Over that same period, the country used its last pound of coal to power its grid, ending a long legacy that stretched back almost 150 years. Coal went from powering 40% of the nation’s electricity in 2012 to nothing in October of last year.

That’s incredible progress, but the U.K. isn’t resting on its laurels. It recently announced it will cut its emissions by more than 80% by 2035.

But what about China? That familiar refrain is becoming ever more absurd as the world’s largest country puts its foot on the accelerator for clean technologies. When it comes to electric vehicles, for example, more than half the vehicles in China – the world’s largest auto market – are expected to come with a plug-in this year. The remarkable growth in EVs in China helped make 2024 another record year for EV sales globally.

On wind and solar, China continues to break its own records. Clean power installations soared last year, as the country hit its 2030 renewable target six years ahead of schedule. That helped stall growth in China’s national emissions.

Climate progress is picking up speed

There is more good news in other parts of the globe. Major polluting nations like Indonesia, for example, have committed to phasing out coal by 2040, which will require a huge ramp-up in renewables. We’ve also seen huge progress across Latin America and the Caribbean as countries including Brazil, Chile and Uruguay add new clean electricity to their grids.

Brazil is hosting the United Nations climate conference in Belém this year, the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, and has made major progress in bringing Amazon deforestation to its lowest level since 2015.

Let’s come back to the United States. Yes, Donald Trump is eviscerating much of what the Biden administration tried to accomplish. But the last time Trump was in office, this simply shifted action to the state level.

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Many of the most durable climate policies that started or continued under the previous Trump and George W. Bush eras are still with us today. That includes two cap-and-trade systems and a basket of state renewable-energy mandates. Currently, 12 states that make up a third of the U.S. economy and more than a quarter of its population have carbon-pricing programs on the books. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia now have requirements for renewable or clean electricity, including many that are Republican-led.

So let’s not lose hope. And let’s make sure that we redouble our efforts to make progress here in Canada. The vast majority of major economies of the world remain deadly serious about decarbonization. We need to keep pace.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute and the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health.

The post The facts of climate progress are the antidote to pessimism appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Outside, temperatures can soar to plus 30°C, but the L+Snow resort, which opened in September 2024, is the world’s largest indoor ski resort. It’s an energy-intensive way of dealing with the climate crisis’s effect on winter sports, requiring 72 cooling machines and 33 snowmaking machines to maintain optimal winter conditions under a roof.

Could this be the future of skiing? Or rather, does skiing have a future at all in a world that’s being lashed  by climate change? It’s a major concern for resort operators, environmental researchers and, of course, winter sports enthusiasts witnessing rising temperatures and vanishing snow.

Last year, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, known as FIS, had to cancel 26 out of 616 World Cup races because of lack of snow and warm weather, prompting it to form a new partnership with the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to raise awareness that “winter sports and tourism face a bleak future because of climate change” unless more is done. In early 2023, 200 of the world’s top skiers sent a letter to FIS demanding more action on climate change, calling for a “geographically reasonable” race schedule with less intercontinental travel and a shift in the season to account for changing weather patterns.

“Climate change is, simply put, an existential threat to skiing and snowboarding. We would be remiss if we did not pursue every possible effort that is rooted in science and objective analysis,” FIS president Johan Eliasch said in a news release announcing the partnership in October.

According to WMO, global temperatures between January and September 2024 were 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average. “Ruined winter vacations and cancelled sports fixtures are – literally – the tip of the iceberg of climate change,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Retreating glaciers, reduced snow and ice cover and thawing permafrost are having a major impact on mountain ecosystems, communities and economies and will have increasingly serious repercussions at [the] local, national and global level for centuries to come.”

Ski resorts struggle to make up for lost snow

Around the world, ski resorts are scrambling to adapt. Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum holds its annual high-level talks about how the world is changing, is home to some of the planet’s best skiing and the longest-running series of high-altitude, day-by-day data on snow depth. The statistics show that since 1971, when the WEF first met in Davos, the area’s snowpack has thinned by more than 40%.

Davos and other areas have turned to snow farming – stockpiling natural snow when it falls to be moved to slopes and trails where the coverage would otherwise be too patchy. A 2023 study by French and Austrian scientists published in Nature Climate Change looked at 2,234 ski resorts in 28 European countries. The study found that without snowmaking, more than half of these resorts risk not having enough snow if global warming reaches 2°C – and nearly all will be wiped out if temperatures warm by 4°C.

It’s not enough for individual resorts to act alone. The power is in education, advocacy and combining our efforts.

– Geoff Buchheister, CEO, Aspen Skiing Company

Snowmaking can be of particular help to small mountains, in areas like Eastern Canada, where 76% of skiable terrain in Quebec and 95% in Ontario already have artificial facilities. But making snow is impractical at many larger sites such as B.C.’s Whistler Blackcomb, which has nearly 8,200 acres (3,300 hectares) to cover, says Daniel Scott, geography and environmental management professor at Ontario’s University of Waterloo. 

“There’s a cost for the water, the refrigeration and moving the snow,” says Scott, who is also executive director of the Waterloo Climate Institute and a board member of Protect Our Winters, a global organization that’s amassing research into the future of snow sports and how to conduct them more sustainably.

The climate pros and cons of snow-making

The great hurdle is reducing the planet-warming emissions involved in making all that snow. One study Scott conducted with colleagues in Innsbruck, Austria, found that the energy needed to produce artificial snow for resorts across Canada in one year equals the energy used by 17,000 homes, producing some 130,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases and using 43.4 million cubic metres of water.

Most of the water is returned to lakes, streams and the ground, but the energy required for all this snowmaking is about 478,000 megawatt hours. Scott says that the environmental impact of snowmaking can be lessened by improved technology, better water conservation and the conversion of electrical systems to renewable, lower- or zero-carbon grids. 

He adds that “snowmaking can actually help reduce total emissions from tourism when it enables millions of skiers to ski regionally instead of driving or flying to far-off ski resorts or selecting another type of carbon-intense holiday. Net-zero-compatible ski holidays are already possible in destinations like Quebec.” 

That said, smaller resorts tend to struggle with snowmaking costs, and only so much can be done when temperatures continue to hover above zero. Even a place like Ontario’s Blue Mountain, with a massive snowmaking system and access to Georgian Bay water, couldn’t open at Christmas in 2023 because of the weather.

How ski resorts are diversifying – and taking action on climate

Major resorts such Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico are going all out to lessen their carbon footprints, worrying about not only whether they can cover their slopes, but also how they can contribute less to the climate emergency that’s causing the snow decline. 

“We’re North America’s only certified B Corp ski resort,” says Dawn Boulware, vice president of environmental and social responsibility at Taos Ski Valley. (In France, the Les Arcs/Peisey-Vallandry area was certified in 2023.) This is the certification given by non-profit B Lab for companies committed to environmental stewardship and social responsibility. 

“We became carbon-neutral in 2022, we’ve electrified or are electrifying all our on-mountain buildings, use 100% solar energy in daytime and are testing an electric-powered snowcat groomer,” Boulware says. 

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Even with snowmaking, the prospect of ski-free winters looms large.

“There is a basic playbook for how ski resorts continue in a warming world,” says Auden Schendler, senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One in Colorado, which operates four mountains: Snowmass, Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands and Buttermilk. Beyond increasing their snowmaking and water storage sustainably, he says that resorts need to “diversify into summer activities like mountain biking and hiking and offer winter activities beyond skiing,” he explains in an email interview.

Resorts of all sizes are taking measures to attract non-skiers year-round, adding attractions like luxury spas and promoting sales of pay-in-advance annual passes, to secure money up front no matter what the season is like. 

Knowing they face an uphill battle, Aspen One’s leaders are going beyond reducing the company’s footprint and using their lobbying power to push governments to take action against the very emissions that are putting their industry at risk. “We started lobbying Washington for climate action in 2004,” Schendler says. “We installed the first solar power array in the ski industry.” Aspen One also built the first electricity plant in the United States to run on biogas waste methane (that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere). 

“We need to fight the larger political battles. Our lobbying paved the way for huge supplies of renewables in Colorado today,” Schendler says. The resort’s parent Aspen Skiing Company is outspoken against actions it considers to be greenwashing, such as carbon offsets, and it produces a detailed annual sustainability report that it hopes will inspire others in the ski industry and the larger corporate world. 

“It’s not enough for individual resorts to act alone. The power is in education, advocacy and combining our efforts,” says Geoff Buchheister, chief executive officer of Aspen Skiing Company.

“Skiing does have a future – if we take action together.”

David Israelson is a writer, non-practising lawyer and communications consultant in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The post How ski resorts are adapting to climate change appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Early analysis suggests that global warming increased the likelihood and intensity of the extreme downpour, caused in this case by clashing warm and cold air over the Mediterranean Sea. In Paiporta, a town where at least 60 people died, residents digging themselves out of the devastation hurled mud from the storm at the king and queen of Spain who came to pay a visit, screaming out “killers” as a balm to their impotence and grief. 

If a picture is still worth a thousand words in our hyper-visual societies, then these fragments of environmental destruction, and those demanding accountability, represent powerful ammunition in the climate-messaging wars swirling around us. 

While outright climate denialism is waning as the direct evidence of global warming mounts around the world, new and more pernicious forms of denial are gaining ground. The election of powerful climate skeptics in 2024 – including Donald Trump, whose new energy secretary is a former fracking CEO who has talked up the benefits of a warmer planet and who just pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord – shows just how fragile the gains made are. 

Last year was exceptional for global democracy. More voters than ever in history headed to the polls in at least 64 countries, representing nearly half the world’s population. That’s why the “super election year” was also considered crucial for climate change – a chance for electorates to install leaders who could shepherd the delicate decisions required to drive down our planet-heating emissions. And yet, climate concerns far from defined those votes, suggesting that the magnitude of the problem still eludes us. 

With 2024 going down as yet another hottest year on record, some scientists call the international target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels “dead as a doornail,” while the United Nations considers it to be “still technically possible.” Setting aside that abstract figures such as these mean little to the average person, the prescription depends on a massive mobilization to cut greenhouse gases, led by the industrialized G20 nations that have most contributed to warming. 

Yet even at the world’s largest annual climate talks, the messaging has grown increasingly murky, muddied by fossil fuel interests and, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell put it, a mix of “bluffing, brinkmanship and pre-meditated playbooks.”

So where do we go from here? What’s the story we should be telling about climate change to produce concrete action that staves off its worst effects? With increasingly polarized public discourse, rampant disinformation and a democracy deficit driving a wedge between leaders and the communities they lead, can messaging make a difference?

1.5 degrees of separation 

“What we know is we can get people to care.” That’s Sergio Velasquez-Rose, head of strategy, insights and analytics at the Potential Energy Coalition, a non-profit, non-partisan alliance of marketing agencies trying to shift the conversation on climate change. 

Polling suggests that much of the global public does, in fact, understand what is at stake. 

The largest stand-alone public opinion survey, known as the People’s Climate Vote, took the temperature of 77 countries – representing 87% of the world’s population – in 2024. It found that 86% of respondents want countries to work together to find climate solutions, even if they disagree on other issues such as trade and security. Eighty percent want their communities to strengthen their climate commitments, and 71% want their countries to replace coal, oil and gas with renewable energy quickly or somewhat quickly. A survey by Potential Energy of 23 countries came to a similar conclusion: more than three-quarters of respondents want governments to do “whatever it takes” to limit the effects of climate change. 

This suggests that crafting a climate message that resonates shouldn’t be that hard. But it has been. 

“We really see this as a major communication problem,” Velasquez-Rose says. “We have the policies, we have the solutions, we know what the problem is and how to address it – but we have not been able to connect with humans in the right way.” He adds, “We’re getting stuck in concepts.” 

In its climate marketing guide called “Talk Like a Human,” Potential Energy lays out tips and traps – the latter of which this article has already fallen victim to. Words including “decarbonization,” “net-zero,” “anthropogenic” or “carbon footprint” don’t work. Instead, lean into pollution, overheating and extreme weather. Don’t exaggerate, it says – terms like “climate emergency” or “climate crisis” work much better with people who are already alarmed but not with people who aren’t, Potential Energy has found. Even something like “fight climate change” has pitfalls, its research has discovered. Instead, “fight pollution” is far more effective, accurate and a framing that people are already familiar with. 

We talk to people’s heads, but we forget to talk to people’s hearts.

—Mark Hertsgaard, co-founder, Covering Climate Now

Too often, climate change coverage is locked in scientific abstractions, such as 1.5 degrees or parts per million, notes Mark Hertsgaard, who co-founded Covering Climate Now, a partnership of now more than 500 media outlets (including Corporate Knights) that share content and expertise over how to cover climate change. Most people don’t know about the Paris Agreement, let alone the significance of 1.5°C.

“We talk to people’s heads, but we forget to talk to people’s hearts,” says Hertsgaard, who has reported on climate for 30 years, from 25 countries. When he launched Covering Climate Now five years ago, the goal was to break the “climate silence.” Through a collective effort that stretches beyond his organization, he believes that has largely been achieved. But coverage is still driven by the “weather story” and occasionally by climate change conferences, with little intersection with political and economic desks. “That reflects a misunderstanding, to put it mildly, of what climate change is and what it means: that this is an existential threat comparable to nuclear war and nuclear weapons, just on a different time frame,” he says. 

India, for example, went to the polls in the midst of a ferocious heat wave in June that claimed the lives of dozens of election workers and set off protests about water shortages – but climate was hardly at the forefront for presidential contenders. A feedback loop was missed. “Had candidates talked more about it, then media would have talked more about it, and had the media talked more about it, candidates would have talked more about it,” Hertsgaard says. 

Therein lies another issue: the messengers. The fact that politicians are currently the main communicators of climate action is a problem, Velasquez-Rose says, given their lack of credibility in large swaths of the planet. In the United States, which Potential Energy research shows has the greatest polarization on climate issues in the world, climate action is mostly associated with just one party, alienating those who support the other. 

Before the pandemic, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish youth environmentalist, had hit a nerve, mobilizing millions of young people from Argentina to Iceland to skip school and join marches to demand greater action from their governments with her Fridays for Future movement. But by 2024, some of the most visible climate messengers were critical of climate policies: European farmers driving their tractors into cities, pelting police with beets and dumping potatoes in front of legislative buildings in a standoff that led legislators to roll back environmental policies on the fastest-warming continent on the planet. 

“We need new voices to be the face of climate,” Velasquez-Rose says. He points to the success of a campaign they have run called “Science Moms,” which features scientists who are also mothers speaking about the impacts of climate change. In the five years since the campaign launched, it has increased support for climate policies by 20% among the target audience of moderate suburban mothers, Velasquez-Rose says. The Science Moms have credibility, and they are relatable, which is part of the secret sauce. 

Climate messaging bubbles and the new denialism

It’s not just what is being said, and who is saying it, but how that messaging is being funnelled and funded. For decades, the right-wing media machine in the United States has been building a powerful amplification system that stretches across evangelical churches, radio talk shows, podcasts, influencers and YouTube streamers, with massive amounts of funding from oil and gas interests and beyond pouring into anti-climate messaging that spreads disinformation like wildfire. “Nothing like that exists on the left,” Hertsgaard says. “Instead, there is a mainstream media that is still trying to play by the old rules that we’re going to be so-called objective and we’re not going to take sides. We sure as hell should be partisan as hell on behalf of the truth.” 

New fronts have also opened in the messaging wars that are reflected in a reframing of who bears responsibility. Richard Brooks, the Toronto-based climate finance director of Stand.earth, an environmental organization, notes the slippery shift from big banks. “There is this term that we keep hearing over and over again, which is that the energy transition that needs to happen has got to be ‘orderly’ – I’m going to put that in quotes,” he says. “And that is code for ‘We will stay invested in oil and gas companies.’ It will continue to be business as usual.” 

Since the Paris Agreement, Canadian bank investments in fossil fuels haven’t significantly changed, Brooks notes, with the “Big Five” banks funnelling nearly $1 trillion into the industry between 2016 and 2023, according to Stand.earth. “Slow-walking on climate action is really the new climate denialism,” he says. 

Brooks is part of a wave of longtime environmental activists who have shifted away from climate-messaging campaigns that try to get the public on side and instead have set their sights on the finance sector, fuelled by the belief that money is the message. Some, like the founders of Investors for Paris Compliance, are now working as shareholder activists, directing their messaging to hold Canadian publicly traded companies accountable to their net-zero promises. A number of environmental groups have established climate finance arms, including Stand.earth, which calls out inconsistent messaging from banks that claim to be net-zero aligned while still financing fossil fuels. 

“We need to challenge any corporate leader [or] CEO of a bank or pension fund who says we need to go orderly on this and slow,” Brooks says. “There’s nothing orderly about wildfires forcing thousands to evacuate [or] Toronto, the financial centre of Canada, flooding twice this summer.” 

From ‘greenwashing’ to ‘greenhushing’

Fear of getting caught in the crosshairs of the climate-messaging wars has contributed to a growing number of companies going quiet. A Republican-led backlash against corporate climate policies, under the banner of ESG (environmental, social, governance), has given rise to “greenhushing” – rather than aggrandizing environmental initiatives through “greenwashing,” companies are shying away from publicizing their green efforts. 

“In a polarized political environment, communicating about climate can feel risky for a publicly-traded company,” writes the Potential Energy Coalition, which teamed up with the We Mean Business Coalition to develop a new messaging guide for businesses. Across the globe, research shows that consumers want companies to reduce planet-warming pollution and invest in clean energy. In fact, they are more likely to spend their money on, speak well of and want to work for corporations that do so. The key, Potential Energy has found, is to frame climate action around materiality – not morality. 

“One thing is the messaging, the other thing is the business reality,” says María Mendiluce, CEO of We Mean Business and co-founder of the Women Leading on Climate coalition. “We see that the business community across the board is moving to clean energy because it makes business sense.” Still, language matters, she says. “In general, it’s quite simple: simple messages that people understand, that they can relate to.” 

“I think the left has been very good at complicating things to a level that many don’t understand and disconnecting with the base, with people who may not have that level of understanding of something that is really complex,” Mendiluce says. “We talk about ESG. And people are like, what is this? Even for me, and I come from the energy world.” 

One person who is adept at distilling a message so it resonates with a wide audience is once again president of the United States. The Democrats may have shied away from making climate change a focal point of their campaign, but Donald Trump used it. In the battleground state of Michigan, the Trump campaign ran ads that demonized the electric vehicle industry and cut to the heart of U.S. sensibilities about personal freedom and government overreach. “Kamala Harris wants to end all gas-powered cars. Crazy but true,” one commercial said. “Michigan auto workers are paying the price. Massive layoffs already started. You could be next.”

The climate change message has become so toxic to right-wing voters that some advocates for climate action believe the key is finding approaches that sidestep the topic and engage on different terms. For Joe Sacks, a Democratic political strategist, that means finding “friendlier terrain.” He is executive director of the EV Politics Project, a venture launched by EV-owning Republicans “frustrated by the growing EV bashing” and looking to foster more productive discussions around electric vehicles. His group found that US$35.5 million was spent nationwide on EV advertising during the presidential campaign. Some 94% of that money was spent in Michigan, the automotive heart of America, and the vast majority of the messaging was anti-EV.

Sacks thinks that Democrats should stop messaging along climate lines when it comes to EVs. “That’s just not how this is going to work. We need to find messaging that brings people in, that meets them where they are,” he says. Right now, he says, that message needs to revolve around manufacturing jobs. “Jobs that you often don’t need to get a college degree for, jobs that are often unionized, and when they’re not unionized they still pay really well, jobs that are spread across this country.” 

Democracy deficit

Tyrell Gittens, a climate change reporter in Trinidad and Tobago, agrees that the key is speaking to people in terms that hit closer to home. Issues like inflation or the success of their crops remain top of mind for many on his island nation, but the volatile climate’s role in that is still not clearly understood by many. “People want to understand; we have to meet them where they are,” he says. “An informed citizenry will create political will.” 

Inés Camilloni, a climate scientist in Argentina, notes a whole host of economic and geopolitical factors well beyond the scope of communication that make progress on tangible climate action complex, and, certainly, too slow. But “we have progressed.” And she credits messaging with helping usher in cultural transformations, including in places like her home country, where young people inspired by Thunberg helped push the government to enact new environmental legislation. That was, however, before the election of the current president, Javier Milei, a strong ally of Trump who echoes his denial that climate change is human-caused. In November, Milei pulled his delegation from the COP29 discussions and then revealed he was reconsidering Argentina’s place in the Paris Agreement, a move that raised the spectre of other countries following suit. “We are in uncertain times,” Camilloni admits. 

The biggest motivator 

For Hertsgaard, there are important levers still to be pulled in the messaging battle. “We have to be talking about solutions – not just what’s wrong,” he says. And drawing more attention to the gap that exists between what people say they want from their governments on climate action and what governments are doing.

The research is already painting a pretty clear picture of what works, Velasquez-Rose notes. Protecting one’s health and protecting our homes and families against extreme weather performs far better as a motivator for action against climate pollution. But fear versus hope is the wrong debate. The biggest motivator is protecting what we love. 

“The thing that ultimately gets us, that really core human truth, is protecting the future for the next generation,” Velasquez-Rose says. “When we think about communicating, we need to think about the humans. I can’t reiterate that enough.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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There was a lot to choose from – something that may not be immediately apparent in the aftermath of the U.S. election and news that 2024 will almost certainly be the hottest on record.   

But it’s true: Canada and the world made enormous strides addressing climate change and building a cleaner economy. Here are the top 10 stories from 2024:  

Electric vehicle sales in Canada continued to rise 

You may not know it from news coverage, but sales of electric vehicles in Canada are at their highest level ever. And they keep rising: market share for EVs in Canada has roughly tripled over the past three years, with the latest quarterly data showing sales at 16.5% nationally. In fact, gas vehicle sales in Canada peaked in 2017 and have been falling ever since.  

The question ahead is one of pace, with Quebec rapidly taking the North American crown for EV adoption. More than one in three vehicle sales in la belle province were electric last quarter –substantially higher than runner-up California.  

Globally, it was the same story: EVs rising  

The trend is even more pronounced globally, where EV sales are set for another record year. A big part of the story is China – the world’s largest auto-market – where the latest data show EVs taking more than half the market. That has contributed to a peak in oil consumption in the country last year, according to the latest official estimates. 

Taken together, the rise of EVs is expected to cut global oil demand by six million barrels per day by 2030, according to the International Energy Association (IEA). 

Peak fossil fuels by 2030

On a related note: the IEA projected that global demand for fossil fuels will peak before 2030, thanks largely to the rapid electrification of the economy. Other forecasts, including those from oil and gas companies, have come to a similar conclusion. Global declines in the demand for fossil fuels will have important implications for Canada and the long-term competitiveness of the oil and gas sector.  

Clean electricity continued to soar 

As fossil fuels decline, they’re quickly being replaced by an age of clean electricity. The IEA expects roughly $2 trillion in clean energy investments in 2024, nearly double the amount invested in fossil fuels. More than 40% of electricity worldwide was non-emitting in 2023, and more than 90% of the growth in net power capacity came from wind and solar. 

Provinces and territories made big moves on clean electricity 

In Canada, we saw big progress on clean electricity across the country, despite some more high-profile disputes. Ontario is ramping up electrification with a goal to become a clean energy superpower. Hydro-Québec is investing up to $185 billion over the next decade to expand clean energy and electrify the province. Quebec inked a deal with Newfoundland and Labrador last week that would see a massive amount of new clean electricity come online in future years. British Columbia is charging ahead with enough new wind projects to increase power supply by 8% – with more to come in future years. The federal government recently committed up to $1 billion in Indigenous-led wind power in New Brunswick, on top of other clean energy investments. And in Saskatchewan, the federal government is investing more than $265 million in clean electricity, including Indigenous-led renewable projects.  

The cost of clean energy continued to drop

The cost of clean energy continued to drop worldwide, especially in solar and battery technologies. In the first half of this year alone, for example, solar photovoltaic prices dropped 20%, according to the IEA. Solar module prices were cut in half over the past year. And grid-scale battery storage prices declined by nearly 10%.  

That can’t help but have positive impacts on affordability here at home. On that front, new research released this year showed that the transition to clean electricity can save people money: most households in Canada can expect to save up to $1,100 each year by switching to more efficient technologies such as EVs and heat pumps by mid-century. That echoes earlier research from the Canadian Climate Institute that found that the switch off fossil fuels can save people money on energy costs over time.  

Indigenous nations led on clean energy 

Indigenous Peoples continued to lead the way on climate and clean energy in 2024. The Oneida battery storage plant – the largest facility of its kind in the country and a 50/50 partnership with the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario – is set to power up next summer. Likewise, an energy storage project led by the Malahat First Nation on Vancouver Island will produce enough battery power for tens of thousands of homes and support hundreds of local jobs. Indigenous Peoples are partners or beneficiaries in nearly one-fifth of Canada’s electricity generation – and almost all of that is renewables.   

This year also brought important new policy research on an Indigenous electrification strategy, Indigenous participation in clean energy, and Indigenous housing and clean technologies.  

Canada has made progress cutting emissions 

The latest estimates from the Canadian Climate Institute show that Canada’s emissions saw a modest drop in 2023 and now sit around 8% below where they were in 2005. Climate policies are working – with industrial carbon pricing leading the pack. Canada’s emissions would be higher today without the actions taken to date by all levels of government since 2015. By 2030, existing climate policies are expected to prevent 226 megatons of emissions – the same amount as current emissions from Quebec and Ontario combined. But getting closer to Canada’s emission targets still requires more action. Governments can deliver even deeper emission cuts by following through and finalizing developing and announced policies.  

Big progress electrifying buildings 

This year also saw Quebec committing to 100% renewable energy to heat all buildings, except in the industrial sector, which will mean a big transition away from fossil fuels to highly efficient electric heat pumps. This type of planned transition in the building sector is necessary to protect consumers from higher costs and stranded assets. Likewise, Vancouver avoided a reversal of its nation-leading rules that effectively banned gas for heating most buildings.    

Oil and gas sector makes progress cutting methane 

Emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector remain a critical challenge for climate policy, making up more than 30% of national emissions. But one area that has seen progress is methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas. Cutting methane is a no-brainer and widely considered to be the cheapest and easiest way to slash emissions from the sector. This fall, British Columbia announced it had already cut methane emissions in half from the sector, exceeding its mandated 2025 target, and Alberta has done the same. The federal government has drafted regulations that would reduce oil and gas methane 75% by 2030. There are important caveats, with recent research finding higher estimates of methane than previously thought, but progress has generally been encouraging.    

Taken together, it’s been a year of surprisingly good news in the realm of climate and clean energy. That’s not to diminish the challenges ahead – but let’s not lose sight of the progress that’s been made. And let’s redouble our efforts in 2025. 

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute. 

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Protection from extreme heat is not a luxury, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told attendees at the COP29 climate conference last week: it is a necessity and a sound investment. In July, Guterres’s office published a call to action on extreme heat, which stated that “the world’s cities are heating up at twice the global average rate due to rapid urbanization and the urban heat island effect.”

Heeding that call to action means cutting carbon emissions, of course. But solutions also lie elsewhere – notably, in better urban design, architecture and planning that mitigates excess heat that’s already a reality and helps reduce heat-related deaths and other detrimental social and economic consequences.

“Cities are where we live, that’s where the heat challenges are,” said Rasmus Astrup, partner and design principal at the Danish landscape architecture firm SLA, one of four expert panellists in a session at last month’s Human/Nature design conference in Toronto called “Forecast for Hotter Cities.”

Astrup is recognized worldwide for climate-adaptive designs rooted in nature. This includes SLA’s work as part of the team that created the framework plan for Toronto’s 520-acre Downsview airport site, the biggest urban redevelopment project in North America. “When we started working on the Downsview airport, we were told that we have to coordinate the whole design so it is fitting with the fact that [Toronto’s climate] would be like Barcelona when the master plan is fully implemented,” Astrup said. “That’s the reality: climate is changing. It’s happening everywhere.”

Astrup’s message, shared by his fellow panellists: “Don’t give up hope. We can do something.” Keeping with that mantra, the group presented an array of innovative ideas, planning policies and design projects from Canada and around the world that cities are now deploying to beat back the heat. Taken together, five key themes emerged.

1. Bring back nature

Data gathered for many years across hundreds of cities show what most urban dwellers know from experience: locations with ample tree cover and vegetation, particularly parks and ravines, are cooler than areas that are mostly pavement and other impervious materials.

Shade is the biggest factor. But trees also cool the environment by emitting water vapour into the air. Bringing back nature also has the collateral benefit of reducing other urban maladies – flooding, noise, air pollution and stress – while also boosting biodiversity.

Applying a “life-centric approach” to projects is another way to incorporate nature into the city fabric, said panellist Dorsa Jalalian, an associate and senior urban designer at the Canadian firm Dialog. It’s a concept that puts nature front and centre, rooted in Indigenous thinking. “If you just design an ecosystem that’s comfortable for all life to thrive, people are probably comfortable there, too,” Jalalian explained.

2. Focus on public health and equity

There’s a second correlation that goes with most of the data linking levels of tree canopy and urban heat: namely, that poorer, marginalized, minority populations typically live and work in the hottest areas. “We know that climate change impacts don’t affect neighbourhoods equally,” Jalalian said. “If you take a [Toronto] surface temperature map and the distribution of tree canopy and overlay that onto the socioeconomic data, you can see that wealthier neighbourhoods have better access to tree canopies and more vulnerable lower-income neighbourhoods have poor access to canopies and shade.”

In 2021, the White House directed the Council on Environmental Quality to develop a Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. It identifies communities that are overburdened, underserved and disadvantaged on eight metrics, including climate change. The tool is now used by federal agencies to ensure that those areas receive an outsized share of benefits from investments in climate and clean energy.

What’s ultimately needed is a reframing of the problem, explained panel moderator Fadi Masoud, associate professor of landscape architecture and urbanism at the University of Toronto. “Equitable access to shade and comfortable microclimates are often perceived as an amenity but should instead be considered a public health concern,” he said.

3. Appoint urban heat officers

When it comes to obstacles preventing cities from mounting strong, effective actions to address extreme heat, one of the biggest is a lack of accountability or coordination of efforts across various city departments. A potential solution, according to panellist Owen Gow, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center in Washington, D.C., is to appoint a chief heat officer.

The idea is to have someone in place who can tackle the issue of extreme heat across the entire city, Gow explained. “Can there be one person who wakes up every day in a city focused entirely on extreme heat; who can go to the health department, the transportation department and start drawing linkages between them?” As the idea catches on, Gow said, chief heat officers also become the face of a city’s response to extreme heat.

To date, Gow said, nearly a dozen municipalities worldwide have appointed chief heat officers. The Climate Resilience Center runs a support network helping the group develop and implement strategies and share ideas. “What’s applicable in Santiago is not applicable often in Freetown or Bangladesh, but there are a lot of commonalities,” he said. The result is an evolving “global playbook” with a set of solutions starting to be deployed around the world.

4. Rethink city streets

If cities are hottest where there’s pavement, then cooling the biggest paved areas – city streets – is low-hanging fruit in the fight against extreme heat. Technical fixes include using lighter-colour or permeable paving that absorbs less heat. But for larger road networks, “green streets” are a proven solution with the potential to be scaled up exponentially.

“Growing Green Streets” is one of the primary heat-mitigation programs now being rolled out by the City of Toronto’s urban design department. Still in the study phase, the initiative is “really about maximizing opportunities for growing the tree canopy across the city,” said Kristina Reinders, urban design program manager. While green street projects often start by simply adding planters and flower beds with enhanced drainage on sidewalks, more ambitious plans include tree plantings, rain gardens and road narrowing.

Related

Can a wave of chief heat officers help cool a melting planet?

There’s an urban tree revolution underway in North America

Knight Bites: Six ways cities are trying to keep their cool in record-breaking heat waves

A second option, of course, is to get rid of roads and pavement entirely and rethink planning policies to downplay the focus on cars. “What heats up the streets, what heats up the environment we live in? That’s the cars,” Astrup said.

To illustrate, he showed slides of an SLA project in Manchester, England, that’s still in the design phase. It involves removing the road in an inner-city block and restoring a river bed that had been routed into a culvert and paved over. ‘It’s the asphalt,” he said. “Asphalt is ‘ass’ and ‘fault.’ Why does it have to influence 70% of the space where I live? It is super dumb.”

5. Mandate thermal comfort

Along with focusing on city streets and pavement, planners and designers are also embracing a more holistic approach, encompassing site plans and building designs, to improve and set standards for maintaining a certain level of “thermal comfort” in public spaces. It’s a methodology that considers four factors that determine how comfortable people feel in an outdoor setting: air temperature, radiant temperature, wind and humidity. Those variables are then combined to calculate a site’s score on a thermal climate index.

In Toronto, designer Dorsa Jalalian is working with the city on a study that will ultimately establish a Toronto-specific methodology to measure thermal comfort, one that incorporates future climate projections. The final guidelines will be “performance-based and not prescriptive,” Jalalian said. “As long as you achieve the target or you are designing with thermal comfort in mind, you can pick whatever works best for your project.”

Brian Banks is a writer and editor whose work focuses mainly on science and nature, conservation, landscape, climate and sustainability.

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The initiative, a partnership between veterans of Canada’s climate fight and relative newcomers, raises the ante, with deep-pocketed foundations and wealthy individuals stepping into the limelight to demonstrate their willingness to spend large sums at a time when many governments seem to be retreating from climate policies.

Two prominent foundations – the Trottier Family Foundation and the Peter Gilgan Foundation – contributed $250 million, with the balance coming from smaller and newer funds, including one set up by direct-air-capture pioneer David Keith, a University of Chicago physicist who last year sold his start-up, Carbon Engineering, to Texas-based Occidental for US$1.1 billion. The Ivey Foundation also recommitted an earlier pledge of $100 million.

According to a press release, “the new commitments were made through the Climate Champions initiative, coordinated by Clean Economy Fund, which has the goal of tripling climate philanthropy in Canada from roughly $100 million to more than $300 million per year by 2030.” The Clean Economy Fund released data in September indicating that Canadian climate donations – $106 million in 2022 – represent less than 1% of all giving.

The committed funds will be allocated by the individual foundations, according to their own philanthropic programs, which may direct grants to advocacy, technology, policy-making or other initiatives, Eric St-Pierre says in an interview. St-Pierre is the executive director of the Trottier Family Foundation, which has long been active in climate philanthropy. “I would say this $405 million is first a pledge, it’s a commitment, and it’s basically a call to action.”

The target audience for this appeal, however, is definitely not mass-market. For the past two years, according to St-Pierre, officials from Trottier and a few other climate philanthropies have been quietly meeting with high-net-worth individuals and families, sounding them out on committing donations to some aspect of the fight against climate change.

This outreach campaign has sought to help smaller foundations figure out how to dip their toes in a space that can involve a good deal of technical complexity, as well as uncertainty as to the effectiveness of those donations. In many cases, wealthy families will set up family foundations with very specific philanthropic goals – healthcare, humanitarian relief, culture, scholarships, et cetera. “We’ve been sitting down for coffee, trying to explain the work that we do, trying to answer questions, trying to bring them along,” St-Pierre says.

An evolving approach to climate philanthropy

Historically, a large chunk of climate-adjacent philanthropy has gone toward conservancy organizations that buy ecologically sensitive land and establish anti-development easements that will protect those tracts in perpetuity. These gifts are also eligible for various types of tax exemptions.

Advocacy groups that target mainly individuals for support have been the other long-standing fixture of climate philanthropy, with donations underwriting lobbying, legal challenges and public action campaigns.

More recently, some foundations have invested in both advocacy and impact funding, meaning investments in either not-for-profit or for-profit revenue-generating activities, or technology start-ups, that may bring some kind of environmental benefit as well as a return on investment. But even climate-focused foundations acknowledge it will take trillions of dollars in private capital to transform and decarbonize massive sectors like energy, transportation and building materials.

Some climate philanthropists now position their role as catalysts pursuing a “theory of change,” with funding that underwrites or supports emerging economic activity, such as electric vehicle supply chains or green steel. “One of the fundamental ways in which we observe and measure this effect is in the unleashing of capital,” observed Eric Campbell, executive director of the Clean Economy Fund, in a recent blog post. “Like the small-sized domino, well-targeted and well-timed philanthropic capital can unlock much greater amounts of public and private capital.”

St-Pierre says that some climate foundations have explored the idea of establishing a pooled climate fund, to which smaller and less experienced, or less well-resourced, family foundations could contribute. “We had looked at that initially, and we’re keeping that option on the table,” he says. “There might be some foundations that might not want to make the decision on where to allocate to specific funders.”

For the time being, the foundations that signed on to today’s commitment will be able to coordinate some of their giving through the Climate Champions initiative, which is a program by the Clean Economy Fund.

Given the broad political swing to the right, and the Trump administration’s signalling that it will pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, it might seem as if such efforts, even well-financed ones, are destined to hit a wall. But St-Pierre says he remains optimistic, noting the precipitous fall in solar and wind prices, as well as the dramatic take-up of EVs in China.

He also points out that when he talks to wealthy families, he no longer has to spend much time convincing them of the issue. “They get it. They’ve seen Jasper burn down, or they’ve witnessed smoke through their communities, and they’re probably physically feeling the effects of flooded basements. There’s no need to convince people of the gravity of climate change.”

Disclosure: John Lorinc has been retained independently by the Ivey Foundation to write a report on their efforts to wind down their granting operations.

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist, author and editor. He writes about cities, climate and cleantech.

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