For the last decade, the Executive Director of the Cornell Industrial and Labour Relations School’s Climate Jobs Institute, Dr. Lara Skinner, has been working to launch union-led climate jobs coalitions. Together with labour unions, elected leaders, environmental groups, and industry experts, she has worked in states like Texas, Illinois, New York, and Rhode Island to transform the way labour engages with equity and climate justice.

Her presentation at the Global Labour Research Centre’s 2023 John Eleen Annual Lecture in Global Labour, “Labour and the Climate Crisis: Developing a Worker- and Equity-Centred Clean Energy Economy,” taught us how union-led coalitions contribute to climate justice.

The United States’ (U.S.) calls for an injection of $370 billion to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calls this the “most significant climate legislation in U.S. history.” This is an opportunity to create scalable projects that create well-paying and unionized climate jobs,  for racialized and frontline communities impacted by climate change and historical inequities. But the move from policy to practice, or in Dr. Skinner's words, the move “from ambition to action,” requires a massive update of American infrastructure and of the US economy.

“Let’s talk about why this is a challenge,” proposes Dr. Skinner. First, unionization rates in fossil fuels industries are twice as high as those in renewables energies. Second, green energy jobs are not paying well when compared to similar jobs in fossil fuels industries. Third, frontline communities hit hard by climate change and historically marginalized communities face significant barriers to accessing clean energy jobs.

In meeting the challenge, Dr. Skinner’s New York Climate Jobs Program developed climate, energy, and labour market analyses for cities and states. The aim was to identify challenges and opportunities for a green energy jobs transition. Quickly, the Program moved from research to policy advocacy and to training, and education on how to maximize emissions reductions and create new union jobs. The program’s ‘labour-only’ grounded approach relied on “building trades and energy unions working in these coalitions.” This is because, Dr. Skinner explains, “unions already have tremendous experience and expertise in making this transition”.

The result? Think equity-based, well-paying green jobs led by unions, Dr. Skinner suggests, working to develop science-based solutions to climate change and designed to help labour and climate movements navigate the transition to a clean energy economy.

The Program’s success laid a foundation for the Climate Jobs National Research Centre. The Centre focusses on forward-looking proposals to identify what needs to be built to realize a green energy transition, all while working to ensure the active participation of unions, equity-deserving groups, and frontline community members in developing a plan. From there, Dr. Skinner says that “unions formed their own coalition, Climate Jobs New York, and they ran a campaign promoting offshore wind” using the Climate Jobs Institute’s proposal. In response, New York committed to securing 50% of its power from offshore wind, and to setting wage requirements for wind and solar projects above one megawatt.

Today, the lessons learned in New York have spread to eight other U.S. states that are now homes of union-led climate jobs coalitions. Dr. Skinner plans to “expand the initial solar study to an annual study of the U.S. clean energy workforce, looking at all parts of the clean energy economy, and then conducting similar studies in other states and at the national level.”

For those of us in Canada, the question remains: why don’t we see this move “from ambition to action” in our country?

According to feminist economist Dr. Marjorie Griffin Cohen, the respondent for the event, it is a matter of economic priorities and political perspective. Despite the push amongst trade unions for clean energy jobs and a ‘just transition’ through groups like Blue-Green Canada, Canada’s transition “is not happening that way: we’re increasing our oil exports, and we’re increasing our oil production.” While unions and workers advocate to change our understanding of the economy, growth, and productivity, governments are stuck greening a small proportion of jobs to make them “compatible with Canada’s path to net zero emissions”, while increasing fossil fuels production.

Like Dr. Cohen, we are left to ask “How can we expand the areas of the economy that are already relatively low contributors to climate change problems, but also shift the focus to meet people’s real care needs?”  The answer is to shift employment away from carbon-intensive jobs to employment in care-giving, Dr. Cohen suggests, contributing to the economy, improving human well-being and protecting nature.

From an organizing perspective, Dr. Skinner had her own answers.

For Skinner, greening the economy in a labour friendly, equitable way starts with expanding union-based training infrastructure and establishing mandated targets for diversifying employment cohorts. And by connecting labour to clean energy by way of project labour agreements, Climate Jobs Coalitions can set up direct-entry, pre-apprenticeship programs. These can help to redirect money from low-quality piecework projects to high quality and high impact union-led clean energy projects.

But this kind of work needs a clear definition of the value and importance of union climate jobs, and these projects need to help frontline and historically marginalized communities achieve a higher quality of life to maximize their impact.

Dr. Skinner’s climate jobs coalition success story is compelling.

Start with unions. Learn from workers.  Help them to propose, organize, and develop clean energy projects in cities and regions to create high quality, unionized jobs for those most in need. That is how how we collectively move “from ambition to action.”

To learn more on union-led climate jobs coalitions, .

Nathi Zamisa is completing an M.A. in Black Studies: Theories of Race and Racism in the Department of Social and Political Thought at �첥��Ƶ. Nathi is currently the President of the �첥��Ƶ Graduate Students Association, the Chair of the York Community Housing Association, a Board Member of the Global Labour Research Centre, and a Member of the York Senate's Academic Planning, Policy, and Research Committee.

The post From Ambition to Action: Labour, Equity, and Climate Justice appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Organized by the CERLAC student caucus and hosted by �첥��Ƶ doctoral students Natasha Sofia Martinez and Alex Moldovan. 

is a Jamaican human rights lawyer and founder of Freedom Imaginaries, an organization that uses human rights law to tackle legacies of slavery and colonialism. She holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School and a Master of Advanced Studies degree from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. She is qualified to practice law in Guyana and Jamaica. 

, PhD is a Jamaican independent film maker, writer, educator and linguist with over thirty-five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist film making gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films include Jamaica for Sale(2009), Fly Me To The Moon (2019). In 2013, Figueroa was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawai’i English Department. Her environmental novel Limbo (2014) was a finalist in the 2015 National Indie Excellence Awards for Multi-cultural Fiction.

“When you think of the Caribbean, it is likely that you think of the region as a victim of climate injustice” Dr. Figueroa observes. “Certainly, in their calls for reparations, Caribbean governments stress the innocence of the region. But Caribbean governments promote extractivist models of development, whereby tourism, plantation agriculture and forestry, industrial fisheries, the extraction of hydrocarbons, metals and minerals, car-centric development and urbanized built environments are the engines of their growth economies.” This is in keeping with the role of Caribbean peoples as the early industrial modernizers in and through sugar plantations, leaders within a world system of colonialism and capitalism. In their scale and complexity, the sugar plantations anticipated later industrial developments in Britain and Europe, Dr. Figueroa argues, creating enormous profits for British colonial owners and funding the expansion of British empire, which at one time included a quarter of humanity. In short, through the plantation system, the Caribbean was central to world processes of industrial modernity, empire and global capitalism. 

This matters for the contemporary climate crisis here and now, Dr. Figueroa insists, because the age of European imperialist expansion accelerated what some call the Anthropocene, an era in which human presence has irrevocably transformed the natural world. European imperialisms were marked by the genocide of tens millions of Indigenous peoples, the theft of their lands and waters, and the repurposing of them as natural resources. “A more accurate conceptualization of the Anthropocene is therefore the Plantationocene”, Dr. Figueroa observes, “a patriarchal, colonial, racist capitalist world political economy that began in the late 15^th in the Americas and in the Caribbean, rooted in the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans and the profitable destruction of the natural world.” The Caribbean’s history of extractivism continues today in Guyana, as Dr. Figueroa describes:

“Guyana is now positioned to become the largest oil producer in the world transforming from a carbon sink, whereby its immense intact forests hold carbon and supply oxygen, to a carbon bomb, with 10 billion barrels of oil slated to be extracted. It is estimated that burning that oil could release over 4 billion tons of greenhouse gases…And in keeping with the Caribbean’s extractivist tradition, the agreement between the government of Guyana, Exxon and other multinational oil corporations, saddles Guyana with debt and liability while enriching the oil companies. Yet the Guyana government portrays their new role as the largest oil producer as one that will catapult Guyanese society into great wealth and prosperity…”.

Caribbean leaders beholden to billion-dollar corporations and wealthy oligarchs adjust to a violent, racist capitalist world by selling off the last of the Caribbean’s so-called natural resources. “The Caribbean is not innocent,” Dr. Figueroa concludes, “despite its calls for reparations given climate injustice.” What is required is a fundamental transformation beyond the global plantation economy that carries so much violence against human beings, especially Indigenous peoples and the natural world.

“The climate crisis is the logical consequence of a racial capitalist system, which normalizes resource plundering, Indigenous dispossession, and the relegation of former colonies to sacrificial zones of extraction,” Malene Alleyne observes. Communities are becoming uninhabitable due to extreme weather events linked with climate change. In Bahamas, people are still recovering from Hurricane Dorian, which in 2019 caused loss of life and massive displacement, with many living today in what were originally conceived as temporary, emergency housing. In Trinidad and Tobago, wildlife and fishing are threatened by oil spills, while in Jamaica, bauxite mining is contaminating water sources and destroying agricultural lands in Cockpit Country. “What I am describing is a system of global racial inequality,” Alleyne continues, “in which Caribbean nations remain trapped in a cycle of dependency on extraction and climate vulnerability.” Migrants, Indigenous people, and Afro-descendent rural people are marginalized within the Caribbean and, when faced with natural disasters created and exacerbated by climate change, they are most likely to suffer from death and displacement. 

A rights-based decolonial approach to justice demands a transformative approach that shifts power to these communities, Alleyne emphasizes, so that they can defend their way of life and environment against unsustainable development. This human rights-based approach to climate justice includes the following three pillars:

• environmental rights, including the right to clean air and water, as well as procedural environmental rights, such as the right to access climate information, participate in climate decision-making processes, and access remedies in cases of harm; 
• a racial equality framework based on international treaties that prohibit racial discrimination, including with respect to climate change;
• climate reparations, including just economic and social systems enabling a postcolonial future; 

This is much more than a matter of financial reparations. Since a racist world capitalist system engenders climate change, Alleyne argues, challenging climate change requires that we dismantle that system and join together to build a more socially, economically and racially just world.

The post Climate Change in the Caribbean: The Role of Capital in the Climate Crisis and the Movement for Climate Justice appeared first on Research & Innovation.

World Water Day: A Solutions-Driven Workshop on Climate Impacts on Freshwater was co-hosted by CIFAL York and the Office of the Provost, in partnership with the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, �첥��Ƶ. The event is part of CIFAL York’s In-Focus Knowledge Exchange Series for Nature, Climate, and People curated by Idil Boran.

The convenors of the workshop were , Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, CIFAL York and Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, and , Associate Professor in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science and Provostial Fellow.

The event participated in World Water Day events, which have been held around the globe since 1993.

Professor Sharma observes that today, two billion people do not have access to clean water at home, while in Canada, more than 800 communities are subject to long-term drinking water advisories. Among communities that have not had clean water for more than ten years, two-thirds are Indigenous, characteristic of the inequitable distribution of fresh water in Canada and around the world. These facts frame the discussions for the workshop, bringing together concerns about access to fresh water and inequities within and across nations during an era of climate change.

Keynote speaker Professor Orbinski, Director of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, began with the observation that freshwater is precious. The contemporary narratives about our relationship with the natural world are inadequate, however, to the challenges we face, given shrinking freshwater supplies due to climate change and inequitable access to water. “We need a different story about how we view ourselves, how we view our relation to each other and to the biosphere,” Professor Orbinski emphasized, adding, “This demands an understanding of the complexity of the hydrosphere and more broadly the biosphere within which all human life exists.” We are now an urban population of close to eight billion people on this fragile earth. The impact of climate change and biodiversity loss is massive, making it very difficult to make accurate predictions about the consequences of these disruptions for the biosphere and human communities. We do know, however, that as climate change diminishes the access to freshwater, competition and conflict increases, as different communities struggle to secure water access for fishing, farming and other subsistence and cultural activities. To begin to address these challenges, Professor Orbinski argues, requires us to let go of tenacious ideas about human dominion over nature so that we may grasp the fundamental truth that, “We are part of nature and we depend on nature for our very being and survival.”

Professor Daniel Olago, Chair of the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, spoke about the continent of Africa, which holds 25% of the world’s surface water. Despite the abundance of freshwater sources, these have been negatively impacted by human activity, including deforestation and overfishing, as well as by climate change. Biodiversity suffers with cascading consequences. Flamingo populations in Lake Nakuru are decreasing, negatively affecting tourism and the economic health of the region, while in Lake Malawi, the loss of native fish leads to hunger and malnutrition among communities dependent on healthy fish stocks. Solutions are made complex by the dozens of political jurisdictions acting in lake areas and sectoral approaches to management, leading to poor coordination in addressing systemic challenges. An Integrated Lake Basin Management approach is required, Profesor Olago argues, bringing a holistic approach that balances conservation with sustainable development goals. 

As Dr. Syed Imran Ali, Research Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, observes, floods and droughts are the spectacular face of climate change and its devastating effects on freshwater sources. Equally important, but less noticed, are changes to the quality of the world’s water due to contamination. Inadequate sanitation always poses risks to the quality of the water supply, but these risks are experienced unequally. Worldwide, rural populations and refugees displaced due to conflict and disaster experience acute difficulties in accessing clean fresh water. The consequence is the proliferation of deadly water-borne infectious diseases, like cholera, watery diarrhoea and hepatitis E. Preventing deaths means improving water quality through chlorination at the point of consumption, where World Health Organization “universal standards” for chlorination are inadequate in many humanitarian crisis contexts. To improve water quality in refugee camps and similar contexts, Dr. Ali and his team have developed machine learning and numerical modelling tools that determine adequate levels of chlorination to ensure water remains safe. This is one example of solutions-driven research that responds to the challenge of providing clean water in crisis situations and that is now in use by seven major humanitarian organizations working around the world.

Dr. , Assistant Professor in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, observes that water crises are not only outside of Canada, but affect many First Nations communities on lands claimed by the Crown. She warns:

“There is something happening beneath our feet. It will stop the rivers from flowing and the water from filling the lakes in the spring. We will lose our fish, our moose and our traditional ways of living…The water will be stolen… All Canadians should be concerned, because the hunger of the oil industry has no limits. If we contaminate waters upstream, we contaminate all water downstream and the ecosystems upon which they depend.”

If Indigenous nations have shown remarkable resilience, they have been impoverished by the colonial theft of Indigenous land and left traumatized by genocide, including the infamous residential school system that sought to extinguish Indigenous kinship and ways of knowing and doing. The oil industries step into this context, making false promises to Indigenous communities that feel they have few choices as they seek to recover the power and knowledges that colonial actors have forcibly wrested from them. Dr. Alook emphasizes that this must end now through the recovery of Indigenous sovereignty, especially taking up responsibilities towards the land: “As long as the sun shines, as long as the rivers flow, let it be the sovereignty of our people that takes precedence over the capitalist and colonial theft of our lands…This is our land, this is our water, and let us be stewards of all that the Creator has bestowed upon us.” 

Dr. Catherine Febria is Canada Research Chair of Freshwater Restoration Ecology at the University of Windsor. Dr. Febria describes the Healthy Headwaters Lab, which she directs, as seeking to “connect land, water and people for future generations” using a decolonial, community-centered interdisciplinary approach. River restoration now involves billions of dollars worldwide but moving forward demands more than money – it requires coordinated actions at every level from the most local to the global. In coordinating, Dr. Febria emphasizes, “Science matters, but so does communication if diverse communities are to be meaningfully involved in river restoration. Best practices foreground local involvement.” In Canterbury in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Māori community members, farmers and community groups came together with scientists to create healthy rivers. “The relationships come before the science” Professor Febria observes, “It’s about building trust by listening and mobilizing lived knowledge alongside science.” 

Human and environmental health depends on clean fresh water. On World Water Day 2022, these researchers came together to emphasize the importance of holistic approaches that take up science in collaboration with those most immediately affected by the contamination of freshwater sites, including Indigenous and other communities marginalized from power and decision-making. New ways of doing science with diverse knowledge holders and new/old ways of understanding human relationships within the natural world are necessary, they emphasize, for freshwater to be restored and for the flourishing of all life in generations to come.

The post World Water Day: A Solutions-Driven Workshop on Climate Impacts on Freshwater appeared first on Research & Innovation.

In the exhibition , Czegledy explains, science, technology and art are brought together by artists who share a deep, contemporary sensitivity to nature. 

The exhibition, featured in Kitchener, Ontario, included Aotearoa/New Zealand artists Caro McCaw and Vicki Smith’s collaborative work “Sounding”, which is concerned with the noise pollution that is increasingly disrupting the sonic environment of marine mammals. McCaw and Smith seek to draw attention to spaces of communication for whales and dolphins that we cannot see, in a blue, underwatery light where viewers listen to echolocation by whales and dolphins recorded in the Tasmanian Sea.

In her work “Spontaneous Generation”, Toronto-based artist Elaine Miller makes links between the melting of the polar ice caps and the emergence of viruses, including Ebola, but with obvious resonance for the current covid-19 pandemic. For her part, Kristine Diekman, creating from California, presents “Behold the Tilapia”, in a stop-motion image of the fish, which is known for its resiliency but that is now facing extinction in polluted waters, exacerbated by the stresses of increasing temperatures due to climate change. Both use mixed media, as Tingley describes, while Maayke Schurer, an artist from Victoria, British Columbia, plays with the idea of the sublime in “Spirits of Wasteland” which creates beautiful yet horrific imagery with plastic and other waste that pollutes our environment. 

Along with other featured women artists from across Canada and around the world, Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene, seeks to “critically and poetically investigate our present, unpack the social and cultural impacts of environmental change, speculate about future realities, and suggest solutions for how we might approach life in the Anthropocene.” This demands that we acknowledge the ways that environmental change, including rising oceans and heat waves, affects all of us, both human and other animals and insects. 

In her work, Liz Miller’s project begins with the Lake Ontario shoreline, its histories and ecologies. Half of the world’s population lives by the coasts, which are densely populated and continue to develop, as Miller explains. Climate change means rising seas and storms that are increasingly affecting coastal areas. Miller’s work brings together engineers, educators, biologists, artists, and youth activists working across disciplines and across species. Through shared data sets, soundscapes, and more than forty short portraits of coastal communities from nine countries, this collaborative project considers the challenge of our collective survival. 

In their different ways, each of these women artists invites us to consider the realities of living in the Anthropocene, an era in which human beings have irrevocably shaped the natural world, with devastating consequences for many species including our own. But these artists ask us to do more than witness. They invite us to engage with urgent ecological questions and to develop new relationships  -- and deep love -- for the ecoystems that sustain all of us. 

The post Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene and The Shore Line Project appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Dr. Kam Sripada is a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and currently manages the Centre for Digital Life Norway, a national biotechnology innovation centre. Dr. Sripada has studied how social and environmental factors influence child brain development and can contribute to global health inequalities. Dr. Sripada’s research, science communication and advocacy seek to strengthen international collaborations that promote healthy brain development starting in early life. Dr. Sripada’ is a member for the (ISCHE), an affiliate member of the University of British Columbia’s Social Exposome Cluster, and previously Research Fellow at UNICEF. You can learn about her work .

Speaking at the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research, Dr. Sripada explains that “children are uniquely vulnerable to climate change.” Childhood is a time of rapid brain development and growth, which means that trauma experienced during early childhood can have permanent, life-long consequences for brain development and health. Climate change creates sudden traumatic events, including flooding, heat waves and wildfires, and slower onset impacts like rising sea levels, water scarcity and the spread of vector-borne diseases. This has immediate, negative impacts families and for children, the effects may last into adulthood.

When water and food are scarce, children suffer from undernourishment. Vector-borne diseases experienced in childhood lead to worse health outcomes for these children as they grow into adulthood. There are other, less direct impacts of climate change for children. Confronted with decreased access to food and water, families may withdraw their children from schools to place them in paid employment or, for girls, into marriage. In these ways, climate change has far-reaching consequences for children, in the immediate and for the adults that they will become. Risks from climate change are compounded by early life exposures to air pollution, toxic chemicals, and other contaminants that are harmful to children’s health and brain development, said Dr. Sripada.

New actions are being taken to mitigate and to adapt to climate change in ways that protect children. Internationally, the United Nations Child Fund (UNICEF) has recently broadened its health focus to include the impact of climate change on children. Dr. Sripada co-led the creation of the new UNICEF programme, , which launched in 2021 and directs stronger actions by the organization to protect children from including . In addition, the new UNICEF Children’s Climate Risk Index seeks to measure the impact of climate change for children. In 2021, UNICEF estimated that one billion children worldwide are at extreme risk due to climate change, in particular through greater exposure to heat waves, cyclones, and riverine and coastal flooding. Fifty percent of victims of such “natural” disasters, caused or exacerbated by climate change, are children (Save the Children, 2007). For some, the trauma created by experiencing disaster and displacement can lead to lasting mental health problems into adulthood.

Locally, nationally and internationally, children are acting to call attention to climate change, on their own terms and in their own voices. , a climate change justice advocate from Kenya, is speaking out to challenge white saviourism and ensure that the children most immediately affected by climate change, in the Global South, have a voice and are heard. Around the world, Fridays for Futures climate change strikes by children remind both children and adults of the urgency of taking action to mitigate climate change, despite a difficult present and challenging futures. 

Dr. Sripada concludes that it is critical to engage the next generation about climate change. She observes that children are taking up the challenge, all the way up to high-level United Nations meetings, where they are demanding that governments do more to protect them and their right to healthy futures. “We are at a moment when the decisions we take to mitigate and adapt to climate change can aggravate risks, creating greater inequality,” Dr. Sripada warns, “or we can join with activists like Eric to protect children’s well-being now and into the future.” 

The post Children in a changing climate appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Written by Elaine Coburn, Director of the Centre for Feminist Research, �첥��Ƶ

Biography

is an Assistant Professor at the School of Environment at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on religion and environment, faith-based environmentalism, faith-based environmental ethics, and religious legal approaches to environmental protection. He is particularly interested in the themes of wastefulness, consumption, and simplicity. Dr. Yoreh is currently researching environmental engagement in faith communities in Canada, the United States, and Israel. He is the author of Waste Not: A Jewish Environmental Ethic (2019). You can find his talk .

At the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, Dr. Tanhum Yoreh (PhD Humanities, �첥��Ƶ) spoke about “Faith Based Environmental Action: The Jewish Experience”. In his talk, he considered possibilities and tensions around religiously rooted environmentalism, turning first to the words of the philosopher Roger S. Gottleib: “For as long as human beings have practiced them, the complex and multifaceted beliefs, rituals and moral teaching known as religion have told us how to think about and relate to everything on earth that we did not make ourselves.”

This observation is helpful, Dr. Yoreh argues, in part because it does not presume the usefulness of religion for understanding environmental questions. Rather, Gottlieb leaves open the possibilities that theology may be helpful or harmful to our interactions with the natural world.

Certainly, many religious people who are active in the environmental movement understand themselves as having a responsibility, even a moral imperative, to respond to the environmental crisis. If religion is life-giving and the ecological crisis is life-destroying, being a responsible part of the Created World demands action to protect life.

Practically, being able to mobilize religious communities around environmental causes, including their ability to organize and their financial and their political clout, makes them at least potentially powerful actors. The United Church, for instance, is actively divesting from fossil fuels. Diverse faith communities are present at events like COP-26 at Glasgow in 2021, asking that we make difficult decisions to reduce ecologically destructive practices and support life in the natural world.

At the same time, Dr. Yoreh observes, religious communities may have entrenched habits that make new engagement with environmental questions difficult or environmental questions may seem irrelevant to the central spiritual mission. In some cases, religious communities may hold ideas antithetical to ecological activism, for instance, theologically rooted fatalisms make action meaningless, since the Book of Life is already written. Some monotheistic communities may understand environmentalists as spiritually wrong-headed, even dangerous, associating “tree hugging” with idol worship.

Prevailing Orthodox understandings of Jewish law, the halakhah, view environmental commitment as morally good but as extra-legal, praiseworthy but not legally necessary. Yet, other aspects of Jewish law may support environmental activism. For instance, if environmental damage is viewed as a form of self-harm, the live-privileging halakhah would be activated in full force to protect human life.

Ecclesiastes Rabbah, a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes, includes a passage in which God reviews “each and every tree” in the Garden of Eden and warns Adam:

 “Behold my creations how pleasant and praiseworthy they are. All that I created, I created for you. Pay heed that you do not ruin and destroy My world. For if you ruin it, there is no one after you who will fix it.” (7:13)

Such passages speak powerfully to many contemporary Jewish environmental activists, enjoining all of humanity to take care of the natural world, understood as God’s Creation.

In contrast to those who understand Judaism as demanding stewardship for God’s Creation, Reform and Orthodox communities may rely on very different vocabularies, for instance, evoking the need for cleanliness to urge an end to littering and pollution. Varying approaches and vocabularies within a diverse Jewish faith community speaks to the need, within the environmental movement, to mobilize a range of language that resonates with different religious actors.

In short, these are matters of different worldviews, different motivations that bring people of faith to the environmental struggle.

What is clear is that faith-based actors are important to environmental struggles. Scientists can measure risks, but they cannot answer the moral and spiritual questions that the contemporary ecological crisis poses. For the faithful, theological imperatives and religious responsibility provide an impetus to act that they find nowhere else.

The post Faith-Based Environmental Action appeared first on Research & Innovation.

(�첥��Ƶ PhD 2005) is Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Global Women’s Issues. She is also a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Professor Baruah specializes in interdisciplinary research at the intersections of gender, economy, environment, and development; gender and work; and social, political, and economic inequality. Her current research aims to understand how to ensure that a global low-carbon economy will be more gender-equitable and socially just than its fossil-fuel-based predecessor. She has published one book, Women and Property in Urban India, (University of British Columbia Press 2010) and more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, working papers, policy briefs and professional reports, in journals like World Development, Feminist Economics, Development in Practice, Water Policy, and Labor Studies. Her work can be found .

In her presentation at the Centre for Feminist Research at �첥��Ƶ, “Gender Equality In Low Carbon Economies: Continuities, Contradiction, Disruptions”, �첥��Ƶ alumni and Canada Research Chair Bipasha Baruah observes that, “Globally, women represent only 22 per cent of the oil and gas industry and 32 per cent of the renewable energy workforce. Women are particularly underrepresented in the energy sector in jobs that require science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) training (28 per cent) compared to non-STEM technical jobs (35 per cent) and administrative positions (45 per cent).” For Baruah, this underrepresentation is not only a problem but an opportunity, as nations around the world are confronted with the urgent need to re-orient the energy sector for environmental sustainability. In developed, emerging and developing economies, the energy sector can be transformed to support more sustainable energy -- and better jobs and more equity for women.

This is true in the developed nations, like Canada, where skill shortages in the renewable energy sector are a challenge but, Professor Baruah emphasizes, also an opportunity, “to train, recruit and promote women, Indigenous peoples, new immigrants, workers with disabilities, and other groups that have historically been marginalized in the energy sector.” This requires support for women to obtain degrees and diplomas in the better-paid science and technology fields, for instance, but also more flexibility for women who take maternity and parental leave to return to work and mandatory quotas for women in upper management and administrative positions. 

Developing nations face their own challenges in the energy transition, but some offer useful models for ways forward for the rest of the world. In a chapter with Rabia Ferroukhi and Celia García-Baños López published in 2021, “Global Trends in Women’s Employment in Renewable Energy,” Professor Baruah and her colleagues point to Zambia’s gender-transformative approach as one helpful example. “Zambia’s National Energy Policy identifies measures to mainstream gender considerations in all energy access programs” they observe, “and highlights the role of women not only as beneficiaries but as also active energy providers and entrepreneurs within the sector.” They conclude that “This is a good example of a[n]…approach that views women not simply as primary end users and beneficiaries, but as actors in the design and delivery of energy solutions.” 

If the energy transition to sustainable industries is necessary and urgent, Professor Baruah’s work is a reminder that there is hope in this transition for creating a more gender-just world. This will require women’s active role as decision-makers, not just in the energy sector but in the social, political and economic structures that now reproduce inequities. They can and must be transformed to bring about both environmental sustainability and gender equity in the critical years ahead.

The post Gender Equality in Low-Carbon Economies appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Dr. is Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at �첥��Ƶ. A member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research focuses on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She is a co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded (Partnership Grant) Corporate Mapping Project, where she completed research with the Parkland Institute on Indigenous experiences in Alberta’s oil industry and its gendered impact on working families. Angele is also a member of the Just Powers research team, a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant, enabling her to produce a documentary called Pikopaywin: It is Broken. Featuring stories on the land, Indigenous traditional land users, environmental officers, and elders bear witness to the impact that the fossil fuel industry, forestry and climate change has on traditional Treaty 8 territory. With Dr. Deborah McGregor, Osgoode Hall Law School and Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC), Angele is co-investigator on the project, funded by �첥��Ƶ. 

“The ways that bureaucracy deals with Indigenous peoples is to assign a group of experts to talk to us and the rest simply continue as they always have,” observes Professor Alook. Government, often working hand in hand with corporations, together speak to Indigenous peoples. “But they do not consult us,” continues Professor Alook, “Nor do they respect their treaties with us.” In the words of community Elders, the consequence is that the land that makes up Treaty 8 territory is now broken, devastated by oil and gas wells and the infrastructure that supports them.

In the film produced by Professor Alook, Pikopaywin: It is Broken, she speaks to Elders from her community who bear witness to the devastation that the oil industry has wrought. “We care for the water. We care for the land. Because it is our diet, it is our livelihood,” emphasizes Elder Albert Yellowkneee. Since the oil industry has destroyed much of the land that gives life and livelihood, Yellowknee fears that he is the last generation to experience the land in this way: “What about my children, my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren? Will they have a place to go out into the woods and meditate? Like we do?” For Professor Alook, such conversations were difficult: “Elder Albert brought me and the film crew close to tears. Because he has a trapline, which has been in his family for many generations, and it has been literally cut down, destroyed, by the oil and forestry industry. He is no longer able to offer traditional, land-based teachings in the same way. We are no longer able to practice our treaty rights.”

To create a future for the children of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory means challenging the government, for its failure to respect treaty rights. This demands confrontation with corporations, who fail to consult with the Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, much less respect Indigenous self-determination. If this is a very unequal struggle, it is a vitally necessary one. As Elder Verna Orr observes, “If we have no trees, there is no life out there.” And she continues, “My hope is for people to stand together, pray together and be strong. And hopefully, the government and the oil companies will stop taking our trees.” 

Pikopaywin: It is Broken is available through the website.

The post Bearing Witness to Climate Change in Treaty 8 Territory appeared first on Research & Innovation.

Dr. Byomkesh Talukder is the inaugural Planetary Health Fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, where he works at the intersection of health, sustainable development, climate change and food and agriculture systems. He is currently project co-director in four research projects: (1) Mapping Canada’s Imported Food Supply Chains to Identify Climate Change-Related Health Risks, (2) Ecological Footprint Health Indicators, (3) Complex Adaptive Modelling of Health Impacts of Climate Change in Malawi & Paraguay, and (4) Climate Change, Salinity & Public Health in Bangladesh. His past research applies a complexity science approach to designing sustainability assessment models of food and agricultural systems in Bangladesh. Dr. Talukder also has over 15 years of interdisciplinary field and training experience, including supervising more than 2,000 emerging leaders in sustainable development programs and policy design in Bangladesh. Since 2016, he has been a Mitacs Postdoctoral Fellow at Parmalat Canada and the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. Dr. Talukdar holds a PhD in Geography and Environmental Studies (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada), a MES in Environmental Studies (Queen’s University, Canada), a MSc in Development Science (Hiroshima University, Japan), and a MSc in Geography and Environment (Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh).

By Elaine Coburn, Director of the Centre for Feminist Research

In his seminar, “Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Community Planetary Health in Bangladesh”, Dr. Talukder observed that if traditional medicine is concerned with health within the human body, planetary systems are concerned with external systems, including the climate, that affect people’s health. This enables a more holistic, non-linear approach to understanding complex issues, including rising salinity associated with rising seas in Bangladesh due to climate change. 

Today, the coastal areas of Bangladesh are home to more than 40 million people. It is estimated that by 2050 about 27 million people will be immediately affected by climate change, including heavily populated areas along coastal rivers. If sea levels rise by just 1.5 metres, more than 80% of people in Bangladesh will be affected since the vast majority of the population lives in a flood plain. In addition, frequent cyclones originate in the Bay of Bengal. Annually, they bring water, now heavily salinated because of rising seas, that kills all vegetation, rendering previously fertile lands barren. Combined with more than 290 dams in India and more than 100 dams in China, which aggravate penuries of water during the dry season, and Himalayan ice melt due to climate change, Bangladesh suffers from significant water shortages and increased salinity. Not only water but soil is becoming increasingly saline.

Development projects along rivers in Bangladesh, including dams, have not worked well but create waterlogging that makes agriculture impossible. In response to changing conditions, farmers have shifted agriculture to saline-water crops, like shrimp, moving away from previous staple crops like rice. If shrimp farming has created economic benefits, the decreased agricultural diversity – in dramatic decline from the 1970s to about 2014 – because of the concentration on the monoculture of shrimp, has created attendant health problems, due to food insecurity and diminished biodiversity. Shrimp feed has aggravated problems by interfering with the natural ecosystems. As mangrove forests decline, water is no longer retained by trees, making communities more vulnerable to the devastating effects of floods. 

Primary negative health impacts include the scarcity of freshwater. This is especially burdensome for women who must travel 5 to 10 km to search out fresh water. Many communities are using rainwater or open pond water for their daily household water needs. This creates communicable diseases, including skin infections, cholera, diarrhea, dysentery and ocular diseases. Hypertension increases due to salt in water and in food systems. 

Secondary negative health impacts include high rates of miscarriage among women who live close to coastal areas. Women stand in saline water for many hours a day, creating problems for women’s reproductive health, an under-investigated health concern observed by many local community groups. A lack of a diversified food given the concentration in the shrimp, creates vitamin D deficiencies, including rickets. 

Tertiary negative health impacts include the increase in breast and ovarian cancers in women. Women are harvesting drinking water in plastic containers and since plastics are unregulated, some are contaminated, which may be the cause of the increase in these cancers among women. There is increased mental health stress, especially among women, given the long distances they must travel to obtain basic needs, like water for the households. Internal migration often means a concentration of formerly rural people in urban slums, creating attendant health problems given the conditions in these slums which have weak sanitation systems. 

Overall, health inequities are increasing, especially in coastal areas.

Resolving these health impacts demands complex solutions from multiple stakeholders, everything from weather predictor systems to public health expertise. We need to listen to different stakeholders and the connections among the different challenges that they face to develop complex models that can help us understand the links among climate change, extreme weather events, internal migration and conflicts and public health, all of which are, in addition, gendered. This means taking into account biodiversity, vector-borne disease and the causal relationships among these different factors to create data beyond current tendencies to work in silos. Dynamic modelling is required if we are to develop scenarios, forecasting and support local communities and other stakeholders in developing community-based interventions to salinity and to enable monitoring to understand the present and better predict future health impacts. 

But modeling is not enough. We need interventions that take into account complex systems to support the government of Bangladesh’s 100-year delta plan, as the state seeks to ensure the sustainability of ecosystems for better livelihoods and intergenerational health in Bangladesh. We must prepare for different futures, knowing that if we do not take action now on climate change we will not be able to adapt to climate change in the future. We need to adapt today and we need to do this for many reasons, including for the health of people like those living in coastal areas of Bangladesh who are already being affected in their everyday life by climate change, especially rising sea levels and increasing salinity of coastal waters. 

Related Work

Talukder, B., Ganguli, N. & VanLoon, G. W., (2022). Climate Change Related Foodborne Zoonotic Diseases and Pathogens Modelling. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 100111.

Talukder, B., Ganguli, N., Matthew, R., VanLoon, G. W., Hipel, K. W., & Orbinski, J. (2022). Climate Change-Accelerated Ocean Biodiversity Loss & Associated Planetary Health Impacts. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 100114

Matthew, R., Chiotha, S., Orbinski, J. & Talukder, B. (2021). Research note: Climate change, peri-urban space and emerging infectious disease. Landscape and Urban Planning, 218, 104298.

Talukder, B., Ganguli, N., Matthew, R., VanLoon, G. W., Hipel, K. W., & Orbinski, J. (2021). Climate change‐triggered land degradation and planetary health: A review. Land Degradation & Development 32 (16), 4509-4522.

Talukder, B., vanLoon, G. W., Hipel, K. W., Chiotha, S. & Orbinski, J. (2021). Health Impacts of Climate Change on Smallholder Farmers. One Health, 100258.

Talukder, B., Matthew, R., Bunch, J. M., vanLoon, G. W., Hipel, K. W. & Orbinski, J. (2021). Melting of Himalayan Glaciers and Planetary Health. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 50, 98-108.

Talukder, B., van Loon, G., Hipel, K. W., & Orbinski, J. (2021). COVID-19's Implications on Agri-food Systems and Human Health in Bangladesh. Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, 100033.

Talukder, B., Blay-Palmer, A., & Hipel, K. W. (2020). Towards Complexity of Agricultural Sustainability Assessment: Main Issues and Concerns. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 100038.

Talukder, B., & Hipel, K. W. (2019). Diagnosis of Sustainability of Trans-Boundary Water Governance in the Great Lakes Basin. World Development, 129, 1-12.

Talukder, B., vanLoon, G. W., & Hipel, K. W. (2018). Energy Efficiency of Agricultural Systems in the Southwest Coastal Zone of Bangladesh. Ecological Indicators, 98, 641-648.

Talukder, B., Hipel, K. W., & vanLoon, G. W. (2017). Developing Composite Indicators for Agricultural Sustainability Assessment: Effect of Normalization and Aggregation Techniques. Resources, 6(4), 66.

Talukder, B., Saifuzzaman, M., & vanLoon, G. W. (2016). Sustainability of Changing Agricultural Systems in the Coastal Zone of Bangladesh. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 31(2) 148-165.

Talukder, B., Nakagoshi, N., & Shahedur, R. M. (2009). State and Management of Wetlands in Bangladesh. Landscape and Ecological Engineering, 5(1), 81-90.

The post Preparing for Healthy Futures in Bangladesh in a World of Climate Change appeared first on Research & Innovation.

By Joel Ong, Director of the Sensorium and assistant professor, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design:

There’s a growing realization in this epoch that much of the crisis we face is caused by decisions that externalize environmental costs and hide the true level of violent extractions and waste from view.  As we encounter the real possibilities of metabolic interventions into the planet by industrial complexes and institutions, art and poetics play an important role in the interdisciplinary approach we all seek, and it is this trajectory that has gained much momentum in changing our narratives and behaviours around climate change.  

At Sensorium and AMPD we are looking at ways to consider environmental solutions as a form of new civic knowledge, such as in collective imagining with communities of practice through site-specific and sustainable eco-scenographics; creative transductions of environmental data, film, sound; simulated evolution and mixed reality worldmaking; and collaborations with scientists and engineers across the campus. These research-creation works are very much indebted to intersectional discourses in feminist, queer, critical disability and Indigenous studies that elevate the aspects of the environment that are traditionally neglected when thinking about climate action - what Marisol De La Cadena calls the ‘anthropo-not-seen’.  Here I will highlight Professors Mary Bunch, Dolleen Manning and team’s work “” (2022), Professor Jane Tingley’s “” (2021), student alumni Ella Morton’s “” (2020) and Nicole Clouston’s “” (2017-), that consider the plurality of ‘ worlds’ other than our own.  These works have been featured in recent Sensorium group exhibitions.

But beyond the aesthetics, art aspires towards a shift in consciousness towards the care and intimacy that we need to encounter, and be accountable to, our environments.  As  Bioartist Jennifer Willet writes, “ notions of love are typically eschewed by academia and science as romantic, popular, or religious; but love can also be interpreted as a radical political act in the face of instrumental rationality”.  Could we say this month, that we love our environment? 

As part of Climate Change Month, Sensorium will be hosting a curatorial presentation and artist talk around the exhibition Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene (2020) on March 21st from 11 am - 12:30 pm. The presenters are  (Feminist Media Lab, Concordia), (Leonardo Network) and (SLO Lab, AMPD).  A listening booth will also be set up to show Liz Miller’s work The Shore Line (2017) that week, an interactive Documentary that features over 40 collaborative videos made with individuals who are confronting the threats of unsustainable development and extreme weather with persistence and ingenuity.  

"For the exhibition Agents for Change | Facing the Anthropocene, we wanted to highlight the often underrepresented voices of women artists and activists in an exhibition on environmental change. Women are so often on the front lines of this type of work (activism), and we wanted to put together a show that highlighted the stories that women artists want to tell. These stories were of course extremely diverse – starting with science, research, and observation – but for me the most exciting part was the interest in highlighting the stories of both human and non-human subjects. The works in varying degrees were informative, experiential, and interactive – and together helped the viewer develop empathy and better understanding of how deeply impactful human activity is on life on this planet – air, water, earth, plant, animal, insect, human. It is extremely important to have diverse representation in gallery exhibitions because ultimately this assures diversity in the stories that get to be told for public consumption. We need this as a society to assure that we begin to comprehend (and hopefully develop sensitivity to) the complexity and diversity that surrounds us in our everyday lives.”

Jane Tingley, Curator 
Director, SLOLab, �첥��Ƶ

Register .

A recording of the panel presentation is available
for an installation of The Shore Line by Professor Liz Miller (Concordia University) from March 28th - 31st The Shore Line is a collaborative web documentary profiling the efforts of educators, artists, architects, scientists, city planners and youth organizations from nine countries taking actions along our global coasts. The project was exhibited as part of the Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene exhibition co-curated by Nina Czegledy (Leonardo Network) and Professor (SLOLab, AMPD, �첥��Ƶ).

Visit the project at the Scott Library or on your device .

The post The Work of Art in the Time of Climate Change appeared first on Research & Innovation.